Craig Davidson - Sarah Court

“Give me your hand.”

He crawls out under his own steam. On the high side of the basin a deer watches in a poplar stand. Tiny red spider mites teem around each of its eyes, so many as to give the impression it’s weeping blood. Colin’s shivering. Nobody thought to bring a blanket.

Back in the truck I get the heater pumping. Parkhurst I banish to the bed.

“I want you there.”

“I’m retired.”

“So un-retire, Daddio.”

Heat’s making me sluggish. Flask’s in the glovebox but it’s too early for that sort of a pick-meup in the company of my kid.

“A hell of a thing to ask, sonnio.”

He’s genuinely baffled. “All’s you got to do is fish me out.”

A reporteronce asked: “When’s the last time you saw your son scared?”

I said that must have been at his circumcision. It was taken as a joke.

One time he had a baby tooth hanging by a strip of sinew. He tied it to a length of dental floss, attached the trailing end a doorknob, tore it out. That night he locked himself in the bathroom and tore out four more. Came out looking like a Gatineau junior hockey league goon. He wrapped his teeth in tinfoil for the fairy. My wife figured a fiver ought to cover it.

Another time on a Cub Scout camping trip. My neighbour Frank Saberhagen was scoutmaster, myself a chaperone. Nighttime round the fire. Boys tossing pine cones on the flames to hear sap hiss.

“The Nepalese army trained the most fearsome warriors in the world,” Saberhagen went. “The Gurkhas. Make the Marines look like a pack of ninnies. They got this knife, the kherkis, so long and wickedly sharp victims see their own neck spurting blood as they die. What nobody knows is a planeload of Gurkhas crashed on this site years ago.”

For a man who’d sworn the Hippocratic oath, Frank was unusually irresponsible.

“Who knows if they’re still alive? What the Gurkhas do is sneak into camp at night and feel your boots. If they’re laced over-under-over, they identify you as a friend. But if they’re laced straight across, they pull out their big ole kherkis and”—drawing a thumb across his throat—“you see your own bloody neck stump as you die.”

Afterwards I upbraided Saberhagen. He denied any wrongdoing.

“The Ghurkas are real, Wes. Go look it up.”

The boys all re-laced their shoes over-under-over. I assumed Colin had done likewise until I saw his boots outside his tent the following morning. Laced straight across.

Somewhere inside myself I knew he’d been up all night, Swiss Army knife clutched in one hand, listening for the scrunch-scrunch of feet on dead leaves.

I’min the truck with Colin’s biographer, Parkhurst. Shorthills provincial park. Sulphur Springs road. A weekly circuit. Fletcher Burger has been tagging along since his troubles but he didn’t pick up when I rang this morning. Parkhurst overheard and asked to tag along. I’d prefer to share my truck with Typhoid Mary.

Colin’s crashing on my couch. Parkhurst curled at his feet like an Irish setter. Colin’s working my phone to drum up media. A “strong maybe” from a cub reporter at the Globe and Mail . Wondrous he’d consider committing to the two-hour drive to witness my son heave himself off the face of the earth. My involvement’s being hyped.

“Yeah, yeah. Been at it thirty years,” Colin’s saying to anyone who’ll listen. “His dad before and his dad before that. He’ll be there to drag whatever’s left out…”

The sun slits through roadside poplars. Feel of cocktail swords stabbing my corneas. Scan for bodies: tough on corduroy roads as they get squashed between raw timbers and all’s you can identify them by is the crushed eggshell of their skulls. Parkhurst smiling that sunny mongoloid’s smile. A face pocked with old acne scars looking like a bag of suet pecked at by hungry jays. By no means charitable but some men invite uncharitable descriptions. Snap on the radio. If it’s quiet enough I might hear the kid’s thoughts, which I envision as sounding much like a boom microphone set inside a tub of mealworms.

Other night I drag myself out of bed in the wee witching hours. Lumbago playing havoc with my spine. Went to the fridge for a barley pop. There was Parkhurst standing over my son. When I asked what he was doing he gave me his doleful emptyheaded look.

“Thought he’d stop breathing, or…”

A smashed septum made Colin snore loud as a leaf-blower. It hit me what the kid said. Not stopped breathing — as in, he was worried. Stop breathing— as in, he wanted to witness the dying breath exit his lungs.

If a man makes his living courting death, is it any surprise he should acquire as companion a human maggot waiting to feast on the inevitable?

“Colin said you went to university,” he said now.

“Jot that down in your notebook, did you? I majored in geology.”

“So why don’t you teach it, or…”

He’s one of those annoying nitwits who never finishes a sentence.

“My wife got pregnant. Needed a job. I became an employee of the Parks Commission.”

“Good money, or is it like…”

“I could walk into a Big Bee, buy a scratch-off ticket, get three cherries and instantly make more than I’ve ever made doing this. I weld, mainly.”

“Funny the way it’ll go.”

“Yep, it’s a regular rib-ticklin’ riot. My split sides are always aching.”

“I know how that goes, or sorta like…”

Moron. I check up by a thatch of duckweed. A possum had bumbled onto the road to avoid black flies. Most get clipped by a fender and thrown clear but this one got run over square. Hind end squashed. Muzzle stuck with cockleburrs.

“Tourist Thoroughfare Maintenance” the Parks Commission designates it, gussying up what is simply road-kill duty. The grim sight of Mr. Possum here, or Mr. Racoon or Ms. Badger or Monsieur Skunk— any critter who goes jelly-kneed when pinned by arc-sodium headlights — is a guaranteed vacationspoiler. Call me the merry maid of the roads.

I reach a shovel out the bed. Parkhurst’s kneeling a foot from the creature. He fails to note the term “playing possum” was coined after observing such behaviour.

“Hold a mirror under its snout,” I tell him. “Fogs up you’ll know it’s alive. The fact it’ll have torn your throat to ribbons will be your second hint.”

He finds a stick. Stabs the possum’s flanks. The animal rears up over its own squandered wreckage. Crazed hissing noises. Its crack-glazed eyes make me think of the Christmas tree ornaments Colin made in grade school. Glass globes with tissue paper paraffined over top. I found them years later, shrunken tissue peeled back from the glass in veins. The fucking kid pokes it again. Bringing my boot down, I snap his stick. His face may’ve found its way into the beast’s wheelhouse — jam it in a Cuisinart for similar results — if I hadn’t shouldered him aside.

“We wanted to see if it was alive. One poke beyond is being an asshole.”

The kill-box is the size of a laundry hamper. Lightweight aluminum. Drill holes let the fumes go. A slot-and-grove mechanism for bigger animals so’s you can finagle their heads inside. Set the possum in whole. Lock it down. Uncoil the hose. Fasten one end over the tailpipe. Screw the trailing end onto the connecting tube feeding the box. Slide onto the driver’s seat. Goose the gas. Carbon dioxide pumps in. Black slivers — possum claws — poke through the drill-holes roped in smoke.

Colinwould send his mother and I news clippings. One showed his body laid out as an anatomical graph. Skinless, as rendered by some magazine’s crackerjack graphics department.

The Wreckage of Daredevil Colin “Brink Of ” Hill. Numbered arrows pointed to the bone-breaks and contusions and pulped cartilage and shorn tendons and detached retinas and assorted devastation. So many goddamn arrows.