Sarah Court

BLACK WATER RIVERMAN & SON

Four hundred. Suicides, failed daredevils, boozesoaked ruins. Four hundred bodies I’ve dragged out that river.

They start two hundred yards higher, where it narrows between Goat Island and Table Rock. Craning their necks north they’d spy that huge green head fronting Frankenstein’s House of Horrors up Clifton Hill — though back in the ’70s when Knieval copycats tossed themselves over regular as clockwork, their eyes would be drawn to mist gathering at the head of the Falls while they floated in their giant lobster pot or other idiot contraption. Rapidly coming to grips with the foolhardiness of their endeavour.

I catch them with hook and rope and a Husky X9 winch. I can only say how they look falling into my care. Simple answer’s bad. Crass one’s discombobulated. Truth is it’s a hard description to approach. The human body’s durable. Idiotically so. The Big Drop shows you all durabilities have limits.

First time you motor out you’re asking, How bad can it be? That question has a way of coming off as a dare to the Almighty.

Most of us cross a body, it’s in a coffin. Frozen in pleasing position. What I drag out of that river is death in the raw. Unadorned yet in its way utterly natural, in that nature holds many strange shapes. Men bent at angles failing to match the angles of our understanding. Pressure’s a sonofabitch. Trapped in chambers hammered out over millennia, a body churns like a ragdoll in a cement mixer. Mortician who handles Plungers — his pet euphemism — has mannequin limbs the colours of all creation. An incomplete head equals a closed casket. No ifs, ands, or buts.

Once I took my boy Colin on a training run. Two of us in a johnboat on the zinced waters of the Niagara. Up top the cataract was my neighbour, Fletcher Burger, with a ballistic latex Resussy-Annie doll stitched to a pair of weighed legs. Colin cupped a handful of water. Rubbed his fingers over his teeth. Earlier that week his mother had collapsed in the shower. Stuff metastasizing to her bones. She’d begun sinking into herself. I’d knelt fully clothed in the tub. Water pelting down. Covering her breasts best as I was able. For his sake. Hers, too.

“Water goes deep enough, it’s always black,” I told him. “Sun can’t penetrate. Colour spectrum fails. At eighty feet it’s total blackness. The sun gives our skin colour. The deepest sea fish get no sun. You can see right into their guts.”

Fletcher hurled the doll. I dragged in its torso. Legs I never did find. One of its eyes burst. The insides crawled the shatter-lines in black threads, like when your digital watchface cracks.

“Happens to us, too,” I said. “Often worse.”

Colin prodded the doll’s head with his sneaker. The liquid black of its eye rolled down its rubber cheek. Even back then he didn’t feel the odds applied to him.

My name is Wesley Bryant Hill. My grandfather was the Riverman. My father, too. That’s the way life unfolds in the territories of my birth.

The boy walks into the strip club as Dracula.

Ordinarily I steer clear of fleshpits. Sadsacks ordering five-dollar steaks — who eats five-dollar meat anywhere tap water runs you ten? — old mares in costume panties with the spanglies falling off, raincoat types with basset faces, DJ playing “Don’t Stop Believing” when it’s clear everyone has. That gathered humanity disintegrating under a disco ball.

I’m here on account of Diznee. Roberta to her mother. Evicted from her night slot by girls bussed in from Quebec—“Nothing against the Kaybeckers,” she says, “but they don’t got horny stiffs in Montreal?”—she toils the midday grind at Private Eyes. We share an apartment block. I babysit her boy, Cody. Black-white. What do you call that? Mulatto. Good kid. I’m here to collect my babysitting monies when I spot Boy-Dracula. Chubby, mop-headed, in a black cape. Clive the afternoon barkeep asks what he’ll have. A gal old enough to be this kid’s auntie slithers naked round a brass pole.

“Clive!”

“One of the girls’ kids.” He serves the boy a glass of maraschino cherries. “Right?” The boy cocks his head as a dog will. “Oh, jeepers,” goes Clive.

I tell the kid he shouldn’t be here.

“This is where ladies… dance.”

