Cataract City

by Craig Davidson

  We sprinted after her. There was nothing but brush and long grass for two miles until you hit the canal. My feet flashed over sedge and crabgrass as the clouds thickened and night came down. To the north the skyway bridge bent against the sky, pale sunlight winking off its spine. I splashed through puddles shimmering with gasoline rainbows—the land had once been a dumpsite and old poisons were still bubbling up.

  I became aware of all the little noises around and inside of me: blood rushing in my ears like a buried river, the hot thrum of crickets in the grass, the ongoing cree-cree-cree of starlings and somewhere, far away, a barking dog—but not Dolly.

  Edwina and I split up. She went in the direction of the bridge, I went south towards the subdivisions edging Queen Street. My limbs had loosened and I ran in an easy rhythm, making small adjustments, relaxing my shoulders and swinging my head side to side to scan for encouraging signs.

  I was ninety-nine percent positive I’d find her; then ninety-eight percent. Soon a persistent doubt burrowed under my skin like a chigger. I knew there are holes buried in the fabric of every ordinary day that can swallow you up. My feet flashed over the darkening earth as I hunted, finding nothing but coils of rusted metal and the shattered bottoms of old soda bottles that shone from the ground like huge glass eyes. Blisters burst on my heels, shooting waves of coin-bright pain up the backs of my calves. I was nearly hyperventilating, but this had nothing to do with exhaustion. Part of my concern was generalized: Dolly was a dumb dog and she was lost and probably didn’t know it yet. And part of my fear was particular: Dolly was more than just a dog. Dolly had become our dog, a special dog.

  Water ran darkly down a narrow streambed. The light of a fresh moon winked where it rippled around the rocks. I strained my ears, hoping a telling sound might separate itself from the maddening noises of nature. When none did I picked a clumsy path across the stream. My shoes slipped on a wet rock and I plunged into the knee-deep water. The chill crawled up my legs and thighs past my balls to my gut, where it collided with the fear, shattering into silvery minnows that zipped around my belly.

  She’s gone, said a voice inside my head—a terrible, nasty voice that I hadn’t heard since I’d been lost in the woods with Owe.

  It happens. Things you love fall off the face of the earth. Nobody ever knows what became of them. And that would be worse, I thought, than if Dolly were to die. At least then we’d know she was gone. Lost is an infinitely more terrible idea. Lost was the most unsolvable puzzle: a mess of possible outcomes like a movie missing its final reel.

  “Dolly! DOLLY!”

  I crashed through the underbrush, branches gouging my rib cage and nettles raking my face, eyes burning in my sockets like heated ball bearings. The fear shot through me now, bright green and juicy-bitter as the chlorophyll in an April leaf. My dog was gone. Ed and me had been talking, in a not-so-serious but sort-of-serious way, about having a kid. How could we, when we couldn’t even keep a dog safe?

  The trees opened onto a strip of concrete along the canal. Wilderness gave way to civilization, that abrupt mash-up that sometimes happens in cities. My eyes scanned frantically but twigged on nothing more than the sidewinder movement of a snake sweeping upriver against the current. Squares of light burned along the escarpment. The moon shot veins of white across the water. I smelled summer in the air, wood resin and horsehair and the greasy smell of barbecue briquettes bursting into flame.

  I moved west or maybe north, disoriented for the first time since that night with Bruiser Mahoney. As I walked along the salt-whitened quay my mind drifted for an instant—one of those instants big enough to hold your entire life. I saw how a city could sink into you, trapping its pulsing heart inside your own heart—except it never feels like a trap. A trap snags you out of nowhere, violently and without warning. But I knew every inch of my trap, didn’t I? I knew the dirt path that led down under the Whirlpool Bridge to a fishing hole stocked with hungry bass. How to jump off the old train trestle in Chippewa and hit the rip of slack water so I could paddle safely to shore. Cataract City was like those fur-covered handcuffs you could get at Tinglers—Ed had come home with a pair of them after a stagette party, embroidered with the phrase Prisoner of Love. The city of your birth was the softest trap imaginable. So soft you didn’t even feel how badly you were snared—how could it be a trap when you knew its every spring and tooth?

