Sarah Court (8 page)

Teddy’s carbonized skeleton was later doused
by firemen. Hands heat-welded to my father’s steel
workbench. Skull pushed back on his spinal column
from the force of the blast.

Insurance covered the rebuilding costs but my
father assumed the neighbours blamed him. We
moved away from Sarah Court, resettling way across
town. Not long after the fire, my father told me I was
adopted.

“Patience, sit there on the couch. A bit of a bomb
I’ll be dropping.”

Less a bomb than a grenade lobbed between
us—a grenade he’d feared would shatter my psyche,
sense of self, my whatever else. It occasioned in me
nothing but curiosity.

Where was I adopted?

“An institution north of here. I wasn’t an ideal
candidate but a solid citizen.”

How did I end up there?

“Nobody saw the need to tell me. People do take
on burdens that overmaster them.”

Why take me in?

“You needed adopting. I was in a position to do
so.”

Did it ever scare you—being a father?

“There should be a training guide for new
fathers. Either your head’s screwed on tight and
gets unscrewed, or you come into it a wreck and
fatherhood is a centralizing circumstance to an even
greater crackup. Fatherhood destroys some men.”

He offered to help track my parents down. I’d no
urge to find them. My father was Philip Nanavatti:
this fact as cleanly connected to me as each finger
at the end of each hand. The circle closed upon
itself and I was content within its circumference.
That I may still have a mother was no different
than discovering I had an extra organ. A tiny sac or
bladder that contributed nothing to my health nor
brought about any sickness. A surgeon could excise
it, yes, but since it was benign and I could quite
happily exist with it somewhere within me, why
bother?

“Your mother was not a bad person, pet.”

I never thought of her as bad. My mother is any
one of a billion women in as many conditions. In
prison or a boardroom or an oil sheik’s harem. A
housewife in Paramus, New Jersey. A roller derby
queen going by the name of Cinnamon Kiss in
Poughkeepsie. A cipher, as the woman who stuffed
baby Jane into a toilet was a cipher.

My mother died birthing me.

The only worrisome quality to not knowing your
parents is you don’t truly know yourself. You never
know what you are capable of, as you cannot see your
roots. The skews of their braiding. What they touch,
or fail to.

It’s
that time of evening where the sun rests at
that particular point in the sky: hitting your eyes
directly, sunlight robs the world of dimension.
Buildings become black cut-outs hammered flat by
the refraction of the sun. A shape darts onto the
road. I swerve, no thump, missing it.

Jane Doe sits in a car seat facing away from the
dashboard. Otherwise if I crashed, accidentally or on
purpose, the passenger-side airbag would deploy to
crush the little-bitty bones of her face. I hit the QEW
highway, going east. A squad car rushes past in the
opposite lane. The highway wends past Niagara Falls
to the Fort Erie border. It suddenly occurs to me that
my mental state is not up to explaining Jane to the
border guards.

I return to St. Catharines and park at the Big Bee
convenience store near the bus depot. I pull in beside
a minivan, unbuckle baby Jane, and enter the store.
I microwave pablum in one of the baby bottles I’d
bought. Another customer scans a low shelf with his
back to me. I spy a pack of fireworks next to sacks
of expired dog kibble. The microwave dings. I dab
pablum on my wrist. Outside a man hops into the
minivan and peels off. I angle the bottle so Jane’s
lips clasp round the nipple. Press her warm body to
my chest.

Tufford Manor is set off Queenston street. With
its bevelled wrought iron gates inset with seraphim,
its faux-granite facade shielded by second-growth
willows, you’d be forgiven for mistaking it for
an upscale condo complex. Until you noted the
proliferation of walkers and wheelchairs and oxygen
canisters. Orderlies with the air of bored cattle
wranglers.

The one behind the desk is a large black man.
Above the starched white collar of his uniform, his
head seems to float disembodied, in the style of a
magician’s trick.

“Patience,” he says.

“Nice to see you, Clive.”

A man so ancient it is conceivable he’d seen his

first military engagement during the Boer War
staggers into the lobby in his sleeping flannels. His
body’s all shrivelled up like a turtle that crawled
under a radiator.

