Craig Davidson - Cataract City

I pulled a Coke from the cooler and drank half in one go.

Drinkwater said: “Plan on paying for that?”

“Think I’d welsh on you, Lem?”

“I don’t know what you’d do — you’re an ex-con, Diggs. Better get used to people having trust issues.” He glanced at Owe, then back to me. “I would have thought you two might have trust issues of your own.”

“I want to fight again, Lem.”

Drinkwater drew back as if shocked. “Diggs! Need I remind you that you’re in polite society? Your animalistic ways don’t fly out here.”

Owe said, “How’s business, Lemmy? Lookin’ a little sluggish. You ought to rotate your merchandise.”

Drinkwater’s tongue played on the point of his eye tooth. “Like I said, Diggs — we’re not mixed up with fighting here. You’d almost think, coming over here with a member of the constabulary, you’re trying to … what’s it called? Entrap me.”

Owe plucked a bag of potato chips off the wire rack and dropped it on the ground. Drinkwater watched him with bright birdlike eyes. Owe set the toe of his boot on the bag. The cellophane squealed thinly before the bag popped, spraying chips over Drinkwater’s boots.

Pinching his jeans at the inseam, Drinkwater shook chips off his pant legs. “Now that,” he said, small veins braiding under his shirt collar, “that couldn’t have been an accident.”

Owe pointed at the security camera above the counter. “You’ve got me. So don’t say entrapment, okay? Not to mention which, I’m consorting with a known smuggler.”

Drinkwater laughed. “Ain’t my fault you don’t pick friends with a finer pedigree.”

“I’m talking about you, Lem.”

Drinkwater batted his eyes. “Why, Officer, you of all people know I’ve never been convicted. As I recall, a great deal of your time and efforts have funnelled down that empty hole.”

“You’re clean,” said Owe. “That doesn’t stop a lot of people from thinking you’re scum. Now that’s a fact, Lem. It’s the way you’re seen.”

Drinkwater’s jaw went hard. He swallowed in one sinuous movement.

“You want to fight, uh?” he said to me.

When I told him I wanted to fight three men, Drinkwater’s eyelids lifted from half-mast.

“One night,” I explained. “Any three men you want.”

“Think you’re the first swinging dick with a death wish who’s walked through these doors?” he said. “Anybody in particular?”

“Anyone’ll do. Whites, blacks, Natives.”

“No women and kids?” Drinkwater laughed softly. “I only ask because, well, I am talking to a man who cut another man’s balls off with a carpet knife, am I not?”

I said, “That’s not how it happened.”

“No? That’s the way everybody believes it went down around here. You snuck up behind poor Igor, slid a blade between his legs and slit him nuts to asshole. Were it not for the hard work of the police”—he turned to Owe, palms pressed together as if in prayer—“and bless you for that, Officer. Bless you . If not for the police you’d have gotten away clean.”

“If that’s the kind of guy you think I am, why not make it all Natives?”

Drinkwater said, “You’re asking me to assemble a war party? You got it, Pontiac. Three stout Indians, of heart proud and true.”

“I want to put a bet on myself, too.”

“Yeah?” said Drinkwater. “Well, nobody put me on this earth to talk grown men out of being stupid.”

The day before the fight I withdrew all but five bucks from my account at the Greater Niagara Credit Union. Edwina had sold our house while I was locked up and transferred my half into the account I’d opened as a ten-year-old to rathole the money I made mowing neighbourhood lawns.

The days leading up to the fight had passed quickly. I’d done plenty of running — I’d slacked off in prison, seeing as it made me feel like a hamster on a wheel. Now I ran at night. I’d wake up in the witching hours and drag myself to the bathroom. I’d open the cupboard and hunt out the bottle at the back with an old rag tented over it. Tuf-Foot . The tagline read: A dog is only as good as his feet .

I’d squeeze some goo into my hands and massage it into my joints. Afterwards my hands were stained brown and achy to the bones, but I needed them to stay together in the fights.

I’d yank on the heavy workboots I used to wear at the Bisk, a hooded sweatshirt, and enter the empty corridors of night.

The streets were pretty much deserted. The few guys I passed weren’t dangerous so much as desperate, broken by pills or inhalants or strong drink or the unstoppable craving for all those things. Every so often a face would jump out of a dark alley asking for something, or offering it, and I’d think: Jesus, I used to know you. We played baseball at Reservoir Park .

I’d run down Stanley Ave. as the bars emptied out, juking around drunk kids laughing their batshit laughter, finding myself a little terrified by that sound — it was the laughter of people who felt invincible because of their youth and promise and the wide-open future. Guys in prison didn’t laugh like that.

I’d run further down the block where other bars were letting out, the ones with dark windows and no signs where the hospital orderlies and tollbooth operators drank. Men would shoulder through black presswood doors with fixed expressions on their faces and cigs fixed between their chalky lips. I’d watch the fresh air smack them in the face, their pupils constricting as the realization dawned: Sweet Jesus, I’m not anywhere near drunk enough! Some of them gave me a slit-eyed look before nodding, but not chummily. These guys weren’t a lot older than me, their faces wrecked from drink or just the years piling up with brutal math.

A lot of nights I’d end up at the Falls, leaning on the observatory railing. There was always light by the Falls. It made no difference if there was a full moon or a sliver no thicker than a bone fish hook: moonlight hit the spray at the base of the Falls and the mist projected it back, an upside-down bowl of light. Baby birds peeped from their cliffside nests, a sound I found mysteriously comforting.

The night of the fight I packed my duffel, tucked the money order into my pocket and headed to a convenience store near my folks’ place. Owe pulled up. I tossed my duffel in the footwell. We drove along the river past the hydro station. Owe cracked the window and hung a cigarette off his bottom lip. “You mind?”

“We all got to die someday.”

He pulled up in front of a bar. Bovine slid into the back seat smelling like he’d spent the afternoon marinating in a vat of Famous Grouse.

“Just a few hand-steadiers,” he said as we drove away.

Trucks were parked ten deep at the warehouse behind Smokin’ Joes. A knot of seamed faces clustered round the door.

“You’ll be heading home with your scalp hanging out of your fucking mouth,” one of them said.

“That wig’s getting split straight down the middle,” said another.

The air hung hot and close inside the warehouse. Pigeons cooed in the rafters. When we entered the fighting area, a heavy silence fell. The Antichrist himself may as well have entered the building.

The fight box was the same as I remembered: a ring of sawhorses from a roadside construction site. Spectators ranged down them, the toes of their boots edging onto the fighting surface. They were drinking but nobody seemed drunk; they wanted to be sober to better witness the destruction.

Drinkwater stepped out of the crowd, laughing over his shoulder with someone. He eyed me up and down, and untucked a cigarette and a wooden match from behind his ear.

“What ya done brung me, son?”