Cataract City (16 page)

I stepped away, the horror so thick in my gorge that I thought I’d throw up. The bag shifted and I saw something else: the greenish plastic head of a glow-in-the-dark Jesus. A snatch of song came to me:
Well, I don’t care if it rains or freezes / Long as I have my plastic Jesus / Riding on the dashboard of my car
. Whoever had done this must’ve been queerly religious, or else had a warped sense of humour. Jesus’s head was shattered at the top, just above his crown of thorns. One of the kittens must’ve bitten it off.

I slumped back in the car seat, assaulted by the memory. But that’s my city in a nutshell—or a trash sack. People around here think if they stuff their problems in a bag, huck it in the water, well, end of problem. And that theory has borne out, for the most part. In my line of work I see proof, over and over.

I drove home in the warm light, my mood curdling further when three police cruisers shrieked past in the opposite lane. I unlocked
my apartment, stared for a moment at the empty dog bed in the kitchen, un-holstered my pistol and popped two pills to quiet the pain singing in my kneecap. I fell into a troubled, profoundly exhausted sleep.

The city feels strange to me now. Changed in a million tiny ways that, taken together, seem massive. It’s like not seeing your own face for eight years, then having someone hand you a mirror.
Who is that guy
? And then you realize: it’s you. It’s still you.

The day after they let me out of prison I awoke in the bedroom where I’d grown up. There wasn’t a clock at the bedside, but I knew the time: 7:33. That was when the prison’s halogens would snap on every morning, my eyelids snapping open with them. Would I wake up at that exact minute for the rest of my life?

I could’ve stayed in bed, which was warm, the mattress permanently sunken from the impression of my body—my teenage body, because I’d been that age the last time I slept in it—but I rose out of habit.

It was so strange to place my feet on carpet instead of cold lacquered concrete. And so wonderful to stand in the bars of honey-coloured sunlight that fell through the venetian blinds. Inside the pen, the sun had never felt the same as it did outside: it was as if the
architecture of the place, or the compounds used to build it—the brick and steel and glass—leeched some part of the sunshine away. Not the heat—I could feel that—but its vitamins or the really nourishing part of it. When it had touched my skin in prison, it had felt as cold as the light from a bare bulb in a broom closet.

I stood in that bedroom sunlight for a long time. Drinking it in, the same way a plant does.

Could I open the bedroom door? I twisted the knob and, yeah, it swung open. It was stupid, but I’d been sure it was locked—even though the lock was on
my side
.

I took a long shower. It was the first time I’d showered alone in forever. Still, I glanced over my shoulder a couple times. The soap was Irish Spring, the soap my mother always bought. Cheap and reliable. It made a thick lather that perfumed the stall with the smell of … what was that smell? It made me think back to days I’d come home as a boy, filthy from the woods, with pine sap smeared on my hands; Mom would punt me into the shower, telling me not to come out until my hair squeaked.

When I went downstairs, Mom was sitting at the kitchen table in her uniform whites, her hands—her thin, birdlike hands—cupped around a ceramic mug. Her hair was salt-and-pepper: strands of jet-black threaded with coarser veins of iron-grey, pinned back behind her ears with silver clips.

“Coffee, Duncan?”

I nodded. “I’ll get it.”

I poured coffee into a ceramic mug. For eight years I’d drunk out of either six-ounce plastic cups or thick-bottomed plastic mugs with a handle big enough to fit a single finger—the kind of cheap, unbreakable dishware they used at summer camps. When those dishes broke, they left no sharp angles.

I added a tablespoonful of sugar, and after a moment, another.
I could have as much as I wanted. In prison everything was rationed: a packet of sugar, a thimble of cream. Now I could add sugar until my teeth ached. Hah!

I sat across from Mom. Sipped. Jesus, that was too sweet.

“You look good, Mom.”

“Yeah?”

