Cataract City

by Craig Davidson

  A gutshot feeling rocked me as I turned away soundlessly. I’d thought that, if anything, Ed was more suitable for me. Our families still lived on the same block. Our ambitions seemed more in keeping … But what the hell did I know of Ed’s ambitions? I felt like a creep, catching them. It reminded me of the night we’d spied on Ed in the bath with Tim Railsback.

  But I couldn’t help thinking: Hadn’t Owe already had enough goddamn good luck in his life?

  “You’re a good kisser,” I heard Ed say in a husky voice.

  Owe laughed, breathless. “Beginner’s luck?”

  When they came back outside I saw different things. In Ed I saw something more than simple lust. I got the sense that she had scared herself—as if she wanted to reach for Owe’s hand but didn’t quite dare.

  Owe looked bemused. As if he was thinking: Hey, that was pretty cool. Wouldn’t mind doing that again if I had a chance.

  One day, when Ed left us at the track to go to her job, we followed.

  This was almost a year after I’d seen her and Owe in the coatroom. Owe was in the midst of his breakout basketball season. The two of them weren’t dating, exactly—I don’t know who was keeping who at arm’s length, but I suspected it was Ed keeping Owe at bay. Or maybe I just wanted to believe that.

  She was working part-time at the Bisk. Ritz line. But she also worked at a bar. She wouldn’t tell us which one. So one night Owe and I followed her.

  “Why bother?” I’d asked him earlier.

  “She thinks we’re kids, Dunk. Screw that! I say we go cadge drinks off her.”

  We followed her in Owe’s father’s car, a late-model Olds. Ed’s Mercury Topaz went down Rickard to Ellesmere, turning left up Stanley to Lundy’s Lane. The night was cool with the smell of creosote and the hum of crickets.

  She pulled in at the Sundowner. She wore jeans ripped at the knee and an oversized Flashdance sweatshirt. She went in through a black door set into a dingy brick wall.

  “Huh” was all Owe said.

  The bouncer was a huge black man with a greying goatee. Seeing Owe, he mimed shooting a jump-shot. “You’re that boy with the sweet shot, am I right?” He ushered us inside without ID’ing us.

  The Sundowner existed in a purplish, glittering perma-twilight. Winking lights ran along the floor like the ones marking the edges of airport runways. The place was packed: well-heeled guys, construction workers, prowling sex tourists, college students nursing pitchers of twenty-dollar draft. An elevated stage swelled into a bulb, where a brass pole shone up to the ceiling. Half-naked women drifted around us like shimmery butterflies. I figured half the world’s supply of body glitter was concentrated right there.

  We lucked into a stageside table just as two other guys were leaving. There was a pit in the middle of the table where a girl would dance if you paid. A DJ’s voice piped up: “Gentlemen, put your hands together for Shah-Shah-Shah-Shasta!”

  The Scorpions’ “Rock You Like a Hurricane” blasted. A woman stepped through the tinsel curtain. She was gorgeous but clearly also drunk or stoned or both. She waggled her ass and stepped out of her bikini bottoms the way kids do: by yanking them down to her ankles and stomping until they came off. She strutted down the catwalk, skidded in her high heels, almost fell, didn’t fall, then tossed her hair around like a boat propeller. Her face was blank as a test pattern.

  “Yeeeeeah!” someone went.

  My mind spun: Ed might be the bartender, right? Or a waitress—and they didn’t take their clothes off, did they?

  A girl sat between us. Cute and thin with boobs that didn’t belong on a frame her size, drinking a Corona through a bendy straw. “Wanna dance, sweetheart? Champagne room. Fifty bucks each.”

  All I had in my wallet was seven dollars. I said, “You’re very pretty, but—”

  “Stow it,” she said. “It was a yes or no question.”

  She pulled a cigarette out of her purse. It was five inches long and looked like it would take a year to smoke.

  “Fucking hot in this sonofabitch,” she said, lighting it with a platinum Zippo. “I’m from the Sioux. Cooler up there.”

  “I’ve heard it’s nice.”

  “It’s a shithole. My ex is from the Sioux. He beat a man half to death with a skillet.” She batted her eyes, pixie-like. “A skillet, dude.”

