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.