Cataract City (9 page)

We found an old backpack in the van. Also a few cans of Coke, half a bag of barbecue chips, a Three Musketeers bar, some rags and a bottle of vitamin caplets big enough to choke an elephant. Glossy magazines with pictures of muscled-up men; other magazines of naked ladies—Dunk put one of those in the pack. We left the pills and empty beer bottles.

Dunk found a box of bullets in the glovebox and fiddled with the pistol. I was afraid it’d go off accidentally, leaving a smoking ring in his forehead. The cylinder fell open. Dunk picked out the spent cartridges, slotted in fresh ones and thumbed the safety. He put it in the backpack and gave the Buck knife to me.

What about the tent? We could burn it, or leave it open for the
animals to find Bruiser. He had dragged us out here, got drunk, gone mad and died. What did we owe him?

“We could … roll him up in the tent? Put some stones on to hold it down.”

Dunk sawed his arm across his nose. “He’s just worm food now, anyway.”

The stones were still warm from the fire. We rolled the biggest ones to the tent. Dunk kicked the tent poles away. It collapsed with an outrush of foul air as the canvas sagged over Mahoney’s body. I could make out his face where the material lay across the hawklike bridge of his nose.

We heaped stones on the tent’s edges. Dunk lifted the biggest one, cradled it to his gut, and dropped it. Mahoney’s body bent at the waist—heels raising up, nose straining against the canvas—then lay flat.

Dunk shrugged the pack onto his shoulders and we followed the tire tracks out of the clearing.

The woods were alive with movement. Here a spooked rush of limbs. There a flurry of wings. All of it was timid. Funny to think that, in daylight, a pair of kids could be lords of the forest.

The only creatures who didn’t fear us were the insects. Mosquitoes helicoptered around my ears, giving off a maddening whine. One drew so close that I was sure it would fly straight into the canal and then into my brain to suck the blood out of the grey matter. When it landed on the hard little hump above my eardrum I pinched it between my fingers; the bastard crumpled with a satisfying feel, like softest metal. The satisfaction was short-lived, as the bugs had found us by then: they were everywhere, crawling and whining and buzzing, drinking our blood and sipping our sweat. Soon my arms were covered in angry whitened bites.

The day was cool beneath the leaves. Shafts of sunlight sparkled, dizzyingly bright, moving in squiggly patterns on the ground as the wind stirred the trees. Gnats meshed above puddles of water, coiling up in bug tornadoes. The heat evaporated the morning’s dew and gave the air a sweet green smell.

Dunk moved confidently, head down, thumbs hooked under the backpack straps. The scabs on his elbows shone like obsidian. Our breath came lightly as our feet flashed over the earth. We seemed to be making decent time, though our finish line was unknown.

We came to a break in the trees. A falcon circled in the sky, the white tips of its wings standing out sharply against the edgeless blue.

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” said Dunk. A squashed gnat was stuck to his front tooth. It looked like a poppy seed.

A stream trickled across the path. Minnows like tiny silver arrows darted and settled in the glassy water, which ran around the rocks in eddies.

Dunk scooped his hand along the stream’s edge and came up with a mudpuppy, an eel-like creature with stunted appendages like mouse paws. It thrashed in Dunk’s palm, whipping back and forth in spine-snapping spasms. Dunk returned it to the water; we watched it squirm under a flat, sandy rock, turn and peer up at us from its muddy bunker.

The slime-covered rocks above the water’s surface reminded me of Chia Pets. Dirty collars of foam surrounded most of them, and the water smelled funky: a waft of sulphur from a struck match.

“Be careful,” Dunk said. “I don’t want to carry you if you twist an ankle.”

“You think I want to carry
you?
”

Dunk hopscotched across the rocks easily. I followed him but slipped on the last rock and got a huge soaker. “Fuckballs!”

Dunk hooted. My socks squelched, mud squeezing out of the eyelets. I flicked water at him off the toe of my sneaker.

“Hey, watch it!” Dunk skipped aside, still laughing.

It pissed me off. Dunk
always
beat me. In our two-man contest I always took the booby prize.

An expanse of sun-baked clay unfurled past the stream. The van’s tires had left no impression in it. We walked to a spot where the clay gave way to a drywash. There was nothing but polished stones and nappy scrub that would have sprung right up after the van had gone over it, leaving no clue.

