Sarah Court (11 page)

“You’re a slobbery drunk, darlin’. What’s the use
getting all lovey-dovey now, champ? Why not save it
for when it could be of value?” Stated to nobody in
particular: “A wet noodle in the sack, this one. Like
to bed down with a hunnert-fifty pounds of cooked
spaghetti stuffed in tube socks. Keep thinking the
cops’ll bust down the door and arrest me for what’sit? Sleeping with dead things . . . ?”

“Necrophilia?” James offers.

“Yeah!” Her laugh is so profoundly crazed you
could imagine it echoing down the austere halls of a
funny farm. “On the money!”

How
exhausting
it
must
be
for
Sunshine.
Stomping
Rodney’s
self
esteem
at
clockwork
intervals. Rodney’s skull half-squashed from her
foot. But then some men yearn to die curled up in a
boot-print.

A fuse blows inside my head and when the juice
flows again I’m in a pickup between Sunshine driving
and Rodney riding shotgun. The
Shave-ass Raygull
spilled over Sunshine’s jeans makes it look she’s
pissed herself. This close she smells of mentholated
cigarettes and Noxema. Crazily alluring. Reaching
between my legs to downshift, she gives my crotch
a cheery honk. Her poor prehensile tail of a fiancée
turns from the moon-plated river to face us.

“Nice having you at our party, Fletcher. Sincerely.
We made a new friend.”

“Bless your pea-pickin’ heart,” says Sunshine.
“You’re too fuckin’ corn-pone to live.”

“Never claimed to be perfect.”

Rodney’s spine must have marinated in battery
acid. Strange wonder his ribcage doesn’t sag to his
hipbone. Sunshine swings into a gravelled half-moon
facing the water. We spill out laughing—Jesus, at
what? I’m about ready to slip a dry cleaning bag over
my head. I gulp air coming off the river in hopes of
oxygenating my rum-soaked cells. I am seriously
hallucination-hammered. Sunshine staggers down
to the water.

“Got to tinkle, boysy-woysies!”

Rodney’s bellied over the truck fender. His body
comes by such positions naturally. Not a single
unbroken posture. A cannonball on a chain hooked
to his forehead.

Sunshine returns topless. Standing at the lip of
the berm with her head cocked. Just . . . y’know,
BAM
. All there.

“Look at yous two. Standing there with your
teeth in your mouth.”

A body so young taken in by the eyes of a man
old as me . . . lechery only another word for jealousy.
I want to eat her skin. She hoists herself onto the
hood. Undoes the topmost button on her jeans.

“Put your hands all over me, Fletcher. A real
man’s hands, for once.”

She’s crazy. Not in any diagnosable way. Not so
much that she’ll bring harm to anybody but herself
and those who hie too closely. My hands on her
would only be an encouragement of that lunacy but
what was my onus of burden? Me, with the lifespan
of a fruit fly.

“Sunny, baby. You make loving you hell.”

“I’m just sitting, Rod. If this man’s hands happen
upon my body, well, it’s not me causing that collision,
now is it?”

The heat of the engine block warms the hood
where I set my hand. Moonlight plays upon the
water. A vein of white fire snaking through things.

“Go ahead and fuck me.” She pulls the take of
their stag and doe from her jeans. “We’ll leave this
scratch-ass town. Escape.”
Ex-cape
. “Just us two.”

Is she purposely degrading herself with those
crumpled fives and tens? Her jeans melt down to
her ankles. When a woman really wants to shed her
clothes it is an act of bodily voodoo. Lips shiny with
blackberry Chapstick. She draws down the lip of her
panties. I see the definitions of her intimates same
way you spot a mouse at the mouth of its hole: by the
wet glints of teeth and eye.

I say: “You doing anything about your little
sexpot of a fiancée, here, Rodney?”

“He’s my dickless little dog.”

Rodney moans like a sick animal. My hand
traces Sunshine’s neck. The panicked thrum of her
heartbeat in my fingertips. This expression of fear
and disgust skims over her face—fleeting, but it’s all
there in that. Sunshine laid open like one of those
Dali women with the chest of drawers where her
guts should be. My rummaging hands inside. I’ve
been wrong from the get-go: believing Rodney lives
in wretchedness when in truth he exists in a state of
ongoing ecstasy.

