She’s a goddamn beautiful lifter. I’ll load the bar with six forty-five pound plates plus the bar: a 315 squat. She chalks her hands — calloused as a dockworker’s — grips the crosshatched bar and swings herself beneath that weight. Legs flared wide: a pair of baby spruces. Jerking the bar off its pegs she’ll go down, thighs perpendicular to the floor. Veins spiderwebbing from the rounds of her shoulders. A serious case of the butterflies as her quadriceps jump and dance. Eyes rotating to the ceiling she explodes with a lung-shattering scream. Primal. A lioness. One time she blew a blood vessel in her eye. Powering out of her crouch, bar bowed over her shoulders with all that weight. Blood surged into her eyeball. The pressure on the vein wall was so fierce it tore. Abby didn’t even feel it. Alarmed, I took her face in my hands. I was so terrified. She said: “I’m okay, Dad. Calm down.”
“Abs, if you never lift another weight… that’d be okay.”
“Right. You’d be busted up.”
“It makes me happy we’re doing something together. That’s all. We could go fishing. You like fishing? I hate it. But anything else. Okay?”
“Yup. Okay.”
“I want to know you’re happy.”
“I know.”
“So. Tell me.”
“I’m happy.”
Did any kid comprehend the love of a parent? Frightening in its rawness. An excised kidney: naked, unprotected and lewd. It sprang from failure and regret which only sharpened the edge. Fanatical, protective, rooted in an understanding the world’s a broken place filled with broken individuals. The fact your child was a part of that ruined tapestry was a kind of miracle.
The parasite Saberhagen pulled into his driveway. He and Nick trotted across the yard. Nick had a black eye but Frank’s poor son always sported a blackened eye, busted nose, facial sutures, or the like. “You go to hell,” I told Frank.
Saberhagen appealed to Abby. “Did we handcuff him to that rack?”
“You did the chicken thing,” she reminded him. “Chicken-chicken brock-brock.”
Saberhagen opened the rear door and sat behind me. “Nick, you and Abby grab more barley pops.”
“Why don’t you?” said Nick.
“Someone’s fixing to chow down on the brown bag special, son o’ mine.”
They went. Frank tapped my shoulder. Pinched between his fingers: a pill. I swallowed it. Adjusted the rearview to frame his face.
“We’ve known each other years. Broken bread together. Why do that to me?”
“Sort of do it to ourselves, wouldn’t you say? Don’t be a drama queen.”
“Go fuck your hat.”
“Not wearing one. As you can plainly see.”
The kids came back with more icy tallboys. Cool wind blew through the windows. Saberhagen’s pill— fabulous! My body may slide into the footwell, my bones soft as poached eggs. Bryan Adams’s “Summer of ’69” played on 97.7 Htz FM.
“Love this tune, Fletch. Pump it.”
“Oh, go home.”
Saberhagen shouldered the door open, swooned onto the driveway, nearly fell, steadied himself then strode before the hood. Abby snapped on the high beams.
“Rock out, Mr. S!”
“You bet your bippy!”
Saberhagen squinted weevil-eyed into the headlamps before embarking on an energetic and truly abysmal faux-rock performance. He brandished an air guitar that to judge by his hand spacing was the size of a classical base: fret-fingers above his head, strumming fingers down at his thighs. Hips gyrating, fingers spasming: he could have been experiencing an epileptic attack.
“Those were the best days of my laaay-fe!” Frank sang. “Baw-baw-baw-ba-ba-baw! Yeah!”
He reeled off the classic cock-rock staples. The Pigeon Neck. The High-leg Kick. The Lewd Crotchthrust. The Pursed-lips-chest-out Rocker Strut. The Angry Schoolmarm. He then threw in moves in no way appropriate to the song: The Water Sprinkler, The Running Man and The Robot.
“I guess nothing can last forever, forever — naaaaaw!”
“You’re not cool!” I shouted, though I had to admit the man did a damned fine Robot.
Abby and Nick joined Frank. Abby gave him one of those mock-tortured-slash-ecstatic your-axeplaying-is-rocking-me-sohard faces. Frank launched into a face-melter guitar riff. He went down on one knee like James Brown. Nick peeled off his shirt and draped it over his father’s shoulders. Frank threw it off with a flourish and kicked out one leg as his performance reached its crescendo.
“Those were the best days of mah liiiiife!”
The three of them collapsed on the hood, howling. Abby thrust devil’s horns into the sky.
“You’re beautiful, Saint Catharines! Goodnight!”
The afternoon following my encounter with Sunshine, the houseboat drifts north. Steel sky. Poplars with metallic bark. The whole world aluminum-plated. Whippoorwills ride updrafts above the boat, their reflections statically pinned to the river’s surface. We’re making three knots against the current. I ask James about the woman from last night.
“I got her number,” he says. “She loves dogs. Who knows? I’ll get off at Coboconk.”
A little town upriver. I ask what’s in Coboconk. A moneymaking opportunity, I’m told.
“I know I give the impression of being a pretty squared-away guy, Fletcher.”
“… yuh-huh.”
“It’s a smokescreen. Know how I make ends meet? A phone titillation provider.”
“Phone sex?”
“We providers prefer ‘titillation.’”
“That has to be weird.”
“You play characters,” James assures me. “Biker Badass. Out-of-Work Model. Southern Dandy.” He puts on a nelly voice: “I douh decleah, this heat’s plum wiltin’ mah britches.”
We reach Coboconk by nightfall and tie to an empty dock. The town unrolls along a single road. Chains of bug-tarred bulbs strung down each side of the street hooked to tarnished steel poles are the only lights. James uses the lone payphone, while I wait with Matilda.
“He’ll send a car around. Meet you back at the boat?”
“I can come. It’s safe?”
“Won’t enjoy yourself, but if you want.”
The car — a Cadillac, new but not flashy — rolls up. The driver’s a kid with stinking dreadlocks piled atop his skull. The open ungracious face of a moron.
We drive until we hit a dirt turnoff. Starlight bends over a lake. Cottages, some no bigger than ice-fishing huts. The Caddy pulls into a horseshoeshaped driveway in the shadow of a monolithic log cabin built by a man who must lack all conception of irony.
The driver leads us into an antediluvian sitting room dominated by a stone fireplace. Raw-cut pine walls. No pictures, rugs, indications of a woman’s touch. An eighty-gallon fish tank but not a single fish. James and I sit on the calfskin couch. Matilda licks the salted leather. There’s a bowl of cashews on the coffee table.
“So, which of you is James?”
The man’s wearing a lumberjack vest and a pair of corduroys so oft-washed the grooves have worn off. Or migrated to his face: his cheeks and forehead are worked with startlingly straight creases that run laterally, resembling the grain of cypress wood. A pleat of skin with the look of a chicken’s coxcomb is folded down over his left eye. James introduces us.
“Fletcher, a pleasure. That must be Matilda.” He points to James’s swollen eye. My scabbed scalp. “Boys look like you’ve been through a war.” So jovial it’s hard to believe he gives a damn. “I’m Starling. Your driver’s my biographer, Parkhurst. I picked him up someplace.”
As if Parkhurst were a tapeworm Starling drank in a glass of Nicaraguan tapwater. Which may not be far off: the kid, Parkhurst, strikes me as the type who’d happily use an old lady as a human shield during a gunfight.