Dunk wiped the sweat off his forehead with the hem of his T-shirt. His hip bones stood out above his belt, as pronounced as ears. My wet shoe baked in the sun, its rotten-algae smell infiltrating my nose. I stood on my tiptoes, straining for sounds of civilization, the silky
shrriiip
of car tires on the road.
Something
. But there was nothing except nature, dominated by the throaty gurgle of the stream. For the first time in my life I found this to be a scary sound.

Dunk said, “Which way?”

I slapped a mosquito. It left a spiky blot of blood on my wrist above the big blue vein. I pointed. “That way looks flatter.”

Dunk said, “Okay … but what did our Scout leader say about following a stream?”

I rubbed my temples, massaging the skin the way Mom did for Dad when he came home after a frazzling day.
It stimulates the thinking muscle
, she’d say.

“He said a small stream leads to a bigger stream, which leads to a river which leads to a lake which leads to a road,” I said.

The streambed carried on for a few hundred yards before hooking around a clump of green bushes. A rime of earth ran along the stream’s edge, making the side sun-cracked but passable.

Duncan said: “Let’s follow it.” He took a rag out of the backpack and tied it to a tree branch. “If we need to come back and go the other way, we’ll know this was where we were … or if we come past this again, we’ll know we’re not very good at orienteering.”

The stream meandered through the woods, a path of least resistance, splitting around molehills to leave small grass-topped islands. Water boatmen paddled in still pools, their bloated bodies moving in clumsy circles. Water skimmers zipped here and there. I’d once asked my father why they didn’t sink and he’d told me they were so light that they could dance along the water without falling into it. “There’s a skin on the water, like the skin that forms on top of pudding,” he’d told me. “A water skimmer’s body is lighter than water, believe it or not, so they can walk on the water just like you or I walk on a floor.”

The temperature rose. Trickles of sweat cut down my face; wet patches formed under my arms. A dark T appeared on the back of Dunk’s T-shirt. The sun dipped behind a bank of grey clouds but it didn’t get any cooler—if anything it was
hotter
, as if the sun, beating down on those rain-packed clouds, threw a blanket of broiling air over us.

Dunk held a steady pace, hitching his pack up on his back, hopping instinctively over spots where the shore threatened to crumble into foot-soaking pockets of mud—pockets that I would’ve stepped in had he not been guiding. The stream grew steadily narrower. We followed it down a long slope through a glade of low-hanging willows whose branches dipped right into the water; it was like walking through a series of doorways strung with beaded curtains.

The stream was now narrow enough that Dunk could straddle it, his feet on either side. And now the woods changed, too. Where before everything was bright green, shot through with the gold of sunlight through the leaves, by afternoon it changed to the denser, darker green of pine needles so thick the light could not penetrate:
the sunlight lay on top of the needles, making it feel as if we were insects picking our way across a saw blade.

We followed the stream, which by then—as we’d probably both admitted to ourselves but hadn’t dared vocalize yet—was only a sad trickle as it cut through a stand of pines. Big grey spiders suspended themselves on webs between the conifers. Dunk touched his finger to the centre of one web. A spider picked its way down like an inverted tightrope walker, the gossamer bowing with its weight. It stopped before reaching Dunk’s finger, thrown off by the heat maybe, then danced onto his fingertip. Dunk held it in his palm: a bead of swirling, concentrated smoke.

“It’s not poisonous,” he said, returning the spider to its web.

“How do you know?”

“Well, it didn’t bite me.”

After that we didn’t worry about walking through the webs. It felt nasty stomping like Godzilla through Tokyo, but we wanted to get back to our homes. The pines thinned to a stretch of waist-high bushes hung with bright red berries—the kind our scoutmaster called bird berries, because only birds could eat them. I was
so
hungry. All I could remember eating last night was licorice at the arena and a chunk of raccoon. I stared longingly at the berries hanging in plump bunches—couldn’t I try just a few? But I pictured my stomach swelling and splitting, my red-tinted guts spilling out like a frog’s who’d been force-fed Alka-Seltzer.

The air was shimmery with mosquitoes. Could you die of mosquito bites? I pictured my body full of tiny pinpricks where mosquitoes had pierced me, an empty skin-coloured balloon blowing in the breeze. Would a hiker find me, fold me up like a love letter, slip me in an envelope and mail me back to my parents?