“Wizzout zeyr pants,” he says in this Nosferatu voice.

Take him onto Bunting road. Sunlight beating on the hoods of Camaros and pickups.

“What’s with the cape?”

“I yam a wampire.”

“You don’t say. How’d you get here?”

“Zee buzz.”

The bus-riding vampire’s name is Dylan. “How come you aren’t shrivelling up in the sun?” “I yam a magical wampire.”

I’ll wager this act gets him beat up a fair load. Walk to a payphone beside Mattress Depot. He calls someone to pick him up. Cross to Mac’s Milk. One Coke and one “Vampire Tonic”: chocolate milk to us non-bloodsuckers. Dylan insists on paying. His fiver has pinpricks run down it.

“So, there a missus Vampire?”

“Sadie,” he says in a regular kid voice. “She’s sort of my girlfriend.”

“A looker?”

“She’s got piglet tails.”

“I think that’s pigtails. Plan on bringing her to visit your Ma and Pa in Transylvania?”

A powder blue Ford pulls in. The driver’s Abigail Burger. From Sarah Court. Fletcher’s daughter. I believe she recognizes me but as we fail to acknowledge this, the moment passes and we shake as two strangers. One hell of a grip.

“Any idea how much trouble a kid can get into with only a bus pass?” she says. “I sew five-dollar bills into the lining of his pants so he’s not penniless.”

“What’s this about him being a vampire?”

“Dad lets him watch monster movies.”

“Mom doesn’t approve?”

“Oh, I’m not his mother.”

I say goodbye. Head home. The sky’s composed of overlapping orange- to blood-coloured curtains when my own son pulls into the complex lot. Driving a shark-grey Olds. Flames lick off the wheel wells. Haven’t seen him in two years and three before that. My apartment’s a shambles. Grab Lucky Lager bottles and sleeve them in the nearest two-four case. Colin’s fist hammers the door.

“Since when do you lock it, Daddio?”

As if he visited weekly and this is a fresh wrinkle. I’m sixty. Colin was born when I was twenty-five. The mathematics bear out in the creases of his face and the calcified humps of his knuckles. His left cheek’s caved inwards below his eye. Happened years back when he 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 containers or ice cream tubs containing our offsprings’ turds. Everybody shamefaced except Saberhagen, who took evident pride in his son’s heroic sample. Wasn’t flashing it around or anything so crass but you could tell. Everyone felt sorry for his son Nick, who went on to become a boxer but not a very good one.

The Inoculation Wagon: room enough for Colin, myself, a nurse. Colin hopped on the butcherpapered bench. Shivered. Two kinds of shivers: the fear-shiver and the shiver of anticipation. First time I’d ever marked a clear distinction.

“This is Verminox,” the nurse told Colin.

“What’s it do?”

“It’s a bit of a disease. We inject you with a teenytiny bit, your body fights it. The worms can’t fight. They die.”

“Gonna make me sick?”

“A little sick so you won’t get a lot sick.”

Colin rucked his sleeve up. Fascinated he’d be infected. The nurse gave me a look. But it was heartening to see my boy cleansed of fear. All the other pansy kids blubbering as my son practically jumped onto that hogsticker.

Later I recognized parents should be thankful their kid is like everyone else’s in the most critical ways. Pricked with a needle, they cry.

“A prototype, Pops.”

“Prototype? It’s a plastic oil drum.”

“I got people working on a better one.”

Ball’s Falls is located off old highway 24 in the shadow of the escarpment. The sun slants through clifftop pines highlighting the schist trickling through the rockface. Only vehicle in the lot is a delivery van. SWEETS FOR THE SWEET on its flank. Bark on silver birches peeling like the skin of blistered feet.

Colin boots the drum down the drywash where a waterwheel churns the creek. Parkhurst has pillows stolen from the Four Diamonds motel where they’ve been shacked up. Next to the KOA campground so when funds run short it will be a painless transition. Colin’s earned a chunk over the years: those TV specials in the ’90s, action dolls, video games. Tells me he’s been working the state fair circuit lately. Jumping junked cars in razed Iowa cornfields. Junked cars in Idaho potato patches.

