“Nice having you at our party, Fletcher. Sincerely. We made a new friend.”
“Bless your pea-pickin’ heart,” says Sunshine. “You’re too fuckin’ corn-pone to live.”
“Never claimed to be perfect.”
Rodney’s spine must have marinated in battery acid. Strange wonder his ribcage doesn’t sag to his hipbone. Sunshine swings into a gravelled half-moon facing the water. We spill out laughing—Jesus, at what? I’m about ready to slip a dry cleaning bag over my head. I gulp air coming off the river in hopes of oxygenating my rum-soaked cells. I am seriously hallucination-hammered. Sunshine staggers down to the water.
“Got to tinkle, boysy-woysies!”
Rodney’s bellied over the truck fender. His body comes by such positions naturally. Not a single unbroken posture. A cannonball on a chain hooked to his forehead.
Sunshine returns topless. Standing at the lip of the berm with her head cocked. Just . . . y’know, BAM. All there.
“Look at yous two. Standing there with your teeth in your mouth.”
A body so young taken in by the eyes of a man old as me . . . lechery only another word for jealousy. I want to eat her skin. She hoists herself onto the hood. Undoes the topmost button on her jeans.
“Put your hands all over me, Fletcher. A real man’s hands, for once.”
She’s crazy. Not in any diagnosable way. Not so much that she’ll bring harm to anybody but herself and those who hie too closely. My hands on her would only be an encouragement of that lunacy but what was my onus of burden? Me, with the lifespan of a fruit fly.
“Sunny, baby. You make loving you hell.”
“I’m just sitting, Rod. If this man’s hands happen upon my body, well, it’s not me causing that collision, now is it?”
The heat of the engine block warms the hood where I set my hand. Moonlight plays upon the water. A vein of white fire snaking through things.
“Go ahead and fuck me.” She pulls the take of their stag and doe from her jeans. “We’ll leave this scratch-ass town. Escape.” Ex-cape. “Just us two.”
Is she purposely degrading herself with those crumpled fives and tens? Her jeans melt down to her ankles. When a woman really wants to shed her clothes it is an act of bodily voodoo. Lips shiny with blackberry Chapstick. She draws down the lip of her panties. I see the definitions of her intimates same way you spot a mouse at the mouth of its hole: by the wet glints of teeth and eye.
I say: “You doing anything about your little sexpot of a fiancée, here, Rodney?”
“He’s my dickless little dog.”
Rodney moans like a sick animal. My hand traces Sunshine’s neck. The panicked thrum of her heartbeat in my fingertips. This expression of fear and disgust skims over her face—fleeting, but it’s all there in that. Sunshine laid open like one of those Dali women with the chest of drawers where her guts should be. My rummaging hands inside. I’ve been wrong from the get-go: believing Rodney lives in wretchedness when in truth he exists in a state of ongoing ecstasy.
“You don’t want me. You couldn’t possibly.”
“Sure,” she say. “Sure I do.”
They love one another. You can glimpse such twisted configurations and acknowledge yes, it is still love. A brutal and excruciating manifestation but unmistakably so. Love as a sickness.
“Fuck me, Fletcher. Take me away.”
“I won’t.”
“What’s the matter with me?”
Turning from her, I offer: “You’re cute enough.”
“I wouldn’t mind,” says Rodney.
Sunshine claws a hand around my hips. That I’m not erect infuriates her.
“Two dickless wonders!”
“I could fuck you, Sunshine, but I couldn’t kiss you.” I’m a brutal human specimen. “Not with your lip like that.”
Retrospectively speaking, I shouldn’t have said this with my back turned.
“Pussyeating dickface motherfucker!”
She leaps onto my back. One mitt’s sunk into my hair while the other lances stiff shots into the veinbunched curve of my throat. The shock of it is quasiparalyzing: the way you’d feel inadvertently catching your mother naked through an open bedroom door. An idiotic sense of masculinity compels me to make like she isn’t hurting me when in fact it hurts vastly.
“Rodney. Please . . . control your woman.”
By whipping side-to-side I manage to buck her off. She strips off a plug of scalp. I stagger toward the river with blood trickling down my neck.
Zany bitch!
“Stick your pecker in her, y’old buckethead!”
