Cataract City

by Craig Davidson

  A rustling arose beyond the trees and for an instant I swore a face materialized. White as milk apart from the lips, which were as red as blood from a freshly torn vein. Teeth filed to crude points. A ravenous ghoul stalking us from the darkness past the fire.

  Mahoney howled—“Reeeeaaaggh!”—and fired. Flame spat from the gun to illuminate the fear-twisted contours of his face.

  “Weasels,” he snarled. “Cowardly punks.” He raked his fingernails down his cheeks. “Think they can dog me out like that? You let a man dog you even once and he’ll dog you until your last breath! Come on, boys.”

  “Where?” said Dunk.

  Mahoney pointed to the trees.

  Years later I’d wonder if it could possibly have happened as I remembered it.

  The woods were black and cold, but not as cold as they would become later. I recall a lack of friction between my body and the things surrounding it—the trees, the spongelike quality of the topsoil—as if I was floating. I remember thinking I was in a place where none of my daily habits carried any impact. I tried to picture my bedroom with the wallpaper my father had put up: a panorama of the earth, small and bright and blue-white as photographed from the moon.

  I slipped my finger through Dunk’s belt loop, anchoring him to me. The long muscle that ran up Dunk’s shoulder and neck to his hairline quivered with a nervous, tentative strength. Prickberry bushes tore gashes in my arms. The pain and adrenaline came together in my legs and fingers and head: a cool tingling under my skin, a hot buzz in my skull.

  Bruiser Mahoney stalked ahead of us, a huge rumpled shape barely distinguishable from the darkness. He followed the silver finger of the gun barrel, his breath filling the space under the leaves. When he coughed the sound was that of an old refrigerator shutting down, the ancient tubes and fittings rattling against one another.

  A serrated leaf feathered my cheek. I brushed it aside, startled by the whiteness of my fingers in the night, then walked through a spider’s web strung between two saplings. The gossamer snapped over my lips and eyelids and for an instant I felt the hollow weight of a spider against my throat, but by the time I’d gathered my breath to scream it was gone, rappelling down my shirt.

  “Take heart, lads,” Mahoney whispered. “Fortune favours the brave.”

  My eyes adjusted. The woods took shape. Trees rose out of the black loam of the forest floor, bark covered in frost that glittered like pulverized salt. Streamers of fog snaked along the ground; I tasted the mineral wetness of it in the back of my mouth. We made no noise at all—even Mahoney, whose grace had otherwise deserted him—our feet sliding silently over the moist leafless earth.

  “Wolverines out here,” said Mahoney. “A wolverine gets hungry enough, it’ll creep into your tent and eat your face off. Wolves, too.”

  As soon as he said that, I saw them: hunched shapes moving between the trees, much bigger than dogs, white-tipped fur bristling along their spines. Their smell rode the breeze, the stink of meat rotting between their fangs. My fingers tightened in Dunk’s belt loop, which I guess made me a pussy but I was too freaked to care.

  A stealthy clawing kicked up behind us. Mahoney whirled and fired. I fell to my knees, ears covered against the thunder. There was blood on Mahoney’s cheek where the gun’s hammer had gouged his flesh.

  “It flanked round behind us, the sneaky bugger.”

  Mahoney trudged off in the direction of his gunfire. We found him bent over a small broken shape. Blood shone in a pool round its spike-shaped head.

  “A coon.” Mahoney laughed without mirth. “We’ve been chasing a damn raccoon.”

  The animal reeked of blood and piss. Its gums were already hardening, black lips drawn back from yellowed teeth. It looked like it had died very confused. Mahoney bent to pick it up by a hind leg. Back at the fire, he laid the dead animal down with reverence.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Who was he apologizing to, us or the raccoon?

  “Hand me my knife,” he said.

  Mahoney unfolded the blade and slid the point into the skin between its front legs and sawed down its belly. The raccoon opened up in the firelight.

  “If you kill an animal and don’t eat it, you’re cursed forever. Earl Starblanket told me that. He was a pureblood Navajo who used to wrestle as Big Chief Jackdaw.”

  Mahoney hacked through the gleaming knots of the creature’s insides. The smell was indescribable. I couldn’t imagine putting it in my mouth.

  Dunk said, “We didn’t kill it.”

  Mahoney looked up sharply. His hands were black with blood. “We all did. We were a hunting party.”

