Cataract City (38 page)

I woke up blind.

My mattress was dented with the impressions of the bodies that had lain in it before me. My nose was swollen with crusted blood, but I could still smell industrial bleach on the sheets.

What had happened after the fight? I remember Drinkwater had balked at paying—as I was sure he would—shrugging his scarecrow shoulders and calling the second fight a draw because the kid hadn’t gone down under my fists. He offered our money back, plus a few extra bucks for my pain and suffering.

Owe and Bovine called bullshit. Drinkwater smiled his way-off smile and played his fingers along the knife sheathed at his waist. But then Silas peeled himself off the floor, rubbing the nasty lump on his jaw.

“You pay these men,” he told Drinkwater. “Every penny they’re owed.”

“That’s not your call,” Drinkwater said.

“It’s not,” Silas agreed, “but if you don’t I’ll make sure everyone on the Akwesasne knows about it.”

A wretched cornered-rat look darkened Drinkwater’s face. I held out my hand with dry insistence.

“Pay me, Drinkwater.”

“I’ll pay, god damn you. I’ll pay.”

I half remembered being carried out by Owe and Bovine, laid in the back seat of Owe’s car. Now here I was, blind in a strange bed. My hands rose instinctively to my eyes, but someone held them back.

“Don’t touch them.” It was Bovine. “They’re swollen shut. You’re swollen all over.”

I tried to say something but my lips were fused with a glaze of blood. Bovine wet his fingertips with water and ran them over my lips.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“Red Coach Inn. Jeez, what a dive. Red Roach Inn paints the better picture. But we couldn’t get you across the border looking like this.”

“Owe?”

“He left last night. You’ve been passed out almost two days. Your face is … Dunk, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

My body was levelled with pain: the sharp variety from the broken bones in my hand, the throbbing variety sunk deep into my face and the bone-deep kind every other place.

For the next three days I barely moved. Bovine was there for most of it, and Owen checked in. They smeared Polysporin on my wounds and made me drink litres of Pedialyte. I lay in a half-waking, half-resting state where nothing was entirely real. The hum of the ceiling fan, the murmur of daytime talk shows.

On the fourth day I gathered my legs and stood. The room was quiet; Bovine was down at the motel bar. I fumbled my way around the bed, barking my shin on the bedpost. Teetering into the bathroom, I ran one blind hand along the wall until my fingers brushed the switch.

My eyes were black balls in the bathroom mirror, nose a mangled knob, shattered capillaries threading over both cheeks. Bovine had stitched the mouse shut; the half-moon curve of the incision bristled with catgut, my forehead dark as an eggplant.

I trailed the fingers of my left hand down my chest and stomach, let them linger on the softball-sized contusions on either side of my ribs: dark purple at their centres, sickly yellow at their edges. My right hand was swaddled in bandages; if I so much as grazed it on a solid surface, a serrated edge of agony would rip all the way to my elbow.

“Fuck it, Duncan Diggs,” I told my reflection. “Were you ever really a handsome man?”

I rented the room indefinitely. Bovine returned to the mortuary. My days were spent reading, watching junk TV, taking epic showers. I sat on the balcony while the housekeeper changed the sheets, listening to the rumble of the Falls over the traffic surging down Buffalo Avenue. My bruises lightened. I could breathe through my nose again and no longer sounded like a tickhound with sinusitis.

One afternoon, there was a knock at the door. I opened it to find a Native teenager holding a duffel bag. The kid shoved it into my chest, spat on the cement near my feet and left.

Inside were stacks of fifties and twenties bound with elastic bands: $398,000, plus a single penny rattling at the bottom. Drinkwater had shorted us two grand. The note he’d slid in with the cash read:
It will never buy back the years you lost
.

“You’re right about that, Lemmy,” I said, with a laugh that hurt my sides. “But it’ll make the years I’ve got left a little sweeter.”

I slept soundly and awoke to a ringing phone.

“You bastard,” Silas said. “We said make it look real, for the love of fuck, not knock me into a coma!”

“I could barely stand,” I said. “Didn’t think—”

“I couldn’t think straight for a week! Still can’t remember where I left my car keys.”

“I’m sorry.”

Silas broke the lingering silence. “You were something up from the grave, Diggs. Remorseless—a zombie! A relentless killing machine! How’s your cabeza?”

