Cataract City

by Craig Davidson

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Son, you’re out. That’s lucky. You’re in one piece. That’s lucky, too. You disappear a few weeks, come back with a busted face and a limp—you don’t need to explain nothing—and maybe that’s good luck or bad luck, I dunno. But your mom and me, we don’t want to see you go back where you’ve been. So take your luck and make something of it. A small something. Start with that.”

  Eventually we walked home, Dad swaying ever so slightly. He tripped on the cracked tarmac leading up to the house, leaned into me and held that position, his head resting lightly on my shoulder.

  The next night I returned to Bender Street and used the pay phone outside the Sleep Easy Motor Inn. Late-autumn midges clustered around the street lamps. Winter was threaded into the wind that wicked up from the Falls. A roll of quarters sat heavy in my pocket—I had taken some money from where I’d stashed it under the closet floorboards of my childhood bedroom—because who knew? Maybe we’d talk a while longer this time.

  “You again.”

  “Yeah. Me.”

  I wanted to ask Ed why she’d kept this number, after all these years. I wanted to know how close she was; I knew she wasn’t in Cataract City, but maybe she wasn’t so far away. I wanted to know if she was happy and in love with someone else. I wanted to know if Dolly was lying beside her as she listened to me breathing down the line.

  “It’s weird without you” is all I said.

  She almost laughed, but caught herself. “Is that your idea of a charming pickup line?”

  Ed knew I’d never had anything in the way of pickup lines, charming or otherwise. “I’m just telling you how I feel.”

  “Well, you’ve had some practice of being without me by now. You should be used to it.”

  “How could I get used to it, Ed? It’ll always be the worst.”

  “You’ll live.”

  Yeah, I would. But I wished she weren’t so hard—I wished she’d give, just the tiniest bit. Then again, I didn’t deserve her softness.

  “I’d like to come find you.”

  After a silence, she said, “I can’t stop you from trying.”

  She knew differently, though. All she had to do was tell me to stop. But she didn’t.

  LIONS IN WINTER: OWEN STUCKEY

  I thought about it a lot during those years when Duncan was in jail. “The Point,” I guess you could call it.

  What was the Point? That place in time where you’d been led, ceaselessly and unerringly, since the day you could first remember. The place you’ll see sometimes in dreams, as familiar as if it belonged to your everyday life, that disappears the moment you rise into waking, its imprint washed away like footprints in the advancing tide. Then one day you’ll see some aspect of it in the filigree of a leaf or the knitted steel of a suspension bridge, and that old dream will collide with reality so perfectly that it creates the whiplash we know as déjà vu.

  In dreams I often found myself in the middle of what, in my waking hours, I knew to be the Niagara River. But this was a different river, I understood—a river of dreams, and it acted according to its own logic. When I kicked for shore a ripcurl would run under my feet, pulling me back to where I’d started. So I just drifted, treading water, but the shore drew no closer and pulled no further away. My sightline never changed: a hawk sat stunned above me, pinned to the blue sky like a butterfly in an entomologist’s book.

  In this dream, it dawned on me that nothing I did made any difference. As hard as I’d kick, that sly ripcurl always drew me back. When I treaded water, the current anchored me in place. My position was fixed—the river muscled and shoved and buffeted me into the exact spot where I was always supposed to end up—and nothing I did could ever alter that.

  The Point is your specific place in the world. And not just your place: your moment. An instant in time, measurable in seconds, that acts as the hinge for everything you’ve ever done. Everything feeds into that moment: your backlog of experience and behaviours determine how you enter that moment and how you’ll walk away from it afterwards. Every way you’ve ever been hurt, every grievance nursed, every secret fear, those moments where you’ve stood up or stepped down and all the love in your body—it all matters when you reach the Point. It is all brought to bear.

  And you’ll look back in the aftermath, trying to piece together how A met B, but you know what? The threads are tangled, yet the links exist in ways you can’t even imagine. And whatever you owe, you pay.

  The Point. It’s in the water; it’s in the sky. Things collapse into it, things spring from it. We’re all either moving towards it or walking away from it.

  THE DOG, A PIT BULL NAMED BANDIT, had been owned—much as anyone can own such an animal—by Igor Bearfoot, presently deceased. It nearly tore my hand off.

