Sarah Court (23 page)

Diverse legal imbroglios prevent Black being
present to hand his card over. I cut it in half in front
of his assistant, a wet-behind-the-ears Vassar grad—
then into quarters and eighths and sixteenths until
it looks as if it passed through a wood-chipper. An
act which I find insanely gratifying.

Next
I see my father we’re faced across his kitchen
table. I’ve come directly from the airport spurred
by his strung-out voicemail message. Between us: a
styrofoam cooler with ORGANIC MATERIAL on the
lid.

Black rings like washers circumference Frank’s
eyes. I’d guess he’s been crying but I’ve never actually
seen Franklin Saberhagen cry.

“It showed up this morning. I decided I’d better
drive Dylan up to his mom’s for the weekend.”

“You better not have been . . .”

“God damn, Nick.” Running a hand through the
wet ropes of his hair. “A little credit?”

“You’re sweating—”

“I haven’t touched a drop. That’s why I’m
sweating.”

I lift the cooler lid. A cloud of dry ice vapour. I see
what’s inside. I close the lid.

“Sensitive biological material,” Dad says. “They’ll
degrade shortly.”

“For . . . ?”

“Yeah. They’re from the Eye Bank . . . an
anonymous donor. You drive.”

Streetlights strobe the car windows to illuminate
the contours of Dad’s havocked face. The cooler sits
in his lap. I cut through the orchards. At a pumpkin
stand a woebegone Canada goose stands like a
sentinel on a frozen squash.

“OR room four,” he says as I drive. “Teaching lab.
We’ll put on scrubs, wheel her in ourselves—”

“Ourselves?”

“You’re my assistant.”

“If we get caught?”

“Seeing as I’m suspended? Jail. I was probably
going, anyway. You’re that worried?”

“Who are you all of a sudden, Montgomery Clift?
Just shut up.”

Service elevator to the fifth floor. When I try to
pull scrubs over my street clothes my father tells me
it’s not a bloody snowsuit. We wheel a gurney into
the elevator and on into Abby’s room. She’s sleeping.
Dad injects her with ketamine so she won’t wake up.
I grasp her feet, Dad under her armpits. An awful
smell, which Dad identifies as burst bedsores.

Up in the OR, Dad runs instruments through the
autoclave, fills a syringe with local, selects suture
thread so thin the plastic pouch containing it appears
empty. The ticking tinnitus of strange machines. An
acrid undernote my father says is burnt bone dust.
He dons glasses I’ve never seen him in: Buddy Holly
style, magnified lenses screwed into the lower hubs.

He removes the eyes from the cooler. White
balls threaded with burst capillaries, ocular stems
attached, in a vacuum-sealed bag. They roll into a
surgical tureen. With a dexterity I’ve rarely seen, he
slices round their base and tweezes up the topmost
layer. He holds one up on the scalpel’s tip: invisible
but for their rainbow refraction in the lights. Inserts
the tip of a syringe below Abby’s eyes. Bubbles where
local collects beneath her skin. Further injections
behind the cups of bone holding each eye. He has
me hold her eyelids open while inserting ocular
spreaders.

With a cookie-cutter instrument he traces the
circumference of Abby’s eyes. “Sweat,” he says.
“Damn it, Nick,
sweat
.” I dab his forehead with a
swatch of surgical gauze. He tweezes out Abby’s
destroyed corneas. Deposits them on her cheeks.
The blue of Abby’s eyes
too
blue: this quivering naked
vibrancy. He shapes the donor corneas until they
are of acceptable size. Lays them over her eyeballs.
Stitches fresh corneas to the edges of old. Gently
clears away the blood occluding her eyes. The useless
corneas are still stuck to her cheeks. He pinches
them between his fingers. When they stick to his
fingertips he blows as one does at an eyelash to make
a wish. Twin scintillas land on the floor, lost on the
tiles like contact lenses. Dad grins. Walleyed and a
bit batty-looking behind those giant lenses.

Afterwards I idle on the sidewalk. Smoker’s row:
patients, orderlies, nurses filing a concrete abutment.
In wheelchairs and hospital blues, dragging vital
sign monitors and oxygen tanks. A snatch of a song
comes to me:
The saddest thing that I ever saw / Was
smokers outside the hospital doors
.

A guy stands in light shed by the ambulance bay.
Shuffling along the halogen-lit brickwork. His fly
is unzipped and his shirt’s buttoned all wrong. His
hair—long, the last time I’d seen him—was razed to
the scalp. I walk over.

“Hey, how are you?”

Colin Hill offers me the most open, beatific smile.

“How do you do?”

He speaks as if a baffler down his belly prevents
him from raising his voice. Slack features. Shaving
cream crusted in his ear-holes. His smile goes on and
on and on.

“We lived on Sarah Court,” I tell him. “As kids.”

He rubs a palm over his scalp as you do a foot
that’s gone to sleep. The muscles mooring his jaw
tense. The frustrated noise he makes is, I’m guessing,
laughter.

“I remember.” He extends both hands in front
of him, palms facing me, touching his thumbs then
spreading his arms to their furthest ambit. The
sort of panoramic gesture a shady condominium
developer makes to encompass vacant swampland
where he plans a timeshare resort. “I remember . . .
everything.”

My euphoria sours. Colin faces the wall again. He
hunts until he finds what he’d lost: a ladybug crawling
in the grouting. He slips a pinkie finger into the gap.
The bug perches on his nail. We’re approached by an
old man in a housecoat and winter boots.

“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 car
wends 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.”