“You got scientists building you another drum?” I ask. “What, it’s going to have non-motel pillows for superior cushioning?”

“I got people, Pops.”

“Don’t call me that. Pops. Like I’m running a malt shop.”

“You’ll see it.”

“Who says?”

I’ll see it. Take this morning: said I wouldn’t come but here I am. My refusal wouldn’t stop it happening. What if he busts a leg? Pulverizes his spine? Parkhurst bawling into his ratty mop of hair. The real thumbscrews part is that Colin knows he’s putting me in a bind.

He boots the drum down a gulch littered with sunbleached paper cups. We reach the shallows near the head of the falls. Water clear over the flat shale bottom. Minnows dart and settle. A fifty-foot drop into a deep rock amphitheater. My son strips to his skivs. Goddammit, it’s autumn. What’s the purpose in him going over as he entered this world? Wearing ballhugger Y-fronts — a banana hammock, I guess you’d have to call it — presenting the shrivelled definition of his privates. Gawking at my kid’s frightened turtle of a wiener. Hell’s the matter with me?

“It’s not watertight,” he tells me. “Why ride home with wet clothes?”

My son, the pragmatic daredevil. Settling into the drum, he sighs. Can’t tell if it’s voluntary or if the compression of those old hurts forces it out.

Muffled laughter as the drum bobs into the current. Follow it upcreek, skipping over rocks with a galloping heart until it bottoms out at the head of the falls. Water booms over the creek-neck but Colin’s hooting like a wild bastard. I find a strong branch. Goddamn, sixty years old and aiming to tip my half-naked son over a waterfall in an oil drum. The sun’s at an angle where I see him through the blue plastic: an embryo inside an egg held up to a flame.

Water sprays. Parkhurst’s overbalanced with one boot submerged in the creek. The stone he’s thrown is sand-coloured, huge, and sharp. It could have easily punctured the drum.

“What to Christ were you thinking?”

Parkhurst offers the docile smile of a moron. A surge sweeps the drum over. I hightail it down steps erected by the Ontario Tourism Board. The drum floats near the basin’s shore. Lid popped off. Colin crawling out like some zombie from its grave. Soaked skivs hanging off his rawbone ass. Water-thinned blood trickling out both nostrils. Smiling but that’s no sign of anything.

“Give me your hand.”

He crawls out under his own steam. On the high side of the basin a deer watches in a poplar stand. Tiny red spider mites teem around each of its eyes, so many as to give the impression it’s weeping blood. Colin’s shivering. Nobody thought to bring a blanket.

Back in the truck I get the heater pumping. Parkhurst I banish to the bed.

“I want you there.”

“I’m retired.”

“So un-retire, Daddio.”

Heat’s making me sluggish. Flask’s in the glovebox but it’s too early for that sort of a pick-meup in the company of my kid.

“A hell of a thing to ask, sonnio.”

He’s genuinely baffled. “All’s you got to do is fish me out.”

A reporter once asked: “When’s the last time you saw your son scared?”

I said that must have been at his circumcision. It was taken as a joke.

One time he had a baby tooth hanging by a strip of sinew. He tied it to a length of dental floss, attached the trailing end a doorknob, tore it out. That night he locked himself in the bathroom and tore out four more. Came out looking like a Gatineau junior hockey league goon. He wrapped his teeth in tinfoil for the fairy. My wife figured a fiver ought to cover it.

Another time on a Cub Scout camping trip. My neighbour Frank Saberhagen was scoutmaster, myself a chaperone. Nighttime round the fire. Boys tossing pine cones on the flames to hear sap hiss.

“The Nepalese army trained the most fearsome warriors in the world,” Saberhagen went. “The Gurkhas. Make the Marines look like a pack of ninnies. They got this knife, the kherkis, so long and wickedly sharp victims see their own neck spurting blood as they die. What nobody knows is a planeload of Gurkhas crashed on this site years ago.”

For a man who’d sworn the Hippocratic oath, Frank was unusually irresponsible.

