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.
BLACK BOX
THE ORGANIST
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 ungai
nliest 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.
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 sehvaans! 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?”
&n
bsp; “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.”
Sarah Court Page 6