  I’d trailed Bearfoot’s Taurus down a side road and pulled into the cut-off a minute after its tail lights dimmed. The car was parked under a naked maple. I’d watched Bearfoot step out with Duncan. I’d been easing down a hill carpeted in dead leaves, pursuing them, when the dog attacked.

  I felt it coming: a swift-moving something springing forward on my right side. It came low, submarine-style, hitting me at the hips in a frenzy of teeth and muscle. For an instant I thought it was a wolverine but then I saw the metal studs glinting on its collar.

  It slammed me broadside and we tumbled down the slope, the dog angling for my windpipe. I’d thrust one arm between its forelegs as its jaws sank into my wrist through the thin fabric of my jacket. I kicked it away but its paws dug into the ground, yanking me flat. I scrambled to my knees, slipping on the mouldy layer of leaves, and the dog let go of my arm and went for my skull. There came a fibrous tearing on the top of my scalp, then the piss of blood as warmth trickled down my temples.

  My un-mauled hand scrabbled for the revolver in its holster—by then I was turtled on the ground with the dog tearing at my shoulder, trying to worm underneath to rip at my face.

  I drew the gun from its holster and reared back; the dog’s body glowed in the moonlight falling through the branches. I levelled the barrel at the centre of that perfect mass and pulled the trigger.

  The dog jerked backwards. A mist of blood hung in the air for an instant before dissolving.

  The ER doc had taken one look at my mitt and sent me up to the ORs. They called in a big-city blade to do the microsurgery—finger reattachment, skin grafts, nerve pathway and blood vessel reconstruction. My pinkie and ring fingers have a little feeling—the skin permanently prickling with pins and needles, like I’ve slept on them funny—and the skin is vaguely purple, but I can still make a fist.

  I’d stayed at the hospital for two weeks; my folks visited often. Mom was retired by then but she knew most of the docs, and one of them, a myopic thoracic surgeon, flirted with her shamelessly until Dad caught on, finally, and told him to knock it off.

  One afternoon Dad visited with a pair of hoagies in a sack. “Thought you’d like something other than hospital chow.”

  My right was heavily bandaged so I ate with my left, non-dominant hand; a tomato slid out the ass-end of the sandwich, dropping in my lap.

  “Hey,” Dad said, as if the fact had just slapped him. “You were born here. Two floors up, in Labour and Delivery. Such a little peanut. Six pounds, three ounces. You came three weeks early and your umbilical cord was wrapped round your waist. You got stuck in the birth canal. One minute everything was tickety-boo and the next machines were beeping and flashing, the room was full of doctors and your mom was whisked to the operating room. Emergency C-section. Back then they didn’t usually let the fathers in, but your mother was known in these halls.

  “They had this sheet up, y’know? Mom’s head on one side, delivery docs on the other. I was on your mom’s side and told myself: don’t look on the other side of that sheet. They got you out and slapped your butt and put you in my arms so Mom could kiss you. That’s the unfair part. Your mom goes through sixteen hours of agony and they won’t let her hold you f
irst. What had I done to deserve that gift?

  “They told me to wait outside and as I’m leaving, my eyes drift over the sheet. Your mom was open, Owen, wide open. I’m sorry, but if I needed any more proof that your mom was the toughest person I’d ever met—tougher than I’ll ever be—well, I had it then.”

  We’d finished the sandwiches and balled the waxed paper, flipping them into the trashcan. Dad made his shot, then retrieved my miss and dropped it in. Stepping into the hall, he glanced left and said, “Three doors down … four? That’s where you stayed after that whole thing in the woods.” He shook his head, eyes on the floor. “Lord, those days. Jerry and me driving around scared out of our skins, hoping to Christ we’d find you. Never again have I felt so purely helpless, and thank God for that.”

  He’d returned to the room, sat again and patted my knee under the bedcovers. “After all that, Jerry and I basically stopped talking. I’d pass him in the parking lot—but we were on different levels at work, so it was easy to ignore each other. We kept you and Duncan apart, too—you were still young enough that we could dictate your friends. Maybe everything would have happened the way it did anyway, but I carry the guilt with me. Jerry too, I’m sure. You two kids were tight, and maybe that’s not such a rare thing in boyhood—but it’s an exceptionally rare thing in life.”

