Cataract City is perma-tacky, but you come to love it the way you’d love an ugly dog with a sweet disposition. The population swells when the tourist tide washes in each summer—that spree-spending, sunburnt horde—but they clear out come late August, leaving nothing but their money. Just enough babies are born at the Niagara Gen to compensate for those who are lost in the retirement castles strung down Dunn Street. A lot of the guys I grew up with roam the streets they were born on, living a block from their childhood homes. Cradle to grave could be Cataract City’s unofficial motto. Some days I peer out the window of my glittery Toronto apartment tower—everything glitters in my part of town; at the first sign of tarnish the wrecking ball starts to swing—and spot that distant landfall across Lake Ontario. The city of my birth is only a few hours down the highway if traffic holds steady, and a part of me will always belong there.
My parents still live in their bungalow on Belmont Road. My room is as I left it: the Dead Alive poster on the wall and the stack of Fangorias on the bookshelf, under a shrunken skull that Uncle C told me he’d bartered from a Peruvian headshrinker, but replicas of which I later found filling a wire bin—three dozen miniaturized specimens—in the Ripley’s Believe It or Not gift shop on Clifton Hill. I spent my childhood within the confines of that house, or haunting a few lonely bolt-holes around town where I wouldn’t be harassed by lads whose chief pleasure was torturing introspective bookish sorts like me.
Back then, the world had jaws that could grip at any time. That tree branch scratching my window at night? That was the fingernail of a vampire roused from the catacombs beneath the Lundy’s Lane cemetery. Its face pale as lamplight, its eyes twin craters burrowed into its skull, its ragged nail scriiiiiiiitching the glass. The rustling of dead leaves in the eaves-troughs was the scuttling of rats in the walls. Not just any old rats: bloated hulks with tails like cherry licorice whips. They skittered behind the drywall on needle-nail feet, harvesting the insulation to build a nest for their mother, the queen, who was the size of a trash can, squatting behind our water tank. The queen had suckled on nameless goo seeping from a cracked drum at the city dump before squeezing through the dryer vent to give birth to a brood of squealing rat-lings. Before long they’d chew through my bedroom wall and pour out in a chittering tide of rancid fur and teeth the colour of stained ivory, and those pink coiling tails….
Looking back, it’s a wonder I got any sleep at all.
Can’t say I get much these days, either. I work at St. Michael’s Hospital in downtown Toronto. Neurosurgery unit. I’m a BCB—a “Big City Blade”—a sobriquet coined by one of the more egotistical members of my fraternity. My job obliges me to enter the operating theatre, where I cut into the human brain. Whenever I bisect a patient’s scalp and remove a scalloped window of skull to assay the knotty web of blood vessels braiding across a brain’s surface—a venous geography individual to each patient, like a fingerprint—I am beset by a passing but intense fear that collects in my mouth, bitter as chewed aspirin.
There was a time, years ago, when I’d drive all the way home after a gruelling operation and take my folks out to Lucky’s Steakhouse. If I was feeling nostalgic—or if the procedure had gone badly—I’d sleep in my old bed. My feet would dangle over the edge, but the sheets smelled as they did when I was a boy. Mom hung them on the line to dry, so they held different scents from season to season: budding blossoms in spring, honeysuckle in summer, a hint of wood-smoke come autumn. I’d lie with the moonlight angling through the backyard maple to cast a fretwork of shadows on the wall and remember the ghost of my old fears, although I no longer saw the shadows as the skeletal hands of a beast come to claim my soul.
i.
That summer of my twelfth year had a rough start when Percy Elkins chucked a firecracker at my head after the last bell of the school year.
We’d once been friends, Percy and me. When he’d first arrived in town, Percy sought me out. New kids usually did. I’d shown Percy those secret spots that were my own back then: the pool of still river under the train trestle teeming with whiskery catfish, the ice caves along the escarpment where the water trickled into the rock. In time, Percy found cooler guys to pal around with. I was used to that.
