Cataract City (31 page)

In the other corner the fat breeder filled a bowl with Gatorade for Seeker. He saturated a cottonball with Adrenalin 1:100 and eased it up Seeker’s rectum with one squashed-flat thumb.

My gaze drifted into the crowd. The old Native guy was working his jaws around another cigarette—his lower lip came up too far for him to have teeth. I hated having anything to do with these ugly men whose stomachs were falling through the shiny denim of their jackets and whose skin hung like wet laundry off the warped dowels of their bones. But I knew we shared one thing: we were fascinated by these creatures, who were perfect in some exquisite, unknowable way—and we would probably watch one of them die.

Folchik limped to the scratch-line. Her eyes were marble-hard and tacky as peeled grapes; she wasn’t blinking anymore. Seeker ebbed out of her corner like liquid.

“Release!”

Folchik tore in at Seeker, who backpedalled madly, seemingly unsure of herself for the first time; the Little Hunter’s rush had the grey dog’s paws scrabbling under her belly, losing traction, at which point Folchik faked a strike at Seeker’s leg. Seeker ripped at Folchik’s head except her head wasn’t there anymore. Folchik had reversed to strike at Seeker’s opposite leg, picking it up and wrenching it sideways, flipping the fat man’s dog onto her side, and for a harried second Seeker’s throat was exposed: the
killshot
. Folchik was straining madly for it and I was sure she’d end it right there—
wanted
her to, because a part of me hated the silky perfection of the other dog—and the crowd rose to a quick roar, sensing the hometown favourite was making her move as the dogs’ fangs buzz-sawed the air. But then Folchik reared back and it was clear something had gone wrong: her muzzle was shredded like cheesecloth to expose the pink rack of her gums and the blood-flecked pegs of her teeth. Seeker sported a long rip down one side of her face but her throat was unhurt.

“Pick her up,” the fat breeder told Drinkwater. “She’s close to dead.”

He refused.

“What’s the
matter
with you?” I said.

Suddenly, it was as if Folchik had lost her heft: the iron had been ripped from her spine. Seeker bullied and harassed her, striking at her retreating forelegs, tearing pink gouges into her coat and rag-dolling her across the pen.

Next I was stepping over the boards into the fighting box. It was an involuntary reaction, like breathing or blinking my eyes. When I elbowed Seeker clear, she lunged, her teeth ripping into my forearm with enough force to pierce the flesh, but only once—whether this was a matter of training or because she had no interest in hurting me, I couldn’t tell. She backed off and sat on her haunches, eyeing her breeders.

I bent beneath those staggered faces under the vapour lamps, wrapping my arms around Folchik, who was shivering uncontrollably. I picked her up, cradling her head in the crook of my bloodied elbow. She buried her face in my armpit. Her bladder let go in a warm trickle that went down my side and soaked the band of my jeans.

I stared at the men ranged round the box. Not disapprovingly, not for sympathy, but to see what they’d make of it. I didn’t see anything other than dark-eyed stoniness. Men with their hands in their pockets stared back at me with no knowable emotion; I could have done what I’d done or not, it mattered very little to them. The only man who seemed to care was Seeker’s primary keeper—he inclined his head at me, the smallest of nods.

Drinkwater stepped into the box with his knife out. He held it low, tip pointing at my belly.

“Put my dog down. We’re not finished.”

“I think so, Lem. I really think this is finished.”

He brought the knife up, the edge pressed to my neck. He raked it against the grain of my stubble, the vibration radiating along my collarbones.

“Lot of witnesses, Lemmy.”

“I own every eye looking at you.”

“People know where I am. It’s a whole lot easier to make a dog disappear than a man. White man, especially.”

Drinkwater squeezed one eye shut. He put the knife back in its sheath.

“Bad dog,” he said softly. “Bad, bad dog.”

Edwina was asleep, or pretending to be. I slid past the bed and stashed the two thousand dollars in the toe of an old workboot.

When I turned, Ed had shifted up on one elbow, face glossed by the moonlight falling through the window. The sight made a small sweet hole in me.

“You find anything?” she said.

“They weren’t looking at the dry docks. Something’ll come up.”

“Why are you dressed like that?”

