Cataract City

by Craig Davidson

  I didn’t dare sit down; my legs would seize with scalding lactic acid. My broken right hand had mushroomed to double its size. I shuffled my feet like a man near the end of an epic dance marathon and waited for the next fighter. When he appeared, I smiled—not that anyone would have noticed since my lips were fat as sausages.

  “Holy shit,” Silas Garrow said to Drinkwater. “You sure you want me to hit this guy? Why not give me a feather—that’ll knock him over just as well.”

  It had all started with a letter. It had arrived at the Kingston Pen in an envelope with a stamp of Chief Big Bear in full headdress—treaty stamps, they were called, dispensed only on reservations to card-holding band members. The envelope had been slit, its contents inspected by the mailroom guard. The return address had been scribbled over with a black felt-tip; all I could read was the band number, 159. The Mohawks of Akwesasne First Nation.

  Greetings, White Devil! I trust you are keeping up with your daily beatings, and I hope you have found a sparring partner who is as happy to administer them as I was. As I am aware that other eyes than yours will read this, I will only say that rockin’ is my business, and business is GOOD. I hear that one of our mutual friends—Mr. Guzzlesoda, let’s call him—has had troubles as of late. Some sticky-fingered thieves took advantage of him. What a shame! When you get out, make sure you look me up. I’m always looking for spare punching bags. Until then, I offer a thousand hosannas in your name.

  Yours in Christ,

  Silas Garrow

  The day after my release I’d walked up the street to the motel pay phone, fed coins into the box and dialled.

  “Akwesasne Import–Export Holdings,” said a female voice. “How may I help you?”

  “Silas Garrow, please.”

  After a snatch of elevator muzak, Garrow picked up.

  “Import–Export, huh?” I said.

  “We import lots,” Garrow said. “Teddy bears, Japanese soda pop. Why must you think so poorly of me, white man?”

  “The big house hardened me.”

  I sketched my idea for him. Garrow listened silently, then said: “It’s Diggstown, baby. It’s also just about the longest long shot I’ve ever heard.”

  “Could you get yourself in?”

  “Maybe. He generally invites tomato cans, doesn’t he? Hell, he invited you.”

  “You’re a peach, Silas.”

  “If I did this, I’d have to set this up so there’s no suspicion—that man’s a lot of things, but a fool he ain’t. And anyway, what makes you figure you’ll make it past the first two?”

  “That’s on me. If not, it’s an easy night for you.”

  Silas considered it. “On the one hand, it would be shit for my boxing cred—losing to a banana-footed white devil. On the other hand, it’s not like Don King’s knocking on my door, right?”

  So Silas made the call, asking Drinkwater to set up a fight. Drinkwater said he’d keep Silas in mind. A few weeks later I’d laid the trap—“If that’s the kind of guy you think I am, why not make it all Natives?” And Drinkwater walked into it.

  “I’ll have to hit you,” Silas had warned me. “Not just to salvage a shred of dignity, but because we can’t give Drinkwater a sniff of this being a tank job.”

  Silas skipped out of his corner lightly, crossing his legs over, making a full circuit around me where I stood rooted in the centre of the ring. Silas shook his head at Drinkwater, said, “Shouldn’t I be wearing an executioner’s hood?”

  Drinkwater’s lips were pressed into a whitened line. “Just get it over with.”

  Silas pumped out a few air-jabs, showing off his speed. I could barely raise my hands to parry them. Silas stepped back, scoffing, playing up his role, then hit me four times: right to the body, left to the body, right to the body, left to the forehead as he was backing away. The violence was sudden and the blows stung like bullets—either my body had stopped pumping adrenaline or I was too hurt for it to have much benefit. But Silas knew where to hit: the guts, the forehead. He avoided my knockout buttons—a liver shot might put me down for good, but anywhere else I’d survive.

  I reeled from the volley, only selling it a little—it hurt like hell, no faking needed. The air-raid siren kicked up in my head; I took a knee. Silas backed off. Drinkwater nearly stormed into the ring.

  “Hit him,” I heard him cry. “Go on, quick! Keep at it!”

  “Come on, Lem. He’s down. Standing eight-count.”

