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 pitifuclass="underline" 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.