Sarah Court

by Craig Davidson

  Strangest thing about a savage beating—one of those within-an-inch-of-your-lifers—is how everything’s the best the following day. You wake up, sun streaming into your room: The most beautiful sunlight ever. Eat a bowl of oatmeal: Goddamn if this isn’t the best thing I ever ate. Look out the window see a butterfly: Mr. Butterfly, you’re the prettiest creature. If you’re lucky to have a girlfriend and if she’s kind enough to kiss those spots that hurt—“Every spot’s hurting, honey”—the feel of her lips will drive you into a whole other dimension of pleasure. That terminal day-after sweetness is so addictive.

  Suggs starched me with a honey of a left hook that no mouthpiece or the direct agency of God could have averted. After the ref raised his hand, Suggs reached over the ropes for his son. Perched him on his shoulder. Never had I seen any two people so concurrently, radiantly happy. For the son: the elemental joy of being in that ring, one arm slung round his pop’s neck. For Suggs: that rare opportunity to share a personal triumph. You and me, boy! You and me. I suppose I became part of what may stand as Clive Suggs’s finest hour—sad, considering: he pulped a kid with no future in the sport in a ring erected between WWII tanks at a bout watched by fifty. But his boy didn’t know that. And it may not have mattered. To his son, Clive was mythic in those moments.

  Suggs knocked over a Gales Gas and earned a jolt in the Kingston penitentiary. “So he did have a life wish,” my father remarked. “A ten-years-to-life wish.” He works at a retirement home now, I hear. That’s just how the wheels roll in these southern Ontario towns, and I roll on it same as anyone.

  But . . . that look Clive Suggs’s boy gave his Dad. That myth-making look. I’ve never given my father that look. And my son has never given it to me.

  The Falls tumble grey to match an overcast sky. A subdued crowd gathers along tarnished railings surveying the basin to watch Colin Hill go over the cataract.

  “You’d’ve figured a bigger turnout,” says Abby.

  She’s training again following a shoulder injury. She returned from vacation overweight and this, she says, had really set her father off. Dylan holds her hand as we come down Clifton Hill. On the patio of a dismal karaoke bar a rotund shill dressed as Elvis croons “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” His Tonawanda accent makes it sound he’s singing, “Are you loathsome tonight?” We find a spot amongst the railbirds. Down in the basin Wesley Hill stands at the stern of his boat.

  “I got to pee.”

  “You peed before we left, Dill.”

  “That hot chocolate,” he reminds me.

  I take Dylan’s hand to lead him across the road. He says he can go himself.

  “That arcade across the street should have one. Come right back. I’m watching.”

  Abby asks after my father. She knows all about the operation he’d botched some time ago. A wayward incision in somebody’s prefrontal lobe. The patient’s identity was protected by privacy statutes.

  “I’m not saying he was drinking beforehand, but when you fall to pieces have the grace to admit it,” I tell her. “Stop dicking around in people’s heads.”

  Where’s Dylan? Abby follows me across the road into the arcade. The attendant occupies a Plexiglas bubble with a police-car cherry rotating above it.

  “See a kid?” I ask him. “Short, a little chubby.”

  “We get a lot of chubby kids in here, dude.”

  The arcade’s rear door leads into an alley that empties onto Clifton Hill. Abby and I trudge uphill pressing our noses to the odd window. The air is quite suddenly full of fibreglass insulation; it sweeps down to the Falls in a pink drift. Abby’s face is clung with pink flakes. Fibreglass stuck to windows and the street. Dylan comes down the sidewalk in the company of a man. They’re holding hands. He’s covered in pink. There’s blood under his fingernails where the fibreglass cut in.

  “Where the hell did you go?” I say, my seething anger barely contained.

  “No place to pee.”

  The man points to a construction site. “I found him up there.”

  “Jeffrey?” Abby says to him. “Are you Jeffrey, from Sarah Court?”

  Older, taller, but unmistakably so. Jeffrey, one of Mama Russell’s special “boys.”

  “Abigail. Nicholas. This is your son.” His inflection makes it less question than assertion.

  “Only mine,” I say. “We’re here for—”

  “Colin Hill.” Jeffrey brushes pink out of his hair. “A block reunion.”