  He gripped the sheet, fretting with threads frayed from much washing. “This thing that happened on the river with the cigarettes … you talked to Duncan about it?”

  I’d wondered: Had I warned Dunk? That was Dad’s real question. The answer was twisted. I had and I hadn’t. Yes, I’d seen him at Smokin’ Joes from the jumpseat of a helicopter, then later I’d spotted him on the Niagara through a pair of high-powered binoculars: Dunk and Drinkwater and Igor Bearfoot on a puntboat, me watching from the bluffs. I’d thought: How much is he paying you, Dunk? A few thousand bucks? There are a million other ways to escape, man. Don’t thin your chances until you’ve only got one.

  But Dunk had gone ahead and I’d caught him—my oldest friend. And for what? The cigarettes would keep coming anyway. A man was dead. Dunk would end up going to prison for it. And I’d be the one who sent him.

  Had it been my duty to stop him? Maybe Dad thought so. Maybe it was Cataract City Code, Man Code, some bullshit code.

  The thing is, I’d wanted to talk to Dunk. About what he was doing, yeah, but about so much more. I wanted to tell him about how the digitized shriek of the precinct phone killed something inside me, as did the fire sprinklers cowled in old spider’s webs. It all made me sick deep into my guts; I see-sawed between wanting to wreck everything and wanting to curl into a ball under my desk and flinch at the hard-soled shoes stomping past. I wanted to tell him how damn little I’d learned in the years since we were boys. It boiled down to this: it’s a lot harder to love than to hate. Harder to be there for those you love—to see them get older, get sick, be taken from you in sudden awful ways. Hate’s dead simple. You can hate an utter stranger from a thousand miles away. It asks nothing of you. It eats you from the inside out but it takes no effort or thought at all.

  When the hospital released me, I hadn’t returned to my apartment. What was waiting for me there? One toothbrush in a plastic cup on the sink. A telephone that I’d stare at as if my slit-eyed gaze might cause it to ring.

  Instead I went to Clancy’s on Stanley, ordered a shot of rye and a Hed. The man sitting across from me had a scar on his neck: thick and bunched up, the skin as smooth and pink as carnival taffy. His hands trembled as if he was forcing them to do so. A layer of sweat shimmered to the surface of my skin. Why was something always wrong with the men around here? I’d never noticed it as a kid. Why so many missing fingers? The men around here put their hands at the service of a mean utility. Those hands got crushed between rollers at the Bisk, melted to stumps by arc-welding torches at the shipworks. I wanted none of it, was humiliated by it in some untranslatable way. But here I was—part of the fabric again.

  Later, when I staggered home, I saw that a fire had been stoked in front of my apartment door. Twigs and random trash remained, plus the stink of kerosene. The fuel had burned off without igniting much else; there was nothing but a twisting scorch mark up the door. Bovine? It seemed like the kind of half-assed statement he’d make.

  The landlord charged me for a new door. His reasoning: the damage had been perpetrated by my enemies, whom I’d rightly earned and whose reprisals were both unsurprising and—in his unvoiced but palpable view—completely justified.

  Eight years went by, the passage of time conspicuous only by the sly pressures it exerted—the lines carving around my eyes and the yellow tinge to my teeth most noticeable when I shaved, my cheeks silked in white foam. One morning while flossing I’d caught a carbolic stink off the waxed floss and wondered: was this how you became acquainted with the smell of your sick, aging self?

  I often woke from nightmares that drained from my brainpan like glue, scratching the undersides of my eyelids like motes of fibreglass. The most common one involved dogs flying out of an unending greyness, same way sharks appear out of silty water. Sometimes every one of those dogs was Fragrant Meat, his head bashed in from a truck’s grille.

  Sometimes I hated this damn city. The sense of omnipresent failure triggered a breed of nausea in me. With it came that feeling of being inside a prison cell with elasticized walls. If I wanted to leave again, Cataract City would let me go—happily, in all likelihood—but if I stayed, it would constrict: an anaconda squeezing me until I couldn’t draw breath.

