Cataract City

by Craig Davidson

  COPYRIGHT © 2013 CRAIG DAVIDSON

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Davidson, Craig, 1976-, author

  Cataract city / Craig Davidson.

  eISBN: 978-0-385-67795-0

  I. Title.

  PS8607.A79C38 2013C813’.6 C2013-902632-0

  C2013-903036-0

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover image: © Lew Long / CORBIS

  Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada,

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited

  www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  For Colleen

  “My city’s still breathing (but barely, it’s true)

  through buildings gone missing like teeth.

  The sidewalks are watching me think about you,

  sparkled with broken glass.

  I’m back with scars to show,

  Back with the streets I know

  Will never take me anywhere but here.”

  — The Weakerthans, from “Left and Leaving”

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: Stony Lonesome

  Part One: Dogs in Space

  Part Two: Dolly Express

  Part Three: Five Million Cigarettes

  Part Four: Donnybrook & Lions in Winter

  Epilogue: The City

  Acknowledgements

  PROLOGUE

  STONY LONESOME

  DUNCAN DIGGS

  Of the 2,912 nights I spent in prison, two were the longest: the first and the last. But then, most cons would tell you the same.

  That first was endless, even more so than those long-ago nights in the woods with Owen when the wind hissed along the earth and the darkness was full of howling. In the woods an animal might rip you to shreds, sure, but it had no goal other than to protect itself and its offspring. The Kingston Pen housed animals who’d flatline you for looking at them cockeyed or breathing their air.

  My cot felt no thicker than a communion wafer, coils cork-screwing into my spine. Penitentiary darkness was different than the outside-the-walls variety. A prison never achieves full black: security lamps forever burning behind mesh screens in the high corners of the cellblock, hourly flashlight sweeps. Your eyes become starved for true night—anything is better than granular, gummy semi-dark where shapes shift, half glimpsed, at the edges of your sight.

  Still, you get used to it, in time. You get used to everything. Then comes that last night. We’d talk all about it, you know? Some guys had been in and out a few times; it didn’t mean as much to them. But for most of us it was … listen, it’s like my buddy Silas Garrow says: We all owe, and we’re all paying. What else is prison but the repayment? Then they set you loose. But some part of you figures you haven’t quite paid enough. You’ve paid what the law demands, sure, but some debts exist beyond that. Blood dues, you could say. And those aren’t collected in the usual way, are they? Those ones tiptoe up behind you like a sneak-thief.

  That last night I lay in my cot—a new one, still prickly—thinking I’d die. The dread certainty entombed itself in my skull. It wouldn’t be anything crazy, nobody was going to stab me in the neck with a sharpened toothbrush or anything like that. No, it’d be a boring and commonplace kind of death. An itty-bitty shred of plaque might detach from an artery wall, surf through my bloodstream, lodge in a ventricle and kill me dead. That would be fair and right, too, because I’d killed a man myself. A fair one-to-one transaction, blood cancelling blood. Fairer still that it should happen in the hours before my release. You’ve got to figure that’s just the way such debts get repaid: with a gotcha.

  I must’ve sweated off half my body weight that night. You could’ve wrung my cot like a sponge. When the first wave of sunlight washed across the cell floor … to be honest, I didn’t know what to make of it. I could still die two steps outside the gates, I guess. That’d meet the accepted terms just as well.

  And so it happened that one afternoon, nearly eight years after I’d scrubbed with delousing powder and donned an orange jumpsuit, my prison term ended. I collected the items I’d been admitted with: $2.32 in change, half a roll of cherry Life Savers stuck with pocket lint. I shook a few quarters out of the manila envelope and slid them into the prison’s pay phone.

  It was a surprise to everyone who I called. Truth? I surprised myself.

  Exiting the penitentiary was a shocking experience. Maybe it’s meant to be.

  Two guards led me down a tight hallway, hands cuffed. A steel door emptied into a small yard, its clipped grass shadowed by the high wall. Jesus, grass.

  One guard removed the cuffs while the other stood with a shotgun at port arms. I rubbed my wrists—not because the cuffs were tight but because I’d seen it done in films when the jailers took the cuffs off a criminal. Which I was. The fact cold-cocked me. For the past eight years I’d been a red fish swimming in a tank with other red fish. But I’d be freed into a sea of blue fish, law-abiding fish, and I was fearful I’d stick out—the prison bars permanently shadowing my face, even in clean sunshine.

  The guards opened another door set into the grey wall. I walked between them. No tearful goodbyes. The door locked softly behind me. I stood in an archway ten feet from a main road. The Saint Lawrence Seaway was a strip of endless blue to the south. Cars motored up and down the hill, entering and exiting my sightline with strange suddenness. I hadn’t seen anything move so fast in eight years; my eyes needed to adjust.

  I took a few tentative steps. A tight group of onlookers clustered on the far sidewalk, gawking at me. I’d heard about these people; they hung around the gates hoping for this exact sight—the first fumbling steps of a long con as he squinted into the new sunlight, his legs trembling like a newborn foal’s.

  Ghouls. I ought to flip them the bird! But the idea of doing so filled me with shapeless fear—I pictured one of them making a call, then the prison doors opening to swallow me up again. What charge? A red fish failing to swim submissively amongst the blue fish?

