Craig Davidson - Sarah Court

“You got matches?” he asks us.

“Would you like a cigarette?” Colin says.

“Did I say cigarette? I said matches.”

Colin’s expression is wounded. The old man intuits things.

“I got a briar, son.” He pulls a pipe from his housecoat. “Bastids at the home won’t let me buy matches.”

“But they let you roam around at night?”

“Roam?” he answers me. “What am I, a cow?”

He takes Colin’s Zippo. We stand in fragrant cherry smoke, which must bother the ladybug as it lifts off from Colin’s fingertip. “Oh, pooh,” says Colin.

Our fathers have met in the hospital foyer. Wesley shakes my hand with a tired smile, then zips up Colin’s fly. It’s decided we’ll go for a drink.

“I can drink a damn beer,” declares the old man, as though one of us had challenged his ability to do so. Wesley asks his name.

“I’m Lonnigan,” he says, and when he smiles his face is vaguely familiar — but in this city everyone’s face seems vaguely so.

“Mr. Lonnigan—”

“Who said mister?”

“Okay, Lonnigan, come on.”

Wes takes his son’s hand to guide him down the sidewalk. Lonnigan lifts the odd car door to see if it’s unlocked. At the Queenston Motel the Hot Nuts machine remains empty. Charred peanut specks stuck to hot greasy glass. Colin cadges a handful of loonies off his father and makes for the Manx TT Superbike video game. We take the window booth. When beers arrive, Lonnigan tells the bartender to put his on our tab and joins Colin at the video game.

“Your son…” Dad asks Wes.

“Barrel couldn’t cope, Frank. They who built it said it’d been tested to so-and-so many psi but that water’s a beast. Seals burst. Colin died a bit down in the dark. But I think he’d probably do it again. Just how he’s made. When I baled him in he reached for my hand. Instinct? I don’t know. He did reach. They did one of those — stuck him in a tube and went at his head with magnets…”

“MRI.”

“Right. Black specks. All over his brain. None of the major neural centres.”

I ask can it be fixed.

“No more than you can fix the rotten spots on an apple,” Dad says.

“Jesus, Dad.”

“I don’t know it’s the worst thing,” Wes says. “Hope this doesn’t come off bad, but I understand him again. For so long he was alien to me.” He stares into his glass. “In some ways he’s back to the kid I taught to shave before he had hairs on his face. Standing next to me in the bathroom, shoulders barely clearing the sink ledge. I lathered him up and he shaved with one of his mom’s old pink leg razors. Thing is — and Frank, you’d know it — even as your kid gets older there’s something of that child about their faces.”

“A hell of a burden, Wes, your age.”

“Yeah, Frank. Fine motor skills coming along. He’ll find a job after therapy. But yeah.”

A black man in orderly whites presses his face to the window. Shakes his head as he steps inside. Lonnigan spots him coming and chugs his beer before the orderly can take his glass away.

“You old cabbagehead. Who let you out?”

“Must’ve been you , Clive,” Lonnigan cackles.

“You crazy goat. I’m’na handcuff you to a bedpost.”

“You try and I’ll sic the CNPEA on you faster than you can say Jack Robinson. Canadian Network for the Prevention of Elder Abuse — ho ho . I know people.”

“Am I safe in believin’ you ain’t wrapped an automobile round a tree tonight?”

“Goddam fine driver, me. I don’t wrap trees.”

“Wrap your ancient dodo ass round a tree, is what I ought to do.”

“CNPEA.” Lonnigan clucks at the orderly. “Remember that.”

“He says you brought him in,” says the orderly, who I instantly recognize as Clive Suggs, the father who KO’d me years ago. “Why do such a thing? Old dude in his housecoat.”

“He was insistent,” says Dad.

“Well, he is that.”

Clive sits for a beer. On duty, he admits, but what’s one going to hurt?

“You want to know what?” he says, easing into his miseries with the air of a man slipping into a well-worn pair of slippers. “That old potato-head steals cars. Joyrides. A teenager do what he do, that boy’s a hooligan. An old man do the same and he’s full of beans. Discrediting the myth aged folk can’t do nothing. Some kind a hero. He even stole a honeywagon.”

“A what?”

“A kind of a septic truck,” Clive tells me. “Suck the wastes out of pay toilets.”

“He is peppy.”

“Demented pain in my ass, what he is.”

After another round, this pleasant fuzz edges everything: sort of like beholding the world from inside a cored peach. Colin and Lonnigan switch their attentions to the Claw Game.

“Go for the big white bear,” Lonnigan instructs him. “Don’t fiddle-fart around with them junky trinkets.”

“Mister L,” says Clive. “You played out your leash. Time to go.”

On the way out Lonnigan checks up in front of Dad.

“I wasn’t there for what happened to your dog,” he says. “After I found out, I left for good. Can’t say I could’ve done much. That woman had her ways. But you knew all about it, didn’t you, doctor?”

Clive grasps Lonnigan’s elbow. Dad drinks his beer with a distant smile. Soon thereafter Wes also says his goodbyes.

“I wish you boys well.”

“Same to you, Wes,” Frank and I say, nearly in unison. “Good speaking.”

Two pairs of men move down the sidewalk. Lonnigan propped up by Clive, Colin by his father. Wes opens his truck door. Helps his son into the cab. Lashes the seatbelt across his hips.

“Hell of a thing,” says Dad. He goes on to tell me Abby got back to her room alright. The eye bandages would stay on for a few days. Patterns and shapes would come before too long.

“When they discover you did it?”

“Same as stealing a car and changing the shabby upholstery. You still stole it. My best friend’s daughter. What can you do?”

“Best friend? Most days you hated Fletcher Burger.”

“Christ, Nick. Never hate anyone. Fletch was a fuck-up, okay, but I mean, heaven’s sakes — who isn’t?”

After their divorce, people got the impression Mom stuck Dad with the corgi as a final screwjob. But Dad loved that dog. When Moxie developed persistent pyodermas, or hotspots, Dad rubbed the dog’s skin with benzoyl peroxide ointment stolen from the hospital supply room. Here was a creature who made no specific attempt to be loved. Which was why Dad loved him. The night Moxie died, Dad found him walking circles in the yard. When he picked him up, Moxie vomited blood with such force he blew out both pupils. The last minutes of his life that dog was blind. Dad tried to force-feed him Ipecac but Moxie died gracelessly, blood all down Dad’s shirt, the corgi’s stiffening legs stuck out of the cradle Dad had made of his arms.

The carwends through stands of jackpine— telephone pole firs — on a strip of one-lane blacktop. Dylan’s in the passenger seat. He’s been expelled from school. If there is such thing as a mercy expulsion, my son was the beneficiary.

He’d vomited down the playground’s corkscrew slide. Climbed the ladder, stuck a finger down his throat. Then he slid down through his upchuck. Iris Trupholme found him sitting at the bottom. Trousers soaked with puke.

The teasing had been nonstop. Someone put a dead frog in his lunchbox. Curly hairs in his PB&J.

“Years ago I had a Pakistani boy, Fahim,” Trupholme told me. “Another boy had one of those laser pointers and shined it on Fahim’s forehead, mimicking the red dot worn by Hindus. The boy’s father had put him up to it. That sort of informed hatred has to be inherited. This with the pubic hairs is similar. Until you’re older, a hair is a hair is a hair. Most of the kids shouldn’t even be growing them yet.”