Sarah Court

by Craig Davidson

  At the elementary school children are out on recess. Pierced upon the chainlink fence are pop cans and pudding cups. A girl with a mouthful of orangepulp-clung braces holds out sticks to three friends. “Whoever gets the shortest stick we’ll hate for the rest of the day.”

  Were a man standing here as I am, rainboots and an umbrella on a cloudless day staring intently over a schoolyard, you’d think he was a molester. But onlookers would peg me as deranged or more likely, wistful. She wants a child. I’m fairly certain I could be a molester.

  My gaze is drawn to a fat boy in a black cape. Sitting alone on a teeter-totter. The sight strikes me as emblematic of futility possibly cosmic in scope. He’s eating candy shaken from a brightly coloured box. Nerds. I haven’t eaten Nerds in decades. Abruptly I wish to taste the world as a child. At the supermarket I stride past a bin of multicoloured spuds—BOUTIQUE POTATOES ½ PRICE!—to the candy aisle. Scan for floorwalkers before prying the lid off a tub of gummy worms. Oh! Too bloody sweet. How do kids eat this garbage? On to the baby aisle. I may look motherly in that my surroundings support that viewpoint. By placing me against a forest backdrop I’d look outdoorsy. Or in a rubber room: bonkers. Lord, all the diapers! Ultra-slim: what sort of parent is so paranoid about their baby’s girth they need to buy low-profile turd-collectors? Super-absorbent with moisturelock gussets. These ones claim to be completely redesigned. How does one completely redesign a diaper without Mother Nature first redesigning the human excretory system?

  Baby food. Strained Bananas and Prunes catches my eye. It was all my father ate his last months. He said it hurt him to eat. I thought he meant hurt his teeth or belly, but the act inflicted more of a philosophical pain. Fuel for a motor that idiotically kept running. Mashed fruit: our first and last spoonfuls. The first from our parents and the last from our children.

  “Perhaps you’ll have a child,” my father said towards the end, “and I will become part of them. A carbon atom in his eye or a vessel of her heart.”

  “That’s stupid. Don’t talk that way.”

  “It’s a loop. Continuous.”

  “And everything and everyone must be on this blessed loop? What about . . . televangelists?”

  “Yes, pet.” His chuckle dissolved into a hacking fit. “Even them.”

  It isn’t stupid. It’s the most unselfish theory of the afterlife I know of: instead of your spirit floating intact upon a cloud, you particalize into millions of fresh lives.

  A jar of Blueberry Tapioca goes into my pocket. Wax Beans and Vegetable. Fruit Medley. At home I arrange them in a pyramid on the table. The answering machine flashes.

  Lieutenant Mulligan from the NRP. It’s been approved for you to view the baby. . . .

  I had a pet squirrel. I wanted to name him Alvin, after the cartoon character. My father preferred Ming Fa, after a fireworks guru from feudal China.

  Alvin entered our lives in the jaws of Excelsior, Mama Russell’s sweet-tempered sheepdog. She deposited the red, squealing, saliva-slick blob on our lawn.

  At the house of our neighbour, Frank Saberhagen, there once stood a pine tree. The tree failed to jibe with Saberhagen’s post-divorce aesthetic: he’d ripped out the sod, salted the earth, and carpeted his yard with shaved white schist imported from Egypt. The pine was plagued with bark weevils. Needles gone brown. Only the doctor’s macabre taste kept it alive.

  A brain surgeon who’d assisted on the groundbreaking Labradum Procedure at Johns Hopkins, Saberhagen evidently found it cathartic to set aside the scalpel in favour of the double-bitted axe. A fluid tornado of a man with the tight-packed frame of a circus acrobat, he’d stood shirtless, axe in hand, boots gritting on the schist comprising his front yard—a horticultural perversity rendering him persona non grata in the neighbourhood—taking crazed strokes at the tree. For all his deftness in the operating theatre, Saberhagen was a bungler when it came to lumberjacking. The axe blade ricocheted off the trunk. Pine cones pelted his head.

  “Give ’er hell, Quincy!” called his neighbour, Fletcher Burger. Saberhagen’s nickname was based on the coroner played by Jack Klugman in the series of the same name, the morbid suggestion being Saberhagen was such a poor surgeon his professional dossier included as many corpses as the fictional coroner.

