Cataract City (29 page)

“Congratulations,” I said. “You’ll have no problem picking up at goth bars.”

Bovine mimed whacking off. “You’re hilarious. I’m thinking we smash it up. Merrittville Speedway, y’know? Demolition Derby
night.” He slapped the hearse’s wide back end. “Just keep backing this baby up into the other cars. Reduce ’em to rubble.”

I said, “Where would we fix it up?”

“The auto shop at the high school,” said Bovine. “I talked to Finnerty and he said sure, so long as we do it at night.”

The first day of what would become an informal but binding “situation” between Lemmy Drinkwater and myself ended with me holding the bloodied body of a pit bull named Folchik—Mohawk for “Little Hunter”—in my arms.

The dog was shivering uncontrollably, shiny with blood under the sodium vapour lamps overhanging the fighting box. Her foam-flecked tongue lolled out the side of her mouth, warm as cooked liver on my forearm.

Little Hunter had fought like a monster but her opponent, a blue-nose pit bull up from the Carolinas named Seeker, had been just that little bit slicker. Seeker sat with her owner: a fat dog breeder wearing a train engineer’s cap and hacked-down combat boots. The dog’s two-tone eyes—one blue, one yellow—were riveted on Little Hunter. Seeker’s sides expanded like a bellows as the blood from her own wounds leaked down her legs to the rosined floor.

It shocked me, how fast it had happened. Only minutes ago Folchik had been a whole creature, full of blood and life. Next? Nothing but a connection of exhausted muscle and torn flesh, opened up in ways no creature ever should be. I felt her heart shuddering under my fingertips at an insane gallop and smelled her adrenaline—the same smell in dogs as it was in men.

The day had begun with me waking next to Edwina.

I had lain still while the bedroom fell into place around me, listening to Ed breathe: long, slow inhales, smooth exhales. She faced away from me but I figured she was awake, as she usually was at this
hour: eyes open to watch the sun spread across the bottom of the windowsill, immersed in her own unknowable thoughts.

I curled into her, slipping an arm down her rib cage. When we were dating she’d once said I didn’t know how to cuddle right.
Your body doesn’t fit itself properly to mine
is how she’d put it. At that age I was worried about being a decent lover—the fact that I might’ve been a piss-poor cuddler never entered my mind.

It’s true that we’d started living together young, but that was how people did things here, as if we were ticking off boxes in an exam called
Life
. But I knew I’d found the real thing with Ed: the spark, that unquestioned connection. So I’d held tight. I regretted nothing and could only hope Ed didn’t, either.

Ed sat on the edge of the bed and stretched. The tendons in her back flexed and she worked her fingers loose as she did every morning—after years of picking busted Arrowroots off the conveyor, it looked as if tiny balloons had been inflated inside her finger joints.

I lay still while she showered. She whistled “The Log Driver’s Waltz”:
It’s birling down a-down white water / A log driver’s waltz pleases girls completely
. She dressed in the thin yellow light and clipped her photo ID to her overalls.

“So,” she said. “What’s your schedule today?”

I smiled wolfishly. “Today I find my ass a new job.”

She nodded as if this was firmly within my abilities.

The Port Weller dry dock was a cathedral of rust.

There wasn’t one exposed strip of scaffolding not pocked or slashed with it. The hulls of ships in the shelf docks were so eaten through that the metal would crumble in your hands like schist. Skycranes tilted against the black-shouldered cliffs of the escarpment, ferrying girders caked in marine paint. Even the air had teeth:
a million tiny fangs gnawed at the exposed skin above my collar.

I walked through the main gates along a strip of canal that shone silver in the new day. Sunfish snatched at zebra mussels clinging to snarls of rebar jutting from the seawall. Gulls circled; they must have followed these hulks in from sea and now, their meal ticket gone, the air was alive with their confused screeches.

The foreman waited at the punch clock: a solid guy with an oily, pancake-flat face.

“You Diggs?”

“Thanks for meeting with me.”

“Part of my job.” His head jerked to indicate I should follow.

We passed over batboards to a walkway alongside the flank of a ship rooted in deep dock. I trailed my fingers over the metal, which trembled under an assault of air-hammers and riveting guns. An arc-welding torch snapped alight above; a soft blue glow streaked the hull, following the roll-lines of the steel. A spray of golden sparks cascaded off the tin overhang, touching the arm of my denim jacket and leaving scorch marks almost too small to see.

