Cataract City

by Craig Davidson

  “And if I walk out right now?”

  He shrugged. “Plenty of warm bodies willing to step in, I’d say.”

  “I’d say. Same purse?”

  “Same as same as.”

  I waded through the railbirds into a small cement-walled room to warm up. A single bulb burned on the end of a cord. I did some jumping jacks and ran in place, high-legging my knees to touch my chest. Sweat beaded my upper lip and my breath fell into an easy rhythm. I rolled my shoulders and snapped out a lazy left jab—my teaser punch, my bait: look at it out there, pesky, a bothersome gnat … you won’t see the right steaming behind it to steal your lights away.

  Fighting didn’t tickle my nuts, just happened to be something I’ve always been half-decent at. I swung my right hand and things went down. There were a million better ways to turn a buck with your hands but I wasn’t good at any of those.

  I chased the money. And I preferred to fight men drawn to the money—money’s clean, money doesn’t have agendas or psychoses. Sometimes I fought men who’d fallen way down the ladder. It’s rough work, tussling with a guy who’s trying to claw back up to that bottom rung. Other men wanted to figure something out about themselves, so okay, I’d oblige.

  And some men were just batshit crazy. Those guys were the worst. Those guys you just about had to kill.

  I’d taken a few bad beats myself. The worst was to a fellow from right there, the Tuscarora Nation. Wasn’t a big guy, but he was fast and wiry and once he’d gone slick with sweat I couldn’t lay hands on him. He didn’t rough me up so much as whittle me down, peppering me with stinging jabs and hooks like a man with a small, sharp knife taking thin peels off a big log. After a while my chest was greasy with blood and I’d swallowed so much of the red stuff that I needed to puke. It was all I could do to grab and hold him close, waltzing with an unwilling partner. At one point I sent up a little prayer: Let him knock me cold, God. Take me out behind the shed and put one in the back of my skull.

  But he just kept at it, quick and relentless. By the end the punches came in the dark—my eyes were two pissholes in the snow—and I felt like I was being beaten with a black sack over my head. That guy, he shaved me down until I was thin as a toothpick and then I just … snapped.

  Everything comes back to that question of hardness. I came from a hard place, yeah—a place where shopkeeps sell loose cigarettes because by the time that third Thursday of the month rolls around, most of their customers can’t afford a whole deck. But that guy, he probably grew up in a tarpaper shack, sleeping on the floor with eight or ten brothers and sisters, and had a dog in the yard chained to a radial tire. That’s another level of hardness, and I couldn’t find the place in my heart to match it.

  The door to the dressing room opened. My opponent tonight was about my size, maybe a bit taller. He didn’t look much older than nineteen, twenty. A kid, really. His eyes pinned me. I gave him a look that said: You don’t have to show me your dick’s bigger, okay? All that’ll sort itself out soon enough.

  He wiped his nose and rolled his eyes to the ceiling as if to say he’d been expecting worse than he’d drawn. “You fight before?”

  “Few times, yuh,” I told him. “You?”

  “First time.”

  “I’ll go easy.”

  I leaned against the wall and watched him warm up. He was quick but gangly and it didn’t look like he could throw a straight right to save his skin—I started feeling sorry for him, then wiped those thoughts away.

  “Know something?” he said. “You smell like Fig Newtons.”

  His skin was drawn tight over his cheekbones. I reminded myself to aim for those spots.

  Drinkwater opened the door. The bare bulb winked off the teeth on his hat.

  “Let’s go, you pigs.”

  The first punch tabbed me flush on the jawbone and that’s when I knew he didn’t have the ol’ boom-boom to put me away. Him and me were only dancing a little dance that would end with me landing a starcher that left him snuffling concrete.

  The punch landed solid, and it lit my head up like a slot machine: Cherry—Pineapple—Star. Yeah, I’d have a fat lip, and yeah, I tasted blood in the chinks of my teeth, but he didn’t quite have the juice.

  I spat warm blood and stared into the crowd: a couple of dudes with the stringy-haired, strung-out look of fairground carnies sat beside a young girl, frighteningly skinny, in a Megadeth shirt: Peace Sells … But Nobody’s Buying. Her eyes were riveted on my opponent.

