Sarah Court

by Craig Davidson

  “You viper. I’d as soon take a lift from the Malibu Strangler.”

  Abby drove slow: partially because she was freshly licensed and partially because any jolt would cause me great ache. Once home I sent her inside for a beer. She returned with tallboys. We popped the tabs and drank.

  “What?” she said. “I’ve had beer.”

  “You damnwell have not around me.”

  We clinked cans.

  “Hungry? Energizer Bowls in the freezer.” “Pass. Group’s working wonders, by the way.”

  Our eyes met in the rearview mirror. I don’t know when, exactly, I hit the understanding that my mother and father had been responsible for rearing me and were thus somewhat reliable but still, they were only human and entitled to their own screwups. I’m reasonably sure Abby hit it right that instant.

  “Who was that boy?”

  “Who, Danny Mulligan?”

  “Danny. Daniel.”

  “He goes to Laura Secord. That place is an incubator for fairies.”

  “You don’t have to be a jerk every day of your life. Take a day off. He’s cute.”

  “Danny Mulligan. Cute. These two absolutes fail to sit comfortably within my universe.”

  “He looked at me. My boobs.”

  “The scumbag. Did he, really?”

  “Better than the horndogs at the gym going on about my pectoral definition.”

  “Please, Abs.”

  A vein throbbed down her neck. Beautiful, my daughter, but physically solid. Workhorse legs. All those veins. “What do you feed her,” Saberhagen once joked, “cotton candy spun out of Dianabol?” The culture of her sport was one where female powerlifters were met derisively: my daughter was a stunt, like a foxy boxer. It bothered Abby her thighs rubbed together walking. That her abdominal muscles were so prominent they resembled a turtle’s belly. That the dress she wore to commencement made her look, in her own self-appraisal, like “a linebacker in drag.” But each sculpted protuberance was evidence of our training regimen. The tensile integrity muscle attains amongst the very best athletes gives it this pocked look. When there’s only enough fat separating flesh from tendon that you won’t die of hypothermia on a mild spring day. Individual fibres present themselves as defined waves. Tendons rumble like gathering thunder over a body.

  You’re rumbling, I’ll say when she’s in top form. Rumbling and raging.

  She’s a goddamn beautiful lifter. I’ll load the bar with six forty-five pound plates plus the bar: a 315 squat. She chalks her hands—calloused as a dockworker’s—grips the crosshatched bar and swings herself beneath that weight. Legs flared wide: a pair of baby spruces. Jerking the bar off its pegs she’ll go down, thighs perpendicular to the floor. Veins spiderwebbing from the rounds of her shoulders. A serious case of the butterflies as her quadriceps jump and dance. Eyes rotating to the ceiling she explodes with a lung-shattering scream. Primal. A lioness. One time she blew a blood vessel in her eye. Powering out of her crouch, bar bowed over her shoulders with all that weight. Blood surged into her eyeball. The pressure on the vein wall was so fierce it tore. Abby didn’t even feel it. Alarmed, I took her face in my hands. I was so terrified. She said: “I’m okay, Dad. Calm down.”

  “Abs, if you never lift another weight . . . that’d be okay.”

  “Right. You’d be busted up.”

  “It makes me happy we’re doing something together. That’s all. We could go fishing. You like fishing? I hate it. But anything else. Okay?”

  “Yup. Okay.”

  “I want to know you’re happy.”

  “I know.”

  “So. Tell me.”

  “I’m happy.”

  Did any kid comprehend the love of a parent? Frightening in its rawness. An excised kidney: naked, unprotected and lewd. It sprang from failure and regret which only sharpened the edge. Fanatical, protective, rooted in an understanding the world’s a broken place filled with broken individuals. The fact your child was a part of that ruined tapestry was a kind of miracle.

  The parasite Saberhagen pulled into his driveway. He and Nick trotted across the yard. Nick had a black eye but Frank’s poor son always sported a blackened eye, busted nose, facial sutures, or the like. “You go to hell,” I told Frank.

  Saberhagen appealed to Abby. “Did we handcuff him to that rack?”

  “You did the chicken thing,” she reminded him. “Chicken-chicken brock-brock.”

  Saberhagen opened the rear door and sat behind me. “Nick, you and Abby grab more barley pops.”

  “Why don’t you?” said Nick.

