“Shab-ruh-hoegan. Dis not name you company to give.”
“My company’s an idiot,” I tell him. That I’d refer to my company as a massive useless singular evidently tickles his Bolshevik funny bone. He smells strongly of pickled something: beets, to guess by the staining of his teeth. He leads me through the airport to a runway where a twin-prop plane awaits. My baggage handler is the pilot. Could be it’s this way all over Russia. The doctor who empties your bedpan cuts out your gallbladder, too.
It’s late afternoon by the time we touch down on a grassy landing slip. Goats graze over a stone wall. A Lada waits. Unsurprisingly, the pilot’s my driver. He guns the four-banger engine.
“Dah. Ve go.”
Stone houses, filling stations, churches with onion-bellied spires. Heaved-backed men with skin so hard and whitened it looks like an exoskeleton. It’s darkening by the time we reach a bluff overlooking the sea. A bay edged by cliffs. A military-style tent is set up on the beach below. A Jeep. Up the bluff with us: a TV truck. Russky station. The satellite dish on its roof is a rusted toadstool.
“Dah,” says my Man Friday. “Joo go.”
Egg-sized beach stones rounded smooth with each tide. Dark skeins of kelp. Blackness of water leeching into the sky. I hear frantic peeps. Light burns out of tents’ eyelets.
“Saberhagen?”
Conway Finnegan steps through the flaps. A St. Catharines native who hopped a ship to the Saudi oilfields and in the ensuing decades became our town’s richest expat. His American Express status took the same upwardly mobile route: green to gold to platinum to Centurion. We’d last met in Delta’s first class lounge at Dulles airport. He’d been off to “sort out some monkeyshines with those Halliburton bastages.” Even at sixty-odd Conway’s huge: a chunk of slob ice broken off the Niagara river miraculously grown legs, arms, and a salt-and-pepper head. One of those guys who, when he hugs you—as he does now—he cradles the back of your head as if you’re an infant with a neck too weak to support your skull. Despite this, he looks smaller than my memory of him. Circumstances tend to shrink a man.
“TV truck still up there?” When I tell him it is: “Vultures a-circling.”
We hop into the Jeep. Connie drives to the seashore. Flicks on foglamps bolted to the roll bar. “See it? Volganeft-188. Bearing cargo I paid for and insured.”
A metallic tusk juts from the water a few knots out. Moonlight bleeds along the downed ship’s hull to make it appear as a curved knife slicing up out of the surf.
“Borne for the western seaboard. Busted apart two-hundred miles from where she was loaded. Four thousand liquid tons of motor oil into the drink. Glug, glug, glug.”
Connie’s flashlight sweeps the shore. It lingers on tar-scummed life rafts. It takes a moment to accept the flat, eye-shaped objects washing in and out as flounders. The seaside is cobbled with dead fish. Oil-smothered birds. Feathers slicked down they’re tinier, the way a dog shrinks when you bathe it. Only the red pinpricks of their eyes aren’t black. “Cleaned a couple best I could,” Connie says. “Still, they died. Oil’s earmarked for Wal-Mart. Biggest oil-change providers in the hemisphere. I got a buzz from their legal eagle, Donald-someone-or-other. Real nut-buster. Says I better get out here, deal with the mess I’d made.”
He crimps one nostril with his thumb. Blows a string of mucous out the other. Back home we call that a gym-teacher’s nose blow.
“He said what I ought to do is collect some of the poor things as samples. A charitable educational initiative. Put them in glass boxes of formaldehyde. Give it a preachy name. Our Poisoned Seas. It’ll spin, he kept saying. It’ll spin!”
Huge fearsome noises rumble up the beach. Connie trains the flashlight. Down the stones, gripped in the oil-thickened surf, is a shark. Easily a thirteen-footer—a rogue, they call lone sharks— threshing on the polished stones. Black, its body all black and while this should have made it more fearsome, a living nightmare, it only looks pitiful. “Great white,” Connie says. “Didn’t think they swam this far north.”
Its saw-like tail slashes. Its massive, rubber-like mouth flexes. Stones burst between its jaws. Pebbles adhere to the glutinous sheen of its oil-covered skin, making portions of its anatomy look like black bedazzled leather. A second tail, far smaller, protrudes partway from its sternum. The shark must’ve swum into the shallows to give birth. The > metallic fluttering of its gill-slits. Dark arterial blood pouring out as it suffocates.
