Sarah Court (15 page)

“These people are professionals?”

“Far as I know, you’re asking whether the mob is
professional.”

Nick showed up. He now worked for a credit card
company. Recently divorced. His kid, Dylan, was
with him. A chubby boy smelling of peanut butter.
I put my dukes up for playful shadowboxing. Halfhoping Nick would slug me. He pushed my hands
down. Hugged me. His kid being there, I guess.
Frank said something mean-spirited but ultimately
truthful. I left.

The farmhouse
stands off the main road. Several
dozen head of cattle sleep in the abutting pasture.
James kicks the door open before the car checks
up. Staggering around with Matilda in her cowl of
bloody towels.

“My dog—my dog’s dying!”

Light blooms in a second-story window. A man in
sleeping flannels leans out.

“She’s been chopped,” James tells him. “Bleeding
real bad.”

“Chopped?”

“Scratched,” I tell the guy. “Clawed. Badger or
something.”

“He said chopped.”

“He’s out of it. We thought you could help. Or tell
us where the nearest vet is.”

A second sleep-puffed face, female, materializes.

“How bad is it?”

“She’s a tough dog,” I tell her. “But deep.”

The woman rubs the flat of her palm over her
face. “I’m no vet, but I could stitch that dog up. Give
me a minute to get decent.”

She meets us downstairs. A hard-shouldered
woman stepping into a pair of galoshes. Husband
taller and thinner with big-knuckled hands. A
hunting rifle is crossed over his chest.

“He thinks you guys could be running a home
invasion scam,” his wife says. “Show up at night with
a sick dog, appealing to our tenderest feelings—”

“How do we know that dog’s hurt?” the guy says.
“Towels soaked in red food colouring.”

“Fair enough,” I say. “I’m Fletcher. This is James
and Matilda.”

“Michelle. Matt’s the hubby. We do all that work
out in the barn.”

Frost-clad grass crunches underfoot as we make
our way through cattle whose bodies steam like
stewpots in the moon-plated field. I touch one: skin
texture of a truck tire. Michelle unlatches the barn
door. Lights screwed into high beams fritz and pop.
She leads us to a metal gooseneck from which a
darkly knotted noose suspends.

“For cows. Drag a bale over so she can reach,”
Michelle says. “Head through it.”

“She won’t bite,” James says.

“Your say-so doesn’t make it any less likely. I’m
not getting my face chewed off.” She’s threading a
needle with surgical catgut. “Thinnest gauge I’ve got.
Use it to repair labial tears after cows give birth.”

She peels towels away to reveal Matilda’s wound.
A near-bloodless gash: stiff white lips with a shiny red
trench between. The needle works through Matilda’s
hide. Michelle pulls the incision lips together, loops,
ties. She swabs Matilda’s hide with rubbing alcohol.
Paints the sutures with mercurochrome.

“Good as I can do for her.”

Back in their kitchen Matthew digs a gallon
tub of ice cream out the freezer. Rinses it, cuts the
bottom out with a utility knife, slices halfway up
its hull. James works the plastic until it fits round
Matilda’s throat. Matthew duct-tapes the cone in
place. Matilda gives the plastic a desultory lick,
chuffs, lays across James’s legs.

We want to let them get back to bed but they say it
isn’t worth bothering. They’d have to be up shortly.
Such are the hours of cattle ranchers.

“Before cattle Matt was a sharecropper,” says
Michelle.

“What sort of crops?”

“Potatoes,” Matt tells me. “Little coloured ones.
Boutique potatoes, they’re called. Funky colours:
purple and orange and bright red. All the rage with
top-flight chefs.”

“Rages come and rages go,” says Michelle. “Why
not russets? Mashers, bakers, fryers.”

“But they aren’t
niche
,” Matt says. “We’ve done
better with cattle.”

“A wonder you didn’t suggest pygmy cows.”
Michelle kisses the top of his head. “Bright purple
pygmy cows.”

The hospital room
was stark white. Abigail covered
in a white sheet.

