Sarah Court (17 page)

Its saw-like tail slashes. Its massive, rubber-like
mouth flexes. Stones burst between its jaws. Pebbles
adhere to the glutinous sheen of its oil-covered
skin, making portions of its anatomy look like
black bedazzled leather. A second tail, far smaller,
protrudes partway from its sternum. The shark
must’ve swum into the shallows to give birth. The >
metallic fluttering of its gill-slits. Dark arterial
blood pouring out as it suffocates.

In the tent we can still hear her dying. All the
little sounds of death. The tent: folding table, chairs,
hurricane lamp hanging on a loop of jute cord.
Bottles of native spirits.

“My father, Seamus” Connie tells me, “had an
embolism. Blood pooling in the brain. First morning
I’m back home he shreds the newspaper into a bowl
and pours milk on it. Then he goes and shakes
cornflakes over the table. Trying to do what he’d
done for thirty-five years: eat cereal, read the paper.
But the circuitry was screwy.”

Connie takes a haul off the nearest bottleneck.
“Money wasn’t a sticky point—I’d have shipped
him to Beth Israel—but I was told Frank Saberhagen,
your Dad, was good as any. Part of some big medical
thingamabob . . .”

“The Labradum Procedure.”

“—right, at—”

“Johns Hopkins.”

“Blood from that blown vessel lingered in Dad’s
head. It . . . turned hard? Went to jelly? Anyway, in
the channels of his brain. Weeks in the hospital.
Norris wing. As a kid, I thought that place was a . . .”
“Nuthouse.”

“You, too?”

“Teachers used to threaten: behave, or I’ll ship
you to the Norris wing with the crazies. You’d think
it was padded cells and straightjackets—”

“—and electroshock therapy, sure. Just rooms,
Nick. Ordinary hospital rooms.”

Wind howls in off the sea and hisses through
the eyelets. My first trip to the Soviet Union. What
would I carry home? Busted Reagan-era video games.
Beet-stained teeth. A shark’s gills sharp as the steel
teeth on a circular saw. Conway Finnegan so shrunk
inside his skin he had the look of a sick Shar-pei.

“Sorry to drag you out,” he tells me. “American
Express was happy enough to dispatch you. Your
father, mine. We’re town boys. I’m just the son of a
welder from St. Kitt’s, Nick.”

I close my eyes. Behind my eyelids fins and beaks,
wings and tails break up from the dark. Two boys
from southern Ontario perched on the other end of
the world at the edge of an oil-black sea.

“How’s your father, Connie?” I ask.

“Cemetery off Queenston. By the liftlocks. Yours?”

“Still kicking.”

Secondly,
I’ll to tell you about my wife. Ex.

What I miss is a hand on her hip. On line at the
movies or navigating the kitchen while we cooked.
An undervalued perk of married life. My hand on her
hip, whenever.

Our first kiss she had Sambuca on her tongue.
Like sucking on a licorice pastille. Making out in my
father’s Camry with “C’Mon and Ride It” by Quad
City DJs on the radio. One of many life events on
which I’d gladly take a do-over. These disassociated
memories I carry forward. These memories, I
imagine, are the ones I’ll die with. Back then I was
still rooting through my father’s
GQ
s, ripping out
the scented cologne ads, rubbing them on my neck.
Also training to fight the curtain-jerker on a card at
the Tonowanda VFW. My opponent: Ox “Eighteen”
Wheeler. Irish so far as I’d been told but he walked
to the ring in a serape and sombrero accompanied by
a mariachi guitarist strumming “Prisonero De Tus
Brazos.” Yes, seriously, and yes, I lost. Ox headbutted
me in the first round. The pressure of our heads
colliding caused veins in my forehead to burst. Those
veins spraying blood like fire hoses under my skin
occasioned two plum-sized mouses to form above
my eyes. By the sixth round they were so massive
I couldn’t see much: like peering out of a basement
window. My father said I’d looked like a goat with
clipped horns. He slit them afterwards. Blood pissed
out of my face halfway across the locker room,
splashing the robe of a flyweight warming up. The
scars now meet in a shallow ‘V’ above my eyebrows.

The adrenaline the Wheeler fight overload of sparring for made
me immoderately, ungovernably horny. More so even than your runof-the-mill nineteen-year-old. Dad blamed it on an overstimulated hypothalamus gland. “I tell guys
with ED to join a boxing club,” he’d say. “A round
of sparring beats that little blue pill all to hell.”
Oversexed boxer + rebellious daughter of landed
gentry = hormonal fireworks. Eleven months: the
span separating our eyes meeting across a crowded
campus bar to Dylan’s birth. To cop a lyric from a
song getting radio play around then: “We were only
freshmen.”

