Sarah Court

by Craig Davidson

  Dad’s beaten us here. Following his medical suspension he’s taken to drinking at the Queenston Motel, a bar lonely, dispossessed men gravitate to before gravity hauls them off the face of the civilized world altogether.

  “Look,” he says with a sigh. “It’s the Count.” “Good eeevening,” Dylan greets his grandfather. In the changeroom Dad unfurls Dylan’s handwraps like lizard’s tongues. Spreads the fleshy starfish of his grandson’s hands to gird them. Dylan sucks air through his teeth. “Tight.”

  Dad unwinds his work. He believes Dill’s wussiness hovers round the fact he required an operation to correct an undescended testicle. But my father is prone to tendering wild accusations based on picayune evidence—such as the time he spotted me with a grape juice moustache and got into a big kerfuffle with Mom, levying the charge I must be “guzzling the frigging stuff,” which according to him was a sign of burgeoning gluttony. I was seven.

  The club is sparsely trafficked. A retired bricklayer hammers away at a heavy bag with a watchman’s cap tugged tight to his eyes. Young hockey players— goons in training—take wild swings at the bags adjacent. I untangle a skipping rope.

  “Try for a minute, Dill.”

  He can’t go ten seconds. As always, I am shocked by his lack of coordination. His feet snarl in the cape. He stomps on the hem and its cord chokes him.

  “Swell cape,” Dad says. Queenston Motel suds percolate out his pores.

  “Saaank you,” Dylan says in his vampire voice. “Jor blood vill stay in jor veins tonight, old one.” “Yeah? That’s swell.”

  I tug Dylan into a pair of sixteen ouncers. Giant red melons attached to his arms. We stake out a bag beside a poster of a vintage Lennox Lewis with his high-and-tight MC Hammer hairdo. Dylan throws a whiffle-armed one-two. The feeble blut of his gloves slapping the bag stirs a deep sorrow in my chest.

  “Pretend it’s vampire bait.”

  “Vampire bat?”

  “Bait.” I shouldn’t encourage it, but: “Vampire bait.”

  “Eef it vas wampire bait, I vould do dees!”—and bites the bag.

  “Dill. How many people you figure sweated all over that?”

  Dylan smacks his lips. “Eet’s wary, wary hard to be a wampire deez daze.”

  He heads to the fountain. Dad’s emptying spit troughs: funnels attached to lengths of flexible PVC hose feeding into Oleo buckets in opposing corners of the ring. The cell-phone girl, Cassie, comes in with who I assume must be her father: Danny Mulligan. His romance with Abby broke down in Moose Jaw along with his VW Minibus. He’s a cop now and looks it: Moore’s suitcoat shiny at the elbows, saddle shoes squashed at the toes like a clown’s, horse teeth, a Marine’s whitewall haircut shorn close to the scalp. I can already picture him as an old man: high blue veins, buttons of nose-hair. He looks—why do I harbour such unreasonable, mean-spirited, perverse thoughts?—like the sort of guy who, mid-fuck, grabs his own ass-cheek with a free hand. That selfconscious hand-push, like he needs help burying it home, coupled with an equally affected back arch. Yeah, he’s that guy.

  “Nick, right?”

  “Danny,” I greet him. “Yeah, hi.”

  “It’s Dan. My little girl tells me there was some ruckus today at school.”

  “That’s right. Something to do with videos.”

  Mulligan spread his legs as if readying to perform a hack squat.

  “Trupholme took away her phone. I bought that for Cassie’s birthday. All her numbers stored in it. Important dates, too.”

  Important dates. She’s ten. What, when the next Tiger Beat hits the newsstands?

  “I imagine she’ll get it back.”

  “If not?”

  “Are you telling me to buy her a new phone?”

  “How about we’ll talk.”

  With that, Dan dismisses me. He pulls gloves onto his daughter’s fists and leads her to a bag. Cassie summons enough force out of her tiny frame to rattle it on its chain.

  “Why not your little gal get in with Dylan?” Dad calls to Mulligan.

  “We’re game,” goes Mulligan, with a shrug.

  Dad turns to Dylan. “What d’ya say, Drac?”

  Dylan scuffs his shoes at a black streak on the floor.

  “I don’t vant to heet a girl.”

  “Not hitting,” I say. I hate seeing him cave. “Manoeuvring. You’ll be okay.”

  Headgear squashes his eyes-nose-mouth into the centre of his face. I tuck his cape into the back of his shorts. The silicon gumshield stretches his lips into an involuntary smile.