  Owen leaned on the hood of his Lincoln, his right knee—the bad one—slightly bent to take the weight off.

  “Thanks for coming,” I said.

  His face tilted upwards, smiling at the sun. “Hop in, man.”

  The Kingston Pen stood atop a hill, a monstrosity of conical turrets and razorwire. I’d forgotten how beastly it looked from the outside. I unrolled the car window. Wind curled over the earth, pulling up the smell of springtime grass. I inhaled deep, dizzying breaths.

  Owen drove down a switchback and hit the highway. My breath came in a shallow rush—I was nearly hyperventilating. Stands of Jack pine blurred into a green wall topped by a limitless sky. I hadn’t seen unbroken sky in so long. It’s too easy to forget the sheer size of the world. We didn’t speak at all until we hit Cataract City limits. It wasn’t uncomfortable.

  “So,” Owen said, “do I need to watch my ass?”

  “Well, old buddy, it’s like this. Every night f
or the past eight years I’ve lain in bed with a three-hundred-pound schizo squealing in his sleep underneath me. You figure I’d want to wrongfoot you if it meant winding up back with all that?”

  Owen said: “Fair enough.”

  We reached our old street, driving past the house Owe used to live in. Not much had changed. The cars were rustier. I got out, then leaned in through the open window. “There’s something I’ll want to talk to you about.”

  “I thought we just settled that.”

  “Yeah, we did. Dead issue. This is something else.”

  “Remember what side of the law I’m on, Dunk.”

  I cocked my head. “Aren’t we on the same side?”

  He gave me a quick half-smile. “Of course, same side. Run it by me any time.”

  The front door to my parents’ house was locked but the key was hidden under a chunk of pinkish granite in the flowerbed, where it’d always been. The house was untouched: same photos in their familiar frames, floorboards squeaking in the same spots they had when as a teenager I’d sneak out to watch the stock-car races. The TV was new but the fridge was the same faded green number my folks had owned since Moses wore diapers, running on a compressor my dad scrounged from the Humberstone dump. A note sat on the kitchen table, written in Mom’s neat cursive.

  Sorry not to be home, Duncan. Both at work. Make yourself at home—and this IS your home, for however long you need it. Love, Mom & Dad.

  My room was pretty much as I’d left it. The poster on the wall of Bruiser Mahoney was yellowed and curling at its edges, but the sheets on my bed were fresh.

  I knelt at the closet door as I’d done so many times as a boy and peeled back a flap of carpeting. Pried up the loose floorboard and took out the cigar box my father had given me: Sancho Panza, it said. My dad had passed it around the waiting room after my birth, back when smoking in hospitals wasn’t a crime.

  I sat on the floor cross-legged, opened the lid and pulled out an old Polaroid: Me and Owe and Bruiser Mahoney, snapped in the change room of the Memorial Arena. I turned it over, read the words on the back.

  To Duncan and Dutchie, two warriors in the Bruiser Mahoney armada. Yours, BM.

  I lifted out the box’s final item. It had remained in my backpack next to my hospital bed when I was twelve. Nobody had bothered to poke through the pack: not the cops, not my folks, nobody. When my parents drove me home from the hospital I’d placed the item in the box under the floorboards, where it’d sat now for … how long? Over twenty years.

  The silver finish was tarnished but the weight was true. I cracked the cylinder, spun it, spellbound by the perfect coin of light that glinted through each empty chamber.

  PART ONE

  DOGS IN SPACE

  OWEN STUCKEY

  After dropping Duncan at his folks’ house, I drove south, stopping at a lookout a few miles upriver from the Falls. A spit of land arrowed into the river; the ground closest to shore was overhung with willows whose ripening buds perfumed the evening air. In the summer families would colonize the picnic tables, stoking fires in old tire rims, grilling tube steaks and corn on the cob. Children would splash in the river under the watchful gaze of their folks; the wild boys who swam from the shallows would earn a cuff on the ear from their fathers—the Niagara turned black and snaky twenty yards from shore, and the river basin was littered with the bones of men and boys who’d pitted their will against it.

  Was this where Bruiser Mahoney had regaled us with the tale of Giant Kichi? If not, Dunk and I had surely been here before. As boys, we’d investigated every crest and dip in this city. No place was unknown to us.

  I remembered the still pools behind the gutted warehouses on Stillwell Road teeming with bullfrogs—Dunk and I would watch tadpoles push themselves out of translucent egg sacs, their iridescent bodies glittering like fish scales. Bizarre to realize that a creature so large, carbuncled and fucking ugly could begin its life so tiny, so radiant.

  The oxbow lake we visited must be west of here, but its exact location was lost to me now … it struck me that a man inevitably surrenders his boyhood sense of direction, as if it were a necessary toll of adulthood. Boys weren’t dependent on atlases or cross streets—a boy’s interests lay off the city grid, his world unmapped by cartographers. Boys navigated by primitive means, their compass points determined by scent and taste and touch and sense-memory, an unsophisticated yet terribly precise method of echolocation.

