Sarah Court (26 page)

That night I broke the head off the sand-cast
dog on Wesley Hill’s front porch with a five-pound
mallet.

Frank Saberhagen
’s corgi, Moxie, once forced itself
upon Mama’s sheepdog.

Excelsior lay on the sidewalk when Moxie “bum
rushed”—Cappy’s term—her haunches as if he
aimed to “drill for Texas tea.” The dog must have
“one hell of a Napoleon complex,” as he was “giving
that ole girl what-for.”

Excelsior shook Moxie off. Moxie persisted
with clumsy jump-thrusts. Excelsior mule-kicked
the corgi. Moxie did a backwards somersault into
Mama’s marigolds. Which he urinated upon. Cappy
laughed. I struggled to understand what was funny
about a small neutered dog doing sex with a big
spayed one. But Cappy laughed, so I did. How my
laughter sounded in my ears: a man in a crowded
room shouting in a foreign language.

Excelsior developed pyrotraumatic dermatitis.
Bacteria on the epidermis caused coin-sized lesions
or “hot spots” to occur. Mama blamed Moxie, who
had a similar condition.

Mama sat the dog in her lap. By then only Mama
could touch her without being bitten. She trimmed
hair round the spots with surgical scissors. Dabbed
them with cortisone cream. When Excelsior died,
Mama’s spell lasted a week.

Mama
has known Colin Hill since he was “knee-high
to a duck’s behind.” She wants to watch him go over
the Falls in his barrel. I wrangle her thick body into
my minivan. Guide her wheelchair to a spot along
the rail.

“I wen’ da turlet.” Mama’s words have been
slurred since the operation. “Loog a muh bug.”

I went to the toilet
, she’s said.
Look in my bag.

I lift the blanket covering her dead legs. The
pouch is three-quarters full. I unclip the stint, walk
up Clifton Hill with a bag of warm urine. I kneel at
a sewer grate, squeeze Mama’s urine out. Uphill is
a construction site encircled by a cyclone fence. The
fat vampire boy stands on a concrete slab. His cape
licks in the wind.

“Hello,” he says to me. “Blah!”

“What are you doing?”

He points to bricks of insulation. There are holes
in the plastic where his fingers punched through.

“Ripping zem.”

“Why?”

“A pink blizzard vood brighten zee day.”

“You are a strange boy.”

He touches his upper lip to his nose. Snorts as
horses do on cold days.

“I yams what I yam and it’s all that I yam.”

I pull a pocketknife from my trenchcoat. Stab a
brick. Wrenching movements slash the plastic. The
boy grabs one flapping sail. Flakes blow downhill.
The boy is laughing very hard. It is interesting
to see. Clifton Hill has gone pink. Next Nicholas
Saberhagen, Abigail Burger are coming.

“Don’t tell,” he says. “
Please
.”

He tenders his hand. He wishes me to hold it. I
do. Tendons tense along Nicholas Saberhagen’s jaw.
His pipe flows red. I let go his son’s hand. They come
down the hill to say hello to Mama.

“Dylan, is it?”
Dywaan, iw ii
? “Handsome darling.”

Mama points to her cheek. Dylan kisses it. With
Mama’s gaze averted, the boy wipes his lips.

Mama
took old Seamus Finnegan to the lake.

Seamus was the father of the richest oilman in
the world, according to Mama. Seamus Finnegan
boasted excellent health before a series of strokes
rendered him paralyzed. Balanced sidelong on his
wheelchair, he peered along his nose at the quivering
knots of his fingers. His sole joy: watching Canada
geese congregate on the lakeshore in Port Dalhousie.
One afternoon Mama turned Seamus Finnegan
away from the geese.

“Someone’s getting overexcited,” she said.

Seamus Finnegan’s chair was aimed at a runoff.
Snags of rebar clung with lily pads. Seamus Finnegan
moaned.

“Husha, darling. Make yourself sick.”

MANIPULATIVE? This is asking a colourblind
man to appreciate a rainbow. Yet if I was Mama’s
favourite Monday, Teddy was her favourite by
Tuesday. She said I ought to be more like Teddy,
who drew lovely pictures. So I drew one: black blobs.
Horrid! Why not fireworks, as Teddy did?

Mama acted out “dramas.” Mama the star,
everybody else the supporting players. The kitchen
was her stage.

