Cataract City

by Craig Davidson

  “No!” Dunk and I said in unison.

  “Don’t be a tease,” the girl said.

  Mahoney cocked a Spockian eyebrow. “I’m not boring you?”

  She sighed. “Go on, you ham.”

  “Visualize it, then, boys. Set the picture in your mind. Giant Kichi—he was a man only in the way Goliath was a man. His head swept the rafters. You think I’m big? Oh, I was a guppy compared to this guy. But I’d vowed to lock horns, a deal had been struck, and then as now I honour my commitments.”

  The girl blew a raspberry.

  “Yes, he was big,” Mahoney said, after a searching look at the girl. “And his eyes … the darkest, most light-eating things I’d ever seen. I could tell right off he was nutty as squirrel turds, a whole flock of bats in his belfry, but I stepped through the ropes and scuffed my feet in the rosin all the same. Now boys, the first time Kichi hit me”—he slammed his fist into his open palm: RAP!—“I thought he’d caved my chest in. The crowd roared. I peeled myself off the canvas before he could land the finishing blow. I figured a man that big was like a tree: once he went down, he wouldn’t get back up. So I chopped at him like a tree. Quick leg kicks, then scooting away. Chop! Chop! Chop! Chop!

  “Kichi growled like an animal and lunged, but I managed to squirt away. Chop! Chop! I felt him weaken. Chop! Chop! The sound of my foot striking his leg was like an axe hacking into wet wood. When he went down—and yes, Giant Kichi did go down—it was with a cry that sounded like a gigantic baby sucking its first breath. He crashed into the mat with a rattle, the whole stadium shaking. I looked at him curled on the mat, helpless … and I couldn’t finish it. He was raised a beast and that’s what he became. So I left him there, may the Lord bless and keep him. And that, boys, was Giant Kichi.”

  The girl clapped. “Bravo!”

  “Did it really happen?” I said.

  Mahoney said, “Ask her. She was there.”

  The girl said, “It’s true. Every word.” She turned her bottle upside down, beer sloshing onto the dirt.

  “What a waste!” Mahoney said.

  “I’ve got to get back home,” she said.

  “Ah, come on. Another story.”

  “Another time.”

  Mahoney stared an instant, then rubbed his nose harshly with his palm. “Yeah, okay. Another time.”

  We drove back. Bruiser reached into the case. The girl briefly set her hand on his. He let go of the bottle, goosed the accelerator and said: “Is it to be like this, then? Is it?”

  “I don’t know what other way you figured it to be.”

  “Did you get the money I sent?”

  “I don’t need the money. Neither does Mom.”

  “The letters, then. You read them?”

  She said: “I read them, yes.”

  “Everything I wrote, I meant.”

  “Sure you did. But that dog’s not going to hunt.”

  For a moment Mahoney rested his hand lightly on the girl’s knee. “We had some high times, now, didn’t we?”

  “You’re a hell of a good time. Nobody would deny it.”

  “Are you telling me we didn’t have some high ol’ times?”

  The girl offered him a distressed smile. “Why would I tell you anything when you already know it all?”

  Bruiser drove back down the river route. The sky had lowered over the river, which had turned the colour of lead. Reaching across the armrest, Bruiser took the girl’s hand. It covered her own like a tarantula clutching a cat’s eye marble. She patted his hand with her free one, the way you’d stroke a tame animal: a toothless old bear maybe, the ones that rode tricycles in Russian circuses.

  Mahoney appeared aggravated with this treatment; the tenderness of it, I figured. Or maybe the fact she stroked his hand as a mother would stroke her child’s? He tore his hand away and punched the roof.

  The girl’s laugh said she’d seen this song and dance before. She turned to us and said, “Big Bruiser maaaad! Bruiser make heap big thunder!”

  “Don’t encourage her, please,” Bruiser told us as we laughed. He sucked on his skinned knuckles and said, “If you encourage her she’ll never grow up.”

  The girl stuck out her tongue at him. “I grew up like a thief, didn’t I? Always out of your sight.”

  He beheld her with reproachful eyes. “When did you get so cold, girl?”

  She stared straight ahead at that. I got the sense it was some kind of act, in which she was playing the hard girl. It didn’t suit her, but she played it well enough.

  We arrived at the house with the small fenced-in yard. The girl kissed Mahoney on the cheek.

