Sarah Court (13 page)

“
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 assures 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?” Starling
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.

“Giddyup!”

The sound it makes glancing off Matilda’s teeth is
the tinny
wynk
of a shanked golf ball. The sound that
comes out of James’s mouth is not a scream so much
as a breathless hiss. Starling raises the hatchet above
his head. It all happens rather quickly.

Matilda leaps onto James’s back. Uses him as
a springboard. The cashew bowl’s upended, nuts
spraying in a fan. Matilda’s jaws clamp fast to
Starling’s shoulder.

“Yeeeeeeeeeeee!”

This is the sound that exits the broken hole of
Starling’s mouth. Matilda’s jaws are nearly hyperextended, upper teeth sunk into the wrinkled
flesh of his deltoid. Starling shakes at the mercy of
a creature one-third his weight but every ounce of
it working muscle. Momentum carries them to the
floor. Matilda’s skull impacting hardwood sounds
like a bowling ball dropped on a dance floor. She
forfeits her grip, flips over, digs her teeth into the
fresh punctures. Starling’s eye rolls back in some
kind of horrible dream-state. The hatchet flails
wildly and its blade hacks into Matilda’s beer-cask
side.

James drags the coffee table—his hand’s still
trussed up—over to her. His feet crunch on cashews.
I help him tear free of the twine. He grips the top
and bottom halves of Matilda’s jaw.

“Drop it.
Drop
.”

Matilda forfeits her grip. James kisses her nose.

We help Starling onto the sofa. Parkhurst
is AWOL. Starling’s skin stinks of busted-open
batteries as adrenaline dumps out every pore.
His shirt’s torn open. Blood bubbles through the
puncture wounds and comes off him in strings. Odd
knittings of skin bracket his armpit and where his
shoulder meets his neck.

I find a first aid kit in the medicine chest.
Starling’s nearly stopped bleeding by the time I
return. The trauma isn’t nearly so bad as it appeared.
The car keys are on the floor. I slip them into my
pocket.