  When the bell rings, my son stares around, confused, perhaps thinking the fire alarm’s gone off. Cassie bears in, one gloved fist big as her head glancing off Dylan’s shoulder. Mulligan’s next to me on the apron. He carries himself in a physically invasive manner. Commandeering airspace. It speaks badly of a man.

  Dylan rucks in gamely, gloves hipped and rubbing against Cassie. Latent frotteur behaviour? He stumbles on his heels trying to find me in the lights, smiling at nobody in particular before turning that silly bewildered smile on his opponent as if to say, “We’re having fun, right?” Cassie’s snorting round her mouthpiece as the headgear constricts her sinuses. She bulls Dylan into a corner and drives her hands into his face before pulling away to slap a glove into Dill’s breadbasket. Dylan quivers: a seismic wave up his neck and down his thighs. They joust in the centre of the ring. Dylan’s pushing at Cassie’s shoulders to keep her unbalanced. I see my son in the west-wall mirror, and the reflected action states more profoundly just how lost he looks, soft and salty and unprotected like a massive quivering eyeball and I’m stepping through the ropes to stop it when Cassie plants a foot and rears so far back at the hips her lead hand nearly touches the back of her knee, coming on with the nastiest overhand right I’ve ever seen thrown by anyone so young. The sound she makes throwing it the screech of a gull. With the blood knocked temporarily out of his face, Dylan looks like an actor in a Japanese Noh play. He gets plunked on his backside where the ropes meet, spread-legged, skull too heavy for his neck. It dips between his knees to touch the canvas.

  Dad’s saying: “To your corners!”

  I reach into Dylan’s mouth. Strings of mucousthickened drool snap as I pull the mouthpiece out. Vacant-eyed—belted into that groggy space where nothing’s fully solidified—he blinks as a berry swells under his left eye. His gloved hands reach at his shorts as if he thinks he’s bare-assed and needs to hike them up. I cradle my hands under his bum. Pick him up.

  In the changeroom I tug his gloves off. Mulligan comes in to apologize. Genuinely surprised and regretful. He asks is Dylan okay. My son smiles. A sheen of blood on his teeth.

  “I’m sorry,” Dylan tells me.

  “You didn’t do anything.”

  That berry under his eye: you’d think an insect laid eggs. A red ring round his neck where the cape string’s choked him. Dylan looks at his hands with the most pitiable expression. Not a fighter, my boy. But he seems aware of it, too, a failure that pains him. He thinks I give a damn. He opens his arms to me and I sense he’s terrified I won’t hug him back.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Dill, please. What is it you think you’ve done?”

  On the way home I stop at Mac’s Milk to buy him an ice-cream sandwich. When I get back he’s flipping through a book I’d tossed in the back seat. Over-and-Out Parenting, by Dr. Dave Schneider. “Gobbledegook,” I tell him. He’s eating Nerds.

  “Where’d you get those?”

  “The stocker.”

  “Night stalker?”

  “The machine stocker.”

  Machine Stalker. Robo-stalker. Presumably bought with the five dollar bills Abby stitches into his trousers. He traces the ice-cream sandwich to his lumpy eye.

  “In class we watched this movie about war.”

  “What war?”

  “The one where everything’s blown up,” he says. “And like, the world gives us everything we need to blow it up. The steel to make planes is dug
out of whaddayacall . . . ?”

  “Mines.”

  “Like, the stuff that’s inside is the stuff blowing it up.” He points to his belly. “What if tiny-tiny aliens landed here—”

  “You mean Phantoids?”

  “Phantoids are peaceful, Dad . . . and so they hate each other and so get into a humongous war? Dig mines into my stomach. Make planes out of my bones and so, the gas is my blood? Mix the juices and the, uh, so, other stuff on my skin to make bombs? Everything they need to kill each other is on me.”

  He rips the waxed wrapper in neat ribbons. He’s fallen into an obsessive habit of taking things apart. Pocket calculators, stereo remotes: anything with diodes, springs, cogs. He asked for a set of jeweller’s screwdrivers to facilitate his deconstructions. I’d bought him a decent Timex for Christmas: he used the screwdrivers to gut it. Endstage methamphetamine addicts take gadgets apart with no intention of putting them back together. It accelerates or accentuates their grotty highs. I’m scared my son is exhibiting meth-head behaviours.

  I say: “There’s a drawing class at the Learning Annex.”

