Edwina visited me only once, a month after I entered the pen.
She looked as beautiful as I’d ever seen her. Believe me when I say this had nothing to do with the fact that all I saw otherwise was the pitted faces of long cons. Hers was a raw beauty, and any changes I could spot were minor: she’d done a little something to her hair or her skin, imparting a fresh lustre.
We sat in the visiting room around circular steel tables that looked like playground carousels. Rays of sunlight carved through the barred windows—heatless in here, as always.
The other inmates snuggled with their wives and girlfriends like high-schoolers under the bleachers, copping feels just to touch flesh that had touched the outside world. Ed and I sat at opposite ends of the table. Ed’s hands stayed on her lap.
“You shithead,” she said flatly.
“I’m a shithead,” I agreed.
She fed quarters into the vending machines and came back with a Coke, a Diet Coke and a honey bun wrapped in cellophane. She slid the Coke and bun across to me.
“Was there a reason you didn’t tell me?”
“About what, Edwina?”
“About all of it.”
“What would you have done if I had told you?”
Edwina had the same hard-boned face as a lot of women in Cataract City, but the difference was in everything going on under that calm surface, nuances expressed in the smallest movements and dilations. I smiled; it was so good just to be this close to her, to see the gold coins of light dancing in each of her eyes.
“Jesus, Duncan. You killed a man.”
The finality with which she spoke those words—it was as if the act itself had attached itself to my name like a cocklebur. I was a killer. Not a murderer, but definitely a killer.
“Did you ever think?” She stared searchingly into my face. “I mean, in a million years …?”
“No, Ed. Never in a million years.”
“How did it happen?”
But this was almost like asking somebody how they’d come down with cancer: you accumulated bad habits and bad luck, I figured, and the next thing you know, something takes root. You don’t set out to get cancer. And I’d never set out to kill a man.
Ed exhaled heavily, blowing a bang slantwise across her forehead. I wanted to reach across the table and tuck that lock of hair behind her ear.
Later, I found a single strand of Ed’s hair in my cell, laid across my pillow like dark thread. I don’t know how it got there—I’d been stripped and scrubbed before entering the pen; everything I’d owned had been taken from me. And we hadn’t touched once during her visit; not a hug, not a handshake. But it was her hair. I knew this simply by feel, the way a man knows the shape of his wife’s body in the dark. A single strand of hair; all I had left of her. I held on to it for years, if you can believe it. I’d lie awake at night twining it around my finger, desperately afraid it’d snap. It never did—I was always gentle with it. If my orange jumpsuit had had pockets, I would’ve carried it close to me all day. But since pockets were banned, I slicked the hair with saliva and smoothed it to the metal frame of my cot in a spot where it wouldn’t be disturbed when the sheets were changed. It lasted three years, that strand of hair. Then one day I reached for it and it was gone. I hunted madly, making Bainbridge get up so I could search the floor under his cot, but no luck. Maybe it simply dissolved from all my handling.
Next Ed said, “Do you actually think I’ll wait?”
No, I knew she wouldn’t wait for me—not because there wasn’t any love between us, but because she’d freely given me the chance to save myself, and I hadn’t taken it. I couldn’t bear to consider her question, and so my mind fled back to the night when we’d first danced.
It happened months after we’d first held hands at Sherkston Shores. I’d asked her to dance on the postage stamp of a stage at the Wild Mushroom bar. The bond had been there in the curve of our bodies as we leaned into the music, heads cocked as we stared at each other. We’d danced to a Beatles song, “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Ed held her hand out to me, her eyebrows raised in a silent question. I’d taken and kissed it, earning a round of desultory wolf-whistles from the rubber-necking barflies. Ed laughed and rolled her eyes. We’d danced to the next song, by the Tragically Hip, “Everytime You Go,” and I’d lip-synched the lines that ever since have been seared into my mind, meshed with the sight of Edwina’s hips swaying to the beat: My girl don’t just walk, she unfurls …
Afterwards we’d walked down Clifton Hill, which was nearly dark at that hour. Stars pinpricked the sky. We took sips from the can of Laker I’d cadged off the bartender at last call. We stood at the observation rail as water hit the cataract, sending up a mushroom cloud of spume. I’d slid my coat around her shoulders and told her about the things that had mattered to me back then: the motorcycle I’d planned to buy but never did, the cut on my hand I’d picked up on my first shift at the Bisk. She told me about the death of her father from esophageal cancer and the all-girl band she’d played in before getting into a fistfight with the lead singer.
