Sarah Court (18 page)

Impact Boxing is located in a strip mall on Hartzell next to a knife shop, King of Knives, whose
banner reads:
Knives, The Perfect Gift for Knife Lovers!
Beyond lies Sterno Dell. Charred tree skeletons poke
from its rain-sodden ash like spears.

Entering the club gives me the same sensation
an Olympic swimmer must get slipping on a clammy
Speedo for morning laps: uncomfortably familiar.
My DNA is soaked into these speed bags, headgear,
punch mitts. Atomized remainders cling to sewage
pipes spanning the ceiling. Photos of prematurely
aged fighters on the walls. My favourite a B&W
portrait of Archie Moore, the Mongoose, with this
quote:
Nowadays fighters tussle for money. I was
fighting when the prize was going to jail.
When I was a
kid, two men nursing a blood feud stepped through
the ropes to go at it barefisted. One hit the other so
hard he face-planted the canvas. While unconscious
he sneezed involuntarily; a pressurized hiss as the air
driven into his skull vented around his eye sockets.
My father said the man had suffered an orbital
blowout fracture and was lucky: had he sneezed
much harder an eyeball might have ejected itself.

Dad’s beaten us here. Following his medical
suspension he’s taken to drinking at the Queenston
Motel, a bar lonely, dispossessed men gravitate to
before gravity hauls them off the face of the civilized
world altogether.

“Look,” he says with a sigh. “It’s the Count.”
“Good
eee
vening,” Dylan greets his grandfather.
In
the
changeroom
Dad
unfurls
Dylan’s handwraps like lizard’s tongues. Spreads the fleshy
starfish of his grandson’s hands to gird them.
Dylan sucks air through his teeth. “Tight.”

Dad
unwinds
his
work.
He
believes
Dill’s
wussiness hovers round the fact he required an
operation to correct an undescended testicle. But my
father is prone to tendering wild accusations based
on picayune evidence—such as the time he spotted
me with a grape juice moustache and got into a big
kerfuffle with Mom, levying the charge I must be
“guzzling the frigging stuff,” which according to him
was a sign of burgeoning gluttony. I was seven.

The club is sparsely trafficked. A retired bricklayer
hammers away at a heavy bag with a watchman’s cap
tugged tight to his eyes. Young hockey players—
goons in training—take wild swings at the bags
adjacent. I untangle a skipping rope.

“Try for a minute, Dill.”

He can’t go ten seconds. As always, I am shocked
by his lack of coordination. His feet snarl in the cape.
He stomps on the hem and its cord chokes him.

“Swell cape,” Dad says. Queenston Motel suds
percolate out his pores.

“
Saaank
you,” Dylan says in his vampire voice.
“Jor blood vill stay in jor veins tonight, old one.”
“Yeah? That’s swell.”

I tug Dylan into a pair of sixteen ouncers. Giant
red melons attached to his arms. We stake out a bag
beside a poster of a vintage Lennox Lewis with his
high-and-tight MC Hammer hairdo. Dylan throws a
whiffle-armed one-two. The feeble
blut
of his gloves
slapping the bag stirs a deep sorrow in my chest.

“Pretend it’s vampire bait.”

“Vampire bat?”

“Bait.” I shouldn’t encourage it, but: “Vampire
bait
.”

“Eef it vas wampire bait, I vould do dees!”—and
bites the bag.

“Dill. How many people you figure sweated all
over that?”

Dylan smacks his lips. “Eet’s wary, wary hard to
be a wampire deez daze.”

He heads to the fountain. Dad’s emptying spit
troughs: funnels attached to lengths of flexible PVC
hose feeding into Oleo buckets in opposing corners
of the ring. The cell-phone girl, Cassie, comes in with
who I assume must be her father: Danny Mulligan.
His romance with Abby broke down in Moose Jaw
along with his VW Minibus. He’s a cop now and looks
it: Moore’s suitcoat shiny at the elbows, saddle shoes
squashed at the toes like a clown’s, horse teeth, a
Marine’s whitewall haircut shorn close to the scalp.
I can already picture him as an old man: high blue
veins, buttons of nose-hair. He looks—why do I
harbour such unreasonable, mean-spirited,
perverse
thoughts?—like the sort of guy who, mid-fuck,
grabs his own ass-cheek with a free hand. That selfconscious hand-push, like he needs help burying it
home, coupled with an equally affected back arch.
Yeah, he’s
that
guy.

“Nick, right?”

