Cataract City

by Craig Davidson

  Drinkwater and the other men held their bodies stiff against the blade-wind as it rose to a fierce howl, ripping fans of dust off the ground. The helicopter banked southward over the band centre and the squat architecture of the rez.

  Drinkwater didn’t say anything about the helicopter as we walked the ruddy scrub behind Smokin’ Joes, down a row of fenced-in pens. At the sound of Drinkwater’s voice, dogs tore out of their cheap plastic doghouses to leap and claw at the chain-link.

  They were pit bulls—some black, some brindle-coated, some the glossy grey of a luxury sedan. And they all had the same physique: a dark heart-shaped nose, black eyes canopied by a jutting forehead, docked ears and a jaw that looked to have been worked into shape by chewing an India rubber ball. Their musculature flared like a cobra’s hood down their ribs, which were prominent when the dogs held certain positions; those bones looked like giant skeletal fingers flexed under the flesh. The males’ penises were sheathed in folds of skin that lay nearly flat against their stomachs like the hood scoops on muscle cars. None of the dogs looked more than sixty-five pounds but they seemed monstrous. It was as if they were made out of well-matched chunks of stone wrapped in jeweller’s velvet.

  “There is no breed to match the pit bull,” Drinkwater said. “Americans love two tons of Detroit rolling iron and supersizing everything, so of course breeders used to figure the biggest dogs were the toughest. German shepherds, Dobermans, Rottweilers, Great Danes, Tosa Inus—all hat, no cattle.”

  Dogfighting was big on the rez. Dogmen came up from the Carolinas and as far south as Florida to fight Drinkwater’s studs. He’d set up a closed-circuit TV link; the fights were broadcast in Vegas and drew heavy wagering.

  Drinkwater bashed a stick against a pen. The dog inside leapt and yowled. Its neighbours did the same, biting at the fence and leaving runners of saliva dangling from the metal.

  “This is my million-dollar gal,” he said. “Folchik. My Little Hunter.”

  I remembered War Hammer, another one of Drinkwater’s million-dollar gals. When he opened the pen door, Folchik bounded out. She looked not much different than the others. I told Drinkwater as much.

  “It’s not the look,” he said. “It’s the game. Game is the dog that won’t quit fighting—the dog that’ll fight with two broken legs! Game is the dog that will toe the scratch knowing it’s already dead. Game is crazy, but game dogs taste more of life because they have no fear of death. And Folchik is dead game.”

  Drinkwater stick-whipped the dog’s ass. The blow sent seismic ripples down the dog’s flanks, but Folchik didn’t register it at all.

  “Another breed, that would be abuse,” Drinkwater said.

  I ran a hand down Folchik’s hide. Muscle throbbed under her skin, strands lapping each other like tight-woven wicker. Her coat held the reflective sheen of the tinted windows of a downtown high-rise, like nothing possible in nature.

  “They’re good with people,” said Drinkwater, “but murder on other dogs.”

  “We had a bull mastiff for a while growing up, before I got Dolly.”

  Drinkwater shook his head as if this was the saddest news he’d heard all day. “Some guy brought a mastiff round for a roll. Neapolitan variety—I guess they’re supposed to be bad-asses. Hundred-fifty pounds and jowly, folds of skin hanging off its muzzle. Disgusting thing! I refused to roll my stock—wasn’t that dog’s fault it had a moron for an owner. Another guy had a beat-up old pit bull cur that was practically a bait dog—one you chuck in with the gamers just to keep them lively—but still, a pittie. That little scrap of shit tore the mastiff’s throat right out. The mastiff’s owner bawled his guts out.”

  Drinkwater leashed Folchik and together we walked to one of the tin-sided sheds. Inside was a treadmill with a two-foot-tall metal cage over the track. Drinkwater swatted Folchik inside the cage and knotted her leash to the treadmill panel. He ramped the elevation to max and cranked it. Folchik fell into a quick run as the treadmill’s belt ripped round the rollers.

  “I want to show you something,” Drinkwater said.

  “We’re leaving her here?”

  “She can run for days.”

  We walked to a warehouse dominated by a giant machine, green like a ’7os-vintage fridge. It was working at a furious pace, well-worn parts ticking with the sound of silenced bullets shot from an automatic rifle.