“You don’t want me. You couldn’t possibly.”

“Sure,” she say. “Sure I do.”

They love one another. You can glimpse such
twisted configurations and acknowledge yes, it is
still love. A brutal and excruciating manifestation
but unmistakably so. Love as a sickness.

“Fuck me, Fletcher. Take me away.”

“I won’t.”

“What’s the matter with me?”

Turning from her, I offer: “You’re cute enough.”

“I wouldn’t mind,” says Rodney.

Sunshine claws a hand around my hips. That I’m
not erect infuriates her.

“
Two
dickless wonders!”

“I could fuck you, Sunshine, but I couldn’t kiss
you.” I’m a brutal human specimen. “Not with your
lip like that.”

Retrospectively speaking, I shouldn’t have said
this with my back turned.

“Pussyeating dickface mother
fucker
!”

She leaps onto my back. One mitt’s sunk into my
hair while the other lances stiff shots into the veinbunched curve of my throat. The shock of it is quasiparalyzing: the way you’d feel inadvertently catching
your mother naked through an open bedroom door.
An idiotic sense of masculinity compels me to make
like she isn’t hurting me when in fact it hurts
vastly
.

“Rodney. Please . . . control your woman.”

By whipping side-to-side I manage to buck her
off. She strips off a plug of scalp. I stagger toward
the river with blood trickling down my neck.

Zany bitch!

“Stick your pecker in her, y’old buckethead!”

“She’s gonna be your wife,” I tell Rodney. “Do
your own grunt work!”

At the lip of the berm Sunshine kicks me in
the spine. The spectre of getting an eye poked out
petrifies me. Clamp my eyelids tight. Hurts like hell
but I laugh a sad bastard’s dirge rolling blindly down.
Must have sounded I was mortally injured because
when I check up on the lee side their truck motor is
gunning into silence.

I haul myself out of the bracken. Tear a clump of
moss ringing an elm tree. Press it to my scalp. Kick
through frosted dandelions, snapping their little
bald heads off. Frozen berries hang on a branch and
I eat a handful and they hurt my teeth. I zone out,
bleeding. The perpetual movement of the cosmos
pushes the moon across a star-salted sky.

My houseboat rounds the horn of the river.

“
Fleeeetcherrrr
!”

“Over here! Here!”

The engine cuts. A flashlight beam pins me.

“I ran into those two you left with. Asked where
the heck were you. They said check the fucking river!
Can you make it out?”

“I can try.”

The river laps against the torn spot in my scalp.
Snapping turtles and steel-mouthed walleye quest at
my toes. James hauls me onboard and sits me in the
galley kitchen. Drapes me in a metallic emergency
blanket. Next he removes my shirt and socks.
Matilda lays across my bare feet. I feel her belly
nipples against my skin.

“That’s one nasty hematoma on your head,”
James says.

Black Box: Compassionate
Human Being

We’re going down. I saw it coming. Takeoff
smooth, clear skies, but twenty years into this
flight my arms got tired. It felt pointless. I let go
of the yoke.

So much of being considered a good person is
decent planning. A steel-trap memory. So much
is: “So-and-so’s birthday is coming. Better send
a card.” Make these token efforts and everyone
says you’re a good person. You’re not necessarily.
You may occupy some Outer Sulawesi of the
soul, but you keep a well-organized day-timer.
Real tests of goodness ignite out of nothingness
and stick it to you bluntly: are you the person
you think you are? The door swings two ways.
Swings a hundred million ways. In those
moments you come to know yourself. Can you
exist within that reckoning?

Out the starboard window one wing snaps
off. Trailing wiring and spitting sparks it falls
through the sky, through a sea of puffy cumulus
clouds. Anyway, who cares? The freight bay is
full of sandbags.

The group
: “Over-and-Out.” Called a “group” to
imply we were pleased as punch to gather every
second Thursday. Our only regret it couldn’t be
weekly, or thrice weekly, or daily or two times a
day. Parents helping parents. What a crock. Over
and out. Get it? Support groups have punny names.
Craniofacial Abnormalities: About Face. Sickle Cell
Anemia: Reaping Hope. Ours was a catchall for
parents “over”-something: overzealous, overbearing,
overcompetitive. I had no choice but to attend. I’d
slit my own throat with earlier actions at a provincial
powerlifting meet.

