“Are we talking laws? Jurisprudence? No— karmic fairness. That dog and me are wedded above any law. Anyway, when they showed up, my ex leashed Matilda in the yard. Went to do whatever she does with Doc Hotlips. Screw on a bearskin rug. I grabbed Matilda. She’s barking her head off. Next it’s Hotlips steamrolling at me. I took a swing. He painted me. All she wrote.”
“The whole fight?”
“When I come to he’s apologizing. My eyes were really watering from the punch—could’ve looked I was crying. Off me and Matty ran. They’re yelling kidnapper and what-have-you. I need a drink.”
James and I slouch down the alcoholic’s ladder. James shows me Matilda’s trick: he balances a peanut on her snout and at his command—“Giddyup!”—she pops the nut up to snatch it out of midair.
We roll out of the bar into a star-cooled night. The road dead-ends at the dock. For whatever reason James and I are holding hands. This blissful look paints his face. The realization comes that I like him quite a bit. Self-love, partially, that reflexive fondness a man feels for another whose beggared circumstances mirror his own.
“Nice boat,” he says. “I had a motorhome. That baby was repossessed.”
James swings his hand, attached to my arm, as if we are on a playdate. Matilda paws down the gangplank. Wind blows off the liftlocks, ruffling our thinning hair.
Black Box: Wife
This flight was buggered from takeoff. Headsets broken. Beef stroganoff poisoned with botulism. An albatross got sucked into the right fuselage. Some other bird—flamingo? charred pink feathers—sucked into the left. We’re going down. Mayday, mayday! . . . screw it.
When we dated she made it known I must earn her. A breathing kewpie doll. I learned to tango. Bought a ’78 Cougar with flake-metal finish. Was the first to say, “I love you.” Once I’d won her, everything that was hard in her went to goo and I hated it and we married. She’d howl when we fucked—I mean, firing on all cylinders. Sounding like a stray cat yowling on a winter’s night. Has chemical castration been undersold? She drove a school bus when we first wed. Cash was tight. My young bride behind the wheel of a big yellow bus, jouncing down the road on leaf springs that make school buses less conveyance than amusement park ride. So young, strong, and gorgeous, whereas school buses were usually driven by bat-faced hags with names like Carla. But as the years wore on it became a way to wound her. When arguments got heated I’d find myself screaming: “You were a fucking bus driver!”
The steering wheel—what do they call it on planes? a yoke?—just busted off in my hands. A shitload of shrieking in the cabin. Gunshots.
My grandfather sang my grandmother’s name in the shower after she died. They quarrelled, publicly, often at Christmastime, but lived sixty years together until she died of liver cancer and he followed from cancer of a different sort. While still alive he sang out her name, a trilling call like a bird’s. He missed her more than he could bear and called her name without knowing.
My wife and I could share a roof sixty years, she could die, I’d grieve—but would I ever sing?
The emblematic event signalling the derailment of my marriage, the precise instant the train skipped the tracks to hurtle headlong into a ravine, was when my wife attempted to fellate me while I slept.
Shocking she even bothered. Under her gaze my member had become a poisoned salt lick ringed with dead deer or worse: as if through some means of anatomical gymnastics my asshole had cartwheeled round to my crotch. Not to mention I was dead asleep. Oblivious, unconsenting. What if I had rucked up her nightie and gone down on her like a thief in the night? Her timing was flawed. I could have been in the grip of a nautical nightmare. The sensation may have knitted with those stark terrors. A hungry sea-leech sucking out my blood and vigours? My leg lashed out instinctively. I awoke to my future ex-wife at the foot of the bed. A goose egg on her forehead.
Our divorce was highly amicable. My wife could have challenged for sole custody despite my being in those halcyon days a functional member of society. I relocated to Sarah Court. Quaint, family-friendly. Myself clinging to the outdated notion I was ever that sort of man.
At the risk of sounding like a drill sergeant, the sooner you structure your child’s life to befit future growth, the better. I rose to anger hearing my girl recount the litany of lackadaisical activities she was now permitted in her mother’s custody.
“I dug yesterday.”
“Dug for what, Abigail?”
“Treasure?”
“My dear, there’s no treasure in your mother’s backyard. You’ll dig up a lump of petrified doggy doo. You’d enjoy discovering that? Let’s go for a bike ride.”
“Can I have an ice-cream sandwich?”