  “This isn’t goddamn Vegas! Hit him and keep on hitting him!”

  I gathered my feet but couldn’t quite find my balance: it was as if I was struggling in a fierce riptide. My body was approaching a cliff that my will couldn’t bridge—no amount of strength would salvage me, no guts or heart. I’d simply topple over. No shame in that, I guess.

  Silas punched me in the belly the way a loanshark punches a deadbeat—straight on, no grace. I hinged at the waist, a long runner of bloody drool between my lips. When Silas pulled his fist away I was almost sad to feel it go. At least it had anchored me in a standing position.

  The simple act of straightening my spine drained me. Silas slipped a punch past my skull, bringing our heads together.

  “Make it real,” he whispered.

  I did.

  My left hand lashed into Silas’s ribs, then I tightened my right hand and brought it up into his chin. The impact was genuine. Silas’s eyes rolled back in their sockets. I broke another bone in my hand but that pain was no more than a sorrowful hum inside my flesh.

  Silas went down on both knees like a man who’d been stabbed in the back, his hands clutching for the blade, then he fell face first onto the cement. His liquid snuffles filled the warehouse.

  Drinkwater stared blankly at Silas Garrow, KO’d on the floor. He threw the white towel. It fluttered down on Silas’s back and I couldn’t tell if he was unconscious or selling it.

  Ten seconds later, he hadn’t moved. The towel rose and fell with his deep breaths. The crowd stood dumbstruck. This was just the freshest in a long line of soul-sapping injustices.

  I fingered Drinkwater as he shrunk into the crowd.

  “My money, Lem.” I smiled, thinking it must be a sight to inspire nightmares. “Don’t make me get rough with you.”

  I thought about the past eight years, the nights without sleep and the constant formless terror; I thought about Edwina because my mind was never far from Edwina; and I thought about cosmic fairness, how it is a mysterious commodity, but sometimes that great wheel really does come around.

  I woke up blind.

  My mattress was dented with the impressions of the bodies that had lain in it before me. My nose was swollen with crusted blood, but I could still smell industrial bleach on the sheets.

  What had happened after the fight? I remember Drinkwater had balked at paying—as I was sure he would—shrugging his scarecrow shoulders and calling the second fight a draw because the kid hadn’t gone down under my fists. He offered our money back, plus a few extra bucks for my pain and suffering.

  Owe and Bovine called bullshit. Drinkwater smiled his way-off smile and played his fingers along the knife sheathed at his waist. But then Silas peeled himself off the floor, rubbing the nasty lump on his jaw.

  “You pay these men,” he told Drinkwater. “Every penny they’re owed.”

  “That’s not your call,” Drinkwater said.

  “It’s not,” Silas agreed, “but if you don’t I’ll make sure everyone on the Akwesasne knows about it.”

  A wretched cornered-rat look darkened Drinkwater’s face. I held out my hand with dry insistence.

  “Pay me, Drinkwater.”

  “I’ll pay, god damn you. I’ll pay.”

  I half remembered being carried out by Owe and Bovine, laid in the back seat of Owe’s car. Now here I was, blind in a strange bed. My hands rose instinctively to my eyes, but someone held them back.

  “Don’t touch them.” It was Bovine. “They’re swollen shut. You’re swollen all over.”
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  I tried to say something but my lips were fused with a glaze of blood. Bovine wet his fingertips with water and ran them over my lips.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “Red Coach Inn. Jeez, what a dive. Red Roach Inn paints the better picture. But we couldn’t get you across the border looking like this.”

  “Owe?”

  “He left last night. You’ve been passed out almost two days. Your face is … Dunk, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  My body was levelled with pain: the sharp variety from the broken bones in my hand, the throbbing variety sunk deep into my face and the bone-deep kind every other place.

  For the next three days I barely moved. Bovine was there for most of it, and Owen checked in. They smeared Polysporin on my wounds and made me drink litres of Pedialyte. I lay in a half-waking, half-resting state where nothing was entirely real. The hum of the ceiling fan, the murmur of daytime talk shows.

