Cataract City

by Craig Davidson

  “Bruiser,” he said. “I think somebody’s here looking for you!”

  “Is it Estelle?” came Bruiser’s voice from the showers. “I told that one it was once and no more. I’m no tomcatter.”

  “It isn’t,” the Brain Smasher said.

  “Well who in hell is it?” Bruiser said, stepping into the room with a towel wrapped round his waist.

  Maybe it was his wet hair hanging down his shoulders in dark ropes instead of the wild mane I was accustomed to. Or maybe it was the water glistening in the concavity between his chest muscles that I’d never seen before. Or the plastic cup with an inch of piss-coloured liquid in it that he downed quickly before tossing the empty cup into the showers. Or was it simply the shock of seeing Bruiser Mahoney in a locker room surrounded by naked men, amidst piles of spangly boots and neon tights? Whatever it was, he looked shockingly human for the first time.

  “Mr. Mahoney,” my father said, finding his voice. “This is my son, Dutchie.”

  “And my son, Duncan,” Mr. Diggs said, guiding his boy forward. “They’re your biggest fans.”

  “Oh, are they now?” Bruiser Mahoney said. “I must say they ought to be, that you’d bring them into this snakepit with these vipers!”

  He laughed and strode forward, offering a hand that swallowed my father’s own. He shook Mr. Diggs’ hand next, then knelt down before me and Dunk like a man preparing to accept a knighthood.

  “Look at you. My wide-eyed little warriors.”

  Up close his eyes were blue, terrifically blue, the skin around them scored with little cracks like the fissures in alabaster. He smelled of carbolic soap. The cleft in his chin bristled with untrimmed stubble.

  “Welcome to the bestiary.” He smiled. The point was broken off one eye tooth. “Fancy joining the carnival, boys?”

  It was overwhelming to be so close to him, to all these men. I still struggled with the notion that the Masked Assassin might lend Disco Dirk his deodorant. Was it possible that any of these men actually wore deodorant, or stood in line at the post office to mail a parcel or behaved in any way like normal people? How could a creature like the Boogeyman have a job, a mortgage, a wife? It was impossible to imagine him grilling steaks in his backyard, his lizard-green face grinning above a Kiss the Cook apron. I had figured these men vanished behind the curtain after a match and lived in some nether-realm, squabbling amongst themselves like petulant demigods until they stepped back through that curtain to settle their grievances the next month.

  “You’re my favourite wrestler.” There was a quaver in Dunk’s voice. “You’re sort of … well, perfect.”

  Bruiser Mahoney laughed. His breath washed over me. I caught the same smell that I’d once caught coming off my father when he’d stepped into my room late one night, watching me silently from the foot of the bed.

  “Perfect, he says. You hear that, fellas? It’s like I keep telling you!”

  “A perfect boondoggle,” Outbacker Luke cracked.

  Bruiser Mahoney took our fathers aside.

  “… come by your house, do the dog-and-pony,” I heard him say. Our fathers sunk their hands into their pockets and smiled politely. “… reasonable rate … wouldn’t gyp you fellas …”

  My father rested his hand on Mahoney’s shoulder, patting it the way you might pat a dog. Next he reached for his wallet. Mahoney’s big hand went to my father’s wrist, trapping his hand in his pocket.

  “Later,” he said softly. “Either of you have a stick of gum?”

  When he came back his breath smelled of spearmint instead of whatever had been in the plastic cup. He grabbed a Polaroid camera from his duffel, handed it to Disco Dirk.

  “Take a shot of me with these little Bruisers,” he said, kneeling to grab us around the shoulders. His power was immense: it was like being hugged by a yeti.

  To Duncan and Dutchie, Mahoney wrote on the still-developing photo. Two warriors in the Bruiser Mahoney armada.

  He signed it with his initials—Yours, BM—and for an instant I was terrified I’d laugh. Sometimes my mom would warn me through the bathroom door: “If you’re taking a big BM, Dutchie, make sure you flush twice or you’ll plug the pipes.”

  When Bruiser handed the photo to Dunk, Dunk stared at him gratefully and said: “I want to grow up to be just like you.”

  For a moment Mahoney’s expression slipped. Under it was the face of a creature who was old, haunted and lost.

  “Ah, you’ll grow up, boy,” he said. “You’ll learn.”

