Cataract City (45 page)

“Not as lucky as some, but … we got lucky the last time we were out here, didn’t we? We’ll get out this time, too.”

“And that’s just it, isn’t it?” A terrible calm settled over me. “You’re always just so … so fucking
sure
of yourself.”

Duncan said, “You didn’t have to come, man. You could’ve stayed put. I wouldn’t have blamed you. So why come?”

My pulse beat in every broken inch of me. This was the deepest part, wasn’t it? The part I could hardly bring myself to contemplate, let alone voice.

“Maybe because of … I don’t know, my anger at you all these years, that I thought was buried … Maybe I let you hang yourself that night on the river.” It was my turn to hold my hands out, a wretched, out-of-place smile on my face. “I can’t say for sure, Dunk. I mean, how well do any of us know ourselves? You paint a picture of the man you hope you are and pray that circumstances never challenge it. And I mean, if I
did
, if I let you walk right into it and did nothing … what does that make me? You’re my best friend.”

“It wasn’t on you,” Duncan said after a long pause. “Over the years I thought about it and I followed it back, too. You gave me fair warning. You painted the picture. I just didn’t see it, or didn’t want to.”

“If your friend’s got his neck in a noose, you don’t kick the chair from under his feet.”

“I kicked it myself.”

Suddenly I was flooded with immense gratitude. I wanted to reach out and touch Dunk’s face. But it was impossible—impossible now to find the effortless touch of our twelve-year-old selves who’d slept with our bodies pressed tightly together, spooning like young lovers, perhaps on this very spot.

“Want to know what I was thinking about?” I said. “The dryer vent at my old house. I used to crouch beside it on winter nights. It was warm, smelled nice. This one time I saw my father smoking in the basement. He’d promised Mom he’d quit, right? He smoked with quick little puffs, waving madly at the smoke, then dropped the butt down the flood drain. It was strange seeing him so worried, so rabbity. It was my
dad
, y’know? The toughest man in my little universe. But now every time I see him he looks older, frailer.

“There’ll come a day when he slips in the shower and won’t be able to get up. He’ll be ninety, I hope to God, but it’ll happen. And it will shock me, because I’ll remember him in times when he was so strong. And all that strength will be gone, and he’ll probably be angry and confused about it. So I’ll need to be there for him. I owe him that. Mom, too. I’ve got to be there to pick them up when they’re too weak to do it themselves, like they did for me all those years ago when I fell on my butt as a baby.”

I shouldered the shotgun. “We’ve got to get ourselves out of this, you get me?”

“I get you,” Dunk said.

The daylight held out longer that evening. The sky was low with a hazy sheen, the sun buoyed by heavy clouds. It hung above the horizon, a diffuse orange ball, edging the trees with a persistent mellow
light. Every so often a noise bubbled up from behind us: the stealthy crack of a stick or a distant crazed holler. Drinkwater was back there somewhere, tracking us.

Just before dusk the heavy throb of helicopter blades washed over the landscape. The sound swelled, swelled … then steadily receded. It was probably the sightseeing helicopter that lifted off from the roof of the downtown Hilton; the Falls were especially beautiful at dusk, although I’d never seen them from the air.

The forest thickened. The land sloped upwards and narrowed to a natural bridge of sorts, thirty yards wide. The trees below were thin and bone-white, the tusks of enormous buried mammoths. We charted the incline and came upon a massive deadfall: a fallen oak with the smaller tusklike trees piled over and around it. The oak had fallen directly across the path; the rock drew steeply down on either side into a forest of those bony trees; if we fell, chances were we’d impale ourselves on them.

Small saplings grew out of the oak. It was a nurse tree: as it rotted, it provided nourishment for smaller trees. But it was a poor nurse: the tusks grew up from the dead oak only to topple over, dead. Their limbs lay at splintered angles, making the deadfall all but impassable.

Duncan said, “Turn back?”

I chided him. “You of all people.”

Duncan clambered onto the oak. The bark collapsed under his boot and his leg punched into the rotted tree. He clutched his chest. I wondered if the impact had jarred the needle loose. He pulled his leg out, brushed petrified wood off his thigh and peered into the hole. “Huh. Could be easier to just go
through
.”

