Cataract City

by Craig Davidson

  A lot of nights I’d end up at the Falls, leaning on the observatory railing. There was always light by the Falls. It made no difference if there was a full moon or a sliver no thicker than a bone fish hook: moonlight hit the spray at the base of the Falls and the mist projected it back, an upside-down bowl of light. Baby birds peeped from their cliffside nests, a sound I found mysteriously comforting.

  The night of the fight I packed my duffel, tucked the money order into my pocket and headed to a convenience store near my folks’ place. Owe pulled up. I tossed my duffel in the footwell. We drove along the river past the hydro station. Owe cracked the window and hung a cigarette off his bottom lip. “You mind?”

  “We all got to die someday.”

  He pulled up in front of a bar. Bovine slid into the back seat smelling like he’d spent the afternoon marinating in a vat of Famous Grouse.

  “Just a few hand-steadiers,” he said as we drove away.

  Trucks were parked ten deep at the warehouse behind Smokin’ Joes. A knot of seamed faces clustered round the door.

  “You’ll be heading home with your scalp hanging out of your fucking mouth,” one of them said.

  “That wig’s getting split straight down the middle,” said another.

  The air hung hot and close inside the warehouse. Pigeons cooed in the rafters. When we entered the fighting area, a heavy silence fell. The Antichrist himself may as well have entered the building.

  The fight box was the same as I remembered: a ring of sawhorses from a roadside construction site. Spectators ranged down them, the toes of their boots edging onto the fighting surface. They were drinking but nobody seemed drunk; they wanted to be sober to better witness the destruction.

  Drinkwater stepped out of the crowd, laughing over his shoulder with someone. He eyed me up and down, and untucked a cigarette and a wooden match from behind his ear.

  “What ya done brung me, son?”

  I gave him the money order: as good as cash but easier to get past the border guards. Drinkwater struck the match on the tight denim draping his thigh, then lit the cigarette.

  “That’s a significant wager” was all he said.

  “If you can’t handle it …”

  “Save your energy,” Drinkwater told me, oh so softly. “I don’t want anyone going home without their fill of blood.”

  “Add this to it,” said Owe, pulling an envelope out of his pocket. “How much?”

  “Why don’t you count it, Lem?”

  “I never learned how. I went to a residential school run by the white man.”

  “Ten.”

  Drinkwater tucked it into his pocket. “Three-to-one odds.”

  “Bullshit,” said Bovine. “Seven-to-one.”

  Drinkwater stared at him. “Who knew shit could talk?” he said mildly. “Four-to-one.”

  “Six,” said Owe.

  “Five. And you can only throw the towel once per fight.”

  Nobody bothered to shake on it. It wasn’t a gentleman’s agreement.

  “Get your ass ready,” Drinkwater said to me. “We Natives are getting restless.”

  I snapped my head sharply to one side to drain the sinus cavities, rolled my shoulders loose and said: “Pitter patter, let’s get at ’er.”

  First up was the big sidekick I’d seen weeks back at Smokin’ Joes. Igor Bearfoot II. He was a skyscraper with legs, three hundred pounds, easy. Drinkwater wanted to tenderize me, so he’d brought in his biggest mallet. Once I made it past this one, I thought, Lem probably had a fillet knife lined up, ready to slice me to ribbons. A dandy plan, I had to admit.

  Still, I was okay with facing this monster out of the gate. Stick and move, chop the guy down Giant Kichi-style. Hopefully I wouldn’t be breathing through a mask of blood by the end.

  “Jesus,” said Bovine, watching the guy warm up.

  We came out of our corners, me stepping lightly on the balls of my feet, keeping my shoulders rolling—a move I’d picked up in jail—staring at the big man out of the tops of my eyes.

  My opponent fought stripped to the waist. His nipples sat in sunken wells of flesh. The skin above and below his bellybutton funnelled into a cleft in the centre of his belly, lapping over in delicate folds like the skin of a half-deflated balloon. At some point he must’ve lost a ton of weight, which left him with those Shar-Pei folds. A weird surge of compassion rolled through me.