“Who knows if they’re still alive? What the Gurkhas do is sneak into camp at night and feel your boots. If they’re laced over-under-over, they identify you as a friend. But if they’re laced straight across, they pull out their big ole kherkis and”—drawing a thumb across his throat—“you see your own bloody neck stump as you die.”

Afterwards I upbraided Saberhagen. He denied any wrongdoing.

“The Ghurkas are real, Wes. Go look it up.”

The boys all re-laced their shoes over-under-over. I assumed Colin had done likewise until I saw his boots outside his tent the following morning. Laced straight across.

Somewhere inside myself I knew he’d been up all night, Swiss Army knife clutched in one hand, listening for the scrunch-scrunch of feet on dead leaves.

I’m in the truck with Colin’s biographer, Parkhurst. Shorthills provincial park. Sulphur Springs road. A weekly circuit. Fletcher Burger has been tagging along since his troubles but he didn’t pick up when I rang this morning. Parkhurst overheard and asked to tag along. I’d prefer to share my truck with Typhoid Mary.

Colin’s crashing on my couch. Parkhurst curled at his feet like an Irish setter. Colin’s working my phone to drum up media. A “strong maybe” from a cub reporter at the Globe and Mail. Wondrous he’d consider committing to the two-hour drive to witness my son heave himself off the face of the earth. My involvement’s being hyped.

“Yeah, yeah. Been at it thirty years,” Colin’s saying to anyone who’ll listen. “His dad before and his dad before that. He’ll be there to drag whatever’s left out…”

The sun slits through roadside poplars. Feel of cocktail swords stabbing my corneas. Scan for bodies: tough on corduroy roads as they get squashed between raw timbers and all’s you can identify them by is the crushed eggshell of their skulls. Parkhurst smiling that sunny mongoloid’s smile. A face pocked with old acne scars looking like a bag of suet pecked at by hungry jays. By no means charitable but some men invite uncharitable descriptions. Snap on the radio. If it’s quiet enough I might hear the kid’s thoughts, which I envision as sounding much like a boom microphone set inside a tub of mealworms.

Other night I drag myself out of bed in the wee witching hours. Lumbago playing havoc with my spine. Went to the fridge for a barley pop. There was Parkhurst standing over my son. When I asked what he was doing he gave me his doleful emptyheaded look.

“Thought he’d stop breathing, or…”

A smashed septum made Colin snore loud as a leaf-blower. It hit me what the kid said. Not stopped breathing — as in, he was worried. Stop breathing— as in, he wanted to witness the dying breath exit his lungs.

If a man makes his living courting death, is it any surprise he should acquire as companion a human maggot waiting to feast on the inevitable?

“Colin said you went to university,” he said now.

“Jot that down in your notebook, did you? I majored in geology.”

“So why don’t you teach it, or…”

He’s one of those annoying nitwits who never finishes a sentence.

“My wife got pregnant. Needed a job. I became an employee of the Parks Commission.”

“Good money, or is it like…”

“I could walk into a Big Bee, buy a scratch-off ticket, get three cherries and instantly make more than I’ve ever made doing this. I weld, mainly.”

“Funny the way it’ll go.”

“Yep, it’s a regular rib-ticklin’ riot. My split sides are always aching.”

“I know how that goes, or sorta like…”

Moron. I check up by a thatch of duckweed. A possum had bumbled onto the road to avoid black flies. Most get clipped by a fender and thrown clear but this one got run over square. Hind end squashed. Muzzle stuck with cockleburrs.

“Tourist Thoroughfare Maintenance” the Parks Commission designates it, gussying up what is simply road-kill duty. The grim sight of Mr. Possum here, or Mr. Racoon or Ms. Badger or Monsieur Skunk— any critter who goes jelly-kneed when pinned by arc-sodium headlights — is a guaranteed vacationspoiler. Call me the merry maid of the roads.

I reach a shovel out the bed. Parkhurst’s kneeling a foot from the creature. He fails to note the term “playing possum” was coined after observing such behaviour.

“Hold a mirror under its snout,” I tell him. “Fogs up you’ll know it’s alive. The fact it’ll have torn your throat to ribbons will be your second hint.”

