Cataract City

by Craig Davidson

  “I’ve never done that,” she said.

  “It’s not that hard. You can watch me, if you want.”

  She sat on a rock, eyeing me. My shoulders tightened slightly under her gaze. My first rock only skipped twice.

  “I could do that,” she said.

  She heeled her rainboots off. Her bare feet had the clammy look feet get when they’re wet and compressed: like turnips gone wrinkly in the bottom of the fridge. She dipped her toes in the water.

  My next rock skipped seven or eight times, with a few dribblers at the end I didn’t count. The girl didn’t look too impressed.

  “Your hands,” she said. “They’re pretty trashed.”

  I stared down at them. “Trashed?”

  “I mean, like, fucked up.”

  I felt my brows beetling, the skin drawing inwards at my temples. I stuffed my hands in my pockets. “How old are you?”

  She said, “Thirteen.”

  “Oh. I thought you were younger.” She was about the age that Edwina’s kid would be—the one who’d left that scar on her stomach. The one she’d given up for adoption. “Anyway, that kind of language …”

  She blew a ringlet off her forehead. “You can’t tell me how to talk.”

  I lifted my shoulders. “I’m not telling you nothing. It’s just, I thought we were being friendly is all.”

  She smiled. “Sure we are.”

  I shifted my feet. The tips of my sneakers were wet from the river. “Anyway, you do as you like. I’m not your dad or anything.”

  Her smile persisted. “You could be, for all I know.”

  We walked together down the Parkway until we reached Burning Spring Hill Road. The Dufferin Islands rolled off to the north in a haze of overgrown sedge and water-rotted sycamores. The Derby Lane dog track was still there, but it had seen better days—although, now that I thought about it, had the place ever seen good days?

  “This place is creepy,” the girl said as we walked past the grounds.

  I could see why she’d think that. The swaybacked spectators’ gallery seemed to be collapsing into itself like a jack-o’-lantern left sitting on a porch until mid-November. Every single bulb in its marquee was busted, likely the work of punks with an obsessive streak.

  “It used to be nicer,” I said. “A little, anyway. I had a dog. My friend and me, we both did. Greyhounds. We raced them here.”

  “Bullshit,” the girl said cheerily.

  “Not bullshit.” I walked across the lot, glass gritting under my soles. “Dolly Express. That was my dog’s name.”

  “That’s weird.”

  I acknowledged her complaint with a nod. “Racing dogs have silly names. We just called her Dolly.”

  She touched her chin, eyes gazing skyward. “That’s an okay dog name. You okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Just thinking.”

  We’d walked only a little further when the girl said, “This is me.”

  A low-rent apartment block sat in the shadow of the escarpment. I watched while she climbed up the front stairs. She went ten steps, turned, and waved.

  “See you.”

  I waved back. “See you around, maybe.”

  Her shrug said: anything’s possible. I watched until she was safely inside the building. She waved me off as if I was being stupid, she could handle herself.

  I walked back to Derby Lane. Wind whipped off the river and howled around the marquee, singing off every point of busted glass. A burning ripcurl surged up from my stomach. This was a vital part of my life, right here. And it was gone now. I felt sick with nostalgia. Memory like a sickness, memory like a drug. I stood in the lengthening shadow of the lane, swallowed up by the black hole of my past.

  BACK WHEN I WAS A YOUNG WORKING STIFF, I often sat on a bench in the locker room after my night shifts, soaking my hands in a bucket of warm water. A weird smell had started leaking out of my pores after my first few shifts at the Bisk, sweet and spicy like a Chinese bakery. I’d noticed that food tasted different, too: drinking a Diet Coke was like sucking on a battery. But I needed the money. Always, the money.

  The regular night-shift mechanic had busted his leg falling off a stepladder in the deep-chill; now, whenever the rollers on the industrial conveyors went wonky, I had to tighten them with a three-foot pipe wrench. I wore heavy-duty work gloves but they didn’t stop the calluses: four dime-sized patches on each hand. Thick and hard, they put pressure on the nerves.

  One night, same as most others, I’d scraped off the dead skin with a butter knife. It flaked away in curls, collecting in my palm. The new skin was pearly-white like cooked haddock; it turned pink with the rush of blood.