But then Percy became my tormentor. Shooting spitballs at the back of my neck, so wet I felt like I was being hit with warm cottage cheese. Tripping me during wind sprints in gym class. Squashing a wad of grape Bubblicious in my hair, two whole cubes, so much gum he looked like a wrathful chipmunk in the moment before the act. It took half a jar of peanut butter to get it out, and my scalp reeked of Skippy for a week. Percy cheerfully led the schoolyard in a rousing rendition of “Fatty Fatty Two by Four”—who, as everyone knows, couldn’t get through the bathroom door, so he did it on the floor, licked it up and et cetera. No longer could I go back to my old cherished spots for fear he’d hunt me down there.
Percy was different from the other boys who picked on me. So long as I took the abuse with a chin-dimpled, verge-of-tears look and didn’t fight back, they usually laid off. Percy felt no such pity. One of his go-to torments was to jam a pencil down the cleft of his unnaturally sweaty ass and chase me around with it—daring me to stop him, his eyes assuring me he could cook up something much worse than a Pink Pearl clammy with butt-sweat if I gave him a reason to. Thing was, Percy was a shrimp with teeth that bucked like shingles on a cedar-shake roof. Judging by size alone, I should’ve creamed him. But Percy was scary in a way that shrunk me to the size of an ant.
When I noticed him stalking across the soccer field after last bell on that final day, skirting the baseball diamond with his predatory lope—the unsettling stride of a Robert Crumb cartoon character come to life—really, I should have realized what was in store. But it was the final day of school. Surely even a bacterium as vile as Percy wouldn’t bother wasting a minute of such a glorious day abusing me.
A heavy-faced boy named Terry Vreeland mooned along after Percy. The Vreelands were a snake-bitten clan who lived out near the old dog track. Once, when I was getting a drink from the fountain outside the teachers’ lounge, I overheard the public health nurse telling the gym teacher, Mrs. Fonseca, that the Vreeland children were “hair-lice and tapeworm recidivists.” This mystery only added to Terry’s menace. Now Terry handed something to Percy. Percy fiddled with whatever it was, smiling chummily at me as if to say, Jake, my friend! All that horrible stuff I said about you? I didn’t mean it, honestly!
He swung his arm in an underhand motion, like he was rolling a bowling ball down the lane. Something arced towards me—
Bang!
The firecracker exploded in front of my eyes, scorching my retinas. I screamed—or I think I did, but my ears were ringing—and I fell backwards, my sinuses burning with gunpowder.
The next thing I heard was Terry Vreeland’s whinnying laughter. A-heee! A-heee! The most beautiful sound on earth, as it meant my eardrums hadn’t ruptured. My sightlines were wonky, the edges blown out, whiteness dancing at the edges of my vision. I staggered to my feet and tried to run, but the treads of my sneakers, nearly bald after a spring spent running away from encounters not half so frightening as this one, couldn’t grip the sun-torched grass. Percy kicked me in the ass and sent me sprawling.
I watched as Percy touched his lighter’s flame to the wick of a Black Cat firecracker no bigger than a pencil stub. I brought my arms up to shield my face…but for a long moment, nothing happened. When I peeked out between my fingers, I saw Percy staggering around clutching the back of his skull. The firecracker dropped between his legs and went off harmlessly, kicking up a puff of dirt.
Then I saw that Percy’s hands were painted bright red. He turned woozily. The wispy blond hair at the back of his head was wet and heavy with blood. A girl stood twenty yards from him with her hips shot to one side, holding a skateboard by its trucks. Her free hand clutched a rock.
“You…bitch,” Percy spat. “You threw a rock at me.”
“Congratulations on solving
the big case, Sherlock.” The girl jutted her chin at Terry Vreeland. “You didn’t even need the help of your trusty associate, Fatson.”
Percy’s eyes took on a shrewd, calculating sheen.
“Terr,” he said almost pleasantly. “Let’s rip her jaw off.”
He and Terry advanced towards the girl…who stood her ground, bouncing the stone in her palm as if testing its weight. It was the size of a robin’s egg and speckled with black dots.
“I played baseball for five years,” she said casually.
Percy’s head tilted like a dog hearing a whistle.
