Sarah Court (9 page)

Full disclosure
: I always wanted a boy.

Shall I put on display the greasy-crawly scraps
of my psyche? You won’t like me. I don’t really
give a damn. I want to be understood within the
parameters of what I am: a hardcore bastard. A
rotten piece of work.

So, honest goods: a boy. Ask a hundred expectant
first-time fathers: boy or girl? Ninety-nine will
tell you boy. The one who doesn’t is giving you the
breeze. The imprint of one Fletcher Burger would
chalk itself more clearly upon the slate of a boy’s
mind so I wished for one. But as wishes are fickle,
any even-minded wisher should be satisfied with
half measures. Which I got: a ten-fingered, ten-toed
baby girl.

My marriage was in shambles by then. My wife
caught me sniffing the seat of my jeans to see whether
they were clean enough to wear again and refused
to kiss me for a week. She’d buy too many bananas
and when they blackened throw them in the freezer
to bake banana bread that never materialized. “Is
it me,” I’d go, “or is our freezer full of frozen gorilla
fingers?” She stockpiled my foibles in a mental
armoury and frequently launched tactical strikes.
Blind-siding me with how I begrudged buying my
own daughter baby gifts. “She’s happiest playing
with a crumpled ball of newsprint!” Arguments often
ended with her saying: “I never worry about Fletcher
Burger’s happiness. Someone’s always watching out
for Fletcher Burger’s happiness.” Pointing a finger at
me. It did anger and disgrace me—I recall weeping
over it in a Dollar Store, the most dispiriting and
pitiful of retail outlets—that I couldn’t love my wife
in the manner that, as a husband, I likely should
have. The way she probably deserved. Weeping while
picking through 99¢ canisters of discontinued,
highly flammable silly string. Two of which I bought
as stocking stuffers.

We’d relied on that baby to salvage whatever was
broken. Yet we knew the only way that could happen
was if our kid was born malformed, encephalitic,
with a hole in its heart. A
Lorenzo’s Oil
scenario to
ennoble us through shared suffering. But as Abby
was perfectly healthy and neither of us suffered
from Münchausen syndrome to make us dissolve
rat poison into her pablum, well, that infant life
preserver we’d hoped would rescue us from the
misery of one another may as well have been tossed
off the deck of the Titanic. Fuck it all, anyway. Men
and women are fundamentally different creatures.
DNA helixes, desires, plumbing, hysteria levels.
What fool stuffs a mongoose and a viper into a gunny
sack, tosses the sack in a raging river, and harbours
hope of a pleasant outcome?

Then Abigail was born . . . staring at her bloodscummed face I knew I’d do anything for her. Never
such ache for my wife. On our marital altar all I’d
been thinking was:
I will let you down
. Yet I can no
longer recall Abby’s face with exactitude. They say
when a person dies you often lose the image of them;
your memories degrade at the pace of that body
interred. She isn’t dead. Still, I cannot frame her
face. Her profile made of sand, continually erased by
a steady wind gusting through my head.

The setting sun
is a swollen ball backgrounding
shore pines as I crank the wheel starboard to butt
a
dock
girded
with
hacked-apart
radial
tires.
WELCOME TO BOBCAYGEON reads a sign above
the marina fuel pumps. Summer rentals all battened
down. Locals look startled in their habitat: slugs at
the heart of a lettuce head. Catch sight of myself in a
shop window. A winnowed aspect to my face. You’d
think its angles had been scored using a dentist’s drill.

The bar’s enclosed by a wrought-iron fence.
Girls too young to be legal sit on the patio with a
jug of radiant green cocktail resembling engine
coolant. Inside it’s quiet enough to hear the
sucksuck
of sorrows in their drowning. The assembled
rubbydubs’ faces look fashioned from slum-grade
tin. Pitted, discoloured, robbed of whatever dignity
flesh possesses robing men of substance. Fuck me if
I don’t fit right in. The draft beer glows unhealthily.
Quaffing the blood of an irradiated god.

Blood. Bones. Organs.