  The DJ said: “Gentlemen, put your hands together and welcome to the stage Dah-Dah-Dah-Disneeeeeeee!”

  Edwina stepped through the tinsel. She knelt and placed her cigarettes and pack of Dentyne on the edge of the stage—would they have been stolen backstage, I wondered through my shock—and strutted down the stage with scissoring steps. The black lights shone on her legs, sleek as cobalt. She didn’t even see us. I’d heard what girls do at these places is pick a spot on the wall and focus on that. Who’d want to focus on all that desperate need howling up at them?

  Owe laughed—a brittle, brutal sound. It stole above the sound of Springsteen’s “Hungry Hearts.”

  Ed’s gaze snapped towards us. Her hands flew briefly to her mouth—then she hopped down nimbly, gave our ears vicious twists and marched us out.

  “Fucking hell, Ed!” Owe said. “That hurts!”

  The crowd catcalled as Ed bulled us through the club and out the front door. “You bastards!” she screamed, shoving us into the parking lot.

  I saw tears in Owe’s eyes but it was hard to tell if they were from his laughter or from Ed’s fingers: she’d pinched my ear so hard that a line of blood trickled down my jaw.

  “What the fuck, Lou?” she said to the bouncer. “You check ID or just stand there looking pretty?”

  Lou held his hands up. “Boss wants numbers, baby. Butts in seats.”

  She stood in the parking lot in a spangly G-string, a dental-floss bikini and teetery stripper heels. Tourists ambling down the strip stared pop-eyed.

  “You little pricks. This your idea of fun?” She got right up in Owe’s face, chest thrust forward. “This what you came to see?”

  Owe gripped Ed’s shoulders gently. It struck me as strange how high he loomed over her.

  “Listen, I’m sorry. I just … you said you were a bartender.”

  “I told you I worked at a bar,” she said fiercely. “I didn’t lie.”

  “I’m not saying you … I’m not angry, just surprised. You do whatever you want, Ed.”

  I saw terror leech into Edwina’s eyes—she could tell Owe meant it. He really didn’t care.

  “It’s a temporary thing.” The cups of her eyelids were brimming. I’d never known Ed to cry.

  Owe lifted his hands off her shoulders, holding them up like he was being threatened at gunpoint.

  “Ed, listen, I don’t know why you’re getting so upset. I’m sorry we came. That was wrong. I won’t do it again.”

  “I just don’t want you to think …” She brushed a palm across her eyes, smearing her mascara. “The Bisk … layoffs, okay? I was lowest on the totem pole. A girlfriend of mine used to dance here. She said … What the fuck?” She hammered a fist into Owe’s chest. “Why do I have to explain it? I didn’t want you to know because …” She threw her hands down her body, a taa-daa motion. Her lips were pressed tight, her chin dimpled like a golf ball. “You know? It’s nothing. Doesn’t mean that I don’t …”

  She looked at me with pleading hopefulness, as if I might know what to say. And I’d have done anything for her if I’d only known what she could possibly need.

  “Ed, it’s cool,” Owe said. “It’s aaall cool, yeah? Me and Dunk are gonna go now. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  Her jaw went hard, like she was struggling not to say the word. But she did. “Promise?”

  Afterwards Owe drove to Queenston, to a footbridge that arced out over the river. Clouds of midges gathered under the bridge lamps.

  “It’s not such a big deal,” I said.

  “Not really,” he agreed. “Did it surprise you all that much?”

  “Sure it did.”

  In time he said:
“Okay, me too. But … did you see that scar on her stomach?”

  I’d seen it. A twisting milky thread rising above the hem of her G-string like a cobra from a fakir’s basket.

  “She had a kid a few years ago,” Owe said. “C-section.”

  “She did? With who?”

  “Not my business.”

  I wondered if Ed had tried to make it his business, share that secret part with him. Maybe he’d told her not to bother. He’d have put it in gentle terms, but still he would’ve said it.

  “She gave it up for adoption. Hasn’t seen the baby since.”

  I said, “Does it matter?”

  Owe’s blue eyes glittered like the moonlit water along the quay. “Does what matter?”

  “That she had a kid. That she gave it up.”

