Cataract City (20 page)

Harry hauled himself into the operator’s seat. “When it gets thirty yards out, let ’em go.”

The mechanical hare zizzed down the rail, spitting blue sparks. The dogs tore off, kicking clods of dirt back into our faces. Fragrant Meat’s rear legs had a noticeable sideways kick. Steadfast Attila worked the outside edge, his brindle coat a beautiful brownish blur against the rust-coloured dirt.

Fragrant Meat held the lead when they hit the turn, but Steadfast Attila pulled into a dead heat around the hundred-yard mark and outdistanced Frag down the stretch. Frag kicked hard to the finish, though; there wasn’t an ounce of quit in that dog.

“I don’t like to dismiss dogs on their first offering, but he’s got the sidewinder legs,” Harry said to Owe, a doctor delivering sad news.

“Sidewinder legs?”

“It’s like hip dysplasia,” Harry told him. “There may not be a lot on your dog, but greyhounds are like precision instruments—even a little is too much when you’re talking about races won by a fraction of a second.” He clapped Owe’s shoulder companionably. “The boy’s got sass. But it’s like running with a clubfoot.”

“He
does
have sass,” Owe said. “He ran his guts out.”

“A good dog only loses because his body can’t compete,” said Harry. “That’s the difference between greyhounds and men—a man’s mind’ll fold, even if he’s got all the tools to win. Some say a dog won’t quit just because dogs are dumb animals. I don’t subscribe to that theory.”

Harry lashed a fresh teddy to the whip. He had a burlap sack full of them: teddy bears and rabbits, pigs and penguins. “I get
them from a carnival supply company,” he said. “Used to go to the Goodwill but they’d give me weird looks.”

He led Steadfast Attila to the kennels and returned with a fawn-coloured greyhound who walked with the high, hopping gait of a show horse.

“Trix Matrix,” he said. “Didn’t come up with that name, either. I call her Trixy. She’s earmarked for great things, I’m told. She’ll earn foreign interest—some of our best dogs are bought by Irish breeders to run at the top tracks overseas.”

Harry led Trixy over to Dolly. The dogs stood nose to nose. Dolly nuzzled her snout into Trixy’s throat. Trixy snapped at Dolly, who whipped her head aside to avoid Trixy’s canines, dancing back, paws stuttering as if the ground was hot as glowing coals.

“She’s got moxie,” Harry said, a smile touching the edges of his mouth. “But plenty of scrubbers do.”

Dolly toed the line beside Trixy. She stood stock-still, rear legs flared, front paws spaced with one slightly in front of the other. Her pulse raced under my fingertips. She looked back at me with a quizzical expression.
You don’t have to hold me so tight
, the look seemed to say.

When the hare raced down the rail, Trixy bolted—god, that dog could boogie. You didn’t have to know much about greyhounds to see she was a true racer: the fibre of her being spoke through her running form.

And Dolly? Well, Dolly just stood there.

“Girl?” I whispered.

Then I felt the run building inside her body: all the little parts gathering momentum, energy coursing through her skin. It was like a giant muscle contracting before it flexed into action. Her entire body recoiled—legs pistoning backwards, haunches dipping low—and there was this awesome tension, every fast-twitch muscle committed to the goal of forward motion. Then she was gone.

At first Dolly’s strides were clipped and violent, paws churning up chunks of dirt until she hit the seventy-yard mark. There she lengthened out into a powerful running motion, her streamlined skull bobbing with each stride.

Trixy ran high, head up, spine bowed. Dolly ran low: head on the same plane as her shoulders, spine prone, slicing through the air like a ballistic missile. She managed to get the same leg-spread as Trixy, though, with her lower gait: her legs scissored under her, tucked paws brushing her belly before they jackknifed out again, barely grazing the dirt.

Trixy held the inside position when they hit the turn; she angled her shoulder towards the rail, steering like a stock car around a high-banked oval. Dolly’s paws skidded for purchase as she muscled herself back into position, her shoulder colliding with Trixy’s; their heads came together, teeth flashing, fighting with each other even as they fought desperately for position.

They raced round the bend. Me, Ed and Owe ran to the rail. The dogs were so close that I couldn’t separate one from the other: there was just an elongated shape, two dogs fused together. They disappeared behind the tote board.