  Observing the flailings of his owner was Moxie: a vile-tempered corgi Saberhagen had been forced to accept during his divorce proceedings. Whereas in many divorces custody of a pet is viciously quarrelled over, the Saberhagens’ quarrel was over who would be obliged to shuffle the dog off its mortal coil. The ex-Mrs. Saberhagen—who at a block party was heard stating that her then-hubby possessed “All the personal charm of a deathwatch beetle,” and went on to characterize him as “giving about as much back to the world as a drainpipe”—was victorious. The flatulent, oily-coated, grumpy old dog became Frank’s tortuous burden.

  Moxie was deeply disagreeable. He constantly escaped Saberhagen’s yard by digging under the fence. Nobody would pet him on account of (a) the corgi’s furious digging occasioned some breed of canine skin disorder manifesting in a greasy hide that stunk of rotting fruit and (b) Moxie snapped at anyone who petted him, anyway, providing less incentive to perform what was already a revolting kindness. Cross-eyed and splenetic, Moxie pissed on marigolds and harassed birds at their baths. Saberhagen no longer responded when his pager flashed: Neighbour called. Dog loose again.

  Saberhagen eventually delivered the pine’s deathblow. The tree split up its trunk and toppled. Moxie was splayed on the porch with Nick, Saberhagen’s son. Cross-eyed as he was, the corgi did note the clutch of baby squirrels tipped from their nest. He bounded off the porch to gleefully gulp down three or four.

  Their frightful dying squeals compelled Excelsior to leap off Mama Russell’s porch into Saberhagen’s yard. Crazed on squirrel meat, Moxie lunged for the much larger sheepdog’s throat. Excelsior seized the corgi by his scruff and whipsawed her head to fling Moxie a good ten feet. The dog’s ungraceful trajectory took him over the tree; he hit harshly and rolled as tumbleweeds do.

  Excelsior rooted through the branches to recover the remaining squirrels. That all four fit safely in the pouches on either side of her teeth was the first oddity. The second was that she dropped them on four different lawns. One she left at the Hills. One she left at Mama Russell’s house, where it was taken in by her “boy,” Jeffrey. One for Abigail Burger. Alvin given to me.

  “The momma squirrel won’t take it back now,” my father said. “Your scent’s on it. It’s tainted. The mother might eat it. Mothers can be like that. In the animal kingdom.”

  We packed a shoebox with cotton batten and set Alvin beneath a gooseneck lamp. I was concerned this may scald him: his pink skin put me in mind of the flesh under a fresh-picked scab. His paws so much like tiny human hands. I wished he would open his eyes so I might intuit what he wanted. But when his eyes did open they were inexpressive black bulbs.

  Each day Alvin remained alive, often barely so, I took as a breed of miracle. My father filled an eyedropper with cornstarch-thickened milk and fed him. He’d squirt hypoallergenic soap into his palm, set Alvin in the bowl of his hand to clean him with gentleness bordering on reverence.

  “So fragile. Bones like sugar.”

  A covering of black fur filled over Alvin’s body. His tail, a nippley nubbin, came in bushy. He never grew quite as big as a squirrel should.

  One afternoon he dashed out the patio door. My father pursued—“Alvin! Come to your senses!”— and, spying him in the crotch of the backyard elm, jabbed a banana on the end of a stick as an enticement. When the squirrel refused, Dad mooned by the window, yet he soon turned philosophical. Not an abandonment, he reasoned, but the animal’s natural predilection.

  “Squirrels live in trees. Gather nuts. As they’ve always done.”

  “Sorry I left the patio door open, Dad.”

  “Never mind, pet. Recall the old saying: ‘If you love something, let it go.’”

  Overjoyed as my father was when
Alvin returned that night, he resolved to let an animal be an animal. Mornings Alvin bolted out his squirrel-door—a miniature doggy door my father installed—to dash across the fencelines attaching yard to yard. Plaguing, in the inimitable manner of squirrels, the local canine population. Even Excelsior chased Alvin, who chattered cheekily from a high bough while the poor sheepdog howled.

  Later, Alvin was shot dead with a revolver.

  Mama Russell took in troubled children. Her “boys,” they were known. Teddy and Jeffrey spent years in her care. Others who broke curfew or broke into neighbours’ houses were sent away. At the time of Alvin’s death, Social Services remanded an infant into Mama’s custody until a foster family could be secured. Mama named him Carter, though she had no right. Afternoons she paraded baby Carter round the court in a pram. Alvin, naturally curious, stole into the pram. I pieced this together afterwards.

