Sarah Court (4 page)

“This was in southern Italy,” he starts, “by the sea.
On a twisting cobbled alley going up, up, up. Behind
me came a truck pulling a trailer. I pressed myself
against the alley wall to let it pass. The trailer held
a shark. A long, sleek, torsional creature. Enormous!
The skin round its eyes was wrinkly as an elephant’s.
It stunk of blood and the sea. Its gill-slits were dilated
and past their red flutterings was the wink of teeth.
Next the screech of tires and—I swear on my life!—
the shark flipped out of the trailer to slide, thrashing
and viciously alive, back down the street. A living
absurdity: the world’s finest predator skidding down
a cobbled alley. It careened into a wall and slid on a
sideways course, jaws snapping. Momentum carried
it down to a stone wall lined with trash sacks, which
it gnashed to shreds as the fishermen in the truck
ran with gaffing hooks and knives to finish the job.
This beautiful shark thrashing in sacks of trash,
hide stuck with potato peelings and junk leaflets. A
stone’s throw from the sea.”

I get rooked into paying the whole bill. Colin sold
it as an act of deep nobility. Please, good sirrah, let
me ante up for this gargantuan strip club bill! Jackrolled by my own flesh and blood. Won’t be able to
afford my phlebitis pills when the prescription runs
dry but que sera, sera and thank God for socialized
healthcare!

The three of us barrel into a cab. It cuts down
Bunting onto the QEW to Niagara Falls. The Falls lit
up green, red, and blue by strobelights. White water
kicking out into a greater darkness. A banner reads:
“
Brink Of,” World’s Greatest Stuntman!
We continue
along the river past the hydroelectric plant.

“Stop,” Colin says. “Stop here.”

The cab pulls into Marineland. This discount
SeaWorld owned by an old Czech who achieved local
fame by strangling an animal rights activist who
dramatically chained himself to the entrance gates.
Parkhurst’s passed out drunk. We lean him against a
tree. Looks as if he’s been shot and arranged
in situ
by a mafia bagman.

Along the back edge of the parking lot a flap
of chainlink peels away from the fence. I shoulder
underneath. My booze-lubed joints don’t note much
until a stab at the base of my spine tells me I’ll feel
it tomorrow.

“What are we doing, Colin? Seriously.”

He hugs me. First he’s done so in I don’t know how
long. Try not to read anything into it, him so fickle
with these intimacies and myself with no desire to
be sucked into his orbit—knowing it can happen,
bam
, that fast—but it feels so damn good.

The amphitheater tiers cast shadows round the
tank. Curves of white belly as killer whales glide past
the glass. A pair of whales landlocked in the middle
of Ontario. Thousands of miles to the nearest ocean.
Years back the third, Niska, chewed off a trainer’s leg.
Were it me and were I aware of how unnatural my life
had been made, yeah, I might bite that feeding hand.

Colin takes my wrist. Turns it over.

“That scab’s been on your wrist since I got here.
Isn’t crusty the way a scab should be. A little red oil
slick. You seen a doctor?”

“It’s a hemoglobin deficiency. I should heal like a
thirty-year-old?”

“I see it and a weird twinge runs under my balls.
Same way I felt with Mom.”

I fail to scab up. On the planet my son occupies,
orbiting a sun whose warmth he alone can feel, this is
reasonable cause for abandonment. We see the same
woman so differently. He remembers her collapsed
in the bathtub skeletonized by cancer. I still see her
in that same tub after we’d married. Soaking when
I’d come in to shave. She asked if I’d like to get in so
I stripped right there on the tiles, lickety split, slid
in with her. That fabulous lack of friction held by
bodies in water. I’m not saying my son lacks empathy.
I’m saying it must be hard for him to conceive of his
mother and I as holding variable states of being.

Colin’s leg twitches. I set a hand on his thigh.

“Come on, now. Please. Don’t.”