Peering into the duffel, I said, “I’ll live.”

Silas grunted, unconvinced. “Get your ass back over here where the health care’s free.”

“Thanks, Silas. For everything.”

“My tenderfeet tell me that big payoff left ol’ Lemmy just about bust. You ought to talk to your cop friend—Drinkwater’s in a desperate frame of mind.”

I hung up and stared again at the money. It was more than I’d ever seen. For some it was nothing of consequence—a decent Christmas bonus for a Fortune 500 CEO—but to me it meant freedom. I just wasn’t sure yet what that freedom would look like. I felt an urge to spread the bills on the bed and roll around like bank robbers do in the movies.

I walked to the window, threw the curtains open. Late-afternoon sunlight bathed the treetops overlooking the cataract basin.

Owe stopped by with a sack of bearclaws and coffee in Styrofoam cups.

“How you feeling?”

“Can’t complain,” I said, tearing into a bearclaw. I was feeling like a bear myself, just stirred from hibernation—devouring everything I could lay my paws on, the sweeter the better.

Owe watched me dump six sugar packets into my coffee. His cop’s eyes were probably lingering over the skin that sat loose upon my frame, the muscle I’d earned in prison now melted away. I unzipped the duffel, tossed him a roll of bills.

“You go ahead, count it.”

“I don’t need to.”

“I’d like it if you did.”

Instead Owe snapped the elastic band off the roll, split the bills roughly in half, snapped the elastic band on one half and flipped it back. “I wasn’t looking at it as a money-making opportunity,” he said. “I just wanted to fuck with Drinkwater.”

I wasn’t about to argue. I nodded and dropped the roll back in the duffel.

“That last guy,” Owe said, one eyebrow raised. “He was looking like a world-destroyer … until you caught him.”

“Even the blind squirrel finds a nut, Owe.”

“I thought you might be interested to know—Drinkwater may be making a move.”

I watched him closely over the rim of my Styrofoam cup. “Yeah?”

Owen had heard the news from one of his fellow boys in blue, a district sergeant with the Niagara PD. The word through the grapevine was that Drinkwater wanted to get out of the cigarette-smuggling business.

“They say he’s trying to sell off his entire apparatus. Cig makers, packagers, labellers, whole shebang.”

“Who’s the buyer?”

“It’ll be a larger smuggling operation, which means either the Akwesasne or Kahnawake tribe.”

“You’re involved in the investigation?”

There was a moment of pent-up tension as the unspoken question lay between us:
Would you tell me if you were involved, Owe, seeing as you didn’t the last time?

“No investigation,” he said, “just suppositions and scuttlebutt. My chief wouldn’t detach me, anyway. Drinkwater’s pretty much a dead issue around the precinct.”

“But not for you.”

Owe’s heavy-lidded gaze oriented on the window. “I buried that fucker’s dog, man.”

A week later I was back at my folks’ place, still thinking about what I’d do next. My nose was skewed at a fresh angle and a mottled scar was scrawled across my forehead. But Cataract City was a hockey player’s town; bust-up noses were commonplace, and I could always grow my bangs out.

Guilt settled over the dinner table and Mom’s bruised eyes avoided mine. She must be so ashamed, I thought. I wondered if my name came up at the Bisk, or during her bowling league night with her girlfriends—or had her friends learned to avoid the subject?

By this time, my post-fight euphoria had soured. I toted up the facts of my life: I was jobless, wifeless, childless, living with my parents, sleeping in the bed I’d slept in as a boy. I was an ex-con with a busted face whose joints ached on humid days.

One evening I sat with my dad at the Tannery on Stanley Avenue. We could pass hours in a silence that wasn’t uncomfortable. Every so often one of us might sit up on our elbows and lean forward in a way that invited conversation, only to signal the bartender for another draft.

“Dade Rathburn,” Dad said, frowning at the foam in his beer glass. “That time he took you and little Owen.”

His shoulders rose almost imperceptibly. I was struck by just how sharp his shoulder bones were, by the chip in his canine tooth he’d never bothered to fix. I thought back to that night in the parking lot when Dad fought Dean Hillicker—he’d been pure
electric
back then. But the electricity had mostly bled out of him now.

