Craig Davidson - Sarah Court

I’d driven her to the mechanic to pick up our old Aerostar. She drove home behind me. At a stoplight on Martindale I observed her out the rearview mirror. In that moment she became a stranger, and my understanding of her that of a stranger. I saw a lovely woman in a minivan singing along to the radio. Really belting it out. One hand drumming the wheel. Wedding band fracturing the sunlight to spit it off in sparks.

She wasn’t my wife, in that moment. Just a beautiful girl who’d married too young and gotten trapped — only she hadn’t quite reached that realization.

I catch a redeyeinto Toronto. A message from Abby awaits me at home.

“Dylan’s in trouble at school. You’ve got a meeting with Iris Trupholme. He’s still a vampire.”

I’d let Dylan watch The Lost Boys . Afterwards he begged me to go to Toys R Us. I outfitted him with a bargain-bin cape and plastic fangs. He’s adopted that Lugosian accent where every ‘w’ becomes a ‘v’: I vant to suck jor blood, blah!

Abby’s waiting outside Dylan’s classroom with a girl my son’s age. She’s got those enamel-coloured dental braces that make wearers look as though they have sets of overlapping teeth, like sharks. She’s chewing an Eberhard eraser and spitting pink bits on the tiles.

Missus Trupholme, Dylan’s teacher: sixtyish, with a low centre of gravity. Her skull sports a vaporous cloud of frizzy red hair which, if it had a taste, would unarguably be cherry. On her desk is a kid’s cellphone. The pink faux-gems are a dead giveaway.

“They’re video cameras now,” Trupholme says. “Everyone’s making their own amateur videos. Next regional meeting it’s number one on the bullethead.”

She flips it open. Fiddles with buttons. “Kids recording one another. Their age’s version of Truth or Dare. Put videos on the Internet. There’s a place…”

“Youtube,” says Abby.

“That one. One shows a grade ten student beating up his Math teacher. The man was months shy of retirement. Phones so small, it’s hard to patrol. Cassie!”

The eraser-chewer slinks in. Trupholme says: “How does this work?”

Cassie presses a few buttons. Trupholme says, “Now go on.”

“Can I have it back?”

“All signs point to ‘no.’”

The girl performs a deep-knee bend, arms hugged round her knees.

“My dad’s gonna kill me.”

“Tell him it’s evidence.”

“Swear to God , I’ll only…” Her lip juts. Stuck with crumbs of eraser. “It’s my property.”

“Sue me.”

Cassie stomps back into the hall. Trupholme shows us the video on the phone’s inch-wide screen. Dylan in corduroys with his vampire cape tied round his throat is standing at the front of the class. Shaky footage shot from halfway under a desk. Trupholme chalks a math problem on the board. Dylan prowls up behind. Rubs against her. She sets both hands on Dylan’s shoulders. Moves him gently away. Dylan presses forward, smiling, to rub on her again.

“Oh, God,” I say. “That’s not Dill at all.”

“His first quasi-sexual offence,” Trupholme says.

Quasi-sexual. Something breaks in me. She goes on:

“Are either of you familiar with the term ‘frotteur’? A person who derives gratification from rubbing. Crowded busses, subway cars: where adult frotteurs operate.”

“That’s what you think Dylan is? A — a budding frotter?”

“ Frotteur . Your son’s too young to have his sexuality sorted out. That said, Mr. Saberhagen, we’re suspending him a week.”

“Yes. Fair. What he’s done is a bad sign. In a year of bad signs. We should make him clean the playground, too.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“Hell, yes. Physical, demeaning labour.”

“I doubt our groundskeeper would be happy to hear that.”

Dylan sits on an orange plastic chair in the cafeteria. Vampire cape draped over its back.

“Outside. You’re cleaning the schoolyard.”

“Vampire Dylan doze not clean.”

“Shut up with that. You’re suspended a week.”

He wipes his nose on the cape. “It was just a joke… blah.”

The wind gusts round the school’s industrial edges. Kid-centric garbage — Fruit Roll-Up sleeves, YOP bottles — skates across autumn grass. Dylan mopes along the fence, cape aflutter, tossing trash haphazardly into the bag.

“That was a dandelion,” I call from the swingset. “Since when are they garbage?”

“They’re weeds !”

His whole life I’ve played the hardass. When his “terrible twos” habit had been to strike out with his fists: always me holding his pudgy hands. He said “Mom” at eight months; he didn’t say “Dada” until he’d reached a year, by which point he’d already said “Car” and “Wow-wow.” Instead of putting trash in the bag, he’s skewering it on fence barbs. Yogurt cups piked like heads.

“You’re supposed to pick it up, not redistribute it,” Abby says. To me: “He was on the computer all day.”

“Should I suspend his privileges?”

“The only way he interacts, Nick. His own birthday — who shows up? That exchange student, Rigo, and me.”

Dylan’s poked the bag full of holes to wear as a muumuu.

“All done. Blah!”

“By the tetherball pole: see? Pop can. Hurry up. Boxing tonight,” I say. Abby gives me a look. “The basics,” I tell her. “We’ll fit a gumshield to his mouth.” I don’t tell her how last time Dylan burst into tears biting down on the warm rubber. “It’s good for him.”

“Yeah, because it was so good for you.”

Old wheezein the boxing game: In the ring, truth finds you . Didn’t put in the roadwork? That finds you. Didn’t leave enough sweat on the heavy bags? That comes to find you. Not just the work: it’s all you are from inside-out. Every little thing, even those you got no defence against. If you’re cursed with brittle hands, say, that truth finds you. If you cut easy or your heart’s not the equal of the man you square up against. In every punch and feint, broken bone and chipped tooth, every gasp and moan, each time you wish you were someplace else, anywhere but here taking this punishment, in your guts and marrow in every place you thought hidden. Boxing is simple arithmetic. The ones and twos never fail to add. Truth always finds its way back to you.

Impact Boxing is located in a strip mall on Hartzell next to a knife shop, King of Knives, whose banner reads: Knives, The Perfect Gift for Knife Lovers! Beyond lies Sterno Dell. Charred tree skeletons poke from its rain-sodden ash like spears.

Entering the club gives me the same sensation an Olympic swimmer must get slipping on a clammy Speedo for morning laps: uncomfortably familiar. My DNA is soaked into these speed bags, headgear, punch mitts. Atomized remainders cling to sewage pipes spanning the ceiling. Photos of prematurely aged fighters on the walls. My favourite a B&W portrait of Archie Moore, the Mongoose, with this quote: Nowadays fighters tussle for money. I was fighting when the prize was going to jail. When I was a kid, two men nursing a blood feud stepped through the ropes to go at it barefisted. One hit the other so hard he face-planted the canvas. While unconscious he sneezed involuntarily; a pressurized hiss as the air driven into his skull vented around his eye sockets. My father said the man had suffered an orbital blowout fracture and was lucky: had he sneezed much harder an eyeball might have ejected itself.

Dad’s beaten us here. Following his medical suspension he’s taken to drinking at the Queenston Motel, a bar lonely, dispossessed men gravitate to before gravity hauls them off the face of the civilized world altogether.