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Authors: Craig Davidson

Tags: #Horror, #General Fiction

Sarah Court (7 page)

BOOK: Sarah Court
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“That’s stupid. Don’t talk that way.”

“It’s a loop. Continuous.”

“And everything and everyone must be on this
blessed loop? What about . . . televangelists?”

“Yes, pet.” His chuckle dissolved into a hacking
fit. “Even them.”

It isn’t stupid. It’s the most unselfish theory of
the afterlife I know of: instead of your spirit floating
intact upon a cloud, you particalize into millions of
fresh lives.

A jar of Blueberry Tapioca goes into my pocket.
Wax Beans and Vegetable. Fruit Medley. At home
I arrange them in a pyramid on the table. The
answering machine flashes.

Lieutenant Mulligan from the NRP. It’s been
approved for you to view the baby. . . .

I had
a pet squirrel. I wanted to name him Alvin,
after the cartoon character. My father preferred
Ming Fa, after a fireworks guru from feudal China.

Alvin entered our lives in the jaws of Excelsior,
Mama
Russell’s
sweet-tempered
sheepdog.
She
deposited the red, squealing, saliva-slick blob on our
lawn.

At the house of our neighbour, Frank Saberhagen,
there once stood a pine tree. The tree failed to jibe
with Saberhagen’s post-divorce aesthetic: he’d ripped
out the sod, salted the earth, and carpeted his yard
with shaved white schist imported from Egypt. The
pine was plagued with bark weevils. Needles gone
brown. Only the doctor’s macabre taste kept it alive.

A
brain
surgeon
who’d
assisted
on
the
groundbreaking
Labradum
Procedure
at
Johns
Hopkins, Saberhagen evidently found it cathartic to
set aside the scalpel in favour of the double-bitted
axe. A fluid tornado of a man with the tight-packed
frame of a circus acrobat, he’d stood shirtless, axe
in hand, boots gritting on the schist comprising his
front yard—a horticultural perversity rendering
him
persona non grata
in the neighbourhood—taking
crazed strokes at the tree. For all his deftness in the
operating theatre, Saberhagen was a bungler when it
came to lumberjacking. The axe blade ricocheted off
the trunk. Pine cones pelted his head.

“Give ’er hell, Quincy!” called his neighbour,
Fletcher Burger. Saberhagen’s nickname was based
on the coroner played by Jack Klugman in the series
of the same name, the morbid suggestion being
Saberhagen was such a poor surgeon his professional
dossier included as many corpses as the fictional
coroner.

Observing the flailings of his owner was Moxie:
a vile-tempered corgi Saberhagen had been forced to
accept during his divorce proceedings. Whereas in
many divorces custody of a pet is viciously quarrelled
over, the Saberhagens’ quarrel was over who would
be obliged to shuffle the dog off its mortal coil.
The ex-Mrs. Saberhagen—who at a block party was
heard stating that her then-hubby possessed “All the
personal charm of a deathwatch beetle,” and went
on to characterize him as “giving about as much
back to the world as a drainpipe”—was victorious.
The flatulent, oily-coated, grumpy old dog became
Frank’s tortuous burden.

Moxie was deeply disagreeable. He constantly
escaped Saberhagen’s yard by digging under the
fence. Nobody would pet him on account of (a) the
corgi’s furious digging occasioned some breed of
canine skin disorder manifesting in a greasy hide
that stunk of rotting fruit and (b) Moxie snapped
at anyone who petted him, anyway, providing less
incentive to perform what was already a revolting
kindness. Cross-eyed and splenetic, Moxie pissed
on marigolds and harassed birds at their baths.
Saberhagen no longer responded when his pager
flashed:
Neighbour called. Dog loose again.

Saberhagen
eventually
delivered
the
pine’s
deathblow. The tree split up its trunk and toppled.
Moxie
was
splayed
on
the
porch
with
Nick,
Saberhagen’s son. Cross-eyed as he was, the corgi did
note the clutch of baby squirrels tipped from their
nest. He bounded off the porch to gleefully gulp
down three or four.

Their frightful dying squeals compelled Excelsior
to leap off Mama Russell’s porch into Saberhagen’s
yard. Crazed on squirrel meat, Moxie lunged for
the much larger sheepdog’s throat. Excelsior seized
the corgi by his scruff and whipsawed her head to
fling Moxie a good ten feet. The dog’s ungraceful
trajectory took him over the tree; he hit harshly and
rolled as tumbleweeds do.

