Craig Davidson - Cataract City

“Can’t do it, Lem,” I said. “If it goes sideways, we both got to carry that.”

“I’m not gonna carry a damn thing — and you, you’re just chickenshit.”

“Sure, Lem. That’s what it is.”

I looked at Bovine, jerking my chin towards the warm-up room. The kid stood in the centre of the ring, fists still tucked, as we walked away.

Lemmy Drinkwater shouldered open the presswood door and let it fall shut, muffling the din of the crowd. “You sure as fuck aren’t a people-pleaser, are you?”

I pulled my hoodie on, stuffed my feet into workboots. “You shouldn’t let that kid fight again, Lem. Something’s off with his ticker. I felt it.”

“Who are you, Trapper John?”

It was easy to hate Drinkwater, and I did. He was a killer — of dogs, at the very least — and a sadist. It tore me up to find myself in his service. Yet he seemed to me the sort of man who could do with his life exactly what he wanted, and I held some whipped-dog respect for that.

“I’m not paying you a red cent for that shitshow you just put on,” he said.

“I didn’t expect you would.”

He scrutinized me through a fringe of dark hair. “You just fight?”

“Just fight what?”

“I mean,” he clarified, “to make rent. Just fight?”

“I work at the Bisk … part-time now.”

“Tough times, I hear. Cutbacks.”

“Times are tough all over.”

Drinkwater nodded to say he understood this to be the way of my life, yet to indicate it wasn’t the way of his own. His eyes were coldly, darkly serious — I felt I was being measured for some future possibility, and in that instant I desperately wanted to show Drinkwater whatever it was he hoped to find. It sickened me, my need .

“Something’s coming up,” he said. “I need somebody on the other side.”

“Of?”

“Of the river. Off the rez. You can’t trust Nationers — they don’t know how to act with that kind of money.”

“What kind of money?”

Drinkwater knocked the air in front of him with his foreknuckle.

“No kind. I was just asking a question. If you were interested.”

“In what ?”

Drinkwater looked as if I’d answered already. “Maybe we’ll talk,” he said.

As I walked away between walls of stacked boxes I heard the sound of dogs fighting, which wasn’t much of a sound at all: low, almost sexual yelps. It struck me that my own fight had been a curtain-jerker for a couple of mutts.

A knot of men stood beside the cigar store Indian in the parking lot. As we passed, one of them shouted, “Cracker candyass!” A bottle sailed over my shoulder and shattered against the warehouse wall, shards rebounding at me. A thick blade of glass whickered past my face, drawing a line of ice across my brow; I ducked instinctively, hands pawing the wound, feeling the quick rush of blood curving down my jawbone.

I turned and saw the men who’d done it. There were five of them — not one real specimen among them, but they stared back challengingly and I knew the beds of their pickups would hold bats and axe handles.

“Come on,” Bovine said.

We continued across the lot. My opponent was helping the girl in the Megadeth shirt into his car. The girl seemed sick, but beyond her thinness I couldn’t tell how. He was so gentle with her, taking her legs and folding them carefully inside the car, leaning in to kiss her cheek. I pictured the two of them driving to a small house on Chemical Row, near the OxyChem plant, where he’d fold her out of the car with the same tenderness. I didn’t know why he’d fought, whether for money or pride or sickness, but I could see he loved her and wanted to believe their life together was a happy one.

I got in my car, and Bovine checked out the cut over my eye. He decided I didn’t need stitches and slapped a butterfly bandage over it.

“Another memory to add to the Dunk scrapbook,” he said.

“There’s a million stories in there.”

“Nope, only one,” Bovine said. “Man takes on world, world wins. But you get to write it over the course of a lifetime — so you’ve got that going for you.”

“Oh, fuck off.”

Bovine howled.

Edwina was waiting in the dark.

She was lying on the couch in the room off the front hall — a room that had seemed so big when we’d moved in from her old house on Culp Street. It had seemed as if we’d never gather enough stuff to fill it.

She drew on her cigarette and the room seemed to quiver, the red ember floating.

“Ed …”

“You win?”

I shook my head, but wondered if she could see my face.

“You get hurt?”

“Not bad. My hand.”

“Let’s take a look at you.”

She got up, snapped on the bathroom light and sat me on the toilet. She wore a shimmery black robe — irregular in some way I couldn’t see — that she’d bought at a clearance warehouse over the river. Perched on the tub’s edge, she drew on her cigarette, squinted into the smoke and traced her pointer finger over my butterflied brow; she brought her fingertip down slowly to touch the split in my lip.

She plucked the cigarette from her mouth and with that same strong, quiet hand reached over my shoulder — the ember singing the fine hairs on my earlobe — to snatch a Kleenex from the box on the toilet tank. She set the cigarette between her lips, twisted one corner of the Kleenex into a rope and pressed it to the split.

Ed had a smooth, open, brown-eyed face with a spray of freckles over her cheeks. She was still as beautiful as when I’d first met her, but a harder breed of it: the dagger-sharp points of her cheekbones, the way the light threw itself off the straight edges of her teeth.

As she leaned forward over my swollen hand, my eyes fell upon her clavicle bone. I wanted to run my tongue along it — post-fight randiness — but I couldn’t just lean across and do it: you need permission for such things, if unspoken, even from those you love.

Ed gathered the front of her robe in one small, casual gesture. Then she put her head far back — very far back, almost like a contortionist — and shook her dark hair loose so that it hung free down her neck.

“Can I have a drag?”

“You don’t smoke,” she said.

“One drag.”

I pulled the cigarette from her lips and drew thinly. The paper tasted of cherry lip gloss. There was no stamp on the filter; everyone at the Bisk bought their smokes off-brand from a guy who sold them out of his trunk in the parking lot.

I turned my head to cough and spotted a lottery ticket on the sink ledge. Ed played them all: 6/49, Lotto Max, Dreamhome Sweepstakes, always ponying up for the Bonus, the Encore. She played with some girls at the Bisk, too. A year or so back they’d picked six out of seven and split a few grand. “If I’d been born on the fifty-sixth of January instead of the thirteenth, we’d have all quit on the spot,” she’d told me, laughing but not really.

She never used to play the lotto. For a long time our life together hadn’t been about waiting on a lucky ship to come in — it had been about building that ship ourselves, with the toil of our own hands, and sailing wherever the hell we wanted.

She pinched the cigarette from between my lips, put it back between her own, then stood in front of the mirror. My gaze rode up her feet, which were strong-toed and callused from hours on the Nutter Butter line, up her calves roped with muscle, past the dimples in the back of her knees to her thighs, which were just starting to go. I stood behind her and my arms went to her hips … and when she didn’t protest, around her waist. The bathroom light reflected off the mirror, doubling itself, and for an instant I felt trapped: a man stunned in the motion-sensor halogens snapping alight along a prison’s barbwire fence.