He finds a stick. Stabs the possum’s flanks. The animal rears up over its own squandered wreckage. Crazed hissing noises. Its crack-glazed eyes make me think of the Christmas tree ornaments Colin made in grade school. Glass globes with tissue paper paraffined over top. I found them years later, shrunken tissue peeled back from the glass in veins. The fucking kid pokes it again. Bringing my boot down, I snap his stick. His face may’ve found its way into the beast’s wheelhouse — jam it in a Cuisinart for similar results — if I hadn’t shouldered him aside.

“We wanted to see if it was alive. One poke beyond is being an asshole.”

The kill-box is the size of a laundry hamper. Lightweight aluminum. Drill holes let the fumes go. A slot-and-grove mechanism for bigger animals so’s you can finagle their heads inside. Set the possum in whole. Lock it down. Uncoil the hose. Fasten one end over the tailpipe. Screw the trailing end onto the connecting tube feeding the box. Slide onto the driver’s seat. Goose the gas. Carbon dioxide pumps in. Black slivers — possum claws — poke through the drill-holes roped in smoke.

Colin would send his mother and I news clippings. One showed his body laid out as an anatomical graph. Skinless, as rendered by some magazine’s crackerjack graphics department.

The Wreckage of Daredevil Colin “Brink Of ” Hill. Numbered arrows pointed to the bone-breaks and contusions and pulped cartilage and shorn tendons and detached retinas and assorted devastation. So many goddamn arrows.

1. Brink Of tore his left kneecap off in a motocross fiasco at the Tallahassee Motor Oval.

2. Brink Of knocked out seven teeth smashing though a plate-glass window as Charles Bronson’s stunt double in Death Wish V: The Face of Death.

Another time I got a package in the mail. A video game unit with his game: Daredevil. He’d been showing up on late-night talkshows. A TV stunt spectacular where he’d recreated Evil Knieval’s Snake River Gorge jump. I called him.

“Daddio!”

“Where are you?”

“Partying in Los Angeles!”

I visualized the standard LA pool with underwater lights shimmering the surface, the same pools over the Hollywood Hills so if you were to observe from on high the landscape would resemble a luminous coral fan. Bareassed girls, starlets as they were known, swimming carefree but not truly, needing their nakedness to be appreciated and the party given a whimsical theme: Christmas in July; Holiday Under the Sea. My son far away from the stink of the killbox and the GM fabrication plant where radial tire moulds are injection-moulded with molten vulcanized rubber: that first nostrilful of air entering Canadian Tire intensified twentyfold. Far away from the rusted skies over the dry docks where men bent the blue of acetylene torches to braise hulls of ships whose prows would cleave the sea places we never dreamt of going. When the whistle blew we showered silently, white holes showing through wetted hair where stray sparks burnt down to our scalps. Colin achieved escape velocity. Who could ever hold that against him?

“Try it, Dad. Try the game.”

I picked up the joystick. A digital version of Colin tooled along on a motorbike. His voice came out the speakers:

“Yeehaaaaaw! C’mon, chicken-guts, give ’er some gas!”

The bike went up a ramp, landed badly, tossed Colin over the handlebars. He skipped along in a broke-boned jig. A tiny ambulance sped across the screen. GAME OVER.

“Ragdoll physics,” Colin said. “How they get me flipping and flapping. Lifelike! A hit in Japan; they love me over th—”

His phone cut out. Or I hung up. I don’t properly recall.

The gal, all of twenty, she’s up on the parquet stage grinding her bits on a brass pole.

Pageboy hairdo, jet-black and futuristic like an android’s haircut. Giving us goons that witchywoman stare they must teach at the stripper academy. Lithe and firm-delted. Could’ve been a gymnast or figure skater… my mind shouldn’t have gone down that route because I’m imagining her mother dropping her off at the rink with a pair of pink skates hung over her shoulders. Eating a Pop Tart. Now she’s up there in the buff doing the higgeldy-piggeldy.