Imagine your breastbone cracked apart. Organs
gouged from knits of silverskin. Price tags clipped
to each. How much is a gently used gallbladder
worth? Liver and pancreas and heart and kidneys
attached to threads extending thousands of miles.
Design of those commercial airline maps tucked
into seatbacks: a fountain of red threads departing
The International Airport of You. Those threads are
mercilessly winched and your parts skip-roll-bounce
on tethers, sucked through incision lips into new
habitats, plugged into varied veinwork, pumped
with foreign bloods. Your skin and bones rolled up
like a moth-eaten carpet. Can a body shatter into
some greater good? Are some men worth more in
pieces? Again, I say: Fuck it. I’ll do as much damage
as I can. This hilarious scene in my mind: my bloodslicked organs in vats and when the faceless butchers
get to my liver—the crown jewel!—it’s naught but
a blasted wineskin riddled with ulcers and while by
rights I should be dead I rise up in a triumphant jerk
to shriek:

“You
bought
a
LEMON!
Caveat
emptor,
motherfuckers!”

Drain my beer and order the next with a bourbon
chaser. I’ll get so stinking pissed you could douse
me in kerosene and strike a match: I’ll burn in bliss.
Some forensics team will be amazed to discover a
resin of boiled bourbon has epoxied my spinal knobs
together.

I’m three sheets to the wind—erstwhile goal:
nine sheets or full-body paralysis—when one of
the girls swans in. Vision of pulchritude! Minx!
Wood nymph! Pixie! That green goo has stained her
tongue the colour of a freeze-dried frog. She’s so
perfect she belongs in a music box. You forget skin
possesses marvellous tension when teenage-fresh.
My own feels moored on strips of ancient velcro and
if a few more hooks come free my face will slide right
off, bunching up in my neck like an un-elasticized
tubesock to present my rye-stained skull.

“Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful,” I tell
her solemnly. She brands me a “freak.” So, I’ve
been reduced to weathering insults from this hip
sophisticate who likely believes pink bubble gum
to be the ideal pairing for a bottle of six-dollar
Chardonnay.

“You can’t come in here with that,” says the
bartender.

That
: a pitbull. Off-white with a bridled coat
tufting at the rolls of its neck. Heeled beside the man
who is presumably its owner. Trousers torn up his
calves showcase the baguettes of his legs. A friendly
face but his teeth jut on tangents like a handful of
dice rolled into his gums:
Come on, lucky seh
vaans
!
One eye’s so discoloured it looks like a plum kicked
into his socket.

“She won’t whiz on the floor.”

Bartender says: “Health code violation.”

“No offence, but this whole place is some kind of
violation.”

“Takes a dump, you clean it up.”

“Bottle of Jamieson’s and a pint glass.”

The bartender obeys. The guy presses the icechilled pint to his battered eye and faces me.

“Well, how bad is it?”

“The first I’ve seen you. No basis for comparison.”

He sets a bowl of cocktail peanuts on the floor.
The sound of tiny bones snapping as the pitbull
chows down.

“He looks tough.”

“He’s a she. Matilda. Matty. I’m James. Owner.”
“Fletcher. She bite?”

“A little.”

Matilda sniffs my topsiders. I pet her anvil-heavy
head—like petting an Indian rubber ball. No water
in the tendons beneath that stretching of hide. Each
defined muscle a ball of copper wire. Ears bitten off.
She licks my fingers. Tongue hard as strop leather.

“You’ve fought her.”

“Birds fly. Rabbits fuck. Pitties fight.”

“And you—fighting?”

“Mighta been.”

“You win?”

“Basest human nature. Who ever wins?”

James pinches a stray peanut between his fingers.
Eases open his swollen eyelid. It rests cradled in the
pocket of purple flesh.

“My wife’s hubby decked me.”

“She’s got a couple of you on the go?”

“Ex-wife, okay. The new hubby socked me. Busted
his hand. Ha! Ha! A surgeon. Dumb bastard makes a
living with his hands.”

“What provoked that?”

“When we split I said keep the dogs.” The peanut
pops free. Matilda eats it. “I didn’t have the bottle for
a pissing match. But I love that bitch”—indicating
the pitbull—“and let her be taken away. I knew they
had a cottage somewhere-hereabouts. Practically
a mansion, on a lake. I pitched my tent off in the
bushes.”

“You robbed them?”