I clutch his sleeve but it’s a meaningless, almost
motiveless gesture. Colin hops a wooden gate
up stairs curling round the tank. Over a bridge
spanning the pool onto the show stage. Kicks his
boots off, peels his shirt over his head. Chest clad in
roping scars and dented where part of his pectoral
muscle was torn off. Unbuttons his flies then raises
his arms to make an arrow of himself. He screams—
“
Yeeeeearrrrgh
!”—and dives.

Rings spread where he goes in. I picture an orca’s
jaws chomping him in half for no other reason
than he’s there to be bitten and no animal should
be expected to behave otherwise. He surfaces. A
whale breeches a foot from him. Colin touches
its innertube skin. A giddy hoot. The whale vents
mackerel-smelling breath through its blowhole. No
cameras or reporters. Only my son expressing the
odd way he is made.

Some creatures live as stars do: burn hard
and hot, feeding on those nearby but primarily
upon themselves. Their lives an inferno and them
happiest in that heat. Eating away at themselves
until all that remains is appetite. What can I ask of
him: that he burn a little less bright? For him that
would be a death every bit as final as the one we’ve
all got coming. My son will go out burning at such
degrees I’ve never known. He will die in flames.

Boys
in Saint Catharines do this thing come their
first teenage summer.

The stump of a train trestle juts over Twelve
Mile creek. Boys leap off it. Grandfather, father,
me: we all made the jump. If you hit nineteen and
for lack of intellect or gumption can’t spin out of
those childhood orbits to college or a job outside city
limits, well, you’ll pass many an adult night drinking
Labatt 50 under that same trestle. For a boy the jump
acts as the bridge between their small world and the
world everyone else inhabits.

Could be I overstate it. Maybe it’s just the thing
to do on those blistering days when the sun hangs
forever and the heat makes you a bit crazy.

Each summer boys come together in packs. Not
even friends, necessarily; just boys from the same
stretch of blocks who happen to be of that age.
They’ll pick their way over the train ties, each railspike inviting tetanus, to where the trestle bends
in a rotted arc. Boys’ll talk about how best to do it:
legs-first, arms crossed over their chest so they fall
as if tipped dead from a coffin. They’ll shove at each
other but no boy ever pushes another over. Some
code of boyhood ethics prevents it. You make the
leap on your own. If you don’t, you clamber down
to the cool grass and put your manhood off another
day, week, however long.

Everyone knows you must jump, surface quick—
even then you’ll come up forty yards from where you
leapt—and kick like hell for shore. But if you cramp
up or get licked by a ripcurl you’ll be sucked into the
break where creek meets river, two-hundred yards to
either shore. That far out, only the sky and water, a
body gets to feeling it’s filled with rocks. A boy did
drown. But that was long ago.

Colin jumped when he was ten. He and one of
Clara Russell’s boys. They stole Frank Saberhagen’s
Cadillac El Dorado and leapt out into the teeth of
night. First my wife or I knew of it was the emergency
crew at the door handing up our son bedraggled and
shivering.

I picture him out there. Scrawny kid hunched
on the ties in his underwear—they found his PJs
flapping on a nail—moonlight plating his bare chest
and the indentation of the Verminox scar on his
arm. Night breeze ruffling his hair to bring up goose
pimples and the darkness such that the water cannot
be seen, only heard, this throaty rush and my son
naked to feel the contact high more acutely. Perched
on the verge of a blackness so deep it must be like
leaping into everlasting night or into death itself.

My son and I sat on the sofa while my wife
thanked the rescue team. Colin wrapped in a
blanket sipping cocoa. Making
hssss
noises between
clenched teeth. I switched on the TV. There he was
on the early morning news. A bobbing dot gripped in
the black fist of the river. “Boys Snatched from Jaws
of Death,” read the news ticker. My son cleaved in
two: one half on the sofa beside me and the other
only coloured dots on a TV screen. One place in peril,
the other safe—but even beside me he wasn’t safe
because some defect in his head worked against any
safety he might know. Wrapped warm in a blanket
sipping
cocoa
with
miniature
marshmallows,
physically present, but the other part of him
suspended in the ashen halo of a rescue helicopter
spotlight, a bullhorn-amplified voice calling out and
a rope dangling inches from his face—an expression
so serene, lips gone blue—but he failed to reach for
it. Smiling so sweetly so close to death. Close enough
to taste, if death has a taste. Unless it’s life he’s been
trying to taste all these years. Life at its furthest
ambit where the definitions are most powerful.

