Craig Davidson - Cataract City

“You Diggs?”

“Thanks for meeting with me.”

“Part of my job.” His head jerked to indicate I should follow.

We passed over batboards to a walkway alongside the flank of a ship rooted in deep dock. I trailed my fingers over the metal, which trembled under an assault of air-hammers and riveting guns. An arc-welding torch snapped alight above; a soft blue glow streaked the hull, following the roll-lines of the steel. A spray of golden sparks cascaded off the tin overhang, touching the arm of my denim jacket and leaving scorch marks almost too small to see.

We stepped through a porthole door into a small, dark, rust-smelling chamber. A smelter was working beneath us: sweat instantly popped along my brow. Around us were chains and pulleys rimed with dark, granular grease. The points of naked hooks swung in front of my eyes, their chains clanking like wind chimes.

The chamber broke onto a narrow footpath spanning the ship’s hull. Men worked thirty feet below: all I could see were the yellow plugs of their hardhats. The sun broke through the ship’s unfinished angles, glinting off the aluminum gangplanks.

The foreman led me into a makeshift office. “Go ahead and go sit down.”

I took blueprints off the chair facing his and set them carefully on the floor. He pulled my crumpled resumé from his pocket.

“The Bisk, huh?”

“Cutbacks. A couple guys I used to work with said I should try here.”

“Yuh, they been through already.” His snort seemed to say we’d been fools to throw our lots in with a multinational conglomerate while he’d had the good sense to stick with ships. “English Literature certificate?”

“I took some classes up at Niagara College.”

“Why?”

When I didn’t reply the foreman massaged his forehead with the stump of his pointer finger — I wondered if he was doing this to call attention to the missing digit.

“Can you weld?”

“I’ve spot-welded.”

“Spot we don’t need. Mig? Tig? Acetylene?”

I shook my head.

“Can you run a Wheelabrator?”

I shook my head.

“Plasma cutter?”

I shook my head.

“Oxy-fuel cutter?”

I shook my head.

“Profile burner?”

“No.”

“Metal lathe?”

“No.”

“Boring mill?”

“I can learn.”

“Just about any walking stiff can. Only takes a year’s apprenticeship up at the college. Same one that taught you those English classes.” He pronounced it clarsis .

“Listen, I need the work and I’ve got a strong back—”

“What do you think we do, haul sacks a cement? This is a skilled labour site. What’d you do at Nabisco?”

“Batch mixer, mainly. A bit of line maintenance.”

“That’s not a skill we’re in need of. Sorry.”

He didn’t look one damn bit sorry. Maybe he was one of those men who enjoyed pressing his heel into the back of his fellow man’s neck. I squinted at his ID badge, which was melted and heat-scorched. Sonny Hillicker . One of that clan, then.

“You related to Clyde?”

“My kid brother.”

“I know Clyde.”

“Yeah. Clyde knows you, too.”

Jesus — wasn’t that just Cataract City? The old snake-ball. Fighting just to fight, even when the battle’s long been lost.

“You smell like a cookie,” Sonny Hillicker said, and he laughed. “Alla you Biskers do.”

Hot coals burned at my temples. But beneath the fire was the insistent scrape of desperation: the dull edge of a knife down the back of my neck.

An hour later I was in the Coffee Time off Drummond eating a cruller that tasted of cigarette smoke and flipping through the job ads. The cell phone buzzed in my pocket.

“Yeah?”

“Diggs.”

“Yeah.”

“Where are you?”

“Who’s this?”

“Drinkwater. Sounds like you’re someplace busy.”

“Coffee shop.”

I picked up a weird abrasion on the line — Drinkwater’s stubble grating on the mouthpiece? Dogs barked in the background.

“You healed up?”

“I’d be okay to go. Anything happening?”

“Why don’t you come over.”

“My cutman’s at work.”

“Don’t need him. Just you.”

“This a job?”

“This isn’t anything if I’m on the phone with you another five seconds.”

“What do you know about fighting dogs, Diggs?”

“I know I wouldn’t want to fight one myself.”

“Smart, paleface.”

Drinkwater had showed up at Smokin’ Joes in a chromed-up Silverado Crew Cab. Joes was the size of a small-town supermarket and sold everything from motorcycle jackets to authentic Tuscaroran birdhouses, but I’d yet to see anyone come out with anything except suds or cigs.

Drinkwater, as always, was all sharp angles and unforgiving bone. I took in the raised pink scar that fish-hooked from his hairline around one ear. He wore the same stovepipe jeans I’d seen him in since the first day I met him, the kind you had to work in like a catcher’s mitt. He retrieved a pit bull from the truck bed, wrapping the leash around his fist.

“Get your ass in gear, Diggs.”

We passed through a gate into an acre-wide impound housing six U-barns: corrugated tin scabbed with rust, the sort of things built to shelter twin-prop airplanes. The far north warehouse was the fight house. The other five? I had no clue what they held.

Drinkwater met with four men inside the gates. They had the same look: the old-style blue jeans, jackets with knotted fringes of fur, the wide-brimmed black bowler hats with partridge feathers stuck in the band. They spoke with their backs to me.

Thunder kicked up over the flatlands. A sleek black helicopter rose over the earth’s hub, hovering over the compound. The air swam with rotor wash, the shimmer of gas fumes. The smell of industrial bearing lubricant hit my nose: it was the same cherry-scented lube we used at the Bisk to grease gears. The chopper rode too high for me to make out its occupants — all I saw were sunglasses whose tinted lenses shone like lynx eyes in the reddening sun.

Drinkwater and the other men held their bodies stiff against the blade-wind as it rose to a fierce howl, ripping fans of dust off the ground. The helicopter banked southward over the band centre and the squat architecture of the rez.

Drinkwater didn’t say anything about the helicopter as we walked the ruddy scrub behind Smokin’ Joes, down a row of fenced-in pens. At the sound of Drinkwater’s voice, dogs tore out of their cheap plastic doghouses to leap and claw at the chain-link.

They were pit bulls — some black, some brindle-coated, some the glossy grey of a luxury sedan. And they all had the same physique: a dark heart-shaped nose, black eyes canopied by a jutting forehead, docked ears and a jaw that looked to have been worked into shape by chewing an India rubber ball. Their musculature flared like a cobra’s hood down their ribs, which were prominent when the dogs held certain positions; those bones looked like giant skeletal fingers flexed under the flesh. The males’ penises were sheathed in folds of skin that lay nearly flat against their stomachs like the hood scoops on muscle cars. None of the dogs looked more than sixty-five pounds but they seemed monstrous. It was as if they were made out of well-matched chunks of stone wrapped in jeweller’s velvet.

“There is no breed to match the pit bull,” Drinkwater said. “Americans love two tons of Detroit rolling iron and supersizing everything , so of course breeders used to figure the biggest dogs were the toughest. German shepherds, Dobermans, Rottweilers, Great Danes, Tosa Inus — all hat, no cattle.”

Dogfighting was big on the rez. Dogmen came up from the Carolinas and as far south as Florida to fight Drinkwater’s studs. He’d set up a closed-circuit TV link; the fights were broadcast in Vegas and drew heavy wagering.