Craig Davidson - Sarah Court

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.”

Its saw-like tail slashes. Its massive, rubber-like mouth flexes. Stones burst between its jaws. Pebbles adhere to the glutinous sheen of its oil-covered skin, making portions of its anatomy look like black bedazzled leather. A second tail, far smaller, protrudes partway from its sternum. The shark must’ve swum into the shallows to give birth. The > metallic fluttering of its gill-slits. Dark arterial blood pouring out as it suffocates.

In the tent we can still hear her dying. All the little sounds of death. The tent: folding table, chairs, hurricane lamp hanging on a loop of jute cord. Bottles of native spirits.

“My father, Seamus” Connie tells me, “had an embolism. Blood pooling in the brain. First morning I’m back home he shreds the newspaper into a bowl and pours milk on it. Then he goes and shakes cornflakes over the table. Trying to do what he’d done for thirty-five years: eat cereal, read the paper. But the circuitry was screwy.”

Connie takes a haul off the nearest bottleneck. “Money wasn’t a sticky point — I’d have shipped him to Beth Israel — but I was told Frank Saberhagen, your Dad, was good as any. Part of some big medical thingamabob…”

“The Labradum Procedure.”

“—right, at—”

“Johns Hopkins.”

“Blood from that blown vessel lingered in Dad’s head. It… turned hard? Went to jelly? Anyway, in the channels of his brain. Weeks in the hospital. Norris wing. As a kid, I thought that place was a…” “Nuthouse.”

“You, too?”

“Teachers used to threaten: behave, or I’ll ship you to the Norris wing with the crazies. You’d think it was padded cells and straightjackets—”

“—and electroshock therapy, sure. Just rooms, Nick. Ordinary hospital rooms.”

Wind howls in off the sea and hisses through the eyelets. My first trip to the Soviet Union. What would I carry home? Busted Reagan-era video games. Beet-stained teeth. A shark’s gills sharp as the steel teeth on a circular saw. Conway Finnegan so shrunk inside his skin he had the look of a sick Shar-pei.

“Sorry to drag you out,” he tells me. “American Express was happy enough to dispatch you. Your father, mine. We’re town boys. I’m just the son of a welder from St. Kitt’s, Nick.”

I close my eyes. Behind my eyelids fins and beaks, wings and tails break up from the dark. Two boys from southern Ontario perched on the other end of the world at the edge of an oil-black sea.

“How’s your father, Connie?” I ask.

“Cemetery off Queenston. By the liftlocks. Yours?”

“Still kicking.”

Secondly,I’ll to tell you about my wife. Ex.

What I miss is a hand on her hip. On line at the movies or navigating the kitchen while we cooked. An undervalued perk of married life. My hand on her hip, whenever.

Our first kiss she had Sambuca on her tongue. Like sucking on a licorice pastille. Making out in my father’s Camry with “C’Mon and Ride It” by Quad City DJs on the radio. One of many life events on which I’d gladly take a do-over. These disassociated memories I carry forward. These memories, I imagine, are the ones I’ll die with. Back then I was still rooting through my father’s GQ s, ripping out the scented cologne ads, rubbing them on my neck. Also training to fight the curtain-jerker on a card at the Tonowanda VFW. My opponent: Ox “Eighteen” Wheeler. Irish so far as I’d been told but he walked to the ring in a serape and sombrero accompanied by a mariachi guitarist strumming “Prisonero De Tus Brazos.” Yes, seriously, and yes, I lost. Ox headbutted me in the first round. The pressure of our heads colliding caused veins in my forehead to burst. Those veins spraying blood like fire hoses under my skin occasioned two plum-sized mouses to form above my eyes. By the sixth round they were so massive I couldn’t see much: like peering out of a basement window. My father said I’d looked like a goat with clipped horns. He slit them afterwards. Blood pissed out of my face halfway across the locker room, splashing the robe of a flyweight warming up. The scars now meet in a shallow ‘V’ above my eyebrows.

The adrenaline the Wheeler fight overload of sparring for made me immoderately, ungovernably horny. More so even than your runof-the-mill nineteen-year-old. Dad blamed it on an overstimulated hypothalamus gland. “I tell guys with ED to join a boxing club,” he’d say. “A round of sparring beats that little blue pill all to hell.” Oversexed boxer + rebellious daughter of landed gentry = hormonal fireworks. Eleven months: the span separating our eyes meeting across a crowded campus bar to Dylan’s birth. To cop a lyric from a song getting radio play around then: “We were only freshmen.”

I was KO’d by an overmuscled bear from Coldwater, Michigan on a card sponsored by the railway switchmen’s union the week my to-be wife announced she was preggers. The sting my father felt at my losing to a guy he trumpeted as “The Coldwater Crumpet” was inflamed by the fact we’d be keeping the baby. We arranged a quickie civil union at the courthouse. Our mothers’ hearts broken: they who’d pined for rose petals, centrepieces, and perhaps to pin some inexact debt on us for arranging it.

My wife: cute, athletic, a field hockey defenceman. The physics of childbirth terrified her. Her “vaginal integrity” would be ruined by a new life steamrolling out. At Lamaze class our instructor, an elderly wide-hipped lesbian (“A dyke with childbearing hips,” my father had said; “Irony, thou art a coy mistress!”) asked us men to picture passing a cherry stone through our urethral tube. “If I could birth our baby that way, I would,” I’d said to my wife during one quarrel. “Even if it widened my urethral tube so bad it ended up a… a windsock!”I was there in the delivery room. She insisted. My first sight of Dylan: this slick quivering mass extruded from my wife’s birth canal. Her labial lips stretched and torn. I’d touched her weeks later, in bed, felt those hairline scabs in the process of healing. To know I’d wreaked that manner of intimate violence upon her. She regained her figure but the skin of her stomach lost tension. She said it looked like a balloon from a New Year’s party fallen behind the couch to be found in April, mostly deflated with half a lungful of sad old air inside.

We had typical married couple fights. My wife hailed from a proper English family. One did not use one’s utensil as a shovel. Food should be pushed up the underside of a fork. She made Dylan — three years old with the fine motor skills of a spider monkey — roll corn niblets up his fork. Or we’d be having sex, she’d run her fingers through my hair and say: “I liked it better long.”

Dad says: “Surveys prove a third of women cheat on their spouse. But if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll know if she’s in that third before it ever happens.” I’m not happy . She kept repeating this the night she left. After the rationales and rage had burnt us down to the bones of it. I’m not happy . What can I change? Nothing. I’m not happy . Is there someone else? No . But there was by then the idea of someone else. She craved the catharsis of a clean break. To tell the truth, it was foretold in one silly everyday episode.