Sarah Court

by Craig Davidson

  SARAH COURT

  CRAIG DAVIDSON

  ChiZine Publications

  COPYRIGHT

  Sarah Court © 2010 by Craig Davidson

  Cover artwork © 2010 by Erik Mohr

  Interior design © 2010 by C. A. Lewis

  Author photograph by Lisa Myers

  All rights reserved.

  Published by ChiZine Publications

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  EPub Edition APRIL 2012 ISBN: 978-1-92685-188-4

  All rights reserved under all applicable International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen.

  No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

  CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS

  Toronto, Canada

  www.chizinepub.com

  info@chizinepub.com

  Edited by Brett Alexander Savory

  Copyedited and proofread by Halli Villegas

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

  Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  PROLOGUE

  BLACK WATER—Riverman and Son

  BLACK POWDER—Stardust

  BLACK BOX—The Organist

  BLACK CARD—Noseratu, My Son

  BLACK SPOT—Pipes

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  Squirrels cause suburbanites more grief than any creatures under your sun.

  Squirrels tore up my garden! Squirrels ate the seeds left out for the robins! Goddamn those marauding buggers!

  I’d laugh, were I capable.

  The Eastern Gray Squirrel, sciurus carolinensis, is, on average, fifteen inches from nose to tail tip. Weighs, on average, one pound. Pick up a pair of wire cutters. Snip your pinkie finger off below the nail. The size of a squirrel brain. A homo sapiens’ synaptic clusters produce enough bioelectricity to jumpstart a Chevrolet. A squirrel’s fail to produce enough to jumpstart a wristwatch.

  Yet despite their many handicaps, they consistently outwit humankind. I’ve seen a grown woman crouched in her nightgown on a freezing winter morn lubing her bird feeder pole with bacon grease. Saw one man shoot a squirrel with a twelve-gauge Remington. Obliterate it. To quote an old aphorism: There’s a difference between scratching your ass and tearing big lumps out.

  Sarah Court had squirrel problems for years. Until its residents domesticated them. “Ushering hobos from gutter to penthouse,” according to one disgruntled homeowner.

  Sarah Court: a ring of homes erected by the Mountainview Holdings Corporation. Cookie-cutter houses put up quick. Residents digging gardens will encounter broken bricks and wiring bales haphazardly strewn and covered with sod. In a town twenty minutes north of Niagara Falls. Grape and wine country. Crops harvested by itinerant Caribbean fieldhands who ride bicycles bundled in toques and fingerless gloves even in summertime. A town unfurling along Lake Ontario. Once so polluted, salmon developed pearlescent lesions on their skin. Ducks, pustules on their webbed feet. They seizured from contagions in their blood. Children were limited to swimming in ten-minute increments.

  You really are such magnificently grim bastards. Trashing utopias is how you party.

  A town where, as they say, everybody is in everybody’s pocket. Where any resident can ask another resident if they have seen any other resident and the answer will be: “I’ve seen him around.” Everybody is always seeing everyone else, around. A town where those who suffer a flat tire are apt to drive on the emergency spare for six months. Whose more corpulent residents have been spotted Whose more corpulent residents have been spotted HOUR FAMINE with no discernible hint of irony. Whose denizens have been collectively referred to by graceless out-of-towners as resembling “your standard roller derby audience.” A town you cannot truly label multicultural, though its undertaker does craft specialty coffins for Muslims to be interred on their sides facing Mecca. He also receives a fee from town coffers for indigents who are interred in industrial rollpaper tubes: basically, toilet paper rolls roomy enough to fit one deceased hobo.

  A town where young men barrel out of downtown boozers to find their gaze fastened upon the starstudded sky, gibbous moon tilting over the low architecture and streetlights of St. Paul street, knowing this is it—their place in the world. A town where if you get away, you get away young. Otherwise inertia locks you into acceptance. A town where men return to their old high schools after the bars shut down. Always a case of warm beer in somebody’s trunk. The “Mobile Party Kit.” They huddle on bleachers talking about that football game they lost but how afterwards they scrapped the winners and sent them home bust up. A town adept at reconfiguring losses as wins. One friend inevitably challenges another to a hundred-yard dash— “Track’s right there, fucko. You chickenshit?”—so they run drunkenly yet somehow desperate, warm beers in hand, on legs already turning soft round their bones.