A solid few kicks broke a hole. The insides were hollow, wood pulp glittery with frost. I pushed my shoulders inside the tree, inhaling a fusty sawmill smell. Chains of fibrous wood hung down,
clung with insect chrysalises that looked like translucent seeds; it felt like being inside a pumpkin. My skull brushed those fibrous chains; a few snapped and fell down my neck, cold as icicles. I reminded myself it’d be far worse in the summer, the tree alive with squirming insects. I pushed at the far side of the dead tree. My palm broke through with ease. I cracked the bark away in jigsaw sections, opening a hole big enough to crawl through.

Dunk spied an overhang to our left, carved into the base of a steep cliff that spilled into an alluvial floodplain. There was room under the rocky shelf for both of us.

We gathered wood from the deadfall and kindled a fire with the last drops of gasoline, sitting on the stony wash as night rolled in. Dunk’s face had a loose, distant quality born of physical exhaustion and mental fatigue. I’m sure my face looked much the same.

“A village once sat at the high side of the Falls,” I said, beginning the story I’d been thinking about all day. “Did you know that?”

Duncan smiled wanly. “I did not.”

“Centuries ago, okay? An unknown plague struck the village. At night, the graveyard was dug up and the bodies devoured—no, not devoured but sucked dry. The villagefolk—”

“Villagefolk,” Duncan said dreamily, rolling the word around in his mouth like hard candy. “I like that.”

“Yeah, so they believed something evil must live in the caves under the Falls. It must creep up the cliffs while they slept to feed on the dead. So they loaded up a canoe with succulent fruits and sailed it over the Falls. But the next night the graves were cracked open again, bones strewn across the ground. The village elders decided to send a virgin over the Falls.”

“Those elders always figure a virgin will do the trick, don’t they?”

“So they grab this poor girl and plunk her in a canoe. But once she’s sailed over the Falls the elders get a bit of buyer’s remorse. They go to the best warrior in the village and say, ‘Hey man, will you go down and get her?’ And he gives them a long look and says, ‘Nah, fuck it.’”

“Really?” Duncan said.
“Nah, fuck it
?”

“I’m paraphrasing, but yeah, that’s the gist. But the youngest warrior, he’s always had a crush on the sacrificial maiden. He volunteers to go. The elders shrug and say, ‘Fill your boots, kid.’ So he clambers down the cliffs and finds a seam in the rock leading behind the Falls. It’s dark in there. He hears the trickle of water on rock. And just underneath that trickle is another sound, soft—a whimper.

“The young warrior creeps into a honeycombed cave under the Falls and he sees … 
it
. His heart quivers. It’s huge. It’s revolting. It’s … a spider. The virgin is cradled in its eight furry legs, each as big as a fence post. Its fangs are dark elephant tusks. Its eyes are black boiled eggs, hundreds of them crammed into the nightmare of its face.”

“Oh, jeez. That’s so
gross
.”

“What could the young warrior do? A buffalo he could handle. A bear, even a moose. But this? He has to
out-think
it. So he backtracks out of the cave. He sees the spider’s tracks going up the Falls—strands of gossamer as thick around as ropes swung from the rock face. He notices the spider’s path scrupulously avoided the water. Is it scared of water?”

“Then why’s it living under the Falls?”

“Maybe,” I said, fixing Duncan with a sidelong look, “the spider was born there. Maybe it doesn’t know any better. Or maybe it was rent-controlled and he was a penny-pinching, miser spider. Fact is, this particular spider didn’t care for water.”

“Ah.”

“The warrior gathers strands of sticky gossamer and lashes them to an outcropping above the spider’s exit hole, high enough that he’d have to jump to reach them. The rocks around the exit he coats with bear grease to make them slippery … except he leaves a few patches dry. Then he creeps back into the cave and yells, ‘Hey, bug!’”

“Is that so?”

“It is so. Spiders hate being called bugs seeing as, technically, they are not. The spider flings the maiden aside and pursues the warrior. They scramble up the cave, the warrior a mere half-step ahead. Venom drips from the spider’s fangs. A drop strikes the warrior’s skin and burns painfully.

“He races out of the cave, steps nimbly on the ungreased rocks and leaps, grabbing a gossamer rope. The spider races out over the cliff, slips and falls. It hits the bottom of the Falls with a splash. The young warrior returns to the cave and finds the maiden. They marry—such was the custom at the time—and have many children.”

“What happened to the spider? Did it drown or what?”

“Probably. Let’s assume so.”

“What do you mean, probably?”

“You’re never satisfied, are you? Every ‘i’ needs to be dotted.”

