Cataract City

by Craig Davidson

  A moment came back, plucked free of time. Ed and me in the coatroom at Derby Lane, the usual dog track smells—wet greyhound, cigar smoke and the alkaline tang of dog drool—overmastered by the smell of her: clean and electric and somehow witchy, the taste in your mouth as a thunderstorm darkens the horizon. Her body was dewy and obliging, which was odd seeing as she was so often distant, untouchable. But back then she had softened as I braced her against the wall, coat hangers jangling round our ears with a musical note. It was not at all how I’d imagined it but still good, so very good, the youth in our bodies electric—I thrummed with it, fumbling but sincere, nervous lightning popping off the tips of my fingers—as she socked her head into the crook of my neck, smelling of Noxzema and Export A cigarettes, of sweat and the dust of the track, biting my throat with her small, even teeth. Laughter bubbled up inside me—the hysterical, uncontrolled giggles that had plagued me as a boy, concentrating first in my belly and fluttering up my throat like antic butterflies. The more I tried to tamp them down the worse they got—like when Bruiser Mahoney signed that Polaroid BM and that sick, insulting laughter had boiled up in me. I’d felt that same fear in the coatroom. You weren’t supposed to laugh when a woman nuzzled your neck, so I’d stifled it—Shhht-SHHHT!—the snort of a horse. Ed stared at me cockeyed for a second before we kissed—and it had been warm and spitty and sloppy like a first kiss ought to be.

  She stopped halfway down the driveway, lamp in hand, gazing at me as I passed. There was no quiver in her eyes. She was stronger than fate—by which I mean she hadn’t imbibed the defeatism at the core of this city, the sense that each step of our lives had been plotted and our role was to follow those footfalls. Her lips moved but I couldn’t make out the words.

  It could have been “Bye, Owe.” Or it could’ve been “You owe.”

  I did owe and I did pay, after a fashion. For eight years I drank too much, nursed a sullen emptiness and waited for something to change, all the while knowing this was the single biggest lie people told themselves: that change will eventually come on its own if you wait patiently enough for it.

  I told myself: When Duncan gets out, you make it right. However you can, in whatever way necessary. Make it right.

  And then, three months after Dunk was released from prison, and three months after his fight at Drinkwater’s, I was given the chance.

  “NEVER FIGURED I’D SEE THE DAY where I was rigged to a wire … by a white man, no less.”

  “It’s not a wire,” I said. “It’s all wireless nowadays. Welcome to the twenty-first century.”

  Silas Garrow made a face. “Explain again how I let you talk me into this.”

  We sat in an unmarked cruiser in the Niagara River spillway. I was in the back seat with Silas, affixing a tiny microphone to the furred hood of his parka. Duncan sat silently up front.

  Silas was set to meet Lemuel Drinkwater on the frozen Niagara to negotiate a deal for Drinkwater’s Molins Mark 9 cigarette machines. After talking with his band elders, Silas had agreed to co-operate with the police.

  Silas and Drinkwater would meet alone. A recent rash of thieveries and his bad luck at the fights had sown a seed of distrust deep inside Drinkwater—and apparently that seed had since flowered into a vine of runaway paranoia. He no longer spoke on cell phones, preferring to dispatch his orders via an ever-shrinking network of impressionable Native teens.

  “This is just preliminary evidence gathering,” I told Silas. “Once we’ve got him on record, I’ll go to my chief and requisition manpower for when the actual deal goes down.”

  Nobody knew about tonight’s activities. I’d signed out the surveillance equipment from the tactical ordnance officer, who handed it over no questions asked. It wasn’t uncommon for officers to pursue their own investigations—some even did freelance PI work, bugging the no-tell motels on Lundy’s Lane, ratting out philandering hubbies to their suspicious wives.

  Silas said, “So what do you need?”

  “Time, place, price,” I told him. “Most of all, intent. Just talk naturally. The information will come.”

  The Niagara Peninsula was clad in sparkling snow. The crescent moon fell upon the iced-over river, its expanse like a polished razor. Silas straddled the skidoo he’d trucked up from the Akwesasne: a tricked-out model with a silenced exhaust that was built to ferry sleds of cigarettes across the Saint Lawrence Seaway. “Should I have a gun?” he wondered.

