Cataract City

by Craig Davidson

  They sat in the water, Ed between Tim’s parted legs. A dull surge of jealousy washed through me. The knobs of Tim’s knees rose above the tub like whitened stadium domes. His hands moved over Ed’s body without settling anywhere. His expression held many things: sadness and queasy expectancy, regret, hopefulness.

  “What is it?” Ed said.

  “It’s just … it’s happening real fast.”

  Ed laughed. “It’s okay, boy. We don’t need to do anything.”

  Ed was the kind of girl who’d call grown men boys. Me and Owe stood trembling, our eyes shining in the doorway. Ed turned her head until her face met Tim’s. Something in her eyes said Don’t make me ask for it. Just tell me.

  Tim said, “I love you.”

  And he must have. Almost everyone who spent any time with Ed came to love her. It made her careless, the way people can be when such a hard-won thing is given over so effortlessly. But I think she loved him, too, at least in that moment. Ed needed a lot of love—but she’d give it, too.

  None of us heard the garage door. Owe and I barely heard the back door shut, and the warning gave us just enough time to dash back to his room and dive under the sheets.

  Ed and Tim weren’t so lucky. Owe’s folks caught them bare-ass. In my house! Under MY roof! Owe’s mom shooed them out, cursing as they fled into the night. Tim wore only his underwear; he left his Letterman jacket on a bathroom hook.

  Of course Owe’s mom called my mom and related the sordid tale. Which is how Ed became the Jezebel.

  That night at Owe’s was the last time I’d see Edwina until the afternoon years later, on the corner of Harvard and Brian, when she stood in front of me cradling Dolly in her arms.

  “You got to keep an eye on this one.” She tsked, handing the dog over as Owe rounded the corner with Frag.

  “Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber,” Ed said. “You two still attached at the hip? And you’ve bought matching dogs, too. How cute.”

  Owe said, “Dunk found them in a Dumpster.”

  This set Ed back for a beat. Then she said, “Who says you can’t find treasure in the trash? You ought to take them to Derby Lane, see if they can run.” She rubbed her thumb and fingers together, giving us the international sign for moolah. “You could be sitting on a mint. I know a guy there, Harry Riggins. Runs the kennels. He can tell you if they’re any good and if not, hey! Still one hell of a pet.”

  The Derby Lane racetrack was a lot like Tinglers, the porno shop on Leeming Street—I mean, everyone knew it was there but only a certain type of guy actually went.

  Derby Lane had been around since the seventies. As my dad said: “Used to be an okay fallback if you were looking to wager a few bucks on animals running in circles and didn’t have the energy to make it down to Fort Erie to catch the ponies.”

  But with the casino going up on the Boulevard with its tinkle-tinkle of one-armed bandits and $5.99 buffet, the dog track was dead as disco. It only attracted the saddest of the sad, lonely old men in shiny-elbowed blazers and Florsheim shoes that had been stylish forty years ago. It was the sort of place that mocked the very idea of luck; even if you won, it was by Derby Lane standards, which meant parlaying a 100-to-1 shot into a measly payoff.

  Me and Owe showed up on a Sunday morning. Sam Bovine dropped us off in his dad’s old hearse—he was an apprentice mortician by then, a calling that I thought didn’t suit him but that Bovine embraced with gusto.

  “I’d stay,” he said, “but I’ve got to get back to the stiffs or else they may wander away, Living Dead–style.”

  Owe said, “Three’s a crowd, anyway.”

  Bovine bristled. “Ah, screw you two. And screw your dogs, too. Get them out of the casket croft—they’re stinking up the upholstery.”

  We waved as Bovine swept the hearse around in a wide arc, flipping us the bird as he tooled off. We walked the dogs across the lot, which was empty except for one ancient pickup truck. The sun glinted off metal flarings outlining the park’s dingy marquee. As we passed the pickup truck I noticed the bed was carpeted with dried-up dog turds. They looked like stubbed cigars.

  We walked through the Winning Ticket Lounge, crossing a threadbare paisley carpet that gave off the stink of fry oil and wet dog. We passed down a line of ancient Silver Chief penny-slots, most of them unplugged, cords wrapped around the levers.

  “Our family came here for Chipped Beef Friday,” I said. “Before, y’know, the kitchen got shut down. Roaches? Mice? I think roaches.”