  I heard it then: a thin whine drifting across the water. At first I mistook it for the sound of my own wheezy breaths rolling across the water only to hit some unseen barrier and rebound back. My feet stuttered to a halt and I held my breath. There—the sound was hidden somewhere within a stand of pines canted at a crooked angle where the quay crumbled into the canal.

  I picked down the incline, pine sap smeared on my palms and the rustlings of the timber above, stiff-arming through snarled branches to the polished rocks gleaming at the shore.

  Oh, Dolly. She stood at the water’s edge stamping her feet. She dipped one paw and withdrew it, growling restlessly.

  It dawned on me: she was upset that it stopped her from going forward.

  I crept to her quietly, certain that she’d bolt. Ten feet … seven … five … She turned, but I’d already hemmed her in: rocks to each side, water behind her.

  “It’s okay, baby. It’s just me.”

  Her haunches dipped and she began to shake. I grabbed her collar in one hand and wrapped the other around her neck. When I felt her in my arms I reared back and swatted her backside.

  “Bad dog. Bad.”

  It was the first and only time I’d ever hit her. And I knew it was wrong of me. She’d only taken advantage of an opportunity that any dog would. I hadn’t struck her out of anger, but just to burn off that pent-up fear.

  Dolly shivered against me. Her flesh pressed to mine, but I realized with a small shock that there was no real closeness—a wall had been set between us, thin as crepe paper but solid as brick.

  Later, as a weary and relieved Ed and I watched Dolly run laps in her sleep, I wondered, What do greyhounds dream about? Endless open fields, I supposed. Escape velocities. I thought of those Russian dogs in the satellite. I knew that if Dolly had been in that satellite, she wouldn’t have felt a shred of fear. She’d have experienced speed at its purest, a gravitational pull slingshotting that satellite around the curve of the earth fast enough to make it glow hot. I pictured Dolly in the cockpit as she hurtled into deep space. Loving it. And that scared me.

  Dolly’s spirits were high the night of the race. So much so that she got into Ed’s purse and chewed up a tube of her mascara.

  “Holy shit!” I said when I spotted the ragged black ring around her lips, teeth black as stalactites.

  “She’s full of beans,” Edwina said, wiping Dolly’s mouth with a paper towel.

  “What’s in that stuff? Could it make her sick … could it make her slow?”

  “Take a pill, Dunk. The tube was nearly empty.”

  We arrived after eight o’clock. Owe was waiting in the parking lot with an envelope full of cash. The two of us had gone to the bank earlier that day to make our withdrawals. The teller had wetted her fingertips with a sponge in a dish and counted the bills with sleepy eyes, as though she worked with that kind of money all the time.

  A silver pickup pulled up beside us. Drinkwater got out with a large man wearing engineer’s overalls. He shot Dolly a look. “She looks like shit—been eating it?”

  The mascara had left a dirty ring around Dolly’s mouth. Ed smiled cheerily and said, “Go fuck yourself.”

  Drinkwater smiled back. “Ooh, a smart-mouthed bitch from Cataract City. Never seen one of you before.”

  Owe and Ed and I took Dolly inside. The Winning Ticket was shuttered, the stands empty. Spotlights shone down on the groomed dirt. Harry waved at us from the kennels.

  “I dragged the smoother around twice,” he said. “The track’s pristine. Where’s Drinkwater?”

  “Out in the parking lot.”

  Ha
rry’s brow creased. “Go on, take Dolly in back. I’ll be with you directly.”

  We took Dolly to the prep room, where Ed babied her onto the scale. I considered writing her weight on her Bertillon card, but why bother? This evening’s event was like a pro boxer fighting a bare-knuckle match in a parking garage.

  When Harry showed up, he paced the length of the prep room and said, “Did you keep an eye on Drinkwater in the parking lot? You got to mind that man, didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I?”

  “What’s the matter?” I said.

  “The man’s got no care for his dogs. They’re just motors to be gunned until they conk out. I already told you about the hot peppers, but there’s other tricks. One is using that boner pill, what’s it called?”

  Owe said, “Viagra?”

  Harry snapped his fingers. “The very thing. Stuff one of those down a dog’s throat and it’ll get the heart racing, open up the blood vessels and give it extra pace down to the wire.”