  He speaks as if he’s joking but there’s no smile. Jeffrey always was an odd duck. Same as the rest of Mama Russell’s reclamation projects.

  By the time we make it down, Colin Hill has already gone over. The crowd is buzzing. In the basin, Wesley Hill’s jonboat has been joined by a tactical ambulance speedboat. Flashing red lights. Flashbulbs pop along the rail.

  Mama Russell is there, and she greets us gladly. She’s wheelchair-bound. Her silver hair is bobbypinned up around her doughy face. She fusses over Dylan. Who is either scared of her or disgusted by her.

  A flake of insulation has gotten trapped under Dill’s eyelid. We say goodbye to Jeffrey and Mama Russell and drive to the walk-in clinic. Dylan sits on Abby’s lap in the waiting room.

  “She smelled like the old mall,” Dylan stagewhispers into Abby’s ear.

  “Who did?”

  “That woman in the wheelchair.”

  He winces, as if understanding it’s not a terribly nice thing to say about someone so aged.

  “She smelled how?” Abby wants to know. “How does a mall smell?”

  “He means the Lincoln mall on the westside,” I say. “With the boarded-up shops and the busted mechanical ponyride, right, Dill? Before it was bulldozed.”

  Dylan nods. With one eye closed due to the fibreglass, he’s tipping this perpetual wink.

  “Sort of musty?” When Dylan nods again, Abby says, “Old people can have peculiar smells. You may smell like that someday.”

  He’s sincerely amazed. “People change smells as they get older?”

  “Go smell a puppy,” Abby tells him. “Then go smell an old dog. People are the same.”

  A nurse flushes his eyeball at an eyewash station. She fits him with a breathable eye patch. Abby tells him he looks like a pirate. I sort of wish she hadn’t done that.

  Lastly —and I mean, obviously—let’s talk about Pops. Once, after we’d returned from a run—Dad harrying me with: “Push it, milquetoast!” and me thinking: What trainer worth his salt calls anyone a milquetoast?—Frank Saberhagen, my dad, made me lie on the driveway with arms and legs spread. He traced my outline with sidewalk chalk.

  “Look at yourself,” he said, forcing me to look at my chalked outline. “Disproportionate as hell. Midget-legged but long-armed. A gorilla’d be jealous of that wingspan. So use it. Keep your opponent at bay. Otherwise I’ll be chalking your outline inside the ring. After you’ve been knocked onto queer street.”

  This was Frank Saberhagen’s idea of constructive encouragement. He missed his calling as a motivational author; his unwritten bestseller’s title could have been: Get Tough, Moron!—The SABERHAGEN Advantage.

  Another time we’re at the boxing club. I’m sparring with Mateusz Krawiec. My father’s in my corner. Mateusz’s dad, Vaclav, is in the corner opposite. Vaclav was at that time the reigning “Sausage King” of southern Ontario: his Polonia kielbasa won the competition held every summer in Montebello Park. Dad felt Vaclav’s win had given him a swollen head. Me and Mateusz went through the usual paces— Mateusz now works at Nabisco as a safety inspector; cute Polish wife, two kids—both of us evenly matched except that he was a southpaw. He kept giving me the Fitzsimmon’s shift to bounce stinging lefts off the bridge of my nose.

  “Overhand right!” Dad hollered. “Shift with him, then go smashmouth on his ass. O.T.S.S.!”

  O.T.S.S.: Only The Strong Survive. Shortly thereafter, Mateusz battered me with an accidental low blow.

  “Call your kid the Foul Pole,” my father cracked.
>
  Vaclav offered a deadpan: “Jah, Foul, ha-ha, jah.” Something was percolating, but with my father you had to wait and see what permutation his unreasoning animus would take.

  When a session ends it was customary for trainers to shake hands. My father stepped through the ropes with menace in mind. Butcher versus doctor. Their professions bore out physically. My dad was tentpolelimbed and spider-fingered. Kraweic looked like he split hog femurs with a friction-taped axe. You really couldn’t beat my father for unadulterated perversity of character.

  “Hey, Sausage King,” he said. “You’re brownbagging it today. My compliments.”

  “Vhat?”

  “You’re brown-bagging it,” Dad said amiably.