“Where’d you sneak off to?” Clive spots the box
of wooden matches tucked under the old man’s arm.
“Give them here, Mister Lonnigan.”

The old man, Lonnigan, stashes the matches
behind his back. They poke past his hipbone.

“Don’t make a nuisance,” Clive says, gently
wresting them away.

“You sadistic bull Negro.”

“What have I told you about that trash?”

“Big as a bull, sadistic, and you’re a Negro.”
Lonnigan pronounces it
Negra
. “Where am I lying?”

“You speak to wound. The preferred nomenclature
is African Canadian.”

Lonnigan’s jaw juts. “When are you gonna fix my
record player?”

“It’s been bust since they rolled you in.”

“You said you’d help.”

“Tomorrow,” says Clive. “Go on, now, give me
peace.”

“Visiting hours are over,” Lonnigan says to me.

“Why fret every little thing, Mister L? Lighten
up. You’ll live longer,” I say.

“Here’s a nudie club bartender telling me how to
live. I lived plenty enough.”

“Nine-tenths of the time he’s demented,” Clive
says to me. “But there’s that other tenth.”

Clive folds his arms across his chest. A puzzled
but not aggressive gesture.

My father died seven months ago. His body’s
interred up the road. His room presently occupied by
someone else.

“I saw these fireworks and thought of Dad.”

“Long ways off the First of July, Patience.”

“Bad idea?”

Clive unknits his arms. “Long as we aim them
over the golf course I can’t see the harm.”

The courtyard: clean-swept and hemmed on
three sides by balconied terraces. Clive wheels
Lonnigan out. A patchwork blanket is draped over
the old man’s legs.

“Mr. L chummed around with your father,” says
Clive.

“Didn’t know you were his relation,” Lonnigan
says. “That your baby?”

Lonnigan appears to have forgotten we all start
out so small. Jane grasps his index finger in her tiny
fist.

“The grip on him. Be a ballplayer.”

“He’s a she.”

“I’ll be damned.”

Clive wrestles a stone flowerpot into the centre
of the courtyard. Windows brighten about us. I angle
a roman candle east over the golf course.

“We need matches.”

“How about it, Mr. L?” says Clive. “You got some
matches for the little lady?”

“Skunk. You rotten skunk.”

“I smoke,” Lonnigan says after Clive’s gone inside
for some. He cups his neck while he talks, as if to keep
in fingertip contact with his heartbeat. “Cherrywood
briar. Got the tobacco but they won’t let me lay my
hands on matches. My doc’s a wet-behind-the-ears
little sonofabitch shaver. Bastard still wears dental
braces. Taking my marching orders from a, a, a—a
brace-face. Pipe but no matches. Like to give a man
a gun but no bullets. Don’t grow old, is my advice to
you.” He gives this same warning to Jane in a high
baby voice: “Don’t . . . grow . . . old.”

Clive returns with a Zippo. Coloured balls of fire
arc over telephone poles at the courtyard’s edge.
Lonnigan’s eyes close. Eyelids thin as tissue paper
wormed with red capillaries.

“When we were kids,” he says, “we’d find bullets
in the fields. Battles had been fought there, you see.
We’d take our spades”—he clarifies—“I mean spades
as in shovels. Not that we had slaves the colour of
Clive here who did our digging.”

“I’m sure Patience appreciates your meaning,
Mister L.”

“. . . took our spades and dug up whatever the
“. . . took our spades and dug up whatever the
30 slugs. We’d pry the slug-heads off, tap the powder
onto a slip of parchment, twist it into a sachet and
light the bugger. That was our fireworks.”

Screaming
Devil,
Volcano,
Hearts
of
Fire.
Residents occur on their balconies. Me, an old man,
Clive, a child whose life I’d first saved and now
stolen. If it isn’t quite the picture I’d framed in my
head . . . had there ever been that picture?

“Fire hazard,” calls a fear-stricken voice from one
of the surrounding balconies. “Fire hazard!”

“Calm
down,
missus
Horvath,”
says
Clive.
“Nothing but fireworks, and see? Landing on the golf
course.”

“Fire haaaaaaaaaaazard!”