  Drinkwater walked me down the line. Bricks of tobacco went into a shredder on one side, cigarettes spat out the other. The cigarette filters chittered down one funnel, where they were attached to the paper, rolled with the tobacco and fastened with a golden band. The machine was manned by chain-smoking Natives; they picked fresh cigs out of the hoppers and lit them off the stumps of their last. One guy smoked like a Frenchman, holding his cig between his third and fourth fingers.

  Drinkwater eyed me down his nose. “You wouldn’t squeal on your old pal Lem, wouldya?”

  When I didn’t reply he led me outside, back to the shed where Folchik was still running strong—if anything, stronger. Her tongue hung out of her mouth, thick and pink.

  “She’s rolling tonight. Got to taper my baby down.”

  He took her out and scratched her ears and under her chin with all the tenderness of a man clawing at a tick bite. The clipped nub of Folchik’s tail wagged gratefully—and Drinkwater cuffed her head so hard that her snout bounced off the dirt. Folchik’s lips rippled along her gums to expose her teeth but she didn’t bite.

  “Good girl,” Drinkwater said softly. “You build the aggression by antagonizing them, see? Turn them into a stick of TNT with a very short fuse, yeah? Come with me.”

  A bearlike specimen waited by Drinkwater’s truck: he was fifty pounds heavier than me, with a dewlapped face. His nose was mobbed with broken veins. He stood spread-legged against the bumper dressed in the same deep-blue dungarees Drinkwater wore and a wifebeater. “Diggs,” Drinkwater said. “This is Igor.”

  “Igor? You’re joking.”

  Neither man spoke so I said, “Hey, Igor.”

  “Hiya,” Igor said, deadpan.

  Folchik rode in back. I rode bitch. Drinkwater pushed the big truck up to eighty down unpaved roads, throwing up a rooster tail of dust. We gunned past houses that weren’t much more than huts held fast by L-clamps and the grace of God. Soon even those were gone: only the uncluttered scrub of the rez where, as they say, a man could watch his dog run away for days.

  Drinkwater said, drily, “What bounty you’ve given us, paleface. What beauty to behold. I guess you’d like it if we were gone—yeah? Sure. We give you heap big headaches. But the ol’ typhoid-infested blanket trick didn’t work, did it? The firewater, though. That was a smart move.”

  He hurled the truck round a blind corner, wheels flirting with the ditch. The momentum threw me against Igor’s unyielding bulk.

  “But you let us hang around, you white devils with your white devil guilt, and now we’re dug in deep.”

  The dirt road gave way to tarmac. The tires bit down and we screamed off the rez into the world of concrete light stanchions, dotted yellow lines and Piggly Wigglys. Drinkwater took us down a switchback hill that emptied into the Niagara river basin. He stopped in front of a puntboat tied along the shore.

  “Let’s see what you can do with this tub,” he said.

  The river was greenest at the shore, greying as it went out and black where it ran deepest. It was five hundred yards wide where we stood, and hooked sharply a half-mile down, around an outcrop of Jack pines. The sun carved over the trees on the far shore, glimmering off a million leaves so that it seemed as if the distant banks were on fire.

  We picked across jags of rock slick with algae at the waterline. An insane glittering of gnats danced above the greenness. We each scooped up a handful of cold river water and ran our fingers over our teeth until we heard the squeak. It was something all men did around here.

  My uncle used to take me fishing for steelhead in a puntboat before the bank took it away. Drinkwater’s b
oat was a long, flat-bottomed pug with rings of rust around every rivet. He and Igor stood at the bow while I shucked the tie-downs and slid us off.

  Once we’d floated free of the rocks I pull-started the old Evinrude and guided us into the deepest seam of the channel. The current held a complex urgency: breaking around rocks and into sucking crevices, forming again, fighting against itself like a thing made of many strings being pulled different ways at once.

  Drinkwater watched me without watching me. Igor’s face remained stony as an Easter Island idol as the dying sun lit it from behind: he looked sandblasted, with divots of shadow on the places he must’ve had acne as a teenager.

  Drinkwater shifted his hips and I saw the curved bone handle of his knife sheathed where his belt ran round his spine. I thought that you didn’t need to be strong or skilled to slide a knife into someone—you only had to core that worm of mercy out of your heart. That was the hardest line, one I couldn’t cross; it put me at a disadvantage with guys like Drinkwater.

  “Cut the motor,” he said.

