Sarah Court (22 page)

“You got mouths to feed?”

“My own. And my dog, who I’m fixing to get back.
So, you horny?”

“Not really. Anymore.”

“We could give it a whirl. What’re you wearing?”

“A parka and earmuffs. Hey, listen—you ever go
through a stage where everything comes apart at
once?”

“Pal, you’re talking to a middle-aged male
phonesex provider.”

“I just got back from the hospital. A friend I’ve
known forever, she’s been hurt. Her father . . . my
dad. Dads. Close with yours?”

“He’s dead now.”

“I’m sorry. My own boy says he hates me. What
made him hate me? But I think, well, I hate my own
dad sometimes. More than some. You got kids?”

“Me? No. Crimped urethral tube. Childhood soccer
mishap. My wife left me over it.”

“Over a crimped urethra?”

He says: “Other shenanigans, too.”

“My ex-wife,” I say. “This one morning we woke
up. I told her how gorgeous she looked first thing.”

“Right. No makeup, the tousled hair.”

“Tousled, yeah. She gave me this arch look and
asked me how long I’d taken to think up that line.
But it just came to me. After that I felt compelled
to . . . only so many times you can tell someone they’re
beautiful and not have it take on the ring of
redundancy, right? After awhile you hope it’s a
given.”

“My ex took up with a greasy surgeon. I’m gonna
carve him out a new asshole one of these days and
you can take that to the
bank
.”

“What am I paying sixty-nine cents for?”

“Sixty-nine cents is the connection fee. This is
running you five bucks a minute.”

“Then listen to me.”

“I hear you. Give it to me, baby. Lay it on me,
stud.”

“For Christ’s sakes. I’m trying to say something
important so—would you? Anticipate my needs. Act
professional.”

“Sorry.”

“Hate, hate, hate. I’ve had more thrust upon me
the past months than the rest of my life combined.
I’m not a guy people should hate, am I?”

“You sound nice. Intense. A bit like your dad.”

“What?”

“I said a bit like my dad.”

“You
know
something?
You’re
a
piss-poor
phonesex provider.”

“I know.”

“I’m hanging up.”

“I sort of knew that, too.”

When
Dylan was three he caught poison ivy at
Martindale pond.

The pond lies in a gully where an old roadway
washes out. I took him fishing. We sat onshore
amongst old catfishers perched on grease tubs with
poles clasped in liquorice-root fingers. He’d get
bored and go romping in the woods. I’d ascribed to
an immersion theory of child rearing at the time.
Let him lick a dog. Put bugs in his mouth. Build that
immune system.

The poison ivy started as splotches on his
thighs. Threads crept to his groin. He clawed it onto
his stomach up to his armpits. The pediatrician
prescribed calamine lotion. Dylan still had fits. Dad
gave me lotion laced with topical anaesthetic.

I stood him in the bathtub, naked. My fingers
went wherever ivy lurked: toes, thighs, belly. Felt odd
doing that but he was so trusting. I worked lotion
into his back. Cleft of his bum. I felt so close to him.
A casual intimacy I thought could go on forever. To
this day I’ll feel it: a phantom
thack-thack
on my bare
palms. My fingertips so close to his heart.

Only
Danny and Cassie Mulligan show up to my
Bullying Symposium.

Mulligan had sat down with Trupholme’s class
to talk about Internet predators. Sadie in particular.
One of the more awkward experiences of his life,
he told me. “Soon as I spoke her name, this eerie
stillness. Like that movie,
Village of the Damned
.
Kids with glowing blue eyes and test-pattern faces.”
Afterwards he’d handed out invitations to this
Symposium, which had been my idea.

My son’s school days have since turned hellish.
He was the one who ratted out “Secret Sadie” to the
grownups. Now he was being teased mercilessly in
the insidious ways modern technology affords: IMs,
text messages. Someone spat in his pencil case. When
I picked him up yesterday he had a wad of grape gum
stuck in his hair. It took half a jar of peanut butter to
untangle it.

During recess I’d idled in my car overlooking the
playground. Dylan ate Nerds alone on the teetertotter. Behind the fence stood a woman. Rainboots
and an umbrella on a sunny day. A man dressed
like that you’d think was a molester. Could be her
womb was barren. I trailed her down the street
before recognizing her as Patience Nanavatti, the
fireworker’s daughter.

