Sarah Court (2 page)

It hurts so bad that I cannot save him, protect him,
keep him out of harm’s way, shield him from pain.
What good are fathers if not for these things?
—Thomas Lynch, “The Way We Are”

Four hundred.
Suicides, failed daredevils, boozesoaked ruins. Four hundred bodies I’ve dragged out
that river.

They start two hundred yards higher, where
it narrows between Goat Island and Table Rock.
Craning their necks north they’d spy that huge
green head fronting Frankenstein’s House of Horrors
up Clifton Hill—though back in the ’70s when
Knieval copycats tossed themselves over regular
as clockwork, their eyes would be drawn to mist
gathering at the head of the Falls while they floated
in their giant lobster pot or other idiot contraption.
Rapidly coming to grips with the foolhardiness of
their endeavour.

I catch them with hook and rope and a Husky
X9 winch. I can only say how they look falling
into my care. Simple answer’s bad. Crass one’s
discombobulated. Truth is it’s a hard description to
approach. The human body’s durable. Idiotically so.
The Big Drop shows you all durabilities have limits.

First time you motor out you’re asking,
How bad
can it be
? That question has a way of coming off as a
dare to the Almighty.

Most of us cross a body, it’s in a coffin. Frozen
in pleasing position. What I drag out of that river is
death in the raw. Unadorned yet in its way utterly
natural, in that nature holds many strange shapes.
Men bent at angles failing to match the angles of our
understanding. Pressure’s a sonofabitch. Trapped
in chambers hammered out over millennia, a body
churns like a ragdoll in a cement mixer. Mortician
who handles Plungers—his pet euphemism—has
mannequin limbs the colours of all creation. An
incomplete head equals a closed casket. No ifs, ands,
or buts.

Once I took my boy Colin on a training run.
Two of us in a johnboat on the zinced waters of the
Niagara. Up top the cataract was my neighbour,
Fletcher Burger, with a ballistic latex Resussy-Annie
doll stitched to a pair of weighed legs. Colin cupped a
handful of water. Rubbed his fingers over his teeth.
Earlier that week his mother had collapsed in the
shower. Stuff metastasizing to her bones. She’d
begun sinking into herself. I’d knelt fully clothed in
the tub. Water pelting down. Covering her breasts
best as I was able. For his sake. Hers, too.

“Water goes deep enough, it’s always black,” I told
him. “Sun can’t penetrate. Colour spectrum fails.
At eighty feet it’s total blackness. The sun gives our
skin colour. The deepest sea fish get no sun. You can
see right into their guts.”

Fletcher hurled the doll. I dragged in its torso.
Legs I never did find. One of its eyes burst. The
insides crawled the shatter-lines in black threads,
like when your digital watchface cracks.

“Happens to us, too,” I said. “Often worse.”

Colin prodded the doll’s head with his sneaker.
The liquid black of its eye rolled down its rubber
cheek. Even back then he didn’t feel the odds applied
to him.

My name is Wesley Bryant Hill. My grandfather
was the Riverman. My father, too. That’s the way life
unfolds in the territories of my birth.

The boy
walks into the strip club as Dracula.

Ordinarily I steer clear of fleshpits. Sadsacks
ordering five-dollar steaks—who eats five-dollar
meat anywhere tap water runs you ten?—old mares
in costume panties with the spanglies falling off,
raincoat types with basset faces, DJ playing “Don’t
Stop Believing” when it’s clear everyone has. That
gathered humanity disintegrating under a disco ball.

I’m here on account of Diznee. Roberta to her
mother. Evicted from her night slot by girls bussed
in from Quebec—“Nothing against the Kaybeckers,”
she says, “but they don’t got horny stiffs in
Montreal?”—she toils the midday grind at Private
Eyes. We share an apartment block. I babysit her boy,
Cody. Black-white. What do you call that? Mulatto.
Good kid. I’m here to collect my babysitting monies
when I spot Boy-Dracula. Chubby, mop-headed, in a
black cape. Clive the afternoon barkeep asks what
he’ll have. A gal old enough to be this kid’s auntie
slithers naked round a brass pole.

“Clive!”

“One of the girls’ kids.” He serves the boy a glass
of maraschino cherries. “Right?” The boy cocks his
head as a dog will. “Oh, jeepers,” goes Clive.

I tell the kid he shouldn’t be here.