“My property.” Meaning Matilda. “How’s that
robbery?”

“The stipulations of my divorce are pretty
ironclad.”

“Are we talking laws? Jurisprudence? No—
karmic fairness. That dog and me are wedded above
any law. Anyway, when they showed up, my ex
leashed Matilda in the yard. Went to do whatever
she does with Doc Hotlips. Screw on a bearskin rug.
I grabbed Matilda. She’s barking her head off. Next
it’s Hotlips steamrolling at me. I took a swing. He
painted me. All she wrote.”

“The whole fight?”

“When I come to he’s apologizing. My eyes were
really watering from the punch—could’ve
looked
I
was crying. Off me and Matty ran. They’re yelling
kidnapper and what-have-you. I need a drink.”

James and I slouch down the alcoholic’s ladder.
James shows me Matilda’s trick: he balances a peanut
on her snout and at his command—“Giddyup!”—she
pops the nut up to snatch it out of midair.

We roll out of the bar into a star-cooled night.
The road dead-ends at the dock. For whatever reason
James and I are holding hands. This blissful look
paints his face. The realization comes that I like
him quite a bit. Self-love, partially, that reflexive
fondness a man feels for another whose beggared
circumstances mirror his own.

“Nice boat,” he says. “I had a motorhome. That
baby was repossessed.”

James swings his hand, attached to my arm,
as if we are on a playdate. Matilda paws down the
gangplank. Wind blows off the liftlocks, ruffling our
thinning hair.

Black Box: Wife

This flight was buggered from takeoff. Headsets
broken. Beef stroganoff poisoned with botulism.
An albatross got sucked into the right fuselage.
Some
other
bird—flamingo?
charred
pink
feathers—sucked into the left. We’re going down.
Mayday, mayday! . . . screw it.

When we dated she made it known I must
earn her. A breathing kewpie doll. I learned to
tango. Bought a ’78 Cougar with flake-metal
finish. Was the first to say, “I love you.” Once I’d
won her, everything that was hard in her went
to goo and I hated it and we married. She’d howl
when we fucked—I mean, firing on all cylinders.
Sounding like a stray cat yowling on a winter’s
night. Has chemical castration been undersold?
She drove a school bus when we first wed. Cash
was tight. My young bride behind the wheel of a
big yellow bus, jouncing down the road on leaf
springs that make school buses less conveyance
than amusement park ride. So young, strong,
and
gorgeous,
whereas
school
buses
were
usually driven by bat-faced hags with names
like Carla. But as the years wore on it became a
way to wound her. When arguments got heated
I’d find myself screaming: “You were a fucking
bus driver
!”

The steering wheel—what do they call it on
planes? a yoke?—just busted off in my hands. A
shitload of shrieking in the cabin. Gunshots.

My grandfather sang my grandmother’s
name in the shower after she died. They
quarrelled, publicly, often at Christmastime,
but lived sixty years together until she died of
liver cancer and he followed from cancer of a
different sort. While still alive he sang out her
name, a trilling call like a bird’s. He missed her
more than he could bear and called her name
without knowing.

My wife and I could share a roof sixty years,
she could die, I’d grieve—but would I ever sing?

The emblematic event
signalling the derailment of
my marriage, the precise instant the train skipped
the tracks to hurtle headlong into a ravine, was
when my wife attempted to fellate me while I slept.

Shocking she even bothered. Under her gaze my
member had become a poisoned salt lick ringed with
dead deer or worse: as if through some means of
anatomical gymnastics my asshole had cartwheeled
round to my crotch. Not to mention I was dead asleep.
Oblivious, unconsenting. What if I had rucked up
her nightie and gone down on her like a thief in the
night? Her timing was flawed. I could have been in
the grip of a nautical nightmare. The sensation may
have knitted with those stark terrors. A hungry
sea-leech sucking out my blood and vigours? My leg
lashed out instinctively. I awoke to my future ex-wife
at the foot of the bed. A goose egg on her forehead.

Our divorce was highly amicable. My wife could
have challenged for sole custody despite my being in
those halcyon days a functional member of society.
I relocated to Sarah Court. Quaint, family-friendly.
Myself clinging to the outdated notion I was ever
that sort of man.