Sarah Court

by Craig Davidson

  Dylan presses his forehead to my hip. “Can I give him it?”

  “Monkeys shouldn’t chew gum.”

  Instead we sprinkle puppy chow from a coin-op dispenser in the carp pond. Dylan’s fascinated by the voracious surges of their liquid pewter bodies.

  “That thing with Missus T,” I say. “What made you do it, Dill?”

  “It was a dare.”

  “Did you enjoy it? The rubbing? If you did . . . you’re at an age of weird body feelings. Confusing stuff. You can talk to me, right?”

  “I talk to Mom on the phone.”

  “Who dared you? Cassie Mulligan?”

  “Sadie.”

  “Is she in your class, this Sadie?”

  “She’s my online friend.”

  “How old is she?”

  “A little older than me. She’s very . . . pretty?”

  “Her photo on the computer screen, you mean. How did you meet?”

  “She friended me. On MySpace.”

  “And she told you to do that to Missus Trupholme?”

  “It’d be funny to play a joke on my teacher. Then Cassie could film it.”

  “Cassie’s friends with Sadie, too?”

  “Sadie’s friends with everybody.” He bites his lip. “Don’t tell anyone.”

  How could it be possible that someone nobody has seen is the most popular person in my son’s class?

  “Dill, you’ve got to stop interacting with this person. Are you listening? Want me to chuck your computer in the creek?”

  “Computers at school. Everywhere.”

  “This is not me trying to hurt you.”

  “You let Cassie punch me.”

  “God. Where’d that come from? Sadie could be some filthy old man in a basement.”

  “Can we go see Mommy?”

  “Is that why you wanted to come to Toronto—to visit your mother?”

  “We’re close by. You could come.”

  “No, I couldn’t. Listen, bud, Mom needs time alone.”

  “Alone from me?”

  “Yes. No.” Pat his knee. An ineffectual but easy gesture. “Not you.”

  “Doesn’t she love you anymore?”

  “You never stop loving someone. Entirely.”

  “So she could come back. We could live in the same house.”

  “You shouldn’t pin much hope on that.”

  Early that morning I wake. Down the hall: the tap-tap of a keyboard.

  I catch my son bathed in the glow of his monitor. No cape or eyepatch. A normal ten-year-old. The gutted remains of a clock radio are spread about his desk.

  “Go away, Daddy.”

  He doesn’t even look at me. Eyes on the computer screen.

  “Who are you talking to?”

  He spreads his hands over the screen. This angry tickling sets up inside my bones. I take his wrists. One of his fists comes free and strikes me. I pull him off the chair. Drag him into the hall.

  “Is it her? Is it? I told you to stop talking to whoever the hell this is.”

  He swivels his wrists as though I’ve hurt them. Perhaps I have.

  “I hate you.”

  I sit at his computer. I’m struck by the orderly layout of his disassembled clock radio. The LCD display, circuit board, and plastic casing laid out in obscurely geometric patterns. Screws collected in a pill bottle scrounged from my medicine chest: Reminyl, which I take. It’s usually prescribed to Alzheimer’s sufferers to address short-term memory deficiencies.

  Microsoft Messenger is running. Sadie’s screenshot is of a cute girl in pigtails. Chatroom semaphore renders much of the conversation unintelligible: lolz, rotflmao, kpc. Sadie is discussing a new nightgown. How snugly it fits. I scroll up and am shocked, terrified, to find a conversation about my wife, myself. Our split.

  Sadie: dillie? dillie-sweetie? u there?

  Dylan: THIS IS DYLAN’S FATHER

  After thirty seconds or so, words start to scrawl across the screen.

  Sadie: hey mr. dillie. i know all about u.

  Dylan: ARE YOU A PERVY OLD FART? I COULD CALL THE POLICE

  Sadie: . . . lol . . . i’m a cute giiiirl . . . i like to snuggle . . .

  Dylan: MY SON SAYS YOU ARE FRIENDS WITH EVERYONE IN HIS CLASS

  Sadie: dillie-baby told u that? such a sweetie-petey! Dylan: DYLAN’S TOLD ME LOTS

  Sadie: . . . lol . . . no he has not . . . dillie hates u, mr. dillie . . . like poison hates u . . .

  Dylan: STAY AWAY FROM MY KID YOU STUPID FUCKER

  Sadie: awwww, threatening a pretty wittle giiiirl . . .