“This is where ladies . . . dance.”

“Wizzout zeyr pants,” he says in this Nosferatu
voice.

Take him onto Bunting road. Sunlight beating on
the hoods of Camaros and pickups.

“What’s with the cape?”

“I yam a wampire.”

“You don’t say. How’d you get here?”

“Zee buzz.”

The bus-riding vampire’s name is Dylan.
“How come you aren’t shrivelling up in the sun?”
“I yam a magical wampire.”

I’ll wager this act gets him beat up a fair load.
Walk to a payphone beside Mattress Depot. He calls
someone to pick him up. Cross to Mac’s Milk. One
Coke and one “Vampire Tonic”: chocolate milk to us
non-bloodsuckers. Dylan insists on paying. His fiver
has pinpricks run down it.

“So, there a missus Vampire?”

“Sadie,” he says in a regular kid voice. “She’s sort
of my girlfriend.”

“A looker?”

“She’s got piglet tails.”

“I think that’s pigtails. Plan on bringing her to
visit your Ma and Pa in Transylvania?”

A powder blue Ford pulls in. The driver’s Abigail
Burger. From Sarah Court. Fletcher’s daughter.
I believe she recognizes me but as we fail to
acknowledge this, the moment passes and we shake
as two strangers. One hell of a grip.

“Any idea how much trouble a kid can get into with
only a bus pass?” she says. “I sew five-dollar bills into
the lining of his pants so he’s not penniless.”

“What’s this about him being a vampire?”

“Dad lets him watch monster movies.”

“Mom doesn’t approve?”

“Oh, I’m not his mother.”

I say goodbye. Head home. The sky’s composed
of overlapping orange- to blood-coloured curtains
when my own son pulls into the complex lot. Driving
a shark-grey Olds. Flames lick off the wheel wells.
Haven’t seen him in two years and three before
that. My apartment’s a shambles. Grab Lucky Lager
bottles and sleeve them in the nearest two-four case.
Colin’s fist hammers the door.

“Since when do you lock it, Daddio?”

As if he visited weekly and this is a fresh wrinkle.
I’m sixty. Colin was born when I was twenty-five. The
mathematics bear out in the creases of his face and
the calcified humps of his knuckles. His left cheek’s
caved inwards below his eye. Happened years back
when he jumped eleven busses at the Merritville
Speedway, misjudged the landing and crushed his
skull off the bars. His helmet split in half—helmets
are designed to split under pressure; otherwise, you
slip it off and inside’s red goo—as his body ragdolled
over the front tire. He survived, as he’s survived the
flaming rings of death and sundry smashups he calls
a career. Hair flecked with white. Nothing like your
son’s hair coming in grey to make you feel fossilized.
Blue eyes, his mother’s, gone pale round the edges.
Leather jacket with “Brink Of, Inc” stenciled on the
back. Ragged cracks like tiny mouths at the elbows.

He’s got a young guy in tow. Look of an Upper
Canadian boarding school preppie. Jeans with
scorpions embroidered down each leg. Dreadlocked
hair. Puppydoggin’ Colin’s heels. My son draws me
into a rough hug. His fingers trace my spine clinically.

“This is Parkhurst,” he says. “He’s writing my
biography.”

The kid biographer smiles. You’d think we’d
shared a moment.

“What’s that doing out, Dad?”

That
is a sand-cast West Highland Terrier. Its
head got busted off by vandals but I epoxied it back
on. Colin’s mother collected Westie paraphernalia.
We had a live one but he went young of liver failure
and convinced my wife she was snakebitten as a pet
owner. Her accumulation had been slow and it was
only afterwards, sitting in a house full of effigies,
that I realized how ardent a collector she’d been.

“Pretty morbid,” says Colin.

The cancer ate away her sense of things. Last few
months she lived in a terminal dreamworld: drugs,
mainly, plus the disease chewing into the wires of
her brain. She wasn’t wholly my wife. She’d damn me
for thinking otherwise. During this time, she—
“Mom treated that dog like it was real,” Colin
tells Parkhurst. “Fed it biscuits. Don’t know why
you’d want it around.”

