Craig Davidson - Cataract City

He’ll never play basketball on that knee again was my first thought. My second was: Never walk properly, either .

Ed cupped Owe’s face. His eyelids fluttered.

“Whoa, Nelly,” he said with a loopy smile. “I got a doozy of a lump, huh?”

“What happened?” I said.

His endless smile terrified me. “I was coming out of the A.N. Myer gym — playing some pickup, right? Walking down O’Neil to the bus stop, dribbling my ball … This car or truck or I don’t know what …”

He swallowed. His throat made a dry click . Edwina gave him water to sip through a straw.

“… this car skipped the curb and whap!” Owe clapped his hands with sudden violence. The sound ricocheted off the eggshell walls. “Then whoosh . Guess they drove off. I heard … laughing? Laughing , man.”

He licked his lips and stared at the wreckage of his leg. His worry seemed mild at best; whatever was dripping into his veins spared him the full extent of the horror.

Ed took his hand. “It’ll be—”

Owe snatched his hand back with casual brutality. “Gonna need a cane, man!” he said in a druggy singsong. “Gonna need a solid gold caaaane to get me down the street!”

By the time he passed out again I was already moving out the door.

I’d kill them.

A curtain of blood had dropped over my vision. It was all I could see, all I could smell.

I drove. Edwina sat in the passenger seat. At first I’d told her not to come but she refused to listen. Fair enough. She deserved blood as much as I did.

She said, “You know who did it?”

“I have an idea.”

“You know why ?”

“No good reason.”

“Drive faster.”

“You gonna pay the fucking ticket, Ed?”

I knew where they drank: the Gunnery, a dive on Dorchester. I knew because everyone knew where everyone else did their drinking in this city. You pick your watering hole and cling to it the rest of your life like a drowning rat to a bit of Styrofoam bobbing in the sewer.

I doused the headlights as I turned into the lot and parked next to Adam Lowery’s shitbox Tercel. The thing shone like fresh blood in the moonlight, drops of water drying on its hood. He’d probably gone to the Coin-Op carwash on Philbrook and given it a good scrub. The front bumper was crushed on the passenger’s side. I pictured Lowery flipping on the high beams at the last instant, pinning Owe in the glare.

The Gunnery hosted some rough customers. The Murphy boys bent their elbows there. The chimes above the door tinkled as I stepped through, Ed right behind me. Her brothers gave her confused smiles from their corner table. Beer-warped floorboards creaked under my feet. The Rock-Ola jukebox was playing a Smiths tune.

Clyde Hillicker turned on his stool, squaring his shoulders. The curtain of blood darkened until I could see only his outline like a charcoal etching on the sidewalk.

I cut fast across the distance between us. Clyde threw a punch that caught me on the neck with a flat smack like a double-cut pork chop slapped on a marble slab. I stepped through it and lowered my head, bringing my right hand up from below my belt.

I won’t claim it was a thing of charm or grace. It was a mean punch, a pure ugly one, and I summoned it from the blackest depths of my soul.

It clocked Clyde on the chin. He fell and his skull hit the rail with a sweaty thud as my momentum carried me over his sagging body into the bar. Nobody offered to pick him up.

Ed slit her eyes at her brothers and mouthed, Where?

Her eldest brother hooked his thumb at the toilets, smiling out the side of his mouth. Ed grabbed a pool cue from the rack and crept to the men’s door.

“Any of you see Adam Lowery,” I said loud enough so he’d hear, “tell him we have issues to discuss.”

I booted the bar door open but stayed inside the bar. The chimes tinkled as the door closed.

Adam Lowery cracked the bathroom door a titch and poked his head out. Ed swung the cue into his face. It landed flush, shattering his nose. Adam squawked; his hands flew up as he fell back through the door. The Murphy brothers laughed.

Ed followed Adam into the bathroom, hitting him with the cue as the door swung back and forth on its bat-wing hinges. Adam was on the floor with his hands up to ward off the blows, but then his hands fell and the cue broke and she went to work with her feet. The door stopped swinging. Ed didn’t step out for a while. Adam was lucky Ed was wearing flip-flops.

She came out breathing heavily. Her brothers offered a round of applause as if she’d finally fulfilled her familial obligations.

We drove away fast. I still couldn’t cope with the idea that Owe’s dreams were toast. And over what? A stupid blood-grievance nurtured since childhood — the sort that festered all over this city — acted upon in a moment of opportunity. We were snakes . A knot of venomous rattlesnakes balled up under a rock. If one of us made a break for daylight the ball constricted, every one of us tightening, pulling that rogue snake back in.

“He could rehab it,” Ed said.

“Sure he could,” I said. “Sure.”

The knuckles of my right hand were split: the skin had opened in crude Xs like the tips of dumdum bullets. The fight hadn’t solved a goddamn thing. It hadn’t even felt good. Clyde would suck his dinner through a straw for a week or two. Adam might need a transfusion but then he’d be fine.

Those facts didn’t un-fuck Owe’s ruined prospects one bit.

Clyde Hillicker earned a five-year hitch at the Kingston Pen for the hit-and-run, the maximum punishment under the law. Apparently he’d been behind the wheel — although it wouldn’t surprise me to hear Adam convinced him to take the rap. Adam was dumb but cunning. Clyde was just dumb.

Adam spent nearly a month laid up. His nose is still so flat that his nostrils run horizontal to his face. They look like coin slots.

Owe never played basketball again. Not at the level he had, anyway. His knee healed as best it could but after six or seven surgeries, the steel pins and bone-screws, his joint had to be fused. The docs outfitted him with a bulky brace.

After a too-short rehab Owe tried to make a comeback. But in basketball, you really need to be that half-step ahead. Owe still had the IQ and that sweet jumper, but he’d lost the speed to make defenders fear him. They stuck tight to his jersey, suffocating him. He got victimized on the defensive end by speedier guards.

The college offers were revoked. He ended up signing a ten-day look-see contract with Lotto Delmonte, a Mexican team run by the banana kingpins. They thought he might have something left in the tank. He didn’t. They cut him loose. He spent a few months drifting and drinking around Marina del Ray. Word spread that Dutch Stuckey, Basketball Boy Wonder, was a bust. Beneath the sadness and resignation, lurking like a foul pocket of mud in a riverbed, was relief. Owe’s failure re-established the status quo in Cataract City.

When he returned from his wandering, Owe threw a prolonged party at Sherkston Shores, a trailer park bordering Lake Erie. He rented the largest trailer on his folks’ dime and invited everyone to stay.

His body was deeply tanned, his eyes a washed-out Windex blue. He reminded me of a scarecrow that had hung too long in a desolate field. The only creature who didn’t seem to notice the change was Fragrant Meat; he was also the only creature capable of bringing a real smile to Owe’s face.

During the day, Owe drank vodka and soda, a habit he’d picked up down south. He sat on the beach, staring out over the slate-grey water and sky welded together without a joint, piling warm sand over his knee. “It’s Ayurvedic medicine,” he’d say cryptically. “The Swami Vishnu gave me the secret .”