  “That’s her thing. Y’know, I just want what makes her happy. I’m out of here soon,” he said. “Scholarship offers pouring in. Once I sit down with Coach and make that choice, I’m gone. A vapour trail. Hasta la vista, Cataract City. Ed’s smarter than you and me put together, Dunk.”

  It was true. But even back then I knew that intelligence and hope run on different rails. Ed was a relic of Owe’s old life: back when he was Dutchie, not Dutch. He was becoming something else. His body moved with new smoothness, joints lubricated by the magical oil of self-confidence. He was coming into his own while Ed remained what she was: a tough girl from a rough brood whose body moved like pure sex under the black lights.

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out a piece of newsprint. I’d unfolded and refolded it so often that the paper was splitting at the edges. I showed Owe the For Sale ad circled in red ink. “Honda CB550 motorcycle,” I said. “Hundred K on the odometer, but Hondas run forever. Five hundred bucks.”

  A smile creased the deeply tanned skin around Owe’s eyes. “Where would you go, Dunk?”

  “Don’t know.” Away wasn’t a place so much as a goal, was it? “It would be nice to motorvate, you know? Yesterday is history, tomorrow’s a mystery.”

  I wanted Owe to know there were a million ways out. That I could do it, too. But then I had a sudden vision of myself as I knew I’d be in a few years—a vision of such unflinching truth that my mind settled around it with shocking ease: I was sitting at some local wet-spot, the Four Hearts or The Gate. My legs were kicked out, toes pointing up, and I slumped in my seat, mimicking the way men sat around here—each of us carving his little plot. I wore overalls dusted with flour from the Bisk. My hair was clipped short and was white at the roots. I was drinking a Hed and a shot, smoking counterfeit cigarettes. My wife worked at the Bisk, too. For a holiday we’d rent a room at the Mist-Eye Motel on the other side of the river; we’d swim in the unnaturally blue pool wearing the irregular bathing suits from the factory outlet centres on Military Road. When the sky was clear we’d be able to see back across the river and catch a glimpse of our own fucking house.

  I said: “I’m glad you’re going, Owe. Not glad-glad, but …”

  You can’t hate your best friend for taking the opportunities he’d been given. That would be the worst sort of hate, wouldn’t it? Because it would mean you hate yourself, too.

  After that night, I saw less of Owe for a while. It was a familiar drift—we’d done that slow fade out of each other’s lives before. The first time, our fathers had instigated it; this time it felt more natural. It’s weird how two guys can grow up on the same street and share the same everyday sights, sit in the same classrooms with the same teachers, roam the same woods, like the same girls … then one zigs, the other zags, and soon enough they’re strangers to each other.

  But you have to understand this: Cataract City is possessive. The city has a steel-trap memory, and it holds a grudge.

  Nothing that grows here is ever allowed to leave.

  On the night that changed Owe’s future, Edwina found me in the lunchroom at the Bisk. I was a trainee by then, working on the line with my old man. The two of us were sitting next to the Coke machine, eating the PB-and-banana sandwiches Mom had packed.

  “Mr. Diggs,” Ed greeted my father.

  Dad knew about the Jezebel business but had never held it against Ed. We could tell by her face that something real bad must’ve happened.

  “Dunk, it’s Owe. He’s in the hospital.”

  A bite of sandwich stuck in my throat, dry as wormy wood. “What?”

  She squeezed her eyes shut. “I don’t know … my friend’s the intake nurse at Niagara Gen. She called to say he’s been admitted.”

  I set a land-speed record driving my dad’s pickup to the hospital. Owe was laid out on a bed with his right leg elevated in a contraption whose many braces, straps, pulleys and lacings drove a spike of dread into me. His mom sat beside the bed in her nurse’s whites.

  “He called out for you,” she said to Ed, her eyes dull with shock. “I dropped the dosage. He surfaced for a minute. He called for me, for his dad … and for you.”

  Two bags of fluid hung on a metal pole and drip-drip-dripped down a tube into a needle poked into his arm. Owe’s right knee was black and swollen to twice its size: it had a rotten shine to it, like the skin of a fruit that’s about to split apart and leak its insides. The kneecap was swivelled so that it now sat under his leg like a giant tumour.

  He’ll never play basketball on that knee again was my first thought. My second was: Never walk properly, either.