Excelsior rooted through the branches to recover
the remaining squirrels. That all four fit safely in
the pouches on either side of her teeth was the first
oddity. The second was that she dropped them on
four different lawns. One she left at the Hills. One
she left at Mama Russell’s house, where it was taken
in by her “boy,” Jeffrey. One for Abigail Burger. Alvin
given to me.

“The momma squirrel won’t take it back now,”
my father said. “Your scent’s on it. It’s tainted. The
mother might eat it. Mothers can be like that. In the
animal kingdom.”

We packed a shoebox with cotton batten and set
Alvin beneath a gooseneck lamp. I was concerned
this may scald him: his pink skin put me in mind
of the flesh under a fresh-picked scab. His paws so
much like tiny human hands. I wished he would open
his eyes so I might intuit what he wanted. But when
his eyes did open they were inexpressive black bulbs.

Each day Alvin remained alive, often barely
so, I took as a breed of miracle. My father filled an
eyedropper with cornstarch-thickened milk and fed
him. He’d squirt hypoallergenic soap into his palm,
set Alvin in the bowl of his hand to clean him with
gentleness bordering on reverence.

“So fragile. Bones like sugar.”

A covering of black fur filled over Alvin’s body.
His tail, a nippley nubbin, came in bushy. He never
grew quite as big as a squirrel should.

One afternoon he dashed out the patio door. My
father pursued—“Alvin! Come to your senses!”—
and, spying him in the crotch of the backyard
elm, jabbed a banana on the end of a stick as an
enticement. When the squirrel refused, Dad mooned
by the window, yet he soon turned philosophical.
Not an abandonment, he reasoned, but the animal’s
natural predilection.

“Squirrels live in trees. Gather nuts. As they’ve
always done.”

“Sorry I left the patio door open, Dad.”

“Never mind, pet. Recall the old saying: ‘If you
love something, let it go.’”

Overjoyed as my father was when Alvin returned
that night, he resolved to let an animal be an animal.
Mornings Alvin bolted out his squirrel-door—a
miniature doggy door my father installed—to
dash across the fencelines attaching yard to yard.
Plaguing, in the inimitable manner of squirrels,
the local canine population. Even Excelsior chased
Alvin, who chattered cheekily from a high bough
while the poor sheepdog howled.

Later, Alvin was shot dead with a revolver.

Mama Russell
took in troubled children. Her
“boys,” they were known. Teddy and Jeffrey spent
years in her care. Others who broke curfew or broke
into neighbours’ houses were sent away. At the time
of Alvin’s death, Social Services remanded an infant
into Mama’s custody until a foster family could be
secured. Mama named him Carter, though she had
no right. Afternoons she paraded baby Carter round
the court in a pram. Alvin, naturally curious, stole
into the pram. I pieced this together afterwards.

Mama swatted at Alvin, who scrambled up a tree.
Mama called the police. A cruiser was dispatched. A
deputy not long on duty unloaded on Alvin with his
service revolver. Centre of mass, as they teach at the
academy.

A squirrel weighing that of a bar of soap.
Annihilated.
My
first
attempt
at
parenthood
culminated with a squirrel so blown apart there
wasn’t much to bury.

“You mustn’t give your heart to wild things,” my
father said that night. “Or take on burdens of care
more than you need to.”

“But aren’t I a burden?”

“I had no choice with you, pet. And was glad not
to. But.” Spoken with finality. “But.”

Take
the hospital elevator to the pediatric ward.
The evening shift nurse—body garrulous in heft but
her face having none of it—eyes me in my military
surplus parka. REYNOLDS stamped in black on the
breast pocket.

“A fine thing, what you did,” she says, after I
identify myself. “Lucky you were there.”

The compliment comes off backhanded: as if my
managing to rescue the baby was as unbelievable as
my having landed a harrier jump-jet on a cocktail
napkin. The nurse glides past darkened delivery
rooms on soft-soled shoes silent as a razor blade
through a bowl of water. A mesh-inlaid mirror runs
the length of the nursery. Inside I am struck by the
smell of new life.