  “Someone’s fixing to chow down on the brown bag special, son o’ mine.”

  They went. Frank tapped my shoulder. Pinched between his fingers: a pill. I swallowed it. Adjusted the rearview to frame his face.

  “We’ve known each other years. Broken bread together. Why do that to me?”

  “Sort of do it to ourselves, wouldn’t you say? Don’t be a drama queen.”

  “Go fuck your hat.”

  “Not wearing one. As you can plainly see.”

  The kids came back with more icy tallboys. Cool wind blew through the windows. Saberhagen’s pill— fabulous! My body may slide into the footwell, my bones soft as poached eggs. Bryan Adams’s “Summer of ’69” played on 97.7 Htz FM.

  “Love this tune, Fletch. Pump it.”

  “Oh, go home.”

  Saberhagen shouldered the door open, swooned onto the driveway, nearly fell, steadied himself then strode before the hood. Abby snapped on the high beams.

  “Rock out, Mr. S!”

  “You bet your bippy!”

  Saberhagen squinted weevil-eyed into the headlamps before embarking on an energetic and truly abysmal faux-rock performance. He brandished an air guitar that to judge by his hand spacing was the size of a classical base: fret-fingers above his head, strumming fingers down at his thighs. Hips gyrating, fingers spasming: he could have been experiencing an epileptic attack.

  “Those were the best days of my laaay-fe!” Frank sang. “Baw-baw-baw-ba-ba-baw! Yeah!”

  He reeled off the classic cock-rock staples. The Pigeon Neck. The High-leg Kick. The Lewd Crotchthrust. The Pursed-lips-chest-out Rocker Strut. The Angry Schoolmarm. He then threw in moves in no way appropriate to the song: The Water Sprinkler, The Running Man and The Robot.

  “I guess nothing can last forever, forever—naaaaaw!”

  “You’re not cool!” I shouted, though I had to admit the man did a damned fine Robot.

  Abby and Nick joined Frank. Abby gave him one of those mock-tortured-slash-ecstatic your-axeplaying-is-rocking-me-sohard faces. Frank launched into a face-melter guitar riff. He went down on one knee like James Brown. Nick peeled off his shirt and draped it over his father’s shoulders. Frank threw it off with a flourish and kicked out one leg as his performance reached its crescendo.

  “Those were the best days of mah liiiiife!”

  The three of them collapsed on the hood, howling. Abby thrust devil’s horns into the sky.

  “You’re beautiful, Saint Catharines! Goodnight!”

  The afternoon following my encounter with Sunshine, the houseboat drifts north. Steel sky. Poplars with metallic bark. The whole world aluminum-plated. Whippoorwills ride updrafts above the boat, their reflections statically pinned to the river’s surface. We’re making three knots against the current. I ask James about the woman from last night.

  “I got her number,” he says. “She loves dogs. Who knows? I’ll get off at Coboconk.”

  A little town upriver. I ask what’s in Coboconk. A moneymaking opportunity, I’m told.

  “I know I give the impression of being a pretty squared-away guy, Fletcher.”

  “. . . yuh-huh.”

  “It’s a smokescreen. Know how I make ends meet? A phone titillation provider.”

  “Phone sex?”

  “We providers prefer ‘titillation.’”

  “That has to be weird.”

  “You play characters,” James a
ssures me. “Biker Badass. Out-of-Work Model. Southern Dandy.” He puts on a nelly voice: “I douh decleah, this heat’s plum wiltin’ mah britches.”

  We reach Coboconk by nightfall and tie to an empty dock. The town unrolls along a single road. Chains of bug-tarred bulbs strung down each side of the street hooked to tarnished steel poles are the only lights. James uses the lone payphone, while I wait with Matilda.

  “He’ll send a car around. Meet you back at the boat?”

  “I can come. It’s safe?”

  “Won’t enjoy yourself, but if you want.”

  The car—a Cadillac, new but not flashy—rolls up. The driver’s a kid with stinking dreadlocks piled atop his skull. The open ungracious face of a moron.

  We drive until we hit a dirt turnoff. Starlight bends over a lake. Cottages, some no bigger than ice-fishing huts. The Caddy pulls into a horseshoeshaped driveway in the shadow of a monolithic log cabin built by a man who must lack all conception of irony.