They shrieked around the turn and hit the final stretch. Dolly had flared out to the right, far from the rail, meaning she’d have to cover more ground. Trixy pounded down the track, head upflung, mouth open and tendons flexed down her throat and across her brisket: she looked like she was screaming. Dolly’s legs pumped so hard it was like watching a machine reaching the point of failure, spindles trembling as it threatened to fling itself to pieces. A red berry was splotched on her coat—Trixy must have bitten her hard enough to draw blood.

They tore down the homestretch. Dolly angled across the track, closing in at the rail. Her form was slipping: her front legs speared
wide as her head jerked up and down. Still, she drew even with about forty yards to go. Trixy kept pace for another ten yards before Dolly blazed past with a vicious finishing kick, accelerating over the line.

Harry ambled down from the operator’s box. He scratched his belly through his overalls and smiled in the way old men do when they see something fresh and exciting—with an element of bewilderment.

“She’s a real dandy, son. And what a low drinker.”

“Low drinker?”

“Old dogman’s saying,” Harry told me, “for a dog that goes down real deep in their running stance, so low their belly’s almost dragging the dirt. They look like they’re crouched by the river lapping up water.”

Ed slapped my back. “Looks like you won the lottery.”

When I went to pick up Dolly she was hopping around, favouring one of her paws.

“What is it, girl?”

She whined thinly, babying her paw in that confused way animals do, as if they can’t quite believe their bodies might break down or fail. She’d run so hard that sand was compacted between her paw-pads. Must’ve hurt like hell.

“It happens when they start racing,” Harry told me. “Buy a bottle of Tuf-Foot—it’ll harden them right up.” And he suggested I take her to the vet.

When the vet instructed me to help Dolly onto the examining table, she buried her snout into the soft spot between my clavicle and neck. Her breath had the ironlike tang of raw liver, which I took to be the smell of pure animal fear. She shook when the vet flushed her paw with peroxide, but she didn’t nip—just beheld him with tragic, injured eyes.

The Tuf-Foot worked. Dolly never had that problem again. But I was worried, and that worry never did go away.

Every time Dolly raced she’d enter the zone, the same as Owe did on a basketball court. And like he said, human beings aren’t meant to exist there for too long. Why should dogs be any different?

But it was Dolly’s element, you know? Blazing down the track so fast her skin must’ve screamed. She was happiest there.

Owe and I became fixtures around the kennels. We’d help Harry sweep out the cages and dole out kibble. There was a fair amount of turd collection, too—it required a wheelbarrow and a shovel. In return, Dolly and Frag got to run with the others. They’re group animals, greyhounds; they do best in a pack.

Sometimes Harry let them rip around the oval. Frag was a scrubber—damn those sidewinder legs. Still, that dog loved to run. Dolly was something else. She had the gift, Harry said. But after seeing her almost self-destruct in that first test against Trixy, I worried a little about racing her seriously—and anyhow, I couldn’t legally register as her owner until I was nineteen, since Derby Lane was a wagering circuit.

This was how Ed fell back into our lives, too—fell into Owe’s life, specifically. Something kindled between them. I don’t know how it began, but by the time I found out, it was blazing hot.

One night I came off the track into the Winning Ticket Lounge. It was empty, but I heard soft noises from the coatroom. I walked over expecting to find the janitor. Instead, Owe and Ed were pawing each other in the gloom. Owe was taller by then; his shoulders jingle-jangled on the empty hangers, a strangely musical sound. His hands cupped Ed’s breasts forcefully, pressing her up against the plywood wall. Ed’s eyes were closed and her hands were clenched in Owe’s hair and her tongue was in his mouth.

A gutshot feeling rocked me as I turned away soundlessly. I’d thought that, if anything, Ed was more suitable for me. Our families still lived on the same block. Our ambitions seemed more in keeping … But what the hell did I know of Ed’s ambitions? I felt like a creep, catching them. It reminded me of the night we’d spied on Ed in the bath with Tim Railsback.

But I couldn’t help thinking: Hadn’t Owe already had enough goddamn good luck in his life?

“You’re a good kisser,” I heard Ed say in a husky voice.

Owe laughed, breathless. “Beginner’s luck?”

When they came back outside I saw different things. In Ed I saw something more than simple lust. I got the sense that she had scared herself—as if she wanted to reach for Owe’s hand but didn’t quite dare.

Owe looked bemused. As if he was thinking:
Hey, that was pretty cool. Wouldn’t mind doing that again if I had a chance
.

One day, when Ed left us at the track to go to her job, we followed.