We’re all rotting. Your body hits a peak at
eighteen, maybe, and that perfect bodily zenith lasts
how long? A day, or a few hours of that day? Next,
descent and decay. Strains and aches and dimming
sight. Stuff yourself with carcinogens because you’ve
surrendered to the inevitability of collapse. You get
winded climbing a flight of stairs. Following that,
lumps and lesions to ice your heart. The Big C? Hold
the whole tortured works together another fifty
years and you’re granted the merciful stillness of the
grave.

But the nursery is stuffed full of showroommodel humans. Brand-spanking new, factory-fresh
rolled off the assembly line. Impregnated with that
new-baby smell. Assaulted by pound upon pound of
sprightly, helpless baby-meat, I fleetingly wish I was
some breed of vampire. A youth vampire. Flap round
the nursery on talcum-powdered wings poking my
head into hermetically-sanitized tubs to hoover
the youthful essence out of these helpless things.
Partake of their luscious and nourishing, sinfully
yummy
esprit. Drain these beautiful babes until I
was a child again and my organs no longer on the rot,
cherubic as I dash away shed of my too-big clothes.
I’d flee barefoot from a nursery full of withered
crepe-paper baby husks.

“So small,” I say, peering at my little toilet baby.
“Was she . . .”

“A preemie?” The nurse shakes her head. “Only
malnourished. Think of a plant under a porch: it’ll
grow down there in the dark and damp. Just not so
well.”

“May I have some time alone?”

“Make it quiet time. If one wakes, they all wake.”

The baby’s name card affixed to the tub: JANE
DOE #2. I section her sleeping face in search of the
woman who’d tried to murder her. But that woman
exists in my memory only as a tangle of emotional
drives. Her face is my own face. The face of everyone
I’ve even known. She made a premeditated choice to
dump this life in a retail chain toilet. Abdicate her
responsibilities in such vicious fashion. How had she
seen her life changing? Your own defenseless child—
how deep must you core into any heart to find that
mammoth well of expedience?

Unbutton my coat. Cradled in stirrups of my own
creation—oversize suspenders accommodating a
cardboard papoose—is a doll I’d stolen from a toy
store.

Teddy
, another of Mama Russell’s boys, set fire
to my father’s workshop and burnt to death in our
basement. Dad was mailing a package. I was in my
bedroom with Abigail Burger, Fletcher Burger’s
daughter.

Teddy was a pygmy pyromaniac with burn scars
on his arms pink as pulled taffy. He wore boxy black
glasses with melted armatures. He’d soak ant hills
in lighter fluid and set them ablaze. He said things
like: “My penis is two and a third inches long” or
“Anacondas have one twelve-foot-long lung” or “My
mama had a nerve disorder. And Poppa is a sailor.”
He was known to eat his elbow and knee scabs. Cut
holes in his trouser pockets so he could squeeze his
testicles. Mama had Teddy wear linen gloves so he
wouldn’t break the skin as he throttled them. He
shimmied through our basement window while
Abigail and I ran our squirrels through a maze of
shoe boxes and toilet paper rolls.

Abby was my only real friend. Her father, Fletcher,
had the bombastic and overbearing demeanour of an
East German gymnastics coach. Forever dragging
her off on bike rides or nature hikes that unfolded
more like the Bataan death march. Of orangutang
proportions, he was often seen in a sweatsuit with a
digital stopwatch strung round his neck.

“Abby!” he’d call. “Bike ride!”

“I don’t want to ride my bike.”

“Who’s that talking? Is it Flabby Abby?”

“I’m not flabby.”

“You will be, my dear, if you don’t ride your bike.”

Fletcher was fanatical about his daughter’s
fitness. Abby became a champion powerlifter. Her
father credited much of her success to his “Energizer
Bowls”: brown rice, broccoli, and amino acids
concocted in massive batches and stored in a chest
freezer in the garage. Abby said the last few bowls
sat in the freezer so long they tasted like “a doomed
Arctic expedition.”

The
explosion
shuddered
the
entire
house.
Volcanic wind blew up the ventilation ducts. Spumes
of burning dust. Abby and I went to the window.
The lawn sparkled with glass. Flames climbed the
siding from blown-apart casements. Our squirrels
scrambled
down
the
downspout.
We
followed
suit. Abby fell and snapped her wrist. A hole burnt
through the roof as it collapsed into the foundation.

BOOK: Sarah Court
7.54Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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