  Mama swatted at Alvin, who scrambled up a tree. Mama called the police. A cruiser was dispatched. A deputy not long on duty unloaded on Alvin with his service revolver. Centre of mass, as they teach at the academy.

  A squirrel weighing that of a bar of soap. Annihilated. My first attempt at parenthood culminated with a squirrel so blown apart there wasn’t much to bury.

  “You mustn’t give your heart to wild things,” my father said that night. “Or take on burdens of care more than you need to.”

  “But aren’t I a burden?”

  “I had no choice with you, pet. And was glad not to. But.” Spoken with finality. “But.”

  Take the hospital elevator to the pediatric ward. The evening shift nurse—body garrulous in heft but her face having none of it—eyes me in my military surplus parka. REYNOLDS stamped in black on the breast pocket.

  “A fine thing, what you did,” she says, after I identify myself. “Lucky you were there.”

  The compliment comes off backhanded: as if my managing to rescue the baby was as unbelievable as my having landed a harrier jump-jet on a cocktail napkin. The nurse glides past darkened delivery rooms on soft-soled shoes silent as a razor blade through a bowl of water. A mesh-inlaid mirror runs the length of the nursery. Inside I am struck by the smell of new life.

  We’re all rotting. Your body hits a peak at eighteen, maybe, and that perfect bodily zenith lasts how long? A day, or a few hours of that day? Next, descent and decay. Strains and aches and dimming sight. Stuff yourself with carcinogens because you’ve surrendered to the inevitability of collapse. You get winded climbing a flight of stairs. Following that, lumps and lesions to ice your heart. The Big C? Hold the whole tortured works together another fifty years and you’re granted the merciful stillness of the grave.

  But the nursery is stuffed full of showroommodel humans. Brand-spanking new, factory-fresh rolled off the assembly line. Impregnated with that new-baby smell. Assaulted by pound upon pound of sprightly, helpless baby-meat, I fleetingly wish I was some breed of vampire. A youth vampire. Flap round the nursery on talcum-powdered wings poking my head into hermetically-sanitized tubs to hoover the youthful essence out of these helpless things. Partake of their luscious and nourishing, sinfully yummy esprit. Drain these beautiful babes until I was a child again and my organs no longer on the rot, cherubic as I dash away shed of my too-big clothes. I’d flee barefoot from a nursery full of withered crepe-paper baby husks.

  “So small,” I say, peering at my little toilet baby. “Was she . . .”

  “A preemie?” The nurse shakes her head. “Only malnourished. Think of a plant under a porch: it’ll grow down there in the dark and damp. Just not so well.”

  “May I have some time alone?”

  “Make it quiet time. If one wakes, they all wake.”

  The baby’s name card affixed to the tub: JANE DOE #2. I section her sleeping face in search of the woman who’d tried to murder her. But that woman exists in my memory only as a tangle of emotional drives. Her face is my own face. The face of everyone I’ve even known. She made a premeditated choice to dump this life in a retail chain toilet. Abdicate her responsibilities in such vicious fashion. How had she seen her life changing? Your own defenseless child— how deep must you core into any heart to find that mammoth well of expedience?

  Unbutton my coat. Cradled in stirrups of my own creation—oversize suspenders accommodating a cardboard papoose—is a doll I’d stolen from a toy store.

  Teddy, another of Mama Russell’s boys, set fire to my father’s workshop and burnt to death in our basement. Dad was mailing a package. I was in my bedroom with Abigail Burger, Fletcher Burger’s daughter.

  Teddy was a pygmy pyromaniac with burn scars on his arms pink as pulled taffy. He wore boxy black glasses with melted armatures. He’d soak ant hills in lighter fluid and set them ablaze. He said things like: “My penis is two and a third inches long” or “Anacondas have one twelve-foot-long lung” or “My mama had a nerve disorder. And Poppa is a sailor.” He was known to eat his elbow and knee scabs. Cut holes in his trouser pockets so he could squeeze his testicles. Mama had Teddy wear linen gloves so he wouldn’t break the skin as he throttled them. He shimmied through our basement window while Abigail and I ran our squirrels through a maze of shoe boxes and toilet paper rolls.