“She’s gonna be your wife,” I tell Rodney. “Do your own grunt work!”
At the lip of the berm Sunshine kicks me in the spine. The spectre of getting an eye poked out petrifies me. Clamp my eyelids tight. Hurts like hell but I laugh a sad bastard’s dirge rolling blindly down. Must have sounded I was mortally injured because when I check up on the lee side their truck motor is gunning into silence.
I haul myself out of the bracken. Tear a clump of moss ringing an elm tree. Press it to my scalp. Kick through frosted dandelions, snapping their little bald heads off. Frozen berries hang on a branch and I eat a handful and they hurt my teeth. I zone out, bleeding. The perpetual movement of the cosmos pushes the moon across a star-salted sky.
My houseboat rounds the horn of the river.
“Fleeeetcherrrr!”
“Over here! Here!”
The engine cuts. A flashlight beam pins me.
“I ran into those two you left with. Asked where the heck were you. They said check the fucking river! Can you make it out?”
“I can try.”
The river laps against the torn spot in my scalp. Snapping turtles and steel-mouthed walleye quest at my toes. James hauls me onboard and sits me in the galley kitchen. Drapes me in a metallic emergency blanket. Next he removes my shirt and socks. Matilda lays across my bare feet. I feel her belly nipples against my skin.
“That’s one nasty hematoma on your head,” James says.
Black Box: Compassionate Human Being
We’re going down. I saw it coming. Takeoff smooth, clear skies, but twenty years into this flight my arms got tired. It felt pointless. I let go of the yoke.
So much of being considered a good person is decent planning. A steel-trap memory. So much is: “So-and-so’s birthday is coming. Better send a card.” Make these token efforts and everyone says you’re a good person. You’re not necessarily. You may occupy some Outer Sulawesi of the soul, but you keep a well-organized day-timer. Real tests of goodness ignite out of nothingness and stick it to you bluntly: are you the person you think you are? The door swings two ways. Swings a hundred million ways. In those moments you come to know yourself. Can you exist within that reckoning?
Out the starboard window one wing snaps off. Trailing wiring and spitting sparks it falls through the sky, through a sea of puffy cumulus clouds. Anyway, who cares? The freight bay is full of sandbags.
The group : “Over-and-Out.” Called a “group” to imply we were pleased as punch to gather every second Thursday. Our only regret it couldn’t be weekly, or thrice weekly, or daily or two times a day. Parents helping parents. What a crock. Over and out. Get it? Support groups have punny names. Craniofacial Abnormalities: About Face. Sickle Cell Anemia: Reaping Hope. Ours was a catchall for parents “over”-something: overzealous, overbearing, overcompetitive. I had no choice but to attend. I’d slit my own throat with earlier actions at a provincial powerlifting meet.
After discovering Abby’s unusual strength I’d embarked on a systematic plan to make her a champion lifter. I bought Joe Weider dumbbells at Consumer’s Distributors. Set up a gym in my old rumpus room. Enrolled her in the Superior Physique Association: a female weightlifting fraternity founded by Doris Barrilleaux, a hyper-developed hausfrau from Canton, Ohio.
I arranged for muscle-responsiveness tests. Abby possesses some seriously enlarged vascular bundles. The cellular walls of her
arteries were elastic. Improved circulation equals increased blood flow. Superior protein absorption. Bigger muscles. Muscle tissue is cellularly complex: the muscle of your biceps, for example, consists of different cellular strata. First the parallel arrays of tubelike muscle fibres bundled together like crayons in a box. Each fibre is made up of smaller sub-units, myofibrils, stacked neatly one atop the other like plates on a shelf. Inside the myofibrils reside the working parts, heavy lifters called sarcomeres, arranged in a lineup like beads on an abacus. Look closely at championship powerlifters: it’s like iodized salt has been sprinkled over every muscle group.
The day her bone density test results arrived I hightailed it to Saberhagen’s house.
“Abby scored a -0.1 on the Bone Mineral Density test. What’s that mean?”
“Means she’s got dense bones,” Frank said. “To match her dad’s skull.”
“I knew it.” As if we Burgers were famous for our bone density and it was only natural this trait should find its pinnacle in my daughter. “Dense.”
