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Going Canada
On the International Bridge two hundred feet I think over water but
maybe more since I'm not so good at telling, the water of Lake Superior
where it kicks its way down into Lake Erie; the scattered shallow straits
of Mackinac rush below—this is why they need the Locks Tony says,
to ease the transition, to bridge that gap, manage the four-foot differential
between the two lakes' water levels; Superior is so strong I say and
high without all this machinery it could just rush down into the other
and wreck the place; ore boats list in one of the many locks somewhere
below in the gray mass of dock and city; we're in my dad's Aerostar,
his first car he said he totalled it and he was drunk I think, and then
ten years notched down the road he's driving empty hearses back from
Sault Ste. Marie, the crossing point you see, the connection North or
South to Canada on the International Bridge, to St. Ignace, not the
crossing point you see South from the top bit of Michigan down into
the dark mess of the Lower Peninsula, the Mackinac bridge—toll
$1.50 and unease—there is a story about my gramps who ran the
ferry across the water and how he tried to sabotage the building of
the bridge and how he failed and there was this guy, a worker laying
concrete who fell, got buried in the stuff, neck up and swallowed; and
that's how I feel right now I tell Tony who's driving, and I suspect
he knows the way out and that's where we're going, going Canada where
his older brother says we'll find the titty bars although I have serious
problems with this we'll never mention it we don't talk about Tony's
brother and what he did to the family, safe-cracking house-breaking
or some such bullshit there's another story here about the bank robbers
in the winter Upper Michigan which means 300 inches of snow some year,
and they held up the place, some bank and I don't mean snow—ho
ho—and escaped on snowmobiles not thinking I guess it's cold I
guess and maybe some moral sense or at least sense of self shuts down
I guess and the cops followed the tracks back and took them down; and
it's a long way down I say to the gassy surface of the lake and Tony
says we're going Canada, eh! and all I can say is yeah cripes eh! and
let's consider for a moment what it means to drop that proposition and
jam it all together.
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Down
Tony & me, we're going Canada, going to without the “to”
as they say up here, we're popped up over the curl of Lake Superior
on the International Bridge whose toll was $1.50 in 1975 according to
the map my parents bought the year of my birth, my father's drive from
here to St. Ignace, South, in an empty hearse; we're cut out over water
and that's what's left, water and the gas and space between us and it
I heard a Yugo got blown off this bridge in a windstorm—boxy little
bastard Tony says when I tell this story again—my friends keep
stealing Lawry's Seasoned Salt from the Elias Brothers Big Boy with
the big-ass lighted boy on the post, keep stealing the salt before the
bridge as a charm for luck and love and at the least to never wreck;
Tony's cutting our way into Canada with an blowtorch in the car; this
is my dream so I see it like I see it, and Tony's going I know downstate
I know sometime soon and this is our last chance to get through February
like a storm I know except we don't call ‘em storms here but nothing
and we don't speak of them instead, and so we're going up to get drunk
and maybe we'll find some bar called Silver's and have ourselves an
embarrassing experience, it's like getting caught, it's like the seam
of scar incurred in a fall from bunk bed to concrete; we're in my car
and pulling the freight of my grandma's locked safe we moved out from
her house but we're no thieves, for what it's worth, and when we see
the pull-aside and lightchurn of customs, I brief I breathe and say
it's good we left the rifles at home, and the crack, Tony kicks conversationally
in, and I expect the guy to look like a Mountie I don't know much about
Canada but amethyst and Thunder Bay and curling, hockey, Corey Hart
I know that isn't much but it's someplace else, a place to start, and
they have signs in French and measure things in metric which sounds
dumb to us but I swear to you it's not.
*
Metric
The sound of it gets me in the gonads I say it's silly to tell Tony
this while we're about to be carried off and washed, watched down by
these customs guys who of course have no idea of course how we got to
here with the safe in the back of the blue-belly grocery-getter beast
we call an Aerostar and is the safe locked I have no idea but with our
luck of course it is and they ask me for my license plate and it's my
dad's car so that's what I tell them but it's no hearse of course and
what I want right now is the avenue out, the light white dust of a Canadian
snow, the devalued dollar slight like a wisp of smoke on a lake, the
frozen ground too hard to bury anybody not nobody not your mother or
that kid who snowmobiled down through the ice into that glossy otherworld,
not your Cousin Urho who died in a sauna drunk and dehydrated and his
skin glowed like burned-up paper you know the kind that's left the kind
that's ash, not nobody gets interred till Spring unless you want to
pay for groundthaw & dig & burial and I want the thin Canadian
pop cans that of course you cannot return stateside, the 0.333 liter
silos, I want a kind of white picket fence that can't be married or
measured off in English words—it's in the way the language doesn't
sound, it purrs and, like grackles, cackles, and they have Boxing Day
and curling and now the Mountie's looking right at me like he knows
we just want out though we'll want back in but you know we can't just
let a locked safe onto Canadian soil he says what if it's a bomb or
a coil of germs or a gentle weapon or some new strain, and I nod as
if I understand, but where are we anyway—we're still above the
international waters so whose ground are we on anyhow if we're even
on ground which we're not, so whose jurisdiction is it, is it my dad's
in the back of a hearse, is it the Canadian border police, is it Tony's
in this, his last week in the better half of Michigan, do youse guys
have jurisdiction over space I start to ask but Tony grunts and cuts
me off and says yes sir that is so right, so I suck that question right
back in but still I want to tell him it's important—the thing
is he can't leave me here in this place hanging over water, in the middle
of all this radio and weather, that it's true, people here they die
on you, they die on you and leave you driving to their funeral in the
spring or their new school downstate, they die and send you postcards,
leave you driving & directionless in a hearse.
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