Cataract City

by Craig Davidson

  “WHAT ARE YOU STILL DOING HERE?”

  I craned my head over my shoulder and saw the red-haired girl in the rubber boots. The girl who’d been so unimpressed with my rock-skipping skills.

  “I’ve been watching from my window,” she said, hooking her thumb at her apartment block. “You’re standing here like a zombie.”

  The wind gusted, blowing ancient litter around the Derby Lane lot. The door of the Winning Ticket Lounge blew open and banged shut on its rusted hinges, issuing a thin squeal. How long had I been standing there? Too long for the girl’s taste, clearly.

  “I was thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “Personal stuff.”

  The girl unhinged her jaw, letting her eyes roll back. “Laaaame.”

  I bristled, aware that she was a child but unable to help myself. “You’re not very nice, you know. Not as long as I’ve known you.”

  “We just met,” she said evenly.

  I kicked a rock, sent it skittering across the tarmac. “Well, anyway. I’d better get going now.”

  “You’re too sensitive.” The girl set her hands on her hips in a schoolmarmish gesture. “This city is going to eat you alive.”

  I waved goodbye to her and walked down the Parkway, heading towards Clifton Hill. Edwina and I used to walk Dolly down here sometimes, but I hadn’t seen either of them in nearly eight years. I wouldn’t be seeing them any time soon, either.

  As I walked, I thought back to that night at Derby Lane—those fleeting moments on the homestretch when Dolly almost flew. I used to see her in a dream, which replaced the one with the hooks and screws. In that dream she was perfect, yet never more so than she was that night. She lived so well in that dream simply because she really could have stepped right out of it, blitzing down the backstretch like coiled thunder.

  In that old dream Dolly scorched the earth with such fierceness that I swear sparks snapped off her paws. No earthly creature was meant to go that fast, but she did. Strange wonder she didn’t burst into flames. In the last few seconds of her racing career Dolly broke free of physics. She broke free of my understanding of them anyway, and in that way she entered the dream.

  I can only imagine it was a scary place to have gone. It asked everything of you and could break you to pieces so easily. I guess Dolly figured the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze.

  Maybe it’s the same with Owe. In all the years since his knee was shattered, I don’t think he’s picked up a basketball more than a few times. He didn’t even teach kids at the summer skills camps, despite the frequent invitations.

  I only remember seeing him on the court again once, a few months after he’d returned from Mexico. I was driving home after a late shift at the Bisk. It was just past midnight, and as I skirted Lions Club Park I saw a solitary figure shooting hoops. His gait was a bit wonky—there was a hitch in his giddy-up, as they say around here—but that form was unmistakable. The ball travelled through the sparkling midnight mist trapped under a lone spotlight, effortlessly beautiful.

  Swish.

  I idled in darkness under the trees, watching. Sweat gleamed on Owe’s brow. His shot dropped through that net as if guided by pure mathematics or pure grace: the ball mapping God’s own perfect angle.

  In that light, in that moment, Owe looked like a kid again. And I wished we could be kids again, just for a while. Revoke for just one day our breaking bodies, our tortured minds. I would have given anything to spend one more day as we once had, even if it was one of those piss-away afternoons reading comic books in Owe’s basement while the rain clicked in the downspout like marbles.

  Owe had tucked the ball under his arm. Regret was carved into every crease of his face. I figure if I’d looked in the rear-view mirror I’d have seen it in mine, too.

  He left the court. I let him go.

  PART THREE

  FIVE MILLION

  CIGARETTES

  DUNCAN DIGGS

  It was night again when I left my childhood bedroom. I slipped silently down the hall, avoiding the spots where the floor creaked, knowing my mother was probably awake anyway, her ears pricked to the sound of my socks whispering on the scuffed linoleum.

  I pulled on boots and a dark hoodie, let the door click softly shut behind me. The air was cool, clean, laden with the alkaline taste of the river. I walked under the street lamps, many of them popping and fritzing—there was something permanently wrong with the city’s power grid. Brownouts, blackouts, phantom outages or surges. People would come home after a weekend away and find their fridge motors burnt out, their eggs gone rotten. My father kept the old Kenmore—nickname: the Green Meanie—going on compressors salvaged from the city dump. Nobody bothered petitioning the city hall about it: to live in Cataract City was to accept many disappointments.

