Cataract City

by Craig Davidson

  “Just like that?”

  He saw I was smiling and said uneasily, “It’s a seniority thing, pure and simple. You had a lot built up, you’ll recall, but then you took that year off to go to college—that put you back down near the bottom.”

  Cutts showed me his palms like I was a dog who figured he was hiding a doggy treat. “We’re offering a month in lieu. Most guys are taking that.”

  “The pension plan I’ve paid into?”

  “Duncan, retirement age is sixty-five. You’ve got forty years left to get a good pension under you. Edwina’s job is safe, I promise.”

  We shook. His hand felt like boiled suet stuffed into a surgical glove. When I got back downstairs Stan Lowery was waiting.

  “We’re going to grieve it!” he told me, sounding like a teacup chihuahua yapping at the mailman. “We’re grieving this fucker all the way up, Diggs, you set your watch to it.”

  He’d made the same promise to the guys turfed before me—and most of them now spent their nights patrolling hotel parking lots with a flashlight. I nodded to a few guys on the way out. It dawned on me how little I knew them. I’d worked at the Bisk for six years, yet I couldn’t recall most of their wives’ names.

  “Well,” Bovine said, “I’m sure she was nice on the inside.”

  The woman was old—how old I couldn’t really say. She lay on a steel table in a white-tiled room in the basement of the Harry Bohnsack Mortuary, a white sheet draping her from neck to toes. She may have been pretty once.

  “Let’s get that pesky blood out of you, dear heart,” Bovine said sweetly.

  I’d spent the afternoon at the Blue Lagoon, pumping Jack and Cokes into myself. Ed was working, Dolly was sleeping, and anyway, I liked watching Bovine work.

  He wore painter’s overalls and a black vulcanized apron. He shook out a length of surgical tubing and fitted one end to a long, thin needle. He fitted the other end to the toaster-oven-sized recovery unit—a funny euphemism for a machine that sucked blood out of dead folks.

  Bovine worked briskly, whistling “The Old Gray Mare” while rolling a blue drum with Nestlé Formalin written on it. How strange that a company known for its chocolate syrup would be a leading producer of formaldehyde. One whiff and I was back in grade ten science class on frog-dissection day. Bovine threaded a surgical tube into the drum, clipped it with surgical shears and attached a stent, joining it with two more lengths of tube. One end of the tube went into the recovery unit; the other end was fastened to a second needle, which Bovine slid into the big vein in the woman’s neck.

  He flicked the machine on. Yellow formalin flowed up one tube. Black blood trickled down the other, collecting in a plastic jug. While the woman drained, Bovine used a pair of industrial clippers to cut her hair off, then her eyebrows.

  “Don’t worry, my dear,” Bovine said, hunting through a bin of sterilized wigs. “Only your hairdresser will know for sure.”

  At first I’d found it creepy that Bovine talked to them. But then I figured we all had our coping mechanisms. He opened a tackle box, the kind you’d keep fishing lures in, and grabbed a pair of ocular suction cups.

  “You going to look away, pussy?” he said.

  “You want me to throw up on the poor girl, ruin all your hard work?”

  Bovine took a swig from a beaker of gin and tonic on the steel slab and eased the woman’s left eye open. The cornea had gone milky as if it had been bleached. What’s worse, it had taken some sort of awful elevator to the basement of her skull.

  “The brain shrinks from lack of moisture,” Bovine said. “Eyeballs get sucked into the cranial vault.”

  He peeled the sticky-tab off a suction cup, attached it to her eyeball and pulled. That sound always got to me: it was like hearing a rubber boot pulled out of thick mud. The eyeball popped into the socket. Bovine ran a bead of glue down the eyelids and pressed them together.

  “Just once I’d like to leave the eyes wide open,” he said. “See the guy peering up out of the casket like: The fuck you looking at?”

  The buzzer rang.

  “That must be Dr. Jekyll,” said Bovine, in a lispy Vincent Price voice. “He’s bringing more carcasses …”

  While he answered the door I stood over the body. Blood still dripped from the tube into the collection jug, dark as tar. A dead person’s blood smelled a little like silver polish. The formaldehyde had put some life back into her: she could’ve just put her head down for a nap.