  “Do you foresee any need for one?” I asked.

  “It’s Drinkwater,” Silas said simply.

  I grabbed the police-issue Mossberg pump-action shotgun from the cruiser. Silas strapped it to the skidoo.

  The rusty burr of a motor carried across the night-stilled air, climbing to a keen. Drinkwater was coming. Silas started his own skidoo and gunned the engine.

  “Make it short,” I said. “Just the essentials.”

  Silas nodded, the trace of consternation never leaving his face. He tore out of the spillway, down the alluvial slope of the riverbank into the river basin, accelerating now, his tail lights flaring bright red—the eyes of some predatory animal—then dimming as he navigated a rim of crested ice.

  Duncan and I sequestered ourselves in the cruiser, listening to the microphone feed. At first we heard nothing but the hornet-drone of the skidoo motor and the wind raking the mic.

  “Cold as a witch’s tit,” we heard Silas say.

  The motor decelerated; there came the tink-tink-tink of metal treads crawling across the ice. From our vantage we could see a brief flare of the tail lights as Silas came to a stop about four hundred yards from shore. The moon cut a rift across the frozen river, glossing the torsional shapes of both skidoos. The crunch of boots on winter snowpack was punctuated by Silas’s ragged exhales.

  SILAS: “You okay?”

  DRINKWATER: “Why shouldn’t I be?”

  “No reason. Look a little troubled, is all.”

  “Meeting out on a goddamn winter river—why shouldn’t I be? Cloak-and-dagger shit. But you want something done right, do it yourself. I’d be a damn sight better if you hadn’t gotten your ass handed to you by some over-the-hill pug. Where the hell’d you get those boxing titles? Out of a Cracker Jack box?”

  “That guy had stones in his hands. What can I say? Wasn’t my night.”

  “Your night?”

  “Lemmy, listen—I didn’t come out here to cry over spilt milk.”

  Lingering pause.

  DRINKWATER: “What’s that?”

  SILAS: “What’s what, Lem?”

  “That, you goddamn shitbird! That … that!”

  A finger of light bloomed on the night river, followed by the report of gunfire.

  Dunk and I put boots to snow, racing down the slope, slipping on the ice-slick stones. We found Silas laid out on the ice, staring up at the sky with a serene look on his face.

  “He shot me,” he managed. “He saw the shotgun. Police issue, isn’t it?”

  I unzipped his parka. The bullet had sheared through his shirt and the meat of his biceps. “Clean through.”

  Wincing, Silas said, “So that’s what—good?”

  I said, “The bullet’s not stuck inside of you. Didn’t ricochet off your bone, otherwise it would have snapped. Let’s get you back to the cruiser.”

  “No way,” Silas told me. “No police, no doctors.”

  “You’ve been shot,” said Duncan.

  “Thanks for the update. I’ve been grazed, right? I got you all the evidence you need, right?”

  I said, “We’ve got him on attempted murder now.”

  “So go get him. Another five minutes, that man will be nothing but a vapour trail. You’ll never find him.”

  I exchanged a look with Duncan. A profound, impossible worry sparked in his eyes.

  “You’ll be okay?” Duncan asked Silas.

  “I have people nearby. We Injuns have people everywhere.”

  Duncan drove. Silas’s skidoo shot across the river so fast that the speed squ
eezed tears from my eyes, all of which vaporized before reaching my ears.

  Drinkwater’s sled tracks cut south, back towards the States, until the ice began to groan ominously—I spotted a black lapping edge where the river wasn’t yet frozen. Then the tracks cut back north.

  The skidoo engine buzzed like honeybees trapped in a tin can. Now Drinkwater’s tracks veered sharply towards the northern shore. I squinted at the banks, dark beneath the pines. No street lamps or bridge lights or car headlights flashed through the trees. The only man-made light came from Clifton Hill: a gauzy bowl of whiteness that was dimming by the second.

  Duncan angled his body into a turn, following the line Drinkwater had carved. The night was clean and clear. No snow to cover up the tracks. He was driving too fast, amped up on adrenaline.

  “Throttle down, Dunk.”