  “I like drawing.”

  “That’s why I said it, buddy. Maybe that’s a little more your speed than boxing.”

  “So . . . if you want.”

  “Not what I want. What you want.”

  “Is it?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Okay, it is.”

  The naked girl on stage has jet-black hair fitted precisely to the plates of bone composing her skull. Playmobil hair—clip it on and off.

  I hate strip clubs. Truly, they leave me griefstricken. They cater to a pitiful male hopefulness. For the young guys, the hope of sucking tit in the champagne lounge. Older guys, the hope a girl might drop her defences to tell him her real name. Not Puma: Trudy. Not Raven: Paula.

  The black card holder’s name is Starling. Wide, lashless eyes set far apart on his head give him the look of a trout. As the girl on stage performs a deadeyed gymnastic manoeuvre, spine bent like the Arc de Triomphe, he tells me he’d recently bought a Japanese dog. While we’re talking, a guy I find familiar walks past. Long hair up in a ponytail. Jacket with Brink Of embroidered on it.

  “Colin,” I say. “Colin Hill. Hey!”

  He smiles, a celebrity posing for paparazzi. “Man, aren’t you . . .”

  “Nick Saberhagen. From Sarah Court.”

  “Riiiiight.”

  He’s here with his father, Wesley, and some kid with dreadlocks. Colin tells us he’s going over the Falls tomorrow morning. I recall reading something in the Pennysaver. I tell him I’ll be there. And my son. Starling tells a bizarre story about a shark that plunges a dagger into all further conversation. Next he’s saying we’ve got to leave.

  Our cab glides down Bunting to Queenston. Tufford Manor and the cemetery where Conway Finnegan’s father lies, on over the liftlocks. QEW to the Parkway to River Road running along bluffs of the Niagara. In the basin puntboats—smugglers, jacklighters—run the channel with kerosene lamps bolted to their prows. The smell of baked wheat from the Nabisco factory. We pass the hydroelectric plant. Static electricity skates along my teeth to find the iron fillings and touch off fireworks in my gums.

  “I imagine,” says Starling, “a fair number drown.”

  “In this river? It happens.”

  “Most common cause of brain damage is oxygen deprivation, Nicholas.” I hate that he calls me that, but his membership fee entitles him to call me “dickface,” if it so pleases him. “Most common cause of oxygen deprivation is water trauma. A man of average intelligence deprived three and a half minutes—he’ll end up with the brain capacity of a colobus monkey. Up to four minutes, a springer spaniel. Truth is, the humans whose company I enjoy most are those most like animals. I spent time in a brain injury ward. One boy suffered massive cerebral hemorrhages due to his mother’s narrow birth chute. The most beautiful, open smile. He experienced more moments of pure joy in one day than I’ll lay claim to in a lifetime. Most of us would be better off having our heads held underwater a couple minutes. Ever see an unhappy dog, Nicholas?”

  “No, sir. Not for very long, anyway.”

  The taxi pulls into a warehouse. Security spots throw light at odd angles. Starling leads me down a domed hallway. A man sits on a wooden chair beside a door.

  “Donald Kerr, you old scallywag.”

  “No names. I said no—”

  “What shall he write on the cheque?” Starling asks, indicating me. “Wal-Mart bagman?”

  Donald’s got a narrow chicken face. Easy to picture him sitting on a clutch of eggs. A flatteringly tailored suit cannot disguise a physique shapeless as a pile of Goodwill parkas. One hand is cocked high on his second rib: a prissy, girlish posture.

  He leads us into the warehouse, which is empty save the object in the centre lit by a suspended bulb. It’s one of those trick boxes stage magicians make water escapes from. Designs carved into base and sides. A softball-shaped something sits inside. Starling leaves Donald and I to examine the box.

  “What’s in the box?”

  “A demon,” Donald tells me.

  “Come on.”

  “You asked, chum.”

  “So it’s a demon.”

  “Another guy, my associate, arranged it with your client. He wants to believe it is, okay, I say let him. It’s whatever he wants it to be. It’s his.”

  “I’m asking you. This other guy, associate of yours, was drunk when he said it.”

  “When I inherited it he wasn’t in any real position to say.”

  “Inherited?”

  “Something like that you don’t have to steal.”

  “Doesn’t look like a demon.”

  “What’s a demon look like?” Donald Kerr’s chin juts at an aggressive angle. “Could be something dredged up from the bottom of the sea nobody’s ever laid eyes on. Not my place to know or not know.”