  We drifted. Igor whispered into Drinkwater’s ear; Lem laughed without mirth.

  “What I need of you …” he said to me, still laughing.

  “How many?” I said.

  He wasn’t laughing now. “How many what?”

  “How many cigarettes and what’s my cut?”

  Drinkwater squinted. “Five million cigarettes. More maybe, next time. No cut. Flat rate. Ten K.”

  In Cataract City, as in any border town, smuggling was common. Most of it penny-ante, done for a cheap thrill. When I was a kid, Bovine’s dad had installed an extra-large windshield-washer-fluid reservoir in his Impala. He’d drive over to Pine Street Liquor and fill it with Comrade Popov’s potato vodka—five gallons of the swill. Anything to declare? the border guard would ask. Just that you’ve got yourselves a real swell country over here, Bovine’s dad would answer with a shit-eating grin.

  “Fine, I’ll do it.”

  Drinkwater picked his fingers along the teeth in his hatband. “Just like that?”

  “Just like that. I want half now.”

  “I’ll give you two now.”

  “Fine.”

  “Igor will be going with you.”

  “When?”

  “When you do it.”

  “Igor’s okay with that?”

  “Igor’s okay with anything I tell him to be okay with.”

  “When do we do it?”

  “I’ll let you know when it becomes critical.”

  “Let’s head back. You give me the two now and call when you need me.”

  “What, you don’t enjoy my company?”

  “Not really, Lem.”

  Drinkwater’s lips skinned back from his teeth and he doubled over, laughter sobbing out of him in a high, breathless wheeze. Straightening up, he flicked away tears from under his eyes with one finger.

  “Hell, ain’t that a shame. I like you well enough.”

  We returned to the Tuscarora without speaking. Once we’d slipped past the razorwire fence, Drinkwater said, “I’ll pay you after the fight, which I need to get back for.”

  “I’m not watching two dogs maul each other.”

  “If that’s all you see you aren’t watching close enough. Anyway, cash doesn’t leave my pocket until the roll’s over.”

  Inside the warehouse, in the same spot where I usually fought, sat a plywood pen. It was waist-high, roughly seven foot by seven. The crowd was mostly Native men in dungarees and jean jackets; a pall of cigarette smoke floated over the fighting box. The men who’d thrown that bottle at me might’ve been there, but I couldn’t remember their faces. The old man who smoked like a Frenchman was there, watching with eyes like peach pits sunk in the net of wrinkles on his face.

  A trio of white men huddled on the far side of the pen, all three of them fat—southern deputy fat. They wore overalls, train engineer’s caps and Caterpillar boots. They had handkerchiefs in their back pockets and they stood on pigeon toes in a rough circle around a dog crate.

  “No dog beats a pittie,” Drinkwater said to me. “The only fact left up for debate is which pit bull bloodline is best. Folchik’s a red nose—best, I say. Those boys came up from Carolina with a blue nose bitch whelped by Grand Champ Negrino, the original slaughterhouse on four legs. So I guess we’ll see.”

  I thought about how, right now, people were looking into problems of great importance. Curing cancers, puzzling out how to make a combustion engine run on orange peels and egg shells, stuff like that. Those kinds of people didn’t live in Cataract City, though. Here were the things my people investigated: which type of dog was the best at killing all other types of dogs. The better I got to know Lemuel Drinkwater, the more I came to see he’d built a laboratory for himself. He was a scientist, you could say, and his field of study was suffering. And now I’d made myself a part of that, too. I was another one of his lab rats.

  One of the fat dog-breeders came over with his cap in his hands, nervously rubbing the hatband’s sheen with his hammerthumbs.

  “I ‘preciate the opportunity,” he said, showing teeth that were shockingly white and straight.

  Drinkwater said: “So who’s this one you brought?”

  “She’s a game bitch,” the man said. “Green, yuh, but plenny game. This yours?”

  “She is,” said Drinkwater. “Folchik.”

  “You rolled her ever?”

  Drinkwater pointed to her flank and said, “Figure she got those scars shaving?”

  The man set the toe of his boot between Folchik’s front legs. “Lotta space between them legs. Blue noses is narrower across the brisket.”

  Drinkwater said, “They must tip over easy.”

  “I ain’t never rolled no tippy dog, mister.”

