Craig Davidson - Cataract City

My room was pretty much as I’d left it. The poster on the wall of Bruiser Mahoney was yellowed and curling at its edges, but the sheets on my bed were fresh.

I knelt at the closet door as I’d done so many times as a boy and peeled back a flap of carpeting. Pried up the loose floorboard and took out the cigar box my father had given me: Sancho Panza , it said. My dad had passed it around the waiting room after my birth, back when smoking in hospitals wasn’t a crime.

I sat on the floor cross-legged, opened the lid and pulled out an old Polaroid: Me and Owe and Bruiser Mahoney, snapped in the change room of the Memorial Arena. I turned it over, read the words on the back.

To Duncan and Dutchie, two warriors in the Bruiser Mahoney armada. Yours, BM .

I lifted out the box’s final item. It had remained in my backpack next to my hospital bed when I was twelve. Nobody had bothered to poke through the pack: not the cops, not my folks, nobody. When my parents drove me home from the hospital I’d placed the item in the box under the floorboards, where it’d sat now for … how long? Over twenty years.

The silver finish was tarnished but the weight was true. I cracked the cylinder, spun it, spellbound by the perfect coin of light that glinted through each empty chamber.

After dropping Duncan at his folks’ house, I drove south, stopping at a lookout a few miles upriver from the Falls. A spit of land arrowed into the river; the ground closest to shore was overhung with willows whose ripening buds perfumed the evening air. In the summer families would colonize the picnic tables, stoking fires in old tire rims, grilling tube steaks and corn on the cob. Children would splash in the river under the watchful gaze of their folks; the wild boys who swam from the shallows would earn a cuff on the ear from their fathers — the Niagara turned black and snaky twenty yards from shore, and the river basin was littered with the bones of men and boys who’d pitted their will against it.

Was this where Bruiser Mahoney had regaled us with the tale of Giant Kichi? If not, Dunk and I had surely been here before. As boys, we’d investigated every crest and dip in this city. No place was unknown to us.

I remembered the still pools behind the gutted warehouses on Stillwell Road teeming with bullfrogs — Dunk and I would watch tadpoles push themselves out of translucent egg sacs, their iridescent bodies glittering like fish scales. Bizarre to realize that a creature so large, carbuncled and fucking ugly could begin its life so tiny, so radiant.

The oxbow lake we visited must be west of here, but its exact location was lost to me now … it struck me that a man inevitably surrenders his boyhood sense of direction, as if it were a necessary toll of adulthood. Boys weren’t dependent on atlases or cross streets — a boy’s interests lay off the city grid, his world unmapped by cartographers. Boys navigated by primitive means, their compass points determined by scent and taste and touch and sense-memory, an unsophisticated yet terribly precise method of echolocation.

If I couldn’t find that oxbow now, I could still remember how afternoon sunshine would fill the slack water, which was bathwater-warm on high August afternoons. A car was submerged at the bottom of the lake; local legend held it was haunted: its occupants, a family from out of town, had been driving through a snowstorm and crashed through the ice. In the schoolyard it was whispered that at the stroke of midnight, three apparitions would hover over the water: the car’s damned occupants, who were rumoured to have been atheists — a filthy word in Cataract City — and probably vegetarians to boot. Having never received a godly Christian burial, their forlorn ghosts were damned to haunt the lake.

There was the starlit field behind Land of Oceans, a marine mammal park where the corpses of whales and sea lions and dolphins were heaped into mass graves. One night Dunk and I hopped the chain-link fence and kicked through dry scrub to the graveyard, finding nothing untoward apart from the smell wafting from the ground, earthy and fungal like certain exotic cheeses you couldn’t buy at the local Pack N’ Save . Duncan led us up what we both believed to be an isolated hummock until we were perched perilously at its lip, staring into a hole. At the bottom, curled like a smelt in a bowl, was Peetka, the performing bottlenose dolphin. Her body was stiffening with rigor mortis — I’d imagined the sly creak of floorboards in an abandoned house — a bloody hole in her head eight inches from the crusted blowhole where a veterinarian had excised a twitching nugget of brain. A dusting of quicklime ate into the milky blue of her eyes. When headlights bloomed over the curve of the earth we’d fled into the long grass, blood booming in our ears, not stopping until we were in the sheltering woods, where we’d collapsed in hysterical, adrenalized giggles — the only way to dispel that terrible pressure.

The two of us had barely spoken on the ride home from prison. My eyes kept skating off Dunk. Prison had reduced him in some unfathomable way. You wouldn’t know to look at him — he was freakishly muscular, a condom stuffed with walnuts — but a distance had settled into his eyes. He’d been banged up eight years. Ten percent of the average human lifespan. Ten percent he’d never reclaim. Ten percent that I’d stolen from him?

I drove back to the Niagara Parkway, swinging around the city hub and turning onto Sodom Road, motoring between grape fields in the alluvial shadow of the escarpment. My department-issued.38 dug under my armpit. I’d carved an X into the soft lead of each bullet, fashioning dumdum rounds. A year ago I’d barrelled through the cheap pressboard door in a lowrise apartment off Kaler to find some fucko smashed on bath salts pressing a carpet knife to his girlfriend’s neck. I shot him three times — textbook centre of mass, a neat isosceles in his chest — yet he’d still managed to nearly saw her head off. From then on I told myself I’d have stopping power, whether or not the department condoned it.

I pulled into a weedy cut-off. The land rolled away from me in swathes of deepening darkness; I spotted a trembling finger of flame burning someplace in the trees. I’d been here before — this exact spot, always at night. Some nights I’d lie in bed listening to my fingernails grow until I couldn’t stand the sound, then get up and drive through the heart of Cataract City. Past the Memorial Arena and down Clifton Hill, skirting the Falls that threw up their endless spray. I didn’t need that primitive boyhood sonar to guide me anymore.

Presently I stepped from the car and flexed my knee; it always throbbed in the springtime and lately it’d been acting up in the winter, too. The clean smell of the forest: cut-potato scent of earth, dry leaves leaving a taste of cinnamon on the tongue.

“Home again, home again, jiggedy jig.”

The wind curled under my trouser cuffs. Worried for no reason I could pinpoint, I glanced over my shoulder and saw the distant glimmer of Clifton Hill. The city makes you; in a million little ways it makes you, and you can’t unmake yourself from it.

When I was twelve I spent three nights in these woods with my best friend — Duncan Diggs. It wasn’t that we were assing around after dark and got waylaid far from our safe streetlit world — lost someplace in the lovely woods, dark and deep, like Frost wrote in that old poem. We were kidnapped: that’s what the papers would write and that was what happened, strictly speaking. But it didn’t feel that way. The man who did it … looking back, I can say he was thoughtless. His actions put us in danger; we could’ve died. But I wouldn’t say he was evil. He was just broken in the way some men can become broken, and failed to see how it might also break those around him.