Sarah Court

by Craig Davidson

“Giddyup!”

  The sound it makes glancing off Matilda’s teeth is the tinny wynk of a shanked golf ball. The sound that comes out of James’s mouth is not a scream so much as a breathless hiss. Starling raises the hatchet above his head. It all happens rather quickly.

  Matilda leaps onto James’s back. Uses him as a springboard. The cashew bowl’s upended, nuts spraying in a fan. Matilda’s jaws clamp fast to Starling’s shoulder.

  “Yeeeeeeeeeeee!”

  This is the sound that exits the broken hole of Starling’s mouth. Matilda’s jaws are nearly hyperextended, upper teeth sunk into the wrinkled flesh of his deltoid. Starling shakes at the mercy of a creature one-third his weight but every ounce of it working muscle. Momentum carries them to the floor. Matilda’s skull impacting hardwood sounds like a bowling ball dropped on a dance floor. She forfeits her grip, flips over, digs her teeth into the fresh punctures. Starling’s eye rolls back in some kind of horrible dream-state. The hatchet flails wildly and its blade hacks into Matilda’s beer-cask side.

  James drags the coffee table—his hand’s still trussed up—over to her. His feet crunch on cashews. I help him tear free of the twine. He grips the top and bottom halves of Matilda’s jaw.

  “Drop it. Drop.”

  Matilda forfeits her grip. James kisses her nose.

  We help Starling onto the sofa. Parkhurst is AWOL. Starling’s skin stinks of busted-open batteries as adrenaline dumps out every pore. His shirt’s torn open. Blood bubbles through the puncture wounds and comes off him in strings. Odd knittings of skin bracket his armpit and where his shoulder meets his neck.

  I find a first aid kit in the medicine chest. Starling’s nearly stopped bleeding by the time I return. The trauma isn’t nearly so bad as it appeared. The car keys are on the floor. I slip them into my pocket.

  “That was unex . . . pected,” Starling gasps.

  “I’ll call you an ambulance.”

  “No ambulance.”

  “You need a doctor.”

  With his good arm Starling digs a cellphone out of his pocket. Speed dials number one.

  “Come now.”

  He hangs up.

  “I have an employee who . . . handles this sort of . . . thing.”

  Matilda has crawled into the darkest part of the room. When James calls she creeps to him on her belly, grovelling the way dogs do when they believe they’ve behaved poorly. The clipped stub of her tail wags weakly. The hatchet wound is shockingly wide and it shocks me more, somehow, to see Matilda— less flesh and bone than bloodless fibres coalesced into the familiar shape of a dog—hurt this way. The shining off-pink ligaments banding her rib cage whiten as they flex.

  James picks her up. “Fuck me. She’s light as a feather.”

  I tell him to wait outside. The flap of skin covering Starling’s eye has folded back. Pale and membranous as the inside of an eyelid. The eye underneath has no cornea, iris, or pigment.

  “Will you be alright?”

  He manages a grisly smile.

  “Bugs, Fletcher. A million slipper-footed space bugs. Walls of my guts. Cores of my bones. Churning, Fletcher. Softest churning you can imagine.”

  “I have to go.”

  “So go. But don’t take . . . my car. You didn’t . . . win.”

  “Fuck off,” I tell him solemnly. “I’m taking it.”

  I fishtail the Caddy down the dirt road. Moths drawn to the phosphorous glow of the headlamps smash on the windscreen. Matilda’s shovel-shaped head pokes from a mummification of towels. Her eyelids are ringed with blood.

  “I can’t bury another dog, Fletcher,” James says.

  Black Box: Daughter

  The emergency crash slides deploy ten thousand feet above sea level: slick yellow tongues sucked into the engines, which explode in twin fireballs. Shrapnel punches through the fuselage. The hiss of decompression as air inside the cabin is drawn outside. Pinhole contrails stain the blue sky.

  This one time, when Abigail was a kid. The playground at the school round the corner from Sarah Court. Sunday: parents airing their kids out after church. Abby on the swingset. This churchgoing man set himself in my sightline. Calling in an abrasive baritone to his own child:

  “Down the slide! Down the slide!”

  I couldn’t see my daughter past this man in his church suit. I wanted to kill him. An animalistic response. You don’t stand between papa bear and his cub.

