Blood follows blood other ways. Offspring follows progenitor. Blood knotted through bodies becomes the red webs binding you. Imagine a net swept over the sea bottom dredging up a frenzy of creation: crab and eel and shark and seahorse and whale caught up in a thrashing teardrop of life. So much life pressed skin on skin on skin.
You are barrels packed to bursting. Barrelsful of frailty, of beauty, of regret, passion, sorrow, envy, horror, guilt, hope, rage and love and pain. Barrelsful of everything it is to be afflicted with your peculiar condition.
So come now, the souls of Sarah Court invite you, and please — open them up.
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.