My son’s generation has a manner of plainspeaking that comes off as casual brutality. Why do I
keep it? It maintains a vision. Not of my wife feeding
a sculpture because her brain was so corrupted she
couldn’t tell it from a real dog. It’s that she tried to
nurture anything at all. Out of all the hours spent
with her in good health, why would he conjure the
scene of his mother feeding a sculpted dog?
“You want me to throw a towel over it?”
“A man does as he likes in his own home.”
“Gee, you’re a prince amongst men.”

Colin looks raggedy and he looks dog tired. Sad,
I’d say—not pitiful: even mummified in bandages in
this or that hospital, the boy’s never been that—but
depressed. I
could
cover it . . . why should I? Where’s
he been? Dog could damnwell stay.

“How did you find me?”

“We stopped in for an eye-opener at the Queenston
Motel. There was Fletcher Burger propping up a
stool. Poor guy’s looking like ten pounds of shit in a
five-pound bag.”

He glances at Parkhurst to ensure he’s transcribed
this morsel of wit.

“What brings you?”

“Can’t I visit my Pops?”

Already sick of the tension. Wish I had a beer
but balk at drinking in front of my kid and besides,
I’m pretty sure they’re all drank up. He shifts on his
rump and, with reticence or the nearest to it my son
might ever draw, says: “I’m going over.”

Sarah Court
, where Colin grew up, kids had pet
squirrels.

My neurosurgeon neighbour Frank Saberhagen
cut down a tree. A clutch of baby squirrels tumbled
out. The doctor’s corgi devoured a few before Clara
Russell’s sheepdog rescued the remainder. Our kids
took them in. The hardware store had a run on
heatlamps.

Semi-domesticated squirrels roamed the court.
A virulent strain of cestoda, a parasitic flatworm,
infested their guts. Saberhagen saw his son Nick
clawing his keister and organized for the Inoculation
Wagon. To make sure our kids were infected we had
to bring samples.

Neighbours
idling
on
the
sidewalk
with
tupperware containers or ice cream tubs containing
our offsprings’ turds. Everybody shamefaced except
Saberhagen, who took evident pride in his son’s
heroic sample. Wasn’t flashing it around or anything
so crass but you could tell. Everyone felt sorry for his
son Nick, who went on to become a boxer but not a
very good one.

The Inoculation Wagon: room enough for Colin,
myself, a nurse. Colin hopped on the butcherpapered bench. Shivered. Two kinds of shivers: the
fear-shiver and the shiver of anticipation. First time
I’d ever marked a clear distinction.

“This is Verminox,” the nurse told Colin.

“What’s it do?”

“It’s a bit of a disease. We inject you with a teenytiny bit, your body fights it. The worms can’t fight. They die.”

“Gonna make me sick?”

“A little sick so you won’t get a lot sick.”

Colin rucked his sleeve up. Fascinated he’d be infected. The nurse gave me a look. But it was
heartening to see my boy cleansed of fear. All the
other pansy kids blubbering as my son practically
jumped
onto that hogsticker.

Later I recognized parents should be thankful
their kid is like everyone else’s in the most critical
ways. Pricked with a needle, they cry.

“A prototype
, Pops.”

“Prototype? It’s a plastic oil drum.”

“I got people working on a better one.”

Ball’s Falls is located off old highway 24 in the shadow of the escarpment. The sun slants through
clifftop pines highlighting the schist trickling
through the rockface. Only vehicle in the lot is a
delivery van. SWEETS FOR THE SWEET on its
flank. Bark on silver birches peeling like the skin of
blistered feet.

Colin boots the drum down the drywash where a
waterwheel churns the creek. Parkhurst has pillows
stolen from the Four Diamonds motel where they’ve
been shacked up. Next to the KOA campground so
when funds run short it will be a painless transition.
Colin’s earned a chunk over the years: those TV
specials in the ’90s, action dolls, video games. Tells
me he’s been working the state fair circuit lately.
Jumping junked cars in razed Iowa cornfields.
Junked cars in Idaho potato patches.

“You got scientists building you another drum?”
I ask. “What, it’s going to have non-motel pillows for
superior cushioning?”

“I got people, Pops.”

“Don’t call me that. Pops. Like I’m running a malt
shop.”

“You’ll see it.”

“Who says?”

I’ll see it. Take this morning: said I wouldn’t
come but here I am. My refusal wouldn’t stop it
happening. What if he busts a leg? Pulverizes his
spine? Parkhurst bawling into his ratty mop of hair.
The real thumbscrews part is that Colin knows he’s
putting me in a bind.