To hold a child and to know conclusively you’ve
lost him. If there is a more jagged and sickening,
more powerless feeling in this world I do not know
of it.

“You’re grounded. A whole month.”

“Sounds fair, Daddy.”

Across
the Falls, U.S. side, you’ll find the Love Canal
district. In 1942, Hooker Chemical corporation
buried 22,000 tons of toxic waste. Later the site
was covered with four feet of clay and re-zoned.
Prefab housing for low-income families. On top of
hazardous waste everyone knew was there. People
so happy to have a roof over their heads they
weren’t fretted by what lay under their feet. Disease
abounded: epilepsy, urinary tract infections, infant
deformities. The notion that folks could raise kids
a few feet above a reservoir of glowing green cancer
didn’t wash with middle America. But they didn’t get
it. That was those people’s orbit. A doomed orbit, yes,
but inertia kept them locked to it.

The streets and byways I’ve roamed my whole life
seem robbed of some crucial quality, too: a quality
of ambition, could be, or self-betterment. Hard to
pinpoint the sickness when everybody’s infected.

I stand at the prow of a johnboat I’ve not set foot
on in years. Fingers on the nautical wheel as it rolls
with the current. Overcast today, cumulus clouds
scudded above the Falls tinting the water the same
gunmetal grey as the boat. Only colour comes from
pink fibreglass insulation drifting over the basin. I
squint at the motley assemblage of press gathered
at the head of the Falls. From where I’m standing
they’re dots. Mildly bemused, mainly bored dots.

Four hundred bodies pulled out in pieces. They
don’t all die. At least twenty I’ve saved. They go
over, kicked at by the current until they’re spat out.
If they’ve gone blue but there’s the ghost of a pulse
I’ll pump their chests and blow air into their lungs.
Sometimes it doesn’t do a tinker’s damn but other
times they barf up a gutful of water and go on living
their blessed lives. Some lack any conception of that
blessing: stay underwater long enough, well, it’s no
different than a surgeon taking half your brain. A
Niagara lobotomy.

This one time. Colin in the backyard while I
barbecued. He tottered up with something in his
hands. Uncupped his palms enough so I could see a
moth battering his fingers.

“You must let it go,” I told him. “Lunar moths have
a protective powder on their wings. If that powder
gets knocked off, they die. Like you with no skin.”

Colin’s hands sprung open. The moth spiralled
off. A shred of one papery wing stuck to my son’s
hand. Colin was four years old. Utterly wrecked.
Hadn’t wanted to hurt the moth. Only hold it for
awhile. He ran inside and came back out with a bottle
of his Mom’s talc powder.

“Where’s that moth, Daddy? I can give it its
powder back.”

My son hasn’t an intentionally hurtful bone in
his body. The only creature he’s ever sought to harm
is himself.

I see him a hundred yards back carried in the
current. Waving to the tiny crowd not yet battened
down. He tucks inside the barrel he’s had made—he
honestly had people working on it—and the earth
sits stunned on its axis. I cycle the motor to cut a
path through the pink-flaked water, aiming for the
spot where they usually come up if they come up at
all and the earth starts spinning as my son hits the
head of the cataract and I see him in there curled
fetally—swear to
Christ
I see him—lit up in a blaze
of his own kindling. So hot his shape is an echo of
the sun itself.

“Square it!”

Screaming this over the motor’s roar and the
boom of the Falls, hammering the engine full-bore
and skipping over the water, spray wetting my face
so I can no longer tell if I’m bawling, though it’s
highly conceivable I am.

“Go on go square that bastard one more time!”

My son melts a path into the day. Burning
through like an ember through a page painted every
colour of our world. Throttling headlong to catch
him and when I reach for him he will take my hand.

I have never seen anything burn so fierce trapped
so close to earth.