Sarah Court (19 page)

“No, sir. Not for very long, anyway.”

The taxi pulls into a warehouse. Security spots
throw light at odd angles. Starling leads me down a
domed hallway. A man sits on a wooden chair beside
a door.

“Donald Kerr, you old scallywag.”

“No names. I said no—”

“What shall he write on the cheque?” Starling
asks, indicating me. “Wal-Mart bagman?”

Donald’s got a narrow chicken face. Easy to
picture him sitting on a clutch of eggs. A flatteringly
tailored suit cannot disguise a physique shapeless as
a pile of Goodwill parkas. One hand is cocked high
on his second rib: a prissy, girlish posture.

He leads us into the warehouse, which is empty
save the object in the centre lit by a suspended
bulb. It’s one of those trick boxes stage magicians
make water escapes from. Designs carved into base
and sides. A softball-shaped something sits inside.
Starling leaves Donald and I to examine the box.

“What’s in the box?”

“A demon,” Donald tells me.

“Come on.”

“You asked, chum.”

“So it’s a demon.”

“Another guy, my associate, arranged it with your
client. He wants to believe it is, okay, I say let him.
It’s whatever he wants it to be. It’s his.”

“I’m asking you. This other guy, associate of
yours, was drunk when he said it.”

“When I inherited it he wasn’t in any real position
to say.”

“Inherited?”

“Something like that you don’t have to steal.”

“Doesn’t look like a demon.”

“What’s a demon look like?” Donald Kerr’s chin
juts at an aggressive angle. “Could be something
dredged up from the bottom of the sea nobody’s ever
laid eyes on. Not my place to know or not know.”

“Why don’t you want it?”

“Why’s that matter? Not my cup of tea or
whatever. It’s mine now, but in a minute it can be his.
He wants it. So let’s make it his.”

“What do I write on the invoice: Boxed Demon?”

“Not my problem, sport.”

I step forward to examine it myself. Whether the
box was built expressly for this purpose is beyond
me. Inside: an oblong ball, faintly pulsating. Its
scabrous outer layer looks like dead fingernails. I
snap a few photos with my cellphone. When the
cheque is cashed the amount transfers to Starlings’
Centurion account. On the memo line I write:
Antique Box
. Blood spatters the paper. My nose has
started to bleed.

I wait in the taxi while Starling speaks to a man
across the road. He leaves the man standing beside
the river and rejoins me. Our cab veers upriver
to Chippewa. A harvest moon slit edgewise by an
isolated cloud. The road bends past Marineland.

“Stop,” Starling tells the driver.

The dreadlocked guy from the strip club is
propped against a tree in the parking lot. His eyes
are a pair of blown fuses. When Starling offers him
a ride I resolve to find my own way home. We load
the guy into the cab and I say goodbye. The cab’s
taillights flare as it accelerates on under an Oneida
billboard.

Somebody’s egged the Marineland ticket booths.
Sunbursts of exploded yolk. I worked here in high
school. One time an animal rights activist with
jaundiced eyes like halved hardboiled eggs shackled
himself to the entry gates with a bicycle U-lock round
his throat. The owner, a fierce Czech with pan-shovel
hands, he’d gripped the protester by his ankles and
shook him as you would a carpet. Roaring like one of
the beasts he was accused of abusing. That was the
autumn of my wife’s pregnancy. Dad floated the idea
of an abortion. My wife showed me a terminated
baby in a Right To Life pamphlet. Nothing so much
as a skinned guinea pig.

From
the
amphitheatre
arises
a
yell—
“Yeeeeearrrrgh!”—followed by a splash.

I walk down McLeod to Stanley. Mist gathers in
funnels of light under the streetlamps. I trot along
the breakdown lane. My father would wake me in
the witching hours to run the gravel trail skirting
Twelve Mile Creek. A gumshield socked in my mouth
conditioning me to breathe past the obstruction.
Taste of epoxy on my tongue: the same taste that
fills your mouth driving past that glue factory in
Beamsville. A sensation innately linked to boxing,
same as the smell of the adrenaline chloride Dad
swabbed in my cuts, through layers of split meat: it
had the smell of silver polish.

A pickup blasts down the yellow line. The bed’s full
of young guys. Something of their circumstances—
so different than my own at that age—washes over
me with the diesel exhaust.

My twenty-seventh fight
, the one where the
wheels began to fall off, was against Clive Suggs. Our
weights the same but Suggs was a man.

We fought at the Lake street armory in a ring
erected between decommissioned tanks. I knew
Suggs was going to cream me. So black that when
sunlight struck him there was a soft undertone of
heavy blue about his skin. Clavicle bones spread like
bat’s wings from his pectorals. His wife had been
there. His boy. I’d be fighting a father. I was a sixteen.

We boxers shared one change room. Suggs caught
my eye and winked. Not an unfriendly gesture. He
had his own problems with a wife giving him hell.

“Boxing at your age,” she said. “You must have a
death wish.”

“Me, baby? Naw. I got a
life
wish.”

My father made a gumshield for me by joining
two mouthpieces together. Glued slightly off-kilter
so my lower teeth jutted ahead of the uppers. A
forced underbite kept my teeth from clicking,
which prevented shockwaves coursing down my
jawbone into the cerebrospinal fluid occupying the
subarachnoid space around my brain, which would
have cold-cocked me. He cut holes in the silicon
so I could vacate air without opening my mouth.
It worked. I took shots that rolled my eyes so far
back that the ligatures connecting to my eyeballs
stretched to snapping. I was overtaken by this
blackness where all I could hear was the scuffling of
boots and thack of my heart. All I felt were bands of
fire where the ring ropes touched my back. I’d sink
back into my skin conscious yet likely concussed.
Hoovering air into my nose. Expelling it in a mad
hiss through holes in my gumshield. My father
strapped oversize surgical Q-Tips to his wrist with a
blue elastic band like they use to bind lobster claws.
He’d soak them in adrenaline chloride 1/100 and
between rounds stuff them so far up my bloody nose
the pain of those Q-Tips poking what felt like the low
hub of my brain made the nerves at the tips of my
fingers spit white fire. And I never gave up. I should
have. You can toughen every part of your anatomy
save that glob of goo in your skull.

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.