  A town where most work at fabrication plants, dry docks, Redpath Sugar. Half a lifetime at one mind-crumbling task: pressing sheet metal into fenders or arc-welding ships’ hulls or filling bags with ice tea mix. Drive past the GM factory at six a.m.: greenhorns coming off skeleton shifts pin-eyed and pasty as arctic zombies while older men with tin lunchboxes festooned with Chiquita banana stickers punch in. Men forever smelling of acetylene sparks, industrial glue, unrefined sugar. Who smell of such on their marriage altars and will smell of such in their coffins. Or should their lives spin terribly awry: rollpaper tubes.

  A town like so many others, with a “right” and “wrong” side, delineated by the CN Pacific tracks cleaved through its heart. How is it so many of your kind’s habitations are thus separated? As if when railcars offloaded the town founders, all the promising citizens disembarked out one side while the wastrels, knaves, scoundrels, and pariahs slithered out the other. Go rip open a bag of trash on the east, or “right,” side: name-brand products. Rip open a bag on the west: yellow no-name packaging, Black Cat cigarette butts, bottles of Wildcat lager— which legend has is concocted from vat dregs recarbonized and sold stone cheap. Sterno Dell’s on the westside: a wooded bowl strewn with mattress skeletons where rubbydubs slept the summer months. That is until one shambles dozed off with his cooker lit and burnt it to an unhealthy blackness. Had you been hovering above the fire you would have seen wild animals fleeing all robed in flame. A sight not unlike solar flares releasing from a sun’s superheated corona.

  Not a town without charm. An escarpment fringes the southeastern edge; the millennia trickle through its steep cliffs. The lake’s sailboat-studded green shading to glassy gold lit by a harvest moon. The people within its limits are good stock. If anything, they meet the challenges life throws at them too quickly. Marriage and parenthood arrive and with them the cessation of so many wild ambitions. Some call this
an unbeautiful place containing a few quite beautiful people. Others say this is an oddly beautiful place containing a few right bastards.

  A spot in Shorthills park overlooks town, near the flame-gutted remains of an El Camino set afire at a rowdy bush party. Were you to stand on this overlook while encroaching darkness flattens the sunlight into a thin red artery between the apartment towers, you could feel the immensity of those lives being lived. The windows of those towers lit thumbprints punched out of the dark. Smoke from GM smokestacks atomizes above the housing projects where lawns go brown each summer. People dancing: in bars, the Ukranian Hall on Louth street, Club Roma near the ball diamonds, teenagers at basement parties—future mechanics dancing cheek-to-cheek with future accountants, plumbers with lawyers, lives elastic with potential. Fucking tenderly, fucking brutally, fucking to bring new life into the fold or satisfy animal drives, entreaties shrieked, empty promises tendered, headboards rattled. Dying: breaking through a stock car’s windshield at the Merritville Speedway, a man’s body propelled straight as a ballistic torpedo and the shattering Saf-T-Glass a million bloodied starlings startled into flight, the white stripe down his racing suit making him look a lightning bolt forked from the vehicle’s interior with a helmetful of red pulp held in place by a shattered jawbone. All those lives thumping at you. One massive thundering heartbeat.

  Blood follows blood.

  A professional fistfighter’s expression. Testifying to the fact that some cuts absorbed during a fight are so deep or critically placed upon a combatant’s face, blood cannot be stopped.