  I dabbed on ointment, emptied the bucket and made my way past the factory lines to the exit. Machines stretched down the floor. I had to remind myself that we made cookies, the kind that kids liked.

  Back then I used to dream about those machines growing into me—I mean, into my body.

  The dream started with me tightening a lugnut on the conveyor belt, something I would do fifteen, twenty times a shift. Both hands on the wrench, torqueing my shoulder to feel the quiver of the machine across my stomach. Next the silver head of a screw pierces my skin. The tip’s winking in the middle of my hand. I’m like, huh? But no pain. I’m shocked, but because dreams are driven by their own weird logic, I’m not terrified.

  The screw has driven through the wrench and through my hand, anchoring me to the machine. Pressure builds up my spine; I lean sideways, putting weight on my right foot. Which is when steel bolts punch through my Caterpillar workboot. Tink! Tink! Tink! When the concrete dust clears I see the bolts have twisted into a snarl that pins my foot to the floor. I laugh. It’s so strange, it’s funny.

  I sink to one knee. Aaaaahh. Feels great to take a load off. The moment I do so, small hooks—like fishing hooks but with a crueller curve, the hooks surgeons use to tug catgut through an open wound—pierce my trousers and sink into my skin. Each hook is attached to a leader like the ones my father used to catch steelhead: braided wire, so the fish can’t rip through with their hacksaw teeth. My dream-skin tears easily. My flesh is chalky and full of holes, like Wonder bread. Still, nothing hurts too much and there is never any blood, a fact that seems more sinister when I’m awake.

  I begin to notice the other men around me—the generic Cataract City guys you see around. Their heads sprout like cabbages along the line. They’re talking over each other, babbling away.

  “… saw him down at the Hillcrest Tavern and knocked his dick in the dirt …”

  “… knocked her up and now she’s figuring to have the damn kid …”

  … gonna put a supercharger in it. It’ll blow your doors off, sonnyboy …”

  I try to remember just how I got there but the lines don’t meet up, the teeth don’t groove. How did this happen? The way everything does, I guess. One thing follows another, naturally.

  After my shift that night I met Edwina in the parking lot. She was heading inside dressed in flour-caked overalls and a hairnet but she was beautiful for all that—or more beautiful because of it. The lot lights burned against the night, making golden rings around her irises. I wanted to paw at her like a lusty dog but I knew she wouldn’t stand for that. She was older—as she often reminded me—and more experienced, as she also reminded me.

  “Your hands?” she asked, taking them into her own.

  “They’re going to have to come off, Ed,” I told her, fake-sad. “I’m cutting them off at the wrist.”

  “I’ll kiss them all better.”

  There were places in Cataract City where you could buy a cold beer at seven in the morning. Two blocks north on Lindy a sleepy-eyed Mexican was still serving icy Sols out of an orange picnic cooler; he could be handing me one in five minutes and I knew just what he’d say: Wrap your leeps around a cold one, partner.

  I was a working man, unlike a lot of guys my age—Owe, for one, who was off at college earning his police services diploma. So I drank, sure. Not
at campus bars where girls wore perfume that smelled like a Mounds bar. At the Double Aces and Blue Lagoon, where women sat with their elbows polishing the bar alongside the guys and everyone ordered “a shot and a Hed”: a shot of rail rye and a glass of Hedley Springs, cheapest beer on tap.

  A shot and a Hed, a shot and a Hed, a shot and a Hed, and you wake up feeling like you’ve been shot in the head!

  Instead I drove to the house Ed and I rented on Culp Street. I caught a whiff of vanilla—I’d spilled concentrate on my hand the other week on the Nilla Wafers line and the smell had crept under my skin. I smelled like a cookie, same as every other long-time stiff at the Bisk.

  Dolly met me at the door, her tail tucked between her legs. Dolly’s a greyhound. I found her in a Dumpster. I was fifteen, maybe. Sixteen?

  I’d been riding my bike to the Bisk; my dad had forgotten his lunchpail. The sun was just up, the city asleep. I was coasting past the Food Terminal when a cube van went screech-assing past, laying rubber. A couple of townies who had been ridding their guts of last night’s piss-up behind the supermarket, was my guess. I dropped Dad’s lunch off and rode back, slaloming lazily between the shopping carts in the Food Terminal lot. At first I thought the yips were just gravel popping under my tires. I braked, ears straining. Were they coming from the Dumpster?