  “Here’s a sackful of knuckle sandwiches.”

  In his defence it was the eighties, when the term “knuckle sandwich” was not hopelessly outdated. But what he did next was indefensible: took a wild, looping swing at the Sausage King. Should you find these circumstances improbable, all I can say is that if you knew Frank Saberhagen, you’d know he defies most sane probabilities every day of his life. Dad’s fist pelted Vaclav’s ear. “Vhat?” said the Sausage King. I wondered if he was having a tough time hearing out of his punched ear or if, more likely, he was merely shocked at being hit by this mouthy fucking twerp. While Vaclav pursued my father in a blooded rage, Mateusz and I felt compelled to square off again. I shifted this time. Came over with my right. Gloves off, no headgear. I crushed the poor sap’s nose. Blood mushroomed between Mateusz’s fingers. Vaclav ceased his pursuit of my father to tend to his son.

  “Overhand right, Nick!” Dad said triumphantly.

  “Told you.”

  That’s how my father operates. He’ll force you into positions where you must stand beside him. Now it’s become a private joke. Whenever one of us gets on the other’s nerves, it’ll be: “Someone’s fixing to feast on the brown bag special.”

  “Wouldn’t it have been great,” he said afterwards, “if I’d said the bag lunch line then nailed him proper?”

  There are points in time you recognize your father as holding none of the special powers that as a child you believed he must. To see at heart he is careless and as often as not confused, that he smashes up things and people and it isn’t that he doesn’t care so much as he’s done it enough to know he is more than capable of it and not entirely able to correct what he’s set wrong. Plus he’s a bastard. He’s my dad, so I can say it. Cavernously narcissistic.

  We lived on a block with a teenage halfway house and the terminally unemployable Fletcher Burger. He savoured the idea of living amongst his financial inferiors. But I’ve had more fun in his company than any other human being. If you conceptualize fun as a string of adrenaline dumps. But it’s dangerous when the merrymaker becomes convinced that’s all he need ever provide. As he’d inflicted himself upon me, made his pursuits mine, he’d hedged the odds of us sharing more “moments” than Mom and I.

  Though I’d never claim that as his clear-sighted aim. Grown men weep at his feet for what he does in the operating theatre. A saviour complex has to fuck with a man’s head. But he realizes he’s an asshole.

  Regarding my mother: “Don’t know why she bothers with me, Nick.” In grade school I’d come home to a message on the answering machine from Mom, who Dad said had taken a “personal vacation”: You goddamn stinking shit. Don’t call, don’t come for me. You get away, you just stay away . . . Frank? She sounded lost. Forsaken. Frank . . . ? You hear people claim they’re “crazy in love.” Plenty of us, yeah, we are. Chemicals exploding in our brains. Perpetually doing the wrong things with the wrong people for the wrong reasons. A chain of bad judgements and miscalculations: ten, fifteen years frittered away. I don’t want to come off as a killjoy. But only the most deluded wouldn’t be a little skeptical, right? My father loves me. I know this much. But his love is brash and undisciplined and inwardly focused. He needs it to reflect back upon itself. Creatures of colossal egotism cannot simply give something away. My mother said once: “I always hope you understand how much I love you.” I do, partly as it exists in opposition to how my father expresses it. Mom’s is a practical love with one obvious motive: to protect what she’s put on this earth. A care-packages-ofboxer-shorts-and-mac-and-cheese sort of love. With

  Dad’s I’m always fighting somebody. Him, mainly. Dad knows I love Mom more. I’ve calibrated this using those means we use to reach such understandings and yes, I do. I think he’s okay with it, too. In order for me to love him equally he’d be forced into concessions he has consistently proven himself unwilling to make.

  I book the week of Dylan’s suspension off. Each morning I wake him he hisses: “Zee light! Yar, zee light, she burns!” He’s drawn a skull-and-crossbones on his eyepatch and sporadically fancies himself a pirate. A vampire pirate: synergy!

  We go grocery shopping at Superstore. Dylan wanders into women’s clothing and returns wearing a bra. The proverbial over-the-shoulder boulder holder, it hangs to his bellybutton. Any woman wearing such a contraption would occasion my father to note: “Whoa—it’s a dead heat in a zeppelin race.”