  I trekked down the hill to a quiet stretch of blocks off Bender Street. There was a pay phone near the Sleepy Eyes Motor Inn. I let the Plexiglas door swing shut, hunted the name out of the book and plugged quarters in the box.

  Five rings later, a sleep-syrupy voice answered. “Yuh?”

  “Hey, man. It’s Dunk.”

  The phone line scratched with static as Owe moved around. He was sitting up in bed, maybe. A glassy knock was followed by deep swallowing sounds.

  “I wake you?”

  Owe yawned. “You figure?”

  “Sorry. How are you?”

  “I’m okay. Yeah, not bad. You?”

  “Keeping on. Listen, I want to talk to you. I … It’s nothing I’m expecting of you.”

  Another swallow, then Owe said, “How are you liking it so far, man? Some guys have a harder time adjusting, is why I’m asking.”

  “It’s nice, yeah. The openness.”

  “I figured,” Owe said. “Easier to breathe?”

  I nodded, even though I knew he couldn’t see me. “Like I was saying …”

  “You looking across the river right now, Dunk? Somewhere in the direction of the Tuscarora Nation, maybe? Are you thinking about who I think you’re thinking about?”

  After a while I said, “I’m not putting you on the hook. I just—”

  “I know what you just, man. You got blood in your eye?”

  I thought about the past eight years, the nights without sleep and the constant edgeless terror; I thought about Edwina because my mind was never far from Edwina; I thought about the fact that cosmic fairness is a mysterious commodity, not something you can buy or sell, but sometimes that great wheel really ought to come around—and if it didn’t, you had to wrench it around yourself. I was a son of Cataract City, and around here we understand payback. You pay what you owe, or you’re made to pay.

  “I’ve got a spot of blood in there, Owe,” I said quietly. “Yeah, I do. And it’s been screwing with the way I see for a while now.”

  The next afternoon I sat in a booth at the Double Diamond with Sam Bovine, a good-ol’ shitkicker jingle playing on the Rock-Ola. It felt so roomy with no bull-necked guard looming on my blindside.

  Bovine looked not bad, considering. His nose was threaded with busted veins and he had a sun-starved look about him, but that was sort of how I’d always pictured him at this age. I laid out my idea. Bovine set to poking holes in it.

  “Three guys?”

  “Or four,” I said. “If I get the first couple down fast and don’t take too much on the chin doing it. Three’s probably the max. He’s got to have at least three scratch fighters he can call, right?”

  Bovine reached across the table to push up the fringe of hair over my forehead. I flicked his hand away.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Looking for the lobotomy scars, Dunk! Jesus, Lemmy Drinkwater? And why three? Why not, y’know, one?”

  “That’s small beer, Sam. This’ll be a trifecta—triple the risk, triple the reward.”

  “But it’s not triple the risk, is it? Triple the risk is fighting three guys over three nights, months apart, with time to heal. You’re talking about fighting thr
ee guys in a row, bang-bang-bang, the same night.”

  I sipped beer and savoured it. Held the glass up to the light to watch the cascading bubbles.

  “I guess you’re right,” I said. “Math isn’t my strong suit.”

  “You seem remarkably put together for a man who could end up crunching on his own teeth like breath mints.”

  Bovine had been with me for every fight at Lem Drinkwater’s place before I went to prison; I used to cross the river for a match every few months. Bovine had been a mortuary attendant by then, same as his pops, so he’d been comfortable around busted flesh.

  The door banged open, throwing a shaft of late-afternoon sunlight across the floor. Owe slid into the booth. Bovine’s hands curled into fists.

  “Relax,” I said. “I asked him to come.”

  Owe put up with Bovine’s stink-eye; given our shared history, maybe he figured Bovine was allowed to be just a little bit pissed.

  “What was it you wanted to talk about?” he said to me.

  I told him the plan.

  “The fights still go down over there,” Owe confirmed. “Every month or so.”

  I said, “You still keeping an eye on him?”

