Cataract City

by Craig Davidson

  “Sorry, but like I said. Plans. Another time.”

  A car pulled into the lot. The horn honked.

  “You can’t go halfway down the rabbit hole, Diggs,” Owe said before turning away.

  I paid for my milk, walked across the lot and got into the grey Ford Taurus. Igor was squashed behind the wheel. He pulled out, driving with the squinty determination of the elderly.

  A pit bull sat in the back seat. It was about the same size as Folchik, white with a black stripe across its eyes.

  “That’s Bandit,” Igor said. “Don’t pet him.”

  “Where’s Drinkwater?”

  “Not coming,” Igor said. “Never does.”

  “Just you and me?”

  “On this side. Others, other side.”

  “You got my money?”

  Igor’s head swivelled slowly, as if his neck was operated by a balky crank. When he didn’t answer I glanced over my shoulder. Stuck hadn’t followed. He couldn’t possibly know where we were going—even I didn’t know that.

  Igor said, “What’s your problem?”

  We hit the I-190 and out across the night river where it split at Navy Island. The street lights vanished as we drove through Buckthorn Island, then came back as we hit the Red Carpet Inn off Grand Inland Boulevard. The wheel looked as thin as copper wire in Igor’s meathooks. I felt the shape of the box-cutter in my pocket. I was ashamed to have brought it—a Dollar Store weapon, something a punk would carry.

  We hit the West River Parkway and swung round the traffic ring into Beaver Island State Park. Light stanchions shone on an empty road glittering with frost. Igor tapped the brakes and eased onto an unlit corduroy road. Bushes whacked up under the car, rattling the coins in the cup holders. Igor pulled under some trees, cut the engine and unrolled the back window enough so Bandit could hop out.

  “We walk from here.”

  The long, open rush of the river and the dampness of the woods crawled up the back of my neck. We trudged through leaf mould that collapsed beneath our feet, boots sinking into the twisted roots that clawed up through the earth.

  Igor moved slowly, tripping once and whistling air between his teeth. Trees with bladelike leaves, willows maybe, grew thickly along the bank. I pushed them clear with hands numb from the cold. The river opened before us.

  It was black, as all night water was—as if the night dissolved directly into it, filling it with the same nothingness that must exist between stars.

  “Those are them,” Igor said.

  I peered at one puntboat, one swift-looking Zodiac. The puntboat was a wide-bottomed hulk topped with a tarpaulin. Under the tarp sat cardboard boxes stacked high, flaps fastened with packing tape.

  “You in this one.” Igor pointed to the punt. “I follow in the Zodiac.”

  The cry came from somewhere behind the willows. Owe. I knew it instinctively, because although years had passed and we were now double the age we were back then, and Owe’s voice had changed and deepened, when we scream—any of us, when we are truly shocked and scared—we sound like boys. Owe screamed as he had when we were boys lost in the woods.

  Instinctively I leapt from the puntboat and moved towards him—which was when Igor smashed a fist into the side of my head. The night swung out of balance, stars pinwheeling as I crashed on the rocks with Igor’s bulk following to crush the air from my lungs.

  “Knew you were dirty …”

  His hands clamped round my throat. My legs thrashed uselessly as Igor hipped himself up on my chest, bearing down with all his weight, shoulders torqueing forward, hands constricting to crush my windpipe.

  Darkness hemmed my vision, a deeper and more profound darkness than night. I brought a fist up and cracked Igor in the mouth but my strength was fleeing, my reflexes too, and I don’t think he even registered it. I slid a hand between his thigh and my stomach, feeling for the box-cutter that lay trapped against the tight denim of my pocket. I clawed for it, my tongue thickening as the pressure of blood swelled behind my eyes.

  My hand closed on the plastic shaft of the box-cutter and I thumbed the mechanism convulsively. I jerked my arm, the box-cutter slicing through my pocket as my hand came up under Igor’s thigh—there was a sensation of things coming apart, a terrifying new looseness—and next my hand was free and in it lay three inches of glinting razor.

  Igor’s hands clenched my throat tighter. White balls burst in front of my eyes. Then warmth was spreading across my chest. Igor’s grip loosened. He stared down with a look of befuddlement. His jeans were dark, as was my shirt and jacket.