After
discovering
Abby’s
unusual
strength
I’d embarked on a systematic plan to make her a
champion lifter. I bought Joe Weider dumbbells at
Consumer’s Distributors. Set up a gym in my old
rumpus room. Enrolled her in the Superior Physique
Association:
a
female
weightlifting
fraternity
founded by Doris Barrilleaux, a hyper-developed
hausfrau from Canton, Ohio.

I arranged for muscle-responsiveness tests. Abby
possesses some seriously enlarged vascular bundles.
The cellular walls of her arteries were elastic.
Improved circulation equals increased blood flow.
Superior protein absorption.
Bigger muscles
. Muscle
tissue is cellularly complex: the muscle of your
biceps, for example, consists of different cellular
strata. First the parallel arrays of tubelike muscle
fibres bundled together like crayons in a box. Each
fibre is made up of smaller sub-units, myofibrils,
stacked neatly one atop the other like plates on
a shelf. Inside the myofibrils reside the working
parts, heavy lifters called sarcomeres, arranged in
a lineup like beads on an abacus. Look closely at
championship powerlifters: it’s like iodized salt has
been sprinkled over every muscle group.

The day her bone density test results arrived I
hightailed it to Saberhagen’s house.

“Abby scored a -0.1 on the Bone Mineral Density
test. What’s that mean?”

“Means she’s got dense bones,” Frank said. “To
match her dad’s skull.”

“I knew it.” As if we Burgers were famous for our
bone density and it was only natural this trait should
find its pinnacle in my daughter. “
Dense
.”

Massive blood-pumping bundles, solid spinal
stem, lode-bearing joints, bones dense as titanium.
Can I be blamed for thinking she was ideally suited?

Now,
get
it
straight:
powerlifting,
not
bodybuilding. The Olympic sport, not the freakshow.
I’m disgusted by those steroid-enlarged gals with
patio flagstones where their boobs should be and
their HGH-swollen faces so out of whack even the
best maxillofacial surgeon couldn’t make them look
womanly again, telling you “But I’m still a
lady
,” in
their Barry White voices. So full of toxins they’d set
off a fallout meter. Steroids: an idiotic lifestyle, what
with the shrunken nuts and prostatitis. They can
turn a gal’s clitoris as big and hard as a baby’s thumb!

I entered Abby in regional meets. She demolished
her own sex. The Ontario Power-lifting Association
agreed to let her compete in the male 14–18 class.
The meet was held in a Hamilton gym inhabited by
strapping male bodies.

“Dogs, the lot of them,” I told her. “They got
heartworm. You’ll pulverize.”

Truth told, I was taken aback at the proliferation
of prepubescent beefcakery. I wanted to run around
with plastic cups: “Piss tests. Piss tests for all!” I
sauntered up to the biggest kid, all of seventeen yet
so prodigiously venous he appeared to be covered in
livid spiderwebs.

“My daughter’s kicking your ass. Bet you folding
money.”

His father, a buzz-cut bohunk with a Hamilton
FD shirt stretched across his chest, pricked up his
ears.

“You’re flabby as all get out,” I went on. “Look at
her dorsal definition. Like peering into a barrel of
snakes, isn’t it?”

“S’matter with you?” his father went.

“This kid’s a bum.” I kept my tone pleasant.
“What do you feed him, tubs of Oleo?”

“You’re not helping,” Abby told me.

“I’m simply allowing this man to prepare the
collection of overgrown blood platelets he calls a son
for an emasculating ass-kicking.”

A judge overheard the commotion. “Back to your
competitor, sir.”

“I got every right being here.”

“If you don’t leave this vicinity—”

“This is my
job
. Don’t you tell me how to do my
job. You don’t see me coming down to the public
toilets to knock the can of Ajax out of your hands,
do you?”

We were eliminated from competition. Abby
nailed it as “a real bonehead manoeuvre.” My ex got
wind. Rumblings of a revision of custody rights. My
lawyer advised a token of penitence would smooth
things. So, the group: “Over and Out.”