  He drove parallel to the riverbank, bloodhounding Drinkwater’s tracks. They zagged towards the shore as if Drinkwater had been debating whether to enter the woods. Winter-naked trees and snow-draped shrubs blurred into a thick wall of foliage.

  At last the tracks rose up an incline into the forest. Why had Drinkwater chosen this entry? Had he heard us coming and panicked? Or was he lying in wait a few hundred yards past the treeline?

  I pointed to an orange trail marker spiked atop a rusted pole. “He followed a trail. Hiking path, maybe an old surveyor’s line.”

  “You figure he knows where he’s going?”

  “He’s done plenty of business on this river.”

  Pins and needles shot up my spine. We’d been searching for forty-five minutes. The river snaked eastward, its whiteness dissolving into the remote darkness of the horizon. Moonlight ghosted the trees, shining on their ice-encased branches—but the light didn’t touch the forest floor, which was carpeted in smooth-running shadows. Apart from the hum of the muffler, the silence was enveloping.

  I thought about how we forget there are still places on earth where you can move so easily from the safety of known roads to the solitude of nature. If you’re not paying attention, you might not even know you’ve crossed that line.

  “Go on,” I said. “He’s running, not waiting.”

  “He’s still Drinkwater.”

  “You’d rather turn back?”

  Dunk opened the throttle, carrying us over the river’s lip and into the woods. Drinkwater’s tracks veered wildly through the snowpack. These trails hadn’t seen use in years. Trees here rose high into the night, oaks and birches nourished by the alluvial silt kicked up from the river. Their trunks were furred with old man’s beard that shone with hoarfrost.

  We nosed into a tributary. Skeins of ice shattered under the treads with the sound of busted light bulbs. Drinkwater’s tracks disappeared. Maybe he’d cut further down the inlet?

  Duncan switched off the engine. The summer woods were host to many sounds, but in the winter woods, sounds were rare, and those that remained took on a haunting note: the hoot of snowy owls, the green-stick snap of a tree limb under the weight of snow, the booming crack of ice fissuring under tremendous pressure.

  Faintly, the whine of a motor—to the north, further down the inlet.

  Duncan forded the tributary, which branched eastward, narrowing, hemmed by shaggy spruces. Soft, hand-shaped spruce fronds lapped our shoulders.

  We surged into a snowy chute that tapered to a flat expanse. Drinkwater’s tracks cut straight ahead, aiming for the thick forest looming against a scrim of winter sky. Duncan charged full-bore, the muffler’s silencer failing, the motor issuing a band-saw buzz. The night moved as winter nights so often do: in soft crests and eddies, plays of moonlight and starlight. Soon Drinkwater’s tracks bent sharply—so sharply that they seemed to disappear. The snow was abruptly trackless.

  I barely sensed the threat.

  Years later I’d return to this spot, a steep decline that lay some four hundred yards shy of the forest. It fell sheer, almost twenty feet straight down. It would take me some time to locate, even in daylight. But then, at night, running flat out, it was nearly impossible to see: the snow and shadows made it look as if the land continued on an even plane.

  Too late, I sensed the outcropping where the snow crusted in a ragged edge. Dunk squeezed the brake levers instinctively but our momentum was unstoppable. We went over the crest at thirty-five miles per hour. A giddy weightlessness gripped my guts, the kind you feel on a roller coaster the instant before the tracks drop from under you.

  The skidoo free-fell, then slammed into a powdery drift. One tread bit, differentials howling, metal shearing apart and spitting off in sharp spears. What I remember of the impact exists in polar flashes. My chin slammed into Duncan’s shoulder, teeth colliding with a brittle snap. My knees popped as I was jolted off, following a broken flight path. With dreamlike clarity I saw Duncan’s chest crush the handlebars; his neck snapped forward, face bashing the hood. His body kicked over the bars and he was sailing free, his arms pinned to his sides like a man kicking furiously towards the water’s surface.

  I came to with pain singing down my arm: an aria, the type sung by sopranos with voices capable of shattering crystal stemware.

  I lay in a drift. I blinked away the flaming birds that flocked before my eyes, focusing on a pine tree to my left. Had I hit it, my skull would’ve been crushed. Pulling my knees in, I struggled to stand. At this I failed.