  “Why don’t you want it?”

  “Why’s that matter? Not my cup of tea or whatever. It’s mine now, but in a minute it can be his. He wants it. So let’s make it his.”

  “What do I write on the invoice: Boxed Demon?”

  “Not my problem, sport.”

  I step forward to examine it myself. Whether the box was built expressly for this purpose is beyond me. Inside: an oblong ball, faintly pulsating. Its scabrous outer layer looks like dead fingernails. I snap a few photos with my cellphone. When the cheque is cashed the amount transfers to Starlings’ Centurion account. On the memo line I write: Antique Box. Blood spatters the paper. My nose has started to bleed.

  I wait in the taxi while Starling speaks to a man across the road. He leaves the man standing beside the river and rejoins me. Our cab veers upriver to Chippewa. A harvest moon slit edgewise by an isolated cloud. The road bends past Marineland.

  “Stop,” Starling tells the driver.

  The dreadlocked guy from the strip club is propped against a tree in the parking lot. His eyes are a pair of blown fuses. When Starling offers him a ride I resolve to find my own way home. We load the guy into the cab and I say goodbye. The cab’s taillights flare as it accelerates on under an Oneida billboard.

  Somebody’s egged the Marineland ticket booths. Sunbursts of exploded yolk. I worked here in high school. One time an animal rights activist with jaundiced eyes like halved hardboiled eggs shackled himself to the entry gates with a bicycle U-lock round his throat. The owner, a fierce Czech with pan-shovel hands, he’d gripped the protester by his ankles and shook him as you would a carpet. Roaring like one of the beasts he was accused of abusing. That was the autumn of my wife’s pregnancy. Dad floated the idea of an abortion. My wife showed me a terminated baby in a Right To Life pamphlet. Nothing so much as a skinned guinea pig.

  From the amphitheatre arises a yell— “Yeeeeearrrrgh!”—followed by a splash.

  I walk down McLeod to Stanley. Mist gathers in funnels of light under the streetlamps. I trot along the breakdown lane. My father would wake m
e in the witching hours to run the gravel trail skirting Twelve Mile Creek. A gumshield socked in my mouth conditioning me to breathe past the obstruction. Taste of epoxy on my tongue: the same taste that fills your mouth driving past that glue factory in Beamsville. A sensation innately linked to boxing, same as the smell of the adrenaline chloride Dad swabbed in my cuts, through layers of split meat: it had the smell of silver polish.

  A pickup blasts down the yellow line. The bed’s full of young guys. Something of their circumstances— so different than my own at that age—washes over me with the diesel exhaust.

  My twenty-seventh fight , the one where the wheels began to fall off, was against Clive Suggs. Our weights the same but Suggs was a man.

  We fought at the Lake street armory in a ring erected between decommissioned tanks. I knew Suggs was going to cream me. So black that when sunlight struck him there was a soft undertone of heavy blue about his skin. Clavicle bones spread like bat’s wings from his pectorals. His wife had been there. His boy. I’d be fighting a father. I was a sixteen.

  We boxers shared one change room. Suggs caught my eye and winked. Not an unfriendly gesture. He had his own problems with a wife giving him hell.

  “Boxing at your age,” she said. “You must have a death wish.”

  “Me, baby? Naw. I got a life wish.”

  My father made a gumshield for me by joining two mouthpieces together. Glued slightly off-kilter so my lower teeth jutted ahead of the uppers. A forced underbite kept my teeth from clicking, which prevented shockwaves coursing down my jawbone into the cerebrospinal fluid occupying the subarachnoid space around my brain, which would have cold-cocked me. He cut holes in the silicon so I could vacate air without opening my mouth. It worked. I took shots that rolled my eyes so far back that the ligatures connecting to my eyeballs stretched to snapping. I was overtaken by this blackness where all I could hear was the scuffling of boots and thack of my heart. All I felt were bands of fire where the ring ropes touched my back. I’d sink back into my skin conscious yet likely concussed. Hoovering air into my nose. Expelling it in a mad hiss through holes in my gumshield. My father strapped oversize surgical Q-Tips to his wrist with a blue elastic band like they use to bind lobster claws. He’d soak them in adrenaline chloride 1/100 and between rounds stuff them so far up my bloody nose the pain of those Q-Tips poking what felt like the low hub of my brain made the nerves at the tips of my fingers spit white fire. And I never gave up. I should have. You can toughen every part of your anatomy save that glob of goo in your skull.