Sarah Court (20 page)

“Look at yourself,” he said, forcing me to look
at my chalked outline. “Disproportionate as hell.
Midget-legged but long-armed. A gorilla’d be jealous
of that wingspan. So
use
it. Keep your opponent at
bay. Otherwise I’ll be chalking your outline inside
the ring. After you’ve been knocked onto queer
street.”

This was Frank Saberhagen’s idea of constructive
encouragement. He missed his calling as a motivational
author; his unwritten bestseller’s title could have been:
Get Tough, Moron!—The
SABERHAGEN Advantage
.

Another time we’re at the boxing club. I’m sparring
with Mateusz Krawiec. My father’s in my corner.
Mateusz’s dad, Vaclav, is in the corner opposite.
Vaclav was at that time the reigning “Sausage King”
of southern Ontario: his Polonia kielbasa won the
competition held every summer in Montebello Park.
Dad felt Vaclav’s win had given him a swollen head.
Me and Mateusz went through the usual paces—
Mateusz now works at Nabisco as a safety inspector;
cute Polish wife, two kids—both of us evenly
matched except that he was a southpaw. He kept
giving me the Fitzsimmon’s shift to bounce stinging
lefts off the bridge of my nose.

“Overhand right!” Dad hollered. “Shift with him,
then go smashmouth on his ass. O.T.S.S.!”

O.T.S.S.: Only The Strong Survive. Shortly
thereafter, Mateusz battered me with an accidental
low blow.

“Call your kid the Foul Pole,” my father cracked.

Vaclav offered a deadpan: “Jah, Foul, ha-ha, jah.”
Something was percolating, but with my father
you had to wait and see what permutation his
unreasoning animus would take.

When a session ends it was customary for trainers
to shake hands. My father stepped through the ropes
with menace in mind. Butcher versus doctor. Their
professions bore out physically. My dad was tentpolelimbed and spider-fingered. Kraweic looked like he
split hog femurs with a friction-taped axe. You really
couldn’t beat my father for unadulterated perversity
of character.

“Hey, Sausage King,” he said. “You’re brownbagging it today. My compliments.”

“Vhat?”

“You’re brown-bagging it,” Dad said amiably.

“Here’s a sackful of knuckle sandwiches.”

In his defence it was the eighties, when the term
“knuckle sandwich” was not hopelessly outdated.
But what he did next was indefensible: took a wild,
looping swing at the Sausage King. Should you find
these circumstances improbable, all I can say is that
if you knew Frank Saberhagen, you’d know he defies
most sane probabilities every day of his life.
Dad’s fist pelted Vaclav’s ear. “
Vhat
?” said the
Sausage King. I wondered if he was having a tough
time hearing out of his punched ear or if, more likely,
he was merely shocked at being hit by this mouthy
fucking twerp. While Vaclav pursued my father in a
blooded rage, Mateusz and I felt compelled to square
off again. I shifted this time. Came over with my
right. Gloves off, no headgear. I crushed the poor
sap’s nose. Blood mushroomed between Mateusz’s
fingers. Vaclav ceased his pursuit of my father to
tend to his son.

“Overhand right, Nick!” Dad said triumphantly.

“Told you.”

That’s how my father operates. He’ll force you
into positions where you must stand beside him.
Now it’s become a private joke. Whenever one of us
gets on the other’s nerves, it’ll be: “Someone’s fixing
to feast on the brown bag special.”

“Wouldn’t it have been great,” he said afterwards,
“if I’d said the bag lunch line then nailed him
proper?”

There are points in time you recognize your father
as holding none of the special powers that as a child
you believed he must. To see at heart he is careless
and as often as not confused, that he smashes up
things and people and it isn’t that he doesn’t care so
much as he’s done it enough to know he is more than
capable of it and not entirely able to correct what he’s
set wrong. Plus he’s a bastard. He’s my dad, so I can
say it. Cavernously narcissistic.

We lived on a block with a teenage halfway house
and the terminally unemployable Fletcher Burger.
He savoured the idea of living amongst his financial
inferiors. But I’ve had more fun in his company than
any other human being. If you conceptualize fun
as a string of adrenaline dumps. But it’s dangerous
when the merrymaker becomes convinced that’s all
he need ever provide. As he’d inflicted himself upon
me, made his pursuits mine, he’d hedged the odds
of us sharing more “moments” than Mom and I.

