Sarah Court

by Craig Davidson

  “A hell of a burden, Wes, your age.”

  “Yeah, Frank. Fine motor skills coming along. He’ll find a job after therapy. But yeah.”

  A black man in orderly whites presses his face to the window. Shakes his head as he steps inside. Lonnigan spots him coming and chugs his beer before the orderly can take his glass away.

  “You old cabbagehead. Who let you out?”

  “Must’ve been you, Clive,” Lonnigan cackles.

  “You crazy goat. I’m’na handcuff you to a bedpost.”

  “You try and I’ll sic the CNPEA on you faster than you can say Jack Robinson. Canadian Network for the Prevention of Elder Abuse—ho ho. I know people.”

  “Am I safe in believin’ you ain’t wrapped an automobile round a tree tonight?”

  “Goddam fine driver, me. I don’t wrap trees.”

  “Wrap your ancient dodo ass round a tree, is what I ought to do.”

  “CNPEA.” Lonnigan clucks at the orderly. “Remember that.”

  “He says you brought him in,” says the orderly, who I instantly recognize as Clive Suggs, the father who KO’d me years ago. “Why do such a thing? Old dude in his housecoat.”

  “He was insistent,” says Dad.

  “Well, he is that.”

  Clive sits for a beer. On duty, he admits, but what’s one going to hurt?

  “You want to know what?” he says, easing into his miseries with the air of a man slipping into a well-worn pair of slippers. “That old potato-head steals cars. Joyrides. A teenager do what he do, that boy’s a hooligan. An old man do the same and he’s full of beans. Discrediting the myth aged folk can’t do nothing. Some kind a hero. He even stole a honeywagon.”

  “A what?”

  “A kind of a septic truck,” Clive tells me. “Suck the wastes out of pay toilets.”

  “He is peppy.”

  “Demented pain in my ass, what he is.”

  After another round, this pleasant fuzz edges everything: sort of like beholding the world from inside a cored peach. Colin and Lonnigan switch their attentions to the Claw Game.

  “Go for the big white bear,” Lonnigan instructs him. “Don’t fiddle-fart around with them junky trinkets.”

  “Mister L,” says Clive. “You played out your leash. Time to go.”

  On the way out Lonnigan checks up in front of Dad.

  “I wasn’t there for what happened to your dog,” he says. “After I found out, I left for good. Can’t say I could’ve done much. That woman had her ways. But you knew all about it, didn’t you, doctor?”

  Clive grasps Lonnigan’s elbow. Dad drinks his beer with a distant smile. Soon thereafter Wes also says his goodbyes.

  “I wish you boys well.”

  “Same to you, Wes,” Frank and I say, nearly in unison. “Good speaking.”

  Two pairs of men move down the sidewalk. Lonnigan propped up by Clive, Colin by his father. Wes opens his truck door. Helps his son into the cab. Lashes the seatbelt across his hips.

  “Hell of a thing,” says Dad. He goes on to tell me Abby got back to her room alright. The eye bandages would stay on for a few days. Patterns and shapes would come before too long.

  “When they discover you did it?”

  “Same as stealing a car and changing the shabby upholstery. You still stole it. My best friend’s daughter. What can you do?”

  “Best friend? Most days you hated Fletcher Burger.”

  “Christ, Nick. Never hate anyone. Fletch was a fuck-up, okay, but I mean, heaven’s sakes—who isn’t?”

  After their divorce, people got the impression Mom stuck Dad with the corgi as a final screwjob. But Dad loved that dog. When Moxie developed persistent pyodermas, or hotspots, Dad rubbed the dog’s skin with benzoyl peroxide ointment stolen from the hospital supply room. Here was a creature who made no specific attempt to be loved. Which was why Dad loved him. The night Moxie died, Dad found him walking circles in the yard. When he picked him up, Moxie vomited blood with such force he blew out both pupils. The last minutes of his life that dog was blind. Dad tried to force-feed him Ipecac but Moxie died gracelessly, blood all down Dad’s shirt, the corgi’s stiffening legs stuck out of the cradle Dad had made of his arms.

  The car wends through stands of jackpine— telephone pole firs—on a strip of one-lane blacktop. Dylan’s in the passenger seat. He’s been expelled from school. If there is such thing as a mercy expulsion, my son was the beneficiary.