“Danny,” I greet him. “Yeah, hi.”

“It’s Dan. My little girl tells me there was some
ruckus today at school.”

“That’s right. Something to do with videos.”

Mulligan spread his legs as if readying to perform
a hack squat.

“Trupholme took away her phone. I bought that
for Cassie’s birthday. All her numbers stored in it.
Important dates, too.”

Important dates. She’s ten. What, when the next
Tiger Beat
hits the newsstands?

“I imagine she’ll get it back.”

“If not?”

“Are you telling me to buy her a new phone?”

“How about we’ll talk.”

With that, Dan dismisses me. He pulls gloves
onto his daughter’s fists and leads her to a bag.
Cassie summons enough force out of her tiny frame
to rattle it on its chain.

“Why not your little gal get in with Dylan?” Dad
calls to Mulligan.

“We’re game,” goes Mulligan, with a shrug.

Dad turns to Dylan. “What d’ya say, Drac?”

Dylan scuffs his shoes at a black streak on the
floor.

“I don’t vant to heet a girl.”

“Not hitting,” I say. I hate seeing him cave.
“Manoeuvring. You’ll be okay.”

Headgear squashes his eyes-nose-mouth into the
centre of his face. I tuck his cape into the back of his
shorts. The silicon gumshield stretches his lips into
an involuntary smile.

When the bell rings, my son stares around,
confused, perhaps thinking the fire alarm’s gone
off. Cassie bears in, one gloved fist big as her head
glancing off Dylan’s shoulder. Mulligan’s next to
me on the apron. He carries himself in a physically
invasive manner. Commandeering airspace. It speaks
badly of a man.

Dylan rucks in gamely, gloves hipped and rubbing
against
Cassie.
Latent
frotteur
behaviour?
He
stumbles on his heels trying to find me in the lights,
smiling at nobody in particular before turning that
silly bewildered smile on his opponent as if to say,
“We’re having fun, right?” Cassie’s snorting round
her mouthpiece as the headgear constricts her
sinuses. She bulls Dylan into a corner and drives
her hands into his face before pulling away to slap
a glove into Dill’s breadbasket. Dylan quivers: a
seismic wave up his neck and down his thighs. They
joust in the centre of the ring. Dylan’s pushing at
Cassie’s shoulders to keep her unbalanced. I see my
son in the west-wall mirror, and the reflected action
states more profoundly just how lost he looks, soft
and salty and unprotected like a massive quivering
eyeball and I’m stepping through the ropes to stop
it when Cassie plants a foot and rears so far back
at the hips her lead hand nearly touches the back
of her knee, coming on with the nastiest overhand
right I’ve ever seen thrown by anyone so young. The
sound she makes throwing it the screech of a gull.
With the blood knocked temporarily out of his face,
Dylan looks like an actor in a Japanese Noh play. He
gets plunked on his backside where the ropes meet,
spread-legged, skull too heavy for his neck. It dips
between his knees to touch the canvas.

Dad’s saying: “To your corners!”

I reach into Dylan’s mouth. Strings of mucousthickened drool snap as I pull the mouthpiece out.
Vacant-eyed—belted into that groggy space where
nothing’s fully solidified—he blinks as a berry
swells under his left eye. His gloved hands reach at
his shorts as if he thinks he’s bare-assed and needs
to hike them up. I cradle my hands under his bum.
Pick him up.

In the changeroom I tug his gloves off. Mulligan
comes in to apologize. Genuinely surprised and regretful.
He asks is Dylan okay. My son smiles. A sheen of
blood on his teeth.

“I’m sorry,” Dylan tells me.

“You didn’t do anything.”

That berry under his eye: you’d think an insect
laid eggs. A red ring round his neck where the cape
string’s choked him. Dylan looks at his hands with
the most pitiable expression. Not a fighter, my boy.
But he seems aware of it, too, a failure that pains
him. He thinks I give a damn. He opens his arms to
me and I sense he’s terrified I won’t hug him back.

“I’m sorry.”

“Dill, please. What is it you think you’ve done?”

On the way home I stop at Mac’s Milk to buy
him an ice-cream sandwich. When I get back he’s
flipping through a book I’d tossed in the back seat.
Over-and-Out Parenting
, by Dr. Dave Schneider.
“Gobbledegook,” I tell him. He’s eating Nerds.

“Where’d you get those?”

“The stocker.”

“Night stalker?”

“The machine stocker.”