  The fat breeder’s pit bull, Seeker, was sleek and streamlined. She had terrifying aerodynamics: she didn’t move so much as flow like grey water. Her skull was a wedge trimming towards her snout, and she had a small overbite—the points of her canines protruded below her top lip.

  The dogs were lifted into the pen. Their noses touched. Seeker licked Folchik’s chin.

  “Razor them,” Drinkwater said.

  Both men made a cut in their dog’s flanks—Drinkwater with the bone-handled knife, the fat breeder with a box-cutter clipped to his overalls. They wet their fingers with the blood and rubbed it onto their own dog’s nose first, then the other dog’s. Folchik snuffled blood up her nose and sneezed, spraying red on the shellacked concrete.

  The dogs nosed up at the scratch-line. The blood had jacked the fight into them. They lunged, forelegs battling, teeth daggering in the smoky air. And still they made no sound: only the soft hiss of breath escaped their lungs.

  “God damn,” the breeder said with real admiration. “That’s a gamer.”

  The dogs were drawn back to their corners, held tight by their scruffs. Seeker yowled and snapped at the air. Folchik sat still as stone.

  “Release,” said Drinkwater.

  The dogs flew at each other like stones from a catapult. Folchik closed the distance and leapt; Seeker dropped levels, flattening as Folchik sailed overtop. For a split second their teeth flashed: Seeker’s head twisting sideways and darting upwards to snap at Folchik’s belly, Folchik’s head straining down to rip at her opponent’s flanks as she passed overhead.

  Folchik’s paws hit the cement and skidded, leaving milky scars in the rosin. As she wrenched her body awkwardly around, claws seeking purchase on the slick floor, her haunches slammed into the plywood with a thump that shook the pen and her rear paws kicked off the barricade to slingshot back at Seeker, who was spinning to meet her.

  Folchik bulled forward, angling for the killshot, skull snaking side to side—but she found nothing except air as Seeker backpedalled smartly, feinting, dodging, her throat half an inch from Folchik’s gnashing teeth. Folchik backed Seeker up to the pen’s edge, trying to bully her into a corner but failing. Seeker slipped to one side, batting Fol
chik’s head with her paw, then tilted her head slightly and arrowed in at the spot just behind Folchik’s jaw.

  It took an instant. Less. When Seeker’s head came away there was a shiny pink disc on Folchik’s throat. It rapidly filled with red that dripped down the dog’s leg.

  The fight found its truth in that moment. Seeker’s manoeuvre was that of a picador baiting a bull, making it believe in its own invulnerability before sinking his little dagger, the pica, into the bull’s neck.

  The dogs met in the centre of the pen. Both rose on their hind legs, forelegs locked over each other’s shoulders like waltzers in a death-dance. Folchik’s mouth was a blur of enamel; ropes of saliva hung from her jaws, stretching and snapping with the crazed movement of her head. Seeker held her own head aslant, parrying Folchik’s crazed thrusts, crow-hopping lightly on her hind legs. Her head stabbed forward when she found an opening, clinical cobra-strikes that opened the skin around Folchik’s jaw and shredded what was left of one docked ear.

  The noise that came out of Folchik caused my guts to contract: it was a confused whine like that of a child confronted with a puzzle she cannot solve.

  Folchik torqued her body and jerked her head to strike at Seeker’s belly. Her jaws fastened onto Seeker’s brisket, but as Folchik was rucking in for a better grip Seeker leapt off her hind legs, tucked her head smartly and flipped over Folchik’s back. Her haunches hit Folchik’s spine and she spun to the side with eerie grace; her head ended up even with Folchik’s back legs. Now Seeker’s teeth flashed like razors—she didn’t need an instant to orient herself; she knew exactly where she was—two quick strikes into Folchik’s right rear leg. By the time Folchik spun round to fend off the attack, Seeker had ducked clear. What looked like a nest of wet red wires hung from a deep wound in Folchik’s thigh.

  “Break!” cried Drinkwater. “Time!”

  Drinkwater and the fat breeder climbed inside the pen to fetch their dogs. Seeker licked Folchik’s bloodied flank lightly, the way she might have licked one of her newborn pups.

  In the corner Drinkwater petted Folchik with great tenderness, whispering, “My beautiful, my beautiful.” He had a bag much like Bovine’s and from it he removed a packet of Monsel’s solution, which he painted onto the dog’s wounds with a wet Q-tip; Folchik stood silent as her flesh hardened into brown jerky.