Cataract City

by Craig Davidson

  The police retraced our route from our hazy descriptions and the physical markers of our trek: a few blackened firepits. We’d covered over thirty-five kilometres, a twisting, doubling-back route that would shame any outdoorsman. Despite this, our scoutmaster claimed that we embodied the very pinnacle of wilderness survival.

  We’d taken a wrong turn almost immediately. Had we gone east we’d have made it back to Stevensville Road by mid-afternoon. Instead we went northwest, into the forested territory fringing Old Highway 98 east of Bethel. But if we were unlucky early, we got lucky late. The Harrington house sat three kilometres from its nearest neighbour. Had Dunk not seen its roof we would have continued into the empty land south of Brookfield junction. Nothing there but scrub pine and desolation, fifty miles to the nearest anything.

  The wilderness took its toll on Bruiser Mahoney, too. The police found him where we’d left him, in a clearing some thirty miles north of Lake Erie. Through Sam Bovine I heard that his legs had been chewed off. Coyotes were the likeliest culprit.

  “My dad used old mannequin legs from the women’s wear department at Sears to fill out the casket,” Bovine told me.

  The rock on Mahoney’s stomach may’ve been all that stopped the coyotes from making off with the rest of him. Or it could be that his taste didn’t suit them.

  The toxicologist said he’d died from an overdose of Clozaril, a knock-off of clozapine, an antipsychotic drug. The pills belonged to El Phantoma—birth name: Miguel Lopez—a Mexican wrestler with a history of bipolar disorder whom Mahoney had driven to a match in Gravenhurst the week before. Lopez had forgotten the pills in the glovebox and Mahoney had mistaken them for his pain medication. The Clozaril reacted badly with the alcohol to cause, in the toxicologist’s opinion, “free-floating delusions, uncontrollable anxiety and a possible psychotic break with reality.”

  All of which seems about right to me.

  Dunk and I went to Dade Rathburn’s funeral. People figured it was some kind of Stockholm syndrome, or else we wanted to spit on the corpse. The big church was mostly empty. The girl was there, the one with the black hair and gold-coin eyes. It turned out she was Rathburn’s daughter—one of many. He’d salted his seed liberally over his territory. She was crying. She hugged us both and apologized. “I said you’d be safe with him. I thought you would be. He wasn’t a bad …”

  “Anyway, it’s not your fault,” Dunk told her.

  Dade Rathburn looked weird in his coffin. A deflated pool toy packed up for winter storage. His dentures were snug, at least, and his eyes were closed. Bovine said his dad had to cut the muscles under his eyelids so they’d roll down, then crazy-glue them shut.

  I remember everyone watching us. I had no urge to spit on Rathburn. Whatever I felt was far too complicated to ever express.

  After the funeral my father told me he’d prefer it if I didn’t hang out with Dunk anymore. Dunk’s dad was of the same mind. It seemed unfair, as if we were the victims of our fathers’ guilty consciences. Had I been seventeen I would have told Dad to suck an egg. But I was twelve, and soon enough Dunk and I just drifted apart. I couldn’t say how it happened. That strong childhood magnetism that draws one boy to another—sometimes that magnetism abruptly switches polarities, flinging those same boys away from each other, setting them on new trajectories.

  My family moved to Cardinal Gardens, a suburb in the city north. Our new house had an in-ground pool and a two-car garage. The day the moving truck came, Dunk stood on the sidewalk dribbling a balding basketball.

  “So you’re moving, huh?”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  I’d meant it as a joke. He blew the hair out of his eyes—it was even longer than when I’d met him, the ends almost touching his nose—and smiled into the sunlight.

  “You can always come visit,” I said.

  “And you can always visit back here.”

  That was the last I saw of Duncan Diggs for many years.

  The next week I was in our new home flicking through TV channels and came upon an episode of Superstars of Wrestling. It shocked me how fake it looked. Punches and kicks missing by a mile. I watched a few minutes, then flipped to another channel.

  DAWN EASED OVER THE ESCARPMENT, sunlight glimmering like a sine wave across the curve of the earth. I stretched my legs inside the car, wincing as the familiar pain cupped my kneecap. Fogerty’s “Who’ll Stop the Rain” had segued into Henley’s “Boys of Summer,” which had segued into a late-night call-in show about paranormal phenomena.

