Colin’s leg twitches. I set a hand on his thigh.
“Come on, now. Please. Don’t.”
I clutch his sleeve but it’s a meaningless, almost motiveless gesture. Colin hops a wooden gate up stairs curling round the tank. Over a bridge spanning the pool onto the show stage. Kicks his boots off, peels his shirt over his head. Chest clad in roping scars and dented where part of his pectoral muscle was torn off. Unbuttons his flies then raises his arms to make an arrow of himself. He screams— “Yeeeeearrrrgh!”—and dives.
Rings spread where he goes in. I picture an orca’s jaws chomping him in half for no other reason than he’s there to be bitten and no animal should be expected to behave otherwise. He surfaces. A whale breeches a foot from him. Colin touches its innertube skin. A giddy hoot. The whale vents mackerel-smelling breath through its blowhole. No cameras or reporters. Only my son expressing the odd way he is made.
Some creatures live as stars do: burn hard and hot, feeding on those nearby but primarily upon themselves. Their lives an inferno and them happiest in that heat. Eating away at themselves until all that remains is appetite. What can I ask of him: that he burn a little less bright? For him that would be a death every bit as final as the one we’ve all got coming. My son will go out burning at such degrees I’ve never known. He will die in flames.
Boys in Saint Catharines do this thing come their first teenage summer.
The stump of a train trestle juts over Twelve Mile creek. Boys leap off it. Grandfather, father, me: we all made the jump. If you hit nineteen and for lack of intellect or gumption can’t spin out of those childhood orbits to college or a job outside city limits, well, you’ll pass many an adult night drinking Labatt 50 under that same trestle. For a boy the jump acts as the bridge between their small world and the world everyone else inhabits.
Could be I overstate it. Maybe it’s just the thing to do on those blistering days when the sun hangs forever and the heat makes you a bit crazy.
Each summer boys come together in packs. Not even friends, necessarily; just boys from the same stretch of blocks who happen to be of that age. They’ll pick their way over the train ties, each railspike inviting tetanus, to where the trestle bends in a rotted arc. Boys’ll talk about how best to do it: legs-first, arms crossed over their chest so they fall as if tipped dead from a coffin. They’ll shove at each other but no boy ever pushes another over. Some code of boyhood ethics prevents it. You make the leap on your own. If you don’t, you clamber down to the cool grass and put your manhood off another day, week, however long.
Everyone knows you must jump, surface quick— even then you’ll come up forty yards from where you leapt — and kick like hell for shore. But if you cramp up or get licked by a ripcurl you’ll be sucked into the break where creek meets river, two-hundred yards to either shore. That far out, only the sky and water, a body gets to feeling it’s filled with rocks. A boy did drown. But that was long ago.
Colin jumped when he was ten. He and one of Clara Russell’s boys. They stole Frank Saberhagen’s Cadillac El Dorado and leapt out into the teeth of night. First my wife or I knew of it was the emergency crew at the door handing up our son bedraggled and shivering.
I picture him out there. Scrawny kid hunched on the ties in his underwear — they found his PJs flapping on a nail — moonlight plating his bare chest and the indentation of the Verminox scar on his arm. Night breeze ruffling his hair to bring up goose pimples and the darkness such that the water cannot be seen, only heard, this throaty rush and my son naked to feel the contact high more acutely. Perched on the verge of a blackness so deep it must be like leaping into everlasting night or into death itself.
My son and I sat on the sofa while my wife thanked the rescue team. Colin wrapped in a blanket sipping cocoa. Making hssss noises between clenched teeth. I switched on the TV. There he was on the early morning news. A bobbing dot gripped in the black fist of the river. “Boys Snatched from Jaws of Death,” read the news ticker. My son cleaved in two: one half on the sofa beside me and the other only coloured dots on a TV screen. One place in peril, the other safe — but even beside me he wasn’t safe because some defect in his head worked against any safety he might know. Wrapped warm in a blanket sipping cocoa with miniature marshmallows, physically present, but the other part of him suspended in the ashen halo of a rescue helicopter spotlight, a bullhorn-amplified voice calling out and a rope dangling inches from his face — an expression so serene, lips gone blue — but he failed to reach for it. Smiling so sweetly so close to death. Close enough to taste, if death has a taste. Unless it’s life he’s been trying to taste all these years. Life at its furthest ambit where the definitions are most powerful.
To hold a child and to know conclusively you’ve lost him. If there is a more jagged and sickening, more powerless feeling in this world I do not know of it.
“You’re grounded. A whole month.”
“Sounds fair, Daddy.”
Across the Falls, U.S. side, you’ll find the Love Canal district. In 1942, Hooker Chemical corporation buried 22,000 tons of toxic waste. Later the site was covered with four feet of clay and re-zoned. Prefab housing for low-income families. On top of hazardous waste everyone knew was there. People so happy to have a roof over their heads they weren’t fretted by what lay under their feet. Disease abounded: epilepsy, urinary tract infections, infant deformities. The notion that folks could raise kids a few feet above a reservoir of glowing green cancer didn’t wash with middle America. But they didn’t get it. That was those people’s orbit. A doomed orbit, yes, but inertia kept them locked to it.
The streets and byways I’ve roamed my whole life seem robbed of some crucial quality, too: a quality of ambition, could be, or self-betterment. Hard to pinpoint the sickness when everybody’s infected.
I stand at the prow of a johnboat I’ve not set foot on in years. Fingers on the nautical wheel as it rolls with the current. Overcast today, cumulus clouds scudded above the Falls tinting the water the same gunmetal grey as the boat. Only colour comes from pink fibreglass insulation drifting over the basin. I squint at the motley assemblage of press gathered at the head of the Falls. From where I’m standing they’re dots. Mildly bemused, mainly bored dots.
Four hundred bodies pulled out in pieces. They don’t all die. At least twenty I’ve saved. They go over, kicked at by the current until they’re spat out. If they’ve gone blue but there’s the ghost of a pulse I’ll pump their chests and blow air into their lungs. Sometimes it doesn’t do a tinker’s damn but other times they barf up a gutful of water and go on living their blessed lives. Some lack any conception of that blessing: stay underwater long enough, well, it’s no different than a surgeon taking half your brain. A Niagara lobotomy.
This one time. Colin in the backyard while I barbecued. He tottered up with something in his hands. Uncupped his palms enough so I could see a moth battering his fingers.
“You must let it go,” I told him. “Lunar moths have a protective powder on their wings. If that powder gets knocked off, they die. Like you with no skin.”