  “Drinkwater’s in the parking lot feeding his dog Viagra?” said Owe.

  Harry said, “I took a peek in the lot and the two of them, him and his buddy, they weren’t feeding that dog anything. I do believe they were injecting it.”

  “Jesus,” Owe said softly. “So what—bet’s off?”

  Harry offered his palms. “You got no grounds to welsh. No drug tests before or after. All you got are the suspicions of a half-blind old man.”

  We met on the track. Drinkwater’s associate looked exactly like the sort of man who’d inject Viagra into a dog. War Hammer stood at the man’s side, body flexed tight as a railroad tie, unblinking, nostrils dilated, breath coming in whimpering gasps.

  We loaded the dogs into the traps. War Hammer in trap 1, Dolly in 5. Drinkwater gave me a queer look: the outside trap meant Dolly needed to cover more ground. War Hammer went into her trap robotically—she looked as if she might explode like a firecracker inside a tin can.

  We retreated to the spectators’ rail while Harry climbed up the operator’s box. The mechanical hare warmed up, sparks popping off the electrified rail. I tasted it in the back of my mouth, sharp as ozone.

  The hare sped off. At the thirty-yard mark it tripped an electrical circuit that sprung the traps.

  The dogs shot out in a fury. Dolly stumbled out of the gate and I turned to Drinkwater thinking he’d rigged it somehow, greasing the dirt, but it was just a slip, a simple slip that could happen to any dog and might set them back half a step—nothing but a bit of bad luck.

  War Hammer was ten yards ahead and accelerating. A terrifying mania ran through her limbs; she was totally out of control and fear-stricken: she ran as if pursued by wolves. The dogs stormed down the dirt, the thunder of their paws matching the thunder in my blood. Dolly dropped a level, spine flattening like a dancer going under a limbo stick.

  That’s it baby, drink looooow.

  They blazed past us and it was as if the passage of their bodies sucked every sound from my ears: they now ran in a wrap of silence like dream animals, untouched by friction or gravity. When they hit the bend War Hammer was still in the lead. Their spines humped over the far rail for the first hundred yards before they both went low enough to vanish. Sound washed over me again as Owe and Ed hollered a single ongoing encouragement:

  “Gooooooo!”

  The dogs rounded back into view. Dolly was outside, banking high, screaming around the turn. Her stride was strangely even, almost conservative—which is when I realized that she’d finally figured it all out. Her speed was there—hell, she was faster than ever—but she was under control. Somewhere on the far side of the track she’d dialled it in. And she was perfect. Perfect the way Owe had been on a basketball court, the way Dade Rathburn had seemed to be in the squared circle. War Hammer was a few yards ahead, but Dolly had saved a little something for the finishing kick. Her eyes bulged from their sockets in a way that might have seemed comical if not for the frothy ropes whipping from her open mouth. It was no longer a matter of who was faster—it was a matter of whether Dolly could catch War Hammer before she ran out of track.

  With 125 yards to go, Dolly’s spine arched and her shoulders rose. She looked as if she was preparing to climb an invisible ramp. Her front legs—was I really seeing this?—appeared to push off from thin air.

  I pictured Harry watching from the operator’s booth, whispering, “I told you it could happen.”

  Another step, maybe two, and she’d have lifted off. I truly believed that would’ve happened.

  And then—

  One time at the Bisk someone dropped a screw into the gears of an industrial mixer. It pinged around the machine housing before sticking between the teeth of two huge tumblers. Nine times out of ten it wouldn’t have stuck: the gears would have spat it out or snapped it in two. But it got stuck fast and the gears seized—and the pent-up torsion tore the entire machine to pieces. Gears stripped off spindles and rotors burned out. Busted gears punched through the housing. The machine was a smoking ruins.

  That was what I thought of watching Dolly break apart.

  The simplest explanation is that Dolly’s rear right paw snagged in her jersey. A thin nylon strap ran across her belly; Harry had snugged it tight but it must have loosened. Dolly’s paw got under the strap, where it was trapped between it and her stomach.