  The guy’s right shoulder dipped as his fist came around. I ducked it easily but I heard his arm rip the air above my head in a wide sweep, like a sailboat’s boom swung free. Pivoting on my heel, switching the power to my hips, I hammered my own right into the man’s ribs. His flesh rippled in a wave and he stepped off, his body buckling before righting itself.

  I backed away, throwing yippy rights and lefts. A flash jab tore the skin over his left eye, and the blood flowed round his socket and down the angle of his jaw. He pawed at the blood, smearing it down his neck, and swung. It caught me on the shoulder—more of a slap than a punch, but it still rocked me sideways. I righted myself and tagged his nose with a smart shot. The crunch of cartilage sounded like the top snapping off an unripe banana.

  A cigarette hit my chest and hissed in the sheen of sweat. I stomped on it while stepping forward, blitzing the big guy with jabs he caught with his elbows and forearms as he peered hesitantly at me through his upraised arms. His face was a horror show and the fight wasn’t even a minute old. Did this guy know how to fight? Would Drinkwater tilt me against a big cream puff with sixty thousand dollars on the table—

  Bullrushing with surprising speed, the guy ducked his head and rose up with his hands hooked under my armpits. I had a crazy weightless moment, my legs kicking at nothing. Then I brought one fist down on the big man’s skull; it sounded like a coconut hitting a softwood floor. He hurled me at a sawhorse. Hungry faces hunched in at the edge of my vision and something sharp—a razor blade? an untrimmed fingernail?—sizzled along my hip bone. The guy bridged a forearm across my chest, cheating the air out of my lungs and bearing down with his claustrophobic bulk. His breath was equal parts Wintergreen Skoal and camphor. I noted the fine grey edge of lead around his dead canine tooth.

  The man brought one world-eating fist down into my face and everything exploded in starlight riots, hollowness threading down my jaw as if nothing anchored it anymore: my face was only a mask, the contents of my skull obliterated.

  I staggered forward as he swung again, reeling into the middle of the ring and punching instinctively, not at a face or even a shape but just at that onrushing warmth. My fist collided with something hard again—snap!—and that hardness split, becoming two separate things under a tight stretch of skin.

  I got knocked down again, my knees mashed to jelly and the air whoofing out of my guts in a helpless gust. The big guy was on top now. Fear chewed into the wires of my brain, the insane lung-chaining fear you feel when trapped under a bigger man’s bulk while your life is slowly choked out of you. Four bloody knuckles dropped from a great height, a cloud-splitting Hand of God. There was a loud crunch inside my head as the back of my skull rang off the concrete, a shockwave juddering me spine-deep.

  Then, miraculously, the weight lifted. A racking gasp tore out of me. My head lolled to one side and I spotted the towel on the floor. Bovine must have thrown it.

  At Drinkwater’s, the white towel didn’t mean the end. A cornerman threw it as a time-out and the injured fighter could get his wounds licked before wading back in.

  I dragged myself up and hauled my ass to the corner amidst catcalls and hoots.

  “He took you out behind the woodshed, whitey!”

  Owe and Bovine sat me in a bright orange cafeteria chair. Bovine held my face, scrutinizing the damage. I let my skull rest against his hands. He slapped a bag of ice on the back of my neck and had Owe hold it there while he worked.

  “He lumped your forehead but bad, Dunk. Burst a blood vessel?”

  The skin of my forehead was tight, an odd shadow looming at t
he upper edge of my sight. I was cut over my left eye. Bovine swabbed the cut with a Q-tip saturated with Adrenalin. The raw burn rode the nerve endings down the side of my face, cabling the tendons in my neck.

  Glancing to the opposite corner, I saw the big guy’s nose was badly bust: cartilage crushed on one side, leaving the other side jutting straight and strange like a shark’s fin. Bright blood streamed from both nostrils but the man sat with an easygoing expression, taking dainty sips from a Hamm’s tallboy. His cutman hovered over him with a packet of Monsel’s solution—the filthiest trick in a cutman’s bag. Of course it was illegal—just not at Drinkwater’s fights.

  The cutman applied solution to the big man’s cracked-open beak, shaking it on like he was salting popcorn. I smelled it—a cooked smell like a skirt steak drenched in battery acid.

  “His ponytail,” Owe said. “The ponytail, Dunk.”