I’d smiled, knowing I was hers now: all body, all soul. I’d been waiting to give myself to somebody that way ever since I could remember.
“I’m taking Dolly,” she said to me in the pen’s visiting room.
“Taking her where?”
“Just away, Dunk.”
I kept my head steady, my gaze calm, but my insides were chewing themselves to pieces. “Okay, sure. She loves you best, anyway.”
“Dogs love everyone the same.”
She stood up. Her jaw worked like she was going to say something else. She looked at the visiting room guard, flustered for a moment, then back at me. “You want another Coke before I go?”
That’s when I realized it was going to end this way: with the woman I loved awkwardly asking if I wanted another soda.
“It’s okay, baby. But thanks.”
She walked out and kept walking. She took Dolly and never looked back. Edwina did the one thing I’d never fully brought myself to do, despite all the dreaming and planning: she left Cataract City.
I grew my hair long, shaved my skull to bare scalp then let it grow again. My body fleshed out: I had thick striations across the chest and marbling on the delts, lats flaring in a noticeable cobra’s hood. I hammered the bag until my body was clad in a fine oil of sweat and every joint rolled smooth in its socket. I sparred with Silas and sat with him at dinnertime in companionable silence. I watched my hair go grey at my temples in the steel mirror above the shitter—everything in the pen was steel, and no reflection was quite right—and wondered if it was something about the character of the light that had given me a permanent squint.
Prison subtly ruins you. The grey cafeteria chow cored a hole through my insides. The pressure of living with five hundred caged animals carved deep lines in my flesh. I saw a man stabbed in the ear with a sharpened toothbrush. Saw another man kicked half to death with bare feet in the showers, his attackers slipping on the tiles as their cocks slapped their thighs. The only solace was that these victims probably deserved it, more or less.
After a time, I was no longer a new fish, but not an old fish. A middle fish, if there was any such thing. Sometimes I’d feel a click in my throat when I swallowed: Igor Bearfoot’s huge hands had partially crushed my Adam’s apple.
As the long-timers said: I worked my time and tried to make it work for me. I enrolled in correspondence English classes, completing the diploma program I’d started years ago. My verbiage improved considerably—the iron bars became ferrous shackles; a pretty actress on TV became a toothsome seductress … you’d never speak that way in the pen, of course, unless you wanted an ass-stomping. But I liked my newfound words, my bons mots—they pushed the walls back just a little, gave me space to breathe. When the book trolley came around I’d say, “Surprise me.” Police procedurals, horror pulps, outdoorsy narratives.
The Count of Monte Cristo—that one I asked for specifically.
Some days I figured I’d do my years quietly and earn my release and life would continue at a lower wattage. I’d stay with my folks and visit my probation officer, get a job—something I could do with my hands—go to the Cairncroft Lounge on Saturday nights for a wobbly pop with Sam Bovine, meet a woman who wasn’t put off by histories and scars. Get a little house off Drummond Road, have a few kids.
It wasn’t such a stretch, was it? Perhaps it wasn’t the life I’d envisioned—but who ever ends up with the life they imagine as a child? Screw anyone who does. What’s to say they hadn’t dreamed too small in the first place?
Other nights I lay in bed with the pads of my feet clenched tight as if I was teetering over a balcony ledge thirty stories up, terrified I’d get cancer and die in this strange grey place. Or maybe a vein would pop in my skull and I’d twitch to death in my sleep with Bainbridge squealing beneath me. Mainly, though, my worries echoed those of most cons: when I got out, what would be left for me? The world would have progressed and I’d have lost my fragile place in it. I’d already lost Edwina—what else was left?
Each New Year I stood in the common room wearing a goofy party hat as Dick Clark announced the ball drop on TV. It was the only way I bothered marking the passage of time. I didn’t count days anymore, or even weeks. They’d welded together, a polished steel rail that I could slide right over.