My son’s idea. He’s been making nice with my neighbour, Diznee. Two of them passing goo-goo eyes. While I don’t fancy sitting with Parkhurst along pervert’s row at a ta-ta bar, well, here you’ll find me. The jugged beer’s got a kinetic glow under the black lights. Eerie, like quaffing toxic sludge.

Colin hits the toilet and on his way back sits at another table with Nicholas Saberhagen, the exboxer and Frank’s son, and a man he introduces as his client. Colin’s talking about his stunt tomorrow. Nick says he’ll bring his own son. Apparently Nick works for American Express. He’d recently returned from a Russian oil spill where he’d seen a shark washed up on the coast. His client — this odd old duck with a face netted in wrinkles as if he’d slept with it pressed against a roll of chicken wire — tells a story.

“This was in southern Italy,” he starts, “by the sea. On a twisting cobbled alley going up, up, up. Behind me came a truck pulling a trailer. I pressed myself against the alley wall to let it pass. The trailer held a shark. A long, sleek, torsional creature. Enormous! The skin round its eyes was wrinkly as an elephant’s. It stunk of blood and the sea. Its gill-slits were dilated and past their red flutterings was the wink of teeth. Next the screech of tires and — I swear on my life! — the shark flipped out of the trailer to slide, thrashing and viciously alive, back down the street. A living absurdity: the world’s finest predator skidding down a cobbled alley. It careened into a wall and slid on a sideways course, jaws snapping. Momentum carried it down to a stone wall lined with trash sacks, which it gnashed to shreds as the fishermen in the truck ran with gaffing hooks and knives to finish the job. This beautiful shark thrashing in sacks of trash, hide stuck with potato peelings and junk leaflets. A stone’s throw from the sea.”

I get rooked into paying the whole bill. Colin sold it as an act of deep nobility. Please, good sirrah, let me ante up for this gargantuan strip club bill! Jackrolled by my own flesh and blood. Won’t be able to afford my phlebitis pills when the prescription runs dry but que sera, sera and thank God for socialized healthcare!

The three of us barrel into a cab. It cuts down Bunting onto the QEW to Niagara Falls. The Falls lit up green, red, and blue by strobelights. White water kicking out into a greater darkness. A banner reads: “Brink Of,” World’s Greatest Stuntman! We continue along the river past the hydroelectric plant.

“Stop,” Colin says. “Stop here.”

The cab pulls into Marineland. This discount SeaWorld owned by an old Czech who achieved local fame by strangling an animal rights activist who dramatically chained himself to the entrance gates. Parkhurst’s passed out drunk. We lean him against a tree. Looks as if he’s been shot and arranged in situ by a mafia bagman.

Along the back edge of the parking lot a flap of chainlink peels away from the fence. I shoulder underneath. My booze-lubed joints don’t note much until a stab at the base of my spine tells me I’ll feel it tomorrow.

“What are we doing, Colin? Seriously.”

He hugs me. First he’s done so in I don’t know how long. Try not to read anything into it, him so fickle with these intimacies and myself with no desire to be sucked into his orbit — knowing it can happen, bam, that fast — but it feels so damn good.

The amphitheater tiers cast shadows round the tank. Curves of white belly as killer whales glide past the glass. A pair of whales landlocked in the middle of Ontario. Thousands of miles to the nearest ocean. Years back the third, Niska, chewed off a trainer’s leg. Were it me and were I aware of how unnatural my life had been made, yeah, I might bite that feeding hand.

Colin takes my wrist. Turns it over.

“That scab’s been on your wrist since I got here. Isn’t crusty the way a scab should be. A little red oil slick. You seen a doctor?”

“It’s a hemoglobin deficiency. I should heal like a thirty-year-old?”

“I see it and a weird twinge runs under my balls. Same way I felt with Mom.”

I fail to scab up. On the planet my son occupies, orbiting a sun whose warmth he alone can feel, this is reasonable cause for abandonment. We see the same woman so differently. He remembers her collapsed in the bathtub skeletonized by cancer. I still see her in that same tub after we’d married. Soaking when I’d come in to shave. She asked if I’d like to get in so I stripped right there on the tiles, lickety split, slid in with her. That fabulous lack of friction held by bodies in water. I’m not saying my son lacks empathy. I’m saying it must be hard for him to conceive of his mother and I as holding variable states of being.