Her nipples were hard. I tried to fiddle with the
thermostat but the box was locked. As my presence
was a breach of the restraining order, I couldn’t
ask for help. I smoothed my hands over the sheets.
So glossy they could be made from spun glass.
Somebody had trimmed her fingernails. Went too
deep on the left pinkie: a rime of dried blood traced
the enamel.

The brain is a funny organ and breaks in funny
ways. Saberhagen says a damaged brain is an old car
in a junkyard that, every once in awhile, you twist
the key and it starts. If this was her forever after and
she’d never remember anything of who she’d been—
pre-September Abby—I could live with it. But some
days the chemicals inside her head would surge, old
doors would open and she’d be who she once was for
an instant. An instant of complete confusion and
rage and in the next she’d know nothing. A lingering
sense, only, a taste on the back of the tongue.

A tray sat on the bedside table. Cold minestrone
soup. Meatloaf. Lime Jell-O. How long would it sit
before being taken away? Would another tray arrive
for breakfast? I wanted to find the orderly who’d
brought it and throw him down a flight of stairs.
Above the tray sat the machines. Beeping, wheezing,
heartbeat-spike-emitting machines. If I didn’t leave
soon I might find myself fiddling with those dials
and knobs. With the easy notion of it.

Imagine driving home one night. You hit a
girl on her bicycle. That broken tapestry of limbs
splayed over your hood. The sound of impact with
the windshield—would it sound like so much at all?
Twisted handlebars in the grille and the ironclad
assurance that the existence you’d followed up
until that moment was finished. Every overblown
ambition harboured. Each foolish hope nursed.
Now imagine it again. This time it’s your own girl.
Realizing you’d settled behind that wheel the very
night she was born. Guided yourself with terrible
precision into that collision. No man can live inside
his skin after reaching such an understanding. Even
a one-celled organism, a planarian worm, would
turn itself inside-out.

I walked down Queenston past a Big Bee
convenience near the bus depot. An elderly man in
what appeared to be pajamas exited a late-model
minivan. He’d left the engine running. I hopped in.

Thus kicked off my short, silly career as vehicle
thief.

The highway
runs north. James and I can’t return
to the houseboat. I don’t even want to. I’m nearly
where I need to be, anyway.

Dawn rises over tailback hills. I drive into the
town of Peterborough. A bakery’s just opening on
the main drag. I go in, buy coffees and rolls hot from
the oven. James and I sit on the hood of the Cadillac.
Matilda lays on the passenger seat. Cone-wrapped
head lolling in the footwell. A pickup passes, its bed
full of itinerant workers in snowmobile suits. The
bus station lot lights snap off, halogen coils dimming
inside their plastic shells as the sun breaks over the
squat block of a Woolco store.

“Where now?”

“Back south,” James says. “I got a place. Niagara Falls. U.S. side. For tax purposes.”

“To do what?”

“I’m thinking—this may sound crazy—about raising earthworms. It’s a messy enterprise,” he
admits, “but they’re gold. Not just for fishing: it’s the
composting wave I’ll ride. Easy to start a worm farm.
Couple kiddie pools, nightcrawlers, off you go. But
you need quality worms. Good bloodlines.”

“Worms have those?”

“I’ve been told so.”

“Well . . . I got to go, James.”

For whatever reason he’s confused. As if he’d expected me to tag along the rest of his life. The
sun carries over the low-rise architecture of this
central Ontario town. In the Cadillac’s windshield
stand James and myself, reflected. James with his
bruised face, me with my scabby scalp. Matilda
stares through the glass. With the cone round her
head brightened by the sun she looks like the bulb in
a car headlamp.

I catch a cab at the bus terminal. It heads to
the destination I’d been given over the phone by a
man with a Robert Goulet voice. Lakefield Research
Centre. Some kind of metallurgy lab. It takes about
an hour. I doze. I give the cabbie everything I’ve got
left on me—everything in my pockets. Cash, half a
pack of gum, a Subway Club card one punch-hole shy
of a free footlong. He takes it all gratefully enough.

