Craig Davidson - Cataract City

“Just you and me?”

“On this side. Others, other side.”

“You got my money?”

Igor’s head swivelled slowly, as if his neck was operated by a balky crank. When he didn’t answer I glanced over my shoulder. Stuck hadn’t followed. He couldn’t possibly know where we were going — even I didn’t know that.

Igor said, “What’s your problem?”

We hit the I-190 and out across the night river where it split at Navy Island. The street lights vanished as we drove through Buckthorn Island, then came back as we hit the Red Carpet Inn off Grand Inland Boulevard. The wheel looked as thin as copper wire in Igor’s meathooks. I felt the shape of the box-cutter in my pocket. I was ashamed to have brought it — a Dollar Store weapon, something a punk would carry.

We hit the West River Parkway and swung round the traffic ring into Beaver Island State Park. Light stanchions shone on an empty road glittering with frost. Igor tapped the brakes and eased onto an unlit corduroy road. Bushes whacked up under the car, rattling the coins in the cup holders. Igor pulled under some trees, cut the engine and unrolled the back window enough so Bandit could hop out.

“We walk from here.”

The long, open rush of the river and the dampness of the woods crawled up the back of my neck. We trudged through leaf mould that collapsed beneath our feet, boots sinking into the twisted roots that clawed up through the earth.

Igor moved slowly, tripping once and whistling air between his teeth. Trees with bladelike leaves, willows maybe, grew thickly along the bank. I pushed them clear with hands numb from the cold. The river opened before us.

It was black, as all night water was — as if the night dissolved directly into it, filling it with the same nothingness that must exist between stars.

“Those are them,” Igor said.

I peered at one puntboat, one swift-looking Zodiac. The puntboat was a wide-bottomed hulk topped with a tarpaulin. Under the tarp sat cardboard boxes stacked high, flaps fastened with packing tape.

“You in this one.” Igor pointed to the punt. “I follow in the Zodiac.”

The cry came from somewhere behind the willows. Owe. I knew it instinctively, because although years had passed and we were now double the age we were back then, and Owe’s voice had changed and deepened, when we scream — any of us, when we are truly shocked and scared — we sound like boys. Owe screamed as he had when we were boys lost in the woods.

Instinctively I leapt from the puntboat and moved towards him — which was when Igor smashed a fist into the side of my head. The night swung out of balance, stars pinwheeling as I crashed on the rocks with Igor’s bulk following to crush the air from my lungs.

“Knew you were dirty …”

His hands clamped round my throat. My legs thrashed uselessly as Igor hipped himself up on my chest, bearing down with all his weight, shoulders torqueing forward, hands constricting to crush my windpipe.

Darkness hemmed my vision, a deeper and more profound darkness than night. I brought a fist up and cracked Igor in the mouth but my strength was fleeing, my reflexes too, and I don’t think he even registered it. I slid a hand between his thigh and my stomach, feeling for the box-cutter that lay trapped against the tight denim of my pocket. I clawed for it, my tongue thickening as the pressure of blood swelled behind my eyes.

My hand closed on the plastic shaft of the box-cutter and I thumbed the mechanism convulsively. I jerked my arm, the box-cutter slicing through my pocket as my hand came up under Igor’s thigh — there was a sensation of things coming apart, a terrifying new looseness — and next my hand was free and in it lay three inches of glinting razor.

Igor’s hands clenched my throat tighter. White balls burst in front of my eyes. Then warmth was spreading across my chest. Igor’s grip loosened. He stared down with a look of befuddlement. His jeans were dark, as was my shirt and jacket.

“Wha—?” he said.

He stood with difficulty. A clean, straight slit ran through his jeans, two inches to the left of his zipper. Blood ran along each edge. His hands trembled at the wound. He pushed as if he might somehow push the blood back inside. He staggered towards the water, still ten or twelve feet from the shore.

Igor got down carefully on his knees; blood splashed the stones, or was it the splash of water? Part of me wanted him to die, but that same part knew I was doomed if he did. That part also knew it was beyond my power to control now.

Igor crawled to the river. He was moaning somebody’s name, I believe, yet the sound came out as a hateful hiss. He fell face first into the water. I staggered to the waterline, rolled Igor over. His eyes were already glassy like a doll’s.

Run, said a rabbity voice inside my head. It’s all you can do now. RUN .

The Zodiac ignited with an easy rumble. I piloted it onto the river, skipping across lapping wavelets, swallowing compulsively because it was hard to breathe. Where was I going? I had no idea. My mind said, Just go .

The Zodiac’s motor stripped out across the water. I angled towards the Falls, charting the bend of the river by the solitary lights hovering above the scrim of the shore. Red and blue lights flashed in the low-lying blackness on the Canadian side, disappearing as the cruisers dipped down a hill and reappearing as they crested it.

A trap door opened in my stomach. Edwina. Owe .

I cycled the motor to surge upriver. There were the lights of Clifton Hill. The Falls were lit with red and green spotlights, and a white bowl of mist foamed up from the basin. The sound was loudest here: a pressurized thrum against my eardrums. I thought fleetingly: You forget how powerful some things are. You take their beauty for granted .

A helicopter rose up from the Falls basin, blades whirring over the tumbling water. Its spotlight illuminated the river. I almost laughed. I spun around and cut back downriver. I screamed into the cold air that wicked off the water, let it fill my mouth with the taste of wet steel. The taste of home.

The searchlight crept across the river until it found me. A cone of light shone down like the finger of God himself. The chopper dropped low; water foamed over the Zodiac’s gunwales. A bullhorn-amplified voice shouted something, but I had no idea what.

Then the puntboat slid out of the darkness in front of me, Owe at the wheel. His skull was clad in a helmet of blood. Jesus, was he okay? I cut the motor and floated forward. The noses of our boats touched, then bounced gently away.

I showed Owe my palms like a magician following some sleight of hand. Ta -daa . The helicopter’s searchlight cored a circle of whiteness out of the night.

“I’m sorry I had to run you down,” he might have said, but his words were carried away by the rotor wash of the helicopter.

“You never had to do anything,” I may have said back.

“You made me.”

“No, Owe. You made yourself.”

We floated in that perfect halo of light. Cataract City men, fully made.

IT WAS NIGHT AGAIN WHEN I LEFT my parents’ house, walking to a quiet stretch of blocks off Bender Street. I’d thought about taking the folks’ car, but my licence had expired while I was in prison and I was done taking stupid risks. Almost done, anyway.

There was a pay phone on the street, near the Sleep Easy Motor Inn. I stepped inside, let the Plexiglas door swing shut, plugged quarters in the box and dialled.

I hadn’t tried the number in years. Would she have kept it?

One ring. Two. Three. Four. Five.

I was getting ready to hang up when a voice said, “Hello?”