  “He’ll get you home safe,” she assured us. “You’re in good hands.”

  When the girl left, it was as if she took some part of Bruiser Mahoney with her. Dunk and I watched in silence as he popped the glovebox and recovered a bottle of pills. He shook a few out and dry-swallowed them and jammed the bottle into one of the many pockets of his coat. Then he drove on. The only sounds were the loose muffler rattling against the undercarriage and the muted clink of bottles.

  “Ah, Jesus,” Mahoney said hoarsely, mopping his brow as a man with a high fever might. “Ah, Jesus, Jesus.”

  Dunk leaned forward to touch Mahoney’s slouched shoulder. Mahoney flinched.

  “God damn it.” He unrolled the window, cleared his throat and spat. “I’m not perfect. Never claimed to be. Made mistakes—who hasn’t? Look at you two. Your fathers get in some silly brawl and let a monstrous stranger walk away with their kids. That’s good parenting? Smelling like damn cookies, the pair of them. What in hell’s that about?”

  “They work at a cookie factory,” I said.

  Mahoney’s head rocked back on the stump of his neck. Maybe he was picturing it as I once had: a tree full of lumpen cookie-making elves, like in the commercials.

  “I bet your dads have never taken you camping, have they?”

  Dunk said: “We went to a cottage once.”

  “Great galloping goose shit!” Mahoney said. He pawed through the case for a fresh beer, opened it and swigged deeply. It clearly rejuvenated him. “Never gone on a camp-out? A couple of fine nellies you’ll turn into.”

  “What’s a nelly?” Dunk said.

  “A pansy. A goddamn bed-wetter! That tears it—I’m taking you boys to the woods. It’ll put some bark on your trees!”

  We pulled onto the highway. Mahoney fled down the two-lane stretch, hair whipping round his head like snakes from the wind through the window. His face crept closer to the windshield; he crouched over the wheel, and I imagined him squinting at the yellow broken lines blurring under the hood.

  A police car fled past in the opposite lane, lights ablaze and sirens blaring. When it was gone Mahoney laughed, a creaky-hinge sound.

  In some dimmed chamber of my heart I realized I ought to be terrified. Yet I wasn’t. Dunk grinned into the wind that screamed through the van, tugging at his clothes and stirring the drifts of soda cans behind us.

  “Ever pitched a tent, boys?” said Mahoney.

  Dunk said: “Never!”

  “Ever baited a trap?”

  “We lit a one-match fire in Cubs.”

  Mahoney snorted. “Your fathers should be bloody ashamed of themselves.” He wrenched the wheel. We were off the main road—off pavement entirely—bouncing down a rutted dirt path. Long grass glowed whitely in the headlamps. I may’ve seen lights burning in the distance, the lights of an isolated farmhouse maybe, but soon those vanished.

  We drove over the crest of some empty land, very flat, the path running as straight as a yardstick, and then came a stand of apple trees hung with winter-withered fruit that shone like nickels at the bottom of a well. Next came pine trees that dropped and kept on dropping. I was sure the van would rattle to pieces. My teeth chattered in my mouth. Bushes whacked up under the frame.

  Mahoney remained hunched over the wheel, his face lit up by the dashboard’s greenish glow. “Now we’re getting somewhere.” His voice
possessed the mad certainty that the leaders of doomed polar expeditions must have held.

  The path kept eroding. Soon it was only the phantom of a road; the woods loomed. Stones pinged off the frame. Branches yawned over the trail, raking the windows like skeletal fingers.

  The van hit a lip. Metal shrieked as we bottomed out. I was thrown forward, shoulder striking the passenger seat before I slumped to the floor, dazed. Dunk helped me back onto the seat.

  “Buckle your seat belt, man.”

  But we weren’t moving anymore. Mahoney mashed the gas pedal, snarling through skinned-back lips. The wheels spun until the sound of smoking rubber reached the pitch of a gut-shot animal. Steam boiled from under the hood. Mahoney climbed out, stumbled in front of the headlights to survey the damage.

  “We’re here,” he said, as if this had been our destination all along. He popped the van’s back doors and flung out an army surplus tent, a blackened cooking grill, sleeping bags.

  “You boys find some firewood,” he said merrily. “Beat the ground in front of you, though—snakes out at this hour.”

