Cataract City

by Craig Davidson

  I stood on the gas pedal. The big block V8 shrieked as the hearse leapt like a scalded cat. The pink car was boogying, too: vaporous streamers of smoke peeled back from its crunched hood. The spotlights shone off the still-bright chrome of the dash, which glowed with its strange circular geometries, and I inhaled the mustard leatherette of the seat and thought about the bodies that had occupied the berth behind me, laid out in coffins with their formaldehyde-stiff skin white as candle wax, wounds sewn tight with black thread, and then I braced my hands on the wheel as the pink car blasted into me.

  A crash of earthbound thunder. Our hoods were welded with the weirdest metallic symmetry. Steel buckled, the alloy became liquid: it tumbled off the front of the hood in silver waves like steel-tinted winter water over the Falls, throwing me against the wheel so hard that I’d wake the next morning with the bright welt of its shape on my chest.

  The impact shocked the air from my lungs. My next inhale was tortured, the sound you make after being under water so long it has almost killed you. I sucked in the steam roiling off the hearse’s engine block—the taste of a blowtorch’s blue flame. As the motor rattled down I smelled gas—on me?—and watched as small flames licked from under the pink car’s hood.

  “Hey! You okay, buddy?”

  The derby inspector hung his big fat melon through the window. I blinked my eyes and tried to focus.

  “Derby’s over, man. You got yourself a bloody nose.”

  “I’ll be okay. Say, did I win?”

  The inspector shook his head. “The Micra took it.”

  When I burst out laughing, the inspector insisted I check in with the on-site medic: unprovoked laughter was a symptom of a concussion.

  After the race we took a cab to the Blue Lagoon. A pair of gay divorcees danced together on the postage stamp of a dance floor. Their pancake makeup shone under the black lights, making them look like lost mimes.

  I drank a pint of Laker and soon the plugs of Kleenex stuffed up my nostrils were wet with beer foam. Bovine had kept himself well lubed on two-dollar drafts at the derby and showed no signs of flagging. Pinpricks of sweat glittered in the hollows of his eyes, and his hair looked like a half-deflated soufflé.

  “Take it easy,” I told him. “You don’t have to drink your body weight.”

  Bovine said, “Who are you—my mother?”

  He staggered onto the dance floor, grinding up on the divorcees. Arms above his head, a highball glass in one hand and a pint in the other. When the women abandoned the floor, Bovine danced by himself in the strobes, thrusting his crotch.

  Owe winced, fished in his back pocket and tossed a deck of cigarettes on the table.

  “You smoke?”

  Owe shook his head. “Sitting on them funny, is all. Screwing with my spine. They’re evidence, actually.” He exhaled casually. “Know much about cigarette smuggling?”

  “Nothing. Why, should I?”

  Owe tore the cellophane off the package, tapped one out. “These’re counterfeits, but they look and taste almost like the real deal.” He rotated the cigarette with his fingertips. “The band’s a little different—the only way to tell. Dull yellow instead of glossy gold. It’s big money.”

  “That so?”

  “Half a billion a year—can you believe that? Mainly on the reserves down in Cornwall. The Akwesasne Mohawks in the U.S., the Kahnawake tribe on our side. When the Saint Lawrence freezes they hoof ’em over the ice. In the summer it’s speedboats.”

  I said, “And nobody arrests them?”

  “You can’t walk onto a rez and start slapping on cuffs. The Six Nations never ceded to the Crown. They’re a sovereign people who walk the path as brothers and equals under the law—but our laws don’t apply. They can cross the border freely. No guards. No duty. They got their own police force, but …”

  “It’s complicated?”

  “Ever been down to the Akwesasne? Right out of Mad Max, man. Where does the money go? Not into infrastructure. Tough tickets, the Mohawks.” Owe smiled as if to say, Crazy, huh? His insurance adjuster’s eyes slid over the slope of my shoulder to my nose, the plugs of bloodied TP, his gaze resting comfortably on mine. “Our old pal Drinkwater’s neck-deep in it.”

  “That so?”

