Craig Davidson - Cataract City

The animal reeked of blood and piss. Its gums were already hardening, black lips drawn back from yellowed teeth. It looked like it had died very confused. Mahoney bent to pick it up by a hind leg. Back at the fire, he laid the dead animal down with reverence.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Who was he apologizing to, us or the raccoon?

“Hand me my knife,” he said.

Mahoney unfolded the blade and slid the point into the skin between its front legs and sawed down its belly. The raccoon opened up in the firelight.

“If you kill an animal and don’t eat it, you’re cursed forever. Earl Starblanket told me that. He was a pureblood Navajo who used to wrestle as Big Chief Jackdaw.”

Mahoney hacked through the gleaming knots of the creature’s insides. The smell was indescribable. I couldn’t imagine putting it in my mouth.

Dunk said, “ We didn’t kill it.”

Mahoney looked up sharply. His hands were black with blood. “We all did. We were a hunting party.”

Dunk shook his head. “Owe and me were just there.”

“That’s right, you were. You witnessed it. Do you want to put your mortal soul in jeopardy?”

Mahoney cut off a strip of meat. He gathered up the raccoon, holding its split body together the way a prim woman holds a purse, humped over to the trees and flung it away. He settled the metal grate over the coals and laid the meat down.

“You don’t eat much,” he said. “Just a bite or two, to honour the animal.”

The meat sizzled. Mahoney speared it with the tip of his knife and turned it over. His lips shone with drool. He crunched some more pills. When the meat was cooked he hacked it into steaming chunks.

“Eat it,” he said darkly.

It was burnt, which was a blessing: I assumed the taste of char was better than the taste of raccoon. Mahoney ate in silence, backhanding the juice that dribbled down his chin.

We lay in the grass. I was exhausted but couldn’t let myself fall asleep next to Bruiser Mahoney — cold snakes squirmed in my belly just thinking about it. The stars were bright in a way they never were in my suburb. The moon was perfectly halved, like a paper circle folded over. The sky so clear that I could see calligraphic threads on the moon’s surface.

“Did you know,” Mahoney said, “that the Russians sent dogs into space? My mother told me this when I was a boy. Nobody knew the effects of space on a body, you see, so they sent dogs first. They found two mongrels on the streets of Moscow. Pchelka, which means Little Bee, and Mushka, which means Little Fly. They went up in Sputnik 6. They were supposed to get into orbit and come right back. But the rockets misfired and shot them into space.

“Whenever I look at the night sky, I think about those dogs. Wearing these hand-stitched spacesuits, bright orange, with their paws sticking out. Big fishbowl helmets. How … crazy . Floating out and out into space. How bewildered they must have been. Freezing, starving, dying from oxygen deprivation. For what? They would have happily spent their days rummaging through trashcans.

“For all anyone knows those dogs are still out there. Two dead mongrels in a satellite. Two dog skeletons in silly spacesuits. Gleaming dog skulls inside fishbowl helmets. They’ll spin through the universe until they burn up in the atmosphere of an uncharted planet. Or get sucked into a black hole to be crushed into a ball of black matter no bigger than an ant turd.”

Bruiser Mahoney laughed. The sound sent a shiver through my gums. His laughter rolled out and out into the wilderness; the sound didn’t touch anything I could recognize or draw hope from.

“Who are you?” I asked — the most searching, most innocent question I’ve asked in my life.

Mahoney propped himself up on one elbow. His fingers were black with dried raccoon blood.

“What do you mean?” he asked, a child himself. When he caught the aim of my question his lips curled back from his teeth. “Am I not still your hero?” he said, deathly soft. “The mighty Bruiser Mahoney? Ooh , you’re a smart boy. You’ve figured me out, haven’t you? Unmasked me. Well then, I guess that makes this the hour of truth. Let’s lay all the cards on the table, hmm? Card one: I’m not Bruiser Mahoney. My name is Dade Rathburn. I was born in Orillia, Ontario. Before becoming a wrestler I was a janitor at a box factory. I’ve spent time in jail — once for beating a man half to death outside a bar, and once again for passing phony cheques. Mahoney? I don’t have a drop of Irish blood in me! I’m a fake, boys.” Coldness crept into his voice. “And I’ll slap down card number two: wrestling’s fake, too.”

Dunk made a helpless noise in his throat, like the tweet of a small bird.

“Oh, yessss,” Mahoney hissed. “Fake as a three-dollar bill! Fake as Sammy Davis Junior’s eye! The matches are bunko. I win because we draw it up that way. The punches and kicks don’t hurt — hell, most times we don’t even touch each other. It’s a big scam, and you bought into it.”

“You be quiet,” Dunk said. “You just shut up.”

Mahoney laughed in Dunk’s face.

“My opponent tonight, the Boogeyman? His name is Barry Schenk. Used to be a math teacher. Good guy. We head to the bar after our matches and have a laugh. We’re friends .”

Dunk twisted into a wretched ball. Mahoney’s expression softened abruptly. He reached out and put his fingers on Dunk’s shoulder. Dunk withdrew from his touch.

“I’m sorry, son,” Mahoney said. “You shouldn’t pay me any mind. I’m a drunk and a clown. You ever see an old clown, boys? No. Old clowns don’t die, though.”

He stood. His eyes shone like glass.

“Be like your fathers,” he said. “Work a solid job. Build a family. Smelling like a cookie’s a small price to pay for ordinary happiness.”

A hellish noise kicked up in the woods: a high gibbering shriek that tapered to an ongoing moan. Mahoney spun on his heel, pistol jerked high.

“God rot you! I’ll have your guts for garters!”

For the next several hours, until the sky lightened in the east, Mahoney blundered around in the forest. Every so often came the splintering of wood or a low animal bellow. Dunk and I lay together by the dying fire, dew silked to our skin.

At some point Mahoney emerged. His clothes were torn and mud-streaked, his face badly scratched and his hair stuck with burrs.

“Goddamn bastards … thought you had me but I outfoxed you … didn’t I, Daddy? Stinking of pig blood but I won. I won .”

He shambled over to the tent, which was much too small for him. His cowboy boots stuck out the flaps.

I rose with the sun scraping the treetops. I’d fallen asleep on my side and woke up tucked close to Dunk. He was sleeping still. His spine bowed with each breath, touching my stomach.

My arm was pins and needles. I flexed my fingers, which felt full of static. My mouth tasted of burnt meat. The clearing was washed in new sunlight. Nothing in the trees except a chipmunk nibbling on a nut. Dunk rolled onto his side, blinking at the sun.

“You okay?”

“I want to go home,” I told him simply.

He stood and stretched, catlike. We scratched our itchy bits and rubbed the dirt out of our hair.

I said: “Should we wake him up?”

“My dad doesn’t like to get up after he’s been drinking.”

“So what are we going to do?”

Dunk stared at the sky as if he could tell the time by where the sun sat. “Okay, let’s wake him up,” he said finally.

Bruiser Mahoney’s cowboy boots still jutted out of the tent. The toes were covered with muddy grass as if he’d been kicking holes in the earth. Dunk tapped one of them with his sneaker.