Craig Davidson - Sarah Court

“I’d better have my people call your people,” I tell him, and hang up.

Afterwards I decide to take a walk. The sky is threatening so: galoshes and an umbrella. After two blocks the clouds withdraw. Sunlight paints the neighbourhood. My feet, trapped in militarysurplus rainboots, are sweating furiously. Mormon kids from Glenridge Academy pedal by on bicycles: boys and girls dressed the same, riding the same sized bikes with matching white helmets following their headmistress. Ducklings waddling after their mother.

At the elementary school children are out on recess. Pierced upon the chainlink fence are pop cans and pudding cups. A girl with a mouthful of orangepulp-clung braces holds out sticks to three friends. “Whoever gets the shortest stick we’ll hate for the rest of the day.”

Were a man standing here as I am, rainboots and an umbrella on a cloudless day staring intently over a schoolyard, you’d think he was a molester. But onlookers would peg me as deranged or more likely, wistful. She wants a child . I’m fairly certain I could be a molester.

My gaze is drawn to a fat boy in a black cape. Sitting alone on a teeter-totter. The sight strikes me as emblematic of futility possibly cosmic in scope. He’s eating candy shaken from a brightly coloured box. Nerds. I haven’t eaten Nerds in decades. Abruptly I wish to taste the world as a child. At the supermarket I stride past a bin of multicoloured spuds— BOUTIQUE POTATOES ½ PRICE! — to the candy aisle. Scan for floorwalkers before prying the lid off a tub of gummy worms. Oh! Too bloody sweet. How do kids eat this garbage? On to the baby aisle. I may look motherly in that my surroundings support that viewpoint. By placing me against a forest backdrop I’d look outdoorsy. Or in a rubber room: bonkers. Lord, all the diapers! Ultra-slim: what sort of parent is so paranoid about their baby’s girth they need to buy low-profile turd-collectors? Super-absorbent with moisturelock gussets. These ones claim to be completely redesigned. How does one completely redesign a diaper without Mother Nature first redesigning the human excretory system?

Baby food. Strained Bananas and Prunes catches my eye. It was all my father ate his last months. He said it hurt him to eat. I thought he meant hurt his teeth or belly, but the act inflicted more of a philosophical pain. Fuel for a motor that idiotically kept running. Mashed fruit: our first and last spoonfuls. The first from our parents and the last from our children.

“Perhaps you’ll have a child,” my father said towards the end, “and I will become part of them. A carbon atom in his eye or a vessel of her heart.”

“That’s stupid. Don’t talk that way.”

“It’s a loop. Continuous.”

“And everything and everyone must be on this blessed loop? What about… televangelists?”

“Yes, pet.” His chuckle dissolved into a hacking fit. “Even them.”

It isn’t stupid. It’s the most unselfish theory of the afterlife I know of: instead of your spirit floating intact upon a cloud, you particalize into millions of fresh lives.

A jar of Blueberry Tapioca goes into my pocket. Wax Beans and Vegetable. Fruit Medley. At home I arrange them in a pyramid on the table. The answering machine flashes.

Lieutenant Mulligan from the NRP. It’s been approved for you to view the baby…

I hada pet squirrel. I wanted to name him Alvin, after the cartoon character. My father preferred Ming Fa, after a fireworks guru from feudal China.

Alvin entered our lives in the jaws of Excelsior, Mama Russell’s sweet-tempered sheepdog. She deposited the red, squealing, saliva-slick blob on our lawn.

At the house of our neighbour, Frank Saberhagen, there once stood a pine tree. The tree failed to jibe with Saberhagen’s post-divorce aesthetic: he’d ripped out the sod, salted the earth, and carpeted his yard with shaved white schist imported from Egypt. The pine was plagued with bark weevils. Needles gone brown. Only the doctor’s macabre taste kept it alive.

A brain surgeon who’d assisted on the groundbreaking Labradum Procedure at Johns Hopkins, Saberhagen evidently found it cathartic to set aside the scalpel in favour of the double-bitted axe. A fluid tornado of a man with the tight-packed frame of a circus acrobat, he’d stood shirtless, axe in hand, boots gritting on the schist comprising his front yard — a horticultural perversity rendering him persona non grata in the neighbourhood — taking crazed strokes at the tree. For all his deftness in the operating theatre, Saberhagen was a bungler when it came to lumberjacking. The axe blade ricocheted off the trunk. Pine cones pelted his head.

“Give ’er hell, Quincy!” called his neighbour, Fletcher Burger. Saberhagen’s nickname was based on the coroner played by Jack Klugman in the series of the same name, the morbid suggestion being Saberhagen was such a poor surgeon his professional dossier included as many corpses as the fictional coroner.

Observing the flailings of his owner was Moxie: a vile-tempered corgi Saberhagen had been forced to accept during his divorce proceedings. Whereas in many divorces custody of a pet is viciously quarrelled over, the Saberhagens’ quarrel was over who would be obliged to shuffle the dog off its mortal coil. The ex-Mrs. Saberhagen — who at a block party was heard stating that her then-hubby possessed “All the personal charm of a deathwatch beetle,” and went on to characterize him as “giving about as much back to the world as a drainpipe”—was victorious. The flatulent, oily-coated, grumpy old dog became Frank’s tortuous burden.

Moxie was deeply disagreeable. He constantly escaped Saberhagen’s yard by digging under the fence. Nobody would pet him on account of (a) the corgi’s furious digging occasioned some breed of canine skin disorder manifesting in a greasy hide that stunk of rotting fruit and (b) Moxie snapped at anyone who petted him, anyway, providing less incentive to perform what was already a revolting kindness. Cross-eyed and splenetic, Moxie pissed on marigolds and harassed birds at their baths. Saberhagen no longer responded when his pager flashed: Neighbour called. Dog loose again.

Saberhagen eventually delivered the pine’s deathblow. The tree split up its trunk and toppled. Moxie was splayed on the porch with Nick, Saberhagen’s son. Cross-eyed as he was, the corgi did note the clutch of baby squirrels tipped from their nest. He bounded off the porch to gleefully gulp down three or four.

Their frightful dying squeals compelled Excelsior to leap off Mama Russell’s porch into Saberhagen’s yard. Crazed on squirrel meat, Moxie lunged for the much larger sheepdog’s throat. Excelsior seized the corgi by his scruff and whipsawed her head to fling Moxie a good ten feet. The dog’s ungraceful trajectory took him over the tree; he hit harshly and rolled as tumbleweeds do.

Excelsior rooted through the branches to recover the remaining squirrels. That all four fit safely in the pouches on either side of her teeth was the first oddity. The second was that she dropped them on four different lawns. One she left at the Hills. One she left at Mama Russell’s house, where it was taken in by her “boy,” Jeffrey. One for Abigail Burger. Alvin given to me.

“The momma squirrel won’t take it back now,” my father said. “Your scent’s on it. It’s tainted. The mother might eat it. Mothers can be like that. In the animal kingdom.”

We packed a shoebox with cotton batten and set Alvin beneath a gooseneck lamp. I was concerned this may scald him: his pink skin put me in mind of the flesh under a fresh-picked scab. His paws so much like tiny human hands. I wished he would open his eyes so I might intuit what he wanted. But when his eyes did open they were inexpressive black bulbs.