Craig Davidson - Sarah Court

When we dated she made it known I must earn her. A breathing kewpie doll. I learned to tango. Bought a ’78 Cougar with flake-metal finish. Was the first to say, “I love you.” Once I’d won her, everything that was hard in her went to goo and I hated it and we married. She’d howl when we fucked — I mean, firing on all cylinders. Sounding like a stray cat yowling on a winter’s night. Has chemical castration been undersold? She drove a school bus when we first wed. Cash was tight. My young bride behind the wheel of a big yellow bus, jouncing down the road on leaf springs that make school buses less conveyance than amusement park ride. So young, strong, and gorgeous, whereas school buses were usually driven by bat-faced hags with names like Carla. But as the years wore on it became a way to wound her. When arguments got heated I’d find myself screaming: “You were a fucking bus driver !”

The steering wheel — what do they call it on planes? a yoke? — just busted off in my hands. A shitload of shrieking in the cabin. Gunshots.

My grandfather sang my grandmother’s name in the shower after she died. They quarrelled, publicly, often at Christmastime, but lived sixty years together until she died of liver cancer and he followed from cancer of a different sort. While still alive he sang out her name, a trilling call like a bird’s. He missed her more than he could bear and called her name without knowing.

My wife and I could share a roof sixty years, she could die, I’d grieve — but would I ever sing?

The emblematic eventsignalling the derailment of my marriage, the precise instant the train skipped the tracks to hurtle headlong into a ravine, was when my wife attempted to fellate me while I slept.

Shocking she even bothered. Under her gaze my member had become a poisoned salt lick ringed with dead deer or worse: as if through some means of anatomical gymnastics my asshole had cartwheeled round to my crotch. Not to mention I was dead asleep. Oblivious, unconsenting. What if I had rucked up her nightie and gone down on her like a thief in the night? Her timing was flawed. I could have been in the grip of a nautical nightmare. The sensation may have knitted with those stark terrors. A hungry sea-leech sucking out my blood and vigours? My leg lashed out instinctively. I awoke to my future ex-wife at the foot of the bed. A goose egg on her forehead.

Our divorce was highly amicable. My wife could have challenged for sole custody despite my being in those halcyon days a functional member of society. I relocated to Sarah Court. Quaint, family-friendly. Myself clinging to the outdated notion I was ever that sort of man.

At the risk of sounding like a drill sergeant, the sooner you structure your child’s life to befit future growth, the better. I rose to anger hearing my girl recount the litany of lackadaisical activities she was now permitted in her mother’s custody.

“I dug yesterday.”

“Dug for what, Abigail?”

“Treasure?”

“My dear, there’s no treasure in your mother’s backyard. You’ll dig up a lump of petrified doggy doo. You’d enjoy discovering that? Let’s go for a bike ride.”

“Can I have an ice-cream sandwich?”

“Your mother lets you eat ice-cream sandwiches all day? Have an apple. Nature’s candy. Can’t have you turning into a Flabby Abby, can we?”

“What’s a flabby?”

“Flabby’s fat. Fat Abby. Big Fat Abigail.”

I never dreamed my daughter might compete as a strength athlete. “Female bodybuilder” conjured images of mustachioed Olympians from coldwater republics galumphing through the Iron Curtain with mysterious bulges in their weightlifting costumes. But Abby was freakishly strong.

This discovery had been made in my next-door neighbour’s backyard. A surgeon, Frank Saberhagen, whose serpentine decline kept pace with my own. Everything between us became a competition so it was no surprise we’d race each other down the drainhole. Our first conversation had been emblematic of our confrontational fellowship. I’d spied rolls of uncovered, browning sod in the backseat of his Cadillac El Dorado and chummily asked what his purpose was. “Oh, wouldn’t you like to know,” was his reply. Our troubled friendship was forged upon that rocky foundation. I never did discover what he did with that sod.

This particular afternoon we were drinking “Flatliners,” the good doctor’s signature concoction, while his son Nicholas roughhoused with Abby.

“Up the tree, Nick.”

Saberhagen forced his son — who would go on to be an amateur boxer good enough to get plastered by future pros while never earning a dime for his pains — to climb the maple daily. Supposedly it developed his fast-twitch muscle fibres.

“Dad, come on.”

“Don’t give me that, buckaroo.”

“None too sturdy, doc. Had it sprayed for Dutch Elm?”

“What are you,” he asked me, “a tree surgeon?” He swayed to his feet and kicked the maple as if it were the tire of a car whose purchase he was considering. “ Solid .”

“Your father is a stubborn man, Nicholas.”

“What’s wrong with my taking an interest in your improvement?” Saberhagen asked his son. “Mr. Burger is clearly uninterested in his daughter’s.”

“Why — because I refuse to send my firstborn up your arboreal deathtrap?”

“The tree’s a metaphor. Life is challenging but what can you do? Watch others climb to success, forever peering up at the treads of more ambitious shoes? Life requires gumption. Good old-fashioned balls.”

A dig at my Abby. Cursed to trudge through life bereft of said apparatuses.

“You slug. Abby can do anything Nick can.”

Saberhagen scoffed. “She’s got a pudding belly.”

Her mother’s fault. Those goddamn ice-cream sandwiches! I’ll admit too many Flatliners had cut my mental age into halves, or in all likelihood quarters. We somehow found ourselves in his garage where Frank welcomed us to the First Annual Saberhagen Pentathlon.

“Saberhagen Pentathlon? Why not BurgerSaberhagen?”

“My garage,” he reasoned.

Our debate was derailed by the appearance of Clara Russell, in a wheelchair, at the base of Frank’s driveway. Awhile back one of her “boys” had hotwired Saberhagen’s Cadillac, along with Wes Hill’s boy Colin. I remained in the garage while Frank chatted. Mama’s sheepdog barked. Frank’s corgi kicked up a ruckus behind the garage door.

“Welcome,” Frank said upon his return, “to the Saberhagen-Burger pentathlon. First event: vertical jump.”

He proclaimed a busted rake the “Measuring Stick” and, holding it at a drunken loft above his head, urged Nicholas to jump and touch it.

“Hold straight, Frank. It’s hanging all crookedass.”

Saberhagen set his Flatliner down and used both hands. Nick came up short.

“Abby’s turn.”

“You get two tries,” he said. “No-no, wait — three.”

“Making up the rules as we go, Quincy?”

“Three tries, Fletch. Olympic rules.”

On the second attempt Saberhagen bent his knees so Nick could touch.

“Foul! Running rigged contests here at casa de Saberhagen?”

“If I bent my knees,” he filibustered, “I’m not saying I did, but if —we can all agree to it being an honest error. I’ve got fluid buildup on my left knee.”

Nick made a fair touch. I reached for the Measuring Stick. Saberhagen balked.

“I’ll hold for Abby, why not?”

“She’s my daughter. Fathers hold for their kid.”

You’d have thought my request was in contravention of the nonexistent rulebook.

“Look, Fletch, now seriously: I’m two inches taller.”

“Your elbows were all crooked-ass.”