I
ask him what the range is between rings, is it big. He goes, “Well,” and moves
down toward me on the other side of the jewelry case, “between $10 and $3000.”
There’s a note pinned to a sheet over the entrance of the stall next door
saying there was a funeral and they’d be back by 3pm. “So, a pretty big range
then.”
The
hub of this place seems kicked up in the dust surrounding the airport. We bank
in low and the yellow, brown and green patchwork spread in soft divisions,
there is nothing but the sense of land to spare. Your brain takes what you know
and shoves it out to you when prompted and here it is screaming Wyoming, maybe
815 miles off. Pterodactyls hang from the ceiling in the airport. Coming down
the escalator the frosted glass doors slide open, shut, open again, half shut,
and through the morse pattern gaps I see their teeth flashing for me, careening
their necks around as if they could get a better look through the static open
space. All the places you’ve already made maps of you haven’t been to, think of
them, to go so far as how you’d feel there in the rolling heat or the curbs
you’d kick off of. How your lips might part and for who and the grinning
wrought spaces your body will make. But the mountains here don’t knock you over
the head, they stay out at the flanks of everywhere you look and the sky rolls
huge to them, a thundering blue vacuum. We send our friends out like settlers
to places like this and picture their wan smiles and the stupid faces they make
and draft up an understanding based on what we know them to be able to take. I
am not surprised to see them healthy but I am surprised to see them glowing,
the lost golden lines of the West coming through them. Standing in the kitchen
doorway of one of your best friend’s houses, not understanding what kind of
light is hammering through the huge windows at a long ways after nine P.M.
Their bare feet slap on the warm wood floors, I’m dazed but accepting of the
champagne glass and not being able to see a thing for all the bouncing yellow
light. He blurts “Uh-oh” as an accidental toast and it fits better than
anything else. It’s the altitude, they will tell me, the sun hangs around low
for hours like the last amicable humming drunk to finally leave the bar, here
the golden hour lasts for four. With that much light around you are bound to
breathe a bit slower.
We’re
both in our bathrobes and we take the walkway like they told us, encased in
glass going over the main drag. Towers on all sides, every oil company you’d
every stored in your head, you could meet with them all in an afternoon and
still have time to get down to the river. My face is rosy and his is too, we’ve
come out now into a mall, there is no pool here.
Places,
cities, like this, seem important intermediaries for specific points of your
life. They come in like a third party mediator, flushed, maybe heavy in the
flanks a bit, but full of resolve. Man, can they clench a fist around your
wrist and jerk your attention, jaw agape, a well of power you’d never pegged
them for. You think yourself very lean, with long muscles that will slip out of
any trace, but oh they come on you like a snuffling dog and clamp down and
lord, do not resist. Take the lesson here. Half the time what’s so tough is you
weren’t trying to learn a thing, your resolve was wheeling around the idea that
proximity was enough but cities like this sniff you out and hell if it couldn’t
have been a more comfortable mark. Lie back on the porch, get a bit heat-spun,
feel yourself smiling with something of a drawl at everybody and see how
familiar your pulse and blood become when something is staving it, cause the
truth is in three hours everything you expected will reverse itself.
He
keeps screaming “SoCal!” and you smile because two people will always stand in
the same place looking at the same thing and see something different.
Sometime
when you are out there in the dark, breathless, with dust being kicked up and
your back against a warm brick wall reverb is kicking through, pushed up a
metre from the ground, huge hands around both your bare legs covering more
ground by just opening splay than all those cross-country races you used to
hammer through, sometime in there she texts you: “Score one for the home team!”
The
things you feel sure of: how this guy is hollering “MOUWN-TIN!” and the way the
light keeps dogging the canines of everybody as they smile back over their
shoulders at you. In an 8ft wide featherbed laughing ourselves sick, the three
of us whipping cans across the room and all the breath going from you past the
red-fleck stars across your vision to maybe you’ll just shatter. Grappling.
Your legs as you climb the cut-out bronze horse silhouettes Joe Fafard made, in
the middle of the city, as thin as a bathroom mirror once you get to their
backs, streets desolate and nothing but her vibrations like a buoy back on the
ground. This body in front of you, cutting the light. Bodies that are built to
be provisioning, to be blankets and ladders and flashing mirrors, to take from
you past where you’re sure. To offer you up grey mornings around the edges of
this valley, to offer you up a trip to the garbage dump in their pickup. One
last, slow morning circling the dwarfed Calgary Tower looking for gas and
slower still once we get back to the hammocks on the porch and you think about
their hands and their feet and their breath here, gorged on gold light. You
were loving them worse but you’ve never loved each other better.