  Karma’s a mongrel. Its blood isn’t pure and it fails to flow in a straight and sensible line. It bites whoever it can and bites randomly. It tallies debts but makes no attempt to match them to the debt-committer. Spend your life totalling black smudges upon your soul thinking in the end they’re yours to bear.

  Capillaries burst beneath my fingernails. Looks as if I’ve had them painted candy apple red. My eardrums explode. Instruments shatter at the same instant my jawbone tears free of its hinges. The air’s full of silver flecks: my fillings, added to blobs of mercury from split dials. Pressure works around the hubs of my eyes, in back, rupturing the ocular roots. I go down in blackness.

  Total muscular failure. The bread-and-butter technique of powerlifting.

  The theory behind total muscular failure is simple: max out your poundage until it is impossible to lift without assistance from your spotter. Easy to spot lifters who embrace the technique. They’re the ones who’ve reached familiarity with the “zonk out”: passing out during your final rep. Acolytes of total muscular failure trust their spotters implicitly.

  The first medal Abby earned was silver in the clean-and-jerk at the Pan Am Games. Bronze initially, until the gold medalist’s urinalysis proved she was whacked out of her tree on Anavar.

  Around this time Abby had found her first true love. Dannyfreaking-Mulligan.

  He blew his MCL on an end-around sweep the final game his senior season. He enrolled in arts college, grew hippy hair, majored in modern sculpture. Particularly galling was the fact he made a point of buying not only a mattress but also underwear, all used, from the Sally Anne.

  “He doesn’t care about brands,” Abby told me. “A total esthete.”

  “Sounds filthy. His used bed could have mites.”

  “They bleach everything before selling it.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “Isn’t he fantastic?”

  “No, I mean I can’t believe there’s a place actually selling pre-worn gitch.”

  Danny invited her to drive cross-country in a VW bus he’d bought at Junkyard Boyz in Welland. I forbid her. We were in up her room. She tore blue ribbons off the walls. Chucked trophies out the window into Saberhagen’s backyard. During the commotion I’d grabbed her. She pushed back so hard I went down on my ass. If she’d known how to translate that strength into violence she could have beaten the living shit out of me.

  “I quit! I’m through lifting.”

  Danny and my daughter reached Moose Jaw before the minibus broke down. The trip convinced Abby that Danny’s posturings were more affected than esthetic. He later dropped out of college to join the police force. I didn’t hound her. If she really wanted to quit, well, what could I say? My thinking— hideous, but I’ll say it—went along the lines of Pavlov. My daughter is a rational and complex being. Still. If you’ve imprinted it deep, sooner or later that creature will ring the bell itself.

  “I want to work him out of my skin,” was how she put it.

  Forget about Danny the way you’d slap a coat of paint on a roomful of sour memories. We buried Danny Mulligan under a fresh coat of muscle. That was many years and several coats ago.

  So it went until last September. I’ve come to divide my daughter into separate entities: pre- and post-September Abbies. She’d sustained a shoulder injury. The shoulder is our most fragile joint structure: a cup-and-socket mechanism as precarious as an egg balanced in a teaspoon. The only curative for a ruptured shoulder is rest. But every muscle possesses a memory. Should you train to a peak and for whatever reason quit, your muscles retain a
memory of that peak. Olympic-level athletes surrender, on average, ten percent capacity every week. But muscle remembers.

  Her layoff included a Mexican bender with old high school cohorts. She returned with a shocking heft. Puffed wheat: my thought as she cleared Customs at Pearson International. This big ole, tanned ole Sugar Crisp. Someplace in Mexico my daughter lost her fire. Along came that September afternoon at the YMCA.

  “Bench press, Abs.”

  Her legs: a pair of cocktail swords. Goddamn the defeatist workings of the human body. She’d rubbed her wrist. I remember all of it. Crystalline.

  “Feel that.”

  A nubbin of cartilage floated free where her wrist met the meat of her palm.

  “Olympic trials next month. You’re goldbricking?”

  “What did I say? I just said, ‘Feel that.’”

  Abby dusted her palms with chalk. I slapped on 45s. Abby bench pressed it easily. The old striation of muscle beneath a veneer of vacation-flab. Two more plates. She shook her wrist loose. Clenched and unclenched her fingers.

  “It’s just tightness, Abs. Loosen up.”