“Your mother lets you eat ice-cream sandwiches all day? Have an apple. Nature’s candy. Can’t have you turning into a Flabby Abby, can we?”
“What’s a flabby?”
“Flabby’s fat. Fat Abby. Big Fat Abigail.”
I never dreamed my daughter might compete as a strength athlete. “Female bodybuilder” conjured images of mustachioed Olympians from coldwater republics galumphing through the Iron Curtain with mysterious bulges in their weightlifting costumes. But Abby was freakishly strong.
This discovery had been made in my next-door neighbour’s backyard. A surgeon, Frank Saberhagen, whose serpentine decline kept pace with my own. Everything between us became a competition so it was no surprise we’d race each other down the drainhole. Our first conversation had been emblematic of our confrontational fellowship. I’d spied rolls of uncovered, browning sod in the backseat of his Cadillac El Dorado and chummily asked what his purpose was. “Oh, wouldn’t you like to know,” was his reply. Our troubled friendship was forged upon that rocky foundation. I never did discover what he did with that sod.
This particular afternoon we were drinking “Flatliners,” the good doctor’s signature concoction, while his son Nicholas roughhoused with Abby.
“Up the tree, Nick.”
Saberhagen forced his son—who would go on to be an amateur boxer good enough to get plastered by future pros while never earning a dime for his pains—to climb the maple daily. Supposedly it developed his fast-twitch muscle fibres.
“Dad, come on.”
“Don’t give me that, buckaroo.”
“None too sturdy, doc. Had it sprayed for Dutch Elm?”
“What are you,” he asked me, “a tree surgeon?” He swayed to his feet and kicked the maple as if it were the tire of a car whose purchase he was considering. “Solid.”
“Your father is a stubborn man, Nicholas.”
“What’s wrong with my taking an interest in your improvement?” Saberhagen asked his son. “Mr. Burger is clearly uninterested in his daughter’s.”
“Why—because I refuse to send my firstborn up your arboreal deathtrap?”
“The tree’s a metaphor. Life is challenging but what can you do? Watch others climb to success, forever peering up at the treads of more ambitious shoes? Life requires gumption. Good old-fashioned balls.”
A dig at my Abby. Cursed to trudge through life bereft of said apparatuses.
“You slug. Abby can do anything Nick can.”
Saberhagen scoffed. “She’s got a pudding belly.”
Her mother’s fault. Those goddamn ice-cream sandwiches! I’ll admit too many Flatliners had cut my mental age into halves, or in all likelihood quarters. We somehow found ourselves in his garage where Frank welcomed us to the First Annual Saberhagen Pentathlon.
“Saberhagen Pentathlon? Why not BurgerSaberhagen?”
“My garage,” he reasoned.
Our debate was derailed by the appearance of Clara Russell, in a wheelchair, at the base of Frank’s driveway. Awhile back one of her “boys” had hotwired Saberhagen’s Cadillac, along with Wes Hill’s boy Colin. I remained in the garage while Frank chatted. Mama’s sheepdog barked. Frank’s corgi kicked up a ruckus behind the garage door.
“Welcome,” Frank said upon his return, “to
the Saberhagen-Burger pentathlon. First event: vertical jump.”
He proclaimed a busted rake the “Measuring Stick” and, holding it at a drunken loft above his head, urged Nicholas to jump and touch it.
“Hold straight, Frank. It’s hanging all crookedass.”
Saberhagen set his Flatliner down and used both hands. Nick came up short.
“Abby’s turn.”
“You get two tries,” he said. “No-no, wait—three.”
“Making up the rules as we go, Quincy?”
“Three tries, Fletch. Olympic rules.”
On the second attempt Saberhagen bent his knees so Nick could touch.
“Foul! Running rigged contests here at casa de Saberhagen?”
“If I bent my knees,” he filibustered, “I’m not saying I did, but if—we can all agree to it being an honest error. I’ve got fluid buildup on my left knee.”
Nick made a fair touch. I reached for the Measuring Stick. Saberhagen balked.
“I’ll hold for Abby, why not?”
“She’s my daughter. Fathers hold for their kid.”
You’d have thought my request was in contravention of the nonexistent rulebook.
“Look, Fletch, now seriously: I’m two inches taller.”
“Your elbows were all crooked-ass.”
“Like hell they were crooked-ass.”
Eventually he gave over the stick. Abigail missed her first attempt.