This was almost a year after I’d seen her and Owe in the coatroom. Owe was in the midst of his breakout basketball season. The two of them weren’t dating, exactly—I don’t know who was keeping who at arm’s length, but I suspected it was Ed keeping Owe at bay. Or maybe I just wanted to believe that.

She was working part-time at the Bisk. Ritz line. But she also worked at a bar. She wouldn’t tell us which one. So one night Owe and I followed her.

“Why bother?” I’d asked him earlier.

“She thinks we’re kids, Dunk. Screw that! I say we go cadge drinks off her.”

We followed her in Owe’s father’s car, a late-model Olds. Ed’s Mercury Topaz went down Rickard to Ellesmere, turning left up
Stanley to Lundy’s Lane. The night was cool with the smell of creosote and the hum of crickets.

She pulled in at the Sundowner. She wore jeans ripped at the knee and an oversized
Flashdance
sweatshirt. She went in through a black door set into a dingy brick wall.

“Huh” was all Owe said.

The bouncer was a huge black man with a greying goatee. Seeing Owe, he mimed shooting a jump-shot. “You’re that boy with the sweet shot, am I right?” He ushered us inside without ID’ing us.

The Sundowner existed in a purplish, glittering perma-twilight. Winking lights ran along the floor like the ones marking the edges of airport runways. The place was packed: well-heeled guys, construction workers, prowling sex tourists, college students nursing pitchers of twenty-dollar draft. An elevated stage swelled into a bulb, where a brass pole shone up to the ceiling. Half-naked women drifted around us like shimmery butterflies. I figured half the world’s supply of body glitter was concentrated right there.

We lucked into a stageside table just as two other guys were leaving. There was a pit in the middle of the table where a girl would dance if you paid. A DJ’s voice piped up: “Gentlemen, put your hands together for Shah-Shah-Shah-
Shasta
!”

The Scorpions’ “Rock You Like a Hurricane” blasted. A woman stepped through the tinsel curtain. She was gorgeous but clearly also drunk or stoned or both. She waggled her ass and stepped out of her bikini bottoms the way kids do: by yanking them down to her ankles and stomping until they came off. She strutted down the catwalk, skidded in her high heels, almost fell, didn’t fall, then tossed her hair around like a boat propeller. Her face was blank as a test pattern.

“Yeeeeeah!” someone went.

My mind spun: Ed might be the bartender, right? Or a waitress—and
they
didn’t take their clothes off, did they?

A girl sat between us. Cute and thin with boobs that didn’t belong on a frame her size, drinking a Corona through a bendy straw. “Wanna dance, sweetheart? Champagne room. Fifty bucks each.”

All I had in my wallet was seven dollars. I said, “You’re very pretty, but—”

“Stow it,” she said. “It was a yes or no question.”

She pulled a cigarette out of her purse. It was five inches long and looked like it would take a year to smoke.

“Fucking
hot
in this sonofabitch,” she said, lighting it with a platinum Zippo. “I’m from the Sioux. Cooler up there.”

“I’ve heard it’s nice.”

“It’s a shithole. My ex is from the Sioux. He beat a man half to death with a skillet.” She batted her eyes, pixie-like. “A
skillet
, dude.”

The DJ said: “Gentlemen, put your hands together and welcome to the stage Dah-Dah-Dah-
Disneeeeeeee
!”

Edwina stepped through the tinsel. She knelt and placed her cigarettes and pack of Dentyne on the edge of the stage—would they have been stolen backstage, I wondered through my shock—and strutted down the stage with scissoring steps. The black lights shone on her legs, sleek as cobalt. She didn’t even see us. I’d heard what girls do at these places is pick a spot on the wall and focus on that. Who’d want to focus on all that desperate
need
howling up at them?

Owe laughed—a brittle, brutal sound. It stole above the sound of Springsteen’s “Hungry Hearts.”

Ed’s gaze snapped towards us. Her hands flew briefly to her mouth—then she hopped down nimbly, gave our ears vicious twists and marched us out.

“Fucking hell, Ed!” Owe said. “That hurts!”

The crowd catcalled as Ed bulled us through the club and out the front door. “You
bastards
!” she screamed, shoving us into the parking lot.

I saw tears in Owe’s eyes but it was hard to tell if they were from his laughter or from Ed’s fingers: she’d pinched my ear so hard that a line of blood trickled down my jaw.