Sarah Court

by Craig Davidson

  My son’s idea. He’s been making nice with my neighbour, Diznee. Two of them passing goo-goo eyes. While I don’t fancy sitting with Parkhurst along pervert’s row at a ta-ta bar, well, here you’ll find me. The jugged beer’s got a kinetic glow under the black lights. Eerie, like quaffing toxic sludge.

  Colin hits the toilet and on his way back sits at another table with Nicholas Saberhagen, the exboxer and Frank’s son, and a man he introduces as his client. Colin’s talking about his stunt tomorrow. Nick says he’ll bring his own son. Apparently Nick works for American Express. He’d recently returned from a Russian oil spill where he’d seen a shark washed up on the coast. His client—this odd old duck with a face netted in wrinkles as if he’d slept with it pressed against a roll of chicken wire—tells a story.

  “This was in southern Italy,” he starts, “by the sea. On a twisting cobbled alley going up, up, up. Behind me came a truck pulling a trailer. I pressed myself against the alley wall to let it pass. The trailer held a shark. A long, sleek, torsional creature. Enormous! The skin round its eyes was wrinkly as an elephant’s. It stunk of blood and the sea. Its gill-slits were dilated and past their red flutterings was the wink of teeth. Next the screech of tires and—I swear on my life!— the shark flipped out of the trailer to slide, thrashing and viciously alive, back down the street. A living absurdity: the world’s finest predator skidding down a cobbled alley. It careened into a wall and slid on a sideways course, jaws snapping. Momentum carried it down to a stone wall lined with trash sacks, which it gnashed to shreds as the fishermen in the truck ran with gaffing hooks and knives to finish the job. This beautiful shark thrashing in sacks of trash, hide stuck with potato peelings and junk leaflets. A stone’s throw from the sea.”

  I get rooked into paying the whole bill. Colin sold it as an act of deep nobility. Please, good sirrah, let me ante up for this gargantuan strip club bill! Jackrolled by my own flesh and blood. Won’t be able to afford my phlebitis pills when the prescription runs dry but que sera, sera and thank God for socialized healthcare!

  The three of us barrel into a cab. It cuts down Bunting onto the QEW to Niagara Falls. The Falls lit up green, red, and blue by strobelights. White water kicking out into a greater darkness. A banner reads: “Brink Of,” World’s Greatest Stuntman! We continue along the river past the hydroelectric plant.

  “Stop,” Colin says. “Stop here.”

  The cab pulls into Marineland. This discount SeaWorld owned by an old Czech who achieved local fame by strangling an animal rights activist who dramatically chained himself to the entrance gates. Parkhurst’s passed out drunk. We lean him against a tree. Looks as if he’s been shot and arranged in situ by a mafia bagman.

  Along the back edge of the parking lot a flap of chainlink peels away from the fence. I shoulder underneath. My booze-lubed joints don’t note much until a stab at the base of my spine tells me I’ll feel it tomorrow.

  “What are we doing, Colin? Seriously.”

  He hugs me. First he’s done so in I don’t know how long. Try not to read anything into it, him so fickle with these intimacies and myself with no desire to be sucked into his orbit—knowing it can happen, bam, that fast—but it feels so damn good.

  The amphitheater tiers cast shadows round the tank. Curves of white belly as killer whales glide past the glass. A pair of whales landlocked in the middle of Ontario. Thousands of miles to the nearest ocean. Years back the third, Niska, chewed off a trainer’s leg. Were it me and were I aware of how unnatural my life had been made, yeah, I might bite that feeding hand.

  Colin takes my wrist. Turns it over.

  “That scab’s been on your wrist since I got here. Isn’t crusty the way a scab should be. A little red oil slick. You seen a doctor?”

  “It’s a hemoglobin deficiency. I should heal like a thirty-year-old?”

  “I see it and a weird twinge runs under my balls. Same way I felt with Mom.”

  I fail to scab up. On the planet my son occupies, orbiting a sun whose warmth he alone can feel, this is reasonable cause for abandonment. We see the same woman so differently. He remembers her collapsed in the bathtub skeletonized by cancer. I still see her in that same tub after we’d married. Soaking when I’d come in to shave. She asked if I’d like to get in so I stripped right there on the tiles, lickety split, slid in with her. That fabulous lack of friction held by bodies in water. I’m not saying my son lacks empathy. I’m saying it must be hard for him to conceive of his mother and I as holding variable states of being.