  I had zoned out, lost myself down the memory hole, and now the dashboard clock was reading 5:26 and the gas tank was near empty. I stepped out of the car and began to walk.

  The cut-off was fringed by long grass bent by a forceful night wind. Sun lightened the eastern fields. The world was cool, wind bearing the smell of burning grapevines. I had nothing on but a thin jacket, yet I didn’t feel cold. Sunlight sparkled the tips of pine trees struggling through soil determined to spit them out.

  I walked until the path began to collapse at its edges. It dipped and I followed … until at last a million tiny cogs seized in every part of my body and I stopped. The woods were closing in on me. Still, I didn’t feel terrorized like I had as a boy. I took in the silky rustle of leaves, that cut-potato smell of the soil. Felt an odd jangle in my nerve endings. I couldn’t quite leave behind the sight of a thin curvature of sunlight on the Lincoln’s hood, so metallic and man-made and human. Couldn’t abandon myself entirely to those woods.

  Maybe if Dunk were here … or maybe there are some paths you can never go down again. I headed back to the car, laughing at my cowardice.

  I dropped the Lincoln into gear and reversed down the cut-off. Back to the world as it existed. But it was good to remember that, long ago, it had been just Dunk and me, the two of us. Two boys in the woods. How far had we fallen from that?

  I drove to the nearest gas station, filled the tank and paid the sleepy-eyed attendant slumped inside his bulletproof Lexan cube. It was rare for me to be up so early—under normal circumstances I’d be inert while my liver filtered whatever I’d drunk the night before—but I relished it. Soon enough the sun would climb to its familiar position, illuminating the sadly familiar sights of the city and ruining the sense of possibility. But until then, there was the lovely silence, the fresh, indescribable smell of a new day—if pure possibility had a smell, this was it—fledgling sunlight washing the grape fields and the rippling surface of the river.

  Staring at that swift, dark-running water, a fresh memory hit me with the force of a ballpeen hammer.

  I must have been seven years old—or eight? Anyway, I was in that human-wallpaper stage of my existence. My father had taken me to the river. We’d go every so often to skip rocks and hunt for crayfish. One afternoon while Dad was taking a whiz I’d spotted a Hefty trash sack bobbing at the river’s edge. It had been sucked into a pool where the current swirled endlessly between the rocks; the pool was edged with the froth that built up at certain spots, crusty and opaque like the scum atop a pot of boiled pork.

  The bag was of the heavy-gauge plastic you’d find wrapping scrap lumber in construction-site Dumpsters; the top was crudely knotted. I remember wondering what was inside, and tearing it open, driven by sudden wild curiosity—there was something about the placement of the bag, I guess; the sullenness of it bobbing in the shallows. At first I’d just stared, head cocked, profoundly puzzled. The contents looked like soggy balls of yarn, the kind Mom used to make macramé potholders and tiered flower holders. Except there was nothing vibrant about the colours: mixed muddy browns and washed-out whites. Then I caught a glimpse of a little arrow shape tufting from one of those balls and it was like when you stare at one of those 3D portraits just right—your eyes adjust and you see the sailboat or the train or whatever. When I saw the whole picture I reared back, horrified at a bone-deep, subcellular level.

  Kittens. I could tell by that one tiny ear. How many? Four, five. I didn’t look long en
ough to know. Kittens stuffed in a trash sack and hurled in the river. Even at that age, it struck me that they almost certainly hadn’t drowned: the sack was so thick and the kittens almost weightless, so it’d probably just bobbed on the surface, too light to sink; perhaps the person who’d done it had watched the sack drift down the Niagara and said, “Huh.” With awful clarity I imagined the kittens tearing at the sack with their little claws. But the plastic was too durable. They would have suffocated.

  I stepped away, the horror so thick in my gorge that I thought I’d throw up. The bag shifted and I saw something else: the greenish plastic head of a glow-in-the-dark Jesus. A snatch of song came to me: Well, I don’t care if it rains or freezes / Long as I have my plastic Jesus / Riding on the dashboard of my car. Whoever had done this must’ve been queerly religious, or else had a warped sense of humour. Jesus’s head was shattered at the top, just above his crown of thorns. One of the kittens must’ve bitten it off.