She touched her hair lightly with one hand. She’d visited me every month, just about—she and Dad both. The three of us would sit at a table bolted to the floor in the visiting room. Dad would drink a vending-machine Sprite. It was Coke for me, Diet Coke for Mom. A muted TV in a wire-mesh cage broadcasted old sitcoms.

We spoke during those visits, but it was surface talk. Sports, the weather—not that the weather made any difference to me. They never asked me what had happened. They
knew
what happened—everyone did—so only one possible question remained: was it necessary to take a man’s life?

“So,” Mom said with typical bluntness, “what now?”

“I haven’t really thought that far ahead.”

Her chin dipped. “Liar.”

For two weeks straight, I walked the city, re-familiarizing myself with it—and with the scale of the outside world. Everything seemed bigger, crazily so.

One night I stopped at a 7-Eleven and stared at the Big Gulp cups so long that the clerk asked me if something was the matter.

“Nah, nothing.” I shook my head. “People drink all of that?”

The clerk, adenoidal and bug-eyed, said, “All that and more. Free refills in the summer, right?”

Why was my confusion so surprising? Yes, it had been eight years, not a lifetime. Yes, I’d watched TV inside, read the newspaper.

I’d noted the shifts the world had taken. But that didn’t prevent the system shock.

Things tasted better. Milk tasted richer, a Snickers bar sweeter. I had no explanation for that, just as there was no evidence to support my sense that penitentiary sunlight was a watery facsimile of the real deal. It was as though I’d gone into a protective cocoon that had mummified my sight and smell and taste, and now, back on the outside, my senses were hyper-attuned.

One day I zoned out on the sidewalk under a maple tree, tracking the progress of a caterpillar across a branch. I picked a leaf, then rubbed its waxy surface until I wore it down to the veiny substructure, chlorophyll staining my fingertips dull green.

“You okay, bud?”

A man stood beside me, his arm raised in a gesture of cautious aid. I guess I’d been rubbing that leaf and staring off into space for too long.

“I’m cool.” I smiled, wondering if that was still what people said. “Just took a personal time-out there.”

I was gripped by a desperate urge to hand the man my leaf.
Get a load of this leaf, man. It’s dynamite!

I walked a lot at night. I’d wake in my childhood bedroom, the shapes and smells all wrong. Sometimes I’d catch the wet, weeping smell of the cinderblock walls in the Kingston Pen. Or I’d reach for Edwina and never find her. That was the worst of it; I saw her ghost everywhere. I was back on familiar streets, and her shape was familiar to those streets. I’d catch the slope of her shoulders entering a doorway, or her legs folding into a stranger’s car. But Ed had achieved escape velocity. This city would never see her shape again—a fact I both knew and somehow didn’t, or couldn’t, believe. Not quite.

I gradually backtracked to spots I was familiar with. Some grisly
compulsion carried me past the Bisk just as the shift whistle blew. Workers trooped in and out, their hair frosted white with flour. I spotted Clyde Hillicker, who looked a lot like his old man except for the deep dent in his right cheekbone. Hillicker had spent a few years in the stony lonesome, too—we finally had something in common.

I returned to places where I’d hung out with Owe and Edwina, mooning around like a lonely mutt. I’d stand on the ground we’d occupied together years ago, closing my eyes; weirdly, I could hear the whisper of their voices in my ear—but when I opened my eyes it was just me, alone in the dark.

One afternoon I walked down the Niagara Parkway, skirting Oak Hall golf course where early-morning duffers were shanking balls into the rough. I kept well off the fairways; the course marshal might’ve spotted me and called the fuzz. I tromped through stands of dense pines—and you know what? They whispered in the wind, just like in those old country and western songs.

I cut south at Upper Rapids Boulevard until I reached the river. A fine layer of mist clung to its surface, evaporating as the temperature inched upwards. A raccoon trundled through the bushes to my left, unafraid of me. I hunted for flat stones along the shoreline, skipping them. Me and Owe used to have skipping contests.
Owe
. I thought about him a lot. Almost as much as Ed. He’d visited me in prison only once, to clear up some lingering business. I can see why he kept his distance. He had every right. But I’d need his help soon—for the plan taking shape, growing stronger with every step I took through my city.