Colin’s leg twitches. I set a hand on his thigh.

“Come on, now. Please. Don’t.”

I clutch his sleeve but it’s a meaningless, almost motiveless gesture. Colin hops a wooden gate up stairs curling round the tank. Over a bridge spanning the pool onto the show stage. Kicks his boots off, peels his shirt over his head. Chest clad in roping scars and dented where part of his pectoral muscle was torn off. Unbuttons his flies then raises his arms to make an arrow of himself. He screams— “Yeeeeearrrrgh!”—and dives.

Rings spread where he goes in. I picture an orca’s jaws chomping him in half for no other reason than he’s there to be bitten and no animal should be expected to behave otherwise. He surfaces. A whale breeches a foot from him. Colin touches its innertube skin. A giddy hoot. The whale vents mackerel-smelling breath through its blowhole. No cameras or reporters. Only my son expressing the odd way he is made.

Some creatures live as stars do: burn hard and hot, feeding on those nearby but primarily upon themselves. Their lives an inferno and them happiest in that heat. Eating away at themselves until all that remains is appetite. What can I ask of him: that he burn a little less bright? For him that would be a death every bit as final as the one we’ve all got coming. My son will go out burning at such degrees I’ve never known. He will die in flames.

Boys in Saint Catharines do this thing come their first teenage summer.

The stump of a train trestle juts over Twelve Mile creek. Boys leap off it. Grandfather, father, me: we all made the jump. If you hit nineteen and for lack of intellect or gumption can’t spin out of those childhood orbits to college or a job outside city limits, well, you’ll pass many an adult night drinking Labatt 50 under that same trestle. For a boy the jump acts as the bridge between their small world and the world everyone else inhabits.

Could be I overstate it. Maybe it’s just the thing to do on those blistering days when the sun hangs forever and the heat makes you a bit crazy.

Each summer boys come together in packs. Not even friends, necessarily; just boys from the same stretch of blocks who happen to be of that age. They’ll pick their way over the train ties, each railspike inviting tetanus, to where the trestle bends in a rotted arc. Boys’ll talk about how best to do it: legs-first, arms crossed over their chest so they fall as if tipped dead from a coffin. They’ll shove at each other but no boy ever pushes another over. Some code of boyhood ethics prevents it. You make the leap on your own. If you don’t, you clamber down to the cool grass and put your manhood off another day, week, however long.

Everyone knows you must jump, surface quick— even then you’ll come up forty yards from where you leapt — and kick like hell for shore. But if you cramp up or get licked by a ripcurl you’ll be sucked into the break where creek meets river, two-hundred yards to either shore. That far out, only the sky and water, a body gets to feeling it’s filled with rocks. A boy did drown. But that was long ago.

Colin jumped when he was ten. He and one of Clara Russell’s boys. They stole Frank Saberhagen’s Cadillac El Dorado and leapt out into the teeth of night. First my wife or I knew of it was the emergency crew at the door handing up our son bedraggled and shivering.

I picture him out there. Scrawny kid hunched on the ties in his underwear — they found his PJs flapping on a nail — moonlight plating his bare chest and the indentation of the Verminox scar on his arm. Night breeze ruffling his hair to bring up goose pimples and the darkness such that the water cannot be seen, only heard, this throaty rush and my son naked to feel the contact high more acutely. Perched on the verge of a blackness so deep it must be like leaping into everlasting night or into death itself.

My son and I sat on the sofa while my wife thanked the rescue team. Colin wrapped in a blanket sipping cocoa. Making hssss noises between clenched teeth. I switched on the TV. There he was on the early morning news. A bobbing dot gripped in the black fist of the river. “Boys Snatched from Jaws of Death,” read the news ticker. My son cleaved in two: one half on the sofa beside me and the other only coloured dots on a TV screen. One place in peril, the other safe — but even beside me he wasn’t safe because some defect in his head worked against any safety he might know. Wrapped warm in a blanket sipping cocoa with miniature marshmallows, physically present, but the other part of him suspended in the ashen halo of a rescue helicopter spotlight, a bullhorn-amplified voice calling out and a rope dangling inches from his face — an expression so serene, lips gone blue — but he failed to reach for it. Smiling so sweetly so close to death. Close enough to taste, if death has a taste. Unless it’s life he’s been trying to taste all these years. Life at its furthest ambit where the definitions are most powerful.