  Bovine said, “Check out what the cat dragged in.”

  I looked up and there was Owe. He was about twenty pounds heavier than last I’d seen him, but the eyes and chin were the same.

  “I saw this guy propping up a bar stool the other night,” Bovine said, “and thought, Jesus, that bastard looks a lot like another bastard I used to know. And it was that very bastard!”

  “How are you, man?” Owe smiled, displaying a big chip in his front incisor.

  “I’m hanging on.” I hadn’t seen him in what, four years? The last I’d heard he was living out west. Calgary? Edmonton? “What brings you back?”

  “Change of scenery? The mountains were getting stale.”

  “How long you been back?”

  “Not long.”

  “You’re still on the force?”

  A quick nod. “Caught on with Niagara Regional. I just want to do something valuable with my life, Dunk.”

  The sarcasm escaped him like a poisonous mist. He scanned my damaged hand and the new scab bristling along my eyebrow. His eyes had a peculiar movement: snapping back and forth, taking things in while his face remained impassive. That was the first real difference I noticed: those insurance adjuster’s eyes.

  “Stuckey’s back in toooown,” Bovine sang to the tune of “Mack the Knife.” “He’s taken an oath to protect we noble savages of Cataract City.”

  Owe nodded towards the body and said: “You dressing her up for a date, Bovine?”

  Owe and I smiled at each other in the old familiar way and I felt myself relax, the old rhythms taking hold.

  “I guess you want to know why I’ve called this meeting,” Bovine announced grandly. “I’ve come up with an extracurricular project for you wastes of skin.”

  He led us into a storage room stacked with heavy-duty cardboard sheets. A few of them had been folded into coffin shapes.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Owe said.

  “What?” said Bovine. “Our budget burials.”

  “People get buried in cardboard?”

  Bovine said: “Once you’re in the ground, who cares?”

  “You don’t put them out for display in one of these things—right?”

  “We’ve got rental caskets, all the nice ones. Evermore Rest, Celestial Sleeper, The Camelot, The Eternal Homestead. We display bodies in a rental, then bury them in cardboard.”

  “That’s just so weird,” said Owe.

  “Who buys a tux you’re only going to wear one night?” Bovine said equitably.

  “Okay, Bovine, but who wants their mother buried in a shoebox like a hamster?”

  “Dutch, tell me. On garbage day, do you see people putting ornate wooden boxes with little brass handles out on their curbs?”

  “What do you do for a headstone—tape two Popsicle sticks together?”

  Bovine said, “When I die, stuff me in a Hefty sack, drag me through the parlour while the organist plays ‘Dust in the Wind,’ on out the back door into an open grave. Bingo, bango, bongo.”

  The storage-room door opened into a garage that housed a pair of Cadillac hearses. Bovine pointed to the old model. “That’s mine now, free and clear.”

  “Congratulations,” I said. “You’ll have no problem picking up at goth bars.”

  Bovine mimed whacking off. “You’re hilarious. I’m thinking we smash it up. Merrittville Speedway, y’know? Demolition Derby night.” He slapped the hearse’s wide back end. “Just keep backing this baby up into the other cars. Reduce ’em to rubble.”

 
I said, “Where would we fix it up?”

  “The auto shop at the high school,” said Bovine. “I talked to Finnerty and he said sure, so long as we do it at night.”

  The first day of what would become an informal but binding “situation” between Lemmy Drinkwater and myself ended with me holding the bloodied body of a pit bull named Folchik—Mohawk for “Little Hunter”—in my arms.

  The dog was shivering uncontrollably, shiny with blood under the sodium vapour lamps overhanging the fighting box. Her foam-flecked tongue lolled out the side of her mouth, warm as cooked liver on my forearm.

  Little Hunter had fought like a monster but her opponent, a blue-nose pit bull up from the Carolinas named Seeker, had been just that little bit slicker. Seeker sat with her owner: a fat dog breeder wearing a train engineer’s cap and hacked-down combat boots. The dog’s two-tone eyes—one blue, one yellow—were riveted on Little Hunter. Seeker’s sides expanded like a bellows as the blood from her own wounds leaked down her legs to the rosined floor.

