Craig Davidson - Cataract City

I showered, towelled off, lay in bed. The clean light of morning pulsed behind the curtains. Dolly hopped up, settled her head on my hip. Her heart beat hard, driving the blood through her veins.

Next week she’d race her first A-Class event. She was unbeaten in her career.

And there was a part of me that really hoped she’d lose.

You know when you’re driving on a hot day and there’s heat-shimmer on the road? As a kid you figure you’ll catch up to it if your folks drive fast enough. Eventually you realize it’s nothing that can be caught because it doesn’t stay put.

A greyhound … now a greyhound will chase that shimmer until its heart explodes, and right up to that very moment it will believe, with every atom of its being, that it’ll catch the thing.

They’re all muscle, greyhounds, all go fast muscle. Their legs are triple-jointed, and in full flight all twelve joints are at work: a smooth piston-like pump, pump, pump . Sometimes I figure it’s nothing but wind shear that keeps them on the ground, y’know? There is no other animal on earth whose skull looks more like it ought to be coming down the barrel of a gun.

Racing greyhounds have got a heart the size of a fist, double the size of a Labrador retriever’s. But they’ve also got heart in the fighter’s sense: a greyhound’s got the deepest bucket of any dog. They’ll run themselves to death if you let them, because that’s what they want to do — what they’ve been made for. But to be a real runner means you must be faster than anything else … which means you’ve got to be forever alone at the head of the pack.

When pure racers spring from the starting traps and hit the straightaway, some of them whine . They’re going so fast that you might mistake the sound of their bodies slicing through space for that of a low-flying jet.

A lot of people want a dog who is always happy to see them. Who’ll sit in their laps. But that’s not a fair hope with a greyhound. You’ve got an animal who is a Ferrari with a brick permanently weighting its gas pedal. The lives of greyhounds are all open stretches and endless horizons.

Of course, neither Owe nor me knew a thing about greyhounds when we found them. And it was a steep learning curve. I mean, Jesus, how would we have known about milking a puppy? That’s what the veterinarian called it: milking .

“They’ll have to accept milk that doesn’t come from their mother,” he told us as our puppies squirmed on his examination table. “They’re still whelps. You’ve got to feed them as their mother would.”

He sent us home with Esbilac, a formula especially for pups. Dolly needed constant feeding. I’d be up at four in the morning when she whined in the shoebox beside my bed. I’d pluck her from her cotton-batten nest, feed her until she burped, and fall asleep until she whined again.

“No eating my newspaper, no tearing up my carpet, no shitting on my floor” were the ground rules my dad laid out for the animal he called the Amazing Dumpster Dog.

I named her Dolly. My great-grandmother’s name. She’d come up from the South, Mom said, to marry a man she’d fallen in love with at a revival gathering. When that love faded she’d met my great-grandfather, ditched the other guy, remarried, and that love stuck fast.

“People didn’t get divorced back then,” Mom had told me. “Oh, god, it was the very mark of shame. But Dolly didn’t care. To hell with all that, she figured. It took guts.”

My Dolly had guts, too. She’d been ripped away from her own mom and chucked in a Dumpster. For a few terrifying days she couldn’t keep the Esbilac down and became so weak she couldn’t stand. One morning I came downstairs to see a pale blue box on the kitchen table; it had once held a Hummel figurine my father had bought for Mom on a whim.

“If the poor nipper goes,” Dad said, “we’ll bury her in that. Out in the backyard.”

Mom came downstairs, spotted the box and my wounded eyes.

“Jesus, Jerry. Do you have a brain rolling around in that thick head of yours?”

“What did I do?” my dad said, genuinely shocked. “It’s the nicest box we own.”

Fact is, Dad cared about that dog. He’d hunker over her shoebox cooing softly, same as he’d probably done with me in my cradle. Later on, when Dolly was ripping up his sneakers and his flowerbed, Dad was much less kind. “That goddamn mutt won’t see her first birthday!”

When she was only weeks old I got permission to bring Dolly to school. She lay in her shoebox beside my desk as I slogged through trig and chem. In shop class I sat her atop the tool caddy while rinsing crusty gunk out of ancient carburetors.

Nobody ragged me about bringing a puppy to school. I already had a rep as a rough ticket. I didn’t really enjoy fighting, but I wasn’t afraid of getting hit and dealt a hard lick. If anybody was making jokes about Duncan Diggs, Dog Boy of Westlane High, it was strictly behind my back.

Meanwhile, girls who had no clue I’d even existed were suddenly stopping by my desk to ogle Dolly. Even Francisca Bevins, head cheerleader and a shoo-in for the Total Bitch All-Stars, was charmed enough by the Amazing Dumpster Dog to pass the time of day with me.

The dogs brought Owen and me back together. I’m not saying that was my aim. But when I found those creatures in the Dumpster the first thought through my mind was: Owe .

Owe’s greyhound was a boy. He named it Fragrant Meat.

“It’s what they call dogs in Mongolia,” he told me. “The ones they eat. At the supermarket, that’s what they label it.”

“Why would you name him that?”

“A dog doesn’t know any different. Fragrant Meat. Shithead. Ass-licker. As long as you say it with kindness .”

It bothered me that Owe chose that name. Sure, the dog wouldn’t know, but wasn’t it disrespectful all the same? Owe eventually shortened it to Frag; he probably got sick of explaining it to people.

Frag developed a life-threatening kidney problem. One morning he stumbled into Owe’s bedroom disoriented, bumping into the walls. When Owe picked him up, Frag burped up warm, white foam.

“Frothy, same as a milk shake,” I remember him telling me.

For a few days it was touch and go. Puffy red rings were permanently fixed around Owe’s eyes. But Frag pulled through. The vet put him on a special diet; Frag had to guzzle a gallon of water a day to flush his kidneys.

We used to take our dogs on walks along the river or down in the valley of the escarpment — always keeping the road firmly in sight. We talked about tons of stuff. Girls, of course, but also our friends and whatever might be waiting for us out in the great wide world — the casual bullshit that makes up the bulk of all conversations.

The dogs brought us together when a lot of things could’ve pushed us apart. We went to different schools. In the summers I worked on the horticulture crew at Land of Oceans. Those same summers Owe was at basketball camps in the Carolinas, scrimmaging against future ACC and Big Ten recruits.

That’s an important part of this story, too: how Owen “Dutchie” Stuckey became known in Cataract City simply as Dutch. For a while people knew him by that one name, the way divas are known. Cher. Whitney. Dutch.

He earned the moniker for one simple reason: the boy was straight-up murder on a basketball court.

Before his talent blipped on the city’s radar screen, Owen was Dutchie. Little Dutchie Stuckey with his cowlicked hair, the joints of his limbs like knots in a rope. Then Dutchie shot up a full foot and began to drain twenty-seven-foot jumpers with a defender’s hand in his face. After that he was Dutch.