To hold a child and to know conclusively you’ve lost him. If there is a more jagged and sickening, more powerless feeling in this world I do not know of it.

“You’re grounded. A whole month.”

“Sounds fair, Daddy.”

Across the Falls, U.S. side, you’ll find the Love Canal district. In 1942, Hooker Chemical corporation buried 22,000 tons of toxic waste. Later the site was covered with four feet of clay and re-zoned. Prefab housing for low-income families. On top of hazardous waste everyone knew was there. People so happy to have a roof over their heads they weren’t fretted by what lay under their feet. Disease abounded: epilepsy, urinary tract infections, infant deformities. The notion that folks could raise kids a few feet above a reservoir of glowing green cancer didn’t wash with middle America. But they didn’t get it. That was those people’s orbit. A doomed orbit, yes, but inertia kept them locked to it.

The streets and byways I’ve roamed my whole life seem robbed of some crucial quality, too: a quality of ambition, could be, or self-betterment. Hard to pinpoint the sickness when everybody’s infected.

I stand at the prow of a johnboat I’ve not set foot on in years. Fingers on the nautical wheel as it rolls with the current. Overcast today, cumulus clouds scudded above the Falls tinting the water the same gunmetal grey as the boat. Only colour comes from pink fibreglass insulation drifting over the basin. I squint at the motley assemblage of press gathered at the head of the Falls. From where I’m standing they’re dots. Mildly bemused, mainly bored dots.

Four hundred bodies pulled out in pieces. They don’t all die. At least twenty I’ve saved. They go over, kicked at by the current until they’re spat out. If they’ve gone blue but there’s the ghost of a pulse I’ll pump their chests and blow air into their lungs. Sometimes it doesn’t do a tinker’s damn but other times they barf up a gutful of water and go on living their blessed lives. Some lack any conception of that blessing: stay underwater long enough, well, it’s no different than a surgeon taking half your brain. A Niagara lobotomy.

This one time. Colin in the backyard while I barbecued. He tottered up with something in his hands. Uncupped his palms enough so I could see a moth battering his fingers.

“You must let it go,” I told him. “Lunar moths have a protective powder on their wings. If that powder gets knocked off, they die. Like you with no skin.”

Colin’s hands sprung open. The moth spiralled off. A shred of one papery wing stuck to my son’s hand. Colin was four years old. Utterly wrecked. Hadn’t wanted to hurt the moth. Only hold it for awhile. He ran inside and came back out with a bottle of his Mom’s talc powder.

“Where’s that moth, Daddy? I can give it its powder back.”

My son hasn’t an intentionally hurtful bone in his body. The only creature he’s ever sought to harm is himself.

I see him a hundred yards back carried in the current. Waving to the tiny crowd not yet battened down. He tucks inside the barrel he’s had made — he honestly had people working on it — and the earth sits stunned on its axis. I cycle the motor to cut a path through the pink-flaked water, aiming for the spot where they usually come up if they come up at all and the earth starts spinning as my son hits the head of the cataract and I see him in there curled fetally — swear to Christ I see him — lit up in a blaze of his own kindling. So hot his shape is an echo of the sun itself.

“Square it!”

Screaming this over the motor’s roar and the boom of the Falls, hammering the engine full-bore and skipping over the water, spray wetting my face so I can no longer tell if I’m bawling, though it’s highly conceivable I am.

“Go on go square that bastard one more time!”

My son melts a path into the day. Burning through like an ember through a page painted every colour of our world. Throttling headlong to catch him and when I reach for him he will take my hand.

I have never seen anything burn so fierce trapped so close to earth.