Cataract City

by Craig Davidson

  I stomped hard. The ice flexed and water spurted, but the surface didn’t break. Duncan was ten yards off, on track but drifting right. I unloaded a fifth round and stomped hard enough that my boot cracked through, making a foot-wide hole. Brown water sucked the smallish plates of ice away.

  I spread my arms and jumped in, dropping to my waist before hitting the rocky river bottom. Blistering cold twined round my legs. I reached under the ice, grasping madly for Duncan as he passed by. The Niagara clutched greedily, buffeting my hips. My duct-taped boots skidded on the slick rocks.

  C’mon, Dunk, be there …

  It felt like being bitten by a big fish. Duncan’s hands were so frozen and rigid that I nearly jerked away in fright, and in so doing I’d have lost him. But instead some instinct made them tighten spastically and I gripped back, as if to fuse our flesh together.

  Duncan’s body rolled with the water. For a long moment it was like a fishing line lying slack in the water. Then came a jerk as he passed further downriver, forcing me to anchor him against the current. My chest shuddered against the jagged crust of ice, knocking the air from my lungs. Digging my feet into the rocks, I realized that if I slipped I’d be under the ice too, both of us dragged into the depthless channels of the river to die amongst the brook trout and catfish locked in their winter stupor. Duncan’s hands gripped mine tightly—was it just nerves now? Did fingers keep gripping after life had fled the body, the same way hair and nails kept growing? Bovine had once said that a corpse’s hair kept growing up to four months after death. It’s true, man. You could dig up a grave and find an old businessman with a mullet.

  I managed to grab Dunk’s elbow and gave a convulsive jerk, not caring if I broke the bone. Bones healed. Brains stayed dead. Gripping his collar, I drew him to me. His hands appeared over the icy lip. They remained outstretched for an instant, livid … then they tightened.

  Duncan’s head appeared, his eyes wide open. For a long moment he did not breathe. Then his mouth flew wide and he drew in a massive choking inhale. I dragged him up, laid him on the ice. Blue veins stood out on his forehead, like on a baby’s head.

  My gun was where I’d dropped it. One round left. I staggered downriver, the water already crackling on my trousers, and found Drinkwater in a spreading pool of blood.

  “Give me your coat, Lemmy.”

  “No,” Drinkwater said.

  “Now.”

  “No,” he repeated.

  I grabbed his coat, aiming to take it from him as you would from a truculent child. He fought back fiercely. Something fell out of his pocket. It lay on the ice, its shiny casing winking in the sun.

  I blinked, disbelieving my own eyes. A cell phone.

  I picked it up. It worked. The signal displayed five full bars.

  Drinkwater pulled his legs to his chest, encircling them with trembling arms. “You can’t trust anyone,” he said.

  EPILOGUE

  THE CITY

  OWEN STUCKEY

  The city holds you.

  And not just this one. Every city has that potential. A city holds you inside itself. The feeling is as comfortable as nesting in a warm cupped palm. And if that hand should tighten into a fist—hell, most times you’ll barely feel it.

  A city knows the shape of things and it shapes itself around you—or perhaps you shape yourself around it. The result is the same. The city doesn’t really change. The city changes you. In my city, you come through hard if you come through at all. But I think people can be more beautiful for being broken.

  We all occupy our own square of space and time. We have our memories and no one else’s. We live one life, accumulating it in our minds as we go along. The city is part of that, too. The city is networked into the memories of everyone who walks those same streets, who works at the same factories, who plays baseball on the same diamonds where the dust still hangs along the base-paths minutes after a player’s passage.

  We city dwellers know the same things about our home, even though we each see them from our own vantage. I know the worn earth along the river’s edge, tromped smooth by adventurous children. I know small lawns fenced with green chain-link. I know backyard pools with empty cans of Laker floating on the surface. I know plastic drinking glasses beaded with sweat from the Kool-Aid inside. I know two boys walking down a secret path to fish rock bass out of the basin, fishing poles slung over their shoulders like carbines. I know the forever surge of the Falls that roars with the blood in my veins. I know of night woods that run thick with white wolves. I know the slow sweet nectar of a Sunday afternoon as it shades into evening, twilight braiding down the streets and across a still river whose waters run deep, street lamps popping alight to hold back the swallowing night.