  Some believe a skull is a skull is a skull. Yet many of your species have an undeniable sharpness of bone. Chins, cheeks, ridges where brow meets socket of eye. Others, thin skin. Others, a fierce heartbeat to stampede blood through the veins. If your bones are so sharp the pressure of a blow causes your tissues to tear apart over them the way a melon halves itself when dropped upon an axe’s blade, or if your skin is stretched tight as drumskin and splits apart easily—as old cutmen say, “his flesh opens with the frequency of elevator doors”—or your heart pounds like a tackhammer to bulge your every vein: if this is you, your blood will run into your eyes, mouth, pooling in your sinus cavities until all you taste, smell, all you know is blood.

  Blood follows blood other ways. Offspring follows progenitor. Blood knotted through bodies becomes the red webs binding you. Imagine a net swept over the sea bottom dredging up a frenzy of creation: crab and eel and shark and seahorse and whale caught up in a thrashing teardrop of life. So much life pressed skin on skin on skin.

  You are barrels packed to bursting. Barrelsful of frailty, of beauty, of regret, passion, sorrow, envy, horror, guilt, hope, rage and love and pain. Barrelsful of everything it is to be afflicted with your peculiar condition.

  So come now, the souls of Sarah Court invite you, and please—open them up.

  BLACK WATER

  RIVERMAN & SON

  It hurts so bad that I cannot save him, protect him,

  keep him out of harm’s way, shield him from pain.

  What good are fathers if not for these things?

  —Thomas Lynch, “The Way We Are”

  Four hundred. Suicides, failed daredevils, boozesoaked ruins. Four hundred bodies I’ve dragged out that river.

  They start two hundred yards higher, where it narrows between Goat Island and Table Rock. Craning their necks north they’d spy that huge green head fronting Frankenstein’s House of Horrors up Clifton Hill—though back in the ’70s when Knieval copycats tossed themselves over regular as clockwork, their eyes would be drawn to mist gathering at the head of the Falls while they floated in their giant lobster pot or other idiot contraption. Rapidly coming to grips with the foolhardiness of their endeavour.

  I catch them with hook and rope and a Husky X9 winch. I can only say how they look falling into my care. Simple answer’s bad. Crass one’s discombobulated. Truth is it’s a hard description to approach. The human body’s durable. Idiotically so. The Big Drop shows you all durabilities have limits.

  First time you motor out you’re asking, How bad can it be? That question has a way of coming off as a dare to the Almighty.

  Most of us cross a body, it’s in a coffin. Frozen in pleasing position. What I drag out of that river is death in the raw. Unadorned yet in its way utterly natural, in that nature holds many strange shapes. Men bent at angles failing to match the angles of our understanding. Pressure’s a sonofabitch. Trapped in chambers hammered out over millennia, a body churns like a ragdoll in a cement mixer. Mortician who handles Plungers—his pet euphemism—has mannequin limbs the colours of all creation. An incomplete head equals a closed casket. No ifs, ands, or buts.

  Once I took my boy Colin on a training run. Two of us in a johnboat on the zinced waters of the Niagara. Up top the cataract was my neighbour, Fletcher Burger, with a ballistic latex Resussy-Annie doll stitched to a pair of weighed legs. Colin cupped a handful of water. Rubbed his fingers over his teeth. Earlier that week his mother had collapsed in the shower. Stuff metastasizing to her bones. She’d begun sinking into herself. I’d knelt fully clothed in the tub. Water pelting down. Covering her breasts best as I was able. For his sake. Hers, too.

  “Water goes deep enough, it’s always black,” I told him. “Sun can’t penetrate. Colour spectrum fails. At eighty feet it’s total blackness. The sun gives our skin colour. The deepest sea fish get no sun. You can see right into their guts.”

  Fletcher hurled the doll. I dragged in its torso. Legs I never did find. One of its eyes burst. The insides crawled the shatter-lines in black threads, like when your digital watchface cracks.

  “Happens to us, too,” I said. “Often worse.”

  Colin prodded the doll’s head with his sneaker. The liquid black of its eye rolled down its rubber cheek. Even back then he didn’t feel the odds applied to him.

  My name is Wesley Bryant Hill. My grandfather was the Riverman. My father, too. That’s the way life unfolds in the territories of my birth.

  The boy walks into the strip club as Dracula.