  Dylan: HAVE YOU ARRESTED CREEP STAY AWAY

  Sadie: ur not the boss of me . . .

  [USER SADIE HAS LOGGED OFF]

  There is part of me that struggles to believe this is even happening. Another part is wondering what, exactly, is happening. I print off the conversation.

  Dylan’s sitting cross-legged in the hall where the walls meet, faced away from me. He rocks forward until his skull touches the wall. I don’t know if he’s crying but if so it’s silently. I want to hug him yet am furious for reasons I can’t articulate. There is a cold fierce tickle inside my bones.

  Niagara Regional Police HQ is a labyrinth of pastel green hallways, solid-core walls, and turretmounted video cameras. I’m buzzed through a steelplated door buttressed by bulletproof glass into a bullpen furnished in outdated Dragnet motif.

  Danny Mulligan meets me at the coffee urn. He fills two cups. “You pay your taxes, right?” he asks before handing me one.

  He leads me to his desk. His Laura Secord letterman jacket is hung over his chair.

  “You still talk to Abby Saberhagen?” he asks.

  “You and her dated back when, hey?”

  He wiggles his ring finger. “Spoken for, now.”

  And Abby cries herself to sleep over that.

  “Dan—”

  “Lieutenant Mulligan.”

  “Right, Lieutenant. About Dylan.”

  “Not my jurisdiction. Try Juvie services. Or Scared Straight.”

  “No, it’s . . . he’s being harassed. Stalked. Something.”

  “Not my jurisdiction. Talk to the principal.”

  “Cassie, too.”

  “Cassie’s involved?”

  “I think so. They’ve got this friend. Dylan calls her a friend, anyway. An online friend. He’s never met her. Nobody has.”

  “And Cassie’s involved?”

  “All that with the cellphone—this person, young girl or so she says, put them up to it. She’s computer friends with everyone in class.”

  “This is your suspect?”

  “Right. Sadie.”

  “Sadie who?”

  “Sadie-the-perverted-old-man-posing-as-a-girlstalking-my-son.”

  “I’ll stop you right there. It may actually be a young girl. Infatuation isn’t a crime.”

  “What if it’s an adult? This person has . . . has infiltrated our kids’ class.”

  “Nick, I’m backlogged. Got a case where a baby was almost drowned in the toilet at Wal-Mart. I’ve got a pursuable lead on that. Sort of.”

  “Mine’s not?”

  “Technically, anything’s pursuable. If you have the manpower.” He sips coffee. Skins his lips from teeth as if he’d slugged down a shot of gutrot mezcal. “Listen, I’ll contact Missus Trupholme. We can sit down with the class and talk about the dangers of Internet predation.”

  When he can’t find any scrap paper on his desk, Mulligan rummages his blazer pocket, finds a foldedover leaflet and absently writes his home number on its bare white back. He hands it over to me.

  He says: “How’s Dylan?”

  “Your girl’s a bombthrower.”

  “Takes after her old man.”

  “Nick, it’s your father.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Just come over.”

  Rain fell earlier tonight. Shredded silver mist rolls up the streets to form halos around streetlights.

  I’d dri
ven Dylan to Toronto for the weekend. He ran to his mother under the candy-striped overhang of her new condominium complex. I stayed in the car.

  Sarah Court. Two lights burning: one in an upper window of Mama Russell’s house, the other in my father’s kitchen. His face is furred with a three-day beard. His skin hangs in doglike folds around his jawbone. He’s drinking peach zinfandel from a box.

  “I went into the hospital today,” he says. “Surgery review board. To revoke my license. I scanned the incoming patient list. Abigail Burger. Emergency admission. You’d better drive.”

  On the way to the hospital my father’s popping the passenger door ashtray open, closed, open again. The booze fumes coming off him are positively kinetic.

  “Remember taking me to the LCBO on my thirteenth birthday?” I say, because he’s in a selfpitying mood and that’s when I prefer to needle him.

  “I never. Your birthday? Never, Nick.”

  “Dragged me in on the way to mini-putt. They were out of your brand of gin. Whersh the damn Tankeraaaay . . .”

  “Uh-huh, in that stupid lush voice. As if I’ve ever spoken that way. Ever.”

  “Were you drinking before that procedure?”

  He avoids the question.

