Sarah Court

by Craig Davidson

  Mama took me to a movie. In it, a boy with massive facial deformities taught a blind girl to “see.” He put a hot potato in her hands: RED. Cotton batten: CLOUDS.

  Mama showed me a photo of baby chickadees: LOVE. A soldier in a ditch beside a bombed farmhouse: LONELY.

  Cappy Lonnigan arrived, drunk, while we were at it.

  “It’s the blind leading the blind.”

  Good, evil: I can differentiate. But I am not impelled to pursue one path to the exclusion of the other. I camouflage myself through conditioned responses. Were a lady to set her head on my shoulder at a car wreck, I could identify her emotion as GRIEF.

  “What a waste,” I could say. I could mean the cars.

  I often find myself trapped in difficult emotional waters. But I can tread water. I employ conversational strategies. One is to repeat what someone says, slightly altered. If I was at a funeral for those killed in that hypothetical car wreck, that same lady might say: “What a pity. They were far too young. So much promise.”

  “Too young,” I might try. “Such promise.”

  Or at a supermarket. A boy making a scene his mother is helpless to arrest. A fellow shopper could whisper: “Someone should tame that little brat.”

  “Whip him,” I might say, that being how a lion tamer tames his lions. “Whip that brat.”

  I also have trouble fitting warring notions in my head. Like: the first time I saw a banana I realized you had to peel its skin to eat its insides. That banana had been given to me by a human. The two knotted in my head. Snapping the top off a banana sounds a lot like snapping the neck of a small, armless, legless, yellow person. I do not eat bananas. Ever. Or welcome yellow objects into my proximity.

  “You got a case of the brainfarts,” Cappy said when I tried to explain.

  “That’s vulgar,” said Mama. “Call them cramps.”

  “Whaddaya mean—like, menstrual cramps?”

  Farts within my brain make me mistake prone. Example: Cappy would bring Mama breakfast in bed. “Great way to spice things up in the ole sack-a-reeno, kid.” Beyond that, he never elaborated.

  One afternoon Gadzooks! quarrelled with a robin. I shinnied up the tree—I had beaten Nicholas Saberhagen in a climbing contest, even though his father made him climb trees daily—to spy eggs in the nest. I brought them home, cracked them into a skillet. Eggs so small fried rapidly. So tiny on that big white plate. I arranged pretty blue egg shells around. When I presented them Mama was HAPPY. Until she studied closely.

  “Jeffrey, where did these come from?”

  “From the tree in Mister Burger’s yard.”

  Mama shrieked. I mustn’t go stealing eggs out of nests. But I worked especially hard to get those eggs. Farmers stole eggs from under chickens’ bums. An egg was an egg . . . ? I only wanted to spice things up in the ole sack-a-reeno. For Mama.

  I stock for Vend-O-Mat Incorporated. Class-A Vending Machine Technician. Member of Vending Machine Union Local 104. At my other job I am, at best, a hobbyist.

  I restock claw machines at bars. The key: place a plush teddy bear in the centre of the cube surrounded by cheap trinkets. The claw is too weak to pick it up, but fixated drunks waste many coins trying. I service Hot Nuts machines, too, but the only place that has one stopped paying their maintenance fee.

  Machines are logical. When I twist my multiuse flat barrel skeleton key on a Beaver 970 gumball dispensing unit—same insides as every Beaver 970 dispensing unit—I instantly spot the problem. Usually a torn-apart gumball in the ratchet mechanism. Or if I open an Aaxon frontload dualcycle washing machine, I will usually find a 3/4-inch washer stuck in the coin slide. You can look into any machine to know exactly what is wrong. How to fix it.

  Weeks ago I was at a school, stocking a Slim Line Mark X—voted Most Reliable Dispensing Unit by the Independent Vendors Association—when a boy interrupted me.

  “Vhat are joo do-ink, blah?”

  “I’m a stocker.”

  “Zee Night Stalker?”

  Gym shorts. A cape. Fat. A short, fat vampire boy. “I stock vending machines.”

  “Do joo stock Nerds?”

  “I do not stalk anybody.”

  “Nerds zee candy.”

  “Products in boxed form do not vend well. Also tube form. Certs vend poorly.”

  “But, blah!” Fists clenched. “Neeeeerds!” He says this the same way Marlon Brando shouted “ Steeellla!” in A Streetcar Named Desire. The fat vampire boy chin-pointed at the Slim Line Mark X.

  “It ate my dollar last week. So I kicked it.”