“Put your legs into it, Abby.” Another miss. “For heaven’s sake. Jell-O in those legs? Tuck your shirt in”—the bastard was right: she did have a little pudding belly—“ and touch . . . the . . . stick.”
A third miss. Quincy whooped it up. I wanted to twist his head off like a bottlecap.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” he told his son. “Old-fashioned balls.”
“Butter churns,” I seethed, “and horehound candies are old-fashioned. Am I to take it that, what, your son’s got a pair of steam-driven testicles?”
A belly laugh from Saberhagen. Too late I realized he’d accomplished his main, if not sole, ambition of that afternoon: pissing me off.
“Next,” he said, “feats of strength.”
In a corner of the garage was a stack of paint cans labelled Bongo Jazz. The hue of afflicted organ meat. To be inside Saberhagen’s house was to inhabit a diseased pancreas. We settled on paint can hammer curls. Nick staked himself to an early lead.
“Twenty-three, twenty-four,” counted Saberhagen. “Look at Hercules go!”
Abby’s biceps muscle was a hard lump under her sleeve. “How long do I have to go, Dad?”
“Longer than him.”
“Daddy,” Nick said, “my arm’s hurting.”
“Don’t call me Daddy, please.”
Abby’s fingers whitened round the paint can wire. Only her circulation temporarily cut off. Nick dropped his can. Twisty veins radiated from his elbow joint. Abby showed no signs of flagging. Arms raised, I jogged a victory lap of the garage.
“Quit carrying on like she’s Sybil Danning,” said Frank.
Best part of waking up in a strange bed is how you lay emptied of personal history. Literally forget who you are. Then, spiderlike, your brain gathers every trapping of your miserable history and entombs it in your skull. You’re you again.
James slept in the bunk below mine curled up like a potato bug. I’m unsure why I’ve invited him aboard, other than my inability to face the coming days alone. He shares DNA strands in keeping with Saberhagen and myself. At a certain age a man welcomes into his life those who are dimmer or more intense reflections of his self. That way, the views he holds are seldom challenged.
We spend the day on the Trent-Severn Waterway. I cut the motor with the sun at its peak. Cones of midges coil off the water. James strips and dives in. Matilda follows. They come onboard covered in snotlike algae. It dries to a green transparency they variously lick or peel off.
Of all my features, my eyes are nicest. They can be transplanted, which I wasn’t aware of until recently. Keratoplasty, it’s called. Only the corneas. Topmost layer peeled off like skin off a grape, scar tissue and ocular bloodclots removed, donor cornea stitched to the recipient’s eye with surgical thread one-sixteenth the thickness of human hair. The International Eye Bank’s donor cornea wait list is years long. Eye Bank sounds so terrifically creepy, doesn’t it? A supercooled vault where disembodied eyeballs float in jars. But not so. As eyes rot same as any living tissue there is no physical bank, per se.
A setting sun red as new blood. The tops of shore pines resemble teeth on a bucksaw as we approach Fenelon Falls. We dock and head into town. Nothing’s open except the local chapter of the Legion. A stag and doe scheduled. We’re bidden entry by a veteran in a sailor’s cap with a face like a bowl of knuckles.
“No pets,” he tells James.
“But this dog saw duty in Afghanistan.” The vet’s features soften significantly.
We sit on orange plastic chairs beneath a mangy moose head with a half-smoked cigar crammed in its mouth. The premises are occupied by runnyeyed lumbermen, many of whom look to have been dragged from under a thicket somewhere. Hairs the colour of week-old piss sprout from every orifice on their faces. James and I bang back shots of Johnny Red with the self-medicating air of alcoholics searching for a level spot on the beam. Sprinkled amongst the backwoods gnomes and tricksters are veterans smoking home-rolled cigs which burn so quickly it’s like watching fuses burn down into the wizened powderkegs of their faces.
A woman sits nearby. Young-ish and familiar, if distantly so, neither beautiful nor plain, and with a baby. Ungodly out-of-place amidst the cigar smoke and shipwrecked vets.
“Cute kid,” James says. “Yours?”
“Cute dog. Yours?”