  Huge windows smudged with oily fingerprints overlooked the track. Ashtrays were set into the armrests of the gallery seats. The track itself was an oval surrounded by billboards for the Flying Saucer restaurant, Murphy’s Pegleg Tavern and other local haunts.

  We made our way to the track. Litter drifted around the empty risers. Dolly strained at her leash as we crossed to the far left of the track, passing a row of metal boxes with a swinging grate attached overtop. The starting boxes?

  The kennels were in a boxcar-shaped building with tin siding. I remember thinking that it must get deadly hot come summertime. Owe knocked. When nobody answered he toed the door open.

  The howls began at once—like a dozen busted foghorns going off. The kennel was bright white, clean and well lit. Industrial fans rotated above the dog pens. To the left was a deep basin sink and a big steel hook hung with leather leashes. Beside it was a hamper of dog muzzles and another of neatly folded racing jerseys.

  A man entered through a side door, yelling, “Shush it! Shush!” He was in his late seventies, short and pot-bellied, wearing carpenter’s overalls and orange galoshes.

  Edwina followed him, waving sunnily. “Here’s the Bobbsey Twins!”

  The old man ambled over and stuck out his hand. “Harry Riggins at your service, boys.” He edged his glasses up his nose. His eyes were watery behind thick, scratched lenses. “I take care of the dogs. Feed ’em, exercise ’em. I also work the mechanical hare on race nights. You know much about greyhounds?”

  “They run pretty fast,” Owe said.

  “They can run, that they can.” Harry knelt, opened Frag’s mouth and ran one squared-off finger along his gums. His other fingers roamed up Frag’s face and opened his eyelids. “Eeesh. Too much pressure behind this one’s eyes. Makes them bulge out. Quirk of the breed. You happen to know their bloodlines?”

  I said, “I found them in a Dumpster.”

  “Oh,” Harry said. “That does happen. Some trainers … goddamn slugs.”

  Ed said briskly, “Well, let’s see if these mutts got any pep in their step.”

  The dog runs were hundred-yard-long fenced enclosures laid out behind the kennels. Greyhounds dashed down the nearest run, skidding to a stop at the fence before barrelling back the other way.

  Harry said, “Let’s put your two in with this wild bunch, see if they can ruck in.”

  Frag and Dolly tried to join the racing pack. Almost immediately they got tangled up and hit the fence; the chain-link made a strained musical note as it was stretched back against the posts—phimmmm!—like an overtuned banjo string. They tumbled across the dirt, scrambled to their feet and raced to rejoin the dogs.

  “Yikes,” said Ed.

  “They’re young yet,” Harry said. “The bitch seems game.”

  I didn’t like Harry calling Dolly a bitch. He didn’t mean anything by it—I knew that, technically, it described what she was—but the term put a burr under my ass.

  I’d never seen Dolly running with a greyhound other than Frag. Now I observed how muscle was packed in fat balls where her chest met her front legs. She ran with abandon: legs outflung, mouth wide open in the closest thing to a smile that a dog can manage.

  “They ain’t much as pets,” Harry told us. “Lap dogs, I mean. You probably figured that out already. Looking to sell them? Probably get a couple hundred for the bitch. The male’s more of a giveaway.”

  “They don’t want to sell, Harry,” said Ed. “They want to race.”

  Har
ry cocked his head at Ed. Stubble glittered along his jaws like flaked mica.

  “Come on now, Edwina.” He turned to us. “You just finished telling me you aren’t any kind of dogmen, right?”

  “We’ve never raced dogs,” I admitted.

  Harry said, “Then I’d urge you to sell. Still some decent dogmen at this track. They’ll treat the nippers well enough, maybe even turn the bitch into a decent B-leveller … Could you really want to keep them as pets?”

  Ed said, “Harry, why not let’s just see what these dogs have got?”

  He looked leery but said, “For you, darlin’? Anything.”

  Minutes later Harry met us at the track. Leashed at his side was a young greyhound with a coffee-cake coat.

  “Steadfast Attila,” he told us. “I didn’t name him. He’ll race in D-Class soon. That’s the lowest level at the Lane. Attila’s a stayer—he’ll race right to the line.”

  Harry left Steadfast Attila with Ed and approached the mechanical hare. It wasn’t a hare at all—just a ratty teddy bear lashed to a five-foot buggywhip pole. Harry pulled a squeeze bottle out of his overall pocket and sprayed down the bear.

