Craig Davidson - Sarah Court

Dad’s I’m always fighting somebody. Him, mainly. Dad knows I love Mom more. I’ve calibrated this using those means we use to reach such understandings and yes, I do. I think he’s okay with it, too. In order for me to love him equally he’d be forced into concessions he has consistently proven himself unwilling to make.

I bookthe week of Dylan’s suspension off. Each morning I wake him he hisses: “Zee light! Yar, zee light, she burns!” He’s drawn a skull-and-crossbones on his eyepatch and sporadically fancies himself a pirate. A vampire pirate: synergy!

We go grocery shopping at Superstore. Dylan wanders into women’s clothing and returns wearing a bra. The proverbial over-the-shoulder boulder holder, it hangs to his bellybutton. Any woman wearing such a contraption would occasion my father to note: “Whoa — it’s a dead heat in a zeppelin race.”

“Put it back.”

“For Mom?”

“Not her size. But it pulls your whole look together.”

This only encourages him to vamp it up. He struts down the shampoo aisle and performs a high-toed buttonhook round a Prell display, grabbing a bottle as a microphone to launch into “Viva Las Vegas,” which he’d heard that Elvis impersonator sing. A woman my age with no ring laughs. I am cognizant of using my son as a lure. His Vampire phase is waning. These in-between spells, casting about for a new persona, I’m most vigilant. Next he’ll be a rocket-powered tree sloth or a cannibal banana who eats nothing but his brother and sister bananas.

“These are the cheapest toothbrushes you can buy,” he says, showing me one.

“You have a toothbrush. You want that one?”

He gawps at me as though I’ve perpetrated some arcane form of child abuse. I thought he was bargainshopping.

I pick up a massive block of toilet paper, thirty-six rolls. On up the soft drink aisle for two cases of diet cream soda. The ringless woman comes down the aisle. Her eyes fall upon my cart and I’m horrified she’s got the impression my life consists of drinking diet soda on my enormous toilet. For a full decade I never had one such thought. The band on my finger stood as proof to womankind: one of you accepts me. All prospects of remedy are exhausting in mere conception. Find a sitter for Dylan to spring me for a night at Fredo’s under the Niagara Skyway, rucking in with the basset-eyed divorcees and sundry wastoids, clamouring for Ms. Right, Ms. Right Now, whatever’s on the hoof. Cruising Toys R Us for single moms. Explaining it to my son: “This is Daddy’s new friend, Trixy. We met at a speed-dating junket down the Lucky Bingo. She’ll be sleeping on Mommy’s side of the bed strictly on a trial basis…”

Dylan presses his lips to a pack of cheap blade steaks and whispers: “Fresh blood.” In produce he gets on hands and knees reaching under a display of coloured potatoes. They’re severely reduced and, judging by the smell, well on their way to becoming vodka. He comes up with a dented can of mushrooms cowled in spiderwebs.

“See?” As if I’d doubted his gathering instincts. “Can we get them?”

“The can’s bulgy. You’ll get botulism.” Wrap both hands round my throat, pretend I’m throttling myself. “ Gak ! Plus you don’t even like mushrooms.”

He darts down the adjacent aisle, Confectionary, and returns while I’m comparing sodium contents on warring brands of cornflakes.

“Dad! Daddy-Daddy-DaddyDaddyDa—”

“What, Dylan? What the hell is it?”

He drops the tub of gummy worms on a low shelf. Prods it between boxes of Mini-Wheats with his toe. Saws an arm across his nose.

“I love you.”

Next he spies boxes of Animal Crackers.

“Can we go to the zoo?”

“You’re not on vacation, sport-o. You’re being punished, remember?”

“Like a field trip. To give me knowledge.”

“How about the butterfly conservatory?”

He traces a finger round the lion’s head on the cracker box. “Butterflies…”

“Fine. The zoo.”

The next day is cool and edged with coming snows. Clouds cast indistinct shadows on Stoney Creek grape fields where field hands tend canebrake fires. Dylan’s in full-on vampire mode.

“Listen to zee creatures of zee avternoon,” he says as we drive south on the four-lane highway. “Vhat beeoootivul music zey make.”

“I’m taking my son to the zoo. Not a vampire. Besides, a vampire’s a scummy creature. They got to kill to live.”

“What if you keep victims in your basement? Take their blood out with a needle?”

“Bleeding prisoners? Worse.”

Offseason zoos are depressing. Polar bears with hotspotted fur snuffle at frozen blocks of fish bobbing in the oily water of their enclosure. The monkey house viewing area is empty. Piped-in jungle noises: roar of lion, caw of toucan, the steady beat of bongos as you hear in films where pithhatted explorers get cooked in cauldrons by needletoothed headhunters. The poor monkeys look as if they’ve been plucked off banyan trees in their native lands, dropped into a sack and dumped here minutes prior to our arrival. One swings down to the floor of its enclosure and creeps forward on its belly. It’s scrabbling through the bars at a wad of chewed gum balled up in its wrapper.

Dylan presses his forehead to my hip. “Can I give him it?”

“Monkeys shouldn’t chew gum.”

Instead we sprinkle puppy chow from a coin-op dispenser in the carp pond. Dylan’s fascinated by the voracious surges of their liquid pewter bodies.

“That thing with Missus T,” I say. “What made you do it, Dill?”

“It was a dare.”

“Did you enjoy it? The rubbing? If you did… you’re at an age of weird body feelings. Confusing stuff. You can talk to me, right?”

“I talk to Mom on the phone.”

“Who dared you? Cassie Mulligan?”

“Sadie.”

“Is she in your class, this Sadie?”

“She’s my online friend.”

“How old is she?”

“A little older than me. She’s very… pretty?”

“Her photo on the computer screen, you mean. How did you meet?”

“She friended me. On MySpace.”

“And she told you to do that to Missus Trupholme?”

“It’d be funny to play a joke on my teacher. Then Cassie could film it.”

“Cassie’s friends with Sadie, too?”

“Sadie’s friends with everybody.” He bites his lip. “Don’t tell anyone.”

How could it be possible that someone nobody has seen is the most popular person in my son’s class?

“Dill, you’ve got to stop interacting with this person. Are you listening? Want me to chuck your computer in the creek?”

“Computers at school. Everywhere.”

“This is not me trying to hurt you.”

“You let Cassie punch me.”

“God. Where’d that come from? Sadie could be some filthy old man in a basement.”

“Can we go see Mommy?”

“Is that why you wanted to come to Toronto — to visit your mother?”

“We’re close by. You could come.”

“No, I couldn’t. Listen, bud, Mom needs time alone.”

“Alone from me?”

“Yes. No.” Pat his knee. An ineffectual but easy gesture. “Not you.”

“Doesn’t she love you anymore?”

“You never stop loving someone. Entirely.”

“So she could come back. We could live in the same house.”

“You shouldn’t pin much hope on that.”

Early that morning I wake. Down the hall: the tap-tap of a keyboard.

I catch my son bathed in the glow of his monitor. No cape or eyepatch. A normal ten-year-old. The gutted remains of a clock radio are spread about his desk.

“Go away, Daddy.”

He doesn’t even look at me. Eyes on the computer screen.

“Who are you talking to?”