“On the boys’ team,” she clarified. “Pitcher. Coach told me I was too wild. I’d put one right down the pipe for a strike, then the next one would sail five feet over the catcher’s head. But I threw hard. Coach liked that.” She scuffed the dirt with her shoe the same way a pitcher did on the mound. “If you take another step, I’m gonna chuck this. Can’t say at who, but I’m leaning towards you,” she told Percy evenly, “because your teeth need fixing, and even the dentists in this fly-strip of a town could do a better job than Mother Nature did.”
She followed this with a shrug. “There’s a fifty percent chance I miss. Probably more than fifty when you consider the tension of the moment.”
Her fingers curled around the stone in a split-fingered fastball grip. There was a bright lunacy in her eyes. A look that said, I can foresee the future and you idiots ain’t in it. Percy must’ve seen it, too: it was kissing cousin to the look in his own eyes.
“You fight dirty.” Percy’s lip curled. “A dirty fighter, chucking rocks.”
I wanted to chime in that Percy was hardly a paragon of fair fighting, tossing firecrackers at unsuspecting people’s faces, but kept my mouth shut.
“It’s a looooong summer,” Percy told her. “Be seeing you.”
Once he and Terry left, the girl helped me up. I wanted to thank her but my tongue lay stunned in my mouth. I couldn’t understand why she’d put herself on the line for me.
“Percy’ll need stitches,” is what I blurted out at last.
“Is that his name? Fits him. Why do you give a shit about that?”
“I don’t care at all. He’s a…”
“Piss-stain?” she offered. “Bag-munch? The Dynamic Dr. Douchenstein?”
Again, I couldn’t speak. Something about this girl made my critical faculties go haywire.
“That’s my good deed for the decade.” She threw her skateboard over her shoulder the way a lumberjack shoulders an axe. “Be seeing you.”
ii.
When I was a kid my father used to come home with blood on his knuckles—which was weird, considering he was a banker.
Dad was the youngest of a brood, the Bakers, who lived in a rambling house on Sofia Street on the east side of Niagara Falls. My grandparents had one daughter, Julia, followed by seven sons. John and Jeffry, then Allen, then Theodore—whom everyone called Teddy—then the twins Billy and Bobby, then Sam, my father. After that, Grandma said the one daughter would suffice.
The day Percy threw that firecracker at me, I went home and scrubbed my face. Pinpricks of blood wept from little holes in my cheeks. Bits of paper had penetrated my skin deep enough to cut me open, like a thousand tiny paper cuts.
I was sitting on the sofa watching The Beachcombers when my father got home. The cuts had clotted up enough by then to blend in with my freckles.
“How’s tricks, kiddo? Wait, have you been crying?” My father never got on me for crying, probably figuring I had more reason to do so than other kids. “Missing your teachers already?”
“Nope. I mean, nope I haven’t been crying.”
“You ought to wear sunblock, son-o’-mine. With your complexion, you’ll be burnt to a cinder by the middle of July.”
I didn’t tell him about the firecracker. He would have launched into a sermon about the need to stick up for myself. Or worse, he’d do something crazy like head to Percy’s house and challenge his father to a fight.
My father’s clan, the Bakers, were known around Cataract City as “the Breakers”: nose-breakers, ballbreakers, promise-breakers, law-breakers, occasionally heartbreakers. It wasn’t just the brothers, either: my aunt Julia could throw a wicked overhand right.
I’d heard about nights where the brothers would get vipered up on Comrade Popov’s potato vodka—$2.75 a gallon at Wedge Discount Liquors across the river—and pound down on some ill-lit tavern like the hammers of hell. They’d stir up shit with another of the city’s brotherhoods, the Murphys or Carrolls or Specks, or else some soldiers on furlough from CFB Petawawa, and before long be out on the sidewalk swinging fists. The Baker boys were happy to take five licks to give one back. It was easy to spot a Breaker around town: look for the squashed noses and smiles that resembled a windblown picket fence. But my uncles and aunt did smile, a lot. They were great lovers of life. They also happened to be masochists. My father used to say, We’re Irish, Jake, which means heredity carries us halfway to madness smack out of the womb. Short of a stake through the heart, it was all but impossible to put a Baker down in a fight.