  When we got out to the parking lot Mr. Lowery and Mr. Hillicker were there with their sons and some other Bisk men. They sat on the tailgates of their pickup trucks drinking cans of Natural Light.

  “Look who it is,” Mr. Lowery said. “The cheat and the gasbag.”

  My father gripped my hand. “Just keep walking, Dutchie.”

  The men hopped off the tailgates. Mr. Hillicker came towards us, bobbing on the toes of his boots while Mr. Lowery skulked low. They formed a semicircle of bleached denim, cigarette smoke and booze fumes.

  “What’s the matter?” Mr. Hillicker said to my dad. “Too big to talk to us grunts?”

  “That’s nothing to do with it,” my father said. “It’s been a long night, Dean. I’m taking my son home.”

  “And we’re stopping you?” said Mr. Lowery. His teeth shone like tiny white spears under the lot lights. “Take him home, Stuckey. Mister Stuckey.”

  “You lay off, Stan,” Mr. Diggs said with ice in his eye. “I’m telling you to just lay off.”

  Mr. Lowery showed Mr. Diggs his palms like a magician performing some dizzying sleight of hand. “I’m laying easy as a blind bitch in her bed, chum.”

  Clyde Hillicker and Adam Lowery watched from the truck. Adam’s eyes were every bit as narrow and flinty as his father’s; it was a scary thing to see in a boy my own age.

  An awful electricity zipped among the older men. Shoulders jostled. Hands balled. Next the air was full of swinging fists.

  Mr. Diggs’ right shoulder dipped and his hand came up, crunching into Mr. Hillicker’s nose. Mr. Hillicker stutter-stepped back on his heels, toes pointed up like in a Three Stooges routine; it would have been comical if not for the new dent in his nose and the blood that lay stunned across his cheeks.

  My father pushed me out of the way as Mr. Lowery surged at him, low and sidewinding. It seemed unreal: Dad in his penny loafers and corduroy slacks fighting Adam Lowery’s father in his chambray work shirt. Mr. Lowery hit my father in the stomach. The air whoofed out of him—“Dad!” I cried—then my father, who I’d never seen throw a punch, brought his fist around in a sweeping roundhouse that clipped Mr. Lowery on the chin.

  A pair of cop cars had been idling at the Country Style Donuts across the street. Now they crossed silently, skipping the curb and rolling into the lot. Four uniformed officers stepped out. They stood with their hands on their hips, smirking, not quite ready to get involved.

  A hand grabbed my jacket and jerked me backwards. My shoulder collided with Dunk’s—we were both gripped at the end of two huge muscular arms.

  “Stay out of the fray, boys,” Bruiser Mahoney said. “You’re liable to lose something.”

  He sat us on the pavement and rucked into the fray. “Stop this mess!” he cried, towering like a colossus. He grabbed one of Mr. Hillicker’s buddies by the scruff of his neck and rag-dolled him across the asphalt. “Cease and desist!”

  Another man fell out of the scrum clutching his arm. Blood squeezed between his clenched fingers. “He cut me!” he shrieked.

  I could have seen a flash of silver in Mr. Diggs’ hand—something that shone like a sliver of moonlight.

  “Break this shit up!” the cops shouted, wading in with their batons swinging. “Give it up, you bastards!”

  Bruiser Mahoney stepped away, panting just a bit. Beads of sweat dotted his brow.

  “Come on, boys.” His hands gripped our forearms. He half led, half lifted us: only my toes touched the ground. />
  “My dad …” Dunk said.

  “Your dad’s in a whack of trouble, son. Nothing to be done for it.”

  The brawl raged on. The cruiser’s lights bathed the scene in blue and red flashes. In hindsight, it was shocking that neither our dads nor the police saw us being led away by a goliath wrestler in scuffed cowboy boots and a buckskin jacket. Equally shocking was the fact that neither Dunk nor I called out to our fathers.

  Bruiser Mahoney’s brown cargo van was parked around back of the arena near the Dumpsters. He popped the side door and said: “Hop in, boys.”

  We sat hip to hip on the ripped bench seat. The van smelled of sweat and turpentine. The left side of the windshield was milky with cracks. A plastic hula girl was stuck to the dash. In the back were a few army duffels, boxes of bodybuilding magazines, sleeping bags and about a million empty Coke cans.

  “What’s going to happen to our dads?” I asked Mahoney.