  “Never kick them. This one weighs a thousand pounds. That is how much a female grizzly bear weighs. Five people a year die from vending machines tipping on them. Squished.”

  “Whoa.”

  There may be some Nerds in my truck, I said. He tagged along.

  “Should you be in gym class?”

  “Jeem eez strictly for zee blood bags.”

  “Us alone in a truck full of treats. I could get in trouble.”

  “Vy?”

  “I could be a molester.”

  The fat vampire boy squinted at the sun. Pulled the cape over his head. Wind goose-pimpled his bare legs. There was a case of Strawberry-Lime Nerds stashed under a box of Mallomars.

  “Seriously? Wow, thanks.”

  “Do not eat them all at once. You are fat already, as I imagine you must know. You risk hyperphagia. Childhood onset diabetes.”

  I checked my pulse. The boy asked what was I doing.

  “Your pulse is the most reliable indicator of overall health.”

  I showed him my wrist. The radial vein popping through tightened skin.

  “Check here.”

  Instead, the boy clutched his crotch.

  “I don’t feel anyzing. I yam zee valking undead!”

  I helped him locate it properly. On his wrist. He looked DISAPPOINTED.

  The day I arrived at Mama’s she baked angel’s food cake. Aside from Cappy, I cannot recollect who was there. Cases—when angry, Mama called us by our Social Services case number—came, went. I ate plentiful welcome cake. She took in cases other systems would not abide. Social Services paid a premium. We dressed alike: tan trousers, hush puppies. Flowbee haircuts.

  “Built like a brick shithouse”: Cappy’s term for Mama. Legs thick as Japanese radishes. One night a big case, Gothia, experienced an episode. Mama weathered his ravings then slapped him. A skullrattler. She pounced on Gothia’s back. Her callused hands on Gothia’s head sounded like sledgehammers breaking open a cement sack. Her pet expression was “Gadzooks!” The night she beat on Gothia, every time she rained down a blow she yelped, “Gadzooks! Gadzooks!”

  Mama was also prone to what she called “spells.” During one she came out of the bathroom with dental floss wound round her fingers so tight her fingertips were bloodless.

  “Who left this? I’ll have a DNA test done, so help me God! This is not the brand we use in this house!”

  How did she identify used dental floss by brand? She was convinced somebody, a stranger, had broke into her home to floss their teeth—also, they would have had to bring their own floss. One of Cappy’s whores, in all probability.

  “Three wolves and three sheep deciding what to eat for supper,” said Cappy Lonnigan, regarding life in Mama’s house. “Who says democracy works?”

  He was her on-again off-again boyfriend. When he found work at the Port Weller dry docks—“I’m hell-on-wheels with a riveting gun, kid”—they were on. When contracts were scarce, so was he. My understanding of human behaviour is that people fall into one another’s orbits out of an inability to exist alone.

  “Type of woman you’d call brassy,” he said of her. “Way a cabaret torch singer is brassy. Big teeth, big hair, big . . . overall. Throwing herself out there not giving a sweet tweet. Except she isn’t really pretty enough to pull it off.”

  Cappy would be around two months, gone six. Mama sniffed his itchy feet. A Sarah Court ritual: Cappy Lonnigan on the la
wn in his boxers while Mama flung his possessions down.

  “Rotten-ass bastard, heave-ho! Come round here, I’ll bust your nuts off!”

  “Crazy bitch—you threw my record player out the window!”

  The Divestment was followed by The Reconciliation: Cappy would show up hat in hand. Eventually he stopped coming round. Last I saw of him for years, he stood in long johns while Mama hurled his belongings out-of-doors.

  “Limp-dicked goat! See you again I’m chopping it off!”

  Cappy shoved his property into a sack he’d stashed under the porch for this eventuality. He sat beside me on the stoop.

  “Shrink your world. Pin everyone under your thumb. Every minute of every day, assert control.” He brought his thumb, forefinger together. “If your kingdom’s small enough and everybody owes, anyone can be Queen.”

  The girl with the Blade Runner haircut dances like a robot.

  I drink a Shirley Temple. My employer sits with Nicholas Saberhagen. I am not sitting with them. I see them across the strip club. Another woman, her name is Diznee, asks may she dance. On my lap. Asks: am I a conventioneer? For fifty she will take me to the motor lodge to “suck on it.” No, thanks.

  My employer is joined by Wesley, Colin Hill, a dreadlocked fellow. I order a five-dollar steak. It arrives with tiny green potatoes.

