Sarah Court (3 page)

He boots the drum down a gulch littered with
sunbleached paper cups. We reach the shallows near
the head of the falls. Water clear over the flat shale
bottom. Minnows dart and settle. A fifty-foot drop
into a deep rock amphitheater. My son strips to his
skivs. Goddammit, it’s autumn. What’s the purpose
in him going over as he entered this world? Wearing
ballhugger Y-fronts—a banana hammock, I guess
you’d have to call it—presenting the shrivelled
definition of his privates. Gawking at my kid’s
frightened turtle of a wiener. Hell’s the matter with
me?

“It’s not watertight,” he tells me. “Why ride home
with wet clothes?”

My son, the pragmatic daredevil. Settling into
the drum, he sighs. Can’t tell if it’s voluntary or if
the compression of those old hurts forces it out.

Muffled laughter as the drum bobs into the
current. Follow it upcreek, skipping over rocks with
a galloping heart until it bottoms out at the head
of the falls. Water booms over the creek-neck but
Colin’s hooting like a wild bastard. I find a strong
branch. Goddamn, sixty years old and aiming to tip
my half-naked son over a waterfall in an oil drum.
The sun’s at an angle where I see him through the
blue plastic: an embryo inside an egg held up to a
flame.

Water sprays. Parkhurst’s overbalanced with one
boot submerged in the creek. The stone he’s thrown
is sand-coloured, huge, and sharp. It could have
easily punctured the drum.

“What to Christ were you thinking?”

Parkhurst offers the docile smile of a moron. A
surge sweeps the drum over. I hightail it down steps
erected by the Ontario Tourism Board. The drum
floats near the basin’s shore. Lid popped off. Colin
crawling out like some zombie from its grave. Soaked
skivs hanging off his rawbone ass. Water-thinned
blood trickling out both nostrils. Smiling but that’s
no sign of anything.

“Give me your hand.”

He crawls out under his own steam. On the high
side of the basin a deer watches in a poplar stand.
Tiny red spider mites teem around each of its eyes,
so many as to give the impression it’s weeping blood.
Colin’s shivering. Nobody thought to bring a blanket.

Back in the truck I get the heater pumping.
Parkhurst I banish to the bed.

“I want you there.”

“I’m retired.”

“So un-retire, Daddio.”

Heat’s
making
me
sluggish.
Flask’s
in
the
glovebox but it’s too early for that sort of a pick-meup in the company of my kid.

“A hell of a thing to ask, sonnio.”

He’s genuinely baffled. “All’s you got to do is fish
me out.”

A reporter
once asked: “When’s the last time you
saw your son scared?”

I said that must have been at his circumcision. It
was taken as a joke.

One time he had a baby tooth hanging by a
strip of sinew. He tied it to a length of dental floss,
attached the trailing end a doorknob, tore it out.
That night he locked himself in the bathroom and
tore out four more. Came out looking like a Gatineau
junior hockey league goon. He wrapped his teeth in
tinfoil for the fairy. My wife figured a fiver ought to
cover it.

Another time on a Cub Scout camping trip. My
neighbour
Frank
Saberhagen
was
scoutmaster,
myself a chaperone. Nighttime round the fire. Boys
tossing pine cones on the flames to hear sap hiss.

“The Nepalese army trained the most fearsome
warriors in the world,” Saberhagen went. “The
Gurkhas. Make the Marines look like a pack of
ninnies. They got this knife, the kherkis, so long and
wickedly sharp victims see their own neck spurting
blood as they die. What nobody knows is a planeload
of Gurkhas crashed on this site years ago.”

For a man who’d sworn the Hippocratic oath,
Frank was unusually irresponsible.

“Who knows if they’re still alive? What the
Gurkhas do is sneak into camp at night and feel your
boots. If they’re laced over-under-over, they identify
you as a friend. But if they’re laced straight across,
they pull out their big ole kherkis and”—drawing a
thumb across his throat—“you see your own bloody
neck stump as you die.”

Afterwards I upbraided Saberhagen. He denied
any wrongdoing.

“The Ghurkas are real, Wes. Go look it up.”

The boys all re-laced their shoes over-under-over.
I assumed Colin had done likewise until I saw his
boots outside his tent the following morning. Laced
straight across.

Somewhere inside myself I knew he’d been up
all night, Swiss Army knife clutched in one hand,
listening for the
scrunch-scrunch
of feet on dead
leaves.