Dunk shrugged the pack off. The straps left creases in his shoulders. We sat on a lichen-covered rock. The stream—what was left
of it—trickled around the rock and down a shallow slope, disappearing into a series of puddles dulled with pond scum and alive with bugs.

We split the barbecue chips, which had been crushed into shrapnel during the hike. Dunk gave me one of the Cokes, warm and salty-tasting. I drank it too fast and got a head-rush. I belched and put the can in the pack. Maybe we could fill it with water later.

Dunk took the nudie magazine out. Its pages were greasy, as if they’d been sprayed with vegetable oil. The women were different than in the Baby Blue Movies. They had bruises. Some had weird scars on their bellies and others had black bars over their eyes. The women without bars stared with dead expressions, spreading their pinkish parts open.

Dunk said, “That girl has a black eye.” He threw the magazine on the ground.

The sun slid across the sky to hang above the blue hills to the west. I shut my eyes and saw my parents at the kitchen table. My father was wearing black-and-white-striped overalls, the kind prisoners wore in old movies. My mother’s fingers steepled under her lips, as if she were suffering in some manner I couldn’t name.

Dunk reached down for the nudie mag and stuffed it back inside the pack. “We can use it to start a fire.”

There was no choice but to keep going in hopes the stream would pick up again. The ground was as soft as stale sponge cake and the bugs were now
everywhere
—midges, maddening brainless midges that rose in seething clouds and flew up my nose, into my mouth and ears. They weren’t even worth slapping; it worked best just to wave at them, batting them away from my face.

My sneaker punched through a stable-looking scrim of dirt into a syrupy pit of stinky mud. I reefed my foot back but the greedy mud held on to my Chuck Taylor, pulling it halfway off my foot;
mud flowed over the lip and into the toe. I leaned on a sapling—it cracked when I put my weight on it, rotted roots bulging out of the ground—and pried my sneaker up. Mud spattered to the ground like black pancake batter. I wiped out my sneaker with a handful of yellowed grass and put it back on. “My mom’s gonna kill me for mucking up my new shoes,” I said.

We were standing in the middle of a lowland marsh, what my dad called a muskeg. All around were dead trees, many of them split in half by lightning or snapped crossways under their own weight. Their bark was stripped and their trunks Swiss-cheesed by termites or woodpeckers. It struck me that the swampy ground was no more than a thin crust covering a vast pool of decay: a mulch of rotted trees and vegetation and the carcasses of whatever idiotic creatures might willingly inhabit such a place. Rising from still pools of water were more Chia Pet hummocks tangled over with vivid purple, ivy-like weeds. The air sang with midges and the dragonflies who dined on them.

“What now?” Dunk asked.

I squinted against the iron-grey sky. Was that a hint of greenery beyond the dismal grey? Maybe the stream re-established itself?

I took a tentative step, putting weight on my forward foot. My toe sunk down like it would on a soccer field soaked with a week’s worth of rain; dingy water filled the depression. Up rose that horrid gassy stink.

Dunk stepped past, hitching the straps on his backpack. “Come on,” he said grimly.

By the time we were deep into the muskeg—and it didn’t take long—we couldn’t have turned back if we’d wanted to. We hopped from one hummock to the next, clambering over blowdowns carefully so we wouldn’t stab ourselves on the sun-bleached sticks. Before long those maddening flashes of green were visible in
every
direction—we may have even turned ourselves around, looking back at land we’d already traversed.

Dunk’s shoulders hunched with the determined gait of a mule plodding into a stiff wind. I wished he’d taken a second to think before offering us both up to this awful grey netherworld, but Dunk didn’t operate that way.

He hopped from an oozy patch of ground onto a hummock that wasn’t a hummock at all—more a toupée of grass covering a sinkhole. Watching him sink through was comical, as pratfalls can be: his hands flew up like a supplicant at church.
Hallelujah, Lawd!
He tilted, grabbing for a jutting branch and bellowing in frustration when it snapped in his hand. He fell into a patch of dead sedge bristling with insects and lay there for a second. Drawing his arms under him, he performed a clumsy pushup. His foot loosened from the muck with a sucking
plop
. His leg was dripping with black sludge all the way to his crotch, his sock hanging off his foot.