  On the eighth rep of her following set Abby abruptly hit total muscular failure. At the same time and at the very height of extension Abby’s right shoulder and left wrist broke. Her wrist re-broke: she’d first broken it years ago leaping from a house on fire. She zonked out. The sound of my daughter breaking apart—greenstick snap of her wrist, fibrous ripping of her shoulder socket—shocked me on such a purely auditory level that the bar slipped through my hands.

  Four forty-five pound plates. A weight bar weighing forty-five pounds. Two safety clips weighing an eighth of a pound each—225¼ pounds fell the distance of a child’s footstep onto my daughter. Her windpipe would have been completely crushed had the bar not been checked by her chin, the bone of which broke into several pieces. Her eyes closed, then opened. They say she likely never regained consciousness. Only body-shock trauma. Blood hemorrhaged into both eyeballs.

  I heaved the bar off her throat. Dislocated both shoulders doing so. She rolled off the bench. Her skull hit the rubberized weight mat. Her eyes tiny stoplights. Jaw hanging open. A dent on her throat where the bar crushed the cartilage-wrapped tube of her airway. Fingernails ripping at her neck hoping to gouge deep enough to let air in. My brokenwristed, broken-shouldered, broke-chinned, redeyed daughter crawling on the shockproof mat of the downtown YMCA. I grabbed for her. Abby’s hand swung wildly. My nose burst. Blood all over. Every part of her flexed so hard.

  When the ambulance arrived an attendant slit her throat below the crimping. Threaded in a tube.

  Our cerebral hemispheres begin to corrode one minute after oxygen is cut. Hypoxic encephalopathy. Cerebral hypoxia. More simply: black holes eating into the fabric of our brains. Wesley Hill, old neighbour and friend: his job was pulling people out of Niagara Falls. If they had been under too long it was no different than pulling turnips out of a garden. A Niagara Lobotomy. Abby’s neurologist— not Saberhagen—said Abigail had surrendered sixty percent neural capacity. Blood surging into her ocular cavities bulged and burst the corneal dams. She’s blind.

  A week afterward purple bruises blotched my shoulders where they’d been pulled out of joint. The local rag painted me a monster. Dredged up Over and Out. My ex-wife secured a temporary restraining order that, following token legal wranglings, would become permanent. I cried easily at things of no importance.

  That evening I found Saberhagen on his back porch shooting at squirrels with a pellet gun. Working on a Flatliner. A booze-puffed texture to his face. He’d been relieved of duties as neurosurgeon at the General. His scalpel had slipped a fraction. When the blade is inside a patient’s head, a slip is catastrophic. A patient may forfeit his childhood or sense of direction. Saberhagen, participant in the famous Labradum Procedure at Johns Hopkins, was disbarred from the operating theatre.

  I said: “Why shoot the poor things?”

  “Eating seeds I laid out for the birds. I’m not running a squirrel soup kitchen. How are you faring?”

  “Guess I want to die, Frank.”

  “If that happened to my kid I guess I’d want to, too.”

  He went inside to fix us drinks. When he sat again, he said: “The very definition of freak accident. I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “A hell of a thing to happen, is all. Abby’s such a good gal.”

  The evening shadows grew teeth. Frank said:

  “Remember that kid who burnt down the fireworker’s house?”

  “Philip Nanavatti. The kid’s name was . . .”

  “Teddy. Wasn’t a bad kid. Just fucked up. In animals, there’s what’s called a biological imperative. What they’re hardwired to do. We’re the same except that little bit smarter. We’re not too smart as a species. Just enough to screw ourselves up. That kid, Teddy . . . burning things was his biological imperative. I was there when firefighters drug out what was left. A carbonized skeleton but Fletch, I swear: that boy died happy. Abby jumps out the window. Breaks her wrist . . . we do it, too. Break things. Ruin ourselves then ruin everything around us. Those closest we ruin worst. Ninety-nine percent is good intentions, I think. We want good things for others. To do good ourselves.”

  Charter members of the Bad Fathers Club, the two of us. Men with matching polarities—we habitual if accidental brutalizers—amplify what’s worst in ourselves. Seeing it reflected in each other somehow justified it. All these years me thinking I wasn’t so bad and my only evidence being my neighbour, the surgeon, was cut from the same cloth.

