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Authors: Craig Davidson

Tags: #Horror, #General Fiction

Sarah Court (10 page)

BOOK: Sarah Court
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At the risk of sounding like a drill sergeant, the
sooner you structure your child’s life to befit future
growth, the better. I rose to anger hearing my girl
recount the litany of lackadaisical activities she was
now permitted in her mother’s custody.

“I dug yesterday.”

“Dug for what, Abigail?”

“Treasure?”

“My dear, there’s no treasure in your mother’s backyard. You’ll dig up a lump of petrified doggy
doo. You’d enjoy discovering that? Let’s go for a bike
ride.”

“Can I have an ice-cream sandwich?”

“Your mother lets you eat ice-cream sandwiches all
day? Have an apple. Nature’s candy. Can’t have you
turning into a Flabby Abby, can we?”

“What’s a flabby?”

“Flabby’s fat. Fat Abby. Big Fat Abigail.”

I never dreamed my daughter might compete
as a strength athlete. “Female bodybuilder” conjured
images of mustachioed Olympians from coldwater
republics galumphing through the Iron Curtain with
mysterious bulges in their weightlifting costumes.
But Abby was freakishly strong.

This discovery had been made in my next-door
neighbour’s backyard. A surgeon, Frank Saberhagen,
whose serpentine decline kept pace with my own.
Everything
between
us
became
a
competition
so it was no surprise we’d race each other down
the drainhole. Our first conversation had been
emblematic
of
our
confrontational
fellowship.
I’d spied rolls of uncovered, browning sod in the
backseat of his Cadillac El Dorado and chummily
asked what his purpose was. “Oh, wouldn’t
you
like
to know,” was his reply. Our troubled friendship
was forged upon that rocky foundation. I never did
discover what he did with that sod.

This particular afternoon we were drinking
“Flatliners,” the good doctor’s signature concoction,
while his son Nicholas roughhoused with Abby.

“Up the tree, Nick.”

Saberhagen forced his son—who would go on to
be an amateur boxer good enough to get plastered
by future pros while never earning a dime for his
pains—to climb the maple daily. Supposedly it
developed his fast-twitch muscle fibres.

“Dad, come on.”

“Don’t give me that, buckaroo.”

“None too sturdy, doc. Had it sprayed for Dutch
Elm?”

“What are you,” he asked me, “a tree surgeon?” He
swayed to his feet and kicked the maple as if it were
the tire of a car whose purchase he was considering.

Solid
.”

“Your father is a stubborn man, Nicholas.”

“What’s wrong with my taking an interest in
your improvement?” Saberhagen asked his son. “Mr.
Burger is clearly uninterested in his daughter’s.”

“Why—because I refuse to send my firstborn up
your arboreal deathtrap?”

“The tree’s a metaphor. Life is challenging but
what can you do? Watch others climb to success,
forever peering up at the treads of more ambitious
shoes? Life requires gumption. Good old-fashioned
balls.”

A dig at my Abby. Cursed to trudge through life
bereft of said apparatuses.

“You slug. Abby can do anything Nick can.”

Saberhagen scoffed. “She’s got a pudding belly.”

Her mother’s fault. Those goddamn ice-cream
sandwiches! I’ll admit too many Flatliners had cut my
mental age into halves, or in all likelihood quarters.
We somehow found ourselves in his garage where
Frank welcomed us to the First Annual Saberhagen
Pentathlon.

“Saberhagen
Pentathlon?
Why
not
BurgerSaberhagen?”

“My garage,” he reasoned.

Our debate was derailed by the appearance of
Clara Russell, in a wheelchair, at the base of Frank’s
driveway. Awhile back one of her “boys” had hotwired
Saberhagen’s Cadillac, along with Wes Hill’s boy
Colin. I remained in the garage while Frank chatted.
Mama’s sheepdog barked. Frank’s corgi kicked up a
ruckus behind the garage door.

“Welcome,” Frank said upon his return, “to the
Saberhagen-Burger pentathlon. First event: vertical
jump.”

He proclaimed a busted rake the “Measuring
Stick” and, holding it at a drunken loft above his
head, urged Nicholas to jump and touch it.

“Hold straight, Frank. It’s hanging all crookedass.”

Saberhagen set his Flatliner down and used both
hands. Nick came up short.

“Abby’s turn.”

“You get two tries,” he said. “No-no, wait—three.”