  I cracked the lid and found two puppies on a flattened Del Monico tomato box. They mewled when the sunlight touched their skin. Another few hours and they would have broiled to death. They were so damn small; I remember feeling their heartbeats through their skin—or was that my own heartbeat pulsing in my hands?

  I can’t tell you why, exactly, I took them to Owen’s house.

  I showed up on his doorstep breathing hard from the ride. Sweat dripped off me in pints, which freaked me out because I was in Cardinal Gardens. The houses all looked pretty much the same, and they were real swish: the lawns a checkerboard green you could only get with a riding lawn mower, the bushes trimmed into leafy bells. I figured the Neighbourhood Watch was going to come along and say: Son, don’t you think you ought to bust your ass back to where you belong?

  I knew where Owe lived, even though we hadn’t talked for years, since the Mahoney thing. Our dads had made that choice. But by the time I showed up at Owen’s house I had my learner’s permit in my pocket and I even knew a guy, Slick, who’d buy me a six-pack of Black Label from the beer store (at double the retailer’s suggested price). All I’m saying is, I had some freedom—I didn’t always do what Dad said anymore.

  I popped the kickstand and shrugged off my backpack. The puppies were nestled on a bed of torn-up Pennysavers, the pack’s zipper halfway open so they could breathe.

  Mr. Stuckey answered the door. He wore a striped shirt with Pearlite buttons, and a slice of buttered toast was clamped between his teeth.

  “Good morning, Master Diggs,” he said around the toast, in an English-butler voice. “How ya been?”

  “Okay, Mr. Stuckey. Owe around?”

  For a sec I figured Mr. Stuckey was going to slam the door. I knew nobody would nominate me for sainthood but still, I’d never had the “bad influence” tag slapped on me. That was for guys like Sam Bovine, who’d been caught selling single pages of his father’s old fuck-book—The Well-Spanked Farm Girl—for a quarter a page. Adam Lowery had ratted Bovine out; Adam bought two pages and was pissed that all he got was four paragraphs about some chick milking cows and the autumn twilight settling across the prairies—but was it Bovine’s fault that a spank-book writer had literary dreams?

  “Come on in,” Mr. Stuckey said after forever.

  I waited in the hall, soaking up the air conditioning. The window unit at my house had gone balls-up that summer; we had a half-dozen fans stirring the humid air around. The backpack squirmed against my sweaty skin.

  Owe came downstairs rubbing sleep from his eyes. Last I’d seen him was about a year before. My dad had been driving me home from baseball practice and we saw him with some buddies. One guy had a crewneck sweater knotted around his neck.

  “Your old friend is palling around with yuppie twerps,” Dad said, frowning.

  Owe went to Ridley Academy, a private school. The school—sorry, the Acchaaaadhemy; in my head I always heard it spoken in a windbaggy British accent—had a fleet of rowing boats, called “sculls,” which the “oarsmen” raced at the Henley Regatta. I’d pictured Owe in one of those old-time rower’s getups: striped bathing suit like the ones women wore in the 1920s, a goofy straw hat perched on his head. Which I admit was a shitty thing to think. Could Owe help it if his folks could afford better?

  “What’s up?” he said.

  “Hey, man. Can we talk somewhere quiet?”

  Owe glanced over his shoulder, where his parents sat at the kitchen table pretending to read the newspaper. “Okay … downstairs.”

  The basement was unfinished. Dusty exercise equipment was heaped in a corner. Owe looked freaked. Did he think I was going to slug him, or confess I’d been having kinky dreams about him?

  I shrugged the backpack off and unzipped it.

  “Holy shit,” Owe said. “Where did you—?”

  “In the Dumpster behind the Food Terminal. Someone … they threw them out like trash, man.”

  The puppies were so small you couldn’t tell what breed they were: just wrinkly things with closed eyes. Their flopped-over ears were the size of fingernails and their paws were bright pink, like a human baby’s hands.

  “What should I do with them?”

  Owe said: “Keep them?”