I awoke to each new day and let it carry me through a familiar routine. I sat at the same table for meals, met Silas at the appointed time for sparring, showered with the same faces, stuffed in earplugs and struggled to sleep. I even got used to Bainbridge’s smell.
In my sixth year Silas Garrow was released. The guards let him throw a little bash in the laundry room: a few bottles of Jack Daniel’s, a sandwich platter. Silas bequeathed me his collection of spank mags.
“Treat them with reverence, paleface.”
I held one up. Fifty and Nifty. “Really, Silas?”
“Older ladies need love, too. See you on the outside?”
“Of course.”
Were they true words? Silas would never leave the Akwesasne and I’d plant myself back in Cataract City. The only place we’d meet again was back inside these cold stone walls.
One night Bainbridge started shrieking and kicking up a mighty fuss. I said to hell with it, reached down and shook the huge man’s shoulder.
“Nathan, god damn it, wake up! You’re having a nightmare.”
Bainbridge blinked his cowlike eyes and spoke in the voice of a child. “Geez, what a crazy dream. There was this ugly witch with a wart on her nose and she was cackling like a loon and—” He swallowed heavily. “She was pulling on my … scrotum. Tugging so dang hard I thought she’d rip the dang thing off.”
“It’s okay, man. See? No witch.”
Bainbridge shuddered. “Thank you, Duncan. Sincerely.”
The rail narrowed and then, one day, it ended. On that day a guard handed over the items I’d been arrested holding: a handful of change, half a roll of cherry Life Savers. I peeled the paper and popped two of them in my mouth—the candies were stuck together with age. They tasted just about as good as I’d remembered.
I dropped two tarnished quarters into the prison’s pay phone. I called Owe.
And then I was out.
And now came payback.
THE DAY AFTER MEETING with Owe and Bovine at the Double Diamond and outlining my intentions, Owe and I drove across the river, through customs, and onto the Robert Moses Parkway. A bullet-pitted road sign said: ENTERING THE TUSCARORA NATION. Owe pulled into Smokin’ Joes. The steel warehouses where Drinkwater’s real business went down still stood behind a fence of electrified chain-link.
The shelves in Smokin’ Joes looked as if they’d been rifled by survivalists. The leather jackets were so old they’d lost their smell, dust collecting on their shoulders. We wandered around aimlessly. I saw the cashier pick up the phone.
Five minutes later Drinkwater pulled into the lot. His silver pickup was dinged and rusty. He stepped inside his store with a hulking, sallow-faced sidekick in tow. The awful thought struck me that the sidekick looked a lot like Igor Bearfoot.
“You’re out of jail, my pretty,” Drinkwater said when he saw me. “And look! You’ve brought your little dog, too.”
I said, “You look haggard, Lem.”
Drinkwater’s fingernail scritched the stubble on his chin like a wooden match pulled over a striking strip. “You look well, Diggs. Prison life must have agreed with you, uh? Three hots and a cot. Yeah, you’ll never get those years back, but you put on a few solid pounds of jail beef.”
I pulled a Coke from the cooler and drank half in one go.
Drinkwater said: “Plan on paying for that?”
“Think I’d welsh on you, Lem?”
“I don’t know what you’d do—you’re an ex-con, Diggs. Better get used to people having trust issues.” He glanced at Owe, then back to me. “I would have thought you two might have trust issues of your own.”
“I want to fight again, Lem.”
Drinkwater drew back as if shocked. “Diggs! Need I remind you that you’re in polite society? Your animalistic ways don’t fly out here.”
Owe said, “How’s business, Lemmy? Lookin’ a little sluggish. You ought to rotate your merchandise.”
Drinkwater’s tongue played on the point of his eye tooth. “Like I said, Diggs—we’re not mixed up with fighting here. You’d almost think, coming over here with a member of the constabulary, you’re trying to … what’s it called? Entrap me.”
Owe plucked a bag of potato chips off the wire rack and dropped it on the ground. Drinkwater watched him with bright birdlike eyes. Owe set the toe of his boot on the bag. The cellophane squealed thinly before the bag popped, spraying chips over Drinkwater’s boots.
