Craig Davidson - Cataract City

“You can leave with the ball,” I said evenly, “or you can leave with your teeth.”

Our dogs were barking at the commotion.

“Shut up, you fucking mutts,” Adam hissed.

I punched him in the gut and he fell back like he’d been pole-axed, dropping the ball. Clyde stepped in uncertainly and when I cocked my fist he flinched like the big marshmallow he was.

Owe collected the ball. Adam grabbed at his chicken-chest like an old woman clutching her pearls. A venomous look came into his eyes. He scrounged a nickel out of his pocket and flipped it onto the concrete.

“Take that home to your daddy,” he wheezed. “You two melt it down, win yourselves another Kub Kar Rally.”

The incident with the Kub Kars was years past — but because this was Cataract City, it may as well have happened yesterday. The city’s got a wet-sidewalk memory: press something into it and the impression remains forever.

Things were gearing towards a scuffle when Owe noticed Dolly had slipped her collar. It lay empty on the grass beside the bench. The park bordered the heavily trafficked Harvard Avenue. I knew greyhounds had zero road sense — most of them figured they could outrun a car.

I sprinted over the grass, shouting her name. “Dolly! Do-lly! ”

I ran down the sidewalk, dodging people, imagining every horrible outcome: she’d been hit by a car; she’d been attacked by another dog, a raccoon, a skunk; she’d been stolen by a dog-thieving prick in a white cube van.

I rounded the corner where Harvard met Brian Crescent and there Dolly was, cradled in the arms of Edwina Murphy.

“Lost something, Diggs?” she said, laughing as Dolly licked her chin. “She’s a quick little bitch. You ought to race her down at Derby Lane.”

Our mothers had a nickname for Edwina Murphy: the Jezebel.

Owe and I first got to know Edwina — everyone called her Ed — when she was fifteen, three years older than we were at the time. Owe’s folks hired her to babysit.

Ed lived down the street, in a house of boys. The Murphy brothers were known hellions; more than a few nights I’d wake to the light of police cherries washing my bedroom windows as one or more of the Murphy boys was dropped off or picked up.

Ed had some hellion in her, too, a wildness that reminded me of comic book vixens: Red Sonja, the Black Widow. Her long dark hair fell straight down and when the sun hit it right, it shone like a curved mirror. She swore like a dock worker and punched you on the shoulder to punctuate her sentences. Still, we thought of her as being different from her thuggish clan. She could be charming when it suited her.

Ed was almost criminally easygoing as a babysitter. Her rules were: No fighting, no drinking, no pills, no lighting fires. Other than that, open season. If Owe wanted Marshmallow Fluff for supper, Ed’s shoulders would lift and she’d say: “Going to rot your teeth out, hombre, but they’re your choppers.”

Sometimes when Owe’s folks were working late Ed would pick us up at school. We’d find her lounging against the flagpole sipping a bottle of Coca-Cola. The male teachers drank in greedy eyefuls of her, and her attitude suggested she didn’t blame them — looking was free, after all.

“Fine afternoon, isn’t it, Pete?” she’d say brightly as our grammar teacher hustled to his car. “It’s a hot, hot, slut-hot ol’ day.”

We’d walk home in the cooling afternoon, puppy-dogging Ed’s heels. She often stopped by Scholten’s Convenience on Abilene, rapping sharply on the back door with her knuckles. Mr. Scholten would slip her a carton of cigarettes, which she sold as singles to her classmates. Every city has hidden doors that require secret knocks. Ed knew a lot of doors. How had she learned the knocks? I knew better than to ask a magician how she did her tricks.

Ed smoked her own product, and her brand was the absolute worst : Export A, in the green deck. The Green Death.

“It’s my last one, boys. Promise,” she’d say.

“But you have another pack in your pocket,” Owe would insist. Ed would just smile.

I’d sleep over at Owe’s when Ed babysat. There was no such thing as a curfew. We could stay up until we heard the garage door rumble on its tracks, at which point we had to hotfoot it to bed and start sawing logs.

We’d watch the MuchMusic Top 2 °Countdown , hip-checking each other along to Twisted Sister and the Beastie Boys. We introduced Ed to the Baby Blue Movie. She declared it wimpy and flicked channels way up to the 100s, where the scrambled pornos played in a never-ending loop.

We watched the grainy broken images and listened to the goofy dialogue — Female: Are you the plumber? Male: That’s right, and I’ve got a biiig pipe to install —set to cheesy ohm-chaka guitar riffs. Every so often the picture came clear in reverse polarity: we’d see a silicone-pumped tit looking like the huge eye of a squid or a man’s face frozen under a blue-white glare, teeth shining like halogen track lights. I found it a lot less sexy than the Baby Blue Movie: the images spoke of adult lust, the desperate kind that took place in murky peep theatres. Ed seemed to sense this and switched back to the Baby Blue.

“That’s too harsh for you boys,” she said, levelling a finger at us. “Don’t watch it again. I’ll kick your asses if you do.”

It was hard to take her threats seriously. Ed literally wouldn’t hurt a fly: she used to catch bluebottles buzzing against the windows and let them free outside. Once she found a brown bat in the toilet — it must have flown in through the open window. She fished it out with her bare hands: its body the size of a peach stone, wings thin as crepe paper. She rested it on the picnic table in Owe’s backyard, under a shoebox propped up with a stick. The bat dragged itself to the table’s edge and flew off.

“I was sure it was a goner,” she said, then asked herself, “Could I have handled that?”

Then, one night, Ed demanded we go to sleep at our regular bedtime. “You best hit the sack, buckaroos,” she said, hooking her thumb upstairs.

Soon after, I heard the front door. Ed walked up the stairwell with Tim Railsback, her boyfriend. They went into the bathroom. The bathtub ran. We got out of bed, curious. The bathroom door was open a crack. To this day I wonder if Ed left it that way on purpose.

Ed and Tim were stripping naked. Steam rose from the tub the way mist rises off lawns on a summer morning. Their bodies were silked with sweat. Railsback was very tall; the top of Ed’s head rose to where his collarbones came together. Her body had none of the hardness I’d see in Elsa Lovegrove.

They sat in the water, Ed between Tim’s parted legs. A dull surge of jealousy washed through me. The knobs of Tim’s knees rose above the tub like whitened stadium domes. His hands moved over Ed’s body without settling anywhere. His expression held many things: sadness and queasy expectancy, regret, hopefulness.

“What is it?” Ed said.

“It’s just … it’s happening real fast.”

Ed laughed. “It’s okay, boy. We don’t need to do anything.”

Ed was the kind of girl who’d call grown men boys . Me and Owe stood trembling, our eyes shining in the doorway. Ed turned her head until her face met Tim’s. Something in her eyes said Don’t make me ask for it. Just tell me .

Tim said, “I love you.”

And he must have. Almost everyone who spent any time with Ed came to love her. It made her careless, the way people can be when such a hard-won thing is given over so effortlessly. But I think she loved him, too, at least in that moment. Ed needed a lot of love — but she’d give it, too.