“Making up the rules as we go, Quincy?”

“Three tries, Fletch. Olympic rules.”

On the second attempt Saberhagen bent his
knees so Nick could touch.

“Foul! Running rigged contests here at casa de
Saberhagen?”

“If I bent my knees,” he filibustered, “I’m not
saying I did, but
if
—we can all agree to it being an
honest error. I’ve got fluid buildup on my left knee.”

Nick made a fair touch. I reached for the
Measuring Stick. Saberhagen balked.

“I’ll hold for Abby, why not?”

“She’s my daughter. Fathers hold for their kid.”

You’d
have
thought
my
request
was
in
contravention of the nonexistent rulebook.

“Look, Fletch, now seriously: I’m two inches
taller.”

“Your elbows were all crooked-ass.”


Like hell
they were crooked-ass.”

Eventually he gave over the stick. Abigail missed
her first attempt.

“Put your legs into it, Abby.” Another miss. “For
heaven’s sake. Jell-O in those legs? Tuck your shirt
in”—the bastard was right: she did have a little
pudding belly—“ and touch . . . the . . .
stick
.”

A third miss. Quincy whooped it up. I wanted to
twist his head off like a bottlecap.

“That’s what I’m talking about,” he told his son.
“Old-fashioned balls.”

“Butter churns,” I seethed, “and horehound
candies are old-fashioned. Am I to take it that, what,
your son’s got a pair of
steam-driven
testicles?”

A belly laugh from Saberhagen. Too late I realized
he’d accomplished his main, if not sole, ambition of
that afternoon: pissing me off.

“Next,” he said, “feats of strength.”

In a corner of the garage was a stack of paint cans
labelled
Bongo Jazz
. The hue of afflicted organ meat.
To be inside Saberhagen’s house was to inhabit a
diseased pancreas. We settled on paint can hammer
curls. Nick staked himself to an early lead.

“Twenty-three,
twenty-four,”
counted
Saberhagen.
“Look at Hercules go!”

Abby’s biceps muscle was a hard lump under her
sleeve. “How long do I have to go, Dad?”

“Longer than him.”

“Daddy,” Nick said, “my arm’s hurting.”

“Don’t call me Daddy, please.”

Abby’s fingers whitened round the paint can
wire. Only her circulation temporarily cut off. Nick
dropped his can. Twisty veins radiated from his
elbow joint. Abby showed no signs of flagging. Arms
raised, I jogged a victory lap of the garage.

“Quit carrying on like she’s Sybil Danning,” said
Frank.

Best part
of waking up in a strange bed is how you
lay emptied of personal history. Literally forget who
you are. Then, spiderlike, your brain gathers every
trapping of your miserable history and entombs it in
your skull. You’re you again.

James slept in the bunk below mine curled up
like a potato bug. I’m unsure why I’ve invited him
aboard, other than my inability to face the coming
days alone. He shares DNA strands in keeping with
Saberhagen and myself. At a certain age a man
welcomes into his life those who are dimmer or more
intense reflections of his self. That way, the views he
holds are seldom challenged.

We spend the day on the Trent-Severn Waterway.
I cut the motor with the sun at its peak. Cones of
midges coil off the water. James strips and dives
in. Matilda follows. They come onboard covered in
snotlike algae. It dries to a green transparency they
variously lick or peel off.

Of all my features, my eyes are nicest. They
can be transplanted, which I wasn’t aware of until
recently. Keratoplasty, it’s called. Only the corneas.
Topmost layer peeled off like skin off a grape, scar
tissue and ocular bloodclots removed, donor cornea
stitched to the recipient’s eye with surgical thread
one-sixteenth the thickness of human hair. The
International Eye Bank’s donor cornea wait list is
years long. Eye Bank sounds so terrifically creepy,
doesn’t it? A supercooled vault where disembodied
eyeballs float in jars. But not so. As eyes rot same
as any living tissue there is no physical bank, per se.

A setting sun red as new blood. The tops of shore
pines resemble teeth on a bucksaw as we approach
Fenelon Falls. We dock and head into town. Nothing’s
open except the local chapter of the Legion. A stag
and doe scheduled. We’re bidden entry by a veteran
in a sailor’s cap with a face like a bowl of knuckles.

“No pets,” he tells James.

“But this dog saw duty in Afghanistan.”
The vet’s features soften significantly.