  It could’ve happened a million other times and nothing would’ve come of it. Maybe it was the way she brought her leg down. Maybe it was the angle of her spine. When Dolly flexed into her next stride her foot remained snagged on the strap. Her leg kept going. The strap had no give—they aren’t designed that way. Dolly ran on the unshakable belief that her leg was going to come down again; she put all her weight into that belief, and in doing so she busted her own leg.

  It went just like Harry said: a stick of spaghetti.

  Her body flung forward, her leg flapping behind like a ribbon in the wind. She hit the track and unravelled.

  My hips were already clearing the rail as War Hammer crossed the finish line. I sprinted to where Dolly lay in an awful tangle, snorting like she had pollen in her nostrils. She rolled onto her side and got up. Maybe I’d seen it all wrong—maybe she’d just twisted her limb? She put her right leg down to see if it might work. It hung like a limp thing with the paw twisted off at a horrible angle.

  She lifted it up again—lifted her haunches which lifted her dangling leg—then tried to put it back down, lifting and putting it down with puzzled helplessness.

  “You’re going to be all right, girl,” I said, because in my heart I still hoped.

  I pulled Dolly into a hug, stroking her head like a father trying to soothe the fever of a sick child. Her body softened into mine and I knew some part of her acknowledged the situation or gave up. Or maybe she was just sick of running.

  The following hours passed in a haze. I remember Ed taking Dolly’s muzzle in her hands and how Dolly licked her face crazily—startled by Ed’s tears, maybe. And I remember Harry’s crestfallen expression, tears hanging in the cups of his eyelids as he said: “I should have tightened those straps. Should have known she’d run that jersey right off her back.”

  I said there was no faulting anything he’d done, but I could tell Harry didn’t accept it. Some men can’t.

  I remember barging into the vet’s office as they were closing. The vet injected Dolly with something that made her eyelids roll down like shutters before testing the leg with his fingers, feeling all the places where it had been ruined. He made a long incision down Dolly’s leg and as soon as it was opened shards of bone from her shattered leg simply fell out; they looked like crushed glass.

  He told us the best he could do was amputate—that, or euthanize her. I almost strangled the man.

  Ed and I smoked too many cigarettes while the vet operated. Ed cried on and off. When it was over Dolly hobbled out on three legs with a plastic cone around her head, woozy from the anaesthesia.

  On the drive home she snoozed on Ed’s lap, her chest rising and fa
lling in the moonlight that fell through the windshield. An immeasurable weight lifted from my own chest.

  There are things I didn’t see, but I do know they happened. I know that War Hammer died shortly after the race from whatever toxic brew Drinkwater had shovelled into her. Owe told me that she’d staggered into the finishing pen, turned a few wonky circles and collapsed. He also told me he’d handed Drinkwater what we owed him—a bet was a bet—and that Drinkwater stuffed the envelopes into his pocket and walked to the parking lot.

  Harry and Owe buried War Hammer in the soft loam along the river, five hundred yards behind Derby Lane. “You got to bury them deep,” Harry said. “Otherwise the shore freezes in the winter and they get spat up out of the earth in the spring thaw.” When Owe asked how he knew that, Harry said simply, “I’ve buried a lot of dogs, son. Only a few of them my own.”

  Dolly never quite found her old footing: she could walk just fine, a funny little hop-step, and developed strong shoulders from putting more weight on them. Ed called her Tripod. She even became a little fat, like an athlete gone to seed. When Ed and I were still together, we’d take her for walks in the park. Ed would toss a tennis ball. Sometimes Dolly would tear after it and I’d see her body drop into that old stance, her belly nearly brushing the clipped blades of grass. But then she seemed to sense it, too, that natural runner rearing up inside her. She shut it down to a trot, no longer wishing to access that old aspect of herself.

  I’d never say I was happy for what happened that night at Derby Lane. The sight of Dolly flipping end over end … sometimes it’ll pop into my mind and I’ll shudder. But here’s something I’ve never told anyone: the accident made Dolly more touchable. Afterwards, I could hold her—just for a few minutes, but that was something. She allowed me to show her love and accepted it as much as her nature allowed. Her breath would fall into a calm rhythm as I stroked her coat. That nub of bone poking my thigh … it always wrecked me. But then I would feel her big heart beating at almost the same tempo as my own and think: Maybe it was for the best.