  Colin’s leg twitches. I set a hand on his thigh.

  “Come on, now. Please. Don’t.”

  I clutch his sleeve but it’s a meaningless, almost motiveless gesture. Colin hops a wooden gate up stairs curling round the tank. Over a bridge spanning the pool onto the show stage. Kicks his boots off, peels his shirt over his head. Chest clad in roping scars and dented where part of his pectoral muscle was torn off. Unbuttons his flies then raises his arms to make an arrow of himself. He screams— “Yeeeeearrrrgh!”—and dives.

  Rings spread where he goes in. I picture an orca’s jaws chomping him in half for no other reason than he’s there to be bitten and no animal should be expected to behave otherwise. He surfaces. A whale breeches a foot from him. Colin touches its innertube skin. A giddy hoot. The whale vents mackerel-smelling breath through its blowhole. No cameras or reporters. Only my son expressing the odd way he is made.

  Some creatures live as stars do: burn hard and hot, feeding on those nearby but primarily upon themselves. Their lives an inferno and them happiest in that heat. Eating away at themselves until all that remains is appetite. What can I ask of him: that he burn a little less bright? For him that would be a death every bit as final as the one we’ve all got coming. My son will go out burning at such degrees I’ve never known. He will die in flames.

  Boys in Saint Catharines do this thing come their first teenage summer.

  The stump of a train trestle juts over Twelve Mile creek. Boys leap off it. Grandfather, father, me: we all made the jump. If you hit nineteen and for lack of intellect or gumption can’t spin out of those childhood orbits to college or a job outside city limits, well, you’ll pass many an adult night drinking Labatt 50 under that same trestle. For a boy the jump acts as the bridge between their small world and the world everyone else inhabits.

  Could be I overstate it. Maybe it’s just the thing to do on those blistering days when the sun hangs forever and the heat makes you a bit crazy.

  Each summer boys come together in packs. Not even friends, necessarily; just boys from the same stretch of blocks who happen to be of that age. They’ll pick their way over the train ties, each railspike inviting tetanus, to where the trestle bends in a rotted arc. Boys’ll talk about how best to do it: legs-first, arms crossed over their chest so they fall as if tipped dead from a coffin. They’ll shove at each other but no boy ever pushes another over. Some code of boyhood ethics prevents it. You make the leap on your own. If you don’t, you clamber down to the cool grass and put your manhood off another day, week, however long.

  Everyone knows you must jump, surface quick— even then you’ll come up forty yards from where you leapt—and kick like hell for shore. But if you cramp up or get licked by a ripcurl you’ll be sucked into the break where creek meets river, two-hundred yards to either shore. That far out, only the sky and water, a body gets to feeling it’s filled with rocks. A boy did drown. But that was long ago.

  Colin jumped when he was ten. He and one of Clara Russell’s boys. They stole Frank Saberhagen’s Cadillac El Dorado and leapt out into the teeth of night. First my wife or I knew of it was the emergency crew at the door handing up our son bedraggled and shivering.

  I picture him out there. Scrawny kid hunched on the ties in his underwear—they found his PJs flapping on a nail—moonlight plating his bare chest and the indentation of the Verminox scar on his arm. Night breeze ruffling his hair to bring up goose pimples and the darkness such that the water cannot be s
een, only heard, this throaty rush and my son naked to feel the contact high more acutely. Perched on the verge of a blackness so deep it must be like leaping into everlasting night or into death itself.

  My son and I sat on the sofa while my wife thanked the rescue team. Colin wrapped in a blanket sipping cocoa. Making hssss noises between clenched teeth. I switched on the TV. There he was on the early morning news. A bobbing dot gripped in the black fist of the river. “Boys Snatched from Jaws of Death,” read the news ticker. My son cleaved in two: one half on the sofa beside me and the other only coloured dots on a TV screen. One place in peril, the other safe—but even beside me he wasn’t safe because some defect in his head worked against any safety he might know. Wrapped warm in a blanket sipping cocoa with miniature marshmallows, physically present, but the other part of him suspended in the ashen halo of a rescue helicopter spotlight, a bullhorn-amplified voice calling out and a rope dangling inches from his face—an expression so serene, lips gone blue—but he failed to reach for it. Smiling so sweetly so close to death. Close enough to taste, if death has a taste. Unless it’s life he’s been trying to taste all these years. Life at its furthest ambit where the definitions are most powerful.

