Sarah Court (16 page)

Other week he found a grocery bag full of used
work gloves at a building site. Sweat encrusted. Worn
through at the fingertips. The sheer uniformity—
gloves! a humongous bagful!—must have intrigued
him. Then days ago he came home with a trash sack
slung over his shoulder. Chewing on a Snickers. Two
questions, son of mine: why did you pick up that
charming sack of trash and where’d you get the
candy? His answer: he discovered the candy in the
sack, which, naturally, was why he picked it up. Its
contents: twenty-odd pounds of chocolate. We drove
to the site of his gold rush. The home’s owner, the
manager of Haig Bowl skating rink’s concession
stand, told me that yes, he’d pitched chocolate
bars past their best-before date. They wouldn’t
kill
anyone. I let Dylan keep five. A finders fee. On the
drive home a sugar rush gave rise to one of my son’s
parented Deep Thoughts:

“Daddy, would a cloned human being have a
soul?”

“Sure, Dill. Why not.”

One
vivid-as-hell
imagination.
He’s
been
a
stegosaurus,
a
fusion-engineered-saber-toothedrattlesnake (with stinging nettle skin), gas vapour
from a 1973 Gran Torino, an atomic mummy, both a
llama and an alpaca as apparently there’s a difference.
For days he’ll speak in this spur-of-the-moment
dialect: “Fitzoey blib-blab hadoo! Wibble-wabble?”
His whimsy gave birth to the Phantoids: aliens the
size of atoms who colonized a marshmallow he
carried in a shoe box. When the marshmallow went
stale he told me the Phantoids returned to their
home world.

“Wasn’t the marshmallow their world?”
“They were on vacation.”

“Budget travellers, those Phantoids.”

You’ve got to carefully monitor his stimuli or he’ll
pick up a contact high that lasts weeks. It can be a
bit embarrassing, as when he overheard a private
conversation between his mother and I and created
a jazzy new superhero: Captain Pap Smear. For a
minor eternity he shouted, in
basso profundo
voice,
“This sounds like a job for Captain Pap Smear!” and
“He seeks out evil and smears it!” Or during his
Night Stalker phase, where he deployed his skills at
sneaking about—he tiptoes like Baryshnikov!—to
catch my wife and I in
flagrante delicto
. He’d popped
up at the end of our bed with a cry of “Yeah
HA
!”
but his brow beetled with perplexity so I’d leapt up
chuckling “Ho ho ho!”, girding my hips with a sheet
to escort him back to bed.

Lately he’s been a vampire. A manageable fixation.
Before that it was No Bone Boy. That incarnation
saw him lounging in sloppy poses over sofa arms.
Splay-armed on the floor.

“Dinner’s on, Dill.”

“Sure am hungry, Daddy, but”—big sigh—“no
bones.”

I’d drag him into the kitchen. Perch him in a chair
like a muppet. Head flat on the table.

“Having a no-boned son sucks, huh?”

“Are the doctors working on those space-age
titanium bones?”

“Around the clock.”

Next he would slide,
sans
bones, onto the
linoleum. I mean, my kid is
method
.

The phone call
comes at three a.m. Flights booked:
Hamilton to JFK onto Russia. From there by charter
to the Sea of Okhotsk. I call Abby.

“It’s Nick,” I whisper. “Sorry, sorry. Alright I bring
Dylan over?”

“Mrrrmf
fah
.”

I pop a Black Cat caffeine pill. Grab a pre-packed duffel. On into Dylan’s room.

“Dill, gotta get up.”

His eyes crack. A stale drool smell wafts off his pillow.

“I’m taking you to Abby’s.”

“Can’t I stay with Mom?”

“Mom’s still settling in up in Toronto.”

He pulls his planet-patterned covers
up, squashing Jupiter upon the curve of his chin.
“No time for this, buckaroo. Either Abby or
grandpa.”

That does it. I bundle him into the car with his
“Emergency Away-From-Home Kit”: locomotive to
his Lionel train set, a book:
Lizards of the Gobi Desert
,
packets of banana-flavoured Carnation Instant
Breakfast which he takes blended with one real
banana.

I drive Ontario Street past the GM plant and its
stargazer’s constellation of security lamps. Chase a
yellow through the intersection of Louth past the
Hotel Dieu hospital. A man sits on an ambulance
bumper. Bloody towel pressed to his head smoking
a cigarette. St. Paul a cold strip hammered flat
between shopfronts. Men in snowmobile suits
with frostburnt fingers black as cigar butts. Dylan’s
touching the inside of his wrist with two fingers.

“What are you up to?”

“Checking my pulse. It’s the most reliable
indicator of bodily health.”