“We got in the car,” Dad said, “Cal Stuckey and me. Cal’s car, remember? The flashy Fifth Avenue he got after his promotion. We’d been sitting in the precinct with officers buzzing around,
asking a lot of questions but not taking any action. We both knew it … if you weren’t found, it would have been over. I mean all of it. Don’t want to sound dramatic, but … how can you be overdramatic, talking about your twelve-year-old boy? We couldn’t have lived with ourselves, y’know? Our wives, your mothers, we couldn’t have looked them in the eye, or they ours. The most important thing on earth ripped away
—on our watch
.

“Anyway, we got in the car. Drove.
Hoping
, was all. Guess we figured we’d find you on the side of the road somewhere, lost, hugging onto each other, but safe and in one piece. Cal kept whispering this little prayer to himself, I remember, telling God he could take away everything else he’d ever given but just give Cal his kid back … You forget the details of these things. It’s a trick your mind plays. All you remember is that
fear
—that’s all you ever need to remember to make sure it never happens again.”

It was the longest speech he’d given in my presence since junior high, when he’d come to my room at Mom’s insistence, hands squeezed into white knots to fumblingly explain the birds and the bees.

“You never found us,” I said.

Dad laughed. “We ran out of gas. Neither of us was watching the needle. Cal had to call CAA.”

The Sabres were getting clocked by the Wings in an early-season game on the bar’s TV. Dead leaves skated up and down the eavestrough outside, a haunting sound.

“Some people say you make your own luck,” Dad said. “I’ve never believed in that. Luck is just something that happens. It’s nothing you can pull towards you. But I think if you get some, you do your best to make the most of it.”

“What luck have you ever had?”

Dad flinched as if I’d reached over and slapped him.

“I’ve had plenty,” he said hoarsely. “What kind of question is that? Jesus, wasn’t I just saying …?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Son, you’re
out
. That’s lucky. You’re in one piece. That’s lucky, too. You disappear a few weeks, come back with a busted face and a limp—you don’t need to explain nothing—and maybe that’s good luck or bad luck, I dunno. But your mom and me, we don’t want to see you go back where you’ve been. So take your luck and make something of it. A small something. Start with that.”

Eventually we walked home, Dad swaying ever so slightly. He tripped on the cracked tarmac leading up to the house, leaned into me and held that position, his head resting lightly on my shoulder.

The next night I returned to Bender Street and used the pay phone outside the Sleep Easy Motor Inn. Late-autumn midges clustered around the street lamps. Winter was threaded into the wind that wicked up from the Falls. A roll of quarters sat heavy in my pocket—I had taken some money from where I’d stashed it under the closet floorboards of my childhood bedroom—because who knew? Maybe we’d talk a while longer this time.

“You again.”

“Yeah. Me.”

I wanted to ask Ed why she’d kept this number, after all these years. I wanted to know how close she was; I knew she wasn’t in Cataract City, but maybe she wasn’t so far away. I wanted to know if she was happy and in love with someone else. I wanted to know if Dolly was lying beside her as she listened to me breathing down the line.

“It’s weird without you” is all I said.

She almost laughed, but caught herself. “Is that your idea of a charming pickup line?”

Ed knew I’d never had anything in the way of pickup lines, charming or otherwise. “I’m just telling you how I feel.”

“Well, you’ve had some practice of being without me by now. You should be used to it.”

“How could I get used to it, Ed? It’ll always be the worst.”

“You’ll live.”

Yeah, I would. But I wished she weren’t so hard—I wished she’d
give
, just the tiniest bit. Then again, I didn’t deserve her softness.

“I’d like to come find you.”

After a silence, she said, “I can’t stop you from trying.”

She knew differently, though. All she had to do was tell me to stop. But she didn’t.

I thought about it a lot during those years when Duncan was in jail. “The Point,” I guess you could call it.

What was the Point? That place in time where you’d been led, ceaselessly and unerringly, since the day you could first remember. The place you’ll see sometimes in dreams, as familiar as if it belonged to your everyday life, that disappears the moment you rise into waking, its imprint washed away like footprints in the advancing tide. Then one day you’ll see some aspect of it in the filigree of a leaf or the knitted steel of a suspension bridge, and that old dream will collide with reality so perfectly that it creates the whiplash we know as déjà vu.