  He’d vomited down the playground’s corkscrew slide. Climbed the ladder, stuck a finger down his throat. Then he slid down through his upchuck. Iris Trupholme found him sitting at the bottom. Trousers soaked with puke.

  The teasing had been nonstop. Someone put a dead frog in his lunchbox. Curly hairs in his PB&J.

  “Years ago I had a Pakistani boy, Fahim,” Trupholme told me. “Another boy had one of those laser pointers and shined it on Fahim’s forehead, mimicking the red dot worn by Hindus. The boy’s father had put him up to it. That sort of informed hatred has to be inherited. This with the pubic hairs is similar. Until you’re older, a hair is a hair is a hair. Most of the kids shouldn’t even be growing them yet.”

  Last night I’d received a call from the American Express head office asking for further photos of the Antique Box that had been bought by client 622, a Mr. Starling Bates. The cellphone images I’d sent were apparently too indistinct. I was told that Starling maintains a residence in Coboconk.

  I’d called my ex-wife to see if she’d take Dylan for the night. No answer. I packed him up in hopes of dropping him off through Toronto. Gridlocked on the Don Valley she told me sorry, she had evening plans. A date? Jesus. I’m not at all prepared for that.

  We stop at a zinc-roofed restaurant, The Dutch Oven. All Dylan wants is Easter Seals Peppermint Patties from the coin-op machine.

  “Dill, eat something proper. A Denver omelette.”

  Dark, fatigued bags under his eyes. I order the omelette and buy four Peppermint Patties. He plays with them like poker chips: stacks them, lines them in a row, a square, a diamond. He isn’t wearing his cape anymore. I ask who he is now.

  “Black.”

  “What do you mean—a black person?”

  “Black the colour. A cloud of black gas coming out of the ass of a sick car.”

  This helpless sense of frustration and fear. My kid vomited down a corkscrew slide, then slid down and sat in his own upchuck. What does that even mean?

  The sky is blackening by the time we reach Coboconk. I grab a room at the Motor Motel: five units in a field outside town. Our room is clean, with a queen-sized bed. I tell Dylan we could ask for a cot, but he says it’s okay we sleep in the same bed. I’m not going to leave him here alone.

  It’s dark by the time we reach Starling’s cottage. All the other units strung around the lake are winterized and empty.

  “Listen to the radio, Dill, okay? And stay put.”

  My knock is answered by the dreadlocked guy we picked up outside Marineland. I follow him into a vaulted chamber. Starling is in a wheelchair. His head is bandaged, one eye covered. His hands similarly wrapped and his legs swaddled in woollen blankets. His arms shrunken, somehow shrivelled: alarmingly, they look like penguin flippers. His left ear is fused to the side of his head as if his skull is devouring itself.

  “Are you alright?”

  “It’s painless.” Starling smiles. His body is just so warped: like he’s been stabbed in the guts and he is gradually curling into the open wound. “How is your boy?”

  Had we ever spoken about Dylan?

  “Fine. I took him to the zoo.”

  “Zoo. Oh my,” says Starling, and smiles. I immediately wish he hadn’t. “I toiled at a zoo. With bears. All males. Bear society is a lot like ours, only the hierarchy’s more bald. One bear, an albino named Cinnamon, got it worst. He rode a tricycle in a midwest circus; when the big top folded he came to the zoo. Undersized, genetically inferior. The others made sport of him. Every day each bear inflicted some casual hu
rt. They pissed on Cinnamon; his coat went yellow from white. Skinnier and skinnier. That’s when they took to raping him. A big black bear, Chief, mounted poor Cinnamon first. The zookeepers felt this was the natural order. As one said: Better fuck-er than fuck-ee.”

  Starling laughs and laughs. A vein fat as a night crawler splits his forehead below the bandages. His fucking eyeballs are sunk so deep into their sockets it’s impossible for them not be to touching his brain.

  “Kids can be that way, too, Nicholas. Singling someone out for torment.”

  I’ll find the goddamn box myself. Doubling down the hallway, I pass a partially open door. A wide, dark, metal-walled loft. The box is in the centre lit by a spotlamp. My camera whirrs as celluloid spools through the flashbox. Whatever’s in the box seems to have sprouted fresh appendages.

  I take a new angle. Twin facts register simultaneously.

  One: Dylan is standing on the opposite side of the box.

  Two: whatever’s in the box has tubes growing out of it. Wriggling . . . tubes.