  We explored the clearing that fringed the woods.

  “Wait!” Mahoney called us back, removing a collapsible Buck knife from his pocket. After considering us at length, he handed it to Dunk. “Just in case,” he said.

  “I already got one,” Dunk said, showing Mahoney the Swiss Army knife he always carried.

  Mahoney pressed his knife into my palm. Warm from his flesh, the brass fittings greased with sweat.

  We picked our way through the trees searching for sticks. An owl nested on a low branch, eyes shining like lanterns. The darkness of Dunk’s hair blended with the blackness under the trees; he seemed as much a part of this wilderness as the owl. I fit my thumbnail into the groove on the Buck knife and pulled it open. The blade clicked smoothly into place—I could smell the oil in the mechanism. Moonlight played off the tiny hairline abrasions along the blade where Mahoney must’ve sharpened it on a whetstone.

  When we returned from our mission Bruiser Mahoney was sitting cross-legged, assembling a tent in the van’s headlights. One of the tent poles was bent at a broken-backed angle in his huge hands. Growling, he flung it into the bushes.

  “Goddamn Tinkertoys.”

  He managed to get one tent up before the van’s battery conked out. We built a ring of rocks and heaped wood inside. Mahoney doused the sticks with turpentine and lit a match.

  “Phwoar!” he cried as the flames roared up.

  Sap hissed and knots popped in the burning wood. Mahoney reached for a beer but the case was empty. He stood up the way a baby does—hands braced in front of him, walking his heels up to meet them—and shuffled to the edge of the woods. He pissed for a minor eternity—his urine sounded heavy, as if threaded with molten lead; I imagined it flattening the weeds and snapping twigs. His body swung around and he returned to the van, hunting through it. He sat back down with a bottle of white liquor and a big silver handgun.

  “I won it in a bet,” he said. “Or I lost a bet and had to take possession of it. I forget now. We might need it tonight.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “You think we’re the only creatures out here?”

  As the night wore on, Mahoney was coming to resemble an animal himself. I peered through the flames at this shaggy man-beast fumbling with a loaded pistol. He looked like a bear trying to play the piano. The cylinder popped open. Bullets fell into his lap. He pinched them between his fingers and thumbed them back into their holes, then took crooked aim at the trees.

  “Bang,” he whispered.

  He handed me the bottle. When I hesitated he said: “Your father never gave you a belt of rum? It’s pirate medicine, son.”

  Whatever was in the bottle blistered my throat. I coughed convulsively and would’ve puked but there was nothing in my stomach.

  Dunk took the bottle. Not only did he keep it down, he took another sip.

  “It does taste like medicine,” Dunk said.

  “When I was your age I believed totally in the power of medicine,” said Mahoney. “One time my grandfather was coughing. I gave him a cough drop. My grandfather had lung cancer. By the end he was hacking up spongy pink bits.”

  “Teach me to wrestle,” Dunk said.

  “A fucking cough drop … What?”

  “To wrestle,” Dunk said. “Teach me.”

  “Why? You want to grow up to be like me?”

  “I do.”

  Mahoney sucked at the bottle and then wiped the shine off his lips. His teeth were the colour of old bone in the firelight.

  “Up, then!” he cried. “Stand and fight!”

  He leapt across the flames and landed nimbly. Dunk was crab-walking away on his palms and heels. Mahoney hauled him up with no more effort or regard than a man lifting a sack of laundry.

  “Lock up,” he snarled, setting himself in a wrestling pose. “Damn you, you wanted to learn so lock up with me!”

  Mahoney got down on his knees. He grabbed Dunk’s hands and slapped one on the back of his neck and the other on his shoulder.

  “Like that,” he said, settling his hands on Dunk’s own neck and shoulder. “You control the other man this way, see? Now control my head.”

  The muscles flexed down Dunk’s arm. Mahoney’s head sat on his neck like a tree stump, moving nowhere. Dunk linked his fingers around the back of Mahoney’s neck, screwed his heels into the ground and pulled as hard as he could.

  “Has a butterfly settled on me?” Mahoney asked acidly.

  “Owe,” Dunk said, his face contorted with effort, “help.”

  I wrapped my arms around Mahoney’s bull neck. He wore the same aftershave my father did, the one with the blue ship on the bottle. The hairs on the back of his neck were as soft as the white spores on a dandelion before they blow away in the wind.

