Sarah Court (5 page)

On
the day she ordered a police deputy to shoot my
squirrel, Clara “Mama” Russell sat on her bed with a
baby and a short-barrelled revolver.

I’d come home from school to discover my pet
squirrel, Alvin, shot. He’d gotten into the baby’s
pram. But Alvin was harmless. The baby wasn’t even
hers. I banged on her door. Jeffrey, one of her boys,
answered. Well-dressed and terribly clean. Another
of her boys, Teddy, would later burn our house down.

“Mama’s pipe is flowing very black,” said Jeffrey.
I pushed past him and found Mama with the baby
and the gun. Mama Russell, a solid woman. A human
dumptruck. But right then, with her radish eyes and
bloody fingernails, she looked like a cheap umbrella
blown inside-out by the wind.

“Patience Nanavatti, isn’t it? The fireworker’s
daughter.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Mama.”

“Yes, Mama.”

A shiny silver six-shooter. I’d never seen a gun.
Could have been fake except for how it dimpled the
duvet. That way its weight expressed itself. Mama
picked it up. She tickled the baby’s foot with the gun’s
silver hammer. Then she set the barrel under her
own chin. Brought it to the tip of one ear round the
curve of her neck. Had it been a razor she would’ve
slit her own throat.

“What it is to be a parent,” she said. “Choices.
Each more difficult than the last.”

Her eyes snagged on that silver “O” of the barrel
as it traced the her upper lip. She seemed perplexed
to find it there—in her house, in her hands—and
she dropped it.

“Oh! But it isn’t loaded.”

She never did show me the empty chambers.

“You won’t tell anyone. Our secret, Patience.
Promise me.”

“I promise.”

The woman
angles through racks of OshKosh B’Gosh
bib overalls and Jamboree caterpillar-patterned dresses
under a display poster of a bugeyed kid heaving on a
giant harmonica. She vanishes behind a bin of pickedover boxer shorts.

Wal-Mart. High-intensity fluorescents, elevator
music—presently Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven is a
Place on Earth”—the thoughtless seethe as shoppers
quest for Windex or paperclips or rotisserie chickens.
Spell of consumerism: they find themselves outside
with bags of crap viable under these lights but in
the sane light of day clearly worthless.
Fuck me,
they
must think,
what am I doing with this giant plastic
candy cane full of cinnamon hearts?

Myself, I steal. Whatever fits unobtrusively in
my pockets. Batteries up to D-cell. Panties, though
a woman with too many panties seems debauched.
Dr. Scholl’s jelly shoe inserts, even though nothing’s
the matter with my feet. Not that I’m poor. Only that
walking past the sensors—I make sure to rip off the
magnetized tags—girdled with ill-gotten loot, I am
satiated. Before long the emptiness crawls back.
My existence is consumed, in fact, by emptiness
avoidance. I’ll scan nuptial announcements in the
paper, don a fugly crinoline dress, show up at churches
to insert myself into photographs. It’s an art, fitting
unobtrusively into the frame. Time it right and
there’s you with a shit-eating grin backgrounding
an earnest portrait of total strangers. My crinoline
dress and goofy grin cropping up in wedding albums
all over the Niagara peninsula; couples will flip
through years later wondering:
Who the hell’s that?
and say: “She must be from
your
side of the family.”

That woman in kidswear is shoplifting. I can smell
my own. Normally I’d watch the rent-a-cops descend
on her. Instead I return the Energizers to their hook
and trail after. Down an aisle of picture frames: the
same cute, blonde, pigtailed girl grins out of them
all. Passing through women’s wear I unhook all the
bras on the display mannequins: a horde of armless,
legless, nipple-less silver torsos in my wake. Catch
my profile in a mirrored support column: green eyes
beneath brows that fail to reach the inner edge of my
eyes give my face a truck-flattened, wide-set aspect.
A combat jacket from the Army Surplus. We frumps
are the most easily ignored.

I find her in Housewares fingering crockpots. She
can’t steal those—tough to convince security you’re
afflicted with a crockpot-sized stomach tumour—
so I figure she’ll make for Cosmetics. Stuff her socks
with eyeliner pencils. She’s really down at the hoof.
An air of unconcern about her looks. Except there’s
no calculation to it, the way some people go about
slovenly as a half-assed statement. No more interest
in her appearance than your average bag lady.

