Craig Davidson - The Fighter

“Alien food,” his mother said derisively. “Is it alien that people should eat healthfully? I can whip you up something — how about an eel wrap?”

To Paul this sounded more like a creepy spa treatment than anything he might want to put in his mouth. “You know, I’ll pass.”

“Fine, mister grilled cheese sandwich.”

Barbara Harris wore a black silk kimono embroidered with dragons. Paul wondered if she’d set foot off the estate all day. Years ago she’d bred Great Danes for show but quit after her prize bitch, Sweet Roses, ran off with a feral short-haired schnauzer who’d roamed the banks of Lake Ontario.

She recovered to sit on the boards of several charitable committees, but quit them and upped her Pilates and Billy Blanks Tae Bo workouts to twice daily; she’d since scaled back in favor of Thai cookery and Japanese Tea Ceremony classes — hence the kimono.

She had not always been this way. Years ago, when they’d lived on the vineyard, she’d played Nana Mouskouri or Roger Whittaker records and sang along while puttering about the house. Friends would come down from Atikokan and stay for weeks, calling her “Babs” or “Bo-Bo.” They drank Blue Nun on the weathered front porch and pored over old photographs: Barbara sitting in the bleachers at a football game in scarf and mittens; at a bush party, the fire making her skin shine like Krugerrand gold. She used to laugh all the time — mildly disconcerting, as his mother’s laugh sounded like a poacher machine-gunning a walrus. But Paul loved her laugh: it was a sound expressive of life and unrestrained joy, though he couldn’t recall the last time he’d really heard it. Wealth hung awkwardly on some people, gave rise to perversions of taste and common sense: fad diets and Tae Bo and shit-in-milk-jug art exhibits. Some people were better off poor.

“Where were you today?” Jack wanted to know. “Working the high steel, driving a steamroller, digging ditches?”

Paul found a loaf of multigrain bread and a jar of organic peanut butter. “I was around.”

“Around what — the unemployment office? Or maybe you were called back to the mothership to report to your leader.”

“I’m here now, so what does it matter?”

“Hear that, Barb? Our son’s off god-knows-where sticking his nose in god-knows-what and he wants to know why it matters!”

“Jack, please.” Barbara’s manner was that of a society doyenne calming a rowdy dinner guest.

Jack ran a hand through his hair: wild, sticking up in icicle spikes. “The other day a shipment of Cabernet bottles arrived — pink. What the hell do you think we’re bottling here, I said to the delivery guy, Asti Spumante?

Baby shampoo? The guy kept flapping the goddamn order sheet and the next thing I knew I had him in a headlock!” He tightened his tie — then, realizing what he’d done, tugged it loose. “I could use you back.”

But Paul couldn’t see himself back at the winery in his Organizational Adviser role, writing memos to his father (Subject: Cost Breakdown of Kill vs. No-Kill Rat Traps for Supply Room) and telling the bambino joke.

“You ought to hire an assistant.”

“Who, some stranger?”

“Who the hell cares? There’s a million guys like me, and Mom doesn’t give two shits what I do—”

“I do,” Barb cut in. “I do give two… shits. And much more. I just wasn’t aware it was your aspiration to be a fruit picker.”

“Guess I should have sent you to the fuckin’ fruit-picking academy!” Jack roared, zero to stone-cold sonofabitch in ten point six seconds — a new record.

“Didn’t know there was one, but that would’ve been swell,” Paul said as he made for the back door.

The backyard described a shallow decline to the shores of Lake Ontario. A snowy owl perched on a tree bough, its flat phosphorescent eyes big as bicycle reflectors. The water was a frozen gunmetal sheet; the lights of Hamilton and Toronto shone upon it.

“Paul, slow up.”

His mother traced a path down to the shoreline. She wore a mink coat Paul had thought flattered her, but now all he could think about was how many minks had been anally electrocuted to make the ridiculous thing.

“Can we walk a bit?” she asked.

“We can.”

Wind whipped over the ice pan, tossing up fans of crystallized snow. Barbara used to walk the lakeshore for hours, calling out for her truant show dog — “Here, Sweet Roses! Here, Sweet, Sweet Roses!” — in hopes of coaxing it away from the renegade schnauzer.

“I’m not too sure what’s been happening lately.” Barb’s face bore a wounded expression. “You were in a fight, you’ve picked grapes. So I guess I know what you’ve been up to — but I can’t see why.”

“You wouldn’t get it.”

“Care to try me?”

Paul shrugged.

“Okay, say you got in a fight—”

“Man or a woman?”

“Say this she-bear of a woman kicked the snot out of you. What do you do?”

“First I’d call the police—”

“See, Mom, that’s where we must part ways.”

“Will you let me finish? You never let me finish. I think I might…” She sighed. “No, I’d call the police. God, Paul, what do you expect me to say? I’d embark on a province-wide killing spree?”

“You don’t go to the police.”

Barb’s wounded expression persisted. “What you said about me not giving a shit—”

“Two shits.”

“Two, even … that wasn’t fair.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, meaning it. “But it’s nothing to do with you.”

She shook her head and shivered. “Cold as a witch’s tit.”

Though many things about his mother had changed, her diction had not. She still said I could’ve dropped cork-legged! when something surprised her; when Paul was young she’d tell him Up the wooden hills to Bedfordshire when it was time for bed. As a kid he’d purposefully misbehave to hear her holler For two pins I swear I’d thump you! safe in the knowledge she’d never actually thump him.

“So what’s this big problem of yours?” she asked after they’d walked for a while.

“It’s bigger than one thing, more complex. I can only tell you some of the symptoms.”

“Symptoms, okay.”

“Okay. Last summer I was driving home dead drunk.” Barb was shaking her head.

“Mother, dear — did you, or did you not, ask? So I’m driving. If I hit a check-stop I knew I’d blow over the limit and I already had that DUI —”

“The one your father cleared up.”

“Can I tell the story? I came across an accident scene. That hairpin curve—”

“At the bridge over the regatta course?”

Paul nodded.

“Two cars. One crashed through the guardrail into the pond; its headlights were submerged and they looked like lights at the bottom of a swimming pool.

The other one slammed into the bridge. A compact Suzuki—”

“Oh, god.” Barbara drove a Lincoln Navigator, comforted by its stellar front-impact safety rating.

“—and all accordioned up. The driver had rocketed through the windshield and was laid out over the hood. His head — her head, his head; who knows? — the head was flattened against the bridge abutment.”

His mother looked ill. “You know, I sat on a traffic safety committee years ago and that same curve came up. I voted to widen it, but the road crews were threatening a strike and… well, go on.”

“There were cops, ambulances, fire trucks, those megawatt accident-scene spots. Everything was focused on the accident. I could have popped my trunk and rolled a headless corpse into the weeds and nobody would’ve said boo.”