Cataract City (10 page)

“Sweet fuckity
fuck
.”

He rolled his sleeve up, exhaled heavily and plunged his arm into the black hole. His eyes squeezed shut, lips skinned back from his teeth. Dribbles of muck speckled his chin. He rooted around in the blackness, his arm jerking spastically: either he was tearing through roots and sifting through brittle insect carapaces or else he’d felt something brush against his arm—something that
lived
down there, which I hardly wanted to envision.

When he withdrew his sneaker, it didn’t look like a sneaker at all; more like a dead, black-encrusted rodent. A thick stream of goo ran out of the heel, resembling the old motor oil Dad drained from his car. Dunk ripped a spongy beard of moss off a nearby tree and swabbed off his sneaker, then stood and surveyed our position. Just hummocks and shattered trees and whatever lurked under the ground.

I pictured the muck beneath us becoming deeper and more treacherous. Would it get deep enough to suck us under? What lived in those festering black pools? The creatures who did were probably blind—no light down there, right? Blind but tenacious, as you’d need to be to live in sludge. Blind and tenacious and
hungry
.

The sun slanted through the dead trees, creating gasoline rainbows on the oily water. Bugs coiled from tufts of boggy grass and crawled out of shattered tree trunks. They were all colours, but mainly that strange grey that suited a muskeg—bugs so grey they were almost translucent, an indication that these bugs were barely living, possessing no organs or brains. Creatures of idiotic instinct that pinged ceaselessly off my arms and neck. After a while I didn’t even flinch as they danced around my head in a maddening corona.

An hour passed, then two. My mood soured as the ground grew swampier. I got a drencher as my foot slipped off a hummock into a moat of brown water. I earned another on my next footstep, sneaker sinking into a pocket of puddinglike mud that moulded to my foot so perfectly you’d think it had been custom-fitted just for me.

“Ah, shit-sticks,” I said, too tired to care. “Crap on a cracker.”

We decided it was best to take our sneakers off, reasoning that before long we’d sacrifice one or both to the sinkholes. We sat on a bleached log and pulled them off, knotted the laces and wrapped them around our fists the way boxers do with hand-wraps, their wet tongues lapping our knuckles. Some debate was given to whether we should doff our socks, too, but the idea of walking barefoot through the syrupy pools was too disturbing.

We began hopping gingerly, jeans rolled past our kneecaps. Shards of dead grass poked through my socks, stinging like nettles. We went from one hummock to the next, hoping each would withstand our weight, steadying ourselves with branches and the sick trees that pushed out of the earth like whitened spears. When those
weren’t close at hand we simply held our arms out for balance—a pair of dirty, inelegant Flying Wallendas.

I ran my tongue over my chapped lips—I was deliriously thirsty—and got a taste of the mud I was tromping through. Pure
putrid
, like biting into a carrot that had sat in a vegetable crisper until it turned droopy, wrinkled, brown.

At last we reached a spot with no hummocks within jumping distance. Fatigue hived in the dark half-moons under Dunk’s eyes. We steeled ourselves and then stepped into the stagnant water, stirring up a platoon of water skimmers and releasing a reek of boggy rot. We sank until the white orbs of our kneecaps shone above the water. My feet squished through cold, congealed gravy. Bubbles quivered up through the water to burst with a sulphury stink; black shrapnel that looked like cockroach exoskeletons swirled and settled back under the water.

We trudged in lurching strides, looking like a couple of Dr. Frankenstein’s monsters. The water’s surface was dotted with green blooms like baby lily pads. They detached from their moors along the edges of the hummocks, trailing thin filaments that reminded me of bean sprouts; these eddied round our legs like stingless jellyfish.

The ground under the water was solid—or at least it wasn’t getting any
less
solid. It felt as if I was walking on a carpet of cow intestines, the kind they sold at the butcher shop as “honeycomb tripe”—I knew because Dad had come home with a plastic bag of them one afternoon, so fresh that blood had pooled in the bag; he’d hoped Mom would fry them with onions, a dish he’d eaten as a child, but Mom said she’d just as soon eat boiled toenails.

Half-rotted sticks jabbed the soft webbing between my toes. There were phantom stirrings against my skin, like the tails of inquisitive fish—then they were gone. Worst of all, I wasn’t certain
we were making headway. Moving, yeah, but to what purpose? I could see nothing ahead but dull grey edged by that maddening, elusive band of green.

