Craig Davidson - Sarah Court

“Tracheal stent,” Dad says. “How long before they opened her airway?”

“Brain scan showed black spots, is all I know. Her eyes. Frank, they turned red .”

Outside the hospital wind shears across Lake Ontario around every angle this town was built upon. Wires of dread twist through me. My oldest friend. My prom date. Guess I thought we’d marry. Even when I was married — and loved my wife, truly — I felt I could have as easily been with Abby. But my son never would’ve been born in that scenario. A son, maybe, but not Dylan: the exact genetic prerequisites wouldn’t have been present. Plus I’d end up with Fletcher Burger as a father-inlaw. One self-obsessed man rampaging through my life was enough.

I leave my father with Fletcher and walk along to the Queenston Motel. A smorgasbord of ravaged faces and sclerotic livers. The lonesome thoughts of the patrons pinball round the dank air, glancing, rebounding, horrified at themselves. An old man eats a submarine sandwich the way you do a cob of corn: he looks like an iguana with a dragonfly clamped in its jaws. Another guy wears a leather vest with nothing on underneath. So insanely over-tanned his skin is purple. This leathery turnip of a head. The woman between them wears a hot pink tube top. Twin C-section scars grace her midriff, inverted ‘T’s overlapping like photographic negatives aligned offkilter.

I order a greyhound. My wife’s drink. The bartender gives me something that tastes like liquefied Band Aids. “Summer of ’69” starts up on the Rockola jukebox. Pink Tube Top gets up on the sad postage-stamp of a dance floor. Breaks out that old Molly-Ringwald-circa Sixteen-Candles , shouldersforward-shoulders-back-slow-motion-running-inplace move. “Yeeow!” goes The Dragonfly. “Yip-yipyee!” goes Leatherhead and he slither-slides up there with her. Now they’re doing some spastic’s version of the Macarena. Now I recall why I don’t drink: it curdles my benevolent worldview.

The Hot Nuts machine is empty. There are no fucking hot nuts in the Hot Nuts machine. The red heat lamp is beating on a glass cube.

“Turn off the fucking Hot Nuts machine,” I tell the bartender. “Some dumb bastard’s liable to burn himself on the glass.”

The barkeep lays a hand on the bartop. Large, scarred, knuckles crushed flat. A mean-ass scar descends from his ear to the dead centre of his chin: a chinstrap welded to his flesh. Am I going to scrap over a Hot Nuts machine? I’ve fought for less. Fortyodd times in gyms and clubs, a greyhound racetrack, the parking lot of a Chuck E. Cheese’s. All to show for it a periodic openmouthed vacancy in my memory. My father said I fought with absolutely no regard for my welfare. A man who had made peace with his forever-after. But you have to acquaint yourself with the notion, before even scuffing your ring boots in the rosin, that not only will you be hurt — there’s no honest way you came out of any fight unhurt— but that you’ll be hurt badly and repeatedly by an opponent who, in the hothouse of that ring, hates you. You cannot batter another human being into unconsciousness unless you harbour some hatred. The second hardest part of boxing is accepting your need to suffer. The hardest part is welcoming that necessary hatred into your heart. I’d stepped between the ropes never believing I could have a wife, a boy, people upon whom I was depended. I can’t fight knowing how any punch — even one thrown by a spud-fisted bartender — could be the one to bust that all apart.

The cab drops me off a block from home. I’m so dehydrated that I steal up to the side of a house, twist the spigot on the garden hose and suck at stale plastic-y water like a poisoned dog. At home I’m nearly drunk enough to call my wife, ex , but it’s late and Dylan is there. I don’t want to be that father.

I’m absentmindedly rooting through my pockets when I turn up that leaflet with Danny Mulligan’s number on the back. I turn it over. On the front is a naked woman, red-haired and busty. Pink stars over her nipples. A larger pink star over her crotch.

What the fuck? What the fuck.

“Sixty-Nine Cent Phone Fantasies,” the operator greets me. “Our titillation experts are sweet and sexy, dom, sub, Black, Asian, naughty nurses, hirsute, leather lovelies, Daddy’s little girls, fat-n-sassy, whips and chains, kinky, mincing, slutty secretaries, southern dandies—”

“Fine,” I say. “That one.”

… click… buzz …

“How y’all doing this faahn evenin’?”

“I’m… Jesus, are you a guy?”

“That’s not what you asked for?”

“I didn’t think I’d need to specify.”

“I talk to whoever switchboard patches through, man.”

“Well. Everyone’s got to make a living.”

“All with little mouths to feed.”

“You got mouths to feed?”

“My own. And my dog, who I’m fixing to get back. So, you horny?”

“Not really. Anymore.”

“We could give it a whirl. What’re you wearing?”

“A parka and earmuffs. Hey, listen — you ever go through a stage where everything comes apart at once?”

“Pal, you’re talking to a middle-aged male phonesex provider.”

“I just got back from the hospital. A friend I’ve known forever, she’s been hurt. Her father… my dad. Dads. Close with yours?”

“He’s dead now.”

“I’m sorry. My own boy says he hates me. What made him hate me? But I think, well, I hate my own dad sometimes. More than some. You got kids?”

“Me? No. Crimped urethral tube. Childhood soccer mishap. My wife left me over it.”

“Over a crimped urethra?”

He says: “Other shenanigans, too.”

“My ex-wife,” I say. “This one morning we woke up. I told her how gorgeous she looked first thing.”

“Right. No makeup, the tousled hair.”

“Tousled, yeah. She gave me this arch look and asked me how long I’d taken to think up that line. But it just came to me. After that I felt compelled to… only so many times you can tell someone they’re beautiful and not have it take on the ring of redundancy, right? After awhile you hope it’s a given.”

“My ex took up with a greasy surgeon. I’m gonna carve him out a new asshole one of these days and you can take that to the bank .”

“What am I paying sixty-nine cents for?”

“Sixty-nine cents is the connection fee. This is running you five bucks a minute.”

“Then listen to me.”

“I hear you. Give it to me, baby. Lay it on me, stud.”

“For Christ’s sakes. I’m trying to say something important so — would you? Anticipate my needs. Act professional.”

“Sorry.”

“Hate, hate, hate. I’ve had more thrust upon me the past months than the rest of my life combined. I’m not a guy people should hate, am I?”

“You sound nice. Intense. A bit like your dad.”

“What?”

“I said a bit like my dad.”

“You know something? You’re a piss-poor phonesex provider.”

“I know.”

“I’m hanging up.”

“I sort of knew that, too.”

WhenDylan was three he caught poison ivy at Martindale pond.

The pond lies in a gully where an old roadway washes out. I took him fishing. We sat onshore amongst old catfishers perched on grease tubs with poles clasped in liquorice-root fingers. He’d get bored and go romping in the woods. I’d ascribed to an immersion theory of child rearing at the time. Let him lick a dog. Put bugs in his mouth. Build that immune system.

The poison ivy started as splotches on his thighs. Threads crept to his groin. He clawed it onto his stomach up to his armpits. The pediatrician prescribed calamine lotion. Dylan still had fits. Dad gave me lotion laced with topical anaesthetic.