  Mahoney said: “You’re huuuurting meeee …”

  His hands shot up, grabbing a fistful of our shirts. He pushed us backwards and we landed hard on our asses and elbows.

  “Oldest trick in the book,” he said, whapping dirt off his knees. “Never trust the wounded dog, boys.”

  Dunk’s elbow was torn open, blood trickling to his wrist. His hands flexed into fists at his sides. Mahoney was by the fire, bent over his bottle. When he stood up Dunk was right there.

  “What?” Mahoney said.

  Dunk showed Mahoney his elbow. Not for sympathy, just so the man could see what he’d done.

  “Sorry about that,” Bruiser said. “Let’s patch it up.”

  Mahoney found a box of Band-Aids in the glovebox and stuck one on Dunk’s elbow. He took the bottle of pills from his pocket, shook a quartet into his palm and chased them with rum.

  “That’s wrestling, boys. Want to see what it earns you?” He rolled his trouser up past his knee. “I always wear tights in the ring. Now you see why.”

  His kneecap was shattered. The two halves of it lay under his skin with one half twisted to one side, the other sunk beneath his knee joint. It looked like a lunar landing photo. The cratered surface of the moon.

  “A steel chair. Whappo. Some kind of no-holds-barred contest. The promoter didn’t bother explaining it too well. He was drunk. Anyway, so was I. The guy who chair-shotted me, the Sandman, he was drunk too. I heard the bone crack. Sounded like a starter’s pistol—pow!” Mahoney shook his head. “That was Texas. Never wrestle in Texas, boyos.”

  He ran his hands through his hair, parting the dark locks. A scar ran across the top of his skull. Pink, ribbed and shockingly thick—it looked like a garter snake frozen under his scalp.

  “Razorwire,” he said. “Some kind of crazy thing in Japan. Opened me up to the bone. Blood pissing all over the mat. That’s how they like it over there. Messy. I kept wrestling. The both of us greasy with blood. I passed out. Came to in the emergency room with a sweet slant-eyed nurse stitching my head up.”

  Everywhere Mahoney had gone left a mark on him. The most crucial testament of his pe
rfection—the fact that he’d come from outside of Cataract City, the great unknown where perfection was still a possibility—was the very thing that had ruined him.

  Dunk said: “Did your dad teach you to wrestle?”

  “My dad was a great man,” Mahoney said. “A beast! When I was a boy he’d pinch my shoulders and say, ‘Look at those tiny trapezius muscles of yours—they’re mousetraps! You should have bear traps like mine! And your neck’s thin as a stack of dimes—what use is a man who can’t even support the weight of his own skull?’ I was a small boy. Sickly. Born premature. Not much bigger than a kaiser roll, my mother said. She hardly realized I’d come out.

  “I got picked on as a boy. Yes! After school I’d make it home a few steps ahead of my tormentors and hide. Then my dad would come home. He was a butcher. His days spent quartering hogs. He’d drag me outside to face the other boys. But before that he’d wad up his apron, still wet with pig blood, and stuff it in my face. ‘Smell it!’ he’d say. ‘It should make you crazy! A mad dog!’ And so I went out with my face smeared with blood and I’d fight. It made me a better man, and I think every boy should … Did you … Did you …?”

  Mahoney was peering into the trees. He closed one eye like he was peering through a magnifying glass, then reared back as if he’d sniffed something foul.

  “Did you see that?”

  Dunk looked. I looked. There was nothing.

  “What is it?” said Dunk.

  “I … I can’t quite say. But do you know who’s out there?” He screwed his palms into his eye sockets and blinked furiously. “Every manner of psycho and degenerate. Where do you go when polite society rejects you? The woods. Eating skunks, biding your time, waiting for your opportunity.”

  Mahoney worked his jaw. The interlocking bones clicked beneath his ear. He scrounged the gun out of his jacket pocket. A log cracked in the fire. He wheeled about in a crazy circle, strafing the trees with the barrel.

  “Who is it? Rotten-ass bastard, show yourself! I’ll plug one between your eyes!”

  We cowered as the pistol swung on wild orbits. Mahoney drank and wiped his lips with the back of the hand gripping the gun.

  “There’s no need for this.” His voice took on a pleading note. “Come sit by the fire. We can—”