  “It is a fact,” said Owe. “Makes him a whole lotta wampum. That’s racist. Sorry. He smuggles across the river into Canada. A risky game, but his rake is huge. Plenty of money on both sides of the river—in Drinkwater’s pocket on that side, in the distributor’s pockets over here. But the river itself … that’s where the smugglers operate. They’re low-level mules, totally expendable. Here in Cataract City, you can’t walk five feet without tripping over one of those poor fools.”

  My bladder tightened. I got up and went to the toilets, and stared at my reflection in the fly-spotted mirror. Did Owen know? Had he seen or heard or somehow read the thoughts bouncing inside my head? Owe was smart—smarter than me. I couldn’t outfox him. He’d give me a heads-up, wouldn’t he? Let me know which way the wind was blowing?

  A quickie vacation—that’s how I floated it to Edwina. Don’t ask where the money came from. Don’t ask me to justify it. Just say you’ll come.

  We’d planned a similar trip years ago, to New Orleans. We’d made it to Kentucky before my old pickup’s engine blew, which was just as well—something burned deep inside my bones the further I’d gone from the city.

  But I remembered even the smallest details from that trip: Ed’s feet on the dashboard, the chipped candy-apple of her nail polish. How we’d sat in a café in West Virginia eating eggs whose yolks were the size of quarters—pigeon eggs, Ed had called them—with sunlight falling through the yellowed windows. How Ed had grabbed my hand impulsively and bit the knuckles. I still had knuckles back then.

  She had sat on the bed in one of those no-tell motels along the interstate, cupping her breasts, laughing and telling me casually, “I really like my tits.” Later that night, dehydrated and ravenous, we’d ransacked our pockets for quarters and wrapped our naked bodies in the motel duvet and crept out to stock up on cold Cokes and Ho Hos, giggling like kids in the glow of the vending machines.

  During that trip I’d realized you can’t have it all in a relationship. Constancy and the ability to thrill—these rarely dwelled within the same person. So you took the best of what you could reasonably expect, made your choice and held to it.

  This time we drove north into Pennsylvania Dutch Country. The grey sky held a perpetual hesitancy, as if it could open up at any moment. The exit signs fascinated me. Turn off at any one and the possibility existed that you could be somebody else entirely. The miles dropped under the hood and tension eased out of my chest. In Cataract City everything was a struggle. It knit itself deep inside you. What was the most awful thing about living as an adult on the same streets where you grew up? It’s so easy to remember how perfect it was supposed to be. Reminders were always smacking you in the face. Good things happened—sure, I knew that. They just happened in other places.

  “Am I a gift?” Ed asked me one night in an interstate motel. “Because you’re a gift, Duncan Diggs. And I treasure that gift. Really, I do.”

  “So do I, Ed. I treasure you, too. Why wouldn’t I?” But the refrain in my head said, Just tell me not to do it, Ed. Whatever it is, whatever you think, just tell me not to go through with it—and I won’t. I swear to you, I won’t.

  But she wouldn’t say anything about how I’d managed to find the money for the trip or what I might be planning. It wasn’t Ed’s way. Looking back, I believe she was making plans even then. The trip had that end-game undercurrent.

  We drove back through unending rain. My cell rang outside Buffalo.

  Drinkwater said, “How’s it going, paleface? Get your sea legs ready.”

  The night before the job, Owe called.

  “Got a minute?”

  “Sure, always.”

  He was drinking—a slurred tempo to his words. I pictured him in his well-ordered cop apart
ment drinking whatever cops drank.

  “You never asked me about Fragrant Meat, man. You never asked how my dog was doing.”

  I sat by the window overlooking the street. Dolly’s head rested on my lap. I scratched her ear flaps and said, “How is he?”

  “Dead.”

  The fact hung between us—dead—like a squashed bug on the sidewalk. Owe laughed, the same mirthless, thousand-yard laugh he’d started using after his knee surgeries.

  “I’m sorry, man. I knew you really cared about—”

  “No, no. Just listen, okay? Listen.” When I didn’t say anything he carried on. “So a stupid fuckhead gets off his stupid fuckhead job on Friday afternoon. The stupid fuckhead has a few too many drinks with the other stupid fuckheads he works with and then hops in his truck and goes screaming down a neighbourhood street at ninety K. That neighbourhood was my neighbourhood. Southern edge of Calgary—I couldn’t see the Rockies from my house, the angle wasn’t right, but the area felt safe, Dunk, and that mattered because I never really felt safe on the job, right?”