Though I’d never claim that as his clear-sighted aim.
Grown men weep at his feet for what he does in
the operating theatre. A saviour complex has to fuck
with a man’s head. But he realizes he’s an asshole.

Regarding my mother: “Don’t know why she bothers
with me, Nick.” In grade school I’d come home to
a message on the answering machine from Mom,
who Dad said had taken a “personal vacation”:
You
goddamn stinking shit. Don’t call, don’t come for me. You
get away, you just stay away . . . Frank?
She sounded
lost. Forsaken.
Frank . . . ?
You hear people claim
they’re “crazy in love.” Plenty of us, yeah, we are.
Chemicals exploding in our brains. Perpetually
doing the wrong things with the wrong people for
the wrong reasons. A chain of bad judgements and
miscalculations: ten, fifteen years frittered away. I
don’t want to come off as a killjoy. But only the most
deluded wouldn’t be a little skeptical, right?
My father loves me. I know this much. But his love
is brash and undisciplined and inwardly focused.
He needs it to reflect back upon itself. Creatures of
colossal egotism cannot simply give something away.
My mother said once: “I always hope you understand
how much I love you.” I do, partly as it exists in
opposition to how my father expresses it. Mom’s is
a practical love with one obvious motive: to protect
what she’s put on this earth. A care-packages-ofboxer-shorts-and-mac-and-cheese sort of love. With

Dad’s I’m always fighting somebody. Him, mainly.
Dad knows I love Mom more. I’ve calibrated
this using those means we use to reach such
understandings and yes, I do. I think he’s okay with
it, too. In order for me to love him equally he’d be
forced into concessions he has consistently proven
himself unwilling to make.

I book
the week of Dylan’s suspension off. Each
morning I wake him he hisses: “Zee light! Yar, zee
light, she burns!” He’s drawn a skull-and-crossbones
on his eyepatch and sporadically fancies himself a
pirate. A vampire pirate: synergy!

We go grocery shopping at Superstore. Dylan
wanders into women’s clothing and returns wearing
a bra. The proverbial over-the-shoulder boulder
holder, it hangs to his bellybutton. Any woman
wearing such a contraption would occasion my father
to note: “Whoa—it’s a dead heat in a zeppelin race.”

“Put it back.”

“For Mom?”

“Not her size. But it pulls your whole look
together.”

This only encourages him to vamp it up. He struts
down the shampoo aisle and performs a high-toed
buttonhook round a Prell display, grabbing a bottle as
a microphone to launch into “Viva Las Vegas,” which
he’d heard that Elvis impersonator sing. A woman
my age with no ring laughs. I am cognizant of using
my son as a lure. His Vampire phase is waning. These
in-between spells, casting about for a new persona,
I’m most vigilant. Next he’ll be a rocket-powered
tree sloth or a cannibal banana who eats nothing but
his brother and sister bananas.

“These are the cheapest toothbrushes you can
buy,” he says, showing me one.

“You have a toothbrush. You want that one?”

He gawps at me as though I’ve perpetrated some
arcane form of child abuse. I thought he was bargainshopping.

I pick up a massive block of toilet paper, thirty-six
rolls. On up the soft drink aisle for two cases of diet
cream soda. The ringless woman comes down the
aisle. Her eyes fall upon my cart and I’m horrified
she’s got the impression my life consists of drinking
diet soda on my enormous toilet. For a full decade I
never had one such thought. The band on my finger
stood as proof to womankind: one of you accepts
me. All prospects of remedy are exhausting in mere
conception. Find a sitter for Dylan to spring me for a
night at Fredo’s under the Niagara Skyway, rucking
in with the basset-eyed divorcees and sundry
wastoids, clamouring for Ms. Right, Ms. Right Now,
whatever’s on the hoof. Cruising Toys R Us for single
moms. Explaining it to my son: “This is Daddy’s new
friend, Trixy. We met at a speed-dating junket down
the Lucky Bingo. She’ll be sleeping on Mommy’s side
of the bed strictly on a trial basis . . .”