In the tent we can still hear her dying. All the little sounds of death. The tent: folding table, chairs, hurricane lamp hanging on a loop of jute cord. Bottles of native spirits.
“My father, Seamus” Connie tells me, “had an embolism. Blood pooling in the brain. First morning I’m back home he shreds the newspaper into a bowl and pours milk on it. Then he goes and shakes cornflakes over the table. Trying to do what he’d done for thirty-five years: eat cereal, read the paper. But the circuitry was screwy.”
Connie takes a haul off the nearest bottleneck. “Money wasn’t a sticky point—I’d have shipped him to Beth Israel—but I was told Frank Saberhagen, your Dad, was good as any. Part of some big medical thingamabob . . .”
“The Labradum Procedure.”
“—right, at—”
“Johns Hopkins.”
“Blood from that blown vessel lingered in Dad’s head. It . . . turned hard? Went to jelly? Anyway, in the channels of his brain. Weeks in the hospital. Norris wing. As a kid, I thought that place was a . . .” “Nuthouse.”
“You, too?”
“Teachers used to threaten: behave, or I’ll ship you to the Norris wing with the crazies. You’d think it was padded cells and straightjackets—”
“—and electroshock therapy, sure. Just rooms, Nick. Ordinary hospital rooms.”
Wind howls in off the sea and hisses through the eyelets. My first trip to the Soviet Union. What would I carry home? Busted Reagan-era video games. Beet-stained teeth. A shark’s gills sharp as the steel teeth on a circular saw. Conway Finnegan so shrunk inside his skin he had the look of a sick Shar-pei.
“Sorry to drag you out,” he tells me. “American Express was happy enough to dispatch you. Your father, mine. We’re town boys. I’m just the son of a welder from St. Kitt’s, Nick.”
I close my eyes. Behind my eyelids fins and beaks, wings and tails break up from the dark. Two boys from southern Ontario perched on the other end of the world at the edge of an oil-black sea.
“How’s your father, Connie?” I ask.
“Cemetery off Queenston. By the liftlocks. Yours?”
“Still kicking.”
Secondly, I’ll to tell you about my wife. Ex.
What I miss is a hand on her hip. On line at the movies or navigating the kitchen while we cooked. An undervalued perk of married life. My hand on her hip, whenever.
Our first kiss she had Sambuca on her tongue. Like sucking on a licorice pastille. Making out in my father’s Camry with “C’Mon and Ride It” by Quad City DJs on the radio. One of many life events on which I’d gladly take a do-over. These disassociated memories I carry forward. These memories, I imagine, are the ones I’ll die with. Back then I was still rooting through my father’s GQs, ripping out the scented cologne ads, rubbing them on my neck. Also training to fight the curtain-jerker on a card at the Tonowanda VFW. My opponent: Ox “Eighteen” Wheeler. Irish so far as I’d been told but he walked to the ring in a serape and sombrero accompanied by a mariachi guitarist strumming “Prisonero De Tus Brazos.” Yes, seriously, and yes, I lost. Ox headbutted me in the first round. The pressure of our heads colliding caused veins in my forehead to burst. Those veins spraying blood like fire hoses under my skin occasioned two plum-sized mouses to form above my eyes. By the sixth round they were so massive I couldn’t see much: like peering out of a basement window. My father said I’d looked like a goat with clipped horns. He slit them afterwards. Blood pissed out of my face halfway across the locker room, splashing the robe of a flyweight warming up. The scars now m
eet in a shallow ‘V’ above my eyebrows.
The adrenaline the Wheeler fight overload of sparring for made me immoderately, ungovernably horny. More so even than your runof-the-mill nineteen-year-old. Dad blamed it on an overstimulated hypothalamus gland. “I tell guys with ED to join a boxing club,” he’d say. “A round of sparring beats that little blue pill all to hell.” Oversexed boxer + rebellious daughter of landed gentry = hormonal fireworks. Eleven months: the span separating our eyes meeting across a crowded campus bar to Dylan’s birth. To cop a lyric from a song getting radio play around then: “We were only freshmen.”
I was KO’d by an overmuscled bear from Coldwater, Michigan on a card sponsored by the railway switchmen’s union the week my to-be wife announced she was preggers. The sting my father felt at my losing to a guy he trumpeted as “The Coldwater Crumpet” was inflamed by the fact we’d be keeping the baby. We arranged a quickie civil union at the courthouse. Our mothers’ hearts broken: they who’d pined for rose petals, centrepieces, and perhaps to pin some inexact debt on us for arranging it.
