Craig Davidson - Cataract City

I saw tears in Owe’s eyes but it was hard to tell if they were from his laughter or from Ed’s fingers: she’d pinched my ear so hard that a line of blood trickled down my jaw.

“What the fuck, Lou?” she said to the bouncer. “You check ID or just stand there looking pretty?”

Lou held his hands up. “Boss wants numbers, baby. Butts in seats.”

She stood in the parking lot in a spangly G-string, a dental-floss bikini and teetery stripper heels. Tourists ambling down the strip stared pop-eyed.

“You little pricks . This your idea of fun?” She got right up in Owe’s face, chest thrust forward. “This what you came to see?”

Owe gripped Ed’s shoulders gently. It struck me as strange how high he loomed over her.

“Listen, I’m sorry. I just … you said you were a bartender.”

“I told you I worked at a bar ,” she said fiercely. “I didn’t lie.”

“I’m not saying you … I’m not angry, just surprised. You do whatever you want, Ed.”

I saw terror leech into Edwina’s eyes — she could tell Owe meant it. He really didn’t care.

“It’s a temporary thing.” The cups of her eyelids were brimming. I’d never known Ed to cry.

Owe lifted his hands off her shoulders, holding them up like he was being threatened at gunpoint.

“Ed, listen, I don’t know why you’re getting so upset. I’m sorry we came. That was wrong. I won’t do it again.”

“I just don’t want you to think …” She brushed a palm across her eyes, smearing her mascara. “The Bisk … layoffs, okay? I was lowest on the totem pole. A girlfriend of mine used to dance here. She said … What the fuck?” She hammered a fist into Owe’s chest. “Why do I have to explain it? I didn’t want you to know because …” She threw her hands down her body, a taa-daa motion. Her lips were pressed tight, her chin dimpled like a golf ball. “You know? It’s nothing. Doesn’t mean that I don’t …”

She looked at me with pleading hopefulness, as if I might know what to say. And I’d have done anything for her if I’d only known what she could possibly need.

“Ed, it’s cool,” Owe said. “It’s aaall cool, yeah? Me and Dunk are gonna go now. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

Her jaw went hard, like she was struggling not to say the word. But she did. “Promise?”

Afterwards Owe drove to Queenston, to a footbridge that arced out over the river. Clouds of midges gathered under the bridge lamps.

“It’s not such a big deal,” I said.

“Not really,” he agreed. “Did it surprise you all that much?”

“Sure it did.”

In time he said: “Okay, me too. But … did you see that scar on her stomach?”

I’d seen it. A twisting milky thread rising above the hem of her G-string like a cobra from a fakir’s basket.

“She had a kid a few years ago,” Owe said. “C-section.”

“She did? With who?”

“Not my business.”

I wondered if Ed had tried to make it his business, share that secret part with him. Maybe he’d told her not to bother. He’d have put it in gentle terms, but still he would’ve said it.

“She gave it up for adoption. Hasn’t seen the baby since.”

I said, “Does it matter?”

Owe’s blue eyes glittered like the moonlit water along the quay. “Does what matter?”

“That she had a kid. That she gave it up.”

“That’s her thing. Y’know, I just want what makes her happy. I’m out of here soon,” he said. “Scholarship offers pouring in. Once I sit down with Coach and make that choice, I’m gone. A vapour trail. Hasta la vista , Cataract City. Ed’s smarter than you and me put together, Dunk.”

It was true. But even back then I knew that intelligence and hope run on different rails. Ed was a relic of Owe’s old life: back when he was Dutchie, not Dutch. He was becoming something else. His body moved with new smoothness, joints lubricated by the magical oil of self-confidence. He was coming into his own while Ed remained what she was: a tough girl from a rough brood whose body moved like pure sex under the black lights.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out a piece of newsprint. I’d unfolded and refolded it so often that the paper was splitting at the edges. I showed Owe the For Sale ad circled in red ink. “Honda CB550 motorcycle,” I said. “Hundred K on the odometer, but Hondas run forever. Five hundred bucks.”

A smile creased the deeply tanned skin around Owe’s eyes. “Where would you go, Dunk?”

“Don’t know.” Away wasn’t a place so much as a goal, was it? “It would be nice to motorvate , you know? Yesterday is history, tomorrow’s a mystery.”

I wanted Owe to know there were a million ways out. That I could do it, too. But then I had a sudden vision of myself as I knew I’d be in a few years — a vision of such unflinching truth that my mind settled around it with shocking ease: I was sitting at some local wet-spot, the Four Hearts or The Gate. My legs were kicked out, toes pointing up, and I slumped in my seat, mimicking the way men sat around here — each of us carving his little plot. I wore overalls dusted with flour from the Bisk. My hair was clipped short and was white at the roots. I was drinking a Hed and a shot, smoking counterfeit cigarettes. My wife worked at the Bisk, too. For a holiday we’d rent a room at the Mist-Eye Motel on the other side of the river; we’d swim in the unnaturally blue pool wearing the irregular bathing suits from the factory outlet centres on Military Road. When the sky was clear we’d be able to see back across the river and catch a glimpse of our own fucking house.

I said: “I’m glad you’re going, Owe. Not glad-glad, but …”

You can’t hate your best friend for taking the opportunities he’d been given. That would be the worst sort of hate, wouldn’t it? Because it would mean you hate yourself, too.

After that night, I saw less of Owe for a while. It was a familiar drift — we’d done that slow fade out of each other’s lives before. The first time, our fathers had instigated it; this time it felt more natural. It’s weird how two guys can grow up on the same street and share the same everyday sights, sit in the same classrooms with the same teachers, roam the same woods, like the same girls … then one zigs, the other zags, and soon enough they’re strangers to each other.

But you have to understand this: Cataract City is possessive. The city has a steel-trap memory, and it holds a grudge.

Nothing that grows here is ever allowed to leave.

On the night that changed Owe’s future, Edwina found me in the lunchroom at the Bisk. I was a trainee by then, working on the line with my old man. The two of us were sitting next to the Coke machine, eating the PB-and-banana sandwiches Mom had packed.

“Mr. Diggs,” Ed greeted my father.

Dad knew about the Jezebel business but had never held it against Ed. We could tell by her face that something real bad must’ve happened.

“Dunk, it’s Owe. He’s in the hospital.”

A bite of sandwich stuck in my throat, dry as wormy wood. “What?”

She squeezed her eyes shut. “I don’t know … my friend’s the intake nurse at Niagara Gen. She called to say he’s been admitted.”

I set a land-speed record driving my dad’s pickup to the hospital. Owe was laid out on a bed with his right leg elevated in a contraption whose many braces, straps, pulleys and lacings drove a spike of dread into me. His mom sat beside the bed in her nurse’s whites.

“He called out for you,” she said to Ed, her eyes dull with shock. “I dropped the dosage. He surfaced for a minute. He called for me, for his dad … and for you.”

Two bags of fluid hung on a metal pole and drip-drip-dripped down a tube into a needle poked into his arm. Owe’s right knee was black and swollen to twice its size: it had a rotten shine to it, like the skin of a fruit that’s about to split apart and leak its insides. The kneecap was swivelled so that it now sat under his leg like a giant tumour.