They fall into conversation. I feel strung-out and edgy. I hear everyone’s fingernails growing. Inappropriate salsa music pipes up. A woman dances. So girthy in her white shirt and tan trousers that from the back she resembles a vanilla soft-serve cone. Her technique makes it appear as if an invisible entity has yanked down her pants and is presently pummelling her to the lungs, kidney, and liver. Steamy dance stylings hold a commonality with killer bees: both are more destructive the farther they migrate away from their equatorial birthplaces.
When the next woman arrives, every eyeball settles on her.
“Chivas Regal, barkeep!” Sounds like: Shave-ass Raygull.
She enters with the ultimate fuck me walk. A strut, more like, a stalking strut that in every hipshift, every swivel and jive, says: I know much about the carnal acts and you better believe it—I’m fucking goooooood. To say she’s beautiful would be to lie. She has a harelip and the surgical repair’s been botched; Saberhagen would howl to see such butchery. But by God, she is purely magnetic. This erotic beartrap of a woman. Big. Nordic-valkyrie big. Stately pipestems like hers you tend to describe in equine terms; I could picture her snapping a fetlock treading in a gopher hole at full gallop. I’d bet folding money she’s a mudder. Her fella stands a respectful distance apart. Rangy and bowlegged in stovepipe jeans. The sad bastard brings to mind visions of a sucking axe gash never let alone to heal.
She sits nearby. Downs her first drink at a gulp and sends the boyfriend off for another Shave-ass.
“Who the hell’re you?”
I’m amazed this woman registers me as anything other than flesh-toned wallpaper.
“Call me Mr. Burger.”
She smiles in a peculiar way. An arrowheadshaped tongue darts over her lips. It strikes me as a gesture she uses often, suggestive of all manner of undefined intimacies.
“Mister Burger?”
“You’re too young to use my grown-up name.”
This woman could destroy me. This woman’s hot white teeth could strip the skin from my bones. Dismantle me piece by piece. She could have me begging for that honour. To throw yourself at her is to throw yourself off a skyscraper. Screaming all the way down. Teeth driven into your skull like tent pegs in
to clay.
“Call me Sunshine. What are you doing here?”
“Paying my respects to the betrothed.”
“Well, the betrothed’s got no idea who in blue fuck you are.”
“You? Hitched to that tall drink of water?”
“The culmination of my every hope and dream.”
Her hubby-to-be’s axe-wound of a face registers pitiful gratefulness that this woman would condescend to entwine her life with his. Sunshine downs her second drink. The ice’s refraction magnifies the scar slit down her upper lip. Her fiancee’s name is Rodney.
“I had a dog named Rodney,” says James.
“He’s my little dog,” Sunshine goes. “My wittle Wodney.” She chucks him under the chin with the edge of her glass. “When hims a bad doggums, hims sleeps in da doghouse.”
Rodney smiles like a man in a tiger cage. Lovestruck sap. His every molecule made of galling attributes: servitude, resignation, bootlicking. As a man I want to slap him around out of pure heartsick revulsion.
Doctor Burger’s cure for the whole maudlin scene? Booze. An oil tanker’s worth. I line up shots of navy rum to fill my prescription. Prognosis: stunningly positive! Rodney’s hand pumps shot glasses into his face with the mechanics of an oil derrick. He tries to kiss Sunshine. She gets her elbow up. His lips meet the knob.
“You’re a slobbery drunk, darlin’. What’s the use getting all lovey-dovey now, champ? Why not save it for when it could be of value?” Stated to nobody in particular: “A wet noodle in the sack, this one. Like to bed down with a hunnert-fifty pounds of cooked spaghetti stuffed in tube socks. Keep thinking the cops’ll bust down the door and arrest me for what’sit? Sleeping with dead things . . . ?”
“Necrophilia?” James offers.
“Yeah!” Her laugh is so profoundly crazed you could imagine it echoing down the austere halls of a funny farm. “On the money!”
How exhausting it must be for Sunshine. Stomping Rodney’s self esteem at clockwork intervals. Rodney’s skull half-squashed from her foot. But then some men yearn to die curled up in a boot-print.
A fuse blows inside my head and when the juice flows again I’m in a pickup between Sunshine driving and Rodney riding shotgun. The Shave-ass Raygull spilled over Sunshine’s jeans makes it look she’s pissed herself. This close she smells of mentholated cigarettes and Noxema. Crazily alluring. Reaching between my legs to downshift, she gives my crotch a cheery honk. Her poor prehensile tail of a fiancée turns from the moon-plated river to face us.
Sarah Court Page 7