  The driver leads us into an antediluvian sitting room dominated by a stone fireplace. Raw-cut pine walls. No pictures, rugs, indications of a woman’s touch. An eighty-gallon fish tank but not a single fish. James and I sit on the calfskin couch. Matilda licks the salted leather. There’s a bowl of cashews on the coffee table.

  “So, which of you is James?”

  The man’s wearing a lumberjack vest and a pair of corduroys so oft-washed the grooves have worn off. Or migrated to his face: his cheeks and forehead are worked with startlingly straight creases that run laterally, resembling the grain of cypress wood. A pleat of skin with the look of a chicken’s coxcomb is folded down over his left eye. James introduces us.

  “Fletcher, a pleasure. That must be Matilda.” He points to James’s swollen eye. My scabbed scalp. “Boys look like you’ve been through a war.” So jovial it’s hard to believe he gives a damn. “I’m Starling. Your driver’s my biographer, Parkhurst. I picked him up someplace.”

  As if Parkhurst were a tapeworm Starling drank in a glass of Nicaraguan tapwater. Which may not be far off: the kid, Parkhurst, strikes me as the type who’d happily use an old lady as a human shield during a gunfight.

  “A fine bitch,” Starling says of Matilda. “I love dogs. What sort of rotten bastard doesn’t? Loyal, forgiving. Run themselves to death to please you. I knew this one bitch, Trudy. Bulldog. She birthed a litter but her pups were taken away. Trudy forgot they were hers. Placed in her care again, she ignored them. When they mewled for her nipples she hounded them off. Yet if her owner was gone for years, that dog would remember. You could rub a pair of his old trousers on her nose and she’d yowl and slobber. Didn’t give a damn about her own kith but old trousers got her yelping.”

  Saliva accumulated at the edges of Starling’s mouth; every time his lips moved looked like a Ziploc bag coming open. His skin loosely moored to his skull as if to disguise a more fearful face lurking underneath. A Russian doll: faces inside faces inside faces.

  “What is it you do?” I ask him.

  “I’m The Middle, Fletcher.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “I do say. You know that old wheeze about the butterfly flapping its wings in Asia followed by a tidal wave swamping Florida? Sure there’s that butterfly and sure, there’s that wave—I mean to say there’s the person who wants a thing done and there’s that thing getting done—but effect doesn’t meet cause and A doesn’t meet C without The Middle. Point B. Moi.”

  And he says no more.

  Starling leads us into a cool scentless night as they often are this far north. James and Matilda, myself, Starling in a camelhair coat. Moonlight falls across a flat-roofed shack enclosed by chicken wire. A huge white dog exits. Matilda squats on her haunches. Licks her hindquarters.

  “This is a joke,” James says. “Right?”

  “That’s an Akita,” Starling tells him. “Japanese fighting dog.”

  “I know what it is. A puffed-up husky. We can’t roll them.”

  “The man I bought it from called it a quarrelsome breed. I feed it chicken blood.”

  “And I’m a dogman, not a butcher.” James is fuming. “We met in an online pitbull forum. You’ve got a fucking sledder here. Akita versus any pitbull, let alone a dead gamer like Matty . . . it’s Mike Tyson fighting a five-year-old. Matilda will crunch that poor thing’s skull like a crouton.”

  “Oh, I very much doubt that. Shall we see?”

  “Are you psycho? Look, I’ll show you.”

  James approaches the chicken wire with Matilda. The Akita yowls: a sexually aggressive sound. Rips at the fence with its teeth. Ropes of drool dangle from the wire. The dogs’ noses touch through the fence. Matilda’s lips curl: a black-gummed riptide displaying the pegs of her canines. She doesn’t growl. Barely moves. The Akita twists upon its flanks. Gnaws its own ass. Turns and crawls inside its doghouse. Flat on its belly. Whimpering.

  “What am I supposed to do with a cur?” says Starling, heartbroken.

  “Akitas are good hunt dogs.”

  “My life’s too complex for a dog.”

  Back inside we have a drink. James and Starling are bummed. The dogfight was to be wagered upon. I’m glad they’re gutted. The booze beelines to my bladder.

  The cabin’s toilet is brushed steel and tiny. An airplane latrine. On the toilet tank sits an old issue of Dog Fancier bookmarked with a memorandum from one Donald Kerr, solicitor. That little thing we discussed . . . reads the subject heading.