I wore my overalls, the only clothes I’d had in my truck. The ones I’d been wearing were covered in blood. After the fight I’d wrapped Folchik in my shirt and left the warehouse. Nobody bothered trying to stop me. I’d driven around town with the dog in the passenger seat; the street lamps shone through the windshield, picking up the sheen of blood on her coat. She’d pawed at the seat with what little energy she had—it dawned on me that she was trying to climb down into the footwell, where it was darker, which was I guess where a dog would prefer to die.

“Hold on, girl,” I’d whispered. “Just a little while longer, okay?”

I’d stopped at a pay phone on an unlit block. The receiver was ripped off but the book was intact. After hunting up the address, I’d driven down Lockport Road, skirting the airport—shark-coloured planes were lifting into the twilight, reminding me of when I’d ride my bike to the Point as a boy and watch them ghost out of the clouds—and pulled into the SPCA.

It was closed, but a sign read
EMERGENCY SERVICE
and an arrow pointed round back. I left the truck idling and gathered Folchik in my arms, worried that she’d bite—she must have been terrified, delirious, confused—but she only whimpered as I lifted her. She weighed nothing at all.

I stepped from the truck with Folchik in my arms. I smelled raw adrenaline dumping out of the dog’s pores and below that, the smell of warm pavement. I banged on the door hard enough to strip the skin off my knuckles. The woman who answered was in her late sixties—a volunteer, I figured. She wore glasses on a beaded string and when she saw me standing there, they slid down her nose to rattle on her chest.

“I found her on the side of the road,” I said. “You have to take her.”

“Oh
Gaad
,” she said with a strong upstate accent. “What happened?”

“I don’t know … someone might’ve hit her with their car.”

“
Savages
. Why wouldn’t they have stopped?”

“Jesus, listen—I don’t
know
.” I held Folchik out to her. “She’s real bad off. Do you have a vet on staff?”

She nodded. “Always one on call. I’ll have to—”

“Call whoever it is. Hurry up, you have to—”

The woman stepped aside, waving me in. Beyond the door lay a small, clean, white-tiled room dominated by a steel examining table.

“Lay the dog down,” she said. “I’ll call the police, too. We have to file a report. You’ll have to talk to them.”

A quick scan of the room told me there was no phone. I said, “Go make the calls.”

“Okay, yes. Oh
Gaad
,” she said, hurrying out.

Blood had soaked through my shirt. Folchik had been breathing shallowly, but her inhales seemed steadier now.

I left before the woman returned. I drove to an all-night carwash on Pine Street and cleaned my truck out, scrubbing the upholstery until my hands turned a chapped red. I changed into my overalls and drove to the Tops Market, where I bought bandages and peroxide in the pharmacy and grabbed a case of Hamm’s from the cooler. In the parking lot, by the glow of the truck’s domelight, I debrided and bandaged my arm where Seeker had bit me. The punctures were ragged, throbbing with a dull, bone-deep heat. I hoped they wouldn’t get infected.

I’d driven back to the border, where I declared and paid full duty on the beer. Then I wound through the quiet streets of my city, drank four beers real quick at the end of my block and finally rolled up the driveway with the headlights off.

“You been drinking?” Edwina said.

I stared at the beer at the end of my arm. “Bovine bought a couple cases over the river. I bought one off him.”

I was shocked at how easily the lie came to me. Dolly padded over and nosed around my legs, snaffling the exposed skin at my ankles. Her tail stiffened.

“Have you been seeing other dogs?” Ed asked.

“A stray wandering around the shipworks.” Another effortless lie.

“Hmm. Dolly’s jealous. Come here,” Edwina said.

We lay in the moonlight. The breeze played on the wind chimes hanging in the window: it was hammered bronze and shaped like tumbling water. A friend of Ed’s had bought it for us at a tourist trap on Clifton Hill. Might as well buy wooden shoes for a Dutchman.

“There’s something on your neck,” Ed said. “Is that blood?”

“Oil, probably. From the docks.”

She rubbed my thigh … then rubbed higher. I liked her this way, all coy and mothering. I needed her to carry me away from the sight
of Folchik broken open on a warehouse floor. Maybe she needed it too, really
needed
it, like me, instead of just wanting it to satisfy the urge.

Lately when we made love, I’d been seeing Ed as someone else. She’d angle her head as she lay on the pillow and the outline of her bone structure would seem more purely arousing to me. But then I’d realize it was still Edwina—just a younger version. Her hair not yet leeched by the bleached flour that constantly hung in the air at the Bisk. Her forearms not yet twisted with thick blue veins. And I’d look at my own hands and they were no longer ruined things, either. It was as if our young selves reappeared … the strangest thing.