I was KO’d by an overmuscled bear from
Coldwater, Michigan on a card sponsored by the
railway switchmen’s union the week my to-be wife
announced she was preggers. The sting my father felt
at my losing to a guy he trumpeted as “The Coldwater
Crumpet” was inflamed by the fact we’d be keeping
the baby. We arranged a quickie civil union at the
courthouse. Our mothers’ hearts broken: they who’d
pined for rose petals, centrepieces, and perhaps to
pin some inexact debt on us for arranging it.

My wife: cute, athletic, a field hockey defenceman. The physics of childbirth terrified her. Her
“vaginal integrity” would be ruined by a new life
steamrolling out. At Lamaze class our instructor,
an elderly wide-hipped lesbian (“A dyke with childbearing hips,” my father had said; “Irony, thou art
a coy mistress!”) asked us men to picture passing a
cherry stone through our urethral tube. “If I could
birth our baby that way, I would,” I’d said to my wife
during one quarrel. “Even if it widened my urethral
tube so bad it ended up a . . . a windsock!”I was there
in the delivery room. She insisted. My first sight
of Dylan: this slick quivering mass extruded from
my wife’s birth canal. Her labial lips stretched and
torn. I’d touched her weeks later, in bed, felt those
hairline scabs in the process of healing. To know I’d
wreaked that manner of intimate violence upon her.
She regained her figure but the skin of her stomach
lost tension. She said it looked like a balloon from a
New Year’s party fallen behind the couch to be found
in April, mostly deflated with half a lungful of sad
old air inside.

We had typical married couple fights. My wife
hailed from a proper English family. One did not
use one’s utensil as a shovel. Food should be pushed
up the underside of a fork. She made Dylan—three
years old with the fine motor skills of a spider
monkey—roll corn niblets up his fork. Or we’d be
having sex, she’d run her fingers through my hair
and say: “I liked it better long.”

Dad says: “Surveys prove a third of women
cheat on their spouse. But if you’re honest with
yourself, you’ll know if she’s in that third before
it ever happens.”
I’m not happy
. She kept repeating
this the night she left. After the rationales and rage
had burnt us down to the bones of it.
I’m not happy
.
What can I change?
Nothing
.
I’m not happy
. Is there
someone else?
No
. But there was by then the idea
of someone else. She craved the catharsis of a clean
break. To tell the truth, it was foretold in one silly
everyday episode.

I’d driven her to the mechanic to pick up our old
Aerostar. She drove home behind me. At a stoplight
on Martindale I observed her out the rearview
mirror. In that moment she became a stranger, and
my understanding of her that of a stranger. I saw
a lovely woman in a minivan singing along to the
radio. Really belting it out. One hand drumming the
wheel. Wedding band fracturing the sunlight to spit
it off in sparks.

She wasn’t my wife, in that moment. Just a
beautiful girl who’d married too young and gotten
trapped—only
she
hadn’t
quite
reached
that
realization.

I catch a redeye
into Toronto. A message from Abby
awaits me at home.

“Dylan’s in trouble at school. You’ve got a meeting
with Iris Trupholme. He’s still a vampire.”

I’d let Dylan watch
The Lost Boys
. Afterwards he
begged me to go to Toys R Us. I outfitted him with a
bargain-bin cape and plastic fangs. He’s adopted that
Lugosian accent where every ‘w’ becomes a ‘v’:
I vant
to suck jor blood, blah!

Abby’s waiting outside Dylan’s classroom with a
girl my son’s age. She’s got those enamel-coloured
dental braces that make wearers look as though they
have sets of overlapping teeth, like sharks. She’s
chewing an Eberhard eraser and spitting pink bits
on the tiles.

Missus Trupholme, Dylan’s teacher: sixtyish,
with a low centre of gravity. Her skull sports a
vaporous cloud of frizzy red hair which, if it had a
taste, would unarguably be cherry. On her desk is
a kid’s cellphone. The pink faux-gems are a dead
giveaway.

“They’re video cameras now,” Trupholme says.
“Everyone’s making their own amateur videos. Next
regional meeting it’s number one on the bullethead.”