  I shake off. Zip up. A darkened room stands opposite the bathroom. Empty but for a box. Glasswalled, eight feet tall: a magician’s box, the kind you fill with water for shackled escapes. Inside rests what looks like an enormous kidney bean. Except it quivers and in this way is more of a Mexican jumping bean. I’d once given such a bean to Abby. I told her the Cydia moth lays an egg inside the bean. The larvae eats away the inside. When the bean warms in your palm the pupal-stage moth quivers to make the bean hop.

  Starling’s smiling when I return.

  “You’ve got a bloody nose, Fletcher.”

  My thumb comes away from my nostrils with a bead of blood on it.

  “Show me again,” says Starling, who couldn’t care less about my nose.

  James sets a cashew on the tip of Matilda’s snout. “Giddyup!” Matilda pops the nut into the air. Swallows it.

  Starling claps. “Bloody marvellous. Could she do it ten times in a row?”

  “All night.”

  “Ten times. Without missing.” Starling studies James. “Why don’t we make a bet on it?”

  “Bet sounds fine. Big bet, fine.”

  “Okay, okay, I’ll make you a very good bet. I’m a rich man. A sporting man. The Cadillac that picked you up. Like it?”

  “It’s nice.” James leans back and he laughs. “I don’t have anything like that.”

  “Get that fine bitch of yours to do her trick ten times in a row and it’s yours. You’d like a Caddy, wouldn’t you?”

  “I’d like it, sure. A Caddy. Who wouldn’t?”

  “We make this bet, then. I put up my car.”

  “And I put up?”

  “I wouldn’t ask you to bet what you cannot afford.”

  “You can’t have my dog.”

  “Some insignificant thing whose parting would not leave you too bereft.”

  “What, then?”

  “How about, say . . . your thumb.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I chop it off.”

  “That’s insane,” I say.

  “James tells me he needs money,” says Starling. “He can sell the car.”

  James considers it. He passes from consid-eration to acceptance far too swiftly for my liking.

  “Otherwise I’m here for nothing. Matilda can’t fight a sledder.” James drinks his drink and says: “Matty does her trick ten times running and I get the car. If she misses even once I lose my thumb. She’s never missed. Which hand?”

  “Your right. Which one’s dominant?” Starl
ing waves it off. “Left, right.”

  “So, left thumb?”

  “That’s the deal. Left thumb.”

  “I can get it reattached. How about my pinkie?”

  “No, thumb.”

  “Index finger.”

  “Thumb.”

  “What year is the car?”

  “Last year’s model. Parkhurst! Keys.”

  Parkhurst materializes and hands over the keys. Starling sets them beside the cashews.

  “Middle finger.”

  “Fine. But I keep it. No re-attachments.”

  “I don’t recall ever having much use for the middle finger of my left hand.” James massages the folds of Matilda’s mouth. “It’s a super bet.”

  “Let’s strap your hand down,” says Starling. “Parkhurst. Fetch nails, string, and a chopping knife.”

  Starling’s biographer returns with hammer, nails, butcher twine and a campfire hatchet. Starling hammers nails into the edge of the coffee table four inches apart. Cheap ten-penny nails with metal burrs clung to the nailheads. He tests them for firmness with his fingers.

  “Put your hand in here. Middle finger out.”

  Starling winds twine over James’s wrist, across his knuckles and around the nails. James’s fingernail whitens. Starling hefts the hatchet: new, shiny, with a foam-grip handle. James seems unperturbed with the blade hovering above his outstretched finger.

  “Begin,” says Starling.

  James sets a cashew on Matilda’s nose. The curve of the nut shapes itself to the dog’s snout. Matilda goes cross-eyed focusing upon it.

  “Giddyup!”

  The nut disappears down her gullet.

  “Good girl.”

  James sets another nut on Matilda’s snout. Starling holds the hatchet level to his ear.

  “Giddyup! Two. Good girl.”

  “Three.”

  “Four.”

  “Five.”

  “Six.”

  Matilda’s a machine. James works her through the procedure steadily. Cashew on snout, pause, “Giddyup!”

  “Seven!”

  “Eight!”

  One end of the ninth cashew is broken off, leaving an imperfect edge. Later I’ll wonder why James chose it when the bowl was full of perfectly good ones.