  “Wha—?” he said.

  He stood with difficulty. A clean, straight slit ran through his jeans, two inches to the left of his zipper. Blood ran along each edge. His hands trembled at the wound. He pushed as if he might somehow push the blood back inside. He staggered towards the water, still ten or twelve feet from the shore.

  Igor got down carefully on his knees; blood splashed the stones, or was it the splash of water? Part of me wanted him to die, but that same part knew I was doomed if he did. That part also knew it was beyond my power to control now.

  Igor crawled to the river. He was moaning somebody’s name, I believe, yet the sound came out as a hateful hiss. He fell face first into the water. I staggered to the waterline, rolled Igor over. His eyes were already glassy like a doll’s.

  Run, said a rabbity voice inside my head. It’s all you can do now. RUN.

  The Zodiac ignited with an easy rumble. I piloted it onto the river, skipping across lapping wavelets, swallowing compulsively because it was hard to breathe. Where was I going? I had no idea. My mind said, Just go.

  The Zodiac’s motor stripped out across the water. I angled towards the Falls, charting the bend of the river by the solitary lights hovering above the scrim of the shore. Red and blue lights flashed in the low-lying blackness on the Canadian side, disappearing as the cruisers dipped down a hill and reappearing as they crested it.

  A trap door opened in my stomach. Edwina. Owe.

  I cycled the motor to surge upriver. There were the lights of Clifton Hill. The Falls were lit with red and green spotlights, and a white bowl of mist foamed up from the basin. The sound was loudest here: a pressurized thrum against my eardrums. I thought fleetingly: You forget how powerful some things are. You take their beauty for granted.

  A helicopter rose up from the Falls basin, blades whirring over the tumbling water. Its spotlight illuminated the river. I almost laughed. I spun around and cut back downriver. I screamed into the cold air that wicked off the water, let it fill my mouth with the taste of wet steel. The taste of home.

  The searchlight crept across the river until it found me. A cone of light shone down like the finger of God himself. The chopper dropped low; water foamed over the Zodiac’s gunwales. A bullhorn-amplified voice shouted something, but I had no idea what.

  Then the puntboat slid out of the darkness in front of me, Owe at the wheel. His skull was clad in a helmet of blood. Jesus, was he okay? I cut the motor and floated forward. The noses of our boats touched, then bounced gently away.

  I showed Owe my palms like a magician following some sleight of hand. Ta-daa. The helicopter’s searchlight cored a circle of whiteness out of the night.

  “I’m sorry I had to run you down,” he might have said, but his words were carried away by the rotor wash of the helicopter.

  “You never had to do anything,” I may have said back.

  “You made me.”

  “No, Owe. You made yourself.”

  We floated in that perfect halo of light. Cataract City men, fully made.

  IT WAS NIGHT AGAIN WHEN I LEFT my parents’ house, walking to a quiet stretch of blocks off Bender Street. I’d thought about taking the folks’ car, but my licence had expired while I was in prison and I was done taking stupid risks. Almost done, anyway.

  There was a pay phone on the street, near the Sleep Easy Motor Inn. I stepped inside, let the Plexiglas door swing shut, plugged quarters in the
box and dialled.

  I hadn’t tried the number in years. Would she have kept it?

  One ring. Two. Three. Four. Five.

  I was getting ready to hang up when a voice said, “Hello?”

  My breath hitched. I felt my heart as a discrete part of me, shuddering in my chest. I couldn’t speak; my voice was lodged tight and hard as a fist somewhere below my lungs.

  “Duncan?”

  After an endless gulf during which I was certain she’d hang up, I squeaked, “Yes.”

  A pause, then a long exhale. “So,” she said, “are you going to try to find me?”

  “Depends,” I answered. “Do you want to be found?”

  She laughed—a husky, frayed-edge sound. The most beautiful sound in the whole world.

  PART FOUR

  DONNYBROOK

  &

  LIONS IN WINTER

  DONNYBROOK: DUNCAN DIGGS

  That first night in the Kingston Pen I lay in the dark above my new cellmate, a huge specimen from Sioux Lookout named Nathan Bainbridge. Bainbridge gave off a billygoat odour: trans-3-methyl-2-hexenoic acid, in fact, which Bainbridge, a borderline schizophrenic, leaked out in his sweat. The poor bastard was plagued by night terrors. His legs thrashed wildly, rattling the bedframe we shared. Sometimes he unleashed piglet squeals, horrified by whatever creatures stalked his dreams.

