Craig Davidson - Cataract City

Dunk showed Mahoney his elbow. Not for sympathy, just so the man could see what he’d done.

“Sorry about that,” Bruiser said. “Let’s patch it up.”

Mahoney found a box of Band-Aids in the glovebox and stuck one on Dunk’s elbow. He took the bottle of pills from his pocket, shook a quartet into his palm and chased them with rum.

“That’s wrestling, boys. Want to see what it earns you?” He rolled his trouser up past his knee. “I always wear tights in the ring. Now you see why.”

His kneecap was shattered. The two halves of it lay under his skin with one half twisted to one side, the other sunk beneath his knee joint. It looked like a lunar landing photo. The cratered surface of the moon.

“A steel chair. Whappo . Some kind of no-holds-barred contest. The promoter didn’t bother explaining it too well. He was drunk. Anyway, so was I. The guy who chair-shotted me, the Sandman, he was drunk too. I heard the bone crack. Sounded like a starter’s pistol— pow !” Mahoney shook his head. “That was Texas. Never wrestle in Texas, boyos.”

He ran his hands through his hair, parting the dark locks. A scar ran across the top of his skull. Pink, ribbed and shockingly thick — it looked like a garter snake frozen under his scalp.

“Razorwire,” he said. “Some kind of crazy thing in Japan. Opened me up to the bone. Blood pissing all over the mat. That’s how they like it over there. Messy . I kept wrestling. The both of us greasy with blood. I passed out. Came to in the emergency room with a sweet slant-eyed nurse stitching my head up.”

Everywhere Mahoney had gone left a mark on him. The most crucial testament of his perfection — the fact that he’d come from outside of Cataract City, the great unknown where perfection was still a possibility — was the very thing that had ruined him.

Dunk said: “Did your dad teach you to wrestle?”

“My dad was a great man,” Mahoney said. “A beast ! When I was a boy he’d pinch my shoulders and say, ‘Look at those tiny trapezius muscles of yours — they’re mousetraps! You should have bear traps like mine! And your neck’s thin as a stack of dimes — what use is a man who can’t even support the weight of his own skull?’ I was a small boy. Sickly. Born premature. Not much bigger than a kaiser roll, my mother said. She hardly realized I’d come out.

“I got picked on as a boy. Yes! After school I’d make it home a few steps ahead of my tormentors and hide. Then my dad would come home. He was a butcher. His days spent quartering hogs. He’d drag me outside to face the other boys. But before that he’d wad up his apron, still wet with pig blood, and stuff it in my face. ‘Smell it!’ he’d say. ‘It should make you crazy ! A mad dog !’ And so I went out with my face smeared with blood and I’d fight. It made me a better man, and I think every boy should … Did you … Did you …?”

Mahoney was peering into the trees. He closed one eye like he was peering through a magnifying glass, then reared back as if he’d sniffed something foul.

“Did you see that?”

Dunk looked. I looked. There was nothing.

“What is it?” said Dunk.

“I … I can’t quite say. But do you know who’s out there?” He screwed his palms into his eye sockets and blinked furiously. “Every manner of psycho and degenerate. Where do you go when polite society rejects you? The woods . Eating skunks, biding your time, waiting for your opportunity.”

Mahoney worked his jaw. The interlocking bones clicked beneath his ear. He scrounged the gun out of his jacket pocket. A log cracked in the fire. He wheeled about in a crazy circle, strafing the trees with the barrel.

“Who is it? Rotten-ass bastard, show yourself! I’ll plug one between your eyes!”

We cowered as the pistol swung on wild orbits. Mahoney drank and wiped his lips with the back of the hand gripping the gun.

“There’s no need for this.” His voice took on a pleading note. “Come sit by the fire. We can—”

A rustling arose beyond the trees and for an instant I swore a face materialized. White as milk apart from the lips, which were as red as blood from a freshly torn vein. Teeth filed to crude points. A ravenous ghoul stalking us from the darkness past the fire.

Mahoney howled—“ Reeeeaaaggh! ”—and fired. Flame spat from the gun to illuminate the fear-twisted contours of his face.

“Weasels,” he snarled. “Cowardly punks.” He raked his fingernails down his cheeks. “Think they can dog me out like that? You let a man dog you even once and he’ll dog you until your last breath! Come on, boys.”

“Where?” said Dunk.

Mahoney pointed to the trees.

Years later I’d wonder if it could possibly have happened as I remembered it.

The woods were black and cold, but not as cold as they would become later. I recall a lack of friction between my body and the things surrounding it — the trees, the spongelike quality of the topsoil — as if I was floating. I remember thinking I was in a place where none of my daily habits carried any impact. I tried to picture my bedroom with the wallpaper my father had put up: a panorama of the earth, small and bright and blue-white as photographed from the moon.

I slipped my finger through Dunk’s belt loop, anchoring him to me. The long muscle that ran up Dunk’s shoulder and neck to his hairline quivered with a nervous, tentative strength. Prickberry bushes tore gashes in my arms. The pain and adrenaline came together in my legs and fingers and head: a cool tingling under my skin, a hot buzz in my skull.

Bruiser Mahoney stalked ahead of us, a huge rumpled shape barely distinguishable from the darkness. He followed the silver finger of the gun barrel, his breath filling the space under the leaves. When he coughed the sound was that of an old refrigerator shutting down, the ancient tubes and fittings rattling against one another.

A serrated leaf feathered my cheek. I brushed it aside, startled by the whiteness of my fingers in the night, then walked through a spider’s web strung between two saplings. The gossamer snapped over my lips and eyelids and for an instant I felt the hollow weight of a spider against my throat, but by the time I’d gathered my breath to scream it was gone, rappelling down my shirt.

“Take heart, lads,” Mahoney whispered. “Fortune favours the brave.”

My eyes adjusted. The woods took shape. Trees rose out of the black loam of the forest floor, bark covered in frost that glittered like pulverized salt. Streamers of fog snaked along the ground; I tasted the mineral wetness of it in the back of my mouth. We made no noise at all — even Mahoney, whose grace had otherwise deserted him — our feet sliding silently over the moist leafless earth.

“Wolverines out here,” said Mahoney. “A wolverine gets hungry enough, it’ll creep into your tent and eat your face off. Wolves, too.”

As soon as he said that, I saw them: hunched shapes moving between the trees, much bigger than dogs, white-tipped fur bristling along their spines. Their smell rode the breeze, the stink of meat rotting between their fangs. My fingers tightened in Dunk’s belt loop, which I guess made me a pussy but I was too freaked to care.

A stealthy clawing kicked up behind us. Mahoney whirled and fired. I fell to my knees, ears covered against the thunder. There was blood on Mahoney’s cheek where the gun’s hammer had gouged his flesh.

“It flanked round behind us, the sneaky bugger.”

Mahoney trudged off in the direction of his gunfire. We found him bent over a small broken shape. Blood shone in a pool round its spike-shaped head.

“A coon.” Mahoney laughed without mirth. “We’ve been chasing a damn raccoon.”