  Were they together? God, I sort of hoped not.

  I circled left and let my right hand hang at my hip, like maybe he’d really stung me and I was trying to haul the scrambled shards of my brain back to where the neurons would start jumping the gaps again. He circled with me—come on, friend, just a little closer now, let me get one good clean look—and the muscles flexed up his side, tightening over the ladder of his ribs as he stepped into a clumsy uppercut.

  I shifted so his fist could pass harmlessly between the outer edge of my shoulder and my neck and for a heartbeat it was there: the knockout button of his outthrust chin. I planted my leg and dropped my head. My right came up in a swift arc; my shoulder joint swivelled in its socket, well-oiled with adrenaline, and my fist passed my ear on its downward flight, falling fast, a bomb splitting the clouds. Hell, it may have whistled like a bomb.

  It met his chin flush. Something broke deep down in my hand. The impact jangled up my arm and hummed like restless honeybees in the hollow of my shoulder socket. He sagged into me, our chests touching. I felt the shuddering beats of his heart through my skin.

  Bah-dum … bah-DUM … bah—

  The kid’s face had gone pale. Beads of milky sweat leaked from the skin under his eyes, which were rolled so far back in his skull that I saw the twitching, vein-threaded whites.

  —DUM … bah-bah-DUM … bah-dum—

  His heart beat out of true. An arrhythmia, could be. A year ago Jeff King, batch mixer on the Oreo line, just lay down in the lunchroom, shut his eyes and died. A heart murmur, I heard. King was 225 pounds with a pulse like a jackrabbit. It was nothing he could guard against; a defect in his nature, was all.

  I felt it in this guy, too: a structural weakness knitted tight to his body. He wasn’t built for this kind of rough work. I was terrified that if we kept at it, he’d die in my arms.

  I held him until the fog left his eyes and he was able to collect his feet under him. When he stood, staggering back, I raised my arms.

  “I’m done,” I said. “You win.”

  The guy, still stumblebum, swung at me and missed. He tucked his fists tight under his chin, swaying unsteadily as I backed off.

  I found Drinkwater in the crowd and said, “There’s something the matter with him. His heart or something.”

  “You’re hilarious,” he said. “Get your ass back in there.”

  The railbirds hissed and catcalled. A plastic cup struck my shoulder, spilling Orange Crush down my shirt.

  “Can’t do it, Lem,” I said. “If it goes sideways, we both got to carry that.”

  “I’m not gonna carry a damn thing—and you, you’re just chickenshit.”

  “Sure, Lem. That’s what it is.”

  I looked at Bovine, jerking my chin towards the warm-up room. The kid stood in the centre of the ring, fists still tucked, as we walked away.

  Lemmy Drinkwater shouldered open the presswood door and let it fall shut, muffling the din of the crowd. “You sure as fuck aren’t a people-pleaser, are you?”

  I pulled my hoodie on, stuffed my feet into workboots. “You shouldn’t let that kid fight again, Lem. Something’s off with his ticker. I felt it.”

  “Who are you, Trapper John?”

  It was easy to hate Drinkwater, and I did. He was a killer—of dogs, at the very least—and a sadist. It tore me up to find myself in his service. Yet he seemed to me the sort of man who could do with his life exactly what he wanted, and I held some whipped-dog respect for that.

  “I’m not
paying you a red cent for that shitshow you just put on,” he said.

  “I didn’t expect you would.”

  He scrutinized me through a fringe of dark hair. “You just fight?”

  “Just fight what?”

  “I mean,” he clarified, “to make rent. Just fight?”

  “I work at the Bisk … part-time now.”

  “Tough times, I hear. Cutbacks.”

  “Times are tough all over.”

  Drinkwater nodded to say he understood this to be the way of my life, yet to indicate it wasn’t the way of his own. His eyes were coldly, darkly serious—I felt I was being measured for some future possibility, and in that instant I desperately wanted to show Drinkwater whatever it was he hoped to find. It sickened me, my need.

  “Something’s coming up,” he said. “I need somebody on the other side.”

  “Of?”