Would he help? He didn’t owe me anything. What we had together, those old loyalties—that was a long time ago.

“What’re you doin’?”

The girl had snuck up on me. She was tall and reedy, wearing orange shorts and a blue hooded sweatshirt with the sleeves hacked off. Her spindly legs rose out of a pair of vulcanized rubber boots. They looked like flower stems poking out of a pot.

“Just skipping rocks,” I told her.

She cocked her head. Her red hair coiled into ringlets that framed the wide angles of her face. Her eyes were green—made greener by the sunlight streaming through the canopy of trees—and they were wide and alert, but with an alertness different from the wary kind I was used to in the eyes of inmates. Her eyes were simply interested.

“I’ve never done that,” she said.

“It’s not that hard. You can watch me, if you want.”

She sat on a rock, eyeing me. My shoulders tightened slightly under her gaze. My first rock only skipped twice.

“I could do
that
,” she said.

She heeled her rainboots off. Her bare feet had the clammy look feet get when they’re wet and compressed: like turnips gone wrinkly in the bottom of the fridge. She dipped her toes in the water.

My next rock skipped seven or eight times, with a few dribblers at the end I didn’t count. The girl didn’t look too impressed.

“Your hands,” she said. “They’re pretty trashed.”

I stared down at them. “Trashed?”

“I mean, like,
fucked up
.”

I felt my brows beetling, the skin drawing inwards at my temples. I stuffed my hands in my pockets. “How old are you?”

She said, “Thirteen.”

“Oh. I thought you were younger.” She was about the age that Edwina’s kid would be—the one who’d left that scar on her stomach. The one she’d given up for adoption. “Anyway, that kind of language …”

She blew a ringlet off her forehead. “You can’t tell me how to talk.”

I lifted my shoulders. “I’m not telling you nothing. It’s just, I thought we were being friendly is all.”

She smiled. “Sure we are.”

I shifted my feet. The tips of my sneakers were wet from the river. “Anyway, you do as you like. I’m not your dad or anything.”

Her smile persisted. “You could be, for all I know.”

We walked together down the Parkway until we reached Burning Spring Hill Road. The Dufferin Islands rolled off to the north in a haze of overgrown sedge and water-rotted sycamores. The Derby Lane dog track was still there, but it had seen better days—although, now that I thought about it, had the place ever seen
good
days?

“This place is creepy,” the girl said as we walked past the grounds.

I could see why she’d think that. The swaybacked spectators’ gallery seemed to be collapsing into itself like a jack-o’-lantern left sitting on a porch until mid-November. Every single bulb in its marquee was busted, likely the work of punks with an obsessive streak.

“It used to be nicer,” I said. “A little, anyway. I had a dog. My friend and me, we both did. Greyhounds. We raced them here.”

“Bullshit,” the girl said cheerily.

“Not bullshit.” I walked across the lot, glass gritting under my soles. “Dolly Express. That was my dog’s name.”

“That’s weird.”

I acknowledged her complaint with a nod. “Racing dogs have silly names. We just called her Dolly.”

She touched her chin, eyes gazing skyward. “That’s an okay dog name. You okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Just thinking.”

We’d walked only a little further when the girl said, “This is me.”

A low-rent apartment block sat in the shadow of the escarpment. I watched while she climbed up the front stairs. She went ten steps, turned, and waved.

“See you.”

I waved back. “See you around, maybe.”

Her shrug said:
anything’s possible
. I watched until she was safely inside the building. She waved me off as if I was being stupid, she could handle herself.

I walked back to Derby Lane. Wind whipped off the river and howled around the marquee, singing off every point of busted glass. A burning ripcurl surged up from my stomach. This was a vital part of my life, right here. And it was gone now. I felt sick with nostalgia. Memory like a sickness, memory like a drug. I stood in the lengthening shadow of the lane, swallowed up by the black hole of my past.