  “Could she be fixed, Frank?”

  “Her brain can’t.”

  “Eyes?”

  “If you had a donor.”

  “Ever done eye surgery?”

  “Eyes are the newspaper route of the surgical world.”

  “Could you do Abby’s?”

  “The Eye Bank’s wait list is long as hell.”

  “What if you had a donor?”

  “. . . as a matter of skill, yes. I could. Changing sparkplugs. Thing is, I can’t. Red tape runs round that sort of procedure.”

  “It’s the two of us speaking.”

  “Even on a purely conjectural level I’d need to know you were serious. Not only serious about the procedure. About everything. Your frame of mind.”

  “I’ve stopped buying green bananas.”

  Frank searched my face. Finally, he said:

  “There’s a loose consortium of businesspeople. Most surgeons know of them. For a price, you can get an organ. Only rule: don’t ask where it came from. And it doesn’t come cheap. Eyes won’t be all they’d take, Fletch.”

  “These people are professionals?”

  “Far as I know, you’re asking whether the mob is professional.”

  Nick showed up. He now worked for a credit card company. Recently divorced. His kid, Dylan, was with him. A chubby boy smelling of peanut butter. I put my dukes up for playful shadowboxing. Halfhoping Nick would slug me. He pushed my hands down. Hugged me. His kid being there, I guess. Frank said something mean-spirited but ultimately truthful. I left.

  The farmhouse stands off the main road. Several dozen head of cattle sleep in the abutting pasture. James kicks the door open before the car checks up. Staggering around with Matilda in her cowl of bloody towels.

  “My dog—my dog’s dying!”

  Light blooms in a second-story window. A man in sleeping flannels leans out.

  “She’s been chopped,” James tells him. “Bleeding real bad.”

  “Chopped?”

  “Scratched,” I tell the guy. “Clawed. Badger or something.”

  “He said chopped.”

  “He’s out of it. We thought you could help. Or tell us where the nearest vet is.”

  A second sleep-puffed face, female, materializes.

  “How bad is it?”

  “She’s a tough dog,” I tell her. “But deep.”

  The woman rubs the flat of her palm over her face.
“I’m no vet, but I could stitch that dog up. Give me a minute to get decent.”

  She meets us downstairs. A hard-shouldered woman stepping into a pair of galoshes. Husband taller and thinner with big-knuckled hands. A hunting rifle is crossed over his chest.

  “He thinks you guys could be running a home invasion scam,” his wife says. “Show up at night with a sick dog, appealing to our tenderest feelings—”

  “How do we know that dog’s hurt?” the guy says. “Towels soaked in red food colouring.”

  “Fair enough,” I say. “I’m Fletcher. This is James and Matilda.”

  “Michelle. Matt’s the hubby. We do all that work out in the barn.”

  Frost-clad grass crunches underfoot as we make our way through cattle whose bodies steam like stewpots in the moon-plated field. I touch one: skin texture of a truck tire. Michelle unlatches the barn door. Lights screwed into high beams fritz and pop. She leads us to a metal gooseneck from which a darkly knotted noose suspends.

  “For cows. Drag a bale over so she can reach,” Michelle says. “Head through it.”

  “She won’t bite,” James says.

  “Your say-so doesn’t make it any less likely. I’m not getting my face chewed off.” She’s threading a needle with surgical catgut. “Thinnest gauge I’ve got. Use it to repair labial tears after cows give birth.”

  She peels towels away to reveal Matilda’s wound. A near-bloodless gash: stiff white lips with a shiny red trench between. The needle works through Matilda’s hide. Michelle pulls the incision lips together, loops, ties. She swabs Matilda’s hide with rubbing alcohol. Paints the sutures with mercurochrome.

  “Good as I can do for her.”

  Back in their kitchen Matthew digs a gallon tub of ice cream out the freezer. Rinses it, cuts the bottom out with a utility knife, slices halfway up its hull. James works the plastic until it fits round Matilda’s throat. Matthew duct-tapes the cone in place. Matilda gives the plastic a desultory lick, chuffs, lays across James’s legs.

  We want to let them get back to bed but they say it isn’t worth bothering. They’d have to be up shortly. Such are the hours of cattle ranchers.

  “Before cattle Matt was a sharecropper,” says Michelle.