But those younger,
other
selves are never really gone, are they? All their possibilities. Why would they be? They’re only waiting for you to chase them down and reclaim them, right?

Who’d have figured wrecking a hearse could be so much fun?

Owe, Bovine and I drove it to Westlane High School, where, as promised, the auto shop teacher let us use the tool bay. We jacked the meat-wagon on a pneumatic hoist and tore it apart.

It was just the three of us drinking Lakers and busting the hell out of the hearse. We took a sledgehammer to it. We stomped the windshield until the Saf-T-Glas webbed, caved and folded into the front seat. We loosed war whoops while crowbarring out the side windows, which broke with such a sweet tinkling. I crawled into the back and ripped down the velvet curtains—
pik-pik-pik!
—off the brass hooks.

Bovine popped the hood. We stood around it.

“Well,” Owen said. “I’m pretty sure that’s an engine.”

At least Bovine had half a clue what to do. He purged the gas tank and rerouted the flow to a hose fed through the glovebox and then into a jerry can duct-taped to the back seat.

“Can’t be any gas in the tank during a demo derby,” he said. “Unless you want a field of flaming fireballs.”

One night I cracked the door leading into the hallway and when the alarm didn’t blare we walked into the darkened school. Our boots squeaked on the tiles, that haunting sound echoing down the hallways.

“Darla Dinkins,” Bovine said, tapping his beer bottle on a locker. “Ol’ Double D. I asked her out dancing at the Blue Lagoon—I had fake ID. Ah, god, did she shoot me
doooown
.”

“She works at the Shoppers Drug Mart on Portage,” I said. “Married to Doug Kirkwood, who sells Chevys at Mullane Motors. Two kids … one’s named Ekko, I think.”

We passed the trophy case, our bodies reflected amidst the golden armatures. The three of us looked younger in the half-light, relieved of the years sunken into our flesh—the effect was so compelling I found myself reaching out to touch our faces where they lay trapped in the glass.

Back in the tool bay we spray-painted
THE DEVIL’S DUE
down each side of the hearse. Bovine hacked down the muffler with an acetylene torch—miraculously without melting his fingers off. The big hulk howled like the hounds of hell.

On the night of the derby we flicked on the hearse’s hazard lights and crept down the back roads to the Merrittville Speedway.

Bovine had spent the afternoon stuck down a bottle, so I drove. Bovine hummed softly in the back seat as wind rushed through the empty windows to carve the hair back from his widow’s peak. The narrow road shone like a runway in the moonlight. Stars salted the sky above the escarpment. I fiddled with the radio and pulled in “Take Me Home Tonight” by Eddie Money.

“Beee mah little bay-bee,”
Bovine crooned in a drunken falsetto.

The Speedway shone under a ring of spotlights. I pulled into the grassy staging area teeming with chopped-down derby rides. The
inspector did a circuit around the hearse, casually snapped the antenna off and said, “Got a helmet?”

“No,” Owe said.

“You can rent one over there. Ten bucks.”

“That’s highway robbery!” Bovine cackled from the back seat.

“That guy better not be driving,” the inspector said.

Owe begged off, seeing as his knee was held together with Silly Putty and carpenter’s glue. Bovine slapped me on both cheeks and gave me a woozy hug. “Steady on, Highlander!”

While Bovine and Owe made their way to the bleachers, I scoped the competition: a rusty delivery van with a giant plastic chicken on its roof; a slab of Detroit rolling iron, cotton-candy pink, with
THE SHOCKER
on the hood; a purple Buick with an armless, legless mannequin lashed to the grille. Two guys sat on the Buick’s hood passing a flask; their laughter floated up towards the stars.

Drivers hopped into our cars. The air was soon hammering with pistons, thick with exhaust fumes. The inspector waved a red flag. I pulled out behind a Nissan Micra that must’ve been some masochist’s idea of a swell ride. We drove a lap past the stands. The lights shone down with the intensity of tiny suns. Owe and Bovine stood, beers in hand, cheering their guts out. I blew them kisses.

The cars idled on the sloped oval, grilles aimed into the centre. When the air horn
blatted
, I threw the tranny into reverse and tromped the accelerator; the tires stuttered, spitting loose stones against the undercarriage until finally they bit, rocketing the hearse up the slope and away from the fray.