Craig Davidson - Cataract City

“It happens when they start racing,” Harry told me. “Buy a bottle of Tuf-Foot — it’ll harden them right up.” And he suggested I take her to the vet.

When the vet instructed me to help Dolly onto the examining table, she buried her snout into the soft spot between my clavicle and neck. Her breath had the ironlike tang of raw liver, which I took to be the smell of pure animal fear. She shook when the vet flushed her paw with peroxide, but she didn’t nip — just beheld him with tragic, injured eyes.

The Tuf-Foot worked. Dolly never had that problem again. But I was worried, and that worry never did go away.

Every time Dolly raced she’d enter the zone, the same as Owe did on a basketball court. And like he said, human beings aren’t meant to exist there for too long. Why should dogs be any different?

But it was Dolly’s element, you know? Blazing down the track so fast her skin must’ve screamed. She was happiest there.

Owe and I became fixtures around the kennels. We’d help Harry sweep out the cages and dole out kibble. There was a fair amount of turd collection, too — it required a wheelbarrow and a shovel. In return, Dolly and Frag got to run with the others. They’re group animals, greyhounds; they do best in a pack.

Sometimes Harry let them rip around the oval. Frag was a scrubber — damn those sidewinder legs. Still, that dog loved to run. Dolly was something else. She had the gift, Harry said. But after seeing her almost self-destruct in that first test against Trixy, I worried a little about racing her seriously — and anyhow, I couldn’t legally register as her owner until I was nineteen, since Derby Lane was a wagering circuit.

This was how Ed fell back into our lives, too — fell into Owe’s life, specifically. Something kindled between them. I don’t know how it began, but by the time I found out, it was blazing hot.

One night I came off the track into the Winning Ticket Lounge. It was empty, but I heard soft noises from the coatroom. I walked over expecting to find the janitor. Instead, Owe and Ed were pawing each other in the gloom. Owe was taller by then; his shoulders jingle-jangled on the empty hangers, a strangely musical sound. His hands cupped Ed’s breasts forcefully, pressing her up against the plywood wall. Ed’s eyes were closed and her hands were clenched in Owe’s hair and her tongue was in his mouth.

A gutshot feeling rocked me as I turned away soundlessly. I’d thought that, if anything, Ed was more suitable for me. Our families still lived on the same block. Our ambitions seemed more in keeping … But what the hell did I know of Ed’s ambitions? I felt like a creep, catching them. It reminded me of the night we’d spied on Ed in the bath with Tim Railsback.

But I couldn’t help thinking: Hadn’t Owe already had enough goddamn good luck in his life?

“You’re a good kisser,” I heard Ed say in a husky voice.

Owe laughed, breathless. “Beginner’s luck?”

When they came back outside I saw different things. In Ed I saw something more than simple lust. I got the sense that she had scared herself — as if she wanted to reach for Owe’s hand but didn’t quite dare.

Owe looked bemused. As if he was thinking: Hey, that was pretty cool. Wouldn’t mind doing that again if I had a chance .

One day, when Ed left us at the track to go to her job, we followed.

This was almost a year after I’d seen her and Owe in the coatroom. Owe was in the midst of his breakout basketball season. The two of them weren’t dating, exactly — I don’t know who was keeping who at arm’s length, but I suspected it was Ed keeping Owe at bay. Or maybe I just wanted to believe that.

She was working part-time at the Bisk. Ritz line. But she also worked at a bar. She wouldn’t tell us which one. So one night Owe and I followed her.

“Why bother?” I’d asked him earlier.

“She thinks we’re kids, Dunk. Screw that! I say we go cadge drinks off her.”

We followed her in Owe’s father’s car, a late-model Olds. Ed’s Mercury Topaz went down Rickard to Ellesmere, turning left up Stanley to Lundy’s Lane. The night was cool with the smell of creosote and the hum of crickets.

She pulled in at the Sundowner. She wore jeans ripped at the knee and an oversized Flashdance sweatshirt. She went in through a black door set into a dingy brick wall.

“Huh” was all Owe said.

The bouncer was a huge black man with a greying goatee. Seeing Owe, he mimed shooting a jump-shot. “You’re that boy with the sweet shot, am I right?” He ushered us inside without ID’ing us.

The Sundowner existed in a purplish, glittering perma-twilight. Winking lights ran along the floor like the ones marking the edges of airport runways. The place was packed: well-heeled guys, construction workers, prowling sex tourists, college students nursing pitchers of twenty-dollar draft. An elevated stage swelled into a bulb, where a brass pole shone up to the ceiling. Half-naked women drifted around us like shimmery butterflies. I figured half the world’s supply of body glitter was concentrated right there.

We lucked into a stageside table just as two other guys were leaving. There was a pit in the middle of the table where a girl would dance if you paid. A DJ’s voice piped up: “Gentlemen, put your hands together for Shah-Shah-Shah- Shasta !”

The Scorpions’ “Rock You Like a Hurricane” blasted. A woman stepped through the tinsel curtain. She was gorgeous but clearly also drunk or stoned or both. She waggled her ass and stepped out of her bikini bottoms the way kids do: by yanking them down to her ankles and stomping until they came off. She strutted down the catwalk, skidded in her high heels, almost fell, didn’t fall, then tossed her hair around like a boat propeller. Her face was blank as a test pattern.

“Yeeeeeah!” someone went.

My mind spun: Ed might be the bartender, right? Or a waitress — and they didn’t take their clothes off, did they?

A girl sat between us. Cute and thin with boobs that didn’t belong on a frame her size, drinking a Corona through a bendy straw. “Wanna dance, sweetheart? Champagne room. Fifty bucks each.”

All I had in my wallet was seven dollars. I said, “You’re very pretty, but—”

“Stow it,” she said. “It was a yes or no question.”

She pulled a cigarette out of her purse. It was five inches long and looked like it would take a year to smoke.

“Fucking hot in this sonofabitch,” she said, lighting it with a platinum Zippo. “I’m from the Sioux. Cooler up there.”

“I’ve heard it’s nice.”

“It’s a shithole. My ex is from the Sioux. He beat a man half to death with a skillet.” She batted her eyes, pixie-like. “A skillet , dude.”

The DJ said: “Gentlemen, put your hands together and welcome to the stage Dah-Dah-Dah- Disneeeeeeee !”

Edwina stepped through the tinsel. She knelt and placed her cigarettes and pack of Dentyne on the edge of the stage — would they have been stolen backstage, I wondered through my shock — and strutted down the stage with scissoring steps. The black lights shone on her legs, sleek as cobalt. She didn’t even see us. I’d heard what girls do at these places is pick a spot on the wall and focus on that. Who’d want to focus on all that desperate need howling up at them?

Owe laughed — a brittle, brutal sound. It stole above the sound of Springsteen’s “Hungry Hearts.”

Ed’s gaze snapped towards us. Her hands flew briefly to her mouth — then she hopped down nimbly, gave our ears vicious twists and marched us out.

“Fucking hell, Ed!” Owe said. “That hurts!”

The crowd catcalled as Ed bulled us through the club and out the front door. “You bastards !” she screamed, shoving us into the parking lot.