Cataract City (13 page)

“The man has a net,” I said, “made from the thinnest threads. Thinner than fishing line or even spider’s web. He walks to the edge of the water and throws it. He pulls in the bodies of those who went over. It takes him a long time. His face crunches up and the veins swell on his skull. It is hard work, and very lonely.

“The bodies don’t always look so good. They are broken in many places. Sometimes he’s got to throw the net more than once. When he has all the pieces he digs a hole in that splintery rock and buries the body upside down, legs facing up and head pointing down. Only the feet poke out.

“It’s a special garden. Whatever’s planted grows the wrong way, down instead of up. The feet keep going down into it—first the
ankles then the heels then the toes. It’s a swallowing garden. Before long it’s empty again.”

Dunk said: “Where do they go?”

“Wherever’s under the Falls. Nobody has ever come back … except one. That was a man who went over the night before he was supposed to get married. Everyone thought he’d died in the plunge. His parents had a funeral. They put sacks of flour in the coffin. But five years later … he was naked, the way Mrs. Lovegrove was that one time. Walking down the low road along the river. His body was perfect. Not a scratch. He looked younger than when he’d gone over. He was smiling at first, but soon he started to cry. The loudest and scariest, the most awful-sad cry you’ve ever heard. When a car stopped and the driver asked what was wrong, he said, ‘I wandered away. Why did I do that? It was so, so … 
perfect
.’ Next his heart blew up. It popped like a balloon in his chest and he died.”

“What was so perfect?”

After a while I said, “Who knows?”

“That’s cheating.”

But even back then I knew cheating was a big part of telling a story.

“That’s BS, Owe,” Duncan persisted. “Sincerely.”

“How can you ask someone to tell a story then call BS when it doesn’t turn out the way you want?”

“Aw,
maaan
. What a gyp.” Dunk stirred the coals with a stick and grinned crookedly across the flames. “Still, cool story. A swallowing garden.
Creepy
.”

I closed my eyes. Firelight wavered against my eyelids. I thought about how I could fall asleep right there on the rocks—but if I did and if things stayed perfectly quiet, if the fire died and I felt nothing, I might never wake up. Whatever it was
that usually pulled me back into the waking world just wouldn’t be there. I’d be too deep in dreams. And that didn’t really seem so bad.

“Hey, Owe?”

“Yeah?”

“I knew about the lead in the car.”

“What?”

“In the Kub Kar. I was there when my dad cut the hole. We melted the lead down in one of Mom’s old pots. It splashed Dad’s hand and left a red mark.”

“Why?”

“… I wanted Dad to win. He wanted me to win. It seemed really important to both of us, but when I think about it now I can’t remember why.”

The resigned slump of his shoulders reminded me of Dunk’s father when Mr. Lowery took his penknife to their car, flicking the metal cube onto the gym floor.

“People aren’t ever gonna let it go,” he said.

Which was true. Cataract City didn’t surrender such things so easily. Dunk Diggs, the boy who’d cheated at the Kub Kar Rally. Son carrying the sins of his father—but what had Mr. Diggs done, really, that all the other fathers hadn’t? You could’ve hacked apart any one of those cars and probably found it pumped full of lead. It was just Dunk’s bad luck to get caught.

“Everyone’s gonna forget, man.”

“Nobody ever
really
forgets, Owe. They just pretend to.”

Noise came from below: a steady scrape and grind, drawing closer. It wasn’t an animal—although how could I be so sure? Was I so locked into the rhythms of the woods that I could now recognize their sounds? It wasn’t Bruiser Mahoney, either—by then I lacked the energy to summon horrors that weren’t real and
immediate. I knew Bruiser Mahoney was where we’d left him, dead in a tent with a rock on his gut.

A shape solidified. A man was clambering up the steep grade, boots gritting on the stones.

“It’s just little ol’ me,” he said.

His head just about brushed the top of the cave. His legs and arms seemed to have more joints than they ought to, as if extra kneecaps and elbows lurked under his faded, streaked clothes. His hands hung from frayed sleeves that stopped halfway up his wrists, below which his long fingers twitched like a puppeteer’s working a marionette. His face seemed to rotate in many directions. There was a yellow catlike tinge to his eyeballs.

“A voice told me to step into the light, so here I am.” He dropped his pack and sat, grabbing each ankle and drawing them under his thighs. He smelled of dust and of something I couldn’t name, something sweetly foul like the glop at the bottom of a carnival trashcan. “What are you doing out here all alone?”

