Craig Davidson - Cataract City

I’d smiled, knowing I was hers now: all body, all soul. I’d been waiting to give myself to somebody that way ever since I could remember.

“I’m taking Dolly,” she said to me in the pen’s visiting room.

“Taking her where?”

“Just away, Dunk.”

I kept my head steady, my gaze calm, but my insides were chewing themselves to pieces. “Okay, sure. She loves you best, anyway.”

“Dogs love everyone the same.”

She stood up. Her jaw worked like she was going to say something else. She looked at the visiting room guard, flustered for a moment, then back at me. “You want another Coke before I go?”

That’s when I realized it was going to end this way: with the woman I loved awkwardly asking if I wanted another soda.

“It’s okay, baby. But thanks.”

She walked out and kept walking. She took Dolly and never looked back. Edwina did the one thing I’d never fully brought myself to do, despite all the dreaming and planning: she left Cataract City.

I grew my hair long, shaved my skull to bare scalp then let it grow again. My body fleshed out: I had thick striations across the chest and marbling on the delts, lats flaring in a noticeable cobra’s hood. I hammered the bag until my body was clad in a fine oil of sweat and every joint rolled smooth in its socket. I sparred with Silas and sat with him at dinnertime in companionable silence. I watched my hair go grey at my temples in the steel mirror above the shitter — everything in the pen was steel, and no reflection was quite right — and wondered if it was something about the character of the light that had given me a permanent squint.

Prison subtly ruins you. The grey cafeteria chow cored a hole through my insides. The pressure of living with five hundred caged animals carved deep lines in my flesh. I saw a man stabbed in the ear with a sharpened toothbrush. Saw another man kicked half to death with bare feet in the showers, his attackers slipping on the tiles as their cocks slapped their thighs. The only solace was that these victims probably deserved it, more or less.

After a time, I was no longer a new fish, but not an old fish. A middle fish, if there was any such thing. Sometimes I’d feel a click in my throat when I swallowed: Igor Bearfoot’s huge hands had partially crushed my Adam’s apple.

As the long-timers said: I worked my time and tried to make it work for me. I enrolled in correspondence English classes, completing the diploma program I’d started years ago. My verbiage improved considerably — the iron bars became ferrous shackles ; a pretty actress on TV became a toothsome seductress … you’d never speak that way in the pen, of course, unless you wanted an ass-stomping. But I liked my newfound words, my bons mots — they pushed the walls back just a little, gave me space to breathe. When the book trolley came around I’d say, “Surprise me.” Police procedurals, horror pulps, outdoorsy narratives.

The Count of Monte Cristo —that one I asked for specifically.

Some days I figured I’d do my years quietly and earn my release and life would continue at a lower wattage. I’d stay with my folks and visit my probation officer, get a job — something I could do with my hands — go to the Cairncroft Lounge on Saturday nights for a wobbly pop with Sam Bovine, meet a woman who wasn’t put off by histories and scars. Get a little house off Drummond Road, have a few kids.

It wasn’t such a stretch, was it? Perhaps it wasn’t the life I’d envisioned — but who ever ends up with the life they imagine as a child? Screw anyone who does. What’s to say they hadn’t dreamed too small in the first place?

Other nights I lay in bed with the pads of my feet clenched tight as if I was teetering over a balcony ledge thirty stories up, terrified I’d get cancer and die in this strange grey place. Or maybe a vein would pop in my skull and I’d twitch to death in my sleep with Bainbridge squealing beneath me. Mainly, though, my worries echoed those of most cons: when I got out, what would be left for me? The world would have progressed and I’d have lost my fragile place in it. I’d already lost Edwina — what else was left?

Each New Year I stood in the common room wearing a goofy party hat as Dick Clark announced the ball drop on TV. It was the only way I bothered marking the passage of time. I didn’t count days anymore, or even weeks. They’d welded together, a polished steel rail that I could slide right over.

I awoke to each new day and let it carry me through a familiar routine. I sat at the same table for meals, met Silas at the appointed time for sparring, showered with the same faces, stuffed in earplugs and struggled to sleep. I even got used to Bainbridge’s smell.

In my sixth year Silas Garrow was released. The guards let him throw a little bash in the laundry room: a few bottles of Jack Daniel’s, a sandwich platter. Silas bequeathed me his collection of spank mags.

“Treat them with reverence, paleface.”

I held one up. Fifty and Nifty . “Really, Silas?”

“Older ladies need love, too. See you on the outside?”

“Of course.”

Were they true words? Silas would never leave the Akwesasne and I’d plant myself back in Cataract City. The only place we’d meet again was back inside these cold stone walls.

One night Bainbridge started shrieking and kicking up a mighty fuss. I said to hell with it, reached down and shook the huge man’s shoulder.

“Nathan, god damn it, wake up! You’re having a nightmare.”

Bainbridge blinked his cowlike eyes and spoke in the voice of a child. “Geez, what a crazy dream. There was this ugly witch with a wart on her nose and she was cackling like a loon and—” He swallowed heavily. “She was pulling on my … scrotum . Tugging so dang hard I thought she’d rip the dang thing off.”

“It’s okay, man. See? No witch.”

Bainbridge shuddered. “Thank you, Duncan. Sincerely.”

The rail narrowed and then, one day, it ended. On that day a guard handed over the items I’d been arrested holding: a handful of change, half a roll of cherry Life Savers. I peeled the paper and popped two of them in my mouth — the candies were stuck together with age. They tasted just about as good as I’d remembered.

I dropped two tarnished quarters into the prison’s pay phone. I called Owe.

And then I was out.

And now came payback.

THE DAY AFTER MEETING with Owe and Bovine at the Double Diamond and outlining my intentions, Owe and I drove across the river, through customs, and onto the Robert Moses Parkway. A bullet-pitted road sign said: ENTERING THE TUSCARORA NATION. Owe pulled into Smokin’ Joes. The steel warehouses where Drinkwater’s real business went down still stood behind a fence of electrified chain-link.

The shelves in Smokin’ Joes looked as if they’d been rifled by survivalists. The leather jackets were so old they’d lost their smell, dust collecting on their shoulders. We wandered around aimlessly. I saw the cashier pick up the phone.

Five minutes later Drinkwater pulled into the lot. His silver pickup was dinged and rusty. He stepped inside his store with a hulking, sallow-faced sidekick in tow. The awful thought struck me that the sidekick looked a lot like Igor Bearfoot.

“You’re out of jail, my pretty,” Drinkwater said when he saw me. “And look! You’ve brought your little dog, too.”

I said, “You look haggard, Lem.”

Drinkwater’s fingernail scritched the stubble on his chin like a wooden match pulled over a striking strip. “You look well, Diggs. Prison life must have agreed with you, uh? Three hots and a cot. Yeah, you’ll never get those years back, but you put on a few solid pounds of jail beef.”