Craig Davidson - Sarah Court

“ Like hell they were crooked-ass.”

Eventually he gave over the stick. Abigail missed her first attempt.

“Put your legs into it, Abby.” Another miss. “For heaven’s sake. Jell-O in those legs? Tuck your shirt in”—the bastard was right: she did have a little pudding belly—“ and touch… the… stick .”

A third miss. Quincy whooped it up. I wanted to twist his head off like a bottlecap.

“That’s what I’m talking about,” he told his son. “Old-fashioned balls.”

“Butter churns,” I seethed, “and horehound candies are old-fashioned. Am I to take it that, what, your son’s got a pair of steam-driven testicles?”

A belly laugh from Saberhagen. Too late I realized he’d accomplished his main, if not sole, ambition of that afternoon: pissing me off.

“Next,” he said, “feats of strength.”

In a corner of the garage was a stack of paint cans labelled Bongo Jazz . The hue of afflicted organ meat. To be inside Saberhagen’s house was to inhabit a diseased pancreas. We settled on paint can hammer curls. Nick staked himself to an early lead.

“Twenty-three, twenty-four,” counted Saberhagen. “Look at Hercules go!”

Abby’s biceps muscle was a hard lump under her sleeve. “How long do I have to go, Dad?”

“Longer than him.”

“Daddy,” Nick said, “my arm’s hurting.”

“Don’t call me Daddy, please.”

Abby’s fingers whitened round the paint can wire. Only her circulation temporarily cut off. Nick dropped his can. Twisty veins radiated from his elbow joint. Abby showed no signs of flagging. Arms raised, I jogged a victory lap of the garage.

“Quit carrying on like she’s Sybil Danning,” said Frank.

Best partof waking up in a strange bed is how you lay emptied of personal history. Literally forget who you are. Then, spiderlike, your brain gathers every trapping of your miserable history and entombs it in your skull. You’re you again.

James slept in the bunk below mine curled up like a potato bug. I’m unsure why I’ve invited him aboard, other than my inability to face the coming days alone. He shares DNA strands in keeping with Saberhagen and myself. At a certain age a man welcomes into his life those who are dimmer or more intense reflections of his self. That way, the views he holds are seldom challenged.

We spend the day on the Trent-Severn Waterway. I cut the motor with the sun at its peak. Cones of midges coil off the water. James strips and dives in. Matilda follows. They come onboard covered in snotlike algae. It dries to a green transparency they variously lick or peel off.

Of all my features, my eyes are nicest. They can be transplanted, which I wasn’t aware of until recently. Keratoplasty, it’s called. Only the corneas. Topmost layer peeled off like skin off a grape, scar tissue and ocular bloodclots removed, donor cornea stitched to the recipient’s eye with surgical thread one-sixteenth the thickness of human hair. The International Eye Bank’s donor cornea wait list is years long. Eye Bank sounds so terrifically creepy, doesn’t it? A supercooled vault where disembodied eyeballs float in jars. But not so. As eyes rot same as any living tissue there is no physical bank, per se.

A setting sun red as new blood. The tops of shore pines resemble teeth on a bucksaw as we approach Fenelon Falls. We dock and head into town. Nothing’s open except the local chapter of the Legion. A stag and doe scheduled. We’re bidden entry by a veteran in a sailor’s cap with a face like a bowl of knuckles.

“No pets,” he tells James.

“But this dog saw duty in Afghanistan.” The vet’s features soften significantly.

We sit on orange plastic chairs beneath a mangy moose head with a half-smoked cigar crammed in its mouth. The premises are occupied by runnyeyed lumbermen, many of whom look to have been dragged from under a thicket somewhere. Hairs the colour of week-old piss sprout from every orifice on their faces. James and I bang back shots of Johnny Red with the self-medicating air of alcoholics searching for a level spot on the beam. Sprinkled amongst the backwoods gnomes and tricksters are veterans smoking home-rolled cigs which burn so quickly it’s like watching fuses burn down into the wizened powderkegs of their faces.

A woman sits nearby. Young-ish and familiar, if distantly so, neither beautiful nor plain, and with a baby. Ungodly out-of-place amidst the cigar smoke and shipwrecked vets.

“Cute kid,” James says. “Yours?”

“Cute dog. Yours?”

They fall into conversation. I feel strung-out and edgy. I hear everyone’s fingernails growing. Inappropriate salsa music pipes up. A woman dances. So girthy in her white shirt and tan trousers that from the back she resembles a vanilla soft-serve cone. Her technique makes it appear as if an invisible entity has yanked down her pants and is presently pummelling her to the lungs, kidney, and liver. Steamy dance stylings hold a commonality with killer bees: both are more destructive the farther they migrate away from their equatorial birthplaces.

When the next woman arrives, every eyeball settles on her.

“Chivas Regal, barkeep!” Sounds like: Shave-ass Raygull .

She enters with the ultimate fuck me walk. A strut, more like, a stalking strut that in every hipshift, every swivel and jive, says: I know much about the carnal acts and you better believe it — I’m fucking goooooood. To say she’s beautiful would be to lie. She has a harelip and the surgical repair’s been botched; Saberhagen would howl to see such butchery. But by God, she is purely magnetic. This erotic beartrap of a woman. Big. Nordic-valkyrie big. Stately pipestems like hers you tend to describe in equine terms; I could picture her snapping a fetlock treading in a gopher hole at full gallop. I’d bet folding money she’s a mudder. Her fella stands a respectful distance apart. Rangy and bowlegged in stovepipe jeans. The sad bastard brings to mind visions of a sucking axe gash never let alone to heal.

She sits nearby. Downs her first drink at a gulp and sends the boyfriend off for another Shave-ass .

“Who the hell’re you?”

I’m amazed this woman registers me as anything other than flesh-toned wallpaper.

“Call me Mr. Burger.”

She smiles in a peculiar way. An arrowheadshaped tongue darts over her lips. It strikes me as a gesture she uses often, suggestive of all manner of undefined intimacies.

“Mister Burger?”

“You’re too young to use my grown-up name.”

This woman could destroy me. This woman’s hot white teeth could strip the skin from my bones. Dismantle me piece by piece. She could have me begging for that honour. To throw yourself at her is to throw yourself off a skyscraper. Screaming all the way down. Teeth driven into your skull like tent pegs into clay.

“Call me Sunshine. What are you doing here?”

“Paying my respects to the betrothed.”

“Well, the betrothed’s got no idea who in blue fuck you are.”

“You? Hitched to that tall drink of water?”

“The culmination of my every hope and dream.”

Her hubby-to-be’s axe-wound of a face registers pitiful gratefulness that this woman would condescend to entwine her life with his. Sunshine downs her second drink. The ice’s refraction magnifies the scar slit down her upper lip. Her fiancee’s name is Rodney.

“I had a dog named Rodney,” says James.

“He’s my little dog,” Sunshine goes. “My wittle Wodney.” She chucks him under the chin with the edge of her glass. “When hims a bad doggums, hims sleeps in da doghouse.”

Rodney smiles like a man in a tiger cage. Lovestruck sap. His every molecule made of galling attributes: servitude, resignation, bootlicking. As a man I want to slap him around out of pure heartsick revulsion.