  “You know, bail may be set at a million. I’d put the house up. Think your mother’d put hers up, too?” “Why the hell would she?”

  “For old times’ sake.”

  “What about trial costs?”

  “That’s me off to Brazil. Non-extradition policy.” “Skip bail and Mom loses her house.”

  “I wasn’t serious.”

  We cut across the parkway. Over the guardrail stands the brickwork of textile mills turned into low-rent apartments. A ladder of red pinpricks where tenants smoke on fire escapes.

  “I took your mom to a cocktail party once. She didn’t know anyone and held it against me. I went off to find a drink. She’s chatting up some guy. Guy says, ‘Your husband, what’s he do?’ and your mother says, ‘Oh, he’s a sonofabitch,’ and the guy says, ‘Whatever pays the bills.’ Ha!”

  We get to the hospital. The elevator rises to a white-walled ward sharing the floor with the neonatal clinic and the Norris wing. Fletcher Burger sits on a chair in the hall. At first I think he’s drunk. But it must be shock. The man’s groggy with it.

  “At the gym,” he tells us. “The weight bar fell on her . . . her throat.”

  Abigail’s on a hospital bed in a paper hospital gown. Veins snake down her arms and trail under plaster casts. A throat incision barbed with catgut.

  “Warmup lift.” Fletcher rubs his thumbs over his fingertips. “I don’t know how but her arm broke.”

  “Tracheal stent,” Dad says. “How long before they opened her airway?”

  “Brain scan showed black spots, is all I know. Her eyes. Frank, they turned red.”

  Outside the hospital wind shears across Lake Ontario around every angle this town was built upon. Wires of dread twist through me. My oldest friend. My prom date. Guess I thought we’d marry. Even when I was married—and loved my wife, truly—I felt I could have as easily been with Abby. But my son never would’ve been born in that scenario. A son, maybe, but not Dylan: the exact genetic prerequisites wouldn’t have been present. Plus I’d end up with Fletcher Burger as a father-inlaw. One self-obsessed man rampaging through my life was enough.

  I leave my father with Fletcher and walk along to the Queenston Motel. A smorgasbord of ravaged faces and sclerotic livers. The lonesome thoughts of the patrons pinball round the dank air, glancing, rebounding, horrified at themselves. An old man eats a submarine sandwich the way you do a cob of corn: he looks like an iguana with a dragonfly clamped in its jaws. Another guy wears a leather vest with nothing on underneath. So insanely over-tanned his skin is purple. This leathery turnip of a head. The woman between them wears a hot pink tube top. Twin C-section scars grace her midriff, inverted ‘T’s overlapping like photographic negatives aligned offkilter.

  I order a greyhound. My wife’s drink. The bartender gives me something that tastes like liquefied Band Aids. “Summer of ’69” starts up on the Rockola jukebox. Pink Tube Top gets up on the sad postage-stamp of a dance floor. Breaks out that old Molly-Ringwald-circaSixteen-Candles, shouldersforward-shoulders-back-slow-motion-running-inplace move. “Yeeow!” goes The Dragonfly. “Yip-yipyee!” goes Leatherhead and he slither-slides up there with her. Now they’re doing some spastic’s version of the Macarena. Now I recall why I don’t drink: it curdles my benevolent worldview.

  The Hot Nuts machine is empty. There are no fucking hot nuts in the Hot Nuts machine. The red heat lamp is beating on a glass cube.

  “Turn off the fucking Hot Nuts machine,” I tell the bartender. “Some dumb bastard’s liable to burn himself on the glass.”

  The barkeep lays a hand on the bartop. Large, scarred, knuckles crushed flat. A mean-ass scar descends from his ear to the dead centre of his chin: a chinstrap welded to his flesh. Am I going to scrap over a Hot Nuts machine? I’ve fought for less. Fortyodd times in gyms and clubs, a greyhound racetrack, the parking lot of a Chuck E. Cheese’s. All to show for it a periodic openmouthed vacancy in my memory. My father said I fought with absolutely no regard for my welfare. A man who had made peace with his forever-after. But you have to acquaint yourself with the notion, before even scuffing your ring boots in the rosin, that not only will you be hurt—there’s no honest way you came out of any fight unhurt— but that you’ll be hurt badly and repeatedly by an opponent who, in the hothouse of that ring, hates you. You cannot batter another human being into unconsciousness unless you harbour some hatred. The second hardest part of boxing is accepting your need to suffer. The hardest part is welcoming that necessary hatred into your heart. I’d stepped between the ropes never believing I could have a wife, a boy, people upon whom I was depended. I can’t fight knowing how any punch—even one thrown by a spud-fisted bartender—could be the one to bust that all apart.