  Dunk shook his head. “Owe and me were just there.”

  “That’s right, you were. You witnessed it. Do you want to put your mortal soul in jeopardy?”

  Mahoney cut off a strip of meat. He gathered up the raccoon, holding its split body together the way a prim woman holds a purse, humped over to the trees and flung it away. He settled the metal grate over the coals and laid the meat down.

  “You don’t eat much,” he said. “Just a bite or two, to honour the animal.”

  The meat sizzled. Mahoney speared it with the tip of his knife and turned it over. His lips shone with drool. He crunched some more pills. When the meat was cooked he hacked it into steaming chunks.

  “Eat it,” he said darkly.

  It was burnt, which was a blessing: I assumed the taste of char was better than the taste of raccoon. Mahoney ate in silence, backhanding the juice that dribbled down his chin.

  We lay in the grass. I was exhausted but couldn’t let myself fall asleep next to Bruiser Mahoney—cold snakes squirmed in my belly just thinking about it. The stars were bright in a way they never were in my suburb. The moon was perfectly halved, like a paper circle folded over. The sky so clear that I could see calligraphic threads on the moon’s surface.

  “Did you know,” Mahoney said, “that the Russians sent dogs into space? My mother told me this when I was a boy. Nobody knew the effects of space on a body, you see, so they sent dogs first. They found two mongrels on the streets of Moscow. Pchelka, which means Little Bee, and Mushka, which means Little Fly. They went up in Sputnik 6. They were supposed to get into orbit and come right back. But the rockets misfired and shot them into space.

  “Whenever I look at the night sky, I think about those dogs. Wearing these hand-stitched spacesuits, bright orange, with their paws sticking out. Big fishbowl helmets. How … crazy. Floating out and out into space. How bewildered they must have been. Freezing, starving, dying from oxygen deprivation. For what? They would have happily spent their days rummaging through trashcans.

  “For all anyone knows those dogs are still out there. Two dead mongrels in a satellite. Two dog skeletons in silly spacesuits. Gleaming dog skulls inside fishbowl helmets. They’ll spin through the universe until they burn up in the atmosphere of an uncharted planet. Or get sucked into a black hole to be crushed into a ball of black matter no bigger than an ant turd.”

  Bruiser Mahoney laughed. The sound sent a shiver through my gums. His laughter rolled out and out into the wilderness; the sound didn’t touch anything I could recognize or draw hope from.

  “Who are you?” I asked—the most searching, most innocent question I’ve asked in my life.

  Mahoney propped himself up on one elbow. His fingers were black with dried raccoon blood.

  “What do you mean?” he asked, a child himself. When he caught the aim of my question his lips curled back from his teeth. “Am I not still your hero?” he said, deathly soft. “The mighty Bruiser Mahoney? Ooh, you’re a smart boy. You’ve figured me out, haven’t you? Unmasked me. Well then, I guess that makes this the hour of truth. Let’s lay all the cards on the table, hmm? Card one: I’m not Bruiser Mahoney. My name is Dade Rathburn. I was born in Orillia, Ontario. Before becoming a wrestler I was a janitor at a box factory. I’ve spent time in jail—once for beating a man half to death outside a bar, and once again for passing phony cheques.
Mahoney? I don’t have a drop of Irish blood in me! I’m a fake, boys.” Coldness crept into his voice. “And I’ll slap down card number two: wrestling’s fake, too.”

  Dunk made a helpless noise in his throat, like the tweet of a small bird.

  “Oh, yessss,” Mahoney hissed. “Fake as a three-dollar bill! Fake as Sammy Davis Junior’s eye! The matches are bunko. I win because we draw it up that way. The punches and kicks don’t hurt—hell, most times we don’t even touch each other. It’s a big scam, and you bought into it.”

  “You be quiet,” Dunk said. “You just shut up.”

  Mahoney laughed in Dunk’s face.

  “My opponent tonight, the Boogeyman? His name is Barry Schenk. Used to be a math teacher. Good guy. We head to the bar after our matches and have a laugh. We’re friends.”

  Dunk twisted into a wretched ball. Mahoney’s expression softened abruptly. He reached out and put his fingers on Dunk’s shoulder. Dunk withdrew from his touch.