We stepped through a porthole door into a small, dark, rust-smelling chamber. A smelter was working beneath us: sweat instantly popped along my brow. Around us were chains and pulleys rimed with dark, granular grease. The points of naked hooks swung in front of my eyes, their chains clanking like wind chimes.

The chamber broke onto a narrow footpath spanning the ship’s hull. Men worked thirty feet below: all I could see were the yellow plugs of their hardhats. The sun broke through the ship’s unfinished angles, glinting off the aluminum gangplanks.

The foreman led me into a makeshift office. “Go ahead and go sit down.”

I took blueprints off the chair facing his and set them carefully on the floor. He pulled my crumpled resumé from his pocket.

“The Bisk, huh?”

“Cutbacks. A couple guys I used to work with said I should try here.”

“Yuh, they been through already.” His snort seemed to say we’d been fools to throw our lots in with a multinational conglomerate while he’d had the good sense to stick with ships. “English Literature certificate?”

“I took some classes up at Niagara College.”

“Why?”

When I didn’t reply the foreman massaged his forehead with the stump of his pointer finger—I wondered if he was doing this to call attention to the missing digit.

“Can you weld?”

“I’ve spot-welded.”

“Spot we don’t need. Mig? Tig? Acetylene?”

I shook my head.

“Can you run a Wheelabrator?”

I shook my head.

“Plasma cutter?”

I shook my head.

“Oxy-fuel cutter?”

I shook my head.

“Profile burner?”

“No.”

“Metal lathe?”

“No.”

“Boring mill?”

“I can learn.”

“Just about any walking stiff can. Only takes a year’s apprenticeship up at the college. Same one that taught you those English classes.” He pronounced it
clarsis
.

“Listen, I need the work and I’ve got a strong back—”

“What do you think we do, haul sacks a cement? This is a skilled labour site. What’d you do at Nabisco?”

“Batch mixer, mainly. A bit of line maintenance.”

“That’s not a skill we’re in need of. Sorry.”

He didn’t look one damn bit sorry. Maybe he was one of those men who enjoyed pressing his heel into the back of his fellow man’s neck. I squinted at his ID badge, which was melted and heat-scorched.
Sonny Hillicker
. One of that clan, then.

“You related to Clyde?”

“My kid brother.”

“I know Clyde.”

“Yeah. Clyde knows you, too.”

Jesus—wasn’t that just Cataract City? The old snake-ball. Fighting just to fight, even when the battle’s long been lost.

“You smell like a cookie,” Sonny Hillicker said, and he laughed. “Alla you Biskers do.”

Hot coals burned at my temples. But beneath the fire was the insistent scrape of desperation: the dull edge of a knife down the back of my neck.

An hour later I was in the Coffee Time off Drummond eating a cruller that tasted of cigarette smoke and flipping through the job ads. The cell phone buzzed in my pocket.

“Yeah?”

“Diggs.”

“Yeah.”

“Where are you?”

“Who’s this?”

“Drinkwater. Sounds like you’re someplace busy.”

“Coffee shop.”

I picked up a weird abrasion on the line—Drinkwater’s stubble grating on the mouthpiece? Dogs barked in the background.

“You healed up?”

“I’d be okay to go. Anything happening?”

“Why don’t you come over.”

“My cutman’s at work.”

“Don’t need him. Just you.”

“This a job?”

“This isn’t anything if I’m on the phone with you another five seconds.”

“What do you know about fighting dogs, Diggs?”

“I know I wouldn’t want to fight one myself.”

“Smart, paleface.”

Drinkwater had showed up at Smokin’ Joes in a chromed-up Silverado Crew Cab. Joes was the size of a small-town supermarket and sold everything from motorcycle jackets to authentic Tuscaroran birdhouses, but I’d yet to see anyone come out with anything except suds or cigs.

Drinkwater, as always, was all sharp angles and unforgiving bone. I took in the raised pink scar that fish-hooked from his hairline around one ear. He wore the same stovepipe jeans I’d seen him in since the first day I met him, the kind you had to work in like a catcher’s mitt. He retrieved a pit bull from the truck bed, wrapping the leash around his fist.

“Get your ass in gear, Diggs.”

We passed through a gate into an acre-wide impound housing six U-barns: corrugated tin scabbed with rust, the sort of things built to shelter twin-prop airplanes. The far north warehouse was the fight house. The other five? I had no clue what they held.