  To hold a child and to know conclusively you’ve lost him. If there is a more jagged and sickening, more powerless feeling in this world I do not know of it.

  “You’re grounded. A whole month.”

  “Sounds fair, Daddy.”

  Across the Falls, U.S. side, you’ll find the Love Canal district. In 1942, Hooker Chemical corporation buried 22,000 tons of toxic waste. Later the site was covered with four feet of clay and re-zoned. Prefab housing for low-income families. On top of hazardous waste everyone knew was there. People so happy to have a roof over their heads they weren’t fretted by what lay under their feet. Disease abounded: epilepsy, urinary tract infections, infant deformities. The notion that folks could raise kids a few feet above a reservoir of glowing green cancer didn’t wash with middle America. But they didn’t get it. That was those people’s orbit. A doomed orbit, yes, but inertia kept them locked to it.

  The streets and byways I’ve roamed my whole life seem robbed of some crucial quality, too: a quality of ambition, could be, or self-betterment. Hard to pinpoint the sickness when everybody’s infected.

  I stand at the prow of a johnboat I’ve not set foot on in years. Fingers on the nautical wheel as it rolls with the current. Overcast today, cumulus clouds scudded above the Falls tinting the water the same gunmetal grey as the boat. Only colour comes from pink fibreglass insulation drifting over the basin. I squint at the motley assemblage of press gathered at the head of the Falls. From where I’m standing they’re dots. Mildly bemused, mainly bored dots.

  Four hundred bodies pulled out in pieces. They don’t all die. At least twenty I’ve saved. They go over, kicked at by the current until they’re spat out. If they’ve gone blue but there’s the ghost of a pulse I’ll pump their chests and blow air into their lungs. Sometimes it doesn’t do a tinker’s damn but other times they barf up a gutful of water and go on living their blessed lives. Some lack any conception of that blessing: stay underwater long enough, well, it’s no different than a surgeon taking half your brain. A Niagara lobotomy.

  This one time. Colin in the backyard while I barbecued. He tottered up with something in his hands. Uncupped his palms enough so I could see a moth battering his fingers.

  “You must let it go,” I told him. “Lunar moths have a protective powder on their wings. If that powder gets knocked off, they die. Like you with no skin.”

  Colin’s hands sprung open. The moth spiralled off. A shred of one papery wing stuck to my son’s hand. Colin was four years old. Utterly wrecked. Hadn’t wanted to hurt the moth. Only hold it for awhile. He ran inside and came back out with a bottle of his Mom’s talc powder.

  “Where’s that moth, Daddy? I can give it its powder back.”

  My son hasn’t an intentionally hurtful bone in his body. The only creature he’s ever sought to harm is himself.

  I see him a hundred yards back carried in the current. Waving to the tiny crowd not yet battened down. He tucks inside the barrel he’s had made—he honestly had people working on it—and the earth sits stunned on its axis. I cycle the motor to cut a path through the pink-flaked water, aiming for the spot where they usually come up if they come up at all and the earth starts spinning as my son hits the head of the cataract and I see him in there curled fetally—swear to Christ I see him—lit up in a blaze of his own kindling. So hot his shape is an echo of the sun itself.

  “Square it!”

  Screaming this over the motor’s roar and the boom of the Falls, hammering the engine full-bore and skipping over the water, spray wetting my face so I can no longer tell if I’m bawling, though it’s highly conceivable I am.

  “Go on go square that bastard one more time!”

  My son melts a path into the day. Burning through like an ember through a page painted every colour of our world. Throttling headlong to catch him and when I reach for him he will take my hand.

  I have never seen anything burn so fierce trapped so close to earth.

  BLACK POWDER

  STARDUST

  On the day she ordered a police deputy to shoot my squirrel, Clara “Mama” Russell sat on her bed with a baby and a short-barrelled revolver.