Massive blood-pumping bundles, solid spinal stem, lode-bearing joints, bones dense as titanium. Can I be blamed for thinking she was ideally suited?
Now, get it straight: powerlifting, not bodybuilding. The Olympic sport, not the freakshow. I’m disgusted by those steroid-enlarged gals with patio flagstones where their boobs should be and their HGH-swollen faces so out of whack even the best maxillofacial surgeon couldn’t make them look womanly again, telling you “But I’m still a lady,” in their Barry White voices. So full of toxins they’d set off a fallout meter. Steroids: an idiotic lifestyle, what with the shrunken nuts and prostatitis. They can turn a gal’s clitoris as big and hard as a baby’s thumb!
I entered Abby in regional meets. She demolished her own sex. The Ontario Power-lifting Association agreed to let her compete in the male 14–18 class. The meet was held in a Hamilton gym inhabited by strapping male bodies.
“Dogs, the lot of them,” I told her. “They got heartworm. You’ll pulverize.”
Truth told, I was taken aback at the proliferation of prepubescent beefcakery. I wanted to run around with plastic cups: “Piss tests. Piss tests for all!” I sauntered up to the biggest kid, all of seventeen yet so prodigiously venous he appeared to be covered in livid spiderwebs.
“My daughter’s kicking your ass. Bet you folding money.”
His father, a buzz-cut bohunk with a Hamilton FD shirt stretched across his chest, pricked up his ears.
“You’re flabby as all get out,” I went on. “Look at her dorsal definition. Like peering into a barrel of snakes, isn’t it?”
“S’matter with you?” his father went.
“This kid’s a bum.” I kept my tone pleasant. “What do you feed him, tubs of Oleo?”
“You’re not helping,” Abby told me.
“I’m simply allowing this man to prepare the collection of overgrown blood platelets he calls a son for an emasculating ass-kicking.”
A judge overheard the commotion. “Back to your competitor, sir.”
“I got every right being here.”
“If you don’t leave this vicinity—”
“This is my job. Don’t you tell me how to do my job. You don’t see me coming down to the public toilets to knock the can of Ajax out of your hands, do you?”
We were eliminated from competition. Abby nailed it as “a real bonehead manoeuvre.” My ex got wind. Rumblings of a revision of custody rights. My lawyer advised a token of penitence would smooth things. So, the group: “Over and Out.”
Sole tonic to my misery was I didn’t have to endure it alone. Frank Saberhagen—whose ex-wife levied charges he was pushing Nick too hard to become a third-tier pugilist—was pressured into attendance. And Clara Russell was there, even though her “boys” weren’t hers by blood.
Our meetings were otherwise populated by decaying alpha males. Gym teachers in sweat suits with teeth marks dug into the plastic whistles dangling round their necks. Business suits with men inside whose skin was so tight-flexed you feared their scalps would tear open to reveal the twitching nests of their id. That breed of intellectually and/or emotionally impoverished male whose pickup truck hitches sport oversized, rubberized novelty scrotal sacks. We were overseen by Dr. Dave, a “Behaviour Coach.” Six-five, one-seventy: his body resembled wet bedsheets hung from a flagpole. Add to this the overeager demeanour of a drivetime DJ. Like he’d signed a contract mandating he be inoffensively funny.
“Welcome to Over and Out,” he began each meeting. “Let’s help each other get ‘over’ the hump, so you can get ‘out’ of your boxes of destructive habitual behaviour.”
We stood at a plywood lectern parading our parental sins in hopes of exculpation. Quincy— who insisted on being called Doctor Frank—was a hambone.
“Why should I, we, be pilloried for promoting our offspring’s betterment through a regimen of physical discipline and structure?” went his typical monologue. “The same structure promoted by my father and his father, which made me the man I am today. A healer of men.”
“Times change,” said Dr. Dave. “Society and, haha, expectations also, Mr. Saberhagen.”
“Doctor Frank, please.”
“You cannot rob a child of choice. Autonomy.”
“Let them choose to be what: carnival roustabouts? Years ago my son wanted to be a tap dancer. What was my option?”
“My boys can be whatever they want.”