  I lay my hands upon Dylan. Shake him far too hard. My adrenaline is redlined. My son’s face is as vacant and bare as the surface of the moon. Blood drips from my nose into his hair. My heart batters the cage of my ribs primed to burst right through.

  “Did you get all you need?” Starling shrieks after me. “Did you SEE?”

  Back at the motel Dylan won’t move. The heat’s drained right out of him. I reef the motel covers back and lay him down fully clothed. He’s not shivering or moving much at all. I head outside for our bags. A pickup pulls into the neighbouring unit. A woman’s laughter plays out its open windows. Three people get out of it.

  “You make loving you hell,” the taller and ganglier of the two men says.

  “Husha, dumb dog,” says the woman, before stepping inside with the other man.

  I go back inside and get into bed with my son. His face is grimed with sweat. I flatten his hair with my palm. Touch my lips to his head. His knapsack’s open on the tabby-orange carpet. Inside are bits and pieces of things he’s stripped apart. Everything in Ziploc bags. Orderly and arranged.

  “What do you hope to accomplish doing this?” I ask him hopelessly.

  “I’m going to put them back together,” he says. “In different ways. I have all the pieces. I’ll put them back together and make them even better than they were before.”

  “It doesn’t work that way, Dylan. You don’t have the skill or know-how. None of this stuff was made to go together any differently than how it came out of package. When you take it apart with no idea how to put it back together, you end up with junk.”

  He sits up. Unlaces the hiker boots his mother bought. Clodhoppers. He starts tugging the thick laces through the eyeholes. I want him to disagree with me, shout at me, but he’s concentrating on his boots. Stripping them apart, too.

  “We’ll find a new school. It’ll be okay. I promise, Dill. Swear to God.”

  After awhile the silence turns mammoth, oppressive, so I take a shower. The yellow water reeks of sulphur the way all water does this far north. Lewd goings-on come through the pressboard walls. The rhythmic knock of a headboard. A man shrieking: “Sweet darlin’ Sunshine!”

  I return to an empty room. The door’s wide open. I step outside with a towel wrapped round my waist. The tall gangly guy sits outside the adjacent door.

  “Did you see a kid come out?”

  “Ain’t seen nothing,” he tells me wretchedly.

  I step back inside. Dylan’s hikers sit at the foot of the bed. Laces tugged out, tongues lolling over the toes. The utility closet door is ajar. I open it.

  Next to my argyle sweater hangs my son on a noose of knotted bootlaces. Dylan’s face is as blue as a sun-bleached parking ticket . . .

  My son has a birthmark on his shoulder. It looks like a pinto bean. During his Steam-Powered Android phase this birthmark became his “on” button:

  “Power up Android Dylan,” I’d say, and press it. Dylan’s head would rise, arms cocked stiffly by his sides. “Android . . . Dill . . .” he’d go, in robot-voice, “. . . needs . . . pudding . . . for . . . power . . . cells.”

  At recess another boy told him if you had a birthmark it meant your parents hadn’t wanted you born. Dill agonized over it all day.

  “Dylan, that boy’s a creep,” I told him. “How could your mother and I not want you born? You’re the best and most precious thing in our lives. Believe me?”

  “Okay. I believe.”

  . . . Rip the hangar rod off the wall, plaster dust and the jingle-jangle of hangars. Dylan’s knees crumple as he falls face-first tangled up in my sweater. I try to pry the noose off but the laces are dug so fucking deep into his throat. A sobbing tension in my chest, agonizing compression pulsing ever-outwards. My vocal cords splinter as I let it loose. Blood’s blurring into the whites of his eyes. I claw my fingers under the laces and my shoulders pop loosening them. My son’s not moving but oh so warm. Prop one hand under his neck and open his airway as I’d been taught at Red Cross training. Settle my lips over his and blow. My breath disappears into the dense loaves of his lungs, circles around and back into my mouth with the taste of stale mucous and something else, slick and vile like gun oil. This cold throttling terror is sharp and blistering as blowtorched masonry nails clawing the surface of my brain.

  Specks. Specks. Thousands upon thousands. I cannot see for their accretion.

  BLACK SPOT

  PIPES

  Pipes. Is how I see you. All human beings. Pipes. As you have running through your home. Transporting fuel, water, wastes. All you often see of a pipe is their mouth, in the form of a drain or toilet bowl. People are pipes through which different substances emit. As a boy I understood out of Mama emitted food, a bed, blankets, smacks, a home, limits, broken glass. Out of Cappy Lonnigan: tobacco, cuss words, larcenous advice. Out of Teddy: moans, burn holes, crying jags, blackened ants.