  On the fourth day I gathered my legs and stood. The room was quiet; Bovine was down at the motel bar. I fumbled my way around the bed, barking my shin on the bedpost. Teetering into the bathroom, I ran one blind hand along the wall until my fingers brushed the switch.

  My eyes were black balls in the bathroom mirror, nose a mangled knob, shattered capillaries threading over both cheeks. Bovine had stitched the mouse shut; the half-moon curve of the incision bristled with catgut, my forehead dark as an eggplant.

  I trailed the fingers of my left hand down my chest and stomach, let them linger on the softball-sized contusions on either side of my ribs: dark purple at their centres, sickly yellow at their edges. My right hand was swaddled in bandages; if I so much as grazed it on a solid surface, a serrated edge of agony would rip all the way to my elbow.

  “Fuck it, Duncan Diggs,” I told my reflection. “Were you ever really a handsome man?”

  I rented the room indefinitely. Bovine returned to the mortuary. My days were spent reading, watching junk TV, taking epic showers. I sat on the balcony while the housekeeper changed the sheets, listening to the rumble of the Falls over the traffic surging down Buffalo Avenue. My bruises lightened. I could breathe through my nose again and no longer sounded like a tickhound with sinusitis.

  One afternoon, there was a knock at the door. I opened it to find a Native teenager holding a duffel bag. The kid shoved it into my chest, spat on the cement near my feet and left.

  Inside were stacks of fifties and twenties bound with elastic bands: $398,000, plus a single penny rattling at the bottom. Drinkwater had shorted us two grand. The note he’d slid in with the cash read: It will never buy back the years you lost.

  “You’re right about that, Lemmy,” I said, with a laugh that hurt my sides. “But it’ll make the years I’ve got left a little sweeter.”

  I slept soundly and awoke to a ringing phone.

  “You bastard,” Silas said. “We said make it look real, for the love of fuck, not knock me into a coma!”

  “I could barely stand,” I said. “Didn’t think—”

  “I couldn’t think straight for a week! Still can’t remember where I left my car keys.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Silas broke the lingering silence. “You were something up from the grave, Diggs. Remorseless—a zombie! A relentless killing machine! How’s your cabeza?”

  Peering into the duffel, I said, “I’ll live.”

  Silas grunted, unconvinced. “Get your ass back over here where the health care’s free.”

  “Thanks, Silas. For everything.”

  “My tenderfeet tell me that big payoff left ol’ Lemmy just about bust. You ought to talk to your cop friend—Drinkwater’s in a desperate frame of mind.”

  I hung up and stared again at the money. It was more than I’d ever seen. For some it was nothing of consequence—a decent Christmas bonus for a Fortune 500 CEO—but to me it meant freedom. I just wasn’t sure yet what that freedom would look like. I felt an urge to spread the bills on the bed and roll around like bank robbers do in the movies.

  I walked to the window, threw the curtains open. Late-afternoon sunlight bathed the treetops overlooking the cataract basin.

  Owe stopped by with a sack of bearclaws and coffee in Styrofoam cups.

  “How you feeling?”

  “Can’t complain,” I said, tearing into a bearclaw. I was feeling like a bear myself, just stirred from hibernation—devouring everything I could lay my paws on, the sweeter the better.

  Owe watched me dump six sugar packets into my coffee. His cop’s eyes were probably lingering over the skin that sat loose upon my frame, the muscle I’d earned in prison now melted away. I unzipped the duffel, tossed him a roll of bills.

  “You go ahead, count it.”

  “I don’t need to.”

  “I’d like it if you did.”

  Instead Owe snapped the elastic band off the roll, split the bills roughly in half, snapped the elastic band on one half and flipped it back. “I wasn’t looking at it as a money-making opportunity,” he said. “I just wanted to fuck with Drinkwater.”

  I wasn’t about to argue. I nodded and dropped the roll back in the duffel.

  “That last guy,” Owe said, one eyebrow raised. “He was looking like a world-destroyer … until you caught him.”

  “Even the blind squirrel finds a nut, Owe.”

  “I thought you might be interested to know—Drinkwater may be making a move.”

  I watched him closely over the rim of my Styrofoam cup. “Yeah?”

