At the same moment I am driving north with the Intended and Neon, my Waitress X is leaving me, leaving for her college in the east. Both of us out on the sunny road, farther and farther apart, like a math problem: if two cars drive in opposite directions at 76 M.P.H, how long before they are no longer an item? Sick of the same highway, I take backroads. I’m jealous of her joining motel beds with her driving companion. Inevitable, I know, she’s not going to sleep by herself. She insists she will phone, write. I know she will do neither. I’m passing every car we see; my arcs around their metal are recklessly perfect.
“Why are you doing this?” asks my Intended. She throws my rhythm off. I wasn’t aware a rhythm was there until it was ruined. I am driving the car too hard, the revs are high, red line, Quaker State 20-50 spread thin. Faster. I want to wreck the engine, be in debt, be a bum on the high chapparal. I imagine smoking pistons and electrons rocketing through the curved shining hood. Instead, a five-point buck sails over the windshield crossing the road in one leap, a quick turn and a horned animal races along beside my car, a green-eyed monster.
We stop at a stucco farmhouse off Correction Road north of Edmonton, and Neon unloads a little dope. They are working on their skidoos in a lit hangar. Big swinging lights. The party-line phone has two rings. It’s the boys from the farm up the gravel road; they always have bags of drugs, though they don’t seem the type at all, looking more like extras on Hee-Haw. Very hayseed, yet coke, mescaline, even acid, a kind of nostalgia.
You sure you don’t want some, they ask Neon, some good mesc. It’s organic.
Maybe some other time, we say. Neon looks tiny by the farmboy brothers, shoulders on Neon like a trout. All of us went to a cockfight but it was low-rent and loud and gave me a headache: one animal cuts up another and bundles of cash change hands in the stands. I used to tape my hands illegally. I don’t care to dwell on the parallels thank you very much. Even though I rarely saw her at the end, I am sad Waitress X is leaving. Illicit lace waves tossed from her smart hips, champagne and lox on someone else’s coffee table. Her on someone’s table. I loved her then when it was simple. The stairs and her walk. My team loses and studies the floor. That same feeling in the stomach. The city will seem empty, just knowing she’s not inside its walls.
In certain skeletal light, on certain high avenues, the mountains to the west leap forward as if pulled by a lens, as if you’re pulled by the wrist into a lunar beauty of white thorns, and I think this is how it is on the moon. From that high pure ice, from those glaciers, wild trout spray down from the clouds, rose-coloured graffiti on their flanks, lunkers in search of an absent ocean. The river straightens after the city and the mountain trout are hooked by Americans or their pricey guides. The trees thin out east of the foothills. The steppes.
P.J. Perry, the sax player, shows us a pretty spot to fly-fish. We tramp through a wheat field, all blue and gilt, and climb down a cliff to the river’s edge, gather at the river. We toss a stick for a dead dog. The fish move in wavering grasses, living inside a bent lens, silty glacier water and trout carried past like the moving floor at the airport.
At the Stampede the palm reader turns away, refuses to tell me what is there. What? What? She gives my money back. Go away, she says, go. (The coach touches my shoulder: Go.)
On the midway I hear an old guy mumbling to himself, eating a corn dog: When I was a child there was a grand old tree; but it was hit by a giant bolt from the sky. Rain and snow got in to strip it. With a whoop the gang rushed to the sleigh and piled in. Milly the horse pulled it. When I was a child, the man at the midway says, oh aye it was a grand old tree.
I am a child at Jawbone Lake for the summer. The small town priest commands electrons of grief from us, pulling it from the assembled like a hormonal cheerleader. The choir sounds like mutinous cows and the priest needs a shave. The locals assume we’re rich. Sermons centre around donations from “the visitors.” My older brother, a late ‘50s greaser, swaggers to confession, and for penance the old priest orders him to mow the church’s lawn. Fuck off, my brother tells the old priest. The next Sunday a ballsy bulldog walks up the aisle in the middle of mass and sniffs around the altar and the priest’s ankles. We all pretend not to see it, assuming it’s Jehovah Witness.
Twelve miles from the lake my Ex-Wife Kathy is talking after church, the same small town church, her white shoes on the white sunny steps and her blouse with pale pink stripes like a beach tent pulled tight by her strong back and breasts, light flowing down her golden throat and in the slight gaps in the blouse front where a delicate chain leads into her white Eaton’s bra. I stop the car and watch her, the woman I was once married to. My finger tip once followed and curled in the cool air between her levitating breasts where there is no sun except light through a thin floral summer dress, a face close to the hovering flesh, the dangling medal and beneath her ribs her curved, goose-bumped navel, her link to her mother. The priest nods in the heat, depressed, ready to pack it in. He’s tired, has to cover too many towns, never thought it would end up this way. Children on the swing, swing. An old woman in black clutches corn poppies and children on the swings swing and my Ex-Wife stands on the wooden steps in the white shoes I once polished in our cellar. The cranium has little to do with memory. It’s centred in the mouth and fingers. A woman’s unfolding of certain asexual vegetables and fruit, her calm teeth. The trouble we go to for our few minutes, swearing of course we won’t be back or rashly insisting that we will (Where a republic begins is where it unravels). I began with her. I watch her.
As I wash my hands in an enamel basin a dead passenger washes up from the plane, from the Turbo-Arrow, water rippling over his face, into his open mouth like gin. We’re all passengers, all floating. I get on the party line again, holler into static.
By Shirt Is Blue’s place we watch a horned owl hit a snowshoe rabbit from behind, take its head right off. I have sympathy, decide this is a pertinent message. The message: if today is your birthday you are intuitive, a natural athlete, sensual, unorthodox and stubborn. Cycle highlights change, romance, travel. Major domestic adjustments can be expected, could relate to residence and marital status. Your lawn will catch fire. Like a snowshoe rabbit, you have lost your head.