My foot brushed something hard and covered in slime—a log, maybe. Or a petrified Burmese python …

… probably a log. No,
definitely
a log.

The afternoon wore into evening. A rock of despair settled on my chest. I couldn’t imagine being stuck in the muskeg as darkness fell, forlornly perched on a hummock like a frog on a toadstool. The insects would drive me insane. But a glint of hope emerged as the band of green thickened towards the horizon.

“There,” Dunk said, as much to himself as to me. “See? See?”

Our pace quickened; we’d grown accustomed to the cold custard underfoot. My feet got ahead of my body—I tripped over a root and pitched out full-length, splashing and sputtering. Brackish water surged past my gritted teeth and I gagged helplessly, tasting barbecue chips at the back of my throat. I was scared I’d swallowed bog water teeming with mosquito eggs. Would they hatch in my stomach and drain me from the inside out? No, I decided, settling on it as a simple article of faith.
Absolutely
not possible.

Dunk helped me up. We plodded on, sneakers thumping hollowly at our hips. The water got shallower: it sank to our shins, then to our ankles. Quite abruptly the land was firm. Greenness assaulted our eyes after what felt like a month of permanent grey.

We found a boulder. Dunk set his hands on it and pushed, halfway convinced it too would topple into a sinkhole. We sat and consulted over the state of our socks, which had torn off our feet—one of Dunk’s was now a sweatband around his ankle.

We dried ourselves with the rags in the backpack. Dunk wrapped one around his foot, a poor substitute for his ruined sock. We pulled our shoes on with aching slowness—they were cold and clammy,
and they reminded me of pulling on still-wet swim trunks for early-morning swimming lessons—and continued into the darkening day.

Twilight transformed the landscape. Everything blended into every other thing, the ground and bushes and rocks layering over themselves. My neck tingled. I’d managed to burn myself in the bog. Usually my mom never let me go out without a slather of sunscreen, plus a stripe of zinc oxide on my nose.

The wind curled across the earth, licking at the sunburn and the wet cuffs of my jeans and chilling me to the core. I thought back to that Coke I’d drunk about a hundred years ago. My tongue ballooned in my mouth, a dry sponge covered in raspy white bumps.

A shrill
peep-peep-peep
came from the bottom of a tree with yellow bark. Each peep sounded like a whistle being blown, as if whatever was making those peeps was using its whole body to make them. Hunting in the grass, we found a baby bird. I almost stepped on it—head tucked, it looked like a pinky-grey rock. “Jeez!” I yanked my foot back, cringing at the thought of its nutlike body pulped under my sneaker.

“He must have fallen out of his nest,” said Dunk.

It didn’t even look like a bird, or something that might turn into one. It had no feathers. Its wings were the colour of my grandfather’s fingernails, its legs tiny thumbs. Its beak was the bright yellow of a McDonald’s straw, splitting its dark blue head in half. When it peeped, the edges of its beak fluttered like tissue paper. You could see through its skin like through a greasy fast-food bag: the dark pinbone of its spine, the weird movement of its guts. There was a milky ball of fat where its tail would pop out.

When Dunk reached to touch it I grabbed his wrist.

“You can’t. If it gets human smell on it, its mom won’t take it
back. It’ll smell like us, not like a bird. Its mom’ll be scared. She won’t feed it.”

“That’s stupid.”

“It’s, like, a scientific fact.”

Dunk hunted through the backpack and found a dry rag. He slipped it over his hand and picked the bird up in the same way you’d pick up a dog turd. The creature peeped crazily before settling. Dunk rolled the rag into a little nest with the bird in the middle.

“Stupid mamma bird,” he said.

Crickets chirped in the green gloom. Through the trees, the sky was bruising towards purple. It’s scary the way night falls in the woods: more abrupt, unsoftened by headlamps or street lamps. The only light comes from stars that bloom in the velvet sky, sharpening as darkness closes around each shining pinprick. Night in the forest falls like a guillotine blade: quick and sharp, cutting you off from everything.