I’m
in the truck with Colin’s biographer, Parkhurst.
Shorthills provincial park. Sulphur Springs road.
A weekly circuit. Fletcher Burger has been tagging
along since his troubles but he didn’t pick up when
I rang this morning. Parkhurst overheard and
asked to tag along. I’d prefer to share my truck with
Typhoid Mary.

Colin’s crashing on my couch. Parkhurst curled
at his feet like an Irish setter. Colin’s working my
phone to drum up media. A “strong maybe” from
a cub reporter at the
Globe and Mail
. Wondrous
he’d consider committing to the two-hour drive to
witness my son heave himself off the face of the
earth. My involvement’s being hyped.

“Yeah, yeah. Been at it thirty years,” Colin’s
saying to anyone who’ll listen. “His dad before and
his dad before that. He’ll be there to drag whatever’s
left out . . .”

The sun slits through roadside poplars. Feel
of cocktail swords stabbing my corneas. Scan for
bodies: tough on corduroy roads as they get squashed
between raw timbers and all’s you can identify them
by is the crushed eggshell of their skulls. Parkhurst
smiling that sunny mongoloid’s smile. A face pocked
with old acne scars looking like a bag of suet pecked
at by hungry jays. By no means charitable but some
men invite uncharitable descriptions. Snap on the
radio. If it’s quiet enough I might hear the kid’s
thoughts, which I envision as sounding much like a
boom microphone set inside a tub of mealworms.

Other night I drag myself out of bed in the wee
witching hours. Lumbago playing havoc with my
spine. Went to the fridge for a barley pop. There
was Parkhurst standing over my son. When I asked
what he was doing he gave me his doleful emptyheaded look.

“Thought he’d stop breathing, or . . .”

A smashed septum made Colin snore loud as a leaf-blower. It hit me what the kid said. Not
stopped
breathing—as in, he was worried.
Stop
breathing—
as in, he wanted to witness the dying breath exit his
lungs.

If a man makes his living courting death, is it any
surprise he should acquire as companion a human
maggot waiting to feast on the inevitable?

“Colin said you went to university,” he said now.

“Jot that down in your notebook, did you? I
majored in geology.”

“So why don’t you teach it, or . . .”

He’s one of those annoying nitwits who never
finishes a sentence.

“My wife got pregnant. Needed a job. I became an
employee of the Parks Commission.”

“Good money, or is it like . . .”

“I could walk into a Big Bee, buy a scratch-off
ticket, get three cherries and instantly make more
than I’ve ever made doing this. I weld, mainly.”

“Funny the way it’ll go.”

“Yep, it’s a regular rib-ticklin’ riot. My split sides
are always aching.”

“I know how that goes, or sorta like . . .”

Moron. I check up by a thatch of duckweed. A
possum had bumbled onto the road to avoid black
flies. Most get clipped by a fender and thrown clear
but this one got run over square. Hind end squashed.
Muzzle stuck with cockleburrs.

“Tourist Thoroughfare Maintenance” the Parks
Commission designates it, gussying up what is simply
road-kill duty. The grim sight of Mr. Possum here,
or Mr. Racoon or Ms. Badger or Monsieur Skunk—
any critter who goes jelly-kneed when pinned by
arc-sodium headlights—is a guaranteed vacationspoiler. Call me the merry maid of the roads.

I reach a shovel out the bed. Parkhurst’s kneeling
a foot from the creature. He fails to note the term
“playing possum” was coined after observing such
behaviour.

“Hold a mirror under its snout,” I tell him. “Fogs
up you’ll know it’s alive. The fact it’ll have torn your
throat to ribbons will be your second hint.”

He finds a stick. Stabs the possum’s flanks. The
animal rears up over its own squandered wreckage.
Crazed hissing noises. Its crack-glazed eyes make
me think of the Christmas tree ornaments Colin
made in grade school. Glass globes with tissue
paper paraffined over top. I found them years later,
shrunken tissue peeled back from the glass in veins.
The fucking kid pokes it again. Bringing my boot
down, I snap his stick. His face may’ve found its way
into the beast’s wheelhouse—jam it in a Cuisinart
for similar results—if I hadn’t shouldered him aside.

“We wanted to see if it was alive. One poke beyond
is being an asshole.”