  “I’m sorry, son,” Mahoney said. “You shouldn’t pay me any mind. I’m a drunk and a clown. You ever see an old clown, boys? No. Old clowns don’t die, though.”

  He stood. His eyes shone like glass.

  “Be like your fathers,” he said. “Work a solid job. Build a family. Smelling like a cookie’s a small price to pay for ordinary happiness.”

  A hellish noise kicked up in the woods: a high gibbering shriek that tapered to an ongoing moan. Mahoney spun on his heel, pistol jerked high.

  “God rot you! I’ll have your guts for garters!”

  For the next several hours, until the sky lightened in the east, Mahoney blundered around in the forest. Every so often came the splintering of wood or a low animal bellow. Dunk and I lay together by the dying fire, dew silked to our skin.

  At some point Mahoney emerged. His clothes were torn and mud-streaked, his face badly scratched and his hair stuck with burrs.

  “Goddamn bastards … thought you had me but I outfoxed you … didn’t I, Daddy? Stinking of pig blood but I won. I won.”

  He shambled over to the tent, which was much too small for him. His cowboy boots stuck out the flaps.

  I rose with the sun scraping the treetops. I’d fallen asleep on my side and woke up tucked close to Dunk. He was sleeping still. His spine bowed with each breath, touching my stomach.

  My arm was pins and needles. I flexed my fingers, which felt full of static. My mouth tasted of burnt meat. The clearing was washed in new sunlight. Nothing in the trees except a chipmunk nibbling on a nut. Dunk rolled onto his side, blinking at the sun.

  “You okay?”

  “I want to go home,” I told him simply.

  He stood and stretched, catlike. We scratched our itchy bits and rubbed the dirt out of our hair.

  I said: “Should we wake him up?”

  “My dad doesn’t like to get up after he’s been drinking.”

  “So what are we going to do?”

  Dunk stared at the sky as if he could tell the time by where the sun sat. “Okay, let’s wake him up,” he said finally.

  Bruiser Mahoney’s cowboy boots still jutted out of the tent. The toes were covered with muddy grass as if he’d been kicking holes in the earth. Dunk tapped one of them with his sneaker.

  “Hey, Bruiser. We got to go home.”

  Dunk kicked harder. Bruiser’s foot barely moved. His boot could have been filled with concrete. Dunk pulled back the tent flap. His nose wrinkled. “He must’ve puked.”

  Bruiser lay on top of his sleeping bag. His hands were covered in raccoon blood; it had dried and split, making his skin look like lizard scales. Dunk crawled inside the tent. I tried to grab him but he was already halfway in.

  The smell was the same as when my dad had found our neighbour’s cat under our porch, eaten by beetles. “That would gag a maggot,” he’d said. Sunlight streamed through the tent’s metal eyelets, picking up the dust above Mahoney’s chest. His skin pale through the rips in his clothing. Quite suddenly I realized how still things were. Nothing but our own timid movements and the floating dust.

  “Bruiser,” Dunk said softly. “Hey … you awake?”

  My knee knocked into Bruiser’s leg. It was hard, like a mannequin leg. I pulled away, spine pressed against the tent’s canvas. Mahoney’s fingers were curled back in defiance of their bones. They reminded me of the Wicked Witch’s shoes in The Wizard of Oz. I thought Mahoney might be taking a long breath. I held mine until my heart thudded at my temples. When I let it out he still hadn’t taken a breath of his own.

  Dunk leaned over him.

  “Bruiser?” Shouting it: “Bruiser!”

  Mahoney’s face was the colour of the moulding clay we used in art class. His eyes were wide open, his eyeballs milky, snaky with burst vessels. White stuff that looked like dried shaving cream was crusted at the sides of his mouth. There was something the matter with his face. His upper teeth were ejected past his lips, connected to a strip of dingy pink plastic.

  “Dentures,” Dunk said quietly. “My grandpa wears them too. When he goes to bed he puts them in a glass of buttermilk.”

  Dunk pressed his thumb to Mahoney’s teeth and tried to push them into his mouth. They wouldn’t go. He pulled on Mahoney’s chin until his mouth opened a bit. The sound was like a rubber band snapping. His dentures fell back into his mouth with a terrible slunk, the sound of an un-oiled drawer sliding shut.

  Dunk pushed Bruiser Mahoney’s dentures back under his lips and tried to pinch them gently together. But his teeth were too big for his mouth. Either they had grown—which was impossible, right?—or his skin had shrunk.