  “Me personally? No. Drinkwater’s a smuggler, and that cottage industry is down with the dollar’s hovering at about par. The whispers are he’s gone soft, lost his touch. I don’t believe it—Drinkwater could find the angle in a circle. Why are you even mixing yourself up in this? It’s none of my business—”

  “That’s right,” Bovine said. “It’s not.”

  Ignoring Bovine, Owe turned to me. “I got the impression you were going straight.”

  “The road, she is a-bendy.”

  “Only if you insist on bending it.”

  Something swam up in my chest, a swirl of angry colours.

  “Are you standing against me, then?”

  Owe said, “Have I ever?”

  NINE OR SO YEARS AGO, my phone rang. It was Bovine, clapped up in the drunk tank at the Niagara Detention Centre. This had put a real bug up my ass. I was fighting in a few hours and not only had Bovine agreed to drive, he was supposed to be my goddamn cutman.

  “You got to spring me, Dunk.”

  I could smell the Old Grouse drifting out of the mouthpiece. “Jesus, Bovine. I mean, seriously. Here I am dozing, trying to get my mind right—”

  “Sorry, Dunk—didn’t I just say sorry? I’m not drunk, even,” he said sulkily. “Not that drunk.”

  I sat on the edge of the bed, curtains pulled against the evening sun. The sheets smelled of the vanilla body butter Edwina wore.

  “I can’t be released on my own whatever …”

  “Recog—”

  “Yeah, recognizance. But you spring me and I’ll pay you right back.”

  I could have left him there. Bovine was no stranger to the drunk tank. He probably had his own cot, with monogrammed sheets. But what was I gonna do? I’d known the guy forever.

  “Be there in a bit.”

  I brushed my teeth. Some fighters don’t brush before a fight, a little fuck-you to their opponent. Other fighters, their breath stinks but it’s just the adrenaline souring in their mouths. Me, I bear my opponents no grudge. I’ll even slap on deodorant.

  I filled my palms with water and ran it over my skull. My hair was cut short—just like everyone’s at the Bisk. The industrial flour got past the hairnets and stuck to your head; at shift’s end you’d take a shower and it was like lathering with plaster of Paris. So we shaved our skulls to the wood. The staff softball photos looked like recruitment posters.

  Despite my fighting, I’d been lucky with my face. I had hairline scars under both eyes and one on the edge of my forehead that looked like a Y. But my nose had never been broke, and my cheeks neither.

  My hands were another matter. We’re talking a pair of ugly bust-up mitts. The knuckles were all crushed, except for one: if I laid my hands side by side, that lonely knuckle looked like the final spike on the EKG machine before a heartbeat flatlines. In the places where I fight, you can go into the ring with open-fingered gloves, with wraps, with nothing. I bare-fist it. You tab a man flush on the button with a bare fist and it’s good night, Gracie. The problem is, my fingers tend to split over the joints.

  Bovine was training to be a mortuary attendant by then, and when he was sober he was a decent cutman. He had this stuff called Negatan, a kind of formaldehyde gel that cauterizes the insides of a stiff’s nostrils and gums. The first time he used it on me it turned the skin on my hands to pig leather. It’d been scary to watch the skin go dry and hard as buckskin. But it killed the blood, so what did it matter? I wasn’t a hand model. I’d caught the other guy with an overhand right ten seconds into the next round and laid him down soft as a baby into bed.

  I threw clean clothes into a duffel and went downstairs. Dolly’s head rose from her dog bed in the kitchen. She padded over, tail sweeping the lino, and tugged at my tearaway pants, popping a few snaps.

  “Stop, you pest,” I told her, and fed her a meatball from last night’s supper as I rummaged for juice in the fridge. Ed hated it when I fed Dolly from the fridge.

  I didn’t leave a note. Edwina would never tell me not to go—even if that was what she really wanted. Ed would never say anything because she was harder than me. Most of us in Cataract City were hard because the place built you that way. It asked you to follow a particular line and if you didn’t, well, you went and lived someplace else. But if you stayed, you lived hard, and when you died you went into the ground that way: hard.

  I guess I was hard enough, but Edwina had always been harder. And so I found that you could love a person even more fiercely for their hardness.