The kill-box is the size of a laundry hamper.
Lightweight aluminum. Drill holes let the fumes go.
A slot-and-grove mechanism for bigger animals so’s
you can finagle their heads inside. Set the possum
in whole. Lock it down. Uncoil the hose. Fasten one
end over the tailpipe. Screw the trailing end onto
the connecting tube feeding the box. Slide onto the
driver’s seat. Goose the gas. Carbon dioxide pumps
in. Black slivers—possum claws—poke through the
drill-holes roped in smoke.

Colin
would send his mother and I news clippings.
One showed his body laid out as an anatomical
graph. Skinless, as rendered by some magazine’s
crackerjack graphics department.

The Wreckage of Daredevil Colin “Brink Of ” Hill.
Numbered arrows pointed to the bone-breaks and
contusions and pulped cartilage and shorn tendons
and detached retinas and assorted devastation. So
many goddamn arrows.

1. Brink Of tore his left kneecap off in a motocross
fiasco at the Tallahassee Motor Oval.

2. Brink Of knocked out seven teeth smashing
though a plate-glass window as Charles Bronson’s
stunt double in
Death Wish V: The Face of Death
.

Another time I got a package in the mail. A
video game unit with his game:
Daredevil
. He’d been
showing up on late-night talkshows. A TV stunt
spectacular where he’d recreated Evil Knieval’s
Snake River Gorge jump. I called him.

“Daddio!”

“Where are you?”

“Partying in Los Angeles!”

I
visualized
the
standard
LA
pool
with
underwater lights shimmering the surface, the same
pools over the Hollywood Hills so if you were to
observe from on high the landscape would resemble
a luminous coral fan. Bareassed girls, starlets as
they were known, swimming carefree but not truly,
needing their nakedness to be appreciated and the
party given a whimsical theme: Christmas in July;
Holiday Under the Sea. My son far away from the
stink of the killbox and the GM fabrication plant
where radial tire moulds are injection-moulded with
molten vulcanized rubber: that first nostrilful of air
entering Canadian Tire intensified twentyfold. Far
away from the rusted skies over the dry docks where
men bent the blue of acetylene torches to braise hulls
of ships whose prows would cleave the sea places
we never dreamt of going. When the whistle blew
we showered silently, white holes showing through
wetted hair where stray sparks burnt down to our
scalps. Colin achieved escape velocity. Who could
ever hold that against him?

“Try it, Dad. Try the game.”

I picked up the joystick. A digital version of Colin
tooled along on a motorbike. His voice came out the
speakers:

“Yee
haaaaaw!
C’mon, chicken-guts, give ’er some
gas!”

The bike went up a ramp, landed badly, tossed
Colin over the handlebars. He skipped along in a
broke-boned jig. A tiny ambulance sped across the
screen. GAME OVER.

“Ragdoll physics,” Colin said. “How they get me
flipping and flapping. Lifelike! A hit in Japan; they
love me over th—”

His phone cut out. Or I hung up. I don’t properly
recall.

The gal
, all of twenty, she’s up on the parquet stage
grinding her bits on a brass pole.

Pageboy hairdo, jet-black and futuristic like
an android’s haircut. Giving us goons that witchywoman stare they must teach at the stripper
academy. Lithe and firm-delted. Could’ve been
a gymnast or figure skater . . . my mind shouldn’t
have gone down that route because I’m imagining
her mother dropping her off at the rink with a pair
of pink skates hung over her shoulders. Eating a
Pop Tart. Now she’s up there in the buff doing the
higgeldy-piggeldy.

My son’s idea. He’s been making nice with my
neighbour, Diznee. Two of them passing goo-goo
eyes. While I don’t fancy sitting with Parkhurst
along pervert’s row at a ta-ta bar, well, here you’ll
find me. The jugged beer’s got a kinetic glow under
the black lights. Eerie, like quaffing toxic sludge.

Colin hits the toilet and on his way back sits at
another table with Nicholas Saberhagen, the exboxer and Frank’s son, and a man he introduces as
his client. Colin’s talking about his stunt tomorrow.
Nick says he’ll bring his own son. Apparently Nick
works for American Express. He’d recently returned
from a Russian oil spill where he’d seen a shark
washed up on the coast. His client—this odd old
duck with a face netted in wrinkles as if he’d slept
with it pressed against a roll of chicken wire—tells
a story.