  “They’re spending a night in the nick,” Bruiser said, contorting himself into the front seat. His wide shoulders made it look as if a Kenmore fridge were occupying the space behind the wheel. “Buckle your seat belts.”

  The van hacked to life. Mahoney drove with his headlights off. The plastic hula girl’s hips swayed as we bounced over the curb.

  “It’s nothing serious,” Mahoney said. “Just grown men fighting. They’ll be out tomorrow no worse for wear.” He craned his head round and winked at us. “Every man ought to spend a night in the stony lonesome once in his life!”

  He snapped on the radio. “Karma Chameleon” by Culture Club was playing.

  “This glitzy fairy can really carry a tune,” he said, snapping his fingers.

  We drove down Parkside and pulled up beside a 5.0 Mustang. A farmer-tanned arm hung casually out the open window. There was a tattoo of a wolf howling at the moon on that arm, except the skin drooped so that the moon looked more like a teardrop—which would be poetic, I guess, if it had been on purpose.

  Mahoney pulled up closer. I caught a flash of the driver: in his mid-thirties, his face deeply seamed and his skin a queer off-yellow like a watery cat’s eye. He looked sick but probably wasn’t. It’s just how men grew up around here. My dad said Cataract City was a pressure chamber: living was hard, so boys were forced to become men much faster. That pressure ingrained itself in bodies and faces. You’d see twenty-year-old men whose hands were stained permanently black with the granular grease from lubing the rollers at the Bisk. Men just past thirty walking with a stoop. Forty-year-olds with forehead wrinkles deep as the bark on a redwood. You didn’t age gracefully around here. You just got old.

  Mahoney pulled into the beer store, left the van running and said, “Be right back.”

  “Do you think they’re okay?” I asked Dunk while Mahoney was inside the liquor store. “Our dads?”

  “I guess so,” Dunk said. “Bruiser said so, right?”

  Mahoney returned with half a flat of Labatt 50. He set it between the front seats and tore the cardboard open. The stubby was swallowed by his hand: only its brown neck protruded between his thumb and pointer finger. He upended the bottle, drank it, belched, sleeved the empty, popped the cap off a fresh one with the church-key dangling from the gearshift and veered onto the road.

  “Need something to take the edge off,” he told us. “The Boogeyman took it out of me tonight, that rat bastard.”

  “Where are we going?” Dunk said.

  “What? You don’t like hanging out with the Bruiser? Your hero?”

  He stopped at a red light, downed the second beer, wiped froth off his lips and cracked a third. “Don’t worry, boys. We’ll cruise around until the heat dies down, then I’ll take you home.”

  The van barrelled down Clifton Hill where the multicoloured marquees of tourist booths and shops burned against the oncoming dark. Mahoney turned right and slowed past the Falls, unrolling his window to breathe the wet spray.

  He drove down the river and pulled into an unfamiliar suburb. He circled one block three times, drumming his fingers on the wheel, before pulling into the driveway that divided a small fenced-in yard.

  “Wait here, little warriors.”

  He skipped up the steps to the house at the end of the drive, spinning balletically to shoot us with finger-pistols cocked at his hips. His knock was answered by a teenaged girl. After a moment’s hesitancy she let him inside.

  “Do you know where we are?” I asked Dunk.

  He leaned between the front seats and looked out the window. Then slumped back into the seat and lip-farted. Bruiser Mahoney came out of the house with the girl, holding her hand and pulling her the way you pull a dog away from an interesting smell.

  He lifted her onto the passenger seat. “Ooh!” she said, laughing the way my mother did when we rode the Tilt-A-Whirl at the Falls carnival. Her long dark hair fell straight down her back and shone like metal in the domelight.

  Mahoney clambered into the driver’s seat and gave her knee a chummy clap. “Look at you! You’re a pip—a real pip!”

  The girl tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and stared out the window. Mahoney shot a look at us and waggled his eyebrows as if to say: We’re cooking now!

  “Hello,” Dunk said.

  The girl nearly jumped out of her skin. “Jesus!” she said to Mahoney. “Who are these—more of yours?”

  The flesh crinkled around Mahoney’s eyes. “Mine? Do you think I have a brood in every town?”

  “I don’t know why you’d think that might surprise me,” the girl said.

  “Don’t be spiteful. These boys came to the show. They got separated from their fathers. I’m taking them home.”

