Sarah Court (25 page)

I do not feel LOVE. RAGE. SYMPATHY. They live
in the black spot. I have woken howling odd places in
twisted bodily positions, never knowing why. I see
guests on daytime talk shows. Emotion-torn faces
crumbling apart under studio lights. Comprehension
eludes me.

Mama took me to a movie. In it, a boy with
massive facial deformities taught a blind girl to
“see.” He put a hot potato in her hands: RED. Cotton
batten: CLOUDS.

Mama showed me a photo of baby chickadees:
LOVE. A soldier in a ditch beside a bombed farmhouse:
LONELY.

Cappy Lonnigan arrived, drunk, while we were at
it.

“It’s the blind leading the blind.”

Good, evil: I can differentiate. But I am not
impelled to pursue one path to the exclusion of the
other. I camouflage myself through conditioned
responses. Were a lady to set her head on my shoulder
at a car wreck, I could identify her emotion as GRIEF.

“What a waste,” I could say. I could mean the cars.

I often find myself trapped in difficult emotional
waters. But I can tread water. I employ conversational
strategies. One is to repeat what someone says,
slightly altered. If I was at a funeral for those killed
in that hypothetical car wreck, that same lady might
say: “What a pity. They were far too young. So much
promise.”

“Too young,” I might try. “Such promise.”

Or at a supermarket. A boy making a scene his
mother is helpless to arrest. A fellow shopper could
whisper: “Someone should tame that little brat.”

“Whip him,” I might say, that being how a lion
tamer tames his lions. “Whip that brat.”

I also have trouble fitting warring notions in my
head. Like: the first time I saw a banana I realized
you had to peel its skin to eat its insides. That banana
had been given to me by a human. The two knotted
in my head. Snapping the top off a banana sounds
a lot like snapping the neck of a small, armless,
legless, yellow person. I do not eat bananas. Ever. Or
welcome yellow objects into my proximity.

“You got a case of the brainfarts,” Cappy said
when I tried to explain.

“That’s vulgar,” said Mama. “Call them cramps.”

“Whaddaya mean—like, menstrual cramps?”

Farts within my brain make me mistake prone.
Example: Cappy would bring Mama breakfast in bed.
“Great way to spice things up in the ole sack-a-reeno,
kid.” Beyond that, he never elaborated.

One afternoon Gadzooks! quarrelled with a
robin. I shinnied up the tree—I had beaten Nicholas
Saberhagen in a climbing contest, even though his
father made him climb trees daily—to spy eggs in
the nest. I brought them home, cracked them into a
skillet. Eggs so small fried rapidly. So tiny on that big
white plate. I arranged pretty blue egg shells around.
When I presented them Mama was HAPPY. Until she
studied closely.

“Jeffrey, where did these come from?”

“From the tree in Mister Burger’s yard.”

Mama shrieked. I mustn’t go stealing eggs out of
nests. But I worked especially hard to get those eggs.
Farmers stole eggs from under chickens’ bums. An
egg was an egg . . . ? I only wanted to spice things up
in the ole sack-a-reeno. For Mama.

I stock
for Vend-O-Mat Incorporated. Class-A
Vending Machine Technician. Member of Vending
Machine Union Local 104. At my other job I am, at
best, a hobbyist.

I restock claw machines at bars. The key: place a
plush teddy bear in the centre of the cube surrounded
by cheap trinkets. The claw is too weak to pick it
up, but fixated drunks waste many coins trying. I
service Hot Nuts machines, too, but the only place
that has one stopped paying their maintenance fee.

Machines are logical. When I twist my multiuse flat barrel skeleton key on a Beaver 970
gumball dispensing unit—same insides as every
Beaver 970 dispensing unit—I instantly spot the
problem. Usually a torn-apart gumball in the ratchet
mechanism. Or if I open an Aaxon frontload dualcycle washing machine, I will usually find a 3/4-inch
washer stuck in the coin slide. You can look into any
machine to know exactly what is wrong. How to fix
it.

Weeks ago I was at a school, stocking a Slim Line
Mark X—voted Most Reliable Dispensing Unit by
the Independent Vendors Association—when a boy
interrupted me.

“Vhat are joo do-ink, blah?”

“I’m a stocker.”

“Zee Night Stalker?”

Gym shorts. A cape. Fat. A short, fat vampire boy.
“I stock vending machines.”

“Do joo stock Nerds?”

“I do not stalk anybody.”

“Nerds zee candy.”

“Products in boxed form do not vend well. Also tube form. Certs vend poorly.”

“But, blah!” Fists clenched. “
Neeeeerds
!”
He says this the same way Marlon Brando shouted “
Steeellla!”
in
A Streetcar Named Desire
. The
fat vampire boy chin-pointed at the Slim Line Mark
X.

“It ate my dollar last week. So I kicked it.”

“Never kick them. This one weighs a thousand
pounds. That is how much a female grizzly bear
weighs. Five people a year die from vending machines
tipping on them. Squished.”

“Whoa.”

There may be some Nerds in my truck, I said. He
tagged along.

“Should you be in gym class?”

“Jeem eez strictly for zee blood bags.”

“Us alone in a truck full of treats. I could get in
trouble.”

“Vy?”

“I could be a molester.”

The fat vampire boy squinted at the sun. Pulled
the cape over his head. Wind goose-pimpled his bare
legs. There was a case of Strawberry-Lime Nerds
stashed under a box of Mallomars.

“Seriously? Wow, thanks.”