  I saw the colour, texture of their emissions. Out of Mama’s pipe flowed burnt orange fluid. Out of Cappy’s: bright blue liquid that when he laughed transformed into moths. Out of Teddy’s: muddy goo stubbled with dead crickets or rusty nails.

  Twist a water tap, water pours out. Not so people. Some days I could do such a thing as comment on Mama’s new haircut—which often made her orange fluid flow brighter—but instead her liquid turned blackblack, full of twitchy, screamy things. Next she committed acts meant to hurt me in ways that I am incapable of being hurt.

  Cappy was a journeyman pipefitter. “I’ve been a journeyman everything,” he would say, “including husband.” He said pipes connect odd ways. People connect odd ways, too. Their colours change when they merge, the way mixing different coloured paints do. I study emissions. Colin Hill’s fluid flowed sun-hot yellow. Abigail Burger’s flowed pale violet until her father yelled at her, at which it blazed hemoglobin-red. When she came to our house after her squirrel was shot, Patience Nanavatti flowed with burping lava. But Mama ran so dark that day, all the lava bled right out of Patience.

  Out of my own pipe emits grey substances the consistency of gruel.

  My pet’s name: Gadzooks! An Eastern grey squirrel suckled on scalded milk. When the neighbourhood kids gathered all our squirrels to play, he was hounded by his siblings. But Gadzooks! was terribly fierce. He once tore the head off a greensnake in an eavestrough. Devoured a family of silky pocket mice nesting in Mama’s walls.

  Last night Gadzooks! dashed out my apartment window, down the drainpipe onto the road. A car ran over him—over him, you understand, not ran him over. The tires did not flatten him. Still, he was dead. By the time I rushed to the street, his legs were stiffening. Trapped under that car, the roaring engine, pinned in that wash of exhaust. Any man overtaken by such unreasoning forces so, too, would die of FRIGHT.

  Now: Gadzooks! is in a shoebox. On a bluff overlooking Ball’s Falls. On top of the box is a silenced Glock 10mm handgun. I am in my vendor’s blues. I am digging a hole.

  Wipe my brow
. Pulse check. Fifty-eight bpm. Heft the gun. Adjust for windage. Empty the magazine into an elm. Collect the shell casings. Gadzooks!: into the hole.

  Voices arise. I kneel at the bluff’s edge. Three men with a blue barrel. Colin Hill, the stuntman. Wesley Hill, his father. A third young man I do not recognize.

  Colin Hill strips at water’s edge. Afterwards, he crawls onshore after plummeting. He ignores his father’s outstretched hand.

  My name is Jeffrey. My mother smoked crack cocaine.

  An addict of loose moral virtue, says Mama, who died giving birth. “A defiance of nature,” Mama said. “A ripe apple pushed out of a rotted one.” My mother died with chalky lips, Mama says.

  Three pounds, nine ounces. They called it a miracle when I failed to die. Six months with casts on my elbows so I would not pull my joints apart with my frantic infant exertions. Mama keeps the casts—so small you cannot even fit a finger into them—to remind me I was once so pitiful.

  There is a stain on my brain the size of a cocker spaniel’s paw print. Occipital with spread to parietal, temporal lobes. Only dead black meat.

  “Your mother was a crackhead,” Mama says, “and your poppa was a sunbeam.”

  The black spot is no physical bother. My fine motor, balance, speech skills: all tip-top. My pulse rate, excellent. Yet I fail to experience pain as others do. As a six-year-old I stuck my finger into a stationary bicycle ridden by Mama’s sometime boyfriend William “Cappy” Lonnigan. “What a nutty thing to do, kid!” My finger hung by a shred. The paramedics said I was “the stoniest little trouper” they ever saw.

  Sundays Mama took us to church for ablution. The congregation swayed.

  “Feel it, darling?” We were all Mama’s darlings. “The LOVE?”

  I do not feel LOVE. RAGE. SYMPATHY. They live in the black spot. I have woken howling odd places in twisted bodily positions, never knowing why. I see guests on daytime talk shows. Emotion-torn faces crumbling apart under studio lights. Comprehension eludes me.