  If I couldn’t find that oxbow now, I could still remember how afternoon sunshine would fill the slack water, which was bathwater-warm on high August afternoons. A car was submerged at the bottom of the lake; local legend held it was haunted: its occupants, a family from out of town, had been driving through a snowstorm and crashed through the ice. In the schoolyard it was whispered that at the stroke of midnight, three apparitions would hover over the water: the car’s damned occupants, who were rumoured to have been atheists—a filthy word in Cataract City—and probably vegetarians to boot. Having never received a godly Christian burial, their forlorn ghosts were damned to haunt the lake.

  There was the starlit field behind Land of Oceans, a marine mammal park where the corpses of whales and sea lions and dolphins were heaped into mass graves. One night Dunk and I hopped the chain-link fence and kicked through dry scrub to the graveyard, finding nothing untoward apart from the smell wafting from the ground, earthy and fungal like certain exotic cheeses you couldn’t buy at the local Pack N’ Save. Duncan led us up what we both believed to be an isolated hummock until we were perched perilously at its lip, staring into a hole. At the bottom, curled like a smelt in a bowl, was Peetka, the performing bottlenose dolphin. Her body was stiffening with rigor mortis—I’d imagined the sly creak of floorboards in an abandoned house—a bloody hole in her head eight inches from the crusted blowhole where a veterinarian had excised a twitching nugget of brain. A dusting of quicklime ate into the milky blue of her eyes. When headlights bloomed over the curve of the earth we’d fled into the long grass, blood booming in our ears, not stopping until we were in the sheltering woods, where we’d collapsed in hysterical, adrenalized giggles—the only way to dispel that terrible pressure.

  The two of us had barely spoken on the ride home from prison. My eyes kept skating off Dunk. Prison had reduced him in some unfathomable way. You wouldn’t know to look at him—he was freakishly muscular, a condom stuffed with walnuts—but a distance had settled into his eyes. He’d been banged up eight years. Ten percent of the average human lifespan. Ten percent he’d never reclaim. Ten percent that I’d stolen from him?

  I drove back to the Niagara Parkway, swinging around the city hub and turning onto Sodom Road, motoring between grape fields in the alluvial shadow of the escarpment. My department-issued .38 dug under my armpit. I’d carved an X into the soft lead of each bullet, fashioning dumdum rounds. A year ago I’d barrelled through the cheap pressboard door in a lowrise apartment off Kaler to find some fucko smashed on bath salts pressing a carpet knife to his girlfriend’s neck. I shot him three times—textbook centre of mass, a neat isosceles in his chest—yet he’d still managed to nearly saw her head off. From then on I told myself I’d have stopping power, whether or not the department condoned it.

  I pulled into a weedy cut-off. The land rolled away from me in swathes of deepening darkness; I spotted a trembling finger of flame burning someplace in the trees. I’d been here before—this exact spot, always at night. Some nights I’d lie in bed listening to my fingernails grow until I couldn’t stand the sound, then get up and drive through the heart of Cataract City. Past the Memorial Arena and down Clifton Hill, skirting the Falls that threw up their endless spray. I didn’t need that primitive boyhood sonar to guide me anymore.

  Presently I stepped from the car and flexed my knee; it always throbbed in the springtime and lately it’d been acting up in the winter, too. The clean smell of the forest: cut-potato scent of earth, dry leaves leaving a taste of cinnamon on the tongue.

  “Home again,
home again, jiggedy jig.”

  The wind curled under my trouser cuffs. Worried for no reason I could pinpoint, I glanced over my shoulder and saw the distant glimmer of Clifton Hill. The city makes you; in a million little ways it makes you, and you can’t unmake yourself from it.

  When I was twelve I spent three nights in these woods with my best friend—Duncan Diggs. It wasn’t that we were assing around after dark and got waylaid far from our safe streetlit world—lost someplace in the lovely woods, dark and deep, like Frost wrote in that old poem. We were kidnapped: that’s what the papers would write and that was what happened, strictly speaking. But it didn’t feel that way. The man who did it … looking back, I can say he was thoughtless. His actions put us in danger; we could’ve died. But I wouldn’t say he was evil. He was just broken in the way some men can become broken, and failed to see how it might also break those around him.

  Was I scared? Shit, yeah. We were lost and cold and hungry and terrified that we’d be torn apart by the makers of those soft, sinister noises that rebounded within the night pines. But I wasn’t scared of the man who’d brought us there. If you were to ask Dunk he’d say the same.

  But all this happened a long time ago, when we were kids. If there’s one time in your life you want to remember fondly, it’s those years.

  The man who took us into the woods was our hero, back when we were young enough to believe in those. Big heroes, you know? Larger than life. As you grow up you find most heroes are the same size as anyone else; their heroics are small, selfless and continual. Back then we believed in the ruddy breed of heroism depicted in the G.I. Joe comics we’d read on rainy afternoons in my basement, water trickling through the downspouts like clicking marbles. We believed heroes like that existed because the world seemed huge enough to hold them. The world still seems huge now, but in a sometimes depressing way that I can’t quite explain. As boys, it was only hugely unknown. Just because we’d never met such men wasn’t proof that they didn’t exist.