Drinkwater met with four men inside the gates. They had the same look: the old-style blue jeans, jackets with knotted fringes of
fur, the wide-brimmed black bowler hats with partridge feathers stuck in the band. They spoke with their backs to me.

Thunder kicked up over the flatlands. A sleek black helicopter rose over the earth’s hub, hovering over the compound. The air swam with rotor wash, the shimmer of gas fumes. The smell of industrial bearing lubricant hit my nose: it was the same cherry-scented lube we used at the Bisk to grease gears. The chopper rode too high for me to make out its occupants—all I saw were sunglasses whose tinted lenses shone like lynx eyes in the reddening sun.

Drinkwater and the other men held their bodies stiff against the blade-wind as it rose to a fierce howl, ripping fans of dust off the ground. The helicopter banked southward over the band centre and the squat architecture of the rez.

Drinkwater didn’t say anything about the helicopter as we walked the ruddy scrub behind Smokin’ Joes, down a row of fenced-in pens. At the sound of Drinkwater’s voice, dogs tore out of their cheap plastic doghouses to leap and claw at the chain-link.

They were pit bulls—some black, some brindle-coated, some the glossy grey of a luxury sedan. And they all had the same physique: a dark heart-shaped nose, black eyes canopied by a jutting forehead, docked ears and a jaw that looked to have been worked into shape by chewing an India rubber ball. Their musculature flared like a cobra’s hood down their ribs, which were prominent when the dogs held certain positions; those bones looked like giant skeletal fingers flexed under the flesh. The males’ penises were sheathed in folds of skin that lay nearly flat against their stomachs like the hood scoops on muscle cars. None of the dogs looked more than sixty-five pounds but they seemed monstrous. It was as if they were made out of well-matched chunks of stone wrapped in jeweller’s velvet.

“There is no breed to match the pit bull,” Drinkwater said. “Americans love two tons of Detroit rolling iron and supersizing
everything
, so of course breeders used to figure the biggest dogs were the toughest. German shepherds, Dobermans, Rottweilers, Great Danes, Tosa Inus—all hat, no cattle.”

Dogfighting was big on the rez. Dogmen came up from the Carolinas and as far south as Florida to fight Drinkwater’s studs. He’d set up a closed-circuit TV link; the fights were broadcast in Vegas and drew heavy wagering.

Drinkwater bashed a stick against a pen. The dog inside leapt and yowled. Its neighbours did the same, biting at the fence and leaving runners of saliva dangling from the metal.

“This is my million-dollar gal,” he said. “Folchik. My Little Hunter.”

I remembered War Hammer, another one of Drinkwater’s million-dollar gals. When he opened the pen door, Folchik bounded out. She looked not much different than the others. I told Drinkwater as much.

“It’s not the look,” he said. “It’s the
game
. Game is the dog that won’t quit fighting—the dog that’ll fight with two broken legs! Game is the dog that will toe the scratch knowing it’s already dead. Game is crazy, but game dogs taste more of life because they have no fear of death. And Folchik is
dead game
.”

Drinkwater stick-whipped the dog’s ass. The blow sent seismic ripples down the dog’s flanks, but Folchik didn’t register it at all.

“Another breed, that would be abuse,” Drinkwater said.

I ran a hand down Folchik’s hide. Muscle throbbed under her skin, strands lapping each other like tight-woven wicker. Her coat held the reflective sheen of the tinted windows of a downtown high-rise, like nothing possible in nature.

“They’re good with people,” said Drinkwater, “but murder on other dogs.”

“We had a bull mastiff for a while growing up, before I got Dolly.”

Drinkwater shook his head as if this was the saddest news he’d heard all day. “Some guy brought a mastiff round for a roll. Neapolitan variety—I guess they’re supposed to be bad-asses. Hundred-fifty pounds and jowly, folds of skin hanging off its muzzle. Disgusting thing! I refused to roll my stock—wasn’t that dog’s fault it had a moron for an owner. Another guy had a beat-up old pit bull cur that was practically a bait dog—one you chuck in with the gamers just to keep them lively—but still, a pittie. That little scrap of shit tore the mastiff’s throat right out. The mastiff’s owner bawled his guts out.”

Drinkwater leashed Folchik and together we walked to one of the tin-sided sheds. Inside was a treadmill with a two-foot-tall metal cage over the track. Drinkwater swatted Folchik inside the cage and knotted her leash to the treadmill panel. He ramped the elevation to max and cranked it. Folchik fell into a quick run as the treadmill’s belt ripped round the rollers.