And I’d heard about those fights. By all accounts, my father and his brothers fought like a pack of wolverines. They came at you as one entity, a crazed unit spiked with long bony limbs, the air surrounding it perfumed with flammable fumes. If you slugged that mass, it might go down—part of it would, at least—but the whole would drag its fallen portion up, one part momentum and two parts wrath, unhinged and angrier, the fight jacked all through it.
The Breakers fought hard but fair. No rabbit punches, no fishhooks, no crotch shots. When an opponent cried “no mas” they were pleased to stop. They’d shake your hand with a dopey adrenalized smile on their faces, then invite you back into the bar for a drink.
“There’s something stupidly thrilling to a tussle, Jake,” my father would tell me. “Afterwards, the stars are brighter than you’ve ever known. The vodka…we called it fight juice. It’s as if a mad genius bottled up a bunch of ghastly spirits, put a cap on them, then waited for us idiots to come along and chug those evil genies down.”
My mother dragged my dad away from that life. Mom hailed from different stock. Her own mother was a social worker, and her father the branch manager of the ScotiaBank on Stanley Avenue. My mother and her brother, Calvin, were the polar opposite of the Bakers: bookish, musical, pacifist. Mom played first-string flute in high school band. As a young woman, she took part in an animal-rights protest at Land of Oceans, our city’s cut-rate SeaWorld, only to get pegged with a beer bottle chucked from a passing pickup, the thrower hollering, “Go get laid, ya cold fish!” The bottle opened the skin above her eyebrow and the cut healed into a scar resembling a bone fishhook.
She met my father at the Bonnevilla House. More accurately, they met outside it. My mother’s teenage years had been, in her eyes, sheltered—so at twenty-one she found herself at the Bonny House with some more adventurous of her friends from the university where she was studying sociology.
It happened as such things do. A pair of eyes meeting across the smoky air. My father’s interest was easy to nail down, my mother’s much less so. At the time, Dad wore a cracked leather jacket and his hair in a mullet, the classic “Niagara Waterfall.” His cheekbone, cut up in a recent tussle, had a Band-Aid flapping off it.
“I looked like a bargain-bin Fonzie,” he told me. “Eeeeh, sit on it!”
“There was just something about him,” Mom would say in response to this, as if to indicate the attraction existed beyond rational explanation. “His eyes didn’t fit with the rest of him. There was an intelligence to them. A kindness.”
“Your mother is a tireless turd polisher,” was my father’s official position on the matter.
That night the brothers got drunk, picked a fight, and scrapped outside the bar. Afterwards, the rest of them went back inside to drink away their lumps. My father lingered under the glow of the parking lot’s light stanchion; he was cut and didn’t want to d
rip blood on the Bonny’s parquet floor. Mom came out. Neither remembers exactly what was said, but it must have been enough.
Mom dated him on the sly. Was she actually falling for this scruffy, scabby-knuckled boy?
What did my father do? Hustled pool. Sharked the rubes at dollar-limit stud poker in the utility shed behind the Knights of Columbus baseball diamond. Drove a delivery truck for Gorson Bros. Furniture Closeouts when his older brother begged off sick. That wasn’t a life my mother would willingly align herself with, and it wasn’t her job to change Sam Baker.
“Thus, she dumped me.” Dad would snap his fingers, relaying the story to me. “Dropped my ass like a bad habit.”
When Mom stopped answering his calls, my father agonized as only a love-starved young man could. He’d lost the love of his life. A life overhaul was in order. He hacked off the mullet, shaved the scruff, bought the best suit he could afford—from the Rowe Funeral Home, as it happened; the mortician was eager to part with a tweedy number that had recently draped a stiff whose measurements matched my father’s—then marched into my grandfather’s bank and asked for a job.
My grandfather knew about the notorious Bakers but his heart was rich with Christian benevolence. He gave my father a teller’s job. Turned out Dad was a whiz with numbers, a talent that had lain dormant through all the drinking and carousing. Mom saw he was trying to make good, and little by little she thawed.
They got hitched at the Two Hearts Wedding Chapel on Stanley Avenue and settled into the house I’d grow up in. My father was promoted to assistant manager. Mom got a job with the Children’s Aid Society…then she missed her period, peed on a stick and up popped the “+” sign. After some tears and a frank discussion they decided to keep me.
The Saturday Night Ghost Club Page 2