  “Is he …?”

  “I think so, yeah,” Dunk said.

  My heart was a wounded bird flapping inside my chest. I wanted to scream but the sound was locked up somewhere under my lungs.

  “Should we close his eyes, Owe?”

  “Is that what you do?”

  Dunk nodded. “So the soul can go to heaven.”

  You think that’s where it’s going? I almost asked.

  Dunk put two fingertips on Mahoney’s eyelids and pulled them down. When he let go they rolled back up like window shades. One of Mahoney’s eyes pointed towards his nose as if the muscles behind it had given up, letting the eyeball roll towards the lowest point on his face. It made him look comical and stupid.

  “Fuck,” said Dunk.

  Outside the tent I wept. I wept because a man I’d idolized without really knowing him—it dawned on me that maybe this was the only way you ever really could idolize anybody—was gone and I was miserable because he’d died overnight, alone, in an army surplus tent with his boots on. And I wept because Dunk and I were in the middle of a big nowhere now. I wept because the only person who could have got us out of this was dead, his eyeball lazing into the centre of his face, and he’d left two dumb scared kids a million miles from anywhere.

  Dunk opened the van door and sat in the driver’s seat. He gripped the wheel so tight his knuckles went white, then punched it. The horn made a low blatt.

  “Should we bury him?” he said.

  I wiped scalding tears off my cheeks. It was the most serious question I’d ever had to answer. “We don’t have a shovel.”

  Dunk nodded; he’d already registered that fact.

  After some thinking, I said: “Could we burn him? That’s what Bovine’s dad does at the funeral parlour. There’s a big oven down in the basement, Bovine says. The coffins go in on a conveyor belt. His dad sweeps the ashes into a metal vase.”

  “A vase?”

  “I guess, like you’re supposed to put it in your living room. Over the fireplace?”

  “Where you hang stockings at Christmas?” Dunk said.

  It was weird. I didn’t tell Dunk that Bovine also told me that sometimes his father pried the gold fillings out of a dead person’s teeth before putting the body in the oven. He gave the gold to the next-of-kin, who usually melted it down, Bovine said, turning it into earrings or doo-dads on a charm bracelet. P
eople were weird about death. Looking at Bruiser Mahoney’s boots sticking out of the tent, I could see why.

  “How would we burn him?” Dunk said.

  “We could stuff sticks inside the tent and light it.”

  “What about the sparks? They could fly off and set the woods on fire.”

  “We could build a ring of rocks around the tent.”

  Dunk touched his lip to his nose, considering it. “Would it get hot enough to turn him into ashes? Last summer we had a cookout along the river and my brother dropped his hot dog in the fire. In the morning it was a shrivelled black stick, like charcoal.”

  I pictured Bruiser Mahoney the same way: the meat cooked black on his bones, his body laid out like a stick figure. What would we do then? Snap his limbs over our knees—I imagined each break sending up a puff of sparkling black dust—and stack Bruiser Mahoney in our arms? We’d have to carry him out of the forest like firewood.

  Dunk climbed out of the van and walked to the tent.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Getting some things,” he said.

  He rummaged inside the tent. The points of his elbows strained against the canvas. Was he rolling Mahoney over? Rooting through the dead man’s pockets? A series of loud pops, like shots from a cap gun, fired quickly. I wondered if it was the trapped air popping between the knobs of Mahoney’s spinal cord.

  That sound opened a hidden trap door in my head and quite suddenly I was staring at my own body in a coffin, my face propped up by a shiny satin pillow. I lay in a parlour with stained-glass windows; “Nearer, My God, to Thee” was playing. My father and mother were there, plus a few of my teachers and some aunts and uncles I hardly ever saw. My face was yellow from that chemical they pump into your veins to replace your blood—the same stuff our science teacher used to preserve dissected frogs. Stitches circled my head; the undertaker had brushed my bangs down to cover them, but not totally. I wondered if they had taken my brain out and if so, why? Maybe evil aliens had stolen it, like the ones in that television show Dunk and I watched late one night: Invasion of the Brain Snatchers. If my brain was gone, what was inside my head now? Packing peanuts like the ones that Dad’s hi-fi equipment had come in? Some balled-up pages out of the Niagara Falls Pennysaver?