  How could my parents say no? It wasn’t like I was begging for a dog from the pet store. This was more like a humanitarian intervention.

  “There’s two,” I said. “I was thinking maybe …”

  “I don’t know,” Owe said. “My folks …”

  “It’s okay,” said Owe’s mom, who’d crept down the stairs. “It’s the right thing to do.”

  After heeling off my workboots, I walked into our unlit kitchen. Dolly padded softly behind me. I set my lunchpail on the counter—it was my dad’s old pail, covered in Chiquita Banana stickers—opened the fridge, shook the milk carton. Only a few mouthfuls left; I gulped straight from the carton, bachelor-style. Then I tore rags of dark meat off a rotisserie chicken. Dolly ate them in that weird, gluttonous way dogs do: snapping her head back and flinging the meat down her throat.

  “You hog,” I said softly. She watched me, eyes shining in the fridge-light.

  I showered, towelled off, lay in bed. The clean light of morning pulsed behind the curtains. Dolly hopped up, settled her head on my hip. Her heart beat hard, driving the blood through her veins.

  Next week she’d race her first A-Class event. She was unbeaten in her career.

  And there was a part of me that really hoped she’d lose.

  You know when you’re driving on a hot day and there’s heat-shimmer on the road? As a kid you figure you’ll catch up to it if your folks drive fast enough. Eventually you realize it’s nothing that can be caught because it doesn’t stay put.

  A greyhound … now a greyhound will chase that shimmer until its heart explodes, and right up to that very moment it will believe, with every atom of its being, that it’ll catch the thing.

  They’re all muscle, greyhounds, all go fast muscle. Their legs are triple-jointed, and in full flight all twelve joints are at work: a smooth piston-like pump, pump, pump. Sometimes I figure it’s nothing but wind shear that keeps them on the ground, y’know? There is no other animal on earth whose skull looks more like it ought to be coming down the barrel of a gun.

  Racing greyhounds have got a heart the size of a fist, double the size of a Labrador retriever’s. But they’ve also got heart in the fighter’s sense: a greyhound’s got the deepest bucket of any dog. They’ll run themselves to death if you let them, because that’s what they want to do—what they’ve been made for. But to be a real runner means you must be faster than anything else … which means you’ve got to be forever al
one at the head of the pack.

  When pure racers spring from the starting traps and hit the straightaway, some of them whine. They’re going so fast that you might mistake the sound of their bodies slicing through space for that of a low-flying jet.

  A lot of people want a dog who is always happy to see them. Who’ll sit in their laps. But that’s not a fair hope with a greyhound. You’ve got an animal who is a Ferrari with a brick permanently weighting its gas pedal. The lives of greyhounds are all open stretches and endless horizons.

  Of course, neither Owe nor me knew a thing about greyhounds when we found them. And it was a steep learning curve. I mean, Jesus, how would we have known about milking a puppy? That’s what the veterinarian called it: milking.

  “They’ll have to accept milk that doesn’t come from their mother,” he told us as our puppies squirmed on his examination table. “They’re still whelps. You’ve got to feed them as their mother would.”

  He sent us home with Esbilac, a formula especially for pups. Dolly needed constant feeding. I’d be up at four in the morning when she whined in the shoebox beside my bed. I’d pluck her from her cotton-batten nest, feed her until she burped, and fall asleep until she whined again.

  “No eating my newspaper, no tearing up my carpet, no shitting on my floor” were the ground rules my dad laid out for the animal he called the Amazing Dumpster Dog.

  I named her Dolly. My great-grandmother’s name. She’d come up from the South, Mom said, to marry a man she’d fallen in love with at a revival gathering. When that love faded she’d met my great-grandfather, ditched the other guy, remarried, and that love stuck fast.

  “People didn’t get divorced back then,” Mom had told me. “Oh, god, it was the very mark of shame. But Dolly didn’t care. To hell with all that, she figured. It took guts.”

  My Dolly had guts, too. She’d been ripped away from her own mom and chucked in a Dumpster. For a few terrifying days she couldn’t keep the Esbilac down and became so weak she couldn’t stand. One morning I came downstairs to see a pale blue box on the kitchen table; it had once held a Hummel figurine my father had bought for Mom on a whim.