  “Rabbit piss,” he said. “Don’t ask how I get it.”

  We led the dogs over to the hare and let them take a sniff. Steadfast Attila started pogo-sticking on his hind legs. Fragrant Meat sat on his haunches and gnawed on his own ass.

  “That’s not an encouraging sign, son,” Harry told Owe.

  Dolly just cocked her head at the hare, and I figured she knew exactly what it was: a piss-soaked teddy bear on a pole.

  Fragrant Meat raced Steadfast Attila first. Owe and I lined up the dogs at the start line. Steadfast Attila barked madly, screwing his haunches into the dirt. Fragrant Meat flattened himself out with his tail straight as a ramrod.

  Harry hauled himself into the operator’s seat. “When it gets thirty yards out, let ’em go.”

  The mechanical hare zizzed down the rail, spitting blue sparks. The dogs tore off, kicking clods of dirt back into our faces. Fragrant Meat’s rear legs had a noticeable sideways kick. Steadfast Attila worked the outside edge, his brindle coat a beautiful brownish blur against the rust-coloured dirt.

  Fragrant Meat held the lead when they hit the turn, but Steadfast Attila pulled into a dead heat around the hundred-yard mark and outdistanced Frag down the stretch. Frag kicked hard to the finish, though; there wasn’t an ounce of quit in that dog.

  “I don’t like to dismiss dogs on their first offering, but he’s got the sidewinder legs,” Harry said to Owe, a doctor delivering sad news.

  “Sidewinder legs?”

  “It’s like hip dysplasia,” Harry told him. “There may not be a lot on your dog, but greyhounds are like precision instruments—even a little is too much when you’re talking about races won by a fraction of a second.” He clapped Owe’s shoulder companionably. “The boy’s got sass. But it’s like running with a clubfoot.”

  “He does have sass,” Owe said. “He ran his guts out.”

  “A good dog only loses because his body can’t compete,” said Harry. “That’s the difference between greyhounds and men—a man’s mind’ll fold, even if he’s got all the tools to win. Some say a dog won’t quit just because dogs are dumb animals. I don’t subscribe to that theory.”

  Harry lashed a fresh teddy to the whip. He had a burlap sack full of them: teddy bears and rabbits, pigs and penguins. “I get them from a carnival supply company,” he said. “Used to go to the Goodwill but they’d give me weird looks.”

  He led Steadfast Attila to the kennels and returned with a fawn-coloured greyhound who walked with the high, hopping gait of a show horse.

  “Trix Matrix,” he said. “Didn’t come up with that name, either. I call her Trixy. She’s earmarked for great things, I’m told. She’ll earn foreign interest—some of our best dogs are bought by Irish breeders to run at the top tracks overseas.”

  Harry led Trixy over to Dolly. The dogs stood nose to nose. Dolly nuzzled her snout into Trixy’s throat. Trixy snapped at Dolly, who whipped her head aside to avoid Trixy’s canines, dancing back, paws stuttering as if the ground was hot as glowing coals.

  “She’s got moxie,” Harry said, a smile touching the edges of his mouth. “But plenty of scrubbers do.”

  Dolly toed the line beside Trixy. She stood stock-still, rear legs flared, front paws spaced with one slightly in front of the other. Her pulse raced under my fingertips. She looked back at me with a quizzical expression. You don’t have to hold me so tight, the look seemed to say.

  When the hare raced down the rail, Trixy bolted—god, that dog could boogie. You didn’t have to know much about greyhounds to see she was a true racer: the fibre of her being spoke through her running form.

  And Dolly? Well, Dolly just stood there.

  “Girl?” I whispered.

  Then I felt the run building inside her body: all the little parts gathering momentum, energy coursing through her skin. It was like a giant muscle contracting before it flexed into action. Her entire body recoiled—legs pistoning backwards, haunches dipping low—and there was this awesome tension, every fast-twitch muscle committed to the goal of forward motion. Then she was gone.

  At first Dolly’s strides were clipped and violent, paws churning up chunks of dirt until she hit the seventy-yard mark. There she lengthened out into a powerful running motion, her streamlined skull bobbing with each stride.

  Trixy ran high, head up, spine bowed. Dolly ran low: head on the same plane as her shoulders, spine prone, slicing through the air like a ballistic missile. She managed to get the same leg-spread as Trixy, though, with her lower gait: her legs scissored under her, tucked paws brushing her belly before they jackknifed out again, barely grazing the dirt.

