Craig Davidson - Cataract City

Mahoney paced round the picnic table, stabbing his fingers through his hair.

“I took a steamship and trained as it sailed. Long hours in the boiler room, flinging lumps of coal into the greedy engine, my skin stained as black as night with the dust. The ship hooked past Greenland. I ran round the deck until icicles formed in my hair and jangled like castanets. I got bigger, stronger, as I knew I must to stand even a snowball’s chance. And I swear, boys, I swear I heard Kichi’s voice on the salt wind, calling me, haunting me, tormenting me.

“ Maaahoney ,” Bruiser mimicked. “ Maaahoney, I kirr you, Maaahoney . Well, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a shredded bag of nerves by the time I reached the land of the rising sun. A rickshaw ferried me to the Tokyo Dome and next I’m being led into the ring. A hundred thousand faces screaming for blood —my blood!”

Mahoney’s expression darkened. He hooked his thumbs into his belt loops and shook his head.

“Ah, anyway. Let’s talk about something else.”

“No!” Dunk and I said in unison.

“Don’t be a tease,” the girl said.

Mahoney cocked a Spockian eyebrow. “I’m not boring you?”

She sighed. “Go on, you ham.”

“Visualize it, then, boys. Set the picture in your mind. Giant Kichi — he was a man only in the way Goliath was a man. His head swept the rafters. You think I’m big? Oh, I was a guppy compared to this guy. But I’d vowed to lock horns, a deal had been struck, and then as now I honour my commitments.”

The girl blew a raspberry.

“Yes, he was big,” Mahoney said, after a searching look at the girl. “And his eyes … the darkest, most light-eating things I’d ever seen. I could tell right off he was nutty as squirrel turds, a whole flock of bats in his belfry, but I stepped through the ropes and scuffed my feet in the rosin all the same. Now boys, the first time Kichi hit me”—he slammed his fist into his open palm: RAP! — “I thought he’d caved my chest in. The crowd roared. I peeled myself off the canvas before he could land the finishing blow. I figured a man that big was like a tree: once he went down, he wouldn’t get back up. So I chopped at him like a tree. Quick leg kicks, then scooting away. Chop! Chop! Chop! Chop!

“Kichi growled like an animal and lunged, but I managed to squirt away. Chop! Chop! I felt him weaken. Chop! Chop! The sound of my foot striking his leg was like an axe hacking into wet wood. When he went down — and yes, Giant Kichi did go down — it was with a cry that sounded like a gigantic baby sucking its first breath. He crashed into the mat with a rattle, the whole stadium shaking. I looked at him curled on the mat, helpless … and I couldn’t finish it. He was raised a beast and that’s what he became. So I left him there, may the Lord bless and keep him. And that, boys, was Giant Kichi.”

The girl clapped. “Bravo!”

“Did it really happen?” I said.

Mahoney said, “Ask her. She was there.”

The girl said, “It’s true. Every word.” She turned her bottle upside down, beer sloshing onto the dirt.

“What a waste!” Mahoney said.

“I’ve got to get back home,” she said.

“Ah, come on. Another story.”

“Another time.”

Mahoney stared an instant, then rubbed his nose harshly with his palm. “Yeah, okay. Another time.”

We drove back. Bruiser reached into the case. The girl briefly set her hand on his. He let go of the bottle, goosed the accelerator and said: “Is it to be like this, then? Is it?”

“I don’t know what other way you figured it to be.”

“Did you get the money I sent?”

“I don’t need the money. Neither does Mom.”

“The letters, then. You read them?”

She said: “I read them, yes.”

“Everything I wrote, I meant.”

“Sure you did. But that dog’s not going to hunt.”

For a moment Mahoney rested his hand lightly on the girl’s knee. “We had some high times, now, didn’t we?”

“You’re a hell of a good time. Nobody would deny it.”

“Are you telling me we didn’t have some high ol’ times?”

The girl offered him a distressed smile. “Why would I tell you anything when you already know it all?”

Bruiser drove back down the river route. The sky had lowered over the river, which had turned the colour of lead. Reaching across the armrest, Bruiser took the girl’s hand. It covered her own like a tarantula clutching a cat’s eye marble. She patted his hand with her free one, the way you’d stroke a tame animal: a toothless old bear maybe, the ones that rode tricycles in Russian circuses.

Mahoney appeared aggravated with this treatment; the tenderness of it, I figured. Or maybe the fact she stroked his hand as a mother would stroke her child’s? He tore his hand away and punched the roof.

The girl’s laugh said she’d seen this song and dance before. She turned to us and said, “Big Bruiser maaaad ! Bruiser make heap big thunder!”

“Don’t encourage her, please,” Bruiser told us as we laughed. He sucked on his skinned knuckles and said, “If you encourage her she’ll never grow up.”

The girl stuck out her tongue at him. “I grew up like a thief, didn’t I? Always out of your sight.”

He beheld her with reproachful eyes. “When did you get so cold, girl?”

She stared straight ahead at that. I got the sense it was some kind of act, in which she was playing the hard girl. It didn’t suit her, but she played it well enough.

We arrived at the house with the small fenced-in yard. The girl kissed Mahoney on the cheek.

“He’ll get you home safe,” she assured us. “You’re in good hands.”

When the girl left, it was as if she took some part of Bruiser Mahoney with her. Dunk and I watched in silence as he popped the glovebox and recovered a bottle of pills. He shook a few out and dry-swallowed them and jammed the bottle into one of the many pockets of his coat. Then he drove on. The only sounds were the loose muffler rattling against the undercarriage and the muted clink of bottles.

“Ah, Jesus,” Mahoney said hoarsely, mopping his brow as a man with a high fever might. “Ah, Jesus, Jesus.”

Dunk leaned forward to touch Mahoney’s slouched shoulder. Mahoney flinched.

“God damn it.” He unrolled the window, cleared his throat and spat. “I’m not perfect. Never claimed to be. Made mistakes — who hasn’t? Look at you two. Your fathers get in some silly brawl and let a monstrous stranger walk away with their kids. That’s good parenting? Smelling like damn cookies, the pair of them. What in hell’s that about?”

“They work at a cookie factory,” I said.

Mahoney’s head rocked back on the stump of his neck. Maybe he was picturing it as I once had: a tree full of lumpen cookie-making elves, like in the commercials.

“I bet your dads have never taken you camping, have they?”

Dunk said: “We went to a cottage once.”

“Great galloping goose shit!” Mahoney said. He pawed through the case for a fresh beer, opened it and swigged deeply. It clearly rejuvenated him. “Never gone on a camp-out? A couple of fine nellies you’ll turn into.”

“What’s a nelly?” Dunk said.

“A pansy. A goddamn bed-wetter! That tears it — I’m taking you boys to the woods. It’ll put some bark on your trees!”

We pulled onto the highway. Mahoney fled down the two-lane stretch, hair whipping round his head like snakes from the wind through the window. His face crept closer to the windshield; he crouched over the wheel, and I imagined him squinting at the yellow broken lines blurring under the hood.