  The clatter of glass, the sloppy gloh-gloh-gloh of liquid sloshing out of a bottle. A heavy exhale, then two convulsive swallows—I heard the click of his Adam’s apple. He’d reached that state of drunkenness where cold clarity settled in. He spoke fluidly.

  “I was walking Fragrant Meat. But I didn’t call him that anymore. Wasn’t any sort of name for a creature you loved, right? He slept on my bed, which was fine seeing as the ladies weren’t exactly lining up to share it with me. I heard the truck before seeing it. The grrrrrr of its engine. It rounded the bend, skipped the grassy strip dividing the street, hopped the curb and … there was no time to do anything. I tell myself that now, Dunk, and … really, that’s the truth I think. But it felt like I had all the time in the world. But that’s only because time slows down in a crisis—that’s what everyone tells me, anyway.

  “The fuckhead hit Frag so hard his collar snapped—the impact knocked the blood through him in a wave, the vet told me, bulging his veins and snapping the collar. All I felt was a slight tug as the leash followed the movement of Frag’s body—like a big fish biting the bait off your hook before the line goes slack.”

  I could hear Owe moving—had he stood up, was he stumbling around? I listened to the familiar squeak of the brace on his knee: an awkward contraption he never bothered to oil. Then came a crash, the squeak of shoe heels on linoleum and a tortured outrush of air.

  “Jesus.” He hissed through his teeth. “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.”

  “You okay?”

  “I’ll live. Unfamiliar surroundings.” His breathing calmed, then he said, “I didn’t see Frag go airborne. But when I close my eyes, Dunk, sometimes I do—Frag tumbling over and over in the air as if he’s rolling up an invisible hill before gravity inevitably takes hold. His legs tucked stiff to his body like he’s already dead, rigor mortis setting in. And y’know, I hope he was dead. I hope the impact knocked the life right out of him.

  “The fuckhead’s truck smoked on down the sidewalk. To this day I have no idea if he even knew. Frag was slumped halfway under an ornamental shrub on somebody’s front lawn. His flesh was split right through his coat, man. Can you imagine the pressure?”

  My eyes drifted to the house across the street. It’d been vacant a few months. The owners had defaulted on their mortgage—happened a lot, even in low-rent neighbourhoods—and the bank hadn’t resold it. It sagged into itself the way neglected homes tend to, as if, vacant of life, the wood and brick surrender their strength and the whole works sinks slowly like a mammoth into a tar pit. The windows were dark but I could see something moving behind the glass.

  “Engine coolant had bled down the street,” Owe said. “I followed it. The truck was parked in an alleyway covered in a blue tarp, the kind you drape over cordwood to keep out the damp. The front headlight hung from its mount. Frag’s collar was meshed with the grille. That’s when I felt it, man. The snap. I’d heard that term around the precinct. The snap is that moment, that sight, that breaks a cop. One guy snapped when he found a baby stuffed into a vacuum cleaner bag by its drugged-out father. He unzipped the bag and saw an ash-grey little face clung with lint and cat hair and … For me, it was a dog collar stuck in the grille of a Dodge pickup.

  “So fuckhead’s sitting on a lawn chair in the backyard, smoking a Chesterfield with a freshly cracked beer. Bloodshot eyes, blood down his shirt: he’d busted his nose on the wheel. I showed him my badge. He goes: I’ve got my rights, don’t I? After the evidence crew showed, I wrapped Frag up and carried him home. I laid him on the kitchen table. Where else … where do you put a dead dog? You’d think that’d be the end of it, right?”

  He lapsed into silence. I didn’t break it. He rustled around, stood up maybe. Next came the grating scrape of a lighter’s flywheel being flicked.

  A trembling flame lit the bay window of the house across the street, illuminating a figure standing in the darkness.

  I listened to a ragged inhale, a prolonged hack.

  “You smoking?”

  “I don’t, as a rule,” Owe said. “Only on stakeouts.”

  My heart double-tapped—two solid mule kicks behind my rib cage.

  “Big case, uh?”

  “Not really, man. Penny-ante, to tell the truth. But guys get themselves shut away for nothing sometimes. But then it’s not my job—”

  “To talk people out of being stupid?”