“We’re not alone,” Dunk told him. “Our fathers are coming soon.”

“You mean your father the
cheater
? Cheater, cheater, pumpkin eater?” The man diddled his earlobe. “The woods have ears and so do I.”

“What are you doing here?” said Dunk.

“Do you own this fuckin’ cave, kid?” The man thrust his sick-looking face forward. Bands of brown gunk edged each of his teeth. “Is this your forest?”

“I’m just asking if you’re lost,” Dunk said.

The man laughed. A dark chattering sound full of razor blades, broken bones and crawly things.

“Me? I’m
never
lost. Wherever I go, there I am!”

At first I’d been glad to see this man. He was an adult. He could get us out of here. But now I couldn’t stop thinking about our next-door neighbour’s dog.

Finnegan was a beagle. Mr. Trowbridge, our neighbour, would let me take him for walks. Poor Finnegan got bit by a raccoon and got rabies.
Contracted
was the word my mother used, as if rabies was something you’d sign for on a dotted line. The disease raced into his brain and made him go mad. Not angry-mad:
mad
-mad, like the old man at the bus station who yelled at pigeons. Mr. Trowbridge had to lock Finnegan in the backyard. I watched him through a knothole in the fence. Finnegan’s muzzle was caked with yellow foam and there were squiggly veins shot through his eyes. He walked in dopey circles, head swinging side to side. “Finnegan,” I called. He tore across the grass, growling and slobbering, hurling himself at the fence so hard the slats splintered. He smelled of vomit and of the shit caked in his fur. The dog catcher slid a dart gun through the fence and shot Finnegan. The dog lay down and died with a little shudder. Mr. Trowbridge cried in the driveway.

This man reminded me of Finnegan. The eyes. The
stink
. But Finnegan was a dog driven mad by disease. This man may have been born that way.

He threw his arm over me. A cold python slipping across my shoulders. “Now
you
—you tell great stories. Will you tell me another?”

Dunk grabbed my leg, pulled on it. “Sit over here,” he said.

The man let his arm slide off me the way a child will let go of a toy he knows he can get back any time he wishes.

“So you’re lost, uh? Happens a lot out here. You walk around for days, seeing things, losing your bearings, crying out for God. But He can’t hear you. You can scream and scream but nobody’ll ever hear you.”

The man threw his head back and howled. “Aaaah
-whoooo
!” Tendons cabled on his neck as his voice echoed out and out into the night. “That isn’t going to touch one set of ears.” A wink. “Human ones, anyway.”

He reached into his pack and pulled out a can of beans. Saliva squirted into my mouth at the sight. He set it in the V of his split legs.

“You must be starved enough to eat a bear’s asshole. Or maybe any old asshole, huh?”

He tapped the tin with one finger, ran his ragged fingernail around the rim. He rucked up his jeans and took a knife out of his boot. The blade was thick, sharpened on both sides. It looked about a foot long.

“Don’t got no can opener.” He slid the blade into the banked coals. “Want some?”

“Yes,” I said, unable to help myself.

The man cocked his head, staring at me. His tongue flicked out of the wet cave of his mouth, snakelike, to caress his canine tooth. “Well okay, but I can’t just
give
it to you. It’s worth something—a lot, by the looks of you. So you do for me and I’ll do for you.”

“Do what?”

“Oh, I dunno … You a dancer? Stand up and give me a twirl.” He adjusted his position, pressing on his crotch with the heel of his palm. “I bet you just
strut
, don’t you? Take your shirt off and swing it over your head. Twitch them hips.
Tease
me.”

Dunk said, “No.”

Their gazes fought above the fire. The man threw up his rubber-band arms in mock defeat.

“Can’t blame a guy for trying, right? Jeez, it’s not like I can make you do anything you don’t want to … 
right
?”

“You sure do look lost,” Dunk said.

The man’s gaze narrowed. A vein pulsed along his jaw.

“Ever play hide-and-seek, kid? I’m
hiding
now. Sometimes you’ve got to hide for a while. That’s okay. I’m good at it. You know what else I’m good at?
Seeking
.” He covered his eyes with his hands. Opened them like cupboard doors. “Peek-a-boo. I
see
you.”