  I slumped back in the car seat, assaulted by the memory. But that’s my city in a nutshell—or a trash sack. People around here think if they stuff their problems in a bag, huck it in the water, well, end of problem. And that theory has borne out, for the most part. In my line of work I see proof, over and over.

  I drove home in the warm light, my mood curdling further when three police cruisers shrieked past in the opposite lane. I unlocked my apartment, stared for a moment at the empty dog bed in the kitchen, un-holstered my pistol and popped two pills to quiet the pain singing in my kneecap. I fell into a troubled, profoundly exhausted sleep.

  PART TWO

  DOLLY EXPRESS

  DUNCAN DIGGS

  The city feels strange to me now. Changed in a million tiny ways that, taken together, seem massive. It’s like not seeing your own face for eight years, then having someone hand you a mirror. Who is that guy? And then you realize: it’s you. It’s still you.

  The day after they let me out of prison I awoke in the bedroom where I’d grown up. There wasn’t a clock at the bedside, but I knew the time: 7:33. That was when the prison’s halogens would snap on every morning, my eyelids snapping open with them. Would I wake up at that exact minute for the rest of my life?

  I could’ve stayed in bed, which was warm, the mattress permanently sunken from the impression of my body—my teenage body, because I’d been that age the last time I slept in it—but I rose out of habit.

  It was so strange to place my feet on carpet instead of cold lacquered concrete. And so wonderful to stand in the bars of honey-coloured sunlight that fell through the venetian blinds. Inside the pen, the sun had never felt the same as it did outside: it was as if the architecture of the place, or the compounds used to build it—the brick and steel and glass—leeched some part of the sunshine away. Not the heat—I could feel that—but its vitamins or the really nourishing part of it. When it had touched my skin in prison, it had felt as cold as the light from a bare bulb in a broom closet.

  I stood in that bedroom sunlight for a long time. Drinking it in, the same way a plant does.

  Could I open the bedroom door? I twisted the knob and, yeah, it swung open. It was stupid, but I’d been sure it was locked—even though the lock was on my side.

  I took a long shower. It was the first time I’d showered alone in forever. Still, I glanced over my shoulder a couple times. The soap was Irish Spring, the soap my mother always bought. Cheap and reliable. It made a thick lather that perfumed the stall with the smell of … what was that smell? It made me think back to days I’d come home as a boy, filthy from the woods, with pine sap smeared on my hands; Mom would punt me into the shower, telling me not to come out until my hair squeaked.

  When I went downstairs, Mom was sitting at the kitchen table in her uniform whites, her hands—her thin, birdlike hands—cupped around a ceramic mug. Her hair was salt-and-pepper: strands of jet-black threaded with coarser veins of iron-grey, pinned back behind her ears with silver clips.

  “Coffee, Duncan?”

  I nodded. “I’ll get it.”

  I poured coffee into a ceramic mug. For eight years I’d drunk out of either six-ounce plastic cups or thick-bottomed plastic mugs with a handle big enough to fit a single finger—the kind of cheap, unbreakable dishware they used at summer camps. When those dishes broke, they left no sharp angles.

  I added a tablespoonful of sugar, and after a moment, another. I could have as much as I wanted. In prison everything was rationed: a packet of sugar, a thimble of cream. Now I could add sugar until my teeth ached. Hah!

  I sat across from Mom. Sipped. Jesus, that was too sweet.

  “You look good, Mom.”

  “Yeah?”

  She touched her hair lightly with one hand. She’d visited me every month, just about—she and Dad both. The three of us would sit at a table bolted to the floor in the visiting room. Dad would drink a vending-machine Sprite. It was Coke for me, Diet Coke for Mom. A muted TV in a wire-mesh cage broadcasted old sitcoms.

  We spoke during those visits, but it was surface talk. Sports, the weather—not that the weather made any difference to me. They never asked me what had happened. They knew what happened—everyone did—so only one possible question remained: was it necessary to take a man’s life?

  “So,” Mom said with typical bluntness, “what now?”

  “I haven’t really thought that far ahead.”

  Her chin dipped. “Liar.”

  For two weeks straight, I walked the city, re-familiarizing myself with it—and with the scale of the outside world. Everything seemed bigger, crazily so.