  Ed cupped Owe’s face. His eyelids fluttered.

  “Whoa, Nelly,” he said with a loopy smile. “I got a doozy of a lump, huh?”

  “What happened?” I said.

  His endless smile terrified me. “I was coming out of the A.N. Myer gym—playing some pickup, right? Walking down O’Neil to the bus stop, dribbling my ball … This car or truck or I don’t know what …”

  He swallowed. His throat made a dry click. Edwina gave him water to sip through a straw.

  “… this car skipped the curb and whap!” Owe clapped his hands with sudden violence. The sound ricocheted off the eggshell walls. “Then whoosh. Guess they drove off. I heard … laughing? Laughing, man.”

  He licked his lips and stared at the wreckage of his leg. His worry seemed mild at best; whatever was dripping into his veins spared him the full extent of the horror.

  Ed took his hand. “It’ll be—”

  Owe snatched his hand back with casual brutality. “Gonna need a cane, man!” he said in a druggy singsong. “Gonna need a solid gold caaaane to get me down the street!”

  By the time he passed out again I was already moving out the door.

  I’d kill them.

  A curtain of blood had dropped over my vision. It was all I could see, all I could smell.

  I drove. Edwina sat in the passenger seat. At first I’d told her not to come but she refused to listen. Fair enough. She deserved blood as much as I did.

  She said, “You know who did it?”

  “I have an idea.”

  “You know why?”

  “No good reason.”

  “Drive faster.”

  “You gonna pay the fucking ticket, Ed?”

  I knew where they drank: the Gunnery, a dive on Dorchester. I knew because everyone knew where everyone else did their drinking in this city. You pick your watering hole and cling to it the rest of your life like a drowning rat to a bit of Styrofoam bobbing in the sewer.

  I doused the headlights as I turned into the lot and parked next to Adam Lowery’s shitbox Tercel. The thing shone like fresh blood in the moonlight, drops of water drying on its hood. He’d probably gone to the Coin-Op carwash on Philbrook and given it a good scrub. The front bumper was crushed on the passenger’s side. I pictured Lowery flipping on the high beams at the last instant, pinning Owe in the glare.

  The Gunnery hosted some rough customers. The Murphy boys bent their elbows there. The chimes above the door tinkled as I stepped through, Ed right behind me. Her brothers gave her confused smiles from their corner table. Beer-warped floorboards creaked under my feet. The
Rock-Ola jukebox was playing a Smiths tune.

  Clyde Hillicker turned on his stool, squaring his shoulders. The curtain of blood darkened until I could see only his outline like a charcoal etching on the sidewalk.

  I cut fast across the distance between us. Clyde threw a punch that caught me on the neck with a flat smack like a double-cut pork chop slapped on a marble slab. I stepped through it and lowered my head, bringing my right hand up from below my belt.

  I won’t claim it was a thing of charm or grace. It was a mean punch, a pure ugly one, and I summoned it from the blackest depths of my soul.

  It clocked Clyde on the chin. He fell and his skull hit the rail with a sweaty thud as my momentum carried me over his sagging body into the bar. Nobody offered to pick him up.

  Ed slit her eyes at her brothers and mouthed, Where?

  Her eldest brother hooked his thumb at the toilets, smiling out the side of his mouth. Ed grabbed a pool cue from the rack and crept to the men’s door.

  “Any of you see Adam Lowery,” I said loud enough so he’d hear, “tell him we have issues to discuss.”

  I booted the bar door open but stayed inside the bar. The chimes tinkled as the door closed.

  Adam Lowery cracked the bathroom door a titch and poked his head out. Ed swung the cue into his face. It landed flush, shattering his nose. Adam squawked; his hands flew up as he fell back through the door. The Murphy brothers laughed.

  Ed followed Adam into the bathroom, hitting him with the cue as the door swung back and forth on its bat-wing hinges. Adam was on the floor with his hands up to ward off the blows, but then his hands fell and the cue broke and she went to work with her feet. The door stopped swinging. Ed didn’t step out for a while. Adam was lucky Ed was wearing flip-flops.

  She came out breathing heavily. Her brothers offered a round of applause as if she’d finally fulfilled her familial obligations.