Cappy would be around two months, gone six. Mama sniffed his itchy feet. A Sarah Court rituaclass="underline" 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 hutwhirr a vayheckle, 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.
That night I broke the head off the sand-cast dog on Wesley Hill’s front porch with a five-pound mallet.
Frank Saberhagen’s corgi, Moxie, once forced itself upon Mama’s sheepdog.
Excelsior lay on the sidewalk when Moxie “bum rushed”—Cappy’s term — her haunches as if he aimed to “drill for Texas tea.” The dog must have “one hell of a Napoleon complex,” as he was “giving that ole girl what-for.”
Excelsior shook Moxie off. Moxie persisted with clumsy jump-thrusts. Excelsior mule-kicked the corgi. Moxie did a backwards somersault into Mama’s marigolds. Which he urinated upon. Cappy laughed. I struggled to understand what was funny about a small neutered dog doing sex with a big spayed one. But Cappy laughed, so I did. How my laughter sounded in my ears: a man in a crowded room shouting in a foreign language.
Excelsior developed pyrotraumatic dermatitis. Bacteria on the epidermis caused coin-sized lesions or “hot spots” to occur. Mama blamed Moxie, who had a similar condition.
Mama sat the dog in her lap. By then only Mama could touch her without being bitten. She trimmed hair round the spots with surgical scissors. Dabbed them with cortisone cream. When Excelsior died, Mama’s spell lasted a week.
Mama has known Colin Hill since he was “knee-high to a duck’s behind.” She wants to watch him go over the Falls in his barrel. I wrangle her thick body into my minivan. Guide her wheelchair to a spot along the rail.
“I wen’ da turlet.” Mama’s words have been slurred since the operation. “Loog a muh bug.”
I went to the toilet, she’s said. Look in my bag.
I lift the blanket covering her dead legs. The pouch is three-quarters full. I unclip the stint, walk up Clifton Hill with a bag of warm urine. I kneel at a sewer grate, squeeze Mama’s urine out. Uphill is a construction site encircled by a cyclone fence. The fat vampire boy stands on a concrete slab. His cape licks in the wind.
“Hello,” he says to me. “Blah!”
“What are you doing?”
He points to bricks of insulation. There are holes in the plastic where his fingers punched through.
“Ripping zem.”
“Why?”
“A pink blizzard vood brighten zee day.”
“You are a strange boy.”
He touches his upper lip to his nose. Snorts as horses do on cold days.
“I yams what I yam and it’s all that I yam.”
I pull a pocketknife from my trenchcoat. Stab a brick. Wrenching movements slash the plastic. The boy grabs one flapping sail. Flakes blow downhill. The boy is laughing very hard. It is interesting to see. Clifton Hill has gone pink. Next Nicholas Saberhagen, Abigail Burger are coming.