The woods changed. Where before there was only the sound of our footsteps and breathing, now there were sly rustlings from all angles. Yet if I were to turn and peer into those black pools linked by long shadows, I’d see nothing. Whatever stirred would pause, hold its breath, melt into the landscape until I turned away—at which point it would stalk us again. A sense of desolation settled within me: a cold, slimy stone lodged under my lungs. There was nothing
happy
about the woods, I thought, especially at night.

We unpacked our belongings under a sweep of elms. What had seemed like plenty that morning now looked pitiful. A chocolate bar, a dirty flannel blanket, a book of matches from a club called Pure Platinum, a nudie mag and a gun and two empty Coke cans.

We built a ring of rocks. Dunk tore pages out of the magazine. I stacked a teepee of sticks over the paper. Five matches in the
matchbook. The match-heads were a dull crumbly red. The striking strip was shiny-smooth.

We huddled over the firepit to keep the wind at bay. Dunk ran a match down the strike-strip. The paper shaft bent. The match didn’t catch. He pressed the match to the strip with his thumb. It burst into flame. A fragile flame cupped in Dunk’s palm. I held my breath as he touched it to the paper.

The wind snuck between us.
Whuff
. Darkness. Something rustled in the tree above, followed by a deep-throated cackle that ascended through several octaves before tapering to a weird shattering sob.

“It’s a bird,” Dunk said. “A stupid little
bird
.”

He tore another match. “Get close,” he said, scratching it on the striking strip. The shaft tore nearly in half. He struck it again. The match-head went up in a hot spark and instantly burned out.

I hated everyone who’d had anything to do with those matches. Whoever made them, sold them or thought they were good for much at all.

Dunk handed them to me. “You try.”

I tore one out and folded the book closed. The match felt worthless: flimsy, already damp with my sweat. It was the first time I’d ever really needed something to
work
. Sometimes your whole life came down to some silly little thing you never thought could matter, not in a million years. A stupid match.

I hunched so far over the firepit that I nearly nosedived into it. If I lit the match as close to the paper as possible, the wind wouldn’t get a chance to snuff it. I ran it down the strip, flicking my wrist like I’d seen men do at the Bisk on their smoke breaks.

It caught. Dunk cupped his hands around mine. Light broke between our fingers in golden spears so bright they seemed solid, as if they might snap like icicles. I touched it to the paper. Flame leapt from match to paper. Relief washed over me.

Wind curled into the pit and between my fingers, silky-cool.
Whuff
.

Darkness—or not quite. A half-moon burned at the paper’s edge, a fine orange band no bigger than a fingernail clipping. Then it went out.

“Fucking
wind
.”

“Scouts taught us how to light a
one-match
fire, right? We’ve still got two left.” Dunk was smiling. His teeth glowed like chips of phosphorus. It amazed me that he’d find anything funny about this.

I blew on my fingertips to dry them, then tore out the second-to-last match. It
had
to light. Not because the law of averages said so, or because if it didn’t we’d be stuck in the dark with that cackling thing in the tree. No, the match had to light because we were two scared kids lost in the woods. The universe owed us that much, didn’t it?

It flared on the first strike. I stretched towards the paper, fingers steady. Wind licked at the flame, blowing it sideways but not quite out. I held it to a ragged edge where the paper had been torn from the magazine, the threadlike fibres oh so flammable, please please
please
, and the match burned down to my fingertips as the heat intensified, becoming unbearable, please
please PLEASE
, and the flame took hold along that edge, timid at first but becoming greedy, devouring the paper and Dunk let out a giddy
whoop
as the fire burned up and up, releasing oily smoke, eating a hole through the crumpled face of a girl with a black bar over her eyes.

We built the fire into a blaze, heaping wood up and laughing until we were out of breath, dancing a crazy jig round the flames.

The burning wood fell inward with a soft, cindery sound that sent a great coil of sparks up to extinguish on the overhanging leaves. The coals brightened and dimmed in the wind. The baby bird peeped softly.

“Do you think it’s hungry?” Dunk said.

“I’m hungry.”

“Me, too.”

I found the bottle of vitamins in the backpack. Each was three times the size of the Flintstones vitamins Mom used to make me take at breakfast. They smelled like a barnyard, of hay and horses. It seemed wise to take them, like medicine.

“Do you think we can survive on vitamins?” Dunk said.