“Large Marge. She’s big as a barge.” When I ask
Lonnigan if that’s who had voiced her concern, he
chuckles. “No. That’s the other Marge yelling.”

Clive lights the Burning Schoolhouse. Cathartic
for some. I never hated school. The baby’s weight
against me. Exhale of her lungs.

Close my eyes. Against the canvas of my lids
the schoolhouse burns on. Fresh trajectories and
possibilities. Each one of my own summoning.

You
might configure my existence as a string of
air disasters. Commercial jetliners scud-missiled
to smithereens in foreign airspace. Botched water
landings where the exits crimp shut: eels and sharks
dart past the porthole windows like an inside-out
aquarium until pressure cracks Plexiglas and the
sea rushes in. Lover, husband, father. All ruinous,
all fatal. Except I survive. My life a pile of flaming
wrecks I somehow stride clear of.

A black box is recovered from each crash site.
My own voice catalogues events, idiotic and selfish,
principal to each fiasco. It isn’t the voice of a man
nearing his own excruciating death, face torn up in
flames with shards of a shattered instrument panel
deep-driven into it. It’s the penitent voice of a man
addressing his God.

The houseboat
’s an Orca Weekender. Its sixty
horsepower Evinrude belches lung-blackening smoke.
I stripped linens off every bed and piled them in a
sultan-like mound on the one where I sleep. Compass,
marine radio, microwave, TV: baby’s tricked out.
Whatever wasn’t clamped down I threw overboard.
Yawing near shore I blasted every emergency flare at
the trees in hopes dead leaves might catch fire. That
was yesterday morning when lint-like fog hung over
the silvered water until the sun chased it upshore to
linger between the trees like low-lying smoke. Rawbeautied county, this far north.

I stole the boat from a hairy-fisted rental agent
who overused the word “doggone.” As in: “This is
the best doggone houseboat in my doggone fleet.”
As in: “Talk about your doggone fine houseboating
weather!” After the umpteenth “doggone” I said
to myself: I’m stealing this fucking spaz’s doggone
property. Handles like a bear. Aim it like a ballistic
missile—
precise
—and hold that course or else you’re
doomed.

What jackass steals a houseboat? A jackass such
as myself, evidently. Idiotic as hotwiring a car to
drive at speeds not exceeding four knots down the
same unending stretch of road. Inlets crook like
arthritic thumbs and riverside towns sporadically
carve themselves out of the barrens but I am locked
upon this waterway.

It’s the second vehicle I’ve stolen. The first was a
minivan left running outside a Big Bee store in the
city of my birth. Freakishly clean. CDs alphabetized.
Bright yellow hockey tape wrapped at ‘10’ and ‘2’
positions on the wheel. So enervated did I become
within its confines that I stopped at a ramshackle
fried chicken shack hours past Toronto. Manning
its counter the ungainliest teenager I’d ever clapped
eyes on. This shocked expression you’d find on a man
kicked awake in his sleep. On his head sat a paper
chicken hat so saturated with sweat and grease its
head drooped to peck the gawky sonofabitch in his
forehead.

“Welcome to the Chubby Chicken.”

The kid blew at his hat same way you’d blow a
lock of hair out your eyes. The chicken head popped
up, came down, pecked the kid in his head.
Ah,
Jesus,
I thought drinking in his dreadful spectre.
This is too fucking sad
. I have been overly sensitive
lately, granted, but this cow-eyed cupcake in his
soggy chicken hat in the airless middle of Buttfuck
Nowhere summoned within me that breed of quasiabstract sadness where spiritual malaise digs in
roots. I mean, not to make too big a deal.

I purchased a family bucket and paid with my
credit card. Gave the mopey bastard a hundred
dollar tip. Hey, big spender! Such largesse from a
man who scant months ago pawed through a box of
old birthday cards hoping an overlooked sawbuck
might fall out.

I ate the entire bucket. Pure gluttony. Choking
down the seventh drumstick the realization dawned
that these were modes of behaviour a man would
adopt upon the discovery he has a week to live. Once
it ceased to matter whether he overate, drank his face
off, snorted Borax. Healthy living is an undertaking
only men with futures bother with.