  Still, you can come to resent your own home. You can fill yourself with the need to escape it. I remember feeling that way, then looking across Lake Ontario at the steel spires and reflective glass of the bigger city in the distance, unable to fathom the industry taking place there. But my smaller city, Cataract City, made sense in an elemental way, the same way wrestling did back when I was a boy.

  These days I drive the city sometimes, alone at night. I drive past the places that built me, remembering. Past Derby Lane at post time, the air crackling with electricity as Harry sends the hare zipping down the rail. Past the weed-scudded lot where the Memorial Arena once stood and where my childhood idol had flown in the ring, unfettered by gravity.

  Those places created me. Time shifts and passes more quickly now, and I sense things will never seem as real as they did in those days. Still, there’s a vital current that runs through the heart of Cataract City, too. That current twists and bends and flows into still pools from which there is no exit. And there is a shadow side to that current, an undertow that flows towards the Falls. In it you can see things toiling, things shifting. And there are always hands to beckon you over.

  Often I find myself at the Falls early in the morning when the tourists are gone. I picture the old man behind the falling water, he of the translucent skin. I think of the men and animals who’ve passed through his swallowing garden—Bruiser Mahoney, Igor Bearfoot, my dog Frag—and gone on into everlasting light. It no longer embarrasses me to think these things.

  We all survived—me and Dunk and Drinkwater. I guess that much is obvious. I made the call on Drinkwater’s phone; ten minutes later the medevac chopper was buzzing overhead.

  It was a near call for Duncan. Stage 3 hypothermia with severe ataxia. Minor brain damage due to oxygen loss. The medics pumped his lungs, flooded his system with Adrenalin and glucosamine.

  He pulled through. Of course he did.

  Drinkwater was in rough shape, but he’s a tough bastard, too. He’d lost three pints of blood from where Duncan plugged him and was bleeding out fast. They slapped on a tourniquet, pumped him full of coagulant and transfused him at the Niagara Gen—where, in one of life’s little ironies, my own mother performed the blood transfusion.

  He went into a five-day coma and came out in time to face charges of attempted murder. Silas Garrow had survived, too, and was more than pleased to point a finger at Drinkwater.

  As for myself: I lost two toes to frostbite, plus the tips of three more. It messed with my balance for a while—you’d be amazed how accustomed you get to distributing your weight across all ten toes—but I got used to it. The surgeons opened up my elbow, pumped me full of anti-infection meds and stitched me up proper.

  The captain has me riding a desk pending further evaluation. That’s fine. I’ve been thinking about quitting the force anyhow.

  There’s a saying around Cataract City: The sun’ll even shine on a dog’s ass some days. I’d never really understood that turn of phrase before, but now I know what it means: Sometimes you fall ass-backwards into good luck. And, yeah, the sun was shining bright that day.

  Duncan left Cataract City shortly after he recovered. He hugged his parents, said goodbye to the rest of us. He’s off to find Ed. And I’m sure he will. He’ll
go to the ends of the earth, just like he said. And I’m sure that when he does find her, she’ll take him back. If ever a pair were meant for each other it’s those two.

  A month after he left I got a postcard in the mail. It had the portrait of a bosomy lass in a red bikini on the front, with the words: Wish You Were Her. On the back was a note written in Dunk’s clumsy all-caps scrawl:

  OWE,

  HEY MAN WHAT’S SHAKING? I’M SITTING IN THIS MOTEL ROOM, FLIPPING CHANNELS. WRESTLING’S ON. GOT ME THINKING OF YOU … TO BE HONEST I DON’T KNOW WHY. THE DOCTORS SAID THAT, YOU KNOW … THEY SAID WHEN A BRAIN IS STARVED FOR OXYGEN, IT’S LIKE BLACK HOLES CHEWING INTO IT. THEY SAID YOU COULD EVEN FORGET YOUR OWN MOTHER! ANYWAY, I SAW IT ON AND THOUGHT OF YOU. AND IT WAS A GOOD FEELING. SO IT MUST HAVE BEEN SOMETHING SPECIAL EVEN IF I CAN’T REMEMBER ANYMORE. I HAVEN’T FOUND HER YET. I WILL.