  “Of the river. Off the rez. You can’t trust Nationers—they don’t know how to act with that kind of money.”

  “What kind of money?”

  Drinkwater knocked the air in front of him with his foreknuckle.

  “No kind. I was just asking a question. If you were interested.”

  “In what?”

  Drinkwater looked as if I’d answered already. “Maybe we’ll talk,” he said.

  As I walked away between walls of stacked boxes I heard the sound of dogs fighting, which wasn’t much of a sound at all: low, almost sexual yelps. It struck me that my own fight had been a curtain-jerker for a couple of mutts.

  A knot of men stood beside the cigar store Indian in the parking lot. As we passed, one of them shouted, “Cracker candyass!” A bottle sailed over my shoulder and shattered against the warehouse wall, shards rebounding at me. A thick blade of glass whickered past my face, drawing a line of ice across my brow; I ducked instinctively, hands pawing the wound, feeling the quick rush of blood curving down my jawbone.

  I turned and saw the men who’d done it. There were five of them—not one real specimen among them, but they stared back challengingly and I knew the beds of their pickups would hold bats and axe handles.

  “Come on,” Bovine said.

  We continued across the lot. My opponent was helping the girl in the Megadeth shirt into his car. The girl seemed sick, but beyond her thinness I couldn’t tell how. He was so gentle with her, taking her legs and folding them carefully inside the car, leaning in to kiss her cheek. I pictured the two of them driving to a small house on Chemical Row, near the OxyChem plant, where he’d fold her out of the car with the same tenderness. I didn’t know why he’d fought, whether for money or pride or sickness, but I could see he loved her and wanted to believe their life together was a happy one.

  I got in my car, and Bovine checked out the cut over my eye. He decided I didn’t need stitches and slapped a butterfly bandage over it.

  “Another memory to add to the Dunk scrapbook,” he said.

  “There’s a million stories in there.”

  “Nope, only one,” Bovine said. “Man takes on world, world wins. But you get to write it over the course of a lifetime—so you’ve got that going for you.”

  “Oh, fuck off.”

  Bovine howled.

  Edwina was waiting in the dark.

  She was lying on the couch in the room off the front hall—a room that had seemed so big when we’d moved in from her old house on Culp Street. It had seemed as if we’d never gather enough stuff to fill it.

  She drew on her cigarette and the room seemed to quiver, the red ember floating.

  “Ed …”

  “You win?”

  I shook my head, but wondered if she could see my face.

  “You get hurt?”

  “Not bad. My hand.”

  “Let’s take a look at you.”

  She got up, snapped on the bathroom light and sat me on the toilet. She wore a shimmery black robe—irregular in some way I couldn’t see—that she’d bought at a clearance warehouse over the river. Perched on the tub’s edge, she drew on her cigarette, squinted into the smoke and traced her pointer finger over my butterflied brow; she brought her fingertip down slowly to touch the split in my lip.

  She plucked the cigarette from her mouth and with that same strong, quiet hand reached over my shoulder—the ember singing the fine hairs on my earlobe—to snatch a Kleenex from the box on the toilet tank. She set the cigarette between her lips, twisted one corner of the Kleenex into a rope and pressed it to the split.

  Ed had a smooth, open, brown-eyed face with a spray of freckles over her cheeks. She was still as beautiful as when I’d first met her, but a harder breed of it: the dagger-sharp points of her cheekbones, the way the light threw itself off the straight edges of her teeth.

  As she leaned forward over my swollen hand, my eyes fell upon her clavicle bone. I wanted to run my tongue along it—post-fight randiness—but I couldn’t just lean across and do it: you need permission for such things, if unspoken, even from those you love.

  Ed gathered the front of her robe in one small, casual gesture. Then she put her head far back—very far back, almost like a contortionist—and shook her dark hair loose so that it hung free down her neck.

  “Can I have a drag?”

  “You don’t smoke,” she said.

  “One drag.”

  I pulled the cigarette from her lips and drew thinly. The paper tasted of cherry lip gloss. There was no stamp on the filter; everyone at the Bisk bought their smokes off-brand from a guy who sold them out of his trunk in the parking lot.

