Craig Davidson - Cataract City

Drinkwater bashed a stick against a pen. The dog inside leapt and yowled. Its neighbours did the same, biting at the fence and leaving runners of saliva dangling from the metal.

“This is my million-dollar gal,” he said. “Folchik. My Little Hunter.”

I remembered War Hammer, another one of Drinkwater’s million-dollar gals. When he opened the pen door, Folchik bounded out. She looked not much different than the others. I told Drinkwater as much.

“It’s not the look,” he said. “It’s the game . Game is the dog that won’t quit fighting — the dog that’ll fight with two broken legs! Game is the dog that will toe the scratch knowing it’s already dead. Game is crazy, but game dogs taste more of life because they have no fear of death. And Folchik is dead game .”

Drinkwater stick-whipped the dog’s ass. The blow sent seismic ripples down the dog’s flanks, but Folchik didn’t register it at all.

“Another breed, that would be abuse,” Drinkwater said.

I ran a hand down Folchik’s hide. Muscle throbbed under her skin, strands lapping each other like tight-woven wicker. Her coat held the reflective sheen of the tinted windows of a downtown high-rise, like nothing possible in nature.

“They’re good with people,” said Drinkwater, “but murder on other dogs.”

“We had a bull mastiff for a while growing up, before I got Dolly.”

Drinkwater shook his head as if this was the saddest news he’d heard all day. “Some guy brought a mastiff round for a roll. Neapolitan variety — I guess they’re supposed to be bad-asses. Hundred-fifty pounds and jowly, folds of skin hanging off its muzzle. Disgusting thing! I refused to roll my stock — wasn’t that dog’s fault it had a moron for an owner. Another guy had a beat-up old pit bull cur that was practically a bait dog — one you chuck in with the gamers just to keep them lively — but still, a pittie. That little scrap of shit tore the mastiff’s throat right out. The mastiff’s owner bawled his guts out.”

Drinkwater leashed Folchik and together we walked to one of the tin-sided sheds. Inside was a treadmill with a two-foot-tall metal cage over the track. Drinkwater swatted Folchik inside the cage and knotted her leash to the treadmill panel. He ramped the elevation to max and cranked it. Folchik fell into a quick run as the treadmill’s belt ripped round the rollers.

“I want to show you something,” Drinkwater said.

“We’re leaving her here?”

“She can run for days.”

We walked to a warehouse dominated by a giant machine, green like a ’7os-vintage fridge. It was working at a furious pace, well-worn parts ticking with the sound of silenced bullets shot from an automatic rifle.

Drinkwater walked me down the line. Bricks of tobacco went into a shredder on one side, cigarettes spat out the other. The cigarette filters chittered down one funnel, where they were attached to the paper, rolled with the tobacco and fastened with a golden band. The machine was manned by chain-smoking Natives; they picked fresh cigs out of the hoppers and lit them off the stumps of their last. One guy smoked like a Frenchman, holding his cig between his third and fourth fingers.

Drinkwater eyed me down his nose. “You wouldn’t squeal on your old pal Lem, wouldya?”

When I didn’t reply he led me outside, back to the shed where Folchik was still running strong — if anything, stronger. Her tongue hung out of her mouth, thick and pink.

“She’s rolling tonight. Got to taper my baby down.”

He took her out and scratched her ears and under her chin with all the tenderness of a man clawing at a tick bite. The clipped nub of Folchik’s tail wagged gratefully — and Drinkwater cuffed her head so hard that her snout bounced off the dirt. Folchik’s lips rippled along her gums to expose her teeth but she didn’t bite.

“Good girl,” Drinkwater said softly. “You build the aggression by antagonizing them, see? Turn them into a stick of TNT with a very short fuse, yeah? Come with me.”

A bearlike specimen waited by Drinkwater’s truck: he was fifty pounds heavier than me, with a dewlapped face. His nose was mobbed with broken veins. He stood spread-legged against the bumper dressed in the same deep-blue dungarees Drinkwater wore and a wifebeater. “Diggs,” Drinkwater said. “This is Igor.”

“Igor? You’re joking.”

Neither man spoke so I said, “Hey, Igor.”

“Hiya,” Igor said, deadpan.

Folchik rode in back. I rode bitch. Drinkwater pushed the big truck up to eighty down unpaved roads, throwing up a rooster tail of dust. We gunned past houses that weren’t much more than huts held fast by L-clamps and the grace of God. Soon even those were gone: only the uncluttered scrub of the rez where, as they say, a man could watch his dog run away for days.

Drinkwater said, drily, “What bounty you’ve given us, paleface. What beauty to behold. I guess you’d like it if we were gone — yeah? Sure. We give you heap big headaches. But the ol’ typhoid-infested blanket trick didn’t work, did it? The firewater, though. That was a smart move.”

He hurled the truck round a blind corner, wheels flirting with the ditch. The momentum threw me against Igor’s unyielding bulk.

“But you let us hang around, you white devils with your white devil guilt, and now we’re dug in deep.”

The dirt road gave way to tarmac. The tires bit down and we screamed off the rez into the world of concrete light stanchions, dotted yellow lines and Piggly Wigglys. Drinkwater took us down a switchback hill that emptied into the Niagara river basin. He stopped in front of a puntboat tied along the shore.

“Let’s see what you can do with this tub,” he said.

The river was greenest at the shore, greying as it went out and black where it ran deepest. It was five hundred yards wide where we stood, and hooked sharply a half-mile down, around an outcrop of Jack pines. The sun carved over the trees on the far shore, glimmering off a million leaves so that it seemed as if the distant banks were on fire.

We picked across jags of rock slick with algae at the waterline. An insane glittering of gnats danced above the greenness. We each scooped up a handful of cold river water and ran our fingers over our teeth until we heard the squeak. It was something all men did around here.

My uncle used to take me fishing for steelhead in a puntboat before the bank took it away. Drinkwater’s boat was a long, flat-bottomed pug with rings of rust around every rivet. He and Igor stood at the bow while I shucked the tie-downs and slid us off.

Once we’d floated free of the rocks I pull-started the old Evinrude and guided us into the deepest seam of the channel. The current held a complex urgency: breaking around rocks and into sucking crevices, forming again, fighting against itself like a thing made of many strings being pulled different ways at once.

Drinkwater watched me without watching me. Igor’s face remained stony as an Easter Island idol as the dying sun lit it from behind: he looked sandblasted, with divots of shadow on the places he must’ve had acne as a teenager.

Drinkwater shifted his hips and I saw the curved bone handle of his knife sheathed where his belt ran round his spine. I thought that you didn’t need to be strong or skilled to slide a knife into someone — you only had to core that worm of mercy out of your heart. That was the hardest line, one I couldn’t cross; it put me at a disadvantage with guys like Drinkwater.

“Cut the motor,” he said.

We drifted. Igor whispered into Drinkwater’s ear; Lem laughed without mirth.

“What I need of you …” he said to me, still laughing.

“How many?” I said.

He wasn’t laughing now. “How many what?”