My wife: cute, athletic, a field hockey defenceman. The physics of childbirth terrified her. Her “vaginal integrity” would be ruined by a new life steamrolling out. At Lamaze class our instructor, an elderly wide-hipped lesbian (“A dyke with childbearing hips,” my father had said; “Irony, thou art a coy mistress!”) asked us men to picture passing a cherry stone through our urethral tube. “If I could birth our baby that way, I would,” I’d said to my wife during one quarrel. “Even if it widened my urethral tube so bad it ended up a . . . a windsock!”I was there in the delivery room. She insisted. My first sight of Dylan: this slick quivering mass extruded from my wife’s birth canal. Her labial lips stretched and torn. I’d touched her weeks later, in bed, felt those hairline scabs in the process of healing. To know I’d wreaked that manner of intimate violence upon her. She regained her figure but the skin of her stomach lost tension. She said it looked like a balloon from a New Year’s party fallen behind the couch to be found in April, mostly deflated with half a lungful of sad old air inside.
We had typical married couple fights. My wife hailed from a proper English family. One did not use one’s utensil as a shovel. Food should be pushed up the underside of a fork. She made Dylan—three years old with the fine motor skills of a spider monkey—roll corn niblets up his fork. Or we’d be having sex, she’d run her fingers through my hair and say: “I liked it better long.”
Dad says: “Surveys prove a third of women cheat on their spouse. But if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll know if she’s in that third before it ever happens.” I’m not happy. She kept repeating this the night she left. After the rationales and rage had burnt us down to the bones of it. I’m not happy. What can I change? Nothing. I’m not happy. Is there someone else? No. But there was by then the idea of someone else. She craved the catharsis of a clean break. To tell the truth, it was foretold in one silly everyday episode.
I’d driven her to the mechanic to pick up our old Aerostar. She drove home behind me. At a stoplight on Martindale I observed her out the rearview mirror. In that moment she became a stranger, and my understanding of her that of a stranger. I saw a lovely woman in a minivan singing along to the radio. Really belting it out. One hand drumming the wheel. Wedding band fracturing the sunlight to spit it off in sparks.
She wasn’t my wife, in that moment. Just a beautiful girl who’d married too young and gotten trapped—only she hadn’t quite reached that realization.
I catch a redeye into Toronto. A message from Abby awaits me at home.
“Dylan’s in trouble at school. You’ve got a meeting with Iris Trupholme. He’s still a vampire.”
I’d let Dylan watch The Lost Boys. Afterwards he begged me to go to Toys R Us. I outfitted him with a bargain-bin cape and plastic fangs. He’s adopted that Lugosian accent where every ‘w’ becomes a ‘v’: I vant to suck jor blood, blah!
Abby’s waiting outside Dylan’s classroom with a girl my son’s age. She’s got those enamel-coloured dental braces that make wearers look as though they have sets of overlapping teeth, like sharks. She’s chewing an Eberhard eraser and spitting pink bits on the tiles.
Missus Trupholme, Dylan’s teacher: sixtyish, with a low centre of gravity. Her skull sports a vaporous cloud of frizzy red hair which, if it had a taste, would unarguably be cherry. On her desk is a kid’s cellphone. The pink faux-gems are a dead giveaway.
“They’re video cameras now,” Trupholme says. “Everyone’s making their own amateur videos. Next regional meeting it’s number one on the bullethead.”
She flips it open. Fiddles with buttons. “Kids recording one another. Their age’s version of Truth or Dare. Put videos on the Internet. There’s a place . . .”
“Youtube,” says Abby.
“That one. One shows a grade ten student beating up his Math teacher. The man was months shy of retirement. Phones so small, it’s hard to patrol. Cassie!”
The eraser-chewer slinks in. Trupholme says: “How does this work?”
Cassie presses a few buttons. Trupholme says, “Now go on.”
“Can I have it back?”
“All signs point to ‘no.’”
The girl performs a deep-knee bend, arms hugged round her knees.
“My dad’s gonna kill me.”
“Tell him it’s evidence.”
“Swear to God, I’ll only . . .” Her lip juts. Stuck with crumbs of eraser. “It’s my property.”
“Sue me.”
