Craig Davidson - Cataract City

Harry grinned, enjoying the possibility. “It could happen, gravity notwithstanding. Why? Because a racing dog doesn’t know it’s not supposed to fly. And if I own the dog that finally does it I’ll holler, Go on, you crazy bastard! Send me a postcard from China! ”

Dolly blazed around the near bend, gobbling up great bites of the track. Harry said, “You’ve got to be mindful, though, seeing as any creature who fails to accept its limits can be a danger to itself.”

We led Dolly to the wash station. Harry hosed dirt off her paws, massaging her pads to release the grit. Dolly rested her chin on his skull, looking like a boxer receiving a rubdown from his trainer.

“Guess it’s too late to tell you that Drinkwater’s a nasty piece of work,” Harry said. “Rumour is he once fed a fistful of Mars Bars to a greyhound his own dog was set to race. It got real sick, chocolate being the worst thing for a dog, and ended up dying on the track. Other awfulness, too.”

“Like what?”

“He runs that shop on the Tuscarora Nation, Smokin’ Joes. Cheap cigs, booze, that sort of thing. Makes a small mint. But he loves his dogs, or loves what they earn him. Not just racing dogs, either. He breeds fighters. Pit bulls. Fights them in the warehouses out behind his shop, though I’d never watch such a thing. And it’s not only dogs who do the fighting. Word is, men fight there. But you’ve got to be one desperate soul to tussle for Lemmy Drinkwater.”

“So you figure he’ll welsh?” My half of the wager was mostly drawn from the college fund my folks had set up. They’d put away a little nut out of every paycheque for years. They’d let me know that if I said to hell with it and went to work at the Bisk, that was okay, but they wanted me to have the chance.

Harry shook his head. “Lemmy’ll square your bet if he loses, but I wouldn’t put it past him to stack things in his favour. All I’d say is, don’t risk anything you’re not willing to part with.”

The day before the race we almost lost Dolly.

Edwina and I took her for a late-evening walk on a path running parallel to the canal. Dolly’s retractable leash snarled around a rusted metal pole, raking a sharp spur. The leash sliced in half clean as a thread drawn across a razor blade.

The severed end of the leash whipped back into its holster. Dolly looked at us, head cocked at a quizzical angle. When Ed called her name— “Do-lleee” —it sounded like a moan. Dolly bolted. Her rear leg kicked over a hummock in a crazy flailing motion of pure joy.

We sprinted after her. There was nothing but brush and long grass for two miles until you hit the canal. My feet flashed over sedge and crabgrass as the clouds thickened and night came down. To the north the skyway bridge bent against the sky, pale sunlight winking off its spine. I splashed through puddles shimmering with gasoline rainbows — the land had once been a dumpsite and old poisons were still bubbling up.

I became aware of all the little noises around and inside of me: blood rushing in my ears like a buried river, the hot thrum of crickets in the grass, the ongoing cree-cree-cree of starlings and somewhere, far away, a barking dog — but not Dolly.

Edwina and I split up. She went in the direction of the bridge, I went south towards the subdivisions edging Queen Street. My limbs had loosened and I ran in an easy rhythm, making small adjustments, relaxing my shoulders and swinging my head side to side to scan for encouraging signs.

I was ninety-nine percent positive I’d find her; then ninety-eight percent. Soon a persistent doubt burrowed under my skin like a chigger. I knew there are holes buried in the fabric of every ordinary day that can swallow you up. My feet flashed over the darkening earth as I hunted, finding nothing but coils of rusted metal and the shattered bottoms of old soda bottles that shone from the ground like huge glass eyes. Blisters burst on my heels, shooting waves of coin-bright pain up the backs of my calves. I was nearly hyperventilating, but this had nothing to do with exhaustion. Part of my concern was generalized: Dolly was a dumb dog and she was lost and probably didn’t know it yet. And part of my fear was particular: Dolly was more than just a dog. Dolly had become our dog, a special dog.

Water ran darkly down a narrow streambed. The light of a fresh moon winked where it rippled around the rocks. I strained my ears, hoping a telling sound might separate itself from the maddening noises of nature. When none did I picked a clumsy path across the stream. My shoes slipped on a wet rock and I plunged into the knee-deep water. The chill crawled up my legs and thighs past my balls to my gut, where it collided with the fear, shattering into silvery minnows that zipped around my belly.

She’s gone , said a voice inside my head — a terrible, nasty voice that I hadn’t heard since I’d been lost in the woods with Owe.

It happens. Things you love fall off the face of the earth. Nobody ever knows what became of them. And that would be worse, I thought, than if Dolly were to die. At least then we’d know she was gone. Lost is an infinitely more terrible idea. Lost was the most unsolvable puzzle: a mess of possible outcomes like a movie missing its final reel.

“Dolly! DOLLY! ”

I crashed through the underbrush, branches gouging my rib cage and nettles raking my face, eyes burning in my sockets like heated ball bearings. The fear shot through me now, bright green and juicy-bitter as the chlorophyll in an April leaf. My dog was gone. Ed and me had been talking, in a not-so-serious but sort-of-serious way, about having a kid. How could we, when we couldn’t even keep a dog safe?

The trees opened onto a strip of concrete along the canal. Wilderness gave way to civilization, that abrupt mash-up that sometimes happens in cities. My eyes scanned frantically but twigged on nothing more than the sidewinder movement of a snake sweeping upriver against the current. Squares of light burned along the escarpment. The moon shot veins of white across the water. I smelled summer in the air, wood resin and horsehair and the greasy smell of barbecue briquettes bursting into flame.

I moved west or maybe north, disoriented for the first time since that night with Bruiser Mahoney. As I walked along the salt-whitened quay my mind drifted for an instant — one of those instants big enough to hold your entire life. I saw how a city could sink into you, trapping its pulsing heart inside your own heart — except it never feels like a trap. A trap snags you out of nowhere, violently and without warning. But I knew every inch of my trap, didn’t I? I knew the dirt path that led down under the Whirlpool Bridge to a fishing hole stocked with hungry bass. How to jump off the old train trestle in Chippewa and hit the rip of slack water so I could paddle safely to shore. Cataract City was like those fur-covered handcuffs you could get at Tinglers — Ed had come home with a pair of them after a stagette party, embroidered with the phrase Prisoner of Love . The city of your birth was the softest trap imaginable. So soft you didn’t even feel how badly you were snared — how could it be a trap when you knew its every spring and tooth?

I heard it then: a thin whine drifting across the water. At first I mistook it for the sound of my own wheezy breaths rolling across the water only to hit some unseen barrier and rebound back. My feet stuttered to a halt and I held my breath. There —the sound was hidden somewhere within a stand of pines canted at a crooked angle where the quay crumbled into the canal.

I picked down the incline, pine sap smeared on my palms and the rustlings of the timber above, stiff-arming through snarled branches to the polished rocks gleaming at the shore.