  I head out the back exit. Ignite the cube van. My employer exits the front door. Into a cab with Nicholas Saberhagen. I tail them down Bunting onto the QEW. Their taxi curls along the Niagara river past the hydroelectric plant. Into a warehouse lot lit by security lamps.

  I park beside the gates. Cross the road to a bench overlooking the river. Check my pulse. Log it. My employer reconnoitres. Transparent molasses flows from his pipe.

  “You?”

  “Yes,” I say. “You?”

  This is all we say. I know what I am supposed to do. Inside the warehouse is a box. The leaden cover draped overtop is of the same material as X-ray vests. I roll it into the cube van, drive to Coboconk. Halfway there I veer into the breakdown lane. I crack the hood to find the source of the persistent hiss. Before long I reach the understanding that it is emanating from inside my skull.

  Cappy Lonnigan taught me to hotwire a car.

  “I spent six months in a Tallahassee lockup for car-nicking,” he told me. “Roaches big as matchbooks chewing my toenails. A southerner, Muddy Phelps, taught me. I’m’na shew yew tuh hutwhirr a vayheckle, son. Muddy’s what you’d call a recidivist criminal. One time I’m bending elbows with Muds—some bum tells ole Muds his mother wears army boots. Well! Muds tells that bum he’s gonna come to where he slept, creep in a window, and slash his weasel throat. Slaysh yer way-zaal thrut. A man was able to get his point across, those days. Anyway, you find yourself an unlocked car. With a flathead screwdriver bust open the wheel collar. Pop the steering lock and touch the red wires. Easy as a beagle bitch in heat.”

  The car I stole was a Cadillac Coupe de Ville belonging to Frank Saberhagen. The night I leapt off the train trestle with Colin Hill. I broke the Cadillac’s steering collar, popped the locks, touched the wires. I could barely see over the dashboard. I ran over a hedge on the corner of Sycamore.

  The train trestle bowed over Twelve Mile Creek where it met Shriner’s Creek washing into Lake Ontario. We climbed rotted rungs nailed to the pilings. Colin Hill’s pipe flowed rabbity orange flecked with dark blue.

  “Still want to?” Colin said.

  I failed to view it as a matter of want.

  “I will.”

  The water so cold my heart nearly burst. I surfaced. Colin Hill bobbed alongside. Smiling. Or had the river wrenched his face into the expression? Days later Wesley Hill stopped by to apologize for Colin’s actions. Mama led him to the sofa. I watched through the upstairs railing.

  “I’m deeply sorry, Clara,” Wesley Hill said.

  “I don’t have eyes in the back of my head.” She gripped Wesley’s skull. Ruffled his hair. “You, neither. Boys will be boys.”

  “They could have been killed. But God works in mysterious ways.”

  “I wouldn’t say mysterious. I wouldn’t say so at all.”

  Mama hugged Wesley Hill. “Been worse on top of bad for you, hasn’t it?” Next she touched his knee. “Your poor wife. Frail as a leaf.”

  Her hand cupping Wesley Hill’s kneecap. He restated his apologies. Left.

  “That ridiculous man thinks I took liberties,” Mama told me later on. “The very idea . . . fetch me a tissue.” Her face was hard when I returned. “Do me a favour, Jeffrey. An itsy-bitsy one. After all I’ve done for you. A silly prank. You LOVE Mama, don’t you?” LOVE I do not comprehend. Loyalty, yes. Loyalty means do as you are told.

  That night I broke the head off the sand-cast dog on Wesley Hill’s front porch with a five-pound mallet.

  Frank Saberhagen’s corgi, Moxie, once forced itself upon Mama’s sheepdog.

  Excelsior lay on the sidewalk when Moxie “bum rushed”—Cappy’s term—her haunches as if he aimed to “drill for Texas tea.” The dog must have “one hell of a Napoleon complex,” as he was “giving that ole girl what-for.”

  Excelsior shook Moxie off. Moxie persisted with clumsy jump-thrusts. Excelsior mule-kicked the corgi. Moxie did a backwards somersault into Mama’s marigolds. Which he urinated upon. Cappy laughed. I struggled to understand what was funny about a small neutered dog doing sex with a big spayed one. But Cappy laughed, so I did. How my laughter sounded in my ears: a man in a crowded room shouting in a foreign language.

  Excelsior developed pyrotraumatic dermatitis. Bacteria on the epidermis caused coin-sized lesions or “hot spots” to occur. Mama blamed Moxie, who had a similar condition.