“That’s right.”

“Fine … know what? The spider was fine. It floated down the river and found another village and sucked everybody dry as a bone. Then it laid eggs in their mummified skulls, which hatched into a brood of huge pissed-off super-spiders who laid siege to the land. Many, many innocents were senselessly slaughtered. An epic bloodbath.”

“Jesus, Owe!”

“Next time don’t ask.”

“How smooth is the language of the whites,” a new voice said, “when they can make right look like wrong and wrong like right.”

We reached for our weapons.

A guttural, mocking laugh creased the air. “I could’ve shot you both if that had been my aim.”

A sickle of light bloomed on the far side of the deadfall. Drinkwater’s face hovered in a flashlight’s beam. Stubble glittered in the sunken pockets of his cheeks and dark matter was caked around his mouth. His eyes were deep holes in his face.

I said, “Why follow us?”

“Why not? You’ve been following me. Turnabout is fair play.”

“You tried to kill us.”

“When?” Drinkwater said, confused.

“The trap.”

“The what?”

“The fox trap. Remember?”

Drinkwater waved his hand. “
Kill?
You were hunting me like a dog. Dogs bite when they’re pursued, don’t they? Nothing evil to that.”

Duncan came around the fire until he was facing Drinkwater.

“You have a gun?”

Drinkwater nodded. “You, too?”

Duncan nodded. “Are you cold?”

The flashlight beam shifted, providing a momentary glimpse of Drinkwater’s eyes. Bloodshot, jittery. Those eyes painted a picture of a man barely holding on to his life and sanity.

“My butane torch ran out,” he said, “and the dark … the dark is
hungry
.”

Duncan pulled a burning stick from the fire. I watched, not saying anything, as he handed it through the deadfall. Drinkwater’s face registered pathetic gratefulness. He lit a small fire. Soon there arose the smell of cooking meat.

“Want any?” Drinkwater asked.

“No,” we said in unison, thinking about the skunk.

We listened as Drinkwater tore into leathery meat. Almost immediately afterwards came the sound of agonized heaving, followed by the stink of bile.

“Can’t keep it down,” Drinkwater said. “Full of worms. First the meat, now me.”

All three of us sat in silence for a while, laying our grievances aside for tonight.

Finally Drinkwater said, “I have a story. A traditional tale my father used to tell.”

“Knock yourself out,” Dunk said.

“Once there were two brothers. Wolf, the elder, and Horse, the younger. Wolf was married to an evil woman. A real bitch! She lusted for Horse and wanted to see the younger brother ruined. She made seductive advances towards Horse, who always told her to bugger off out of love for his brother.

“One day Wolf came home and found his wife’s clothing ripped and her hair in a tangle. The salmon-jawed witch told him Horse tried to have his way with her. Wolf was livid and sickened to hear it. But Wolf was also a snake—he resolved to kill his brother by stealth.” Drinkwater paused. “You two ever fight over a woman?”

Duncan hesitated before saying, “No.”

“Huh. You sure?”

“Why do you care?”

“No reason. Anyway, every summer the waterfowl would moult. They left feathers on the surface of the lake Wolf lived beside. The two brothers got into a buffalo-hide boat and paddled to an island in the middle of the lake to collect feathers to fashion fletching for their arrows. That summer, while Horse gathered feathers, Wolf paddled away, leaving his brother to die alone on the island.

“The lake was deep, prone to sudden storms. Flight from the island was impossible. Deeply hurt, Horse looked into the water and began to cry. He prayed to the nature spirits for help. He called on the Moon and Planets to vindicate him. Along came a friendly Beaver. Beaver said, ‘Why the long face?’
Hah!
” Drinkwater slapped his knee. “Get it? When Horse told Beaver his sad tale, Beaver was outraged. He invited Horse to live in his dam. They lived happily together through the winter and spring.

“In the summer Wolf returned, expecting to find his brother’s bones. While Wolf was looking around, Horse crept down the shore, stole his boat and paddled off. Wolf grovelled, ‘Come back, bro! A misunderstanding!’ But Horse smelled his brother’s bullshit a mile away. When Wolf’s wife saw the boat returning with Horse in it she fled into the forest, never to be seen again. The end.”

Duncan said, “Kind of anticlimactic, Lem.”

“A traditional Native tale,” Drinkwater said stiffly. “We don’t give a fuck about your Hollywood endings.”