  I held my arms out. The right was heavy. I let it fall a few inches. A rivulet of blood ran out of my parka sleeve. The pain was duller now, its knife edge gone.

  What had happened? I remembered the headlights falling off the cliff, remembered clinging to Duncan tightly, figuring—with that childlike hope that attaches itself to fearful moments—that if I held on to him the way I had as a boy, everything would work out.

  “Dunk? Man, you okay?”

  Silence. Running the fingers of my left hand over my right arm, I could feel a small surgical incision in the fabric above the elbow. I prodded two fingers through the slit until they met something soft, warm, pulpy. Hinging my arm at the elbow, I felt something stuck in my flesh near the bone.

  Shock: this, too, came from far away. I must be in shock. When I pulled my fingers out they were chalk-white to the second joint, after which they turned red.

  “Dunk?”

  Fear seeped into my chest when this second call went unanswered. I noticed that a fingernail was ripped off my right hand. My phone! Patting my pocket, I felt its comforting shape. But when I dug it out, its face was spidered. The liquid crystal leaked through the cracks like oil.

  A fingernail-slice of moon hung over the pines. The only light came where it reflected off veins of quartz in the cliff face: these shone like rivers on a map. The skidoo lay twenty yards off. One tread had shredded off; shards of metal winked in the snow.

  That’s when I saw him. Duncan lay thirty-odd feet beyond the wrecked skidoo. His body was heaped near a rocky outcropping. Fear thrummed down my neck.

  Be okay—god damn it, you be okay, Dunk.

  I staggered around the skidoo and drew near to Duncan. Now I saw that it wasn’t rocks he was sprawled across: it was bare bracken, as black as obsidian. He rolled over, groaning weakly. His face appeared to be covered in molasses. His nose had exploded. The cartilage was shoved off to the right and blood bubbled out of his nostrils.

  “Breathe through your mouth,” I said. “Your nose is … bad.”

  Duncan must’ve heard me; he quit bubbling. His limbs jutted at the proper angles: no green-sticks or feet facing the wrong direction. His hands were a mess, skin rasped off the remaining knuckles. One of those hands rose instinctively towards my face, moved over my chin, the pits of my eyes. Satisfied, Dunk let it drop back into the bracken.

  “Jesus, Owe. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I didn’t see it either. Your nose …”

  “Bad. You said that already.” He pawed at his face and said, “Yeah, it’s bust … it’s been bust worse.”

  I had a hard time believin
g that. “We got lucky. The good Lord watches over drunks, fools and skidooers.”

  Duncan rose to his knees, then stopped abruptly, clutching at his chest.

  “What’s the matter?”

  His fingers crawled over the front of his parka. “I don’t know … That hurt, though.”

  I couldn’t recall a time Duncan admitted that anything hurt.

  “Can you stand?”

  Duncan did. “You said something about your arm?”

  “It’s fine for now. Do you have a phone?”

  He shook his head. “I was meaning to get one, but …”

  We hobbled to the skidoo and hunted through the emergency satchel: two flares, a Leatherman tool, protein bars, duct tape and a medical kit. No phone.

  Duncan unzipped his parka. His fingers roamed under his sweater, investigating his chest. “Sorta like heartburn. Worst case ever.”

  Starlight reflected off the curved metal jutting from his waistband.

  I said, “What’s that? Tucked into your pants.”

  His gaze met mine, the momentary quiver in his eyes hardening. He lifted his sweater to show me Bruiser Mahoney’s gun.

  “Mind telling me why you’re carrying that?”

  “I wasn’t planning to shoot Drinkwater, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “You carry a gun, Diggs, you ought to have a reason.”

  “Gee, thanks, pops.”

  We stared at each other evenly. The blood on Duncan’s face was freezing to a shiny glaze.

  “I’m not asking that you hand it over …”

  “But you’d highly recommend it?”

  “This is still a police investigation, Diggs.”

  Duncan pulled the sweater over the gun and zipped his parka up.

  We stripped the skidoo. Duncan detached the oil reservoir and dumped the oil. Next he used the Leatherman to cut the length of rubber hose connecting the air intake to the carburetor, unscrewed the gas cap and slid the hose down. He sucked until his mouth flooded with gasoline, retched, and siphoned gas into the reservoir.