  Ordinarily I steer clear of fleshpits. Sadsacks ordering five-dollar steaks—who eats five-dollar meat anywhere tap water runs you ten?—old mares in costume panties with the spanglies falling off, raincoat types with basset faces, DJ playing “Don’t Stop Believing” when it’s clear everyone has. That gathered humanity disintegrating under a disco ball.

  I’m here on account of Diznee. Roberta to her mother. Evicted from her night slot by girls bussed in from Quebec—“Nothing against the Kaybeckers,” she says, “but they don’t got horny stiffs in Montreal?”—she toils the midday grind at Private Eyes. We share an apartment block. I babysit her boy, Cody. Black-white. What do you call that? Mulatto. Good kid. I’m here to collect my babysitting monies when I spot Boy-Dracula. Chubby, mop-headed, in a black cape. Clive the afternoon barkeep asks what he’ll have. A gal old enough to be this kid’s auntie slithers naked round a brass pole.

  “Clive!”

  “One of the girls’ kids.” He serves the boy a glass of maraschino cherries. “Right?” The boy cocks his head as a dog will. “Oh, jeepers,” goes Clive.

  I tell the kid he shouldn’t be here.

  “This is where ladies . . . dance.”

  “Wizzout zeyr pants,” he says in this Nosferatu voice.

  Take him onto Bunting road. Sunlight beating on the hoods of Camaros and pickups.

  “What’s with the cape?”

  “I yam a wampire.”

  “You don’t say. How’d you get here?”

  “Zee buzz.”

  The bus-riding vampire’s name is Dylan. “How come you aren’t shrivelling up in the sun?” “I yam a magical wampire.”

  I’ll wager this act gets him beat up a fair load. Walk to a payphone beside Mattress Depot. He calls someone to pick him up. Cross to Mac’s Milk. One Coke and one “Vampire Tonic”: chocolate milk to us non-bloodsuckers. Dylan insists on paying. His fiver has pinpricks run down it. />
  “So, there a missus Vampire?”

  “Sadie,” he says in a regular kid voice. “She’s sort of my girlfriend.”

  “A looker?”

  “She’s got piglet tails.”

  “I think that’s pigtails. Plan on bringing her to visit your Ma and Pa in Transylvania?”

  A powder blue Ford pulls in. The driver’s Abigail Burger. From Sarah Court. Fletcher’s daughter. I believe she recognizes me but as we fail to acknowledge this, the moment passes and we shake as two strangers. One hell of a grip.

  “Any idea how much trouble a kid can get into with only a bus pass?” she says. “I sew five-dollar bills into the lining of his pants so he’s not penniless.”

  “What’s this about him being a vampire?”

  “Dad lets him watch monster movies.”

  “Mom doesn’t approve?”

  “Oh, I’m not his mother.”

  I say goodbye. Head home. The sky’s composed of overlapping orange- to blood-coloured curtains when my own son pulls into the complex lot. Driving a shark-grey Olds. Flames lick off the wheel wells. Haven’t seen him in two years and three before that. My apartment’s a shambles. Grab Lucky Lager bottles and sleeve them in the nearest two-four case. Colin’s fist hammers the door.

  “Since when do you lock it, Daddio?”

  As if he visited weekly and this is a fresh wrinkle. I’m sixty. Colin was born when I was twenty-five. The mathematics bear out in the creases of his face and the calcified humps of his knuckles. His left cheek’s caved inwards below his eye. Happened years back when he jumped eleven busses at the Merritville Speedway, misjudged the landing and crushed his skull off the bars. His helmet split in half—helmets are designed to split under pressure; otherwise, you slip it off and inside’s red goo—as his body ragdolled over the front tire. He survived, as he’s survived the flaming rings of death and sundry smashups he calls a career. Hair flecked with white. Nothing like your son’s hair coming in grey to make you feel fossilized. Blue eyes, his mother’s, gone pale round the edges. Leather jacket with “Brink Of, Inc” stenciled on the back. Ragged cracks like tiny mouths at the elbows.