On the day of the Symposium I lead the Mulligans
into my family room. Finger sandwiches in a ruffled
plastic tray. Dylan’s on the sofa. No cape. The other
day I asked after his new persona. He said, “I’m
nobody. Just stupid old me.” His mother’s looking
into having him finish the school year in Toronto.

“You should’ve called everyone’s parents, Nick, to
make sure they got the invites.”

Mulligan’s the sort of guy who, you’re waiting for
an elevator, he’ll push the button again. Even though
you’ve already pushed it. Even though it’s lit.

The DVD I’d taken out from the library is called:
Bullies: Pain in the Brain
. The cast is comprised of little
Aryans. An omniscient narrator asks questions:

“Jonathan, is your gang fun?”

Jonathan: “It’s super. I used to be in a different
gang but they started bullying. I didn’t feel right
about that, so I left and started my own gang!”
Calliope music kicks up.

Jonathan dances with the members of his new
gang. They sit down to read books quietly.

”What do you know about bullying, Amy?”

Amy: “I was in a gang that started bullying. It
was hard not to join in when they picked on others.”
This hardened ex-gang member is a seven-year-old
in barrettes and a turtleneck sweater. What gang
could she possibly belong to? The Thumb Suckers?
The Bedwetters? After thirty minutes the ex-bullies
and ex-victims form a conga line and dance off the
edge of the screen to “Islands in the Stream.”

Afterwards Mulligan shoos Cassie and Dylan
outside. We head upstairs to Dylan’s computer. He
surfs to Youtube. Types ‘Trupholme Joke’ in the
search box. One result. He clicks the video. It’s
Dylan rubbing against his teacher. A bundle of pixels
available to anonymous eyes. Mulligan scrolls to the
comments.

I hate u, dylan! looozer!

He should die . . . lolz!!

And, from SECRETSADIE:

Omg! what a total drip! if I wuz him, i’d kill myself
and get it over with!

It wrenches my heart to see such hatred. So
bloodless. Cowardly. I want to seek out their fathers.
Those who’ve fostered under their roofs such horrid
monsters. Bash them to bone paste.

“I sent it onto the Internet crime division. How’s
Dylan’s frame of mind?”

“He’s
ten,
Dan.
Overweight.
Picked
on
in
cyberspace. This one.” Pointing at the cutesy moniker
of SECRETSADIE. “Is encouraging him to . . .”

Out in the backyard Dylan pulls the padded
seatcover off a lawn recliner. Earwigs scuttle into
patio cracks. Cassie shrieks. I should have put the
patio furniture in the shed by now. My wife usually
reminds me.

Dan clicks on SECRETSADIE to open a fresh
window:
Clips viewed by this poster
. He clicks the only
other video:
Colin “Brink Of ” Hill NF Stunt
.

The scene opens on the Falls. Grainy footage
of Wesley Hill in his boat. The angle zooms out to
spectators clustered along the railing. In the left
corner, fleetingly, I catch sight of myself and Abby
crossing the road. The viewfinder sweeps Goat
Island and the Skylon Tower. Pink flakes congest
the air. The lens climbs Clifton Hill to zoom on a
construction site. I see Dylan in a mesh of raw girders
on a concrete foundation slab. He’s ripping with his
bare hands at a giant plastic-wrapped insulation
brick. He is joined by Jeffrey, Mama’s boy. Together
they tear at the bricks. The camera captures the
steel filigree of a knife in Jeffrey’s hand. My son is
obscured by pink. The vantage returns to the river,
where Colin Hill’s barrel goes over the cataract. The
camera pans the basin, shifts abruptly to the barrel
floating past the spume. It’s broken open. Colin’s arm
is a white branch crooked over the rim. Wesley Hill
enters the frame. He lays his son’s body in the belly
of the boat. Whatever clothes Colin was wearing had
been sucked off by the water. A thatch of dark pubic
hair and the rest of his body is whitish-blue. His legs
are all twisted together like a figure skater’s in midSalchow.