She pulls a U-ey at Fabrics. I lose her amidst unravelling bolts of merino wool. I do my best impression
of a neurotic shopping for pinking shears—“These
ones have the comfort-grip handles,” I whisper. “These
are endorsed by Martha Stewart”—until she exits the
public toilets.

Wal-Mart’s toilets. Same Wal-Mart halogens,
same Wal-Mart paint: eggshell white with a greenish
under-hue. The colour of an egg with a stillborn
chick inside. Water slicked over the tiles. Had she
tried to flush a tampon—a boxful?

A puffy lump wedged down the lone bowl. Mycoloured: I mean to say, the colour of skin. The fact
it’s in a toilet prevents my understanding. A baby in
a crapper fails to conform to any known reality so
remains as unbelievable as satellite footage of that
same baby orbiting Saturn. Face down, arms pinned
in the guts of the bowl where the plumbing begins
so all I see is a wad, not distinguishably human,
clogging things.

I reach into the toilet to grip the body and turn
it,
her
, face up. Skin stained 2,000 Flushes blue.
I accidentally bonk her head on the lid and hope
to Christ I didn’t hit her fontanelle and squash
something—her sense of smell? zest for life?—
permanently.

I cradle her, dripping, to the diaper change
station. Root my index finger through her mouth
fearing the insane bitch stuffed her throat full of
toilet paper. Close my lips over her mouth and nose.
I might’ve inhaled her entire head if it wasn’t so
bulbous, that being the style of baby heads. Blow too
hard and I’ll rupture her lungs. So I’m blowing as if
to inflate a fleshed-out plum.

Not a cough, sigh, or puke and all this is now
barrelling toward a senseless end. Trying to pour
life into a permanently stoppered vessel—had to
head the list of Worst Human Experiences. Top five,
guaranteed. My fingerprints all over this beautiful
dead body.

“Breathe.” Thumb-pumping her sternum. “You
stupid little bitch,
breathe
.”

A gutful of warm toilet water. This wee infant
girl’s bawling.

I was told
my mother died birthing me. You could
say I killed her, though this is the only course nature
can unfortunately take. My father survived, but
you could say his heart did not. It went hard as pig
leather in his chest, with no capacity for much else
but me. And Alvin, as it would turn out.

Philip Nanavatti, my father, built fireworks.
An archaic livelihood, same as a cobbler. His work
funded by cigarette companies who organized a
competition, Symphony of Fire, where fireworkers
from across the globe set off volleys from rafts
floating on Lake Ontario. He was more wizard
than artisan. Much of this had to do with what he
created. A cobbler mends shoes, a pair of which is
owned by everyone and exist permanently beneath
our eyes; through natural processes of alignment,
the cobbler comes to be seen the same. Fireworks are
totally unnecessary. The cobbler is earthbound. The
fireworker’s domain is the heavens.

He looked the part of wizard, albeit a modernday variety. A threadbare man who cultivated a
beard out of expediency and the rising cost of razor
blades. His favourite article of clothing a macrame
poncho bought on a Pueblo reserve, which he wore
in his drafty basement workroom. Drywall hung
with tools whose outlines he traced in black marker.
Unlike other handymen whose toolboxes contained
spanners and drillbits and lugnuts, my father’s
contained pill bottles—he bought them wholesale
from a medi-supply company—full of powders,
pellets, shards, clusters, and gems all carefully
labelled. Sodium D-Line. Potassium Perchlorate.
Rice Starch. The indentation of safety goggles
permanently impressed into the flesh round his eyes,
the way spectacle-wearers have nose-pad grooves on
their noses.

My father once found a box of flashcubes at a
garage sale. A joyous discovery, it turned out. We
returned home with haste, to the basement, where
he put the cubes in a vice and drilled a hole through
the paper-thin glass.