She flips it open. Fiddles with buttons. “Kids
recording one another. Their age’s version of Truth
or Dare. Put videos on the Internet. There’s a place . . .”

“Youtube,” says Abby.

“That one. One shows a grade ten student beating
up his Math teacher. The man was months shy of
retirement. Phones so small, it’s hard to patrol.
Cassie!”

The eraser-chewer slinks in. Trupholme says:
“How does this work?”

Cassie presses a few buttons. Trupholme says,
“Now go on.”

“Can I have it back?”

“All signs point to ‘no.’”

The girl performs a deep-knee bend, arms hugged
round her knees.

“My dad’s gonna kill me.”

“Tell him it’s evidence.”

“Swear to
God
, I’ll only . . .” Her lip juts. Stuck
with crumbs of eraser. “It’s my property.”

“Sue me.”

Cassie stomps back into the hall. Trupholme
shows us the video on the phone’s inch-wide screen.
Dylan in corduroys with his vampire cape tied round
his throat is standing at the front of the class. Shaky
footage shot from halfway under a desk. Trupholme
chalks a math problem on the board. Dylan prowls
up behind. Rubs against her. She sets both hands on
Dylan’s shoulders. Moves him gently away. Dylan
presses forward, smiling, to rub on her again.

“Oh, God,” I say. “That’s not Dill at all.”

“His first quasi-sexual offence,” Trupholme says.

Quasi-sexual. Something breaks in me. She goes
on:

“Are either of you familiar with the term
‘frotteur’? A person who derives gratification from
rubbing. Crowded busses, subway cars: where adult
frotteurs operate.”

“That’s what you think Dylan is? A—a budding
frotter?”

“
Frotteur
. Your son’s too young to have his
sexuality sorted out. That said, Mr. Saberhagen,
we’re suspending him a week.”

“Yes. Fair. What he’s done is a bad sign. In a
year of bad signs. We should make him clean the
playground, too.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“Hell, yes. Physical, demeaning labour.”

“I doubt our groundskeeper would be happy to
hear that.”

Dylan sits on an orange plastic chair in the
cafeteria. Vampire cape draped over its back.

“Outside. You’re cleaning the schoolyard.”

“Vampire Dylan doze not clean.”

“Shut up with that. You’re suspended a week.”

He wipes his nose on the cape. “It was just a joke
. . . blah.”

The wind gusts round the school’s industrial
edges. Kid-centric garbage—Fruit Roll-Up sleeves,
YOP bottles—skates across autumn grass. Dylan
mopes along the fence, cape aflutter, tossing trash
haphazardly into the bag.

“That was a dandelion,” I call from the swingset.
“Since when are they garbage?”

“They’re
weeds
!”

His whole life I’ve played the hardass. When his
“terrible twos” habit had been to strike out with his
fists: always me holding his pudgy hands. He said
“Mom” at eight months; he didn’t say “Dada” until
he’d reached a year, by which point he’d already said
“Car” and “Wow-wow.” Instead of putting trash in
the bag, he’s skewering it on fence barbs. Yogurt cups
piked like heads.

“You’re supposed to pick it up, not redistribute it,”
Abby says. To me: “He was on the computer all day.”

“Should I suspend his privileges?”

“The only way he interacts, Nick. His own
birthday—who shows up? That exchange student,
Rigo, and me.”

Dylan’s poked the bag full of holes to wear as a
muumuu.

“All done. Blah!”

“By the tetherball pole: see? Pop can. Hurry up.
Boxing tonight,” I say. Abby gives me a look. “The
basics,” I tell her. “We’ll fit a gumshield to his mouth.”
I don’t tell her how last time Dylan burst into tears
biting down on the warm rubber. “It’s good for him.”

“Yeah, because it was so good for you.”

Old wheeze
in the boxing game:
In the ring, truth
finds you
. Didn’t put in the roadwork? That finds you.
Didn’t leave enough sweat on the heavy bags? That
comes to find you. Not just the work: it’s all you are
from inside-out. Every little thing, even those you
got no defence against. If you’re cursed with brittle
hands, say, that truth finds you. If you cut easy or
your heart’s not the equal of the man you square up
against. In every punch and feint, broken bone and
chipped tooth, every gasp and moan, each time you
wish you were someplace else, anywhere but here
taking this punishment, in your guts and marrow
in every place you thought hidden. Boxing is simple
arithmetic. The ones and twos never fail to add.
Truth always finds its way back to you.