His knife slid through the coals, its tip glowing like magma. I wondered how it’d feel sinking into my stomach: would I feel much at all or would I only watch, dumbfounded, as the moon-sheened quicksilver slid into me, my skin parting like curtains? This man might not think two ways about it; he could have been sticking the knife into a brick of butter. He chewed the air, snapping big bites out of the darkness. His teeth snicked shut, opened, snicked again.

“I’m the rogue wolf. Know what a rogue is, kiddies? A wolf that doesn’t play by the rules of the pack. He does what he likes. What feels
gooood
. Now the pack, they don’t like the rogue. They try to pull the rogue in line.” His lips twisted into an exaggerated pout. “
Waaah
. So the rogue, he takes five. Hits the powder room. But that’s just fine and dandy, because a rogue doesn’t need much … But even a wolf’s got
needs
, yeah? His little taste of
meat
.”

A knot of terror seized my stomach. I was prepared to die at nature’s unfeeling hands; Mother Nature was unforgiving but at least she carried no agenda. But this man … if he hurt us, it would be brutal, careless, and he’d show no regard for our bodies. I’d be okay dying of frostbite or by falling off some rocks and snapping my spine, but not at this man’s hands.

Wind whipped into the cave, howling round our shoulders and exiting with an outrush that batted down the fire: only trembling fingerlings of flame licked from the charred logs. In that instant I saw the man change form. His face elongated, nose and mouth pushing out from the windburnt flatness of his face, nostrils arching
upwards before spreading and blackening into a rubbery texture. His face made awful noises as it melted and lengthened—the splinter of ice cubes in a glass—his skin stretching like fairground taffy. His hands curled into solid masses bristling with coarse dark fur; black claws slit through, each as wicked as a crow’s beak. His skull crumpled into his forehead, deflating like an inner tube packed with shattering light bulbs, the bone solidifying again, as sleek and aerodynamic as a bullet. His ears crept up the side of his head, tapering into arrowheads fuzzed in grey fur. His jaw unhinged with the
crack
of a starter’s pistol, mouth widening down each side as the skin tore across his muzzle with a silken noise, the edges upturned to make room for the new teeth crowding his mouth. Fangs pierced through his gums, as sharp and pale as bleached bone. The man was a wolf in all ways but his eyes: his sockets were empty, withered like two cored-out tomatoes.

When the flames kicked up, the gun was in Dunk’s hand.

The man saw it pointed at his chest. He blinked, as if that might make it go away. When it remained in Dunk’s hand he seemed baffled, an emotion that darkened into annoyance, then shaded into restrained anger.

“Where did you get that?”

“I took it off a dead wrestler.”

The man laughed but stopped when neither of us joined in.

“You did, did you? You even know how to shoot it?”

“Is there that much to it?” said Dunk with a tilt of his head.

“Give it here. Let me see if the safety’s on.”

“No thanks.”

“Come on, kid. You’re liable to blow your hand off.”

Dunk kept the barrel squarely on him. His hands didn’t shake. The safety
was
on. I reached over and flicked it off.

“Cock it,” I said.

Dunk thumbed the hammer back. The man gave me a look to melt bones.

“Listen, you want me to get you out of here? Take you home? I can, okay? I know the way. All that before? I was just blowing off steam. You think I was going to leave you out here? What kind of guy would I be if I did that?”

Dunk said: “A fucking psycho hiding in the woods.”

The man worked his jaw side to side, grinding his molars to dust.

“Right. Which I’m
not
. So just hand it over and we can get going …”

He reached across the fire, fingers closing in on the gun. Dunk raised the barrel until it pointed at the man’s head. I figure it must’ve been like peering into a very deep, dark tunnel.

The man’s eyes rolled up to the top of his skull, oriented on the spot on his forehead where the bullet would drive in. He fidgeted, and I was convinced he’d lunge. I was equally convinced Dunk would shoot him. The man realized that, too. He’d caught that unwavering
something
in Dunk’s eyes.

“Here’s the difference between a knife and a gun,” the man said. “A gun has many working parts that can jam up or misfire. A knife is foolproof. In tight quarters you get one chance with a gun. A knife … well, a knife can go as long as you’ve got strength to stick it in, right? A gun’s for cowards. A knife’s up close. Blood running down your knuckles. And if you get shot with a gun, you die. It’s quick. With a knife, the pain goes on and on and on. With a gun you die once. With a knife you die a thousand times.”