  I breathed shallowly, trying not to wake Bainbridge. Searchlights strafed the yard outside the window. I listened to the living engine of the prison: mice squeaking, inmates hacking wetly, screams that died soon after they were born. I’ll admit it freaked me out.

  My own toughness wasn’t something I’d had cause to question. It was an aspect of my makeup, same as my black hair and the cleft in my chin. Still, I understood that I was Cataract City tough, with a head-down, fists-cocked grittiness that’d only get me hurt in here, where all a man really needed was ratlike cunning and a willingness to sink in the blade. In prison, every blind corner held a threat. I got used to it in time, the way a guy living beneath a flight path gets used to his windows rattling every time a 747 cruises overhead.

  Night washed slowly into day. When sunlight began to creep over the floor Bainbridge rolled out of bed, walked to the commode and flopped his dick out of his PJs. While his piss hit the steel with a ringing tinkle, Bainbridge stared at me blankly and crooned Phil Collins: “It’s just another day/For you and me/In paradise.”

  I’d killed a man. That much was known around the pen. That the man had been Iroquois earned me points in some quarters, hatred in others. I didn’t bother clarifying the facts to anyone; that night on the Niagara River had taken on a dreamlike quality in my memory—a nightmare of moon-silvered steel and blood the colour of tar.

  At the trial the prosecution had submitted grainy photos of a man laid out on a riverbank. His body looked deflated, a tire with a pinhole leak, limbs wrenched at odd angles on the rocks.

  Seeing those photos, a bony-fingered hand squeezed my heart muscle. I hadn’t wanted it—hadn’t meant for this to happen.

  I got nine years for involuntary manslaughter in the killing of Igor Bearfoot, plus three and a half years for attempting to introduce a controlled substance across international borders. Which meant I earned statutory release after eight.

  In his sworn testimony, Owen Stuckey stated the killing of Bearfoot had been a matter of life and death. At the time of the pretrial hearing the bruises on my throat had mushroomed into a purplish-yellow collar, testament to his claim. When asked to identify the suspect from the witness box, Owe’s eyes met mine unblinkingly. He’d fingered me with his right hand—his left was still heavily bandaged from his encounter with a pit bull, Bandit, owned by the deceased.

  Bearfoot’s body was returned to the Tuscarora Nation, to be buried in keeping with Iroquois custom. No charges were levied against Lemuel Drinkwater.

  Those first few years inside I punished myself.

  The prison weight pen was available during out-of-cell hours—I got two daily—and I spent the first half of it curling ancient barbells and strapping heavy weight plates around my hips to grind out wide-grip chin-ups. I performed each move silently, my features wrenched into strained expressions; I could feel the thick veins radiating from my temples. I must’ve looked like one of those hooded monks in frescoes at the Sacred Heart church, stripped to the waist, lashed with iron-tipped whips—men dedicated to acts of extreme penance. Flagellants, my mom called those guys.

  A boxing ring was set off the weight pen. In the second hour I’d smash my fists into the heavy bag so hard that the leather groaned against the hanging chain and the skin over my knuckles split open. Afterwards I wrapped my shredded mitts with prickly prison-issue toilet paper—even the TP was designed to remind us of our sins—and if I was lucky I’d fall into an exhausted sleep, riding those maddening night hours where time could draw itself out like a blade.

  Often I’d jerk awake from dreams where I was adrift on the Niagara as Igor Bearfoot’s head swam out of the black water, eye sockets picked clean by sunfish.

  One day while I was hammering the bag a young inmate ambled over. He was of medium height and build, with reddish-brown skin and hands graced with long, clever fingers. He flipped me a pair of hand-wraps.

  “They’re my old ones,” he said. “Keep you from busting your mitts up any worse than they already are.”

  Silas Garrow was a full-blooded Mohawk Indian from the Akwesasne rez. Other than me, he was the only inmate to make use of the boxing setup—Garrow had once been the Native American Boxing Council’s top-ranked middleweight.