Dylan presses his lips to a pack of cheap blade
steaks and whispers: “Fresh blood.” In produce he
gets on hands and knees reaching under a display
of coloured potatoes. They’re severely reduced and,
judging by the smell, well on their way to becoming
vodka. He comes up with a dented can of mushrooms
cowled in spiderwebs.

“See?” As if I’d doubted his gathering instincts.
“Can we get them?”

“The can’s bulgy. You’ll get botulism.” Wrap
both hands round my throat, pretend I’m throttling
myself. “
Gak
! Plus you don’t even like mushrooms.”

He darts down the adjacent aisle, Confectionary,
and returns while I’m comparing sodium contents
on warring brands of cornflakes.

“Dad! Daddy-Daddy-DaddyDaddyDa—”

“What, Dylan? What the hell is it?”

He drops the tub of gummy worms on a low shelf.
Prods it between boxes of Mini-Wheats with his toe.
Saws an arm across his nose.

“I love you.”

Next he spies boxes of Animal Crackers.

“Can we go to the zoo?”

“You’re not on vacation, sport-o. You’re being
punished, remember?”

“Like a field trip. To give me knowledge.”

“How about the butterfly conservatory?”

He traces a finger round the lion’s head on the
cracker box. “Butterflies . . .”

“Fine. The zoo.”

The next day is cool and edged with coming
snows. Clouds cast indistinct shadows on Stoney
Creek grape fields where field hands tend canebrake
fires. Dylan’s in full-on vampire mode.

“Listen to zee creatures of zee avternoon,” he says
as we drive south on the four-lane highway. “Vhat
beeoootivul music zey make.”

“I’m taking my son to the zoo. Not a vampire.
Besides, a vampire’s a scummy creature. They got to
kill to live.”

“What if you keep victims in your basement?
Take their blood out with a needle?”

“Bleeding prisoners? Worse.”

Offseason
zoos
are
depressing.
Polar bears
with hotspotted fur snuffle at frozen blocks of
fish bobbing in the oily water of their enclosure.
The monkey house viewing area is empty. Piped-in
jungle noises: roar of lion, caw of toucan, the steady
beat of bongos as you hear in films where pithhatted explorers get cooked in cauldrons by needletoothed headhunters. The poor monkeys look as if
they’ve been plucked off banyan trees in their native
lands, dropped into a sack and dumped here minutes
prior to our arrival. One swings down to the floor
of its enclosure and creeps forward on its belly. It’s
scrabbling through the bars at a wad of chewed gum
balled up in its wrapper.

Dylan presses his forehead to my hip. “Can I give
him it?”

“Monkeys shouldn’t chew gum.”

Instead we sprinkle puppy chow from a coin-op
dispenser in the carp pond. Dylan’s fascinated by the
voracious surges of their liquid pewter bodies.

“That thing with Missus T,” I say. “What made
you do it, Dill?”

“It was a dare.”

“Did you enjoy it? The rubbing? If you did . . .
you’re at an age of weird body feelings. Confusing
stuff. You can talk to me, right?”

“I talk to Mom on the phone.”

“Who dared you? Cassie Mulligan?”

“Sadie.”

“Is she in your class, this Sadie?”

“She’s my online friend.”

“How old is she?”

“A little older than me. She’s very . . . pretty?”

“Her photo on the computer screen, you mean.
How did you meet?”

“She friended me. On MySpace.”

“And
she
told
you
to
do
that
to
Missus
Trupholme?”

“It’d be funny to play a joke on my teacher. Then
Cassie could film it.”

“Cassie’s friends with Sadie, too?”

“Sadie’s friends with everybody.” He bites his lip.
“Don’t tell anyone.”

How could it be possible that someone nobody
has seen is the most popular person in my son’s
class?

“Dill, you’ve got to stop interacting with this
person. Are you listening? Want me to chuck your
computer in the creek?”

“Computers at school. Everywhere.”

“This is not me trying to hurt you.”

“You let Cassie punch me.”

“God. Where’d that come from? Sadie could be
some filthy old man in a basement.”

“Can we go see Mommy?”

“Is that why you wanted to come to Toronto—to
visit your mother?”

“We’re close by. You could come.”

“No, I couldn’t. Listen, bud, Mom needs time
alone.”

“Alone from me?”

“Yes. No.” Pat his knee. An ineffectual but easy
gesture. “Not you.”

“Doesn’t she love you anymore?”