We sit on orange plastic chairs beneath a mangy moose head with a half-smoked cigar crammed in
its mouth. The premises are occupied by runnyeyed lumbermen, many of whom look to have been
dragged from under a thicket somewhere. Hairs the
colour of week-old piss sprout from every orifice on
their faces. James and I bang back shots of Johnny
Red with the self-medicating air of alcoholics
searching for a level spot on the beam. Sprinkled
amongst the backwoods gnomes and tricksters are
veterans smoking home-rolled cigs which burn so
quickly it’s like watching fuses burn down into the
wizened powderkegs of their faces.

A woman sits nearby. Young-ish and familiar, if
distantly so, neither beautiful nor plain, and with a
baby. Ungodly out-of-place amidst the cigar smoke
and shipwrecked vets.

“Cute kid,” James says. “Yours?”

“Cute dog. Yours?”

They fall into conversation. I feel strung-out and edgy. I hear everyone’s fingernails growing.
Inappropriate salsa music pipes up. A woman
dances. So girthy in her white shirt and tan trousers
that from the back she resembles a vanilla soft-serve
cone. Her technique makes it appear as if an invisible
entity has yanked down her pants and is presently
pummelling her to the lungs, kidney, and liver.
Steamy dance stylings hold a commonality with
killer bees: both are more destructive the farther
they migrate away from their equatorial birthplaces.

When the next woman arrives, every eyeball
settles on her.

“Chivas Regal, barkeep!” Sounds like:
Shave-ass
Raygull
.

She enters with the ultimate
fuck me
walk. A
strut, more like, a stalking strut that in every hipshift, every swivel and jive, says:
I know much about
the carnal acts and you better believe it—I’m fucking
goooooood.
To say she’s beautiful would be to lie. She
has a harelip and the surgical repair’s been botched;
Saberhagen would howl to see such butchery. But by
God, she is purely magnetic. This erotic beartrap of
a woman. Big. Nordic-valkyrie big. Stately pipestems
like hers you tend to describe in equine terms; I
could picture her snapping a fetlock treading in a
gopher hole at full gallop. I’d bet folding money she’s
a mudder. Her fella stands a respectful distance
apart. Rangy and bowlegged in stovepipe jeans. The
sad bastard brings to mind visions of a sucking axe
gash never let alone to heal.

She sits nearby. Downs her first drink at a gulp
and sends the boyfriend off for another
Shave-ass
.

“Who the hell’re you?”

I’m amazed this woman registers me as anything
other than flesh-toned wallpaper.

“Call me Mr. Burger.”

She smiles in a peculiar way. An arrowheadshaped tongue darts over her lips. It strikes me as
a gesture she uses often, suggestive of all manner of
undefined intimacies.

“Mister Burger?”

“You’re too young to use my grown-up name.”

This woman could destroy me. This woman’s
hot white teeth could strip the skin from my bones.
Dismantle me piece by piece. She could have me
begging for that honour. To throw yourself at her is
to throw yourself off a skyscraper. Screaming all the
way down. Teeth driven into your skull like tent pegs
into clay.

“Call me Sunshine. What are you doing here?”

“Paying my respects to the betrothed.”

“Well, the betrothed’s got no idea who in blue
fuck you are.”

“You? Hitched to that tall drink of water?”

“The culmination of my every hope and dream.”

Her hubby-to-be’s axe-wound of a face registers
pitiful
gratefulness
that
this
woman
would
condescend to entwine her life with his. Sunshine
downs her second drink. The ice’s refraction
magnifies the scar slit down her upper lip. Her
fiancee’s name is Rodney.

“I had a dog named Rodney,” says James.

“He’s my little dog,” Sunshine goes. “My wittle
Wodney.” She chucks him under the chin with the
edge of her glass. “When hims a bad doggums, hims
sleeps in da doghouse.”

Rodney smiles like a man in a tiger cage.
Lovestruck sap. His every molecule made of galling
attributes: servitude, resignation, bootlicking. As a
man I want to slap him around out of pure heartsick
revulsion.

Doctor Burger’s cure for the whole maudlin scene?
Booze. An oil tanker’s worth. I line up shots of navy
rum to fill my prescription. Prognosis: stunningly
positive! Rodney’s hand pumps shot glasses into his
face with the mechanics of an oil derrick. He tries to
kiss Sunshine. She gets her elbow up. His lips meet
the knob.

BOOK: Sarah Court
4.56Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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