  Silence again.

  “Fuckhead’s lawyer got him house arrest. Ultimately he got two years for drunk driving. It was only a dead dog, right? He stood before the judge and was all, I have a disease. Look into your heart. Three priors—a pair of DUIs and another for driving with a suspended licence. Your garden-variety fuckhead driven by garden-variety demons. Anyway, here’s the part you need to know. The fuckhead who killed my dog went for a smoke every night. Right before bed. He turned in late—two in the morning. How did I know he smoked, Dunk?”

  I didn’t say anything. The answer was obvious: because he’d watched him.

  The line was so quiet I could hear the paper of his smoke crackle as it burned.

  “Four nights I watched from my car in the alley. At one o’clock on the fifth night I got out with an iron pipe. Fuckhead smoked in the backyard, under the patio’s bare bulb. I crept into his yard, unscrewed the bulb so the contact points weren’t touching. Then … well. Next day Chief calls me into his office. Said nobody would be trying all that hard to find the guy who assaulted fuckhead, shattering his kneecap and crushing his orbital socket … but maybe police work wasn’t my bag.”

  The ember brightened in the dark house across the road. Owe’s breath feathered the mouthpiece, gently rasping.

  “And I’ll tell you, because why the hell not … there are moments you realize that when you carry through with a given plan of action, you’re gonna come out a changed man. Won’t be noticeable on the outside but you’ll never be the same behind the eyes. Standing in the dark in fuckhead’s yard, waiting, a small part of me kept yammering: this isn’t you. But who are any of us, really? We inhabit different states of being. Some are fleeting and some become permanent. Sometimes what we are, or who, or … it’s just a question of circumstance, y’know? How far would you go? How much does it mean to you? How much do you need it?”

  Dolly whined thinly, then heaved herself up and padded into the kitchen. I listened to the dry click of nails on the linoleum, the dry crunch of kibble between her molars.

  “Anyway, that’s Frag. I cremated him and scattered his ashes on his favourite walking trail … favourite, I think, because who can tell a dog’s mind? It’s hokey as hell, but whatever. I loved him, uh?”

  “I know you did.”

  “He was sorta stupid but I love stupid things. Like you, Dunk.”

  “Awww, aren’t you a peach.”

  “Don’t do it, man.”

  I said, “Do what?” but the line was dead.

  I sat watching th
e figure across the road. The figure watched me back.

  At some point Ed returned from work.

  “What are you looking at?”

  “Nothing, beautiful. The stars.”

  The next night I didn’t say goodbye to Ed, just slipped into my boots and left her sleeping. I flagged down a cab at the top of the street and told the driver to hit the casino. It rolled down Clifton Hill, the neon-lit marquees watery behind a curtain of rain. I bought a ticket for the casino shuttle. A couple of old warhorses in Sansabelt slacks stumbled on the bus, moaning about the rigged slots.

  At the Rainbow Bridge a bored-looking border guard checked my passport. The shuttle headed east along the river and turned right at the aquarium before heading up Pine Street.

  The driver stopped at the Piggly Wiggly. I stepped out, jacket pulled tight around my shoulders. The night seemed colder on this side of the river.

  The bell chimed as I stepped inside the store. The clerk was eighteen, zitty, tending to the hot-dog rotisserie. I headed to the dairy case, grabbed a quart of full-fat milk. Moo juice, as my mom called it. The bell chimed. I turned to the pastries, craving something sweet and body-wrecking. A Hostess Choco-Bliss, maybe.

  “Dunk?”

  Owe stood behind the swinging glass of the soda cooler. He let it fall shut and squared his shoulders. His expression betrayed nothing.

  “Hey, Owe.”

  “Fancy seeing you here.”

  “Yeah, fancy that.”

  I picked up a cellophane-wrapped bearclaw and rubbed the serrated edge of the wrapper against my chin.

  “What are you doing over here?” he said.

  “Meeting somebody.”

  “Anyone I know?”

  “Don’t figure so. We met after you left town.”

  “Where you going?”

  I said, “What are you doing here?”

  Owe smiled sheepishly. “Pizza and wings at Sammy’s.”

  “By yourself?”

  “Why—want to come with? I don’t like eating alone.”