Russia. Goddamn. Okhotsk? Sound you’d make
choking on a fishbone. These gigs usually go a day
or two. Any longer I’ll have to buy local vestments.
Waddling about in a bearskin parka, a babushka, one
of those furry too-big KGB caps.

Abby musters a groggy smile when we arrive.
Boxers and a MET-RX tee shirt. Corded legs and
calves a-trickle with veins.

“Hey, troublemaker,” she says to Dylan in his
one-piece pajamas with padded booties; I think he’s
too old for them, but the fact they’re manufactured
in his size makes this hard to argue.

I drive to the airport and check in. Doze with
the pocketed lights of Hamilton burning through
the airplane window. Awake to a New York dawn.
Layover in JFK. Commuters shuffling under halogens
that accord us the look of zombies cooling our heels
between takes of a grade-Z horror flick. No jetsetters.
Jetlagged middle-of-the-roaders. Economy-classers.
Shreds of airline-peanut foil under our fingernails.
We, the tribe of semis: semi-handsome, semiintellectual,
semi-successful, semi-leisure class, semi-happy, semi-alive. Half lifers.

I’m in what a headshrinker might call “a fragile
state of mind.” Not so much I cannot cope, not so
much I’d abdicate my responsibilities, but . . . yeah.
Fragile. There’s this commercial on TV a lot these
days. For the Alzheimer’s Society. Maybe you’ve seen
it? This old fellow in a house full of lemons. Shelves,
the floor, fridge chockablock. He can’t remember
he’d already bought them, see? Buys more and
more. This poor old man in a house full of lemons.
Playing solitaire. It wrecks me. Takes precious little,
so suddenly. The ass-end of Christopher Cross’s
“Sailing” on an easy-listening station. The smell
of burning leaves. I’m standing there, welling up,
asking myself:
What the hell’s this all about?

A pair of leggy foreign girls—German tennis
players to take a wild stab—breeze past. Young and
somehow more attractive for their harried-ness:
a woman-on-the-go quality. Speaking in exotic
tongues. Hair done up invitingly. I try on a smile but
catch my profile in a chain pizzeria’s mirrored facade
and the sight—punch-squashed nose, cauliflower
ears: reminders of a childhood in the ring—causes
the smile to rot on my face. I can’t even summon the
enthusiasm to play the gay divorcée.

Auf Wiedersehen, ladies.

The next flight finds me stranded between beefy
members of the beleaguered proletariat. A breakfast
omelette resembles novelty vomit. My stomach
curdles over the vast grey Atlantic.

I work for American Express. Caretaker for
Centurion holders. The Black Card.

It began as an urban myth: American Express
distributed a card with which you could buy
anything to the limit of the company’s 20.87 billion
dollar worth. A decommissioned battleship or gently
used space shuttle. But the card never existed. Until
one of the bigwigs at head office said, “Why not?”
The Centurion is limited to 4,000 clients worldwide.
Member fee: $350,000.

You can look at me as a concierge. A perk built
into the card’s exorbitant fees. Occasionally this
reduces me to professional nose-wiper. I’m sent to
monitor peculiar purchases. If a client’s aiming to
buy a cruise missile, I have to say:
nix
.

Clients do fall from Centurion status. In those
cases we do as with any deadbeat: cut their card up.
I cut up Michael Jackson’s, if you can believe it. He
was in Europe. We charted his egress by the locations
of each gobsmacking purchase. Three Qing Dynasty
vases ($750,000 apiece) at a Glasgow antiques
emporium. The 1.5-ton chandelier from the Belfast
Grand Opera House auctioned at Sotheby’s Helsinki.
An attempted purchase of Marienburg castle, a deal
nearly shepherded to fruition by Duke Philip von
Wuerttemberg—that man knew a pigeon when he
saw one—occasioned my dispatch. I tracked Jackson
to a hotel room in Budapest. Ushered past mucketymucks and a diaper-clad chimp before reaching the
man himself. Who was a mess. Face falling off the
put-upon bones of his skull. “Big fan,” I told him
awkwardly, snipping his card in half. “My first slow
dance was to ‘Baby Be Mine.’”

That damn chimp scratched my arms all to hell.
Novosibirsk airport holds the eye-bruising
shade of a black market kidney. Red, arterial red,
steak-tartare-served-on-a-stop-sign red stretching
everywhere. The arcade past Customs consists of
four Ms. Pacmans. Three of the four are busted. The
man waiting at the luggage carousel—check that,
luggage disgorger: scuffed tongue of a conveyor
belt drooling suitcases into a metal basin—jabs a
squared-off finger at the pocket he assumes I keep
my passport in.

“
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.”