Machine
Stalker.
Robo-stalker.
Presumably
bought with the five dollar bills Abby stitches into
his trousers. He traces the ice-cream sandwich to his
lumpy eye.

“In class we watched this movie about war.”

“What war?”

“The one where everything’s blown up,” he says.
“And like, the world gives us everything we need to
blow it up. The steel to make planes is dug out of
whaddayacall . . . ?”

“Mines.”

“Like, the stuff that’s inside is the stuff blowing it
up.” He points to his belly. “What if tiny-tiny aliens
landed here—”

“You mean Phantoids?”

“Phantoids are peaceful, Dad . . . and so they
hate each other and so get into a humongous war?
Dig mines into my stomach. Make planes out of my
bones and so, the gas is my blood? Mix the juices and
the, uh, so, other stuff on my skin to make bombs?
Everything they need to kill each other is
on
me.”

He rips the waxed wrapper in neat ribbons.
He’s fallen into an obsessive habit of taking
things apart. Pocket calculators, stereo remotes:
anything with diodes, springs, cogs. He asked for
a set of jeweller’s screwdrivers to facilitate his
deconstructions. I’d bought him a decent Timex for
Christmas: he used the screwdrivers to gut it. Endstage methamphetamine addicts take gadgets apart
with no intention of putting them back together.
It accelerates or accentuates their grotty highs. I’m
scared my son is exhibiting meth-head behaviours.

I say: “There’s a drawing class at the Learning
Annex.”

“I like drawing.”

“That’s why I said it, buddy. Maybe that’s a little
more your speed than boxing.”

“So . . . if you want.”

“Not what I want. What you want.”

“Is it?”

“You tell me.”

“Okay, it is.”

The naked girl
on stage has jet-black hair fitted
precisely to the plates of bone composing her skull.
Playmobil hair—clip it on and off.

I hate strip clubs. Truly, they leave me griefstricken. They cater to a pitiful male hopefulness.
For the young guys, the hope of sucking tit in the
champagne lounge. Older guys, the hope a girl might
drop her defences to tell him her real name. Not
Puma: Trudy. Not Raven: Paula.

The black card holder’s name is Starling. Wide,
lashless eyes set far apart on his head give him the
look of a trout. As the girl on stage performs a deadeyed gymnastic manoeuvre, spine bent like the
Arc de Triomphe, he tells me he’d recently bought
a Japanese dog. While we’re talking, a guy I find
familiar walks past. Long hair up in a ponytail.
Jacket with
Brink Of
embroidered on it.

“Colin,” I say. “Colin Hill. Hey!”

He smiles, a celebrity posing for paparazzi. “Man,
aren’t you . . .”

“Nick Saberhagen. From Sarah Court.”

“
Riiiiight
.”

He’s here with his father, Wesley, and some kid
with dreadlocks. Colin tells us he’s going over the
Falls tomorrow morning. I recall reading something
in the Pennysaver. I tell him I’ll be there. And my
son. Starling tells a bizarre story about a shark that
plunges a dagger into all further conversation. Next
he’s saying we’ve got to leave.

Our cab glides down Bunting to Queenston.
Tufford Manor and the cemetery where Conway
Finnegan’s father lies, on over the liftlocks. QEW
to the Parkway to River Road running along bluffs
of the Niagara. In the basin puntboats—smugglers,
jacklighters—run the channel with kerosene lamps
bolted to their prows. The smell of baked wheat from
the Nabisco factory. We pass the hydroelectric plant.
Static electricity skates along my teeth to find the
iron fillings and touch off fireworks in my gums.

“I imagine,” says Starling, “a fair number drown.”

“In this river? It happens.”

“Most common cause of brain damage is oxygen
deprivation, Nicholas.” I hate that he calls me
that, but his membership fee entitles him to call
me “dickface,” if it so pleases him. “Most common
cause of oxygen deprivation is water trauma. A man
of average intelligence deprived three and a half
minutes—he’ll end up with the brain capacity of
a colobus monkey. Up to four minutes, a springer
spaniel. Truth is, the humans whose company I enjoy
most are those most like animals. I spent time in a
brain injury ward. One boy suffered massive cerebral
hemorrhages due to his mother’s narrow birth chute.
The most beautiful, open smile. He experienced
more moments of pure joy in one day than I’ll lay
claim to in a lifetime. Most of us would be better off
having our heads held underwater a couple minutes.
Ever see an unhappy dog, Nicholas?”