  “That’s time!” Drinkwater called.

  The crowd stirred as we surged out of our corners. The guy’s nose was predictably hideous: lips of bubbly flesh opened down to the gleam of buckled cartilage. He’d have to find a doctor to dig out that pavement of scar tissue with a scalpel—otherwise he’d be left with a second pair of deformed lips running vertically down his schnozz.

  He came out like a grizzly awoken from hibernation. I came out nimbly this round, my attitude set in the register of give-a-fuck, moving side to side with my hands hipped like cocked pistols. The fight was in my blood now, and it was an ecstatic feeling; my senses had jacked in at last, operating on some dog-whistle frequency only I could hear.

  The big guy clipped me with a looping cross, opening the cut Bovine had just closed. I shook my head, droplets spraying, and cuffed him with a clumsy left as the crowd rose to a quick roar. We circled out of a sloppy clinch where I caught a heat-seeking whiff of raw adrenaline coming out of his pores.

  We clashed in the rough centre of the ring. The guy hauled in bulldog breaths, blood burping out his nose. His sweat-heavy trousers had slipped around his waist to expose his BVDs, which were a cheery shade of robin’s egg blue. He dipped his head and came on but this time I timed it and stepped aside, letting him rumble past like a subway on fixed rails. Next, I was able to make two small adjustments that pretty much put the fight to bed, and I was lucky enough to do them in one fluid motion—watching it happen, I guess you might think we’d choreographed the damn thing.

  What I did was snatch the guy’s ponytail with my left hand, doubling it over in my fist and yanking back hard like I was bringing a big dog to heel, which forced his chin to tilt up. Then I torqued my hips and came round with the dynamite right, whipping my torso to propel my fist with all the juice my body could generate.

  The punch struck the big man dead in the middle of his face. The sound was like two flat rocks spanked together. Everyone in that warehouse leaned back—it was like an explosion had gone bang in the ring.

  For a second the whole world sat still: me with that grimy handful of hair, my fist flattened against the big man’s face. If you could have frozen that image, you would have seen my curled fingers resting flush with the poor guy’s eye sockets, his nose having turned into mash.

  The big man let out a muffled moan, spraying red spittle. His hands came up in search of blood or pity, I couldn’t tell. And I reached down inside, crushed that tiny voice in my chest pleading for mercy, cocked my fist and drove it into the guy’s face again.

  That was it. The man’s body hung slack, back bowed, held up by my hand in his hair—he looked like a dead shark on a dock with a gaffing hook sunk into his snout. I lowered him to the floor gently as I could, then found my chair and sat. The ice bag hit the back of my neck. Blissful cold washed down my spine like water trickling in a downspout.

  “You got lucky,” a voice hissed somewhere to my left.

  I blew at the fringe of blood-grimed hair plastered to my rapidly ballooning hematoma and thought, You got that right, buddy. I’m the luckiest man in all Creation.

  Two men dragged the big fellow away by his heels like hunters lugging a dead bear out of the woods. My next opponent warmed up across the ring. As predicted, he was young and thin, with whiplike arms and legs that, if they were attached to a woman, you’d say went on for days, took a break at the knee and went a few days more. He had the empty, edgeless gaze of a psychopath.

  Bovine took my right hand in his own. “Is it …?”

  “Broke? Yeah.”

  “I’ve got some cortisone.”

  “Just leave it be.”

  Before we got to it the kid stuck his hand out, wanting to shake. Bad sign: it meant he saw this as pure business, which meant he wasn’t any kind of dick-swinger. Drinkwater had found a pro. For him this was punching a clock. This particular shift, his job was to put me to bed. Thankfully I got the sense he’d do no more than was needed to reach that goal—but he would finish me.

  The first shot impacted the mouse on my forehead with the mathematical precision of a laser-guided missile. The kid followed it up with a smart jab to my nose and another to my mouth. I reeled. My nose was so packed with blood I couldn’t breathe; my lungs emptied through my mouth in a ragged hiss, air singing over my newly chipped tooth.

  The kid slipped in blood falling from my face. Lowering my chin, I threw a punch that came up over my shoulder and tabbed the kid where his collarbone met his neck. The concussive smack travelled up to the rafters, making the pigeons take flight.