  The girl was a high-schooler—the pleated skirt gave it away. She smelled of Noxzema and cigarette smoke. “Separated from your father, huh? Join the club.”

  We drove along the river. Mahoney pulled into a lookout along the water’s edge.

  “Yeearrrgh!” He stepped out of the van and stretched his long frame. “That air! Takes years off a man.”

  We sat at a picnic table under a canopy of spring leaves. The night air was moist like inside a greenhouse. Mahoney opened a beer and held it out to the girl.

  “So,” she said to us, “you’re fans of the mighty Bruiser, I imagine?” There was a small, perfect coin of gold in the centre of her left eye.

  “We are,” Dunk said solemnly.

  “So serious!” She sipped her beer. Mahoney watched her with a crooked eye. “I suppose you’d like to hear stories of his greatest matches, wouldn’t you?”

  “We would,” said Dunk.

  “Well, Bruiser?” she said. “Care to indulge them?”

  “Dearest heart,” he said, “what tale would you have me regale them with?”

  The girl stroked her chin, considering. “How about Giant Kichi?”

  Mahoney slapped the table. The crack of his palm caused a flock of nesting starlings to take flight.

  “Aha! Giant Kichi, is it?” He rounded on us. “Kichi was the meanest wrestler on the Japanese circuit, one of twins born in Hiroshima. Their father was a madman. He raised cows on a patch of soil where the first bomb touched down, you see, and suckled his sons on the milk. When they were old enough, he had those same cows slaughtered and made his sons eat the irradiated meat. The radiation did something to those boys—lengthened their bones, gave them incredible strength. A pair of giants, the two of them!”

  Mahoney upended his beer, then set one huge meathook on my shoulder and stared sorrowfully into my eyes.

  “On their twelfth birthday, much the same age you are now, that madman led his sons into the woods. Whichever one of you comes out alive is my true son, he said, and left them there. Two weeks later, Giant Kichi came out. Torn up and scabbed and practically naked. Something had happened in those woods. He’d changed. Become a madman like his father.

  “His father trained Kichi to become a wrecking machine. He brought in masters of each martial arts discipline. Wing Chun. Praying Mantis. Ku
ng fu fighting. Everyone was doing it.” He winked at the girl. “Giant Kichi sucked it up like a sponge. Big and strong he was, but also nimble. He beat holy hell out of his masters, full of rage and bloodlust. Finally his father stepped up and said, How’d you like a piece of your old man? Giant Kichi said, I’d like that quite a lot, thanks, and snapped his father over his knee like a stick of wood!”

  “He did, did he?” the girl said.

  “He did indeed!” Mahoney grinned. “Giant Kichi popped up on my radar years ago. I’d been touring the Eastern Seaboard with Killer Kowalski and Spider Winchell, eking out a rough living in the squared circle and doing some pest elimination on the side. I heard that Tugboat Sims—one tough S.O.B. and the only man to have beaten the Plague—had taken the challenge of this crazy Jap wrestler. Giant Kichi beat him so bad that Tugboat pissed his trunks and begged for his mama. Well, wouldn’t you know it but two weeks later I’m at home dusting my knick-knacks when comes a knock at the door. I open it to see this little Jap fella with a wrinkly face like a cat’s clenched bunghole. It was RiJishi, Giant Kichi’s manservant. He hands me this funny scroll. It’s an invitation to fight Kichi in the Tokyo Dome!”

  Mahoney paced round the picnic table, stabbing his fingers through his hair.

  “I took a steamship and trained as it sailed. Long hours in the boiler room, flinging lumps of coal into the greedy engine, my skin stained as black as night with the dust. The ship hooked past Greenland. I ran round the deck until icicles formed in my hair and jangled like castanets. I got bigger, stronger, as I knew I must to stand even a snowball’s chance. And I swear, boys, I swear I heard Kichi’s voice on the salt wind, calling me, haunting me, tormenting me.

  “Maaahoney,” Bruiser mimicked. “Maaahoney, I kirr you, Maaahoney. Well, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a shredded bag of nerves by the time I reached the land of the rising sun. A rickshaw ferried me to the Tokyo Dome and next I’m being led into the ring. A hundred thousand faces screaming for blood—my blood!”

  Mahoney’s expression darkened. He hooked his thumbs into his belt loops and shook his head.

  “Ah, anyway. Let’s talk about something else.”