  I came to sense a sinisterness about the city, too. It wasn’t anything you could pinpoint—how could a city be evil? A city was just concrete and steel and glass, feeling no pain, retaining no memories. But then houses are made of the same stuff, and people go around claiming they’re haunted all the time.

  At first I’d told myself it was just me. I’d been away too long, returning under a dark cloud. But as the days bled past I recognized that it wasn’t me—or was me, partially at least, because I’d inhabited these streets before, bearing the infection I’d harboured since birth.

  I’d stay up at night, imagining a vast sea of poison underneath the city. A churning sea of lampblack-coloured ichor burbling, leaching into the soil as it spread the infection.

  Part of that was the job. Want to see the ugly side of any city? Start carrying a badge. I would cruise ours at night, an embalmed moon throwing its light upon weed-strewn lots and sagging rowhouses long vacant of human habitation. I’d listen to the wind whistle through those empty skeletons, singing off exposed nailheads and around flame-thinned beams with a low mournful sound. Empty houses have this look to them, or at least they do in Cataract City: like faces ravaged by leprosy. Shattered bay windows resemble leering mouths; punched-out second-storey windows look like avulsed eyeballs. Darkness had a way of transforming everyday sights into nightmarish apparitions. It did the same when Dunk and I spent those nights in the woods.

  Sometimes I’d drive into the farmland on the outskirts of town. A rot-toppled silo lay in the fields to the north, isolated beside a decaying granary. A long, dark tube softening into the earth like a giant earthworm half smashed under a boot. It had torn up rags of fibrous earth when it fell; the rags, still attached to the silo’s hull, fluttered like curtains as the wind blew over a carpet of withered seeds: a sound like the pattering of tiny feet.

  If I squinted, sometimes I’d see odd movement in the silo, deep in that brooding darkness. I’d think so, anyway. Who—what? It’s not something I’ve investigated. Or ever will.

  Something’s the matter with Cataract City. To live here is to be infected with it. And you don’t even know how sick you are. How can you, when we all share the same poison?

  For eight years my life was locked in stasis—I may as well have been frozen in a cryo-chamber. I became jaded, a stranger to myself: a desk sergeant with the Niagara Regional Police, tracking down child welfare beefs with a rotating cast of pantsuited social work
ers. Putting bad men in jail only to see them sprung by a showboating defence lawyer or some give-a-fuck judge. The system was broke—most systems were—and I was just one gear spinning imperfectly within it.

  After work I’d hit one of the bars along Stanley Road, prop myself up on a stool with the rubadubs, listen to country music on the jukebox and inhale the sour whiff of spilled beer. Then I’d go home to the shoebox apartment, the unmade bed, empty bottles queued along the windowsill like giant bullets in want of a revolver, and the dripping faucet that I couldn’t quite rouse myself to fix.

  Every so often I’d pick a convenient start point—New Year’s Day was popular—and say: Time for a change, Stuckey! Get a membership at the Y, show up for pickup basketball with the old men and high-school dropouts, can a few jumpers and get a little groove going. But soon the six pins and quartet of screws holding my knee together started to burn with smokeless heat; I’d gimp to the bench, my resolve already eroding.

  I’d see old faces around. Duncan’s mother, Celia, waiting at the bus stop after her shift. Wearing a pencil skirt and support hose—hot date with the mister?—varicose veins bulging up the backs of her calves. I drove past without stopping, feeling the weight of her gaze on me. Sam Bovine would wash up in the drunk tank as reliably as the tide, usually around the holidays. He’d pass out in the holding cell, tinselly Christmas garlands noosed around his neck. One night he showed up outside my apartment screaming incoherently, although the gist was clear: you’re a turncoat, Stuckey, a scummer and a snake. I rang Dispatch and when the cruiser arrived Bovine stared at my window, wounded and pissy. I had the officers drive his drunk ass home.

  I saw Edwina once, a few months after Duncan’s arrest. Driving past their old house, ostensibly on a neighbourhood sweep, I’d spotted a FOR SALE sign on the lawn and a U-Haul trailer stacked with boxes. I slowed down, knuckles whitening on the wheel. Ed walked out the front door with a gooseneck lamp, Dolly padding at her heels. She’d held on to her wintry beauty—although it was flintier now—retaining that bodily wildness both Duncan and I had surrendered to.