Pinching his jeans at the inseam, Drinkwater shook chips off his pant legs. “Now that,” he said, small veins braiding under his shirt collar, “that couldn’t have been an accident.”
Owe pointed at the security camera above the counter. “You’ve got me. So don’t say entrapment, okay? Not to mention which, I’m consorting with a known smuggler.”
Drinkwater laughed. “Ain’t my fault you don’t pick friends with a finer pedigree.”
“I’m talking about you, Lem.”
Drinkwater batted his eyes. “Why, Officer, you of all people know I’ve never been convicted. As I recall, a great deal of your time and efforts have funnelled down that empty hole.”
“You’re clean,” said Owe. “That doesn’t stop a lot of people from thinking you’re scum. Now that’s a fact, Lem. It’s the way you’re seen.”
Drinkwater’s jaw went hard. He swallowed in one sinuous movement.
“You want to fight, uh?” he said to me.
When I told him I wanted to fight three men, Drinkwater’s eyelids lifted from half-mast.
“One night,” I explained. “Any three men you want.”
“Think you’re the first swinging dick with a death wish who’s walked through these doors?” he said. “Anybody in particular?”
“Anyone’ll do. Whites, blacks, Natives.”
“No women and kids?” Drinkwater laughed softly. “I only ask because, well, I am talking to a man who cut another man’s balls off with a carpet knife, am I not?”
I said, “That’s not how it happened.”
“No? That’s the way everybody believes it went down around here. You snuck up behind poor Igor, slid a blade between his legs and slit him nuts to asshole. Were it not for the hard work of the police”—he turned to Owe, palms pressed together as if in prayer—“and bless you for that, Officer. Bless you. If not for the police you’d have gotten away clean.”
“If that’s the kind of guy you think I am, why not make it all Natives?”
Drinkwater said, “You’re asking me to assemble a war party? You got it, Pontiac. Three stout Indians, of heart proud and true.”
“I want to put a bet on myself, too.”
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“Yeah?” said Drinkwater. “Well, nobody put me on this earth to talk grown men out of being stupid.”
The day before the fight I withdrew all but five bucks from my account at the Greater Niagara Credit Union. Edwina had sold our house while I was locked up and transferred my half into the account I’d opened as a ten-year-old to rathole the money I made mowing neighbourhood lawns.
The days leading up to the fight had passed quickly. I’d done plenty of running—I’d slacked off in prison, seeing as it made me feel like a hamster on a wheel. Now I ran at night. I’d wake up in the witching hours and drag myself to the bathroom. I’d open the cupboard and hunt out the bottle at the back with an old rag tented over it. Tuf-Foot. The tagline read: A dog is only as good as his feet.
I’d squeeze some goo into my hands and massage it into my joints. Afterwards my hands were stained brown and achy to the bones, but I needed them to stay together in the fights.
I’d yank on the heavy workboots I used to wear at the Bisk, a hooded sweatshirt, and enter the empty corridors of night.
The streets were pretty much deserted. The few guys I passed weren’t dangerous so much as desperate, broken by pills or inhalants or strong drink or the unstoppable craving for all those things. Every so often a face would jump out of a dark alley asking for something, or offering it, and I’d think: Jesus, I used to know you. We played baseball at Reservoir Park.
I’d run down Stanley Ave. as the bars emptied out, juking around drunk kids laughing their batshit laughter, finding myself a little terrified by that sound—it was the laughter of people who felt invincible because of their youth and promise and the wide-open future. Guys in prison didn’t laugh like that.
I’d run further down the block where other bars were letting out, the ones with dark windows and no signs where the hospital orderlies and tollbooth operators drank. Men would shoulder through black presswood doors with fixed expressions on their faces and cigs fixed between their chalky lips. I’d watch the fresh air smack them in the face, their pupils constricting as the realization dawned: Sweet Jesus, I’m not anywhere near drunk enough! Some of them gave me a slit-eyed look before nodding, but not chummily. These guys weren’t a lot older than me, their faces wrecked from drink or just the years piling up with brutal math.
Cataract City Page 27
