Craig Davidson - Sarah Court

“Look,” he says with a sigh. “It’s the Count.” “Good eee vening,” Dylan greets his grandfather. In the changeroom Dad unfurls Dylan’s handwraps like lizard’s tongues. Spreads the fleshy starfish of his grandson’s hands to gird them. Dylan sucks air through his teeth. “Tight.”

Dad unwinds his work. He believes Dill’s wussiness hovers round the fact he required an operation to correct an undescended testicle. But my father is prone to tendering wild accusations based on picayune evidence — such as the time he spotted me with a grape juice moustache and got into a big kerfuffle with Mom, levying the charge I must be “guzzling the frigging stuff,” which according to him was a sign of burgeoning gluttony. I was seven.

The club is sparsely trafficked. A retired bricklayer hammers away at a heavy bag with a watchman’s cap tugged tight to his eyes. Young hockey players— goons in training — take wild swings at the bags adjacent. I untangle a skipping rope.

“Try for a minute, Dill.”

He can’t go ten seconds. As always, I am shocked by his lack of coordination. His feet snarl in the cape. He stomps on the hem and its cord chokes him.

“Swell cape,” Dad says. Queenston Motel suds percolate out his pores.

“ Saaank you,” Dylan says in his vampire voice. “Jor blood vill stay in jor veins tonight, old one.” “Yeah? That’s swell.”

I tug Dylan into a pair of sixteen ouncers. Giant red melons attached to his arms. We stake out a bag beside a poster of a vintage Lennox Lewis with his high-and-tight MC Hammer hairdo. Dylan throws a whiffle-armed one-two. The feeble blut of his gloves slapping the bag stirs a deep sorrow in my chest.

“Pretend it’s vampire bait.”

“Vampire bat?”

“Bait.” I shouldn’t encourage it, but: “Vampire bait .”

“Eef it vas wampire bait, I vould do dees!”—and bites the bag.

“Dill. How many people you figure sweated all over that?”

Dylan smacks his lips. “Eet’s wary, wary hard to be a wampire deez daze.”

He heads to the fountain. Dad’s emptying spit troughs: funnels attached to lengths of flexible PVC hose feeding into Oleo buckets in opposing corners of the ring. The cell-phone girl, Cassie, comes in with who I assume must be her father: Danny Mulligan. His romance with Abby broke down in Moose Jaw along with his VW Minibus. He’s a cop now and looks it: Moore’s suitcoat shiny at the elbows, saddle shoes squashed at the toes like a clown’s, horse teeth, a Marine’s whitewall haircut shorn close to the scalp. I can already picture him as an old man: high blue veins, buttons of nose-hair. He looks — why do I harbour such unreasonable, mean-spirited, perverse thoughts? — like the sort of guy who, mid-fuck, grabs his own ass-cheek with a free hand. That selfconscious hand-push, like he needs help burying it home, coupled with an equally affected back arch. Yeah, he’s that guy.

“Nick, right?”

“Danny,” I greet him. “Yeah, hi.”

“It’s Dan. My little girl tells me there was some ruckus today at school.”

“That’s right. Something to do with videos.”

Mulligan spread his legs as if readying to perform a hack squat.

“Trupholme took away her phone. I bought that for Cassie’s birthday. All her numbers stored in it. Important dates, too.”

Important dates. She’s ten. What, when the next Tiger Beat hits the newsstands?

“I imagine she’ll get it back.”

“If not?”

“Are you telling me to buy her a new phone?”

“How about we’ll talk.”

With that, Dan dismisses me. He pulls gloves onto his daughter’s fists and leads her to a bag. Cassie summons enough force out of her tiny frame to rattle it on its chain.

“Why not your little gal get in with Dylan?” Dad calls to Mulligan.

“We’re game,” goes Mulligan, with a shrug.

Dad turns to Dylan. “What d’ya say, Drac?”

Dylan scuffs his shoes at a black streak on the floor.

“I don’t vant to heet a girl.”

“Not hitting,” I say. I hate seeing him cave. “Manoeuvring. You’ll be okay.”

Headgear squashes his eyes-nose-mouth into the centre of his face. I tuck his cape into the back of his shorts. The silicon gumshield stretches his lips into an involuntary smile.

When the bell rings, my son stares around, confused, perhaps thinking the fire alarm’s gone off. Cassie bears in, one gloved fist big as her head glancing off Dylan’s shoulder. Mulligan’s next to me on the apron. He carries himself in a physically invasive manner. Commandeering airspace. It speaks badly of a man.

Dylan rucks in gamely, gloves hipped and rubbing against Cassie. Latent frotteur behaviour? He stumbles on his heels trying to find me in the lights, smiling at nobody in particular before turning that silly bewildered smile on his opponent as if to say, “We’re having fun, right?” Cassie’s snorting round her mouthpiece as the headgear constricts her sinuses. She bulls Dylan into a corner and drives her hands into his face before pulling away to slap a glove into Dill’s breadbasket. Dylan quivers: a seismic wave up his neck and down his thighs. They joust in the centre of the ring. Dylan’s pushing at Cassie’s shoulders to keep her unbalanced. I see my son in the west-wall mirror, and the reflected action states more profoundly just how lost he looks, soft and salty and unprotected like a massive quivering eyeball and I’m stepping through the ropes to stop it when Cassie plants a foot and rears so far back at the hips her lead hand nearly touches the back of her knee, coming on with the nastiest overhand right I’ve ever seen thrown by anyone so young. The sound she makes throwing it the screech of a gull. With the blood knocked temporarily out of his face, Dylan looks like an actor in a Japanese Noh play. He gets plunked on his backside where the ropes meet, spread-legged, skull too heavy for his neck. It dips between his knees to touch the canvas.

Dad’s saying: “To your corners!”

I reach into Dylan’s mouth. Strings of mucousthickened drool snap as I pull the mouthpiece out. Vacant-eyed — belted into that groggy space where nothing’s fully solidified — he blinks as a berry swells under his left eye. His gloved hands reach at his shorts as if he thinks he’s bare-assed and needs to hike them up. I cradle my hands under his bum. Pick him up.

In the changeroom I tug his gloves off. Mulligan comes in to apologize. Genuinely surprised and regretful. He asks is Dylan okay. My son smiles. A sheen of blood on his teeth.

“I’m sorry,” Dylan tells me.

“You didn’t do anything.”

That berry under his eye: you’d think an insect laid eggs. A red ring round his neck where the cape string’s choked him. Dylan looks at his hands with the most pitiable expression. Not a fighter, my boy. But he seems aware of it, too, a failure that pains him. He thinks I give a damn. He opens his arms to me and I sense he’s terrified I won’t hug him back.

“I’m sorry.”

“Dill, please. What is it you think you’ve done?”

On the way home I stop at Mac’s Milk to buy him an ice-cream sandwich. When I get back he’s flipping through a book I’d tossed in the back seat. Over-and-Out Parenting , by Dr. Dave Schneider. “Gobbledegook,” I tell him. He’s eating Nerds.

“Where’d you get those?”

“The stocker.”

“Night stalker?”

“The machine stocker.”

Machine Stalker. Robo-stalker. Presumably bought with the five dollar bills Abby stitches into his trousers. He traces the ice-cream sandwich to his lumpy eye.

“In class we watched this movie about war.”

“What war?”

“The one where everything’s blown up,” he says. “And like, the world gives us everything we need to blow it up. The steel to make planes is dug out of whaddayacall…?”