Lakefield is painted that industrial lime shade
common in the seventies. Inside are the partially lit
hallways, gypsum floors, and whitewashed concrete
walls of any elementary school. I walk down halls,
finding nobody, nothing but the hum of machinery
through the walls. I come upon a chair and man
sitting in it. Old, in a janitor’s outfit. I tell him who I
am and he nods. I follow him down another hallway,
up a flight of stairs. The reek of ozone. A green-tiled
room. Riveted metal floors. Military cot. I lie upon
it and fall into an exhausted sleep and awake to face
my butcher.

Starling looks not bad, considering. Bandaged up,
everything safety-pinned in place. He sits awkwardly
in a wooden chair backgrounded by a man I find
familiar. Starling sniffles. The other man wipes his
nose with a Kleenex, which he balls and tucks up his
sleeve as an old biddy would.

“The man’s dog?”

“Tough dog.”

“Tough,” Starlings agrees.

“So who cuts—you?”

“I’m not a professional,” Starling tells me. “Or a gifted amateur. Only The Middle. Your organs
are point A. Their destinations point C. They meet
through me. We have surgeons. Not, mind you, the
best this world has to offer.”

“You can cut me to rags and throw my body to the
dogs. But my eyes . . .”

“Your daughter,” says Starling. “You love her?
You must. There will be various handler’s fees,”
he
explains.
“Other
miscellaneous
expenses.
Whatever’s left will be deposited into your account.”

I brace my arms on the cot’s edge. “How much do
you figure I’m worth?”

“Depends how much you’re needed. By whom.”

“There’ll be some kind of . . . gas?”

“We’re businesspeople, not animals. Go shower.”

A shower room as I remember from high school.
Steel colonnades stretching ceiling to floor. Nozzles
strung round. I strip down and twist the knob.

She will see life as an eternal ten-year-old. The
worst fate in the world? Hardly. That this is the
most cowardly plan of action can hardly be denied.
History is crowded with fathers who’ve fled blood
debts. I could try to pay back in increments what I
stole. In moments and hours and days. Fifty years
paying back what is essentially un-repayable. But I’m
not that man. Never possessed that strength. Not
for one instant in my existence.

It hurts to deny my daughter her rage. Hurts she
cannot scream it into my face. Direct the cold barrel
of that hatred at me. Melt the flesh off my bones.
My deepest frustration finds itself here. Since
anyone can be a father, can’t they? Half the human
race. Takes nothing but to find a woman, tell her
you love her—or love her truly, if you have that in
you. Fatherhood follows. Yet nothing is so easy. I
do love my daughter but this much is true: love is a
sickness. Some kind of pathogen existing above all
explanation.

A peculiar darkness falls through the casement
window—a cold hole opening in the centre of the
sun—as droplets fall, silver freckles striking my
skin. No noise at all. The water. My heartbeat. That
cold widening spot in the sun.

Black Box: Fletcher Burger.

The plane is afflicted with vehicular leprosy.
Exterior panels flake off, rivets bursting, plates
of steel carried off in the jet stream. Grip fast
the yoke as it shimmies in my hands. I could let
go but to this final end I am selfish. The life you
cling to most dearly, worthwhile or not, is your
own.

Guilt crushes you into shapes unrecognizable.
Hate to sound weak of will but things happen.
They happen. And yet I am truly quite sorry.

I pull back on the yoke. The line in the sky
separating earth from sky, that sketchy pastel
scrim of blue, gives way to darkness. The
plane comes apart. As do I. My hands blacken.
Whiteness of knuckle through charred skin.
My eyes catch fire in a green flash the way
phosphorous flares burn in the colours of their
dyeing.

How deeply do any of us know our own
selves?
Ask
yourself.
We
hold
a
picture
of
how we wish to be and pray it goes forever
unchallenged.
Passing
through
life
never
pursuing aspects of our natures with which
we’d rather not reckon. Dying strangers to
ourselves.

First,
let me tell you about my boy. Dylan. Great kid.
The greatest.

He’s chubby. Chubby-edging-fat. I’ve always been
thin and my wife, ex-wife, she’s trim as a willow
switch. The charitable genes we inherited reversed
polarities in him. Now I don’t mind that he’s chubby
but I don’t know what it’s like to be chubby so I’m
a stranger to his struggles. My dad suggests a
dietician. Too Hollywood. A ten-year-old with a
dietician. What next—a PR flack?