Craig Davidson - Cataract City

While he answered the door I stood over the body. Blood still dripped from the tube into the collection jug, dark as tar. A dead person’s blood smelled a little like silver polish. The formaldehyde had put some life back into her: she could’ve just put her head down for a nap.

Bovine said, “Check out what the cat dragged in.”

I looked up and there was Owe. He was about twenty pounds heavier than last I’d seen him, but the eyes and chin were the same.

“I saw this guy propping up a bar stool the other night,” Bovine said, “and thought, Jesus, that bastard looks a lot like another bastard I used to know. And it was that very bastard!”

“How are you, man?” Owe smiled, displaying a big chip in his front incisor.

“I’m hanging on.” I hadn’t seen him in what, four years? The last I’d heard he was living out west. Calgary? Edmonton? “What brings you back?”

“Change of scenery? The mountains were getting stale.”

“How long you been back?”

“Not long.”

“You’re still on the force?”

A quick nod. “Caught on with Niagara Regional. I just want to do something valuable with my life, Dunk.”

The sarcasm escaped him like a poisonous mist. He scanned my damaged hand and the new scab bristling along my eyebrow. His eyes had a peculiar movement: snapping back and forth, taking things in while his face remained impassive. That was the first real difference I noticed: those insurance adjuster’s eyes.

“Stuckey’s back in toooown,” Bovine sang to the tune of “Mack the Knife.” “He’s taken an oath to protect we noble savages of Cataract City.”

Owe nodded towards the body and said: “You dressing her up for a date, Bovine?”

Owe and I smiled at each other in the old familiar way and I felt myself relax, the old rhythms taking hold.

“I guess you want to know why I’ve called this meeting,” Bovine announced grandly. “I’ve come up with an extracurricular project for you wastes of skin.”

He led us into a storage room stacked with heavy-duty cardboard sheets. A few of them had been folded into coffin shapes.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Owe said.

“What?” said Bovine. “Our budget burials.”

“People get buried in cardboard ?”

Bovine said: “Once you’re in the ground, who cares?”

“You don’t put them out for display in one of these things — right?”

“We’ve got rental caskets, all the nice ones. Evermore Rest, Celestial Sleeper, The Camelot, The Eternal Homestead. We display bodies in a rental, then bury them in cardboard.”

“That’s just so weird,” said Owe.

“Who buys a tux you’re only going to wear one night?” Bovine said equitably.

“Okay, Bovine, but who wants their mother buried in a shoebox like a hamster?”

“Dutch, tell me. On garbage day, do you see people putting ornate wooden boxes with little brass handles out on their curbs?”

“What do you do for a headstone — tape two Popsicle sticks together?”

Bovine said, “When I die, stuff me in a Hefty sack, drag me through the parlour while the organist plays ‘Dust in the Wind,’ on out the back door into an open grave. Bingo, bango, bongo.”

The storage-room door opened into a garage that housed a pair of Cadillac hearses. Bovine pointed to the old model. “That’s mine now, free and clear.”

“Congratulations,” I said. “You’ll have no problem picking up at goth bars.”

Bovine mimed whacking off. “You’re hilarious. I’m thinking we smash it up. Merrittville Speedway, y’know? Demolition Derby night.” He slapped the hearse’s wide back end. “Just keep backing this baby up into the other cars. Reduce ’em to rubble.”

I said, “Where would we fix it up?”

“The auto shop at the high school,” said Bovine. “I talked to Finnerty and he said sure, so long as we do it at night.”

The first day of what would become an informal but binding “situation” between Lemmy Drinkwater and myself ended with me holding the bloodied body of a pit bull named Folchik — Mohawk for “Little Hunter”—in my arms.

The dog was shivering uncontrollably, shiny with blood under the sodium vapour lamps overhanging the fighting box. Her foam-flecked tongue lolled out the side of her mouth, warm as cooked liver on my forearm.

Little Hunter had fought like a monster but her opponent, a blue-nose pit bull up from the Carolinas named Seeker, had been just that little bit slicker. Seeker sat with her owner: a fat dog breeder wearing a train engineer’s cap and hacked-down combat boots. The dog’s two-tone eyes — one blue, one yellow — were riveted on Little Hunter. Seeker’s sides expanded like a bellows as the blood from her own wounds leaked down her legs to the rosined floor.

It shocked me, how fast it had happened. Only minutes ago Folchik had been a whole creature, full of blood and life. Next? Nothing but a connection of exhausted muscle and torn flesh, opened up in ways no creature ever should be. I felt her heart shuddering under my fingertips at an insane gallop and smelled her adrenaline — the same smell in dogs as it was in men.

The day had begun with me waking next to Edwina.

I had lain still while the bedroom fell into place around me, listening to Ed breathe: long, slow inhales, smooth exhales. She faced away from me but I figured she was awake, as she usually was at this hour: eyes open to watch the sun spread across the bottom of the windowsill, immersed in her own unknowable thoughts.

I curled into her, slipping an arm down her rib cage. When we were dating she’d once said I didn’t know how to cuddle right. Your body doesn’t fit itself properly to mine is how she’d put it. At that age I was worried about being a decent lover — the fact that I might’ve been a piss-poor cuddler never entered my mind.

It’s true that we’d started living together young, but that was how people did things here, as if we were ticking off boxes in an exam called Life . But I knew I’d found the real thing with Ed: the spark, that unquestioned connection. So I’d held tight. I regretted nothing and could only hope Ed didn’t, either.

Ed sat on the edge of the bed and stretched. The tendons in her back flexed and she worked her fingers loose as she did every morning — after years of picking busted Arrowroots off the conveyor, it looked as if tiny balloons had been inflated inside her finger joints.

I lay still while she showered. She whistled “The Log Driver’s Waltz”: It’s birling down a-down white water / A log driver’s waltz pleases girls completely . She dressed in the thin yellow light and clipped her photo ID to her overalls.

“So,” she said. “What’s your schedule today?”

I smiled wolfishly. “Today I find my ass a new job.”

She nodded as if this was firmly within my abilities.

The Port Weller dry dock was a cathedral of rust.

There wasn’t one exposed strip of scaffolding not pocked or slashed with it. The hulls of ships in the shelf docks were so eaten through that the metal would crumble in your hands like schist. Skycranes tilted against the black-shouldered cliffs of the escarpment, ferrying girders caked in marine paint. Even the air had teeth: a million tiny fangs gnawed at the exposed skin above my collar.

I walked through the main gates along a strip of canal that shone silver in the new day. Sunfish snatched at zebra mussels clinging to snarls of rebar jutting from the seawall. Gulls circled; they must have followed these hulks in from sea and now, their meal ticket gone, the air was alive with their confused screeches.

The foreman waited at the punch clock: a solid guy with an oily, pancake-flat face.