  I turned my head to cough and spotted a lottery ticket on the sink ledge. Ed played them all: 6/49, Lotto Max, Dreamhome Sweepstakes, always ponying up for the Bonus, the Encore. She played with some girls at the Bisk, too. A year or so back they’d picked six out of seven and split a few grand. “If I’d been born on the fifty-sixth of January instead of the thirteenth, we’d have all quit on the spot,” she’d told me, laughing but not really.

  She never used to play the lotto. For a long time our life together hadn’t been about waiting on a lucky ship to come in—it had been about building that ship ourselves, with the toil of our own hands, and sailing wherever the hell we wanted.

  She pinched the cigarette from between my lips, put it back between her own, then stood in front of the mirror. My gaze rode up her feet, which were strong-toed and callused from hours on the Nutter Butter line, up her calves roped with muscle, past the dimples in the back of her knees to her thighs, which were just starting to go. I stood behind her and my arms went to her hips … and when she didn’t protest, around her waist. The bathroom light reflected off the mirror, doubling itself, and for an instant I felt trapped: a man stunned in the motion-sensor halogens snapping alight along a prison’s barbwire fence.

  Some questions you can look at two ways: What might I have been without you? One coin, yeah, but two sides. Ed must’ve looked at both sides of that coin, too.

  When Wally Cutts called me up to his glassed-in office above the Bisk’s factory line, I knew what was coming.

  I’d showed up early that morning to shower. The showerhead at home was calcified—the chemicals that were dumped into the city’s water supply crystallized, meaning many of us in Cataract City had to replace our showerheads every year. I’d stood under the nozzle as the water melted the remains of the fight from my skin and nerves, working my swollen hand under the hot water.

  Then I’d dressed in my whites with the other men, each of us smelling of our lines, put on my hairnet and latex gloves and passed through the disinfectant chamber onto the factory floor. We stood in a loose semicircle while the safety inspector ran his tests. There was no sound but the ticking down of the giant grey units stretching deep into the factory. A haze of flour hung in the air—our lips were already whitened with it.

  While we waited we limbered up using the exercises the productivity expert taught us: deep knee bends and hip swivels. We looked like an old-timers football team prepping to take the field. Knuckles a
nd knees cracking, elbow joints popping—I could tell whose elbow or knee without even looking: each man’s body had its own sounds.

  The red lights flicked green and the line leapt to life: worn canvas cloth chattering over steel pins, chukka-chikka-chukka. We inclined our heads over the line and tried to hold that pose for eight hours.

  At the end of the shift I climbed the stairs to Cutts’ office and knocked.

  “Come in, Duncan. Sit down.”

  Wally Cutts was the line super—it was the same job Owe’s dad had once held. His degree hung on the wall, same as Mr. Stuckey’s had. At last summer’s corporate picnic the shop steward, a ratlike creature named Stan Lowery—Adam’s older brother—hung a piñata from the crotch of a tree: a leering burglar with a black mask over his eyes. Lowery had painted the burglar’s feet to look like workboots, just like those Cutts wore while walking the shop floor. Lowery stood with his gang of line-pigs, good ol’ boys with swollen wine-cask bellies, all of them laughing as their kids beat holy hell out of that piñata. Cutts stood there with his wife and young boy, chewing potato salad and ruffling his son’s hair as if this was a big lark and he was in on it.

  “Hurt your hand?” Cutts said now.

  I nodded.

  “But you’re okay?”

  My shrug indicated it was nothing he should bother himself about.

  “Duncan … you know how it’s going, yes?”

  I squinted at him dumbly, as if I didn’t, or couldn’t.

  “First of all, production’s way down. Not because we can’t make the stuff, but because people aren’t eating it. It’s a healthier world, Duncan—and that’s fine and dandy, unless you’re baking cookies.”

  Cutts was chubby-edging-into-fat with a beery face that broke into laughter at a great many things that weren’t funny. He’d walk the line filling a paper sack with warm Chips Ahoy, plucking them off the moving belt.

  “How old are you, Duncan?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “Twenty five,” he said, as if it was impossible for him to recall ever having been so young. How the hell old was he—thirty? I could’ve happily murdered him in that moment. “We’re letting you go.”