  Owen had heard the news from one of his fellow boys in blue, a district sergeant with the Niagara PD. The word through the grapevine was that Drinkwater wanted to get out of the cigarette-smuggling business.

  “They say he’s trying to sell off his entire apparatus. Cig makers, packagers, labellers, whole shebang.”

  “Who’s the buyer?”

  “It’ll be a larger smuggling operation, which means either the Akwesasne or Kahnawake tribe.”

  “You’re involved in the investigation?”

  There was a moment of pent-up tension as the unspoken question lay between us: Would you tell me if you were involved, Owe, seeing as you didn’t the last time?

  “No investigation,” he said, “just suppositions and scuttlebutt. My chief wouldn’t detach me, anyway. Drinkwater’s pretty much a dead issue around the precinct.”

  “But not for you.”

  Owe’s heavy-lidded gaze oriented on the window. “I buried that fucker’s dog, man.”

  A week later I was back at my folks’ place, still thinking about what I’d do next. My nose was skewed at a fresh angle and a mottled scar was scrawled across my forehead. But Cataract City was a hockey player’s town; bust-up noses were commonplace, and I could always grow my bangs out.

  Guilt settled over the dinner table and Mom’s bruised eyes avoided mine. She must be so ashamed, I thought. I wondered if my name came up at the Bisk, or during her bowling league night with her girlfriends—or had her friends learned to avoid the subject?

  By this time, my post-fight euphoria had soured. I toted up the facts of my life: I was jobless, wifeless, childless, living with my parents, sleeping in the bed I’d slept in as a boy. I was an ex-con with a busted face whose joints ached on humid days.

  One evening I sat with my dad at the Tannery on Stanley Avenue. We could pass hours in a silence that wasn’t uncomfortable. Every so often one of us might sit up on our elbows and lean forward in a way that invited conversation, only to signal the bartender for another draft.

  “Dade Rathburn,” Dad said, frowning at the foam in his beer glass. “That time he took you and little Owen.”

  His shoulders rose almost imperceptibly. I was struck by just how sharp his shoulder bones were, by the chip in his canine tooth he’d never bothered to fix. I thought back to that night in the parking lot when Dad fought Dean Hillicker—he’d been pure electric back then. But the electricity had mostly bled out of him now.

  “We got in the car,” Dad sai
d, “Cal Stuckey and me. Cal’s car, remember? The flashy Fifth Avenue he got after his promotion. We’d been sitting in the precinct with officers buzzing around, asking a lot of questions but not taking any action. We both knew it … if you weren’t found, it would have been over. I mean all of it. Don’t want to sound dramatic, but … how can you be overdramatic, talking about your twelve-year-old boy? We couldn’t have lived with ourselves, y’know? Our wives, your mothers, we couldn’t have looked them in the eye, or they ours. The most important thing on earth ripped away—on our watch.

  “Anyway, we got in the car. Drove. Hoping, was all. Guess we figured we’d find you on the side of the road somewhere, lost, hugging onto each other, but safe and in one piece. Cal kept whispering this little prayer to himself, I remember, telling God he could take away everything else he’d ever given but just give Cal his kid back … You forget the details of these things. It’s a trick your mind plays. All you remember is that fear—that’s all you ever need to remember to make sure it never happens again.”

  It was the longest speech he’d given in my presence since junior high, when he’d come to my room at Mom’s insistence, hands squeezed into white knots to fumblingly explain the birds and the bees.

  “You never found us,” I said.

  Dad laughed. “We ran out of gas. Neither of us was watching the needle. Cal had to call CAA.”

  The Sabres were getting clocked by the Wings in an early-season game on the bar’s TV. Dead leaves skated up and down the eavestrough outside, a haunting sound.

  “Some people say you make your own luck,” Dad said. “I’ve never believed in that. Luck is just something that happens. It’s nothing you can pull towards you. But I think if you get some, you do your best to make the most of it.”

  “What luck have you ever had?”

  Dad flinched as if I’d reached over and slapped him.

  “I’ve had plenty,” he said hoarsely. “What kind of question is that? Jesus, wasn’t I just saying …?”