  The cab drops me off a block from home. I’m so dehydrated that I steal up to the side of a house, twist the spigot on the garden hose and suck at stale plastic-y water like a poisoned dog. At home I’m nearly drunk enough to call my wife, ex, but it’s late and Dylan is there. I don’t want to be that father.

  I’m absentmindedly rooting through my pockets when I turn up that leaflet with Danny Mulligan’s number on the back. I turn it over. On the front is a naked woman, red-haired and busty. Pink stars over her nipples. A larger pink star over her crotch.

  What the fuck? What the fuck.

  “Sixty-Nine Cent Phone Fantasies,” the operator greets me. “Our titillation experts are sweet and sexy, dom, sub, Black, Asian, naughty nurses, hirsute, leather lovelies, Daddy’s little girls, fat-n-sassy, whips and chains, kinky, mincing, slutty secretaries, southern dandies—”

  “Fine,” I say. “That one.”

  . . . click . . . buzz . . .

  “How y’all doing this faahn evenin’?”

  “I’m . . . Jesus, are you a guy?”

  “That’s not what you asked for?”

  “I didn’t think I’d need to specify.”

  “I talk to whoever switchboard patches through, man.”

  “Well. Everyone’s got to make a living.”

  “All with little mouths to feed.”

  “You got mouths to feed?”

  “My own. And my dog, who I’m fixing to get back. So, you horny?”

  “Not really. Anymore.”

  “We could give it a whirl. What’re you wearing?”

  “A parka and earmuffs. Hey, listen—you ever go through a stage where everything comes apart at once?”

  “Pal, you’re talking to a middle-aged male phonesex provider.”

  “I just got back from the hospital. A friend I’ve known forever, she’s been hurt. Her father . . . my dad. Dads. Close with yours?”

  “He’s dead now.”

  “I’m sorry. My own boy says he hates me. What made him hate me? But I think, well, I ha
te my own dad sometimes. More than some. You got kids?”

  “Me? No. Crimped urethral tube. Childhood soccer mishap. My wife left me over it.”

  “Over a crimped urethra?”

  He says: “Other shenanigans, too.”

  “My ex-wife,” I say. “This one morning we woke up. I told her how gorgeous she looked first thing.”

  “Right. No makeup, the tousled hair.”

  “Tousled, yeah. She gave me this arch look and asked me how long I’d taken to think up that line. But it just came to me. After that I felt compelled to . . . only so many times you can tell someone they’re beautiful and not have it take on the ring of redundancy, right? After awhile you hope it’s a given.”

  “My ex took up with a greasy surgeon. I’m gonna carve him out a new asshole one of these days and you can take that to the bank.”

  “What am I paying sixty-nine cents for?”

  “Sixty-nine cents is the connection fee. This is running you five bucks a minute.”

  “Then listen to me.”

  “I hear you. Give it to me, baby. Lay it on me, stud.”

  “For Christ’s sakes. I’m trying to say something important so—would you? Anticipate my needs. Act professional.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Hate, hate, hate. I’ve had more thrust upon me the past months than the rest of my life combined. I’m not a guy people should hate, am I?”

  “You sound nice. Intense. A bit like your dad.”

  “What?”

  “I said a bit like my dad.”

  “You know something? You’re a piss-poor phonesex provider.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m hanging up.”

  “I sort of knew that, too.”

  When Dylan was three he caught poison ivy at Martindale pond.

  The pond lies in a gully where an old roadway washes out. I took him fishing. We sat onshore amongst old catfishers perched on grease tubs with poles clasped in liquorice-root fingers. He’d get bored and go romping in the woods. I’d ascribed to an immersion theory of child rearing at the time. Let him lick a dog. Put bugs in his mouth. Build that immune system.

  The poison ivy started as splotches on his thighs. Threads crept to his groin. He clawed it onto his stomach up to his armpits. The pediatrician prescribed calamine lotion. Dylan still had fits. Dad gave me lotion laced with topical anaesthetic.