Sarah Court Read Free

jumped eleven busses at the Merritville
Speedway, misjudged the landing and crushed his
skull off the bars. His helmet split in half—helmets
are designed to split under pressure; otherwise, you
slip it off and inside’s red goo—as his body ragdolled
over the front tire. He survived, as he’s survived the
flaming rings of death and sundry smashups he calls
a career. Hair flecked with white. Nothing like your
son’s hair coming in grey to make you feel fossilized.
Blue eyes, his mother’s, gone pale round the edges.
Leather jacket with “Brink Of, Inc” stenciled on the
back. Ragged cracks like tiny mouths at the elbows.
    He’s got a young guy in tow. Look of an Upper
Canadian boarding school preppie. Jeans with
scorpions embroidered down each leg. Dreadlocked
hair. Puppydoggin’ Colin’s heels. My son draws me
into a rough hug. His fingers trace my spine clinically.
    “This is Parkhurst,” he says. “He’s writing my
biography.”
    The kid biographer smiles. You’d think we’d
shared a moment.
    “What’s that doing out, Dad?”
    That is a sand-cast West Highland Terrier. Its
head got busted off by vandals but I epoxied it back
on. Colin’s mother collected Westie paraphernalia.
We had a live one but he went young of liver failure
and convinced my wife she was snakebitten as a pet
owner. Her accumulation had been slow and it was
only afterwards, sitting in a house full of effigies,
that I realized how ardent a collector she’d been.
    “Pretty morbid,” says Colin.
    The cancer ate away her sense of things. Last few
months she lived in a terminal dreamworld: drugs,
mainly, plus the disease chewing into the wires of
her brain. She wasn’t wholly my wife. She’d damn me
for thinking otherwise. During this time, she—
“Mom treated that dog like it was real,” Colin
tells Parkhurst. “Fed it biscuits. Don’t know why
you’d want it around.”
    My son’s generation has a manner of plainspeaking that comes off as casual brutality. Why do I
keep it? It maintains a vision. Not of my wife feeding
a sculpture because her brain was so corrupted she
couldn’t tell it from a real dog. It’s that she tried to
nurture anything at all. Out of all the hours spent
with her in good health, why would he conjure the
scene of his mother feeding a sculpted dog?
“You want me to throw a towel over it?”
“A man does as he likes in his own home.”
“Gee, you’re a prince amongst men.”
    Colin looks raggedy and he looks dog tired. Sad,
I’d say—not pitiful: even mummified in bandages in
this or that hospital, the boy’s never been that—but
depressed. I could cover it . . . why should I? Where’s
he been? Dog could damnwell stay.
    “How did you find me?”
    “We stopped in for an eye-opener at the Queenston
Motel. There was Fletcher Burger propping up a
stool. Poor guy’s looking like ten pounds of shit in a
five-pound bag.”
    He glances at Parkhurst to ensure he’s transcribed
this morsel of wit.
    “What brings you?”
    “Can’t I visit my Pops?”
    Already sick of the tension. Wish I had a beer
but balk at drinking in front of my kid and besides,
I’m pretty sure they’re all drank up. He shifts on his
rump and, with reticence or the nearest to it my son
might ever draw, says: “I’m going over.”
    Sarah Court , where Colin grew up, kids had pet
squirrels.
    My neurosurgeon neighbour Frank Saberhagen
cut down a tree. A clutch of baby squirrels tumbled
out. The doctor’s corgi devoured a few before Clara
Russell’s sheepdog rescued the remainder. Our kids
took them in. The hardware store had a run on
heatlamps.
    Semi-domesticated squirrels roamed the court.
A virulent strain of cestoda, a parasitic flatworm,
infested their guts. Saberhagen saw his son Nick
clawing his keister and organized for the Inoculation
Wagon. To make sure our kids were infected we had
to bring samples.
    Neighbours
idling
on
the
sidewalk
with
tupperware