Craig Davidson - Cataract City

Owe said, “Have I ever?”

NINE OR SO YEARS AGO, my phone rang. It was Bovine, clapped up in the drunk tank at the Niagara Detention Centre. This had put a real bug up my ass. I was fighting in a few hours and not only had Bovine agreed to drive, he was supposed to be my goddamn cutman.

“You got to spring me, Dunk.”

I could smell the Old Grouse drifting out of the mouthpiece. “Jesus, Bovine. I mean, seriously. Here I am dozing, trying to get my mind right—”

“Sorry, Dunk — didn’t I just say sorry? I’m not drunk, even,” he said sulkily. “Not that drunk.”

I sat on the edge of the bed, curtains pulled against the evening sun. The sheets smelled of the vanilla body butter Edwina wore.

“I can’t be released on my own whatever …”

“Recog—”

“Yeah, recognizance. But you spring me and I’ll pay you right back.”

I could have left him there. Bovine was no stranger to the drunk tank. He probably had his own cot, with monogrammed sheets. But what was I gonna do? I’d known the guy forever.

“Be there in a bit.”

I brushed my teeth. Some fighters don’t brush before a fight, a little fuck-you to their opponent. Other fighters, their breath stinks but it’s just the adrenaline souring in their mouths. Me, I bear my opponents no grudge. I’ll even slap on deodorant.

I filled my palms with water and ran it over my skull. My hair was cut short — just like everyone’s at the Bisk. The industrial flour got past the hairnets and stuck to your head; at shift’s end you’d take a shower and it was like lathering with plaster of Paris. So we shaved our skulls to the wood. The staff softball photos looked like recruitment posters.

Despite my fighting, I’d been lucky with my face. I had hairline scars under both eyes and one on the edge of my forehead that looked like a Y. But my nose had never been broke, and my cheeks neither.

My hands were another matter. We’re talking a pair of ugly bust-up mitts. The knuckles were all crushed, except for one: if I laid my hands side by side, that lonely knuckle looked like the final spike on the EKG machine before a heartbeat flatlines. In the places where I fight, you can go into the ring with open-fingered gloves, with wraps, with nothing. I bare-fist it. You tab a man flush on the button with a bare fist and it’s good night, Gracie. The problem is, my fingers tend to split over the joints.

Bovine was training to be a mortuary attendant by then, and when he was sober he was a decent cutman. He had this stuff called Negatan, a kind of formaldehyde gel that cauterizes the insides of a stiff’s nostrils and gums. The first time he used it on me it turned the skin on my hands to pig leather. It’d been scary to watch the skin go dry and hard as buckskin. But it killed the blood, so what did it matter? I wasn’t a hand model. I’d caught the other guy with an overhand right ten seconds into the next round and laid him down soft as a baby into bed.

I threw clean clothes into a duffel and went downstairs. Dolly’s head rose from her dog bed in the kitchen. She padded over, tail sweeping the lino, and tugged at my tearaway pants, popping a few snaps.

“Stop, you pest,” I told her, and fed her a meatball from last night’s supper as I rummaged for juice in the fridge. Ed hated it when I fed Dolly from the fridge.

I didn’t leave a note. Edwina would never tell me not to go — even if that was what she really wanted. Ed would never say anything because she was harder than me. Most of us in Cataract City were hard because the place built you that way. It asked you to follow a particular line and if you didn’t, well, you went and lived someplace else. But if you stayed, you lived hard, and when you died you went into the ground that way: hard .

I guess I was hard enough, but Edwina had always been harder. And so I found that you could love a person even more fiercely for their hardness.

Dolly nosed around the back door as I slipped on my sneakers. She was hoping I’d take her along.

“Sorry, girl. Not tonight.”

Best to keep your dog far away from Lemmy Drinkwater. Best to keep anything you loved far, far away.

The detention centre’s night-shift guard tipped his hat as I stepped inside. I nodded sheepishly, as if it was me who’d done wrong. One-hundred and fifty-three bucks later, Bovine sauntered out of the drunk tank. He made a point of shaking the guard’s hand.

“This is the last time you’ll see me.”

“You said that last time,” said the guard.

“This time I’m being sincere.”

The first thing Bovine did was hug me. It’s the first thing he always did. He stunk of rye and sweat and there were pinpricks of blood on his untucked shirt.

He did a soft-shoe number down the cracked stairs of the D.C., tripping over his feet and pitching onto the sidewalk. I didn’t bother asking what had landed him in detention this time. Seeing as he didn’t look super-drunk, I figured he’d been pinched for the “disorderly” half of “drunk and disorderly.” Why did I hang out with this fool? For one thing, Owe had toddled off to join the boys in blue. My circle of friends, never big to begin with, had shrunk.

Bovine reached into his pocket, produced a thick fold of bills and peeled off a mitt full. I took what he owed and gave the rest back.

“Aw, come on, Dunk. For pain and suffering.”

He knew I needed money. I was still trying to recover what I’d lost on Dolly’s race a few years back. Then last year Dolly had come down with a case of gastroplexy that nearly killed her; five thousand bucks and one stomach resectioning later, she was a healthy pooch.

We drove down Clifton Hill, past the teenybop meat markets, and crossed the Rainbow Bridge. The falls were lit with red spotlights; it looked like a spray of blood was frothing from the basin.

We cleared customs and headed up Niagara Street, past the OxyChem plant’s smokestacks pumping grey vapour. We turned right onto Packard, skirting the Love Canal. Bovine tossed a bottle out the window; it smashed on the pavement and the sound sent Velcro spiders scurrying up my spine — the fight was crawling into me.

We hit Saunders Settlement Road and crossed onto the Tuscarora First Nations land. I eased on the brakes and pulled into Smokin’ Joes Trading Post. I drove round back to the warehouses and parked beside a pickup truck with a giant novelty ball-sac hanging from the trailer hitch — it was that kind of crowd.

Bovine grabbed his cutman kit. Taking his face in my hands, I stared into his eyes. His pupils seemed about right.

“I don’t need a drunk working on my face.”

“Come on, Dunk. You know I’d never if I was shitfaced.”

The warehouse door was propped open with a cigar store Indian, a cigarette duct-taped in its mouth. A couple of guys were passing a flask outside the entrance.

“How you feeling tonight?” one asked.

“Buy the ticket, take the ride.”

Their rasping laughter followed me into the warehouse. Boxes and crates stacked high; the smells of patent leather and tobacco. We walked down aisles towards the light and buzz of a milling crowd.

A half-dozen sawhorses formed a ring on the shellacked concrete floor. A hundred-odd spectators stood or sat on stacked pallets. It was your standard fight crowd: fat and magpie-eyed, drinking Hamm’s tallboys. A few cheered at the sight of me: I guess they’d cashed in on my ass before.

Lem Drinkwater was dressed in his usual pegged blue jeans, a chambray shirt with pearl-snap buttons, his Crocodile Dundee hat with a ring of alligator teeth round the band.

“You feeling it?” he asked, eyeing me down his nose.