“Teddy: be Beatrice Klugman, that nelly from
Children’s Aid. Stand there like a stunned cow.”
Teddy:
empty-eyed
behind
Coke-bottle
glasses
with melted frames. “Yes! Jeffrey, you be the Social
Services Ombudsman. Scratch yourself—he’s got
psoriasis something awful—and mumble.”

“Er, em, homina homina . . .” I would go, imitating
Ralph Kramden.

“Perfect, darling!”

“You got any matches in this house, woman?”
Cappy would say. “I got to watch your twisted little
productions, least let me smoke my pipe.”

“How can I have matches with eight-oh-four, a
known P-Y-R-O, under my roof?”

Teddy, me, were allowed to draw on the driveway
with sidewalk chalks. Once I had been allowed to set
up a lemonade stand. Lemon-lime Kool-Aid mixed
with hose water. My only customer, Fletcher Burger,
said: “This tastes scummy as hell.” Next Teddy drank
a whole jugful. On a sugar high he doused an old
recliner in Mama’s garage with nail polish remover.
Set it on fire.

From then on: no lemonade stands. Only sidewalk
chalks.

Teddy’s drawings were all the same. Splooges of
orange, red, yellow but at their hearts, shapes as
creatures may look with their bodies wrecked by
flame. One afternoon Frank Saberhagen returned
from a vigorous run with his Nicholas. He swung
round the court on his bicycle before stopping
at our driveway. His pipe flowed static green. He
considered my picture: a man with broomstick legs.
Belly following a strip of patching tar.

“You’re missing his eyes.”

I pointed out two holes in the driveway where air
bubbles in the foundation had popped. I modelled
the man around those pits.

“Beefy fellow,” said Frank Saberhagen. “What’s
his favourite food?”

I said my own favourite food. “Fish, chips.”

“Fish and chips?”

“Fish, chips.”

He nodded, then picked up—
stole—
one of my
chalks to trace his son’s outline on their driveway.
Afterwards he yelled at Nicholas, especially his
“gorilla arms.”

That night Mama came into my room with a
pizza box. Also the mallet I used to break the head
off Wesley Hill’s sand-cast dog. She took Gadzooks!
off the bookshelf. Shut him inside the pizza box.

“I saw you talking to that awful man today.”

On the box was HEAVY DUTY in orange script.
Cheapest pizzeria in town. Pepperoni with the
texture of bologna. I did not know what putting
Gadzooks! in a box or malleting him to death had
to do with me talking to Frank Saberhagen. Had
Gadzooks! done something to make Mama wish to
squish him? If she killed the squirrel I would bury
him. As you did with dead things. Put them in holes.

“Don’t ever—
ever
—talk to that horrid man again.”

“Alright.”

Inside the box, Gadzooks! made the same noises
as when he had been only a baby.

Last autumn
Mama collapsed. An emergency
procedure addressed a saccular aneurysm in her
brain. Surgical complications. Mama’s legs no longer
function. A machine now regulates her nocturnal
oxygen supply.

Mama was homebound. Smashing her belongings.
Urinating in her pants on purpose. I bought her a
computer. Presented it with a red bow tied round.

From Your Darling
.

According to her, Mama became “a regular
computer nerd.” I signed her up for
Cyber Seniors
at
the library. Mama is online “24/7.” She has many
cyber-friends.

“Same as real friends,” she says, “only less polite.”

New friends keep Mama young at heart. You can
reach out, she says, and touch anybody.

Cappy showed up after Mama’s miseries. But she
did not want him dragging his “ragged ass” back into
her life. Allegedly he called her “fat as the queen of
sea cows.”

“Flat busted” though he looked, Mama did say
Cappy drove a fancy automobile.

The night Gadzooks! got run over I visited
Tufford Manor.

“Lonnigan?” said the black orderly. “You’re his
relation?”

“No.”

“Shoot. Then you must be psychoneurotically
disturbed.”

“Pop by to offer my sympathies and she calls me
ragged assed,” Cappy Lonnigan told me, once the
orderly located him. “Who put the potato up her
tailpipe?” He went on in this vein. “She suffered a
man before me. Don’t know his name—do you think
he could have surrendered even
that
? She grinded
that bum down to a
nub
. She sure bled all the charm
and romance out of self-pity. Days lying in the dark
unwashed. Nowadays there’s pills for that. She take
pills?”