  It shocked me, how fast it had happened. Only minutes ago Folchik had been a whole creature, full of blood and life. Next? Nothing but a connection of exhausted muscle and torn flesh, opened up in ways no creature ever should be. I felt her heart shuddering under my fingertips at an insane gallop and smelled her adrenaline—the same smell in dogs as it was in men.

  The day had begun with me waking next to Edwina.

  I had lain still while the bedroom fell into place around me, listening to Ed breathe: long, slow inhales, smooth exhales. She faced away from me but I figured she was awake, as she usually was at this hour: eyes open to watch the sun spread across the bottom of the windowsill, immersed in her own unknowable thoughts.

  I curled into her, slipping an arm down her rib cage. When we were dating she’d once said I didn’t know how to cuddle right. Your body doesn’t fit itself properly to mine is how she’d put it. At that age I was worried about being a decent lover—the fact that I might’ve been a piss-poor cuddler never entered my mind.

  It’s true that we’d started living together young, but that was how people did things here, as if we were ticking off boxes in an exam called Life. But I knew I’d found the real thing with Ed: the spark, that unquestioned connection. So I’d held tight. I regretted nothing and could only hope Ed didn’t, either.

  Ed sat on the edge of the bed and stretched. The tendons in her back flexed and she worked her fingers loose as she did every morning—after years of picking busted Arrowroots off the conveyor, it looked as if tiny balloons had been inflated inside her finger joints.

  I lay still while she showered. She whistled “The Log Driver’s Waltz”: It’s birling down a-down white water / A log driver’s waltz pleases girls completely. She dressed in the thin yellow light and clipped her photo ID to her overalls.

  “So,” she said. “What’s your schedule today?”

  I smiled wolfishly. “Today I find my ass a new job.”

  She nodded as if this was firmly within my abilities.

  The Port Weller dry dock was a cathedral of rust.

  There wasn’t one exposed strip of scaffolding not pocked or slashed with it. The hulls of ships in the shelf docks were so eaten through that the metal would crumble in your hands like schist. Skycranes tilted against the black-shouldered cliffs of the escarpment, ferrying girders caked in marine paint. Even the air had teeth: a million tiny fangs gnawed at the exposed skin above my collar.

  I walked through the main gates along a strip of canal that shone silver in the new day. Sunfish snatched at zebra mussels clinging to snarls of rebar jutting from the seawall. Gulls circled; they must have followed these hulks in from sea and now, their meal ticket gone, the air was alive with their confused screeches.

  The foreman waited at the punch clock: a solid guy with an oily, pancake-flat face.

  “You Diggs?”

  “Thanks for meeting with me.”

  “Part of my job.” His head jerked to indicate I should follow.

  We passed over batboards to a walkway alongside the flank of a ship rooted in deep dock. I trailed my fingers over the metal, which trembled under an assault of air-hammers and riveting guns. An arc-welding torch snapped alight above; a soft blue glow streaked the hull, following the roll-lines of the steel. A spray of golden sparks cascaded off the tin overhang, touching the arm of my denim jacket and leaving scorch marks almost too small to see.

  We stepped through a porthole door into a small, dark, rust-smelling chamber. A smelter was working beneath us: sweat instantly popped along my brow. Around us were chains and pulleys rimed with dark, granular grease. The points of naked hooks swung in front of my eyes, their chains clanking like wind chimes.

  The chamber broke onto a narrow footpath spanning the ship’s hull. Men worked thirty feet below: all I could see were the yellow plugs of their hardhats. The sun broke through the ship’s unfinished angles, glinting off the aluminum gangplanks.

  The foreman led me into a makeshift office. “Go ahead and go sit down.”

  I took blueprints off the chair facing his and set them carefully on the floor. He pulled my crumpled resumé from his pocket.

  “The Bisk, huh?”

  “Cutbacks. A couple guys I used to work with said I should try here.”

  “Yuh, they been through already.” His snort seemed to say we’d been fools to throw our lots in with a multinational conglomerate while he’d had the good sense to stick with ships. “English Literature certificate?”