  Abby was my only real friend. Her father, Fletcher, had the bombastic and overbearing demeanour of an East German gymnastics coach. Forever dragging her off on bike rides or nature hikes that unfolded more like the Bataan death march. Of orangutang proportions, he was often seen in a sweatsuit with a digital stopwatch strung round his neck.

  “Abby!” he’d call. “Bike ride!”

  “I don’t want to ride my bike.”

  “Who’s that talking? Is it Flabby Abby?”

  “I’m not flabby.”

  “You will be, my dear, if you don’t ride your bike.”

  Fletcher was fanatical about his daughter’s fitness. Abby became a champion powerlifter. Her father credited much of her success to his “Energizer Bowls”: brown rice, broccoli, and amino acids concocted in massive batches and stored in a chest freezer in the garage. Abby said the last few bowls sat in the freezer so long they tasted like “a doomed Arctic expedition.”

  The explosion shuddered the entire house. Volcanic wind blew up the ventilation ducts. Spumes of burning dust. Abby and I went to the window. The lawn sparkled with glass. Flames climbed the siding from blown-apart casements. Our squirrels scrambled down the downspout. We followed suit. Abby fell and snapped her wrist. A hole burnt through the roof as it collapsed into the foundation.

  Teddy’s carbonized skeleton was later doused by firemen. Hands heat-welded to my father’s steel workbench. Skull pushed back on his spinal column from the force of the blast.

  Insurance covered the rebuilding costs but my father assumed the neighbours blamed him. We moved away from Sarah Court, resettling way across town. Not long after the fire, my father told me I was adopted.

  “Patience, sit there on the couch. A bit of a bomb I’ll be dropping.”

  Less a bomb than a grenade lobbed between us—a grenade he’d feared would shatter my psyche, sense of self, my whatever else. It occasioned in me nothing but curiosity.

  Where was I adopted?

  “An institution north of here. I wasn’t an ideal candidate but a solid citizen.”

  How did I end up there?

  “Nobody saw the need to tell me. People do take on burdens that overmaster them.”

  Why take me in?

  “You needed adopting. I was in a position to do so.”

  Did it ever scare you—being a father?

  “There should be a training guide for new fathers. Either your head’s screwed on tight and gets unscrewed, or you come into it a wreck and fatherhood is a centralizing circumstance to an even greater crackup. Fatherhood destroys some men.”

  He offered to help track my parents down. I’d no urge to find them. My father was Philip Nanavatti: this fact as cleanly connected to me as each finger at the end of each hand. The circle closed upon itself and I was c
ontent within its circumference. That I may still have a mother was no different than discovering I had an extra organ. A tiny sac or bladder that contributed nothing to my health nor brought about any sickness. A surgeon could excise it, yes, but since it was benign and I could quite happily exist with it somewhere within me, why bother?

  “Your mother was not a bad person, pet.”

  I never thought of her as bad. My mother is any one of a billion women in as many conditions. In prison or a boardroom or an oil sheik’s harem. A housewife in Paramus, New Jersey. A roller derby queen going by the name of Cinnamon Kiss in Poughkeepsie. A cipher, as the woman who stuffed baby Jane into a toilet was a cipher.

  My mother died birthing me.

  The only worrisome quality to not knowing your parents is you don’t truly know yourself. You never know what you are capable of, as you cannot see your roots. The skews of their braiding. What they touch, or fail to.

  It’s that time of evening where the sun rests at that particular point in the sky: hitting your eyes directly, sunlight robs the world of dimension. Buildings become black cut-outs hammered flat by the refraction of the sun. A shape darts onto the road. I swerve, no thump, missing it.

  Jane Doe sits in a car seat facing away from the dashboard. Otherwise if I crashed, accidentally or on purpose, the passenger-side airbag would deploy to crush the little-bitty bones of her face. I hit the QEW highway, going east. A squad car rushes past in the opposite lane. The highway wends past Niagara Falls to the Fort Erie border. It suddenly occurs to me that my mental state is not up to explaining Jane to the border guards.

  I return to St. Catharines and park at the Big Bee convenience store near the bus depot. I pull in beside a minivan, unbuckle baby Jane, and enter the store. I microwave pablum in one of the baby bottles I’d bought. Another customer scans a low shelf with his back to me. I spy a pack of fireworks next to sacks of expired dog kibble. The microwave dings. I dab pablum on my wrist. Outside a man hops into the minivan and peels off. I angle the bottle so Jane’s lips clasp round the nipple. Press her warm body to my chest.