  “Put it back.”

  “For Mom?”

  “Not her size. But it pulls your whole look together.”

  This only encourages him to vamp it up. He struts down the shampoo aisle and performs a high-toed buttonhook round a Prell display, grabbing a bottle as a microphone to launch into “Viva Las Vegas,” which he’d heard that Elvis impersonator sing. A woman my age with no ring laughs. I am cognizant of using my son as a lure. His Vampire phase is waning. These in-between spells, casting about for a new persona, I’m most vigilant. Next he’ll be a rocket-powered tree sloth or a cannibal banana who eats nothing but his brother and sister bananas.

  “These are the cheapest toothbrushes you can buy,” he says, showing me one.

  “You have a toothbrush. You want that one?”

  He gawps at me as though I’ve perpetrated some arcane form of child abuse. I thought he was bargainshopping.

  I pick up a massive block of toilet paper, thirty-six rolls. On up the soft drink aisle for two cases of diet cream soda. The ringless woman comes down the aisle. Her eyes fall upon my cart and I’m horrified she’s got the impression my life consists of drinking diet soda on my enormous toilet. For a full decade I never had one such thought. The band on my finger stood as proof to womankind: one of you accepts me. All prospects of remedy are exhausting in mere conception. Find a sitter for Dylan to spring me for a night at Fredo’s under the Niagara Skyway, rucking in with the basset-eyed divorcees and sundry wastoids, clamouring for Ms. Right, Ms. Right Now, whatever’s on the hoof. Cruising Toys R Us for single moms. Explaining it to my son: “This is Daddy’s new friend, Trixy. We met at a speed-dating junket down the Lucky Bingo. She’ll be sleeping on Mommy’s side of the bed strictly on a trial basis . . .”

  Dylan presses his lips to a pack of cheap blade steaks and whispers: “Fresh blood.” In produce he gets on hands and knees reaching under a display of coloured potatoes. They’re severely reduced and, judging by the smell, well on their way to becoming vodka. He comes up with a dented can of mushrooms cowled in spiderwebs.

  “See?” As if I’d doubted his gathering instincts. “Can we get them?”

  “The can’s bulgy. You’ll get botulism.” Wrap both hands round my throat, pretend I’m throttling myself. “Gak! Plus you don’t even like mushrooms.”

  He darts down the adjacent aisle, Confectionary, and returns while I’m comparing sodium contents on warring brands of cornflakes.

  “Dad! Daddy-Daddy-DaddyDaddyDa—”

  “What, Dylan? What the hell is it?”

  He drops the tub of gummy worms on a low shelf. Prods it between boxes of Mini-Wheats with his toe. Saws an arm across his nose.

  “I love you.”

  Next he spies boxes of Animal Crackers.

  “Can we go to the zoo?”

  “You’re not on vacation, sport-o. You’re being
punished, remember?”

  “Like a field trip. To give me knowledge.”

  “How about the butterfly conservatory?”

  He traces a finger round the lion’s head on the cracker box. “Butterflies . . .”

  “Fine. The zoo.”

  The next day is cool and edged with coming snows. Clouds cast indistinct shadows on Stoney Creek grape fields where field hands tend canebrake fires. Dylan’s in full-on vampire mode.

  “Listen to zee creatures of zee avternoon,” he says as we drive south on the four-lane highway. “Vhat beeoootivul music zey make.”

  “I’m taking my son to the zoo. Not a vampire. Besides, a vampire’s a scummy creature. They got to kill to live.”

  “What if you keep victims in your basement? Take their blood out with a needle?”

  “Bleeding prisoners? Worse.”

  Offseason zoos are depressing. Polar bears with hotspotted fur snuffle at frozen blocks of fish bobbing in the oily water of their enclosure. The monkey house viewing area is empty. Piped-in jungle noises: roar of lion, caw of toucan, the steady beat of bongos as you hear in films where pithhatted explorers get cooked in cauldrons by needletoothed headhunters. The poor monkeys look as if they’ve been plucked off banyan trees in their native lands, dropped into a sack and dumped here minutes prior to our arrival. One swings down to the floor of its enclosure and creeps forward on its belly. It’s scrabbling through the bars at a wad of chewed gum balled up in its wrapper.