“Everything
on
earth
is
made
up
of
four
elements,” he told me. “Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen,
nitrogen. All living things are carbon-based. There
is a static number of carbon atoms on our planet. No
more or less today than a trillion years ago. Things
are born, live, expire, break down to component
elements. Those carbon atoms go on to be part of
new life. Like plasticine: mould a dog, smush it up,
mould a cat. The bulk of matter never changes. Only
the creations.”

He had me fetch an egg from the icebox. He
poked a hole in it to drain white and yolk. He mixed
coloured magnesium with the flashbulb powder and
funnelled it into the egg. Wadding, a fuse, sealed
with a bead of paraffin wax.

“You and I are cobbled together out of carbon
cells that were once other things entirely. You may
have a trilobite’s tail in your elbow, pet. A cell from
Attila the Hun in your eye. Your tonsils could have a
brontosaurus nail in them.”

“Where did we come from?”

“The simplest answer is the stuff making up all
life is hydrogen, whose atoms come from the fusion
process taking place at the centre of suns. So I
suppose you can say we come from stellar waste.” He
touched the tip of his tongue to a canine tooth. “Or
from stardust. Better?”

“Better.”

“Stardust, then.”

The park near our house had shuffleboard courts.
White sandblasted stone. Dad centred the egg on the
court and waved me back to the jungle gym. He lit
the fuse and ran with hands tucked over his head:
gait of a soldier running down a foxhole.

“A
carbonized
imprint,”
he
said
after
the
detonation. “Magical, isn’t it?”

The shuffleboard court was framed with colours,
shapes, patterns or their raw inklings. A solar system
in miniature: every manifestation of life, insect and
beast and plant and forms long extinct or as yet
undiscovered helixing into each other, nameless
in their complexities. Limbs and stalks, broken
angles, conchial whorls, geographic forms that
struck as unnatural only as they existed beyond my
understanding. The arch of a swan’s neck thinned
into an umbilical cord shot through with emerald
threads spidering into beetle-legged strands which
in turn shattered into violently-coloured orbits. Such
designs must exist, invisible, all about us. When
the powder in that egg ignited, powerful chemical
magnets drew them out of the air to imprint them,
recklessly, on the stone.

Who else but a wizard could conjure a sight like
that?

Lieutenant
Daniel Mulligan is attractive if horsetoothed. He smiles in a manner that—were his lips
to skin back to reveal the pink beds his teeth are
buried in—might be wolfish. A horse-toothed wolf?

A
corkboard-panelled
room
at
the
Niagara
Regional Police headquarters. Terrazzo tiles scuffed
with shoe skidmarks. It’s not difficult to envision
them being made by a stave-gutted plainclothesman
pivoting on his brogan to smash a telephone book
into a poor perp’s skull. Lt. Mulligan picks at a wart
on his index finger. Distressingly, it resembles a
nipple. A finger-nipple. A . . . fipple? When I think
of his hands upon my body—as I’ve been doing since
he came in—I now picture spongy growths like
toadstools popping up every place he’s touched.

“The woman. Tell us what she looked like.”
“Us?”

“The constabulary working this case.”

“I’m a case?”

Mulligan smiles.

“You’re a good Samaritan. Yes?”

He sets a folder on the table.
Patience Nanavatti

on a label affixed to its tab. Cleat-shod music-box
ballerinas spin pirouettes up my spine.

“My permanent record?”

He flips it open. “Says here you peed your pants
in grade five gym. Kidding. That whole ‘permanent
record’ stuff, it’s bullsh—malarkey. If everyone left
that kind of paper trail, paper-pushers would get
biceps big as grapefruits shoving it around.” His laugh
indicates the paper-pushers of his acquaintance are
shrivelled of arm. “You’re nervous.”

“Trying to remember if I peed my pants in grade
five.”

“That’s not germane to the investigation.”

He directs my attention to a wall-mounted TV.
“Security tapes. Took awhile to get clearance—big
conglomerates.”

Footage: iron greys wash into gauzier greys. Spots
of polar whiteness. Humanoid shapes move herkyjerk: the world’s most tedious nickelodeon show. The
woman is a dark, jagged, lumpen apparition ghosting
through the frame.

“That’s her.”

“Right, we’ve ascertained as much. What we’re
interested in, Ms. Nanavatti—”