  One night I stopped at a 7-Eleven and stared at the Big Gulp cups so long that the clerk asked me if something was the matter.

  “Nah, nothing.” I shook my head. “People drink all of that?”

  The clerk, adenoidal and bug-eyed, said, “All that and more. Free refills in the summer, right?”

  Why was my confusion so surprising? Yes, it had been eight years, not a lifetime. Yes, I’d watched TV inside, read the newspaper.

  I’d noted the shifts the world had taken. But that didn’t prevent the system shock.

  Things tasted better. Milk tasted richer, a Snickers bar sweeter. I had no explanation for that, just as there was no evidence to support my sense that penitentiary sunlight was a watery facsimile of the real deal. It was as though I’d gone into a protective cocoon that had mummified my sight and smell and taste, and now, back on the outside, my senses were hyper-attuned.

  One day I zoned out on the sidewalk under a maple tree, tracking the progress of a caterpillar across a branch. I picked a leaf, then rubbed its waxy surface until I wore it down to the veiny substructure, chlorophyll staining my fingertips dull green.

  “You okay, bud?”

  A man stood beside me, his arm raised in a gesture of cautious aid. I guess I’d been rubbing that leaf and staring off into space for too long.

  “I’m cool.” I smiled, wondering if that was still what people said. “Just took a personal time-out there.”

  I was gripped by a desperate urge to hand the man my leaf. Get a load of this leaf, man. It’s dynamite!

  I walked a lot at night. I’d wake in my childhood bedroom, the shapes and smells all wrong. Sometimes I’d catch the wet, weeping smell of the cinderblock walls in the Kingston Pen. Or I’d reach for Edwina and never find her. That was the worst of it; I saw her ghost everywhere. I was back on familiar streets, and her shape was familiar to those streets. I’d catch the slope of her shoulders entering a doorway, or her legs folding into a stranger’s car. But Ed had achieved escape velocity. This city would never see her shape again—a fact I both knew and somehow didn’t, or couldn’t, believe. Not quite.

  I gradually backtracked to spots I was familiar with. Some grisly compulsion carried me past the Bisk just as the shift whistle blew. Workers trooped in and out, their hair frosted white with flour. I spotted Clyde Hillicker, who looked a lot like his old man except for the deep dent in his right cheekbone. Hillicker had spent a f
ew years in the stony lonesome, too—we finally had something in common.

  I returned to places where I’d hung out with Owe and Edwina, mooning around like a lonely mutt. I’d stand on the ground we’d occupied together years ago, closing my eyes; weirdly, I could hear the whisper of their voices in my ear—but when I opened my eyes it was just me, alone in the dark.

  One afternoon I walked down the Niagara Parkway, skirting Oak Hall golf course where early-morning duffers were shanking balls into the rough. I kept well off the fairways; the course marshal might’ve spotted me and called the fuzz. I tromped through stands of dense pines—and you know what? They whispered in the wind, just like in those old country and western songs.

  I cut south at Upper Rapids Boulevard until I reached the river. A fine layer of mist clung to its surface, evaporating as the temperature inched upwards. A raccoon trundled through the bushes to my left, unafraid of me. I hunted for flat stones along the shoreline, skipping them. Me and Owe used to have skipping contests. Owe. I thought about him a lot. Almost as much as Ed. He’d visited me in prison only once, to clear up some lingering business. I can see why he kept his distance. He had every right. But I’d need his help soon—for the plan taking shape, growing stronger with every step I took through my city.

  Would he help? He didn’t owe me anything. What we had together, those old loyalties—that was a long time ago.

  “What’re you doin’?”

  The girl had snuck up on me. She was tall and reedy, wearing orange shorts and a blue hooded sweatshirt with the sleeves hacked off. Her spindly legs rose out of a pair of vulcanized rubber boots. They looked like flower stems poking out of a pot.

  “Just skipping rocks,” I told her.

  She cocked her head. Her red hair coiled into ringlets that framed the wide angles of her face. Her eyes were green—made greener by the sunlight streaming through the canopy of trees—and they were wide and alert, but with an alertness different from the wary kind I was used to in the eyes of inmates. Her eyes were simply interested.