Craig Davidson - Sarah Court

Mama Russell is there, and she greets us gladly. She’s wheelchair-bound. Her silver hair is bobbypinned up around her doughy face. She fusses over Dylan. Who is either scared of her or disgusted by her.

A flake of insulation has gotten trapped under Dill’s eyelid. We say goodbye to Jeffrey and Mama Russell and drive to the walk-in clinic. Dylan sits on Abby’s lap in the waiting room.

“She smelled like the old mall,” Dylan stagewhispers into Abby’s ear.

“Who did?”

“That woman in the wheelchair.”

He winces, as if understanding it’s not a terribly nice thing to say about someone so aged.

“She smelled how?” Abby wants to know. “How does a mall smell?”

“He means the Lincoln mall on the westside,” I say. “With the boarded-up shops and the busted mechanical ponyride, right, Dill? Before it was bulldozed.”

Dylan nods. With one eye closed due to the fibreglass, he’s tipping this perpetual wink.

“Sort of musty?” When Dylan nods again, Abby says, “Old people can have peculiar smells. You may smell like that someday.”

He’s sincerely amazed. “People change smells as they get older?”

“Go smell a puppy,” Abby tells him. “Then go smell an old dog. People are the same.”

A nurse flushes his eyeball at an eyewash station. She fits him with a breathable eye patch. Abby tells him he looks like a pirate. I sort of wish she hadn’t done that.

Lastly— and I mean, obviously — let’s talk about Pops. Once, after we’d returned from a run — Dad harrying me with: “Push it, milquetoast!” and me thinking: What trainer worth his salt calls anyone a milquetoast? — Frank Saberhagen, my dad, made me lie on the driveway with arms and legs spread. He traced my outline with sidewalk chalk.

“Look at yourself,” he said, forcing me to look at my chalked outline. “Disproportionate as hell. Midget-legged but long-armed. A gorilla’d be jealous of that wingspan. So use it. Keep your opponent at bay. Otherwise I’ll be chalking your outline inside the ring. After you’ve been knocked onto queer street.”

This was Frank Saberhagen’s idea of constructive encouragement. He missed his calling as a motivational author; his unwritten bestseller’s title could have been: Get Tough, Moron! — The SABERHAGEN Advantage .

Another time we’re at the boxing club. I’m sparring with Mateusz Krawiec. My father’s in my corner. Mateusz’s dad, Vaclav, is in the corner opposite. Vaclav was at that time the reigning “Sausage King” of southern Ontario: his Polonia kielbasa won the competition held every summer in Montebello Park. Dad felt Vaclav’s win had given him a swollen head. Me and Mateusz went through the usual paces— Mateusz now works at Nabisco as a safety inspector; cute Polish wife, two kids — both of us evenly matched except that he was a southpaw. He kept giving me the Fitzsimmon’s shift to bounce stinging lefts off the bridge of my nose.

“Overhand right!” Dad hollered. “Shift with him, then go smashmouth on his ass. O.T.S.S.!”

O.T.S.S.: Only The Strong Survive. Shortly thereafter, Mateusz battered me with an accidental low blow.

“Call your kid the Foul Pole,” my father cracked.

Vaclav offered a deadpan: “Jah, Foul, ha-ha, jah.” Something was percolating, but with my father you had to wait and see what permutation his unreasoning animus would take.

When a session ends it was customary for trainers to shake hands. My father stepped through the ropes with menace in mind. Butcher versus doctor. Their professions bore out physically. My dad was tentpolelimbed and spider-fingered. Kraweic looked like he split hog femurs with a friction-taped axe. You really couldn’t beat my father for unadulterated perversity of character.

“Hey, Sausage King,” he said. “You’re brownbagging it today. My compliments.”

“Vhat?”

“You’re brown-bagging it,” Dad said amiably.

“Here’s a sackful of knuckle sandwiches.”

In his defence it was the eighties, when the term “knuckle sandwich” was not hopelessly outdated. But what he did next was indefensible: took a wild, looping swing at the Sausage King. Should you find these circumstances improbable, all I can say is that if you knew Frank Saberhagen, you’d know he defies most sane probabilities every day of his life. Dad’s fist pelted Vaclav’s ear. “ Vhat ?” said the Sausage King. I wondered if he was having a tough time hearing out of his punched ear or if, more likely, he was merely shocked at being hit by this mouthy fucking twerp. While Vaclav pursued my father in a blooded rage, Mateusz and I felt compelled to square off again. I shifted this time. Came over with my right. Gloves off, no headgear. I crushed the poor sap’s nose. Blood mushroomed between Mateusz’s fingers. Vaclav ceased his pursuit of my father to tend to his son.

“Overhand right, Nick!” Dad said triumphantly.

“Told you.”

That’s how my father operates. He’ll force you into positions where you must stand beside him. Now it’s become a private joke. Whenever one of us gets on the other’s nerves, it’ll be: “Someone’s fixing to feast on the brown bag special.”

“Wouldn’t it have been great,” he said afterwards, “if I’d said the bag lunch line then nailed him proper?”

There are points in time you recognize your father as holding none of the special powers that as a child you believed he must. To see at heart he is careless and as often as not confused, that he smashes up things and people and it isn’t that he doesn’t care so much as he’s done it enough to know he is more than capable of it and not entirely able to correct what he’s set wrong. Plus he’s a bastard. He’s my dad, so I can say it. Cavernously narcissistic.

We lived on a block with a teenage halfway house and the terminally unemployable Fletcher Burger. He savoured the idea of living amongst his financial inferiors. But I’ve had more fun in his company than any other human being. If you conceptualize fun as a string of adrenaline dumps. But it’s dangerous when the merrymaker becomes convinced that’s all he need ever provide. As he’d inflicted himself upon me, made his pursuits mine, he’d hedged the odds of us sharing more “moments” than Mom and I.

Though I’d never claim that as his clear-sighted aim. Grown men weep at his feet for what he does in the operating theatre. A saviour complex has to fuck with a man’s head. But he realizes he’s an asshole.

Regarding my mother: “Don’t know why she bothers with me, Nick.” In grade school I’d come home to a message on the answering machine from Mom, who Dad said had taken a “personal vacation”: You goddamn stinking shit. Don’t call, don’t come for me. You get away, you just stay away… Frank? She sounded lost. Forsaken. Frank…? You hear people claim they’re “crazy in love.” Plenty of us, yeah, we are. Chemicals exploding in our brains. Perpetually doing the wrong things with the wrong people for the wrong reasons. A chain of bad judgements and miscalculations: ten, fifteen years frittered away. I don’t want to come off as a killjoy. But only the most deluded wouldn’t be a little skeptical, right? My father loves me. I know this much. But his love is brash and undisciplined and inwardly focused. He needs it to reflect back upon itself. Creatures of colossal egotism cannot simply give something away. My mother said once: “I always hope you understand how much I love you.” I do, partly as it exists in opposition to how my father expresses it. Mom’s is a practical love with one obvious motive: to protect what she’s put on this earth. A care-packages-ofboxer-shorts-and-mac-and-cheese sort of love. With