  Trixy held the inside position when they hit the turn; she angled her shoulder towards the rail, steering like a stock car around a high-banked oval. Dolly’s paws skidded for purchase as she muscled herself back into position, her shoulder colliding with Trixy’s; their heads came together, teeth flashing, fighting with each other even as they fought desperately for position.

  They raced round the bend. Me, Ed and Owe ran to the rail. The dogs were so close that I couldn’t separate one from the other: there was just an elongated shape, two dogs fused together. They disappeared behind the tote board.

  They shrieked around the turn and hit the final stretch. Dolly had flared out to the right, far from the rail, meaning she’d have to cover more ground. Trixy pounded down the track, head upflung, mouth open and tendons flexed down her throat and across her brisket: she looked like she was screaming. Dolly’s legs pumped so hard it was like watching a machine reaching the point of failure, spindles trembling as it threatened to fling itself to pieces. A red berry was splotched on her coat—Trixy must have bitten her hard enough to draw blood.

  They tore down the homestretch. Dolly angled across the track, closing in at the rail. Her form was slipping: her front legs speared wide as her head jerked up and down. Still, she drew even with about forty yards to go. Trixy kept pace for another ten yards before Dolly blazed past with a vicious finishing kick, accelerating over the line.

  Harry ambled down from the operator’s box. He scratched his belly through his overalls and smiled in the way old men do when they see something fresh and exciting—with an element of bewilderment.

  “She’s a real dandy, son. And what a low drinker.”

  “Low drinker?”

  “Old dogman’s saying,” Harry told me, “for a dog that goes down real deep in their running stance, so low their belly’s almost dragging the dirt. They look like they’re crouched by the river lapping up water.”

  Ed slapped my back. “Looks like you won the lottery.”

  When I went to pick up Dolly she was hopping around, favouring one of her paws.

  “What is it, girl?”

  She whined thinly, babying her paw in that confused way animals do, as if they can’t quite believe their bodies m
ight break down or fail. She’d run so hard that sand was compacted between her paw-pads. Must’ve hurt like hell.

  “It happens when they start racing,” Harry told me. “Buy a bottle of Tuf-Foot—it’ll harden them right up.” And he suggested I take her to the vet.

  When the vet instructed me to help Dolly onto the examining table, she buried her snout into the soft spot between my clavicle and neck. Her breath had the ironlike tang of raw liver, which I took to be the smell of pure animal fear. She shook when the vet flushed her paw with peroxide, but she didn’t nip—just beheld him with tragic, injured eyes.

  The Tuf-Foot worked. Dolly never had that problem again. But I was worried, and that worry never did go away.

  Every time Dolly raced she’d enter the zone, the same as Owe did on a basketball court. And like he said, human beings aren’t meant to exist there for too long. Why should dogs be any different?

  But it was Dolly’s element, you know? Blazing down the track so fast her skin must’ve screamed. She was happiest there.

  Owe and I became fixtures around the kennels. We’d help Harry sweep out the cages and dole out kibble. There was a fair amount of turd collection, too—it required a wheelbarrow and a shovel. In return, Dolly and Frag got to run with the others. They’re group animals, greyhounds; they do best in a pack.

  Sometimes Harry let them rip around the oval. Frag was a scrubber—damn those sidewinder legs. Still, that dog loved to run. Dolly was something else. She had the gift, Harry said. But after seeing her almost self-destruct in that first test against Trixy, I worried a little about racing her seriously—and anyhow, I couldn’t legally register as her owner until I was nineteen, since Derby Lane was a wagering circuit.

  This was how Ed fell back into our lives, too—fell into Owe’s life, specifically. Something kindled between them. I don’t know how it began, but by the time I found out, it was blazing hot.

  One night I came off the track into the Winning Ticket Lounge. It was empty, but I heard soft noises from the coatroom. I walked over expecting to find the janitor. Instead, Owe and Ed were pawing each other in the gloom. Owe was taller by then; his shoulders jingle-jangled on the empty hangers, a strangely musical sound. His hands cupped Ed’s breasts forcefully, pressing her up against the plywood wall. Ed’s eyes were closed and her hands were clenched in Owe’s hair and her tongue was in his mouth.