Sarah Court Read Online Free Page B

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