  Mama sat the dog in her lap. By then only Mama could touch her without being bitten. She trimmed hair round the spots with surgical scissors. Dabbed them with cortisone cream. When Excelsior died, Mama’s spell lasted a week.

  Mama has known Colin Hill since he was “knee-high to a duck’s behind.” She wants to watch him go over the Falls in his barrel. I wrangle her thick body into my minivan. Guide her wheelchair to a spot along the rail.

  “I wen’ da turlet.” Mama’s words have been slurred since the operation. “Loog a muh bug.”

  I went to the toilet, she’s said. Look in my bag.

  I lift the blanket covering her dead legs. The pouch is three-quarters full. I unclip the stint, walk up Clifton Hill with a bag of warm urine. I kneel at a sewer grate, squeeze Mama’s urine out. Uphill is a construction site encircled by a cyclone fence. The fat vampire boy stands on a concrete slab. His cape licks in the wind.

  “Hello,” he says to me. “Blah!”

  “What are you doing?”

  He points to bricks of insulation. There are holes in the plastic where his fingers punched through.

  “Ripping zem.”

  “Why?”

  “A pink blizzard vood brighten zee day.”

  “You are a strange boy.”

  He touches his upper lip to his nose. Snorts as horses do on cold days.

  “I yams what I yam and it’s all that I yam.”

  I pull a pocketknife from my trenchcoat. Stab a brick. Wrenching movements slash the plastic. The boy grabs one flapping sail. Flakes blow downhill. The boy is laughing very hard. It is interesting to see. Clifton Hill has gone pink. Next Nicholas Saberhagen, Abigail Burger are coming.

  “Don’t tell,” he says. “Please.”

  He tenders his hand. He wishes me to hold it. I do. Tendons tense along Nicholas Saberhagen’s jaw. His pipe flows red. I let go his son’s hand. They come down the hill to say hello to Mama.

  “Dylan, is it?” Dywaan, iw ii? “Handsome darling.”

  Mama points to her cheek. Dylan kisses it. With Mama’s gaze averted, the boy wipes his lips.

  Mama took old Seamus Finnegan to the lake.

  Seamus was the father of the richest oilman in the world, according to Mama. Seamus Finnegan boasted excellent health before a series of str
okes rendered him paralyzed. Balanced sidelong on his wheelchair, he peered along his nose at the quivering knots of his fingers. His sole joy: watching Canada geese congregate on the lakeshore in Port Dalhousie. One afternoon Mama turned Seamus Finnegan away from the geese.

  “Someone’s getting overexcited,” she said.

  Seamus Finnegan’s chair was aimed at a runoff. Snags of rebar clung with lily pads. Seamus Finnegan moaned.

  “Husha, darling. Make yourself sick.”

  MANIPULATIVE? This is asking a colourblind man to appreciate a rainbow. Yet if I was Mama’s favourite Monday, Teddy was her favourite by Tuesday. She said I ought to be more like Teddy, who drew lovely pictures. So I drew one: black blobs. Horrid! Why not fireworks, as Teddy did?

  Mama acted out “dramas.” Mama the star, everybody else the supporting players. The kitchen was her stage.

  “Teddy: be Beatrice Klugman, that nelly from Children’s Aid. Stand there like a stunned cow.” Teddy: empty-eyed behind Coke-bottle glasses with melted frames. “Yes! Jeffrey, you be the Social Services Ombudsman. Scratch yourself—he’s got psoriasis something awful—and mumble.”

  “Er, em, homina homina . . .” I would go, imitating Ralph Kramden.

  “Perfect, darling!”

  “You got any matches in this house, woman?” Cappy would say. “I got to watch your twisted little productions, least let me smoke my pipe.”

  “How can I have matches with eight-oh-four, a known P-Y-R-O, under my roof?”

  Teddy, me, were allowed to draw on the driveway with sidewalk chalks. Once I had been allowed to set up a lemonade stand. Lemon-lime Kool-Aid mixed with hose water. My only customer, Fletcher Burger, said: “This tastes scummy as hell.” Next Teddy drank a whole jugful. On a sugar high he doused an old recliner in Mama’s garage with nail polish remover. Set it on fire.

  From then on: no lemonade stands. Only sidewalk chalks.

  Teddy’s drawings were all the same. Splooges of orange, red, yellow but at their hearts, shapes as creatures may look with their bodies wrecked by flame. One afternoon Frank Saberhagen returned from a vigorous run with his Nicholas. He swung round the court on his bicycle before stopping at our driveway. His pipe flowed static green. He considered my picture: a man with broomstick legs. Belly following a strip of patching tar.