  That note filled me with ineffable sadness, but I know all minds hold on to what is necessary and jettison the rest. I’d just have to carry those memories for both of us.

  Dunk gave Drinkwater fire when I would’ve happily let him freeze to death. He’s a better man than me. The admission bears with it no shame. If you encounter one of the world’s exceptional specimens and happen to fall short of that standard, where’s the shame in that?

  I’m still kicking around. Sam Bovine and I go to the Cairncroft Lounge, which sits beside the Food Terminal on Lundy’s Lane. It’s a middle-aged meat market, to be frank—but what am I if not middle-aged meat?

  I met a nice girl there, Gayle. She works at the Bisk. Nilla Wafers line. Skin sweetly perfumed of vanilla. Divorced, one child. I like them both a whole lot. We’re talking about me moving in, and I’ll do it if she’ll have me.

  The other day I drove across the river to the Attica prison just east of Buffalo. The day was clear and clean. White ribbons of smoke pumped out of the smokestacks at OxyChem.

  I parked in the prison lot, sat on the hood of my car. The yard lay behind a maze of reinforced chain-link banded with razorwire. The inmates milled in the yard, playing pickup ball or lifting free weights.

  Drinkwater looked like the world’s oldest scarecrow in his orange jumper. His hair was shaved down to a half-inch. He walked down the fence, then turned his eyes fearfully to the sky as if he thought something would plummet down on him.

  He hooked his fingers into the chain-link. His lips were moving but I couldn’t make out the words. I wondered if he’d gone soft. Then his eyes locked with mine across the fifty yards separating us. I saw that old calculating clarity, the gears still winding true, and was relieved.

  Some places you just can’t leave, y’know? The specific gravity’s too strong, keeps you locked in orbit. You’ve got to be launched out, like a circus performer from a cannon. If you manage to find that separation, it’s all care free horizons. And if you never find the separation … well, maybe it was nothing you really wanted.

  I’m glad Dunk’s gone. Not happy, but glad. It’s a big world out there. And I think Duncan Diggs was always meant to gobble it up in great big bites.

  Drinkwater spread his arms wide, a crucifixion pose, and gave me a smile as big as the sky. This time, I could make out the words he spoke just fine.

  “I’m still here, baby.”

  Spreading my own arms, I gave him that smile right back.

  So am I, baby. So am I.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I figured I’d ladle out my thanks in the simplest order: the order of those who read the manuscript as it slowly turned itself into a book, offering their help and guidance.

  So first, thanks to my father—always my first reader—for consuming and commenting on each part of Cataract City as I wrote them. For a retired banker, he makes a great first reader. “Well, son of mine,” he said, “this is something different out of you. The same in some ways, sure, but different. In a good way, in case you were wondering.”

  Thanks to Neil Paris and Erin Tigchchelaar, who read an early draft of Part One, “Dogs in Space,” and offered keen suggestions.

  A huge thanks to my agent, Kirby Kim, who picked me up off the scrapheap in many ways, tuned me up, and got me back into the race. He worked the manuscript over, proposing changes that put the book in its best possible shape before sending it out for submission. Thanks to Ian Dalrymple for his comments as well.

  An equally huge thanks to Lynn Henry, my editor. A more sensitive, writer-friendly editor you will not find. Under her guidance I molded the book into something different, and better, than what it was originally. You have to trust someone pretty deeply to embark on such a process, and I trusted Lynn completely. That trust was well-placed. Thanks as well to Kiara Kent, who made some very wise and helpful edits. Also to Francis Geffard, Ravi Mirchandani and Steve Woodward for their suggestions for improvement.

  Thanks, finally, to the love of my life (corny, sure; but true), Colleen. She read the book at its final stage, fine-tooth-combing it for the tiny, maddening mistakes that can plague any first-edition book. I’m not saying they’re all gone, but it’s not for her lack of scrupulousness. Love you, baby.

  Finally, thanks—and perhaps an apology—to Niagara Falls. Lest anyone get the impression it’s exactly as I describe, I fully acknowledge it’s not. The geography of the book doesn’t always follow reality. And sure, it’s got its share of demons and ghosts, but that’s the same for any place. Any Cataract City residents who read this and feel a little sore, or believe that I’ve done their city a disservice, please understand that I hold a spot of profound affection for your hometown.