  “Twenty-one wins, three losses.” He gave his biceps a little pump. “A regular rambling rumbler—reservation-to-reservation, swinging TNT every place I went.” He held his fists under his chin. “These babies had ’em trembling in their teepees, limping back to their longhouses.”

  But his boxing ambitions were cut short after he got pinched for smuggling.

  “They caught me driving a rig of Bronco smokes across the Saint Lawrence in the middle of February,” he told me. “The ice broke, right? Soon the rig was just a-sinkin’. I was only twenty-two, my first run, so I flung the doors open and started hucking boxes out. Well, next the emergency crew rolls in and I’m still stuck … a skidoo, a skidoo, my kingdom for a skidoo! Even a pair of fuckin’ ice skates—throw a dog a bone!”

  When I tried to explain my own situation, Silas held up one hand.

  “I know all about the Tuscarora. Who was it? Dale Hawkwind? Lemmy Drinkwater?”

  “Drinkwater, yeah.”

  “There’s a verse we were taught in school,” Silas said. “Learn to be patient observers like the owl; learn courage from the jay, who will attack an owl ten times its size to drive it off its territory … I think that’s how it went. Anyway, Lem Drinkwater learned how to do business from Raven—the Trickster. You killed one of his men?”

  “An accident …”

  “Always is, man. What was his name?”

  “Igor Bearfoot.”

  “Igor? Sounds like an apple.”

  “An apple?”

  “Not a real Indian, man. Red on the outside, white on the inside.”

  We started training together. I’d never truly learned to box: I just bulled forward, swinging lefts and rights, a tactic that tended to work against the tomato cans Drinkwater had thrown at me. But Silas was rangy and oh so slippery. I’d hem him into a corner, shutting down angles in hopes of landing a crushing shot. Silas would pop a few jabs in my face—yip! yip! yip!—with enough sting to either back me off or make him throw a clumsy haymaker. Next he’d slip out of the corner slick as oil.

  A greased eel’s got nothing on this guy, I’d think—usually just before getting blitzed with another of Silas’s crisp jabs.

  “The Great Spirit has conveyed tremendous power into these vessels,” Silas would say, kissing each of his fists. “He told me, Go forth, Silas Garrow, and wreak great havoc on the white man and all their wicked ways.”
/>
  “The white man? Silas, all your fights were against Indians.”

  “Yeah? Well, they had it coming. We all do.”

  I’d tsk-tsk. “You’re such a racist.”

  “I’m a self-hating Indian, man. Learn to spot the difference.”

  We sparred four days a week, and the other three I nursed my various hurts. Black eyes and fat lips and a hematoma on my forehead big as a boiled egg, the blood wrapped tight as a fist under the skin. One day my guard stopped by my cell and whispered, “We can’t help unless you tell us who does this to you.”

  I said, “I ran into a doorknob.”

  “Suit yourself, hard guy.”

  Sometimes, without quite admitting the instinct, I’d lean into one of Silas’s shots—Silas was a pitty-patter fighter anyway, no real gas in his pistons—and let his fist fillet my face. Once or twice he got an inkling about what I was doing; he’d cut a hard look at me, yank off his gloves and say, “The point of boxing is to not get hit.”

  “Keep it coming, man. One more round.”

  “You think I like kicking a dog down the street?”

  “Come on. Give it to me like you mean it.”

  One day Silas simply refused to go another round. “Listen, man … we’re all in here for good reason. Everybody’ll tell you it was a judge on the warpath or crooked cops, but facts sit square against that. The only sunlight I see is this one ray coming through my window in the morning—and man, I put my face to that ray, drink that shit up like Kool-Aid. We all owe and we’re all paying. But you don’t got to pay extra, okay? And if you’re bent on it, fine, but don’t go making me your fuckin’ Shylock.”

  Silas won when we sparred because Silas was naturally gifted, but I picked up a few nifty new tricks. Every once in a while I’d catch him with a sweet hook to the short rib; the natural red would fall out of his face, to be replaced with puréed chalk.

  Afterwards we’d sit on the apron, faces flushed and leather-burnt. Silas would tap me companionably on the back of the head with his glove. Sometimes his expression became solemn—or mock-solemn? I could never tell. “Can’t believe I’m actually friends with a paleface. This is going to fuck my cred all to shit if they ever find out on the rez.”