This from Clara Russell. She sat with one of her charges, Jeffrey, a little turd who stole eggs out of the robin’s nest in my oak tree. Unwed and technically childless, Russell shared her home with a rotating herd of youthful fruitcakes and some poor old bastard she made a habit of kicking out, quite publicly, every year or so.
“Dancers,” she persisted, “or bricklayers—”
“Or little arsonists or kleptomaniacs, obviously,” Saberhagen said.
“You’ll let that stand, Dr. Dave?” said Clara. “Isn’t this a supportive haven?”
“Everyone, ha-ha, let’s take a step back. . . .”
“My boys have behavioural anomalies and unnatural fixations, sir.” Russell was an imposing woman. Paul Bunyan in a smock. “Can’t wave a magic wand and fix them.”
“Listen, Dave,” Frank went on, ignoring her. “I love my son.”
“Unconditional, Dr. Saberhagen—can you say your love is that?”
“Whose ever is?”
After meetings, most of us loafed about smoking, gnashing wads of gum, or grinding the weave of our sweaters against nicotine patches. Always a mobile party kit in somebody’s trunk. We drank and decompressed. It mainly took the form of jibes at Dr. Dave, who we all agreed was about as useful as a set of tonsils.
The usual post-group clan: three fathers and one mother, Nadia, whose gymnast daughters tore ACL ligaments in separate pommel horse calamities. Saberhagen and I nicknamed her “Nadia CommenNazi.” The third father was Dale Mulligan: a slab of free-range masonry with the primeval face of the Piltdown Man. That, or a block of clay punched into a rude semblance of humanity by a mildly artistic gorilla. He taught Phys Ed at Laura Secord, an “arts” school where students interpretive-danced their way to course credit. His son was the football team’s running back. You’d think the sun shone directly out the kid’s ass.
“My boy, Danny,” Dale prattled on one night, “racked up a hundred-twenty yards on the ground in scrimmage. Took a few tackler’s arms as trophies.”
I was uninspired at the boy’s ability to tear through a defensive line of landscape painters. Shortly afterwards the aforementioned apple of Mulligan’s eye arrived to pick his father up.
“My daughter’s stronger than him,” I heard myself say.
“You out of your sonofabitchin’ mind, Fletcher?”
“Dale, please. He’s got the build of a snow pear.” By the time Abby arrived to pick me up, Dale and I were nipple-to-nipple, bumping chests as men do when each feels he’s been affronted yet neither is ready to plant a fis
t in his antagonist’s nose. Not quite. At Abby’s arrival I strode to the bike rack. Rusted bars, solid steel, welded at right angles.
“Okay, Mulligan. Dead lift. Your boy, my girl.”
“I’m not lifting anything,” said Abby.
“Just a few lifts. Look at him.”
“Go fall in a hole, Dad. I’m picking you up. That’s it.”
“Abs. This guy thinks he can beat you.”
“You think you can beat me?” she asked Dale’s son, Danny Mulligan.
“I don’t even know what we’re talking about,” Danny said, mystified.
“How about,” said Quincy, “the two dads lift? Hey, Abby—your old man puts his shoulder to the millstone?”
“What does that prove, Frank?”
“Tell you what it proves if you don’t, Fletch: you’re a grade-A chickenshit.” Quincy tucked his hands under his armpits and flapped. “Bro-bro-broooock.”
Dale Mulligan had already installed himself at the bike rack. No heroic way to extricate myself, so after deep-knee bends and some isometric stretching I spat on my palms. Gripped the rack. I could do this, baby! Feet set, hammies flexed, I straightened my spine and loosed a convulsive grunt—YE GODS! A firecracker exploded between my fifth and sixth vertebrae. I came to on my back. The motherloving pain! Spine ripped out, soaked in jellied gasoline, lit, the white-hot knobs sewn back inside. A paraplegic. I’d be blowing into a straw to move the hubs of my wheelchair. My droppings evacuated into sterile plastic bags. Crippled . . . by a bike rack!
“Oh, fuck my life!”
Quincy knelt. Ran a finger up my spine. “You tweaked a disc. Nothing earth-shattering.”
“Can’t believe you did that,” Abby said.
Was it wrong to cherish the fear in her voice?
The post-therapy group swiftly disbanded. Quincy offered to help drive me home.
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