“Do not eat them all at once. You are fat already,
as I imagine you must know. You risk hyperphagia.
Childhood onset diabetes.”

I checked my pulse. The boy asked what was I
doing.

“Your pulse is the most reliable indicator of
overall health.”

I showed him my wrist. The radial vein popping
through tightened skin.

“Check here.”

Instead, the boy clutched his crotch.

“I don’t feel anyzing. I yam zee valking undead!”

I helped him locate it properly. On his wrist. He
looked DISAPPOINTED.

The day
I arrived at Mama’s she baked angel’s food
cake. Aside from Cappy, I cannot recollect who was
there. Cases—when angry, Mama called us by our
Social Services case number—came, went. I ate
plentiful welcome cake. She took in cases other
systems would not abide. Social Services paid a
premium. We dressed alike: tan trousers, hush
puppies. Flowbee haircuts.

“Built like a brick shithouse”: Cappy’s term for
Mama. Legs thick as Japanese radishes. One night
a big case, Gothia, experienced an episode. Mama
weathered his ravings then slapped him. A skullrattler. She pounced on Gothia’s back. Her callused
hands on Gothia’s head sounded like sledgehammers
breaking open a cement sack. Her pet expression
was “Gadzooks!” The night she beat on Gothia, every
time she rained down a blow she yelped, “Gadzooks!
Gadzooks!”

Mama was also prone to what she called “spells.”
During one she came out of the bathroom with
dental floss wound round her fingers so tight her
fingertips were bloodless.

“Who left this? I’ll have a DNA test done, so help
me God! This is not the
brand we use in this house!
”

How did she identify used dental floss by brand?
She was convinced somebody, a stranger, had broke
into her home to floss their teeth—also, they would
have had to bring their own floss. One of Cappy’s
whores
, in all probability.

“Three wolves and three sheep deciding what to
eat for supper,” said Cappy Lonnigan, regarding life
in Mama’s house. “Who says democracy works?”

He was her on-again off-again boyfriend. When
he found work at the Port Weller dry docks—“I’m
hell-on-wheels with a riveting gun, kid”—they
were on. When contracts were scarce, so was he. My
understanding of human behaviour is that people
fall into one another’s orbits out of an inability to
exist alone.

“Type of woman you’d call
brassy
,” he said of her.
“Way a cabaret torch singer is brassy. Big teeth, big
hair, big . . . overall. Throwing herself out there not
giving a sweet tweet. Except she isn’t really pretty
enough to pull it off.”

Cappy would be around two months, gone six.
Mama sniffed his itchy feet. A Sarah Court ritual:
Cappy Lonnigan on the lawn in his boxers while
Mama flung his possessions down.

“Rotten-ass bastard, heave-ho! Come round here,
I’ll bust your nuts off!”

“Crazy bitch—you threw my record player out the
window!”

The Divestment was followed by The Reconciliation:
Cappy would show up hat in hand.
Eventually he stopped coming round. Last I saw of
him for years, he stood in long johns while Mama
hurled his belongings out-of-doors.

“Limp-dicked goat! See you again I’m chopping it
off!”

Cappy shoved his property into a sack he’d
stashed under the porch for this eventuality. He sat
beside me on the stoop.

“Shrink your world. Pin everyone under your
thumb. Every minute of every day, assert control.”
He brought his thumb, forefinger together. “If
your kingdom’s small enough and everybody owes,
anyone can be Queen.”

The girl
with the
Blade Runner
haircut dances like
a robot.

I drink a Shirley Temple. My employer sits with
Nicholas Saberhagen. I am not sitting with them. I
see them across the strip club. Another woman, her
name is Diznee, asks may she dance. On my lap.
Asks: am I a conventioneer? For fifty she will take
me to the motor lodge to “suck on it.” No, thanks.

My employer is joined by Wesley, Colin Hill, a
dreadlocked fellow. I order a five-dollar steak. It
arrives with tiny green potatoes.

I head out the back exit. Ignite the cube van.
My employer exits the front door. Into a cab with
Nicholas Saberhagen. I tail them down Bunting onto
the QEW. Their taxi curls along the Niagara river
past the hydroelectric plant. Into a warehouse lot lit
by security lamps.

I park beside the gates. Cross the road to a bench
overlooking the river. Check my pulse. Log it. My
employer reconnoitres. Transparent molasses flows
from his pipe.

“You?”

“Yes,” I say. “You?”

This is all we say. I know what I am supposed to do. Inside the warehouse is a box. The leaden cover
draped overtop is of the same material as X-ray
vests. I roll it into the cube van, drive to Coboconk.
Halfway there I veer into the breakdown lane. I
crack the hood to find the source of the persistent
hiss. Before long I reach the understanding that it is
emanating from inside my skull.

Cappy Lonnigan
taught me to hotwire a car.

“I spent six months in a Tallahassee lockup for
car-nicking,” he told me. “Roaches big as matchbooks
chewing my toenails. A southerner, Muddy Phelps,
taught me.
I’m’na shew yew tuh hut
whirr
a
vay
heckle,
son
. Muddy’s what you’d call a recidivist criminal.
One time I’m bending elbows with Muds—some bum
tells ole Muds his mother wears army boots. Well!
Muds tells that bum he’s gonna come to where he
slept, creep in a window, and slash his weasel throat.
Slaysh yer way-zaal thrut
. A man was able to get his
point across, those days. Anyway, you find yourself
an unlocked car. With a flathead screwdriver bust
open the wheel collar. Pop the steering lock and
touch the red wires. Easy as a beagle bitch in heat.”

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.