Craig Davidson - Sarah Court

The car I stole was a Cadillac Coupe de Ville belonging to Frank Saberhagen. The night I leapt off the train trestle with Colin Hill. I broke the Cadillac’s steering collar, popped the locks, touched the wires. I could barely see over the dashboard. I ran over a hedge on the corner of Sycamore.

The train trestle bowed over Twelve Mile Creek where it met Shriner’s Creek washing into Lake Ontario. We climbed rotted rungs nailed to the pilings. Colin Hill’s pipe flowed rabbity orange flecked with dark blue.

“Still want to?” Colin said.

I failed to view it as a matter of want.

“I will.”

The water so cold my heart nearly burst. I surfaced. Colin Hill bobbed alongside. Smiling. Or had the river wrenched his face into the expression? Days later Wesley Hill stopped by to apologize for Colin’s actions. Mama led him to the sofa. I watched through the upstairs railing.

“I’m deeply sorry, Clara,” Wesley Hill said.

“I don’t have eyes in the back of my head.” She gripped Wesley’s skull. Ruffled his hair. “You, neither. Boys will be boys.”

“They could have been killed. But God works in mysterious ways.”

“I wouldn’t say mysterious. I wouldn’t say so at all.”

Mama hugged Wesley Hill. “Been worse on top of bad for you, hasn’t it?” Next she touched his knee. “Your poor wife. Frail as a leaf.”

Her hand cupping Wesley Hill’s kneecap. He restated his apologies. Left.

“That ridiculous man thinks I took liberties,” Mama told me later on. “The very idea… fetch me a tissue.” Her face was hard when I returned. “Do me a favour, Jeffrey. An itsy-bitsy one. After all I’ve done for you. A silly prank. You LOVE Mama, don’t you?” LOVE I do not comprehend. Loyalty, yes. Loyalty means do as you are told.

That night I broke the head off the sand-cast dog on Wesley Hill’s front porch with a five-pound mallet.

Frank Saberhagen’s corgi, Moxie, once forced itself upon Mama’s sheepdog.

Excelsior lay on the sidewalk when Moxie “bum rushed”—Cappy’s term — her haunches as if he aimed to “drill for Texas tea.” The dog must have “one hell of a Napoleon complex,” as he was “giving that ole girl what-for.”

Excelsior shook Moxie off. Moxie persisted with clumsy jump-thrusts. Excelsior mule-kicked the corgi. Moxie did a backwards somersault into Mama’s marigolds. Which he urinated upon. Cappy laughed. I struggled to understand what was funny about a small neutered dog doing sex with a big spayed one. But Cappy laughed, so I did. How my laughter sounded in my ears: a man in a crowded room shouting in a foreign language.

Excelsior developed pyrotraumatic dermatitis. Bacteria on the epidermis caused coin-sized lesions or “hot spots” to occur. Mama blamed Moxie, who had a similar condition.

Mama sat the dog in her lap. By then only Mama could touch her without being bitten. She trimmed hair round the spots with surgical scissors. Dabbed them with cortisone cream. When Excelsior died, Mama’s spell lasted a week.

Mamahas known Colin Hill since he was “knee-high to a duck’s behind.” She wants to watch him go over the Falls in his barrel. I wrangle her thick body into my minivan. Guide her wheelchair to a spot along the rail.

“I wen’ da turlet.” Mama’s words have been slurred since the operation. “Loog a muh bug.”

I went to the toilet , she’s said. Look in my bag.

I lift the blanket covering her dead legs. The pouch is three-quarters full. I unclip the stint, walk up Clifton Hill with a bag of warm urine. I kneel at a sewer grate, squeeze Mama’s urine out. Uphill is a construction site encircled by a cyclone fence. The fat vampire boy stands on a concrete slab. His cape licks in the wind.

“Hello,” he says to me. “Blah!”

“What are you doing?”

He points to bricks of insulation. There are holes in the plastic where his fingers punched through.

“Ripping zem.”

“Why?”

“A pink blizzard vood brighten zee day.”

“You are a strange boy.”

He touches his upper lip to his nose. Snorts as horses do on cold days.

“I yams what I yam and it’s all that I yam.”

I pull a pocketknife from my trenchcoat. Stab a brick. Wrenching movements slash the plastic. The boy grabs one flapping sail. Flakes blow downhill. The boy is laughing very hard. It is interesting to see. Clifton Hill has gone pink. Next Nicholas Saberhagen, Abigail Burger are coming.

“Don’t tell,” he says. “ Please .”

He tenders his hand. He wishes me to hold it. I do. Tendons tense along Nicholas Saberhagen’s jaw. His pipe flows red. I let go his son’s hand. They come down the hill to say hello to Mama.

“Dylan, is it?” Dywaan, iw ii ? “Handsome darling.”

Mama points to her cheek. Dylan kisses it. With Mama’s gaze averted, the boy wipes his lips.

Mamatook old Seamus Finnegan to the lake.

Seamus was the father of the richest oilman in the world, according to Mama. Seamus Finnegan boasted excellent health before a series of strokes rendered him paralyzed. Balanced sidelong on his wheelchair, he peered along his nose at the quivering knots of his fingers. His sole joy: watching Canada geese congregate on the lakeshore in Port Dalhousie. One afternoon Mama turned Seamus Finnegan away from the geese.

“Someone’s getting overexcited,” she said.

Seamus Finnegan’s chair was aimed at a runoff. Snags of rebar clung with lily pads. Seamus Finnegan moaned.

“Husha, darling. Make yourself sick.”

MANIPULATIVE? This is asking a colourblind man to appreciate a rainbow. Yet if I was Mama’s favourite Monday, Teddy was her favourite by Tuesday. She said I ought to be more like Teddy, who drew lovely pictures. So I drew one: black blobs. Horrid! Why not fireworks, as Teddy did?

Mama acted out “dramas.” Mama the star, everybody else the supporting players. The kitchen was her stage.

“Teddy: be Beatrice Klugman, that nelly from Children’s Aid. Stand there like a stunned cow.” Teddy: empty-eyed behind Coke-bottle glasses with melted frames. “Yes! Jeffrey, you be the Social Services Ombudsman. Scratch yourself — he’s got psoriasis something awful — and mumble.”

“Er, em, homina homina…” I would go, imitating Ralph Kramden.

“Perfect, darling!”

“You got any matches in this house, woman?” Cappy would say. “I got to watch your twisted little productions, least let me smoke my pipe.”

“How can I have matches with eight-oh-four, a known P-Y-R-O, under my roof?”

Teddy, me, were allowed to draw on the driveway with sidewalk chalks. Once I had been allowed to set up a lemonade stand. Lemon-lime Kool-Aid mixed with hose water. My only customer, Fletcher Burger, said: “This tastes scummy as hell.” Next Teddy drank a whole jugful. On a sugar high he doused an old recliner in Mama’s garage with nail polish remover. Set it on fire.

From then on: no lemonade stands. Only sidewalk chalks.

Teddy’s drawings were all the same. Splooges of orange, red, yellow but at their hearts, shapes as creatures may look with their bodies wrecked by flame. One afternoon Frank Saberhagen returned from a vigorous run with his Nicholas. He swung round the court on his bicycle before stopping at our driveway. His pipe flowed static green. He considered my picture: a man with broomstick legs. Belly following a strip of patching tar.

“You’re missing his eyes.”

I pointed out two holes in the driveway where air bubbles in the foundation had popped. I modelled the man around those pits.

“Beefy fellow,” said Frank Saberhagen. “What’s his favourite food?”

I said my own favourite food. “Fish, chips.”