  “I took some classes up at Niagara College.”

  “Why?”

  When I didn’t reply the foreman massaged his forehead with the stump of his pointer finger—I wondered if he was doing this to call attention to the missing digit.

  “Can you weld?”

  “I’ve spot-welded.”

  “Spot we don’t need. Mig? Tig? Acetylene?”

  I shook my head.

  “Can you run a Wheelabrator?”

  I shook my head.

  “Plasma cutter?”

  I shook my head.

  “Oxy-fuel cutter?”

  I shook my head.

  “Profile burner?”

  “No.”

  “Metal lathe?”

  “No.”

  “Boring mill?”

  “I can learn.”

  “Just about any walking stiff can. Only takes a year’s apprenticeship up at the college. Same one that taught you those English classes.” He pronounced it clarsis.

  “Listen, I need the work and I’ve got a strong back—”

  “What do you think we do, haul sacks a cement? This is a skilled labour site. What’d you do at Nabisco?”

  “Batch mixer, mainly. A bit of line maintenance.”

  “That’s not a skill we’re in need of. Sorry.”

  He didn’t look one damn bit sorry. Maybe he was one of those men who enjoyed pressing his heel into the back of his fellow man’s neck. I squinted at his ID badge, which was melted and heat-scorched. Sonny Hillicker. One of that clan, then.

  “You related to Clyde?”

  “My kid brother.”

  “I know Clyde.”

  “Yeah. Clyde knows you, too.”

  Jesus—wasn’t that just Cataract City? The old snake-ball. Fighting just to fight, even when the battle’s long been lost.

  “You smell like a cookie,” Sonny Hillicker said, and he laughed. “Alla you Biskers do.”

  Hot coals burned at my temples. But beneath the fire was the insistent scrape of desperation: the dull edge of a knife down the back of my neck.

  An hour later I was in the Coffee Time off Drummond eating a cruller that tasted of cigarette smoke and flipping through the job ads. The cell phone buzzed in my pocket.

  “Yeah?”

  “Diggs.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Drinkwater. Sounds like you’re someplace busy.”

  “Coffee sh
op.”

  I picked up a weird abrasion on the line—Drinkwater’s stubble grating on the mouthpiece? Dogs barked in the background.

  “You healed up?”

  “I’d be okay to go. Anything happening?”

  “Why don’t you come over.”

  “My cutman’s at work.”

  “Don’t need him. Just you.”

  “This a job?”

  “This isn’t anything if I’m on the phone with you another five seconds.”

  “What do you know about fighting dogs, Diggs?”

  “I know I wouldn’t want to fight one myself.”

  “Smart, paleface.”

  Drinkwater had showed up at Smokin’ Joes in a chromed-up Silverado Crew Cab. Joes was the size of a small-town supermarket and sold everything from motorcycle jackets to authentic Tuscaroran birdhouses, but I’d yet to see anyone come out with anything except suds or cigs.

  Drinkwater, as always, was all sharp angles and unforgiving bone. I took in the raised pink scar that fish-hooked from his hairline around one ear. He wore the same stovepipe jeans I’d seen him in since the first day I met him, the kind you had to work in like a catcher’s mitt. He retrieved a pit bull from the truck bed, wrapping the leash around his fist.

  “Get your ass in gear, Diggs.”

  We passed through a gate into an acre-wide impound housing six U-barns: corrugated tin scabbed with rust, the sort of things built to shelter twin-prop airplanes. The far north warehouse was the fight house. The other five? I had no clue what they held.

  Drinkwater met with four men inside the gates. They had the same look: the old-style blue jeans, jackets with knotted fringes of fur, the wide-brimmed black bowler hats with partridge feathers stuck in the band. They spoke with their backs to me.

  Thunder kicked up over the flatlands. A sleek black helicopter rose over the earth’s hub, hovering over the compound. The air swam with rotor wash, the shimmer of gas fumes. The smell of industrial bearing lubricant hit my nose: it was the same cherry-scented lube we used at the Bisk to grease gears. The chopper rode too high for me to make out its occupants—all I saw were sunglasses whose tinted lenses shone like lynx eyes in the reddening sun.