  The kid’s knees buckled and he backed off shaking his head, the glazed look in his pale brown eyes turning into something far more feral and crafty.

  I shook my head too, droplets flying off the tips of my blood-quilled hair. How many pints did a man have in him? It felt like I’d bled out a few pints and swallowed another: my gut was heavy with the iron-tasting stuff that flowed down the back of my throat.

  Our heads clashed with accidental violence. The shockwave of bone on bone telescoped around my skull, a high ringing note like an air-raid siren. Rocking on my heels, I threw a hopeful uppercut but nobody was home to receive it. A left cross stung in reply. Next a body blow landed like a mule kick and once again siphoned the air from my lungs.

  I pressed forward on instinct. A brutal shot sheered off my jaw. The kid’s fist slammed the hematoma, again, again—he kept tagging it like some asshole pressing an elevator button. The mouse had swollen ridiculously: its Cro-Magnon curve dominated the crest of my sight.

  I closed in and hit him twice to the body, intending to crush his liver and rupture his kidneys, bear-maul this kid and put him down. I cornered him against the sawhorses but my punch swung through clean air, missing horribly, and next I was face to face with a jeering man in the crowd. A fist slammed into my ribs and sent bile burning up my throat. Turning, I was met with a right that tabbed me flush. Black lights flash-popped before my eyes and I was falling backwards into a wonderful coolness that felt like ever-tumbling water, so cold, so sweet and—

  I was in a cave. The ground was black and granular. A tree. No top, no bottom, roots braiding in both directions. A slit in the tree’s bark. A man’s face appeared in it. He unfolded himself from the tree with great care, like a contortionist from a glass box. Small, so goddamn small, his skin a pale translucence. He was incredibly old; just looking at him, I felt my eyes dry in their sockets. The man dug a hole. Sometimes his shovel blade made a sound like hissing snakes as it bit into the ground; other times, it sounded like raindrops. When the hole was finished the man cocked his head calmly as if to say: Well, son, it’s your choice. I climbed into the hole headfirst. Wonderful, warm and comforting. A ball of light bloomed, becoming larger, larger …

  I was slumped on the chair with Owe snapping a towel at my face. My skull felt like it had been cracked open and blowtorched. My ears were plugged as if I’d been swimming and water had packed into my ear canals. The kid stared at me from across the ring with a look of mingled respect and pity. You dragged yourself up after being knocked down, that look said. But what’s
the use when I’m just going to plant you again?

  Bovine edged in on my right, a razor blade pinched between his fingers. “We’ve got to cut that thing,” he said.

  He drew the blade along my forehead, slitting the bulging mouse. Blood sheeted down my face, blinding me. Owe mopped it, and Bovine swabbed the cut with Adrenalin—I could feel the Q-tip moving inside the pocket of swollen flesh—and painted it with Hemostop.

  Owe leaned in. “Keep going, Dunk? You sure? You’ve fought like an animal, but this guy … this guy. It’s only money, man.”

  Acid curdled in my gut. Only money. It’s always only money if you’ve always had it. I heaved myself up to meet the kid.

  What happened next happened quickly, as things often do in fights. It was an accident, pure and simple: I stepped on the kid’s foot.

  I was rabbiting in, trying to close the distance. The kid side-stepped deftly, his left hand coming around with awful intent. My right fist was fixed on a similar orbit, moving slower but with a lot more oomph. Coming forward, I stepped on the kid’s right foot. It was nothing purposeful or planned. The kid’s fist collided with my ear, pinching a vessel threaded through the cartilage. My own punch landed solidly enough to knock him off balance. As he went back his left foot slipped on a patch of sweat, pulling him into an awkward splits.

  His Achilles tendon tore. His left leg crumpled. The kid tried to stand. Instinctively, I offered my hand to help him up. I squinted down, wobbly on my feet—then withdrew my hand sadly and said, “You ought to stay down.” The kid followed my eyes. The tendon had ripped off the bone, wadding up around his ankle like a loose tube sock. He nodded.

  A few of the kid’s buddies stepped from the crowd. They picked him up and carried him past Drinkwater, who stood with a painful, pursed grin on his face.