Cassie stomps back into the hall. Trupholme shows us the video on the phone’s inch-wide screen. Dylan in corduroys with his vampire cape tied round his throat is standing at the front of the class. Shaky footage shot from halfway under a desk. Trupholme chalks a math problem on the board. Dylan prowls up behind. Rubs against her. She sets both hands on Dylan’s shoulders. Moves him gently away. Dylan presses forward, smiling, to rub on her again.
“Oh, God,” I say. “That’s not Dill at all.”
“His first quasi-sexual offence,” Trupholme says.
Quasi-sexual. Something breaks in me. She goes on:
“Are either of you familiar with the term ‘frotteur’? A person who derives gratification from rubbing. Crowded busses, subway cars: where adult frotteurs operate.”
“That’s what you think Dylan is? A—a budding frotter?”
“Frotteur. Your son’s too young to have his sexuality sorted out. That said, Mr. Saberhagen, we’re suspending him a week.”
“Yes. Fair. What he’s done is a bad sign. In a year of bad signs. We should make him clean the playground, too.”
“That’s not necessary.”
“Hell, yes. Physical, demeaning labour.”
“I doubt our groundskeeper would be happy to hear that.”
Dylan sits on an orange plastic chair in the cafeteria. Vampire cape draped over its back.
“Outside. You’re cleaning the schoolyard.”
“Vampire Dylan doze not clean.”
“Shut up with that. You’re suspended a week.”
He wipes his nose on the cape. “It was just a joke . . . blah.”
The wind gusts round the school’s industrial edges. Kid-centric garbage—Fruit Roll-Up sleeves, YOP bottles—skates across autumn grass. Dylan mopes along the fence, cape aflutter, tossing trash haphazardly into the bag.
“That was a dandelion,” I call from the swingset. “Since when are they garbage?”
“They’re weeds!”
His whole life I’ve played the hardass. When his “terrible twos” habit had been to strike out with his fists: always me holding his pudgy hands. He said “Mom” at eight months; he didn’t say “Dada” until he’d reached a year, by which point he’d already said “Car” and “Wow-wow.” Instead of putting trash in the bag, he’s skewering it on fence barbs. Yogurt cups piked like heads.
“You’re supposed to pick it up, not redistribute it,” Abby says. To me: “He was on the computer all day.”
“Should I suspend his privileges?”
“The only way he interacts, Nick. His own birthday—who shows up? That exchange student, Rigo, and me.”
Dylan’s poked the bag full of holes to wear as a muumuu.
“All done. Blah!”
“By the tetherball pole: see? Pop can. Hurry up. Boxing tonight,” I say. Abby gives me a look. “The basics,” I tell her. “We’ll fit a gumshield to his mouth.” I don’t tell her how last time Dylan burst into tears biting down on the warm rubber. “It’s good for him.”
“Yeah, because it was so good for you.”
Old wheeze in the boxing game: In the ring, truth finds you. Didn’t put in the roadwork? That finds you. Didn’t leave enough sweat on the heavy bags? That comes to find you. Not just the work: it’s all you are from inside-out. Every little thing, even those you got no defence against. If you’re cursed with brittle hands, say, that truth finds you. If you cut easy or your heart’s not the equal of the man you square up against. In every punch and feint, broken bone and chipped tooth, every gasp and moan, each time you wish you were someplace else, anywhere but here taking this punishment, in your guts and marrow in every place you thought hidden. Boxing is simple arithmetic. The ones and twos never fail to add. Truth always finds its way back to you.
Impact Boxing is located in a strip mall on Hartzell next to a knife shop, King of Knives, whose banner reads: Knives, The Perfect Gift for Knife Lovers! Beyond lies Sterno Dell. Charred tree skeletons poke from its rain-sodden ash like spears.
Entering the club gives me the same sensation an Olympic swimmer must get slipping on a clammy Speedo for morning laps: uncomfortably familiar. My DNA is soaked into these speed bags, headgear, punch mitts. Atomized remainders cling to sewage pipes spanning the ceiling. Photos of prematurely aged fighters on the walls. My favourite a B&W portrait of Archie Moore, the Mongoose, with this quote: Nowadays fighters tussle for money. I was fighting when the prize was going to jail. When I was a kid, two men nursing a blood feud stepped through the ropes to go at it barefisted. One hit the other so hard he face-planted the canvas. While unconscious he sneezed involuntarily; a pressurized hiss as the air driven into his skull vented around his eye sockets. My father said the man had suffered an orbital blowout fracture and was lucky: had he sneezed much harder an eyeball might have ejected itself.
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