“Criminal mischief,” says Mulligan, I guess in
reference to Dylan’s fibreglass-ripping. “Not that
your son’s old enough to be charged. It just doesn’t
seem something a well-adjusted ten-year-old would
do. You know the man he’s with?”

“Jeffrey, yeah. He used to live down the street.”

“From here?”

“No. As kids. On Sarah Court.”

Back downstairs Mulligan tells our kids they
have to stick together. Rough lately, he knows, but
your Dads will fix things. Cassie asks if we’ll come
to school and beat up the bullies. Dan places a hand
atop his daughter’s head. His fingertips pulse like a
heartbeat.

“What’s this?”

Cassie grits her teeth. “What?”

“A brain sucker. What’s it doing?”

“I dunno.”

“Starving.” He kisses her head where his hand
had been. “Beat them up yourself.”

That evening I take Dylan to his grandfather’s
house. I find him on the back porch with Fletcher
Burger. The two of them could’ve crawled out of
the same bottle. Despite their drunkenness there’s
evidence—a bodily gravity between them—of a
serious conversation having taken place.

“The champ!” Fletcher rocks boozily to his feet.
“And the little champ!”

I hug him. It comes as a surprise to both of us.
That he’s sitting here, drunk, while his daughter’s in
the hospital . . . this enrages me.

“What are you two talking about?” I say.

“Well,” Dad says, “Fletcher here has just finished
giving me an object lesson in cowardice.”

Fletcher heads home shortly after this. Dylan
goes inside to watch television.

“He’s not wearing the cape.”

“He’s quits with that.”

“Weird habit. That girl folded him up like a K-Way
jacket in the ring.”

I’m
amazed
at
my
father’s
ability
to
link
unattached grievances into a single incoherent
insult. No use getting my dander up. Arguing
with him is like eating charcoal briquettes: stupid,
pointless, and ultimately quite painful.

“Fletcher and I were talking about being fathers,”
he says to break the silence. “How hard can it be,
you know? The butcher’s a father. The plumber.
Mailmen.”

“And, what—you failed?”

Now it’s Frank Saberhagen’s turn to wallow in
silence.

“My last fight I lost to a pipefitter from
Coldwater,” I say.

“Didn’t have to be your last.”

“We fought at the Lucky Bingo. The whatever it
is, scoreboard, was still lit up from the last game that
afternoon. B-17. I-52. He drove up on a Saturday. No
cutman. No cornerman. By himself. Knocked me out
Saturday night and drove home Sunday. He was back
fitting pipes Monday morning. I was never going to
be the middleweight champ. Not of the world. Not
of anyplace.”

“You’ll never convince me of that.”

Ride the horse until it dies
. A phrase you’ll hear
around clubs. It’s often spoken by trainers behind
their boxers’ backs. Ride the horse until it cannot
prove its worth or meet its stable costs. If it’s not
dead, cut it loose. The bloody unvarnished truth of
what happens everyday in many walks of life. You
wish that horse no ill will but business is business.

Truth is, I could accept and even get behind that
reasoning. But it’s nine shades of brutal when your
own father’s your jockey.

“I was a boxer like the guy who strums guitar
Monday nights at Starbucks is a musician.”

“You’ll never get me to see it that way.”

“Yeah, Dad. I know.”

Work
keeps me on the road. I fly to Hawaii to watch
fifteen rust-acned fishing trawlers get dynamited
off the coast to serve as fish habitats; it earned the
cardholder several million points when written off
as a charitable donation. To London for the sale of
Damien Hirst’s “The Physical Impossibility of Death
in the Mind of Someone Living”—a thresher shark
preserved in 4,666 gallons of formaldehyde—at
Harrod’s. To Florida to cut up Conrad Black’s card.
I take exquisite joy in this. When American Express
dispatched me to hand-deliver his card years ago,
Conrad held it against his chest. “Black”—tucking it
into his shirt pocket—“on Black.” I laughed, as I’d
assumed was his expectation. He told me not to act
like a “jumped-up little twerp and sycophant.” I was
later dispatched to oversee his purchase of Bonkers,
a Glen of Imaal Terrier that cost 750,000 British
pounds. Conrad bought it for his second wife, who
fussed over it all of three weeks before offloading
it on one of the Puerto Rican housekeepers at their
Palm Beach estate.