Craig Davidson - Cataract City

A police car fled past in the opposite lane, lights ablaze and sirens blaring. When it was gone Mahoney laughed, a creaky-hinge sound.

In some dimmed chamber of my heart I realized I ought to be terrified. Yet I wasn’t. Dunk grinned into the wind that screamed through the van, tugging at his clothes and stirring the drifts of soda cans behind us.

“Ever pitched a tent, boys?” said Mahoney.

Dunk said: “Never!”

“Ever baited a trap?”

“We lit a one-match fire in Cubs.”

Mahoney snorted. “Your fathers should be bloody ashamed of themselves.” He wrenched the wheel. We were off the main road — off pavement entirely — bouncing down a rutted dirt path. Long grass glowed whitely in the headlamps. I may’ve seen lights burning in the distance, the lights of an isolated farmhouse maybe, but soon those vanished.

We drove over the crest of some empty land, very flat, the path running as straight as a yardstick, and then came a stand of apple trees hung with winter-withered fruit that shone like nickels at the bottom of a well. Next came pine trees that dropped and kept on dropping. I was sure the van would rattle to pieces. My teeth chattered in my mouth. Bushes whacked up under the frame.

Mahoney remained hunched over the wheel, his face lit up by the dashboard’s greenish glow. “Now we’re getting somewhere.” His voice possessed the mad certainty that the leaders of doomed polar expeditions must have held.

The path kept eroding. Soon it was only the phantom of a road; the woods loomed. Stones pinged off the frame. Branches yawned over the trail, raking the windows like skeletal fingers.

The van hit a lip. Metal shrieked as we bottomed out. I was thrown forward, shoulder striking the passenger seat before I slumped to the floor, dazed. Dunk helped me back onto the seat.

“Buckle your seat belt, man.”

But we weren’t moving anymore. Mahoney mashed the gas pedal, snarling through skinned-back lips. The wheels spun until the sound of smoking rubber reached the pitch of a gut-shot animal. Steam boiled from under the hood. Mahoney climbed out, stumbled in front of the headlights to survey the damage.

“We’re here,” he said, as if this had been our destination all along. He popped the van’s back doors and flung out an army surplus tent, a blackened cooking grill, sleeping bags.

“You boys find some firewood,” he said merrily. “Beat the ground in front of you, though — snakes out at this hour.”

We explored the clearing that fringed the woods.

“Wait!” Mahoney called us back, removing a collapsible Buck knife from his pocket. After considering us at length, he handed it to Dunk. “Just in case,” he said.

“I already got one,” Dunk said, showing Mahoney the Swiss Army knife he always carried.

Mahoney pressed his knife into my palm. Warm from his flesh, the brass fittings greased with sweat.

We picked our way through the trees searching for sticks. An owl nested on a low branch, eyes shining like lanterns. The darkness of Dunk’s hair blended with the blackness under the trees; he seemed as much a part of this wilderness as the owl. I fit my thumbnail into the groove on the Buck knife and pulled it open. The blade clicked smoothly into place — I could smell the oil in the mechanism. Moonlight played off the tiny hairline abrasions along the blade where Mahoney must’ve sharpened it on a whetstone.

When we returned from our mission Bruiser Mahoney was sitting cross-legged, assembling a tent in the van’s headlights. One of the tent poles was bent at a broken-backed angle in his huge hands. Growling, he flung it into the bushes.

“Goddamn Tinkertoys.”

He managed to get one tent up before the van’s battery conked out. We built a ring of rocks and heaped wood inside. Mahoney doused the sticks with turpentine and lit a match.

“Phwoar!” he cried as the flames roared up.

Sap hissed and knots popped in the burning wood. Mahoney reached for a beer but the case was empty. He stood up the way a baby does — hands braced in front of him, walking his heels up to meet them — and shuffled to the edge of the woods. He pissed for a minor eternity — his urine sounded heavy , as if threaded with molten lead; I imagined it flattening the weeds and snapping twigs. His body swung around and he returned to the van, hunting through it. He sat back down with a bottle of white liquor and a big silver handgun.

“I won it in a bet,” he said. “Or I lost a bet and had to take possession of it. I forget now. We might need it tonight.”

“Why?” I asked.

“You think we’re the only creatures out here?”

As the night wore on, Mahoney was coming to resemble an animal himself. I peered through the flames at this shaggy man-beast fumbling with a loaded pistol. He looked like a bear trying to play the piano. The cylinder popped open. Bullets fell into his lap. He pinched them between his fingers and thumbed them back into their holes, then took crooked aim at the trees.

“Bang,” he whispered.

He handed me the bottle. When I hesitated he said: “Your father never gave you a belt of rum? It’s pirate medicine, son.”

Whatever was in the bottle blistered my throat. I coughed convulsively and would’ve puked but there was nothing in my stomach.

Dunk took the bottle. Not only did he keep it down, he took another sip.

“It does taste like medicine,” Dunk said.

“When I was your age I believed totally in the power of medicine,” said Mahoney. “One time my grandfather was coughing. I gave him a cough drop. My grandfather had lung cancer. By the end he was hacking up spongy pink bits.”

“Teach me to wrestle,” Dunk said.

“A fucking cough drop … What?”

“To wrestle,” Dunk said. “Teach me.”

“Why? You want to grow up to be like me?”

“I do.”

Mahoney sucked at the bottle and then wiped the shine off his lips. His teeth were the colour of old bone in the firelight.

“Up, then!” he cried. “Stand and fight!”

He leapt across the flames and landed nimbly. Dunk was crab-walking away on his palms and heels. Mahoney hauled him up with no more effort or regard than a man lifting a sack of laundry.

“Lock up,” he snarled, setting himself in a wrestling pose. “Damn you, you wanted to learn so lock up with me!”

Mahoney got down on his knees. He grabbed Dunk’s hands and slapped one on the back of his neck and the other on his shoulder.

“Like that,” he said, settling his hands on Dunk’s own neck and shoulder. “You control the other man this way, see? Now control my head.”

The muscles flexed down Dunk’s arm. Mahoney’s head sat on his neck like a tree stump, moving nowhere. Dunk linked his fingers around the back of Mahoney’s neck, screwed his heels into the ground and pulled as hard as he could.

“Has a butterfly settled on me?” Mahoney asked acidly.

“Owe,” Dunk said, his face contorted with effort, “ help .”

I wrapped my arms around Mahoney’s bull neck. He wore the same aftershave my father did, the one with the blue ship on the bottle. The hairs on the back of his neck were as soft as the white spores on a dandelion before they blow away in the wind.

Mahoney said: “You’re huuuurting meeee …”

His hands shot up, grabbing a fistful of our shirts. He pushed us backwards and we landed hard on our asses and elbows.

“Oldest trick in the book,” he said, whapping dirt off his knees. “Never trust the wounded dog, boys.”

Dunk’s elbow was torn open, blood trickling to his wrist. His hands flexed into fists at his sides. Mahoney was by the fire, bent over his bottle. When he stood up Dunk was right there.

“What?” Mahoney said.