  I’d come home from school to discover my pet squirrel, Alvin, shot. He’d gotten into the baby’s pram. But Alvin was harmless. The baby wasn’t even hers. I banged on her door. Jeffrey, one of her boys, answered. Well-dressed and terribly clean. Another of her boys, Teddy, would later burn our house down.

  “Mama’s pipe is flowing very black,” said Jeffrey. I pushed past him and found Mama with the baby and the gun. Mama Russell, a solid woman. A human dumptruck. But right then, with her radish eyes and bloody fingernails, she looked like a cheap umbrella blown inside-out by the wind.

  “Patience Nanavatti, isn’t it? The fireworker’s daughter.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Mama.”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  A shiny silver six-shooter. I’d never seen a gun. Could have been fake except for how it dimpled the duvet. That way its weight expressed itself. Mama picked it up. She tickled the baby’s foot with the gun’s silver hammer. Then she set the barrel under her own chin. Brought it to the tip of one ear round the curve of her neck. Had it been a razor she would’ve slit her own throat.

  “What it is to be a parent,” she said. “Choices. Each more difficult than the last.”

  Her eyes snagged on that silver “O” of the barrel as it traced the her upper lip. She seemed perplexed to find it there—in her house, in her hands—and she dropped it.

  “Oh! But it isn’t loaded.”

  She never did show me the empty chambers.

  “You won’t tell anyone. Our secret, Patience. Promise me.”

  “I promise.”

  The woman angles through racks of OshKosh B’Gosh bib overalls and Jamboree caterpillar-patterned dresses under a display poster of a bugeyed kid heaving on a giant harmonica. She vanishes behind a bin of pickedover boxer shorts.

  Wal-Mart. High-intensity fluorescents, elevator music—presently Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven is a Place on Earth”—the thoughtless seethe as shoppers quest for Windex or paperclips or rotisserie chickens. Spell of consumerism: they find themselves outside with bags of crap viable under these lights but in the sane light of day clearly worthless. Fuck me, they must think, what am I doing with this giant plastic candy cane full of cinnamon hearts?

  Myself, I steal. Whatever fits unobtrusively in my pockets. Batteries up to D-cell. Panties, though a woman with too many panties seems debauched. Dr. Scholl’s jelly shoe inserts, even though nothing’s the matter with my feet. Not that I’m poor. Only that walking past the sensors—I make sure to rip off the magnetized tags—girdled with ill-gotten loot, I am satiated. Before long the emptiness crawls back. My existence is consumed, in fa
ct, by emptiness avoidance. I’ll scan nuptial announcements in the paper, don a fugly crinoline dress, show up at churches to insert myself into photographs. It’s an art, fitting unobtrusively into the frame. Time it right and there’s you with a shit-eating grin backgrounding an earnest portrait of total strangers. My crinoline dress and goofy grin cropping up in wedding albums all over the Niagara peninsula; couples will flip through years later wondering: Who the hell’s that? and say: “She must be from your side of the family.”

  That woman in kidswear is shoplifting. I can smell my own. Normally I’d watch the rent-a-cops descend on her. Instead I return the Energizers to their hook and trail after. Down an aisle of picture frames: the same cute, blonde, pigtailed girl grins out of them all. Passing through women’s wear I unhook all the bras on the display mannequins: a horde of armless, legless, nipple-less silver torsos in my wake. Catch my profile in a mirrored support column: green eyes beneath brows that fail to reach the inner edge of my eyes give my face a truck-flattened, wide-set aspect. A combat jacket from the Army Surplus. We frumps are the most easily ignored.

  I find her in Housewares fingering crockpots. She can’t steal those—tough to convince security you’re afflicted with a crockpot-sized stomach tumour— so I figure she’ll make for Cosmetics. Stuff her socks with eyeliner pencils. She’s really down at the hoof. An air of unconcern about her looks. Except there’s no calculation to it, the way some people go about slovenly as a half-assed statement. No more interest in her appearance than your average bag lady.

  She pulls a U-ey at Fabrics. I lose her amidst unravelling bolts of merino wool. I do my best impression of a neurotic shopping for pinking shears—“These ones have the comfort-grip handles,” I whisper. “These are endorsed by Martha Stewart”—until she exits the public toilets.