  Dolly nosed around the back door as I slipped on my sneakers. She was hoping I’d take her along.

  “Sorry, girl. Not tonight.”

  Best to keep your dog far away from Lemmy Drinkwater. Best to keep anything you loved far, far away.

  The detention centre’s night-shift guard tipped his hat as I stepped inside. I nodded sheepishly, as if it was me who’d done wrong. One-hundred and fifty-three bucks later, Bovine sauntered out of the drunk tank. He made a point of shaking the guard’s hand.

  “This is the last time you’ll see me.”

  “You said that last time,” said the guard.

  “This time I’m being sincere.”

  The first thing Bovine did was hug me. It’s the first thing he always did. He stunk of rye and sweat and there were pinpricks of blood on his untucked shirt.

  He did a soft-shoe number down the cracked stairs of the D.C., tripping over his feet and pitching onto the sidewalk. I didn’t bother asking what had landed him in detention this time. Seeing as he didn’t look super-drunk, I figured he’d been pinched for the “disorderly” half of “drunk and disorderly.” Why did I hang out with this fool? For one thing, Owe had toddled off to join the boys in blue. My circle of friends, never big to begin with, had shrunk.

  Bovine reached into his pocket, produced a thick fold of bills and peeled off a mitt full. I took what he owed and gave the rest back.

  “Aw, come on, Dunk. For pain and suffering.”

  He knew I needed money. I was still trying to recover what I’d lost on Dolly’s race a few years back. Then last year Dolly had come down with a case of gastroplexy that nearly killed her; five thousand bucks and one stomach resectioning later, she was a healthy pooch.

  We drove down Clifton Hill, past the teenybop meat markets, and crossed the Rainbow Bridge. The falls were lit with red spotlights; it looked like a spray of blood was frothing from the basin.

  We cleared customs and headed up Niagara Street, past the OxyChem plant’s smokestacks pumping grey vapour. We turned right onto Packard, skirting the Love Canal. Bovine tossed a bottle out the window; it smashed on the pavement and the sound sent Velcro spiders scurrying up my spine—the fight was crawling into me.

  We hit Saunders Settlement Road and crossed onto the Tuscarora First Nations l
and. I eased on the brakes and pulled into Smokin’ Joes Trading Post. I drove round back to the warehouses and parked beside a pickup truck with a giant novelty ball-sac hanging from the trailer hitch—it was that kind of crowd.

  Bovine grabbed his cutman kit. Taking his face in my hands, I stared into his eyes. His pupils seemed about right.

  “I don’t need a drunk working on my face.”

  “Come on, Dunk. You know I’d never if I was shitfaced.”

  The warehouse door was propped open with a cigar store Indian, a cigarette duct-taped in its mouth. A couple of guys were passing a flask outside the entrance.

  “How you feeling tonight?” one asked.

  “Buy the ticket, take the ride.”

  Their rasping laughter followed me into the warehouse. Boxes and crates stacked high; the smells of patent leather and tobacco. We walked down aisles towards the light and buzz of a milling crowd.

  A half-dozen sawhorses formed a ring on the shellacked concrete floor. A hundred-odd spectators stood or sat on stacked pallets. It was your standard fight crowd: fat and magpie-eyed, drinking Hamm’s tallboys. A few cheered at the sight of me: I guess they’d cashed in on my ass before.

  Lem Drinkwater was dressed in his usual pegged blue jeans, a chambray shirt with pearl-snap buttons, his Crocodile Dundee hat with a ring of alligator teeth round the band.

  “You feeling it?” he asked, eyeing me down his nose.

  “All I want to feel right now is the bills in my hand.”

  Drinkwater’s laugh wasn’t really a laugh, just bared teeth with air hissing through them: hsh-hsh-hsh! “You’ll get paid after.”

  “That’s not how it worked before.”

  “S’the way it works now. Roll with them punches, Diggs.”

  I scratched behind my ear. “You got me over a bit of a barrel, Lemmy.”

  “That’s not my aim,” he said—and maybe it wasn’t, but I also knew he didn’t give two sweet fucks whether anything he did happened to put me over a barrel.