“Vitamins.”

“What Clara can’t admit is, she’s sick-minded.
Comes over her like a thundercloud. Turns her into
somebody else—no: just a worser reflection. Pills
are for weaklings. That’s how she sees it. She hasn’t a
hateful heart. Just not an ounce of flex to her.”

Sick-minded? Sick is vomit. What was Mama’s
mind vomiting? I went to the toilet. When I returned
Cappy was gone. Also the keys in my jacket pocket.
I found him jamming my apartment key in the
ignition.

“Let’s blow this popstand.”

“This is my minivan.”

“What’s that got to do with the price of tea in
China?” He pointed out the hockey tape I’d affixed
to the steering wheel. “What’s this?”

“So I remember where to put my hands.”

“Well, that’s creepy. We should go tomcatting.”

“You are wearing a housecoat.”

“So? A man never feels so good as when he’s got a
full tank of gas, fifty bucks in his pocket, the night
ahead of him. Yesterday’s history and tomorrow’s
the mystery.”

“The gas in the tank belongs to me. Do you have
fifty dollars?”

“Did I say I felt good
personally
? A
man
feels good.
A hypothetical. Jeez. I got to buy matches. Clive’s
canvassed every store in a five-block radius.
No
matches for this man
—toting a Polaroid of me, as if I
aim to light myself afire.”

We drove to a Big Bee convenience store near the
bus shelter. Inside, the overhead fans flapped like
heron’s wings. I brushed past a woman with a baby.
Her back was turned to me. Cappy Lonnigan entered.

“No matches for the old man. He’ll burn his hair
off. Yeah, yeah. Where’s the pisser?”

When we go outside, my minivan is gone. Cappy
removed one foot from its slipper. Wiggled his toes.

“You left it running.”

“Hadda
whizz.
Who
thought
anyone
would
nick it?”

Emotion I do not grasp. Irony, yes.

“Thievery, Jeffrey. It’s the lowest form of human
behaviour.”

The car
is a rental. Ford Taurus. Car equivalent of
Teflon: eyes slide off. On a static scale it would weigh
twenty-two ounces over stock: mass of the Phoenix
Arms 9mm affixed to the undercarriage. Exposed
hammer. Satin nickel finish. It is the firearm
equivalent of a Ford Taurus. Everyone owns one.

I rigged the car at a do-it-yourself garage. The
gun’s polished blue barrel friction-taped to the
steering linkage. Stock U-clamped to the left rear
wheel well. Trigger, recoil spring in the washer fluid
reservoir. Hammerhead rounds in the passenger
seat coils. Firing pin under my tongue.

Days ago I received my employer’s call.

“Come. Now.”
Click
.

I drove to the Niagara district airport. Boarded a Cessna Twin. Landed on a dirt strip near Coboconk.
Drove the waiting car to my employer’s. He lay on
the floor of his lake house. He’d been dog-mauled,
apparently. A plate of inflated flesh over his left
eye. Webs of skin thin as bat’s wings connecting his
fingers.

“Slipper-footed space bugs,” he kept saying.

When he was able to walk I helped him to the car.
We drove until daybreak. A lab complex. Fletcher
Burger. Men in scrubs. Whine of a surgical saw. Burnt
bone dust. I leave with a cooler marked ORGANIC
MATERIAL.

At the Coboconk dock I found Fletcher Burger’s
houseboat. I drove downriver to Happy Houseboat
Rentals. I discovered Fletcher Burger had stolen the
houseboat.

“That doggone prick,” the owner of Happy
Houseboat Rentals said when I told him where he
could find it. “I should wring that guy’s doggone
neck.”

My minivan was in the lot. Covered in maple
keys. Fletcher Burger must have stolen it, too. There
was a bucket of chicken bones between the seats.
The upholstery stunk of fried chicken.

Flash-forward to right now:

I clear the U.S. border. Niagara Falls, New York.
I drive up Pine Street. Men outside bodegas with
bottles between their feet. Stop at Piggly Wiggly for
a bottle of Faygo Red Pop. Ask for the bathroom key.
Take the toilet paper roll.

In a parking garage near the Niagara Falls airport
authority I reassemble the gun. Blow off road grit
with bursts of WD-40. Trigger hitch lubed with
saliva. I empty the pop bottle. Stuff it with toilet
paper. Fix the top over the barrel with duct tape.