Craig Davidson - Cataract City

“Come on, kid. You’re liable to blow your hand off.”

Dunk kept the barrel squarely on him. His hands didn’t shake. The safety was on. I reached over and flicked it off.

“Cock it,” I said.

Dunk thumbed the hammer back. The man gave me a look to melt bones.

“Listen, you want me to get you out of here? Take you home? I can, okay? I know the way. All that before? I was just blowing off steam. You think I was going to leave you out here? What kind of guy would I be if I did that?”

Dunk said: “A fucking psycho hiding in the woods.”

The man worked his jaw side to side, grinding his molars to dust.

“Right. Which I’m not . So just hand it over and we can get going …”

He reached across the fire, fingers closing in on the gun. Dunk raised the barrel until it pointed at the man’s head. I figure it must’ve been like peering into a very deep, dark tunnel.

The man’s eyes rolled up to the top of his skull, oriented on the spot on his forehead where the bullet would drive in. He fidgeted, and I was convinced he’d lunge. I was equally convinced Dunk would shoot him. The man realized that, too. He’d caught that unwavering something in Dunk’s eyes.

“Here’s the difference between a knife and a gun,” the man said. “A gun has many working parts that can jam up or misfire. A knife is foolproof. In tight quarters you get one chance with a gun. A knife … well, a knife can go as long as you’ve got strength to stick it in, right? A gun’s for cowards. A knife’s up close. Blood running down your knuckles. And if you get shot with a gun, you die. It’s quick. With a knife, the pain goes on and on and on. With a gun you die once. With a knife you die a thousand times.”

Dunk said: “I really don’t give a shit how many times you die, so long as you’re dead.”

The man shook his head. He put the beans back in his pack. Uncrossed his legs. I watched for his calves to tense, any sign he’d spring.

“You boys have lost a chance to make a lifelong friend and benefactor.”

“We’re kids,” said Dunk. “We’ll make more friends.”

The man withdrew his knife from the fire and stood up. “You’re never getting out of here. You know that, don’t you? You little fucks are going to die . Die without your parents and friends. With shit in your pants and your tongues sticking out like clowns. Alone . By the time anyone finds you the birds will have pecked out your eyes. Maggots overflowing your bust-open bellies. And me? I’ll be laughing like a bastard … Well, toodles.”

He picked his way down the slope gingerly, knife tip weaving a faint orange trail through the darkness.

Dunk held the pistol for hours, pointed out into the night. His shoulders must have ached. His wrists surely must have seized up. But he never put it down. The barrel never even dipped.

It rained overnight. It began as a sing-sing pattering on the leaves and rocks, moon-whitened needles falling like shards of starlight. By the time a grey dawn washed over the hillsides it was sheeting down. Thunderheads crowded the steely sky; every now and then a giant flashbulb would go off inside one of them, turning them translucent like tadpoles and showing the swirling purple-silver nimbus within. We edged under the overhang and drank the water that collected in our cupped palms.

The forest spooled out in the misty-hazy morning, spruces and pines holding a blue tint. The downfall had doused the fire. We sat shivering.

My hunger had fled overnight. All that was left was a dull gnawing in the bowl of my belly. My stomach was eating itself, I figured, or the nearby organs. I pictured a toothy split opening in my stomach as it devoured my liver, pancreas, spleen. Maybe that was why starving people had swollen bellies: their stomachs had eaten everything else inside them. The thought made me laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Dunk said.

“Nothing,” I said, because in fact there was nothing funny about starving to death.

I must have closed my eyes — that, or my consciousness was stolen away for a few minutes — because when I snapped to, Dunk was staring at a spider’s web in the corner of the cave. A grasshopper was caught in it. Its body was the green of a twig snapped off a healthy tree. Each time it thrashed, another part of it got glued to the web. The sticky threads vibrated like guitar strings.

A spider exited a hole in the cave wall. Its legs came first, flicking tentatively before spreading out like the metal ribs of an umbrella opening. It was as black as an oil bead, with red bell-shaped shadings. It picked its way down the web, walking upside down on a single strand before reaching the heart of the web where it spread its legs further. The grasshopper flung itself around madly. The spider paused as if in wonderment at the bounty it had been given.

We watched silently, hunched close, Dunk’s head cocked, chin balanced on his fist. It didn’t enter our minds to save the grasshopper. We would never have thought of kicking a dog or tossing firecrackers at a tomcat, but we watched nature in all its fascinating forms — as boys should watch, I think now, unapologetically, a right and ritual of childhood.

The spider raised its front legs like a bucking horse, then clambered nimbly over the grasshopper’s head and sank its fangs into one convex eye. Its thorax pulsed as it pumped in venom. The grasshopper went still. Next the spider was log-rolling the grasshopper, spinning its body rapidly, cocooning it in gossamer.

“Sucks to be him,” Dunk said softly.

My heart pounded behind my eyes, each beat a miniature earthquake. I phased in and out of consciousness, sometimes rocking forward and other times snapping out of a dream state where the world was not so much different than this one, just slightly warmer and safer.

Eventually, the sun fought through heavy clouds to speckle the valley with light that pricked my eyeballs. I nodded my head at the world outside our cave. “We should try,” I said.

“Okay,” Dunk said docilely.

He set the gun’s safety and snugged it in his pocket. The baby bird was sitting on his lap. It was still alive, breathing shallowly inside the rag.

The smell of sweet potato seeped out of the earth, which was raw and cold and flushed green from the rain. A curtain of mist was strung across the horizon. I inhaled the heavy musk of a deer’s scat, rich with whatever it had digested. Worst of all I smelled Dunk and myself: sweat, sickness and desperation.

We came to a forest of tall pines through which the light slanted in dusty beams like rays falling through the stained-glass windows of an old cathedral. The ground was carpeted in layers of brown needles; it felt like walking on a horsehair mattress. At one point Dunk turned to me, distressed. He held his empty palm out, the one not carrying the bird.

“My knife,” he said. “It’s gone. It was in my pocket and now it’s not.”

He walked in a circle, lead foot stabbing out as though he was going to set off in one direction, then stepping back in, his free hand hitching at the loose hem of his jeans without seeming to realize it, round and round in a circle.

“It’s okay, Dunk. How long do you think since you lost it?”

“I don’t know,” he said, staring at me as though I was a stranger — but no, it wasn’t that: he was just stunned, the way I was the time Sam Bovine accidentally kicked a soccer ball into my face. “I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know .”

“It’s okay, okay? Want to go back and look for it?”

“My dad gave me that knife — not for Christmas, Owe, not for a birthday, just gave it to me. I don’t get things just ’cause , man. He’s going to kill me.”