Craig Davidson - Cataract City

“You pay these men,” he told Drinkwater. “Every penny they’re owed.”

“That’s not your call,” Drinkwater said.

“It’s not,” Silas agreed, “but if you don’t I’ll make sure everyone on the Akwesasne knows about it.”

A wretched cornered-rat look darkened Drinkwater’s face. I held out my hand with dry insistence.

“Pay me, Drinkwater.”

“I’ll pay, god damn you. I’ll pay.”

I half remembered being carried out by Owe and Bovine, laid in the back seat of Owe’s car. Now here I was, blind in a strange bed. My hands rose instinctively to my eyes, but someone held them back.

“Don’t touch them.” It was Bovine. “They’re swollen shut. You’re swollen all over.”

I tried to say something but my lips were fused with a glaze of blood. Bovine wet his fingertips with water and ran them over my lips.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“Red Coach Inn. Jeez, what a dive. Red Roach Inn paints the better picture. But we couldn’t get you across the border looking like this.”

“Owe?”

“He left last night. You’ve been passed out almost two days. Your face is … Dunk, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

My body was levelled with pain: the sharp variety from the broken bones in my hand, the throbbing variety sunk deep into my face and the bone-deep kind every other place.

For the next three days I barely moved. Bovine was there for most of it, and Owen checked in. They smeared Polysporin on my wounds and made me drink litres of Pedialyte. I lay in a half-waking, half-resting state where nothing was entirely real. The hum of the ceiling fan, the murmur of daytime talk shows.

On the fourth day I gathered my legs and stood. The room was quiet; Bovine was down at the motel bar. I fumbled my way around the bed, barking my shin on the bedpost. Teetering into the bathroom, I ran one blind hand along the wall until my fingers brushed the switch.

My eyes were black balls in the bathroom mirror, nose a mangled knob, shattered capillaries threading over both cheeks. Bovine had stitched the mouse shut; the half-moon curve of the incision bristled with catgut, my forehead dark as an eggplant.

I trailed the fingers of my left hand down my chest and stomach, let them linger on the softball-sized contusions on either side of my ribs: dark purple at their centres, sickly yellow at their edges. My right hand was swaddled in bandages; if I so much as grazed it on a solid surface, a serrated edge of agony would rip all the way to my elbow.

“Fuck it, Duncan Diggs,” I told my reflection. “Were you ever really a handsome man?”

I rented the room indefinitely. Bovine returned to the mortuary. My days were spent reading, watching junk TV, taking epic showers. I sat on the balcony while the housekeeper changed the sheets, listening to the rumble of the Falls over the traffic surging down Buffalo Avenue. My bruises lightened. I could breathe through my nose again and no longer sounded like a tickhound with sinusitis.

One afternoon, there was a knock at the door. I opened it to find a Native teenager holding a duffel bag. The kid shoved it into my chest, spat on the cement near my feet and left.

Inside were stacks of fifties and twenties bound with elastic bands: $398,000, plus a single penny rattling at the bottom. Drinkwater had shorted us two grand. The note he’d slid in with the cash read: It will never buy back the years you lost .

“You’re right about that, Lemmy,” I said, with a laugh that hurt my sides. “But it’ll make the years I’ve got left a little sweeter.”

I slept soundly and awoke to a ringing phone.

“You bastard,” Silas said. “We said make it look real, for the love of fuck, not knock me into a coma!”

“I could barely stand,” I said. “Didn’t think—”

“I couldn’t think straight for a week! Still can’t remember where I left my car keys.”

“I’m sorry.”

Silas broke the lingering silence. “You were something up from the grave, Diggs. Remorseless — a zombie! A relentless killing machine! How’s your cabeza?”

Peering into the duffel, I said, “I’ll live.”

Silas grunted, unconvinced. “Get your ass back over here where the health care’s free.”

“Thanks, Silas. For everything.”

“My tenderfeet tell me that big payoff left ol’ Lemmy just about bust. You ought to talk to your cop friend — Drinkwater’s in a desperate frame of mind.”

I hung up and stared again at the money. It was more than I’d ever seen. For some it was nothing of consequence — a decent Christmas bonus for a Fortune 50 °CEO — but to me it meant freedom. I just wasn’t sure yet what that freedom would look like. I felt an urge to spread the bills on the bed and roll around like bank robbers do in the movies.

I walked to the window, threw the curtains open. Late-afternoon sunlight bathed the treetops overlooking the cataract basin.

Owe stopped by with a sack of bearclaws and coffee in Styrofoam cups.

“How you feeling?”

“Can’t complain,” I said, tearing into a bearclaw. I was feeling like a bear myself, just stirred from hibernation — devouring everything I could lay my paws on, the sweeter the better.

Owe watched me dump six sugar packets into my coffee. His cop’s eyes were probably lingering over the skin that sat loose upon my frame, the muscle I’d earned in prison now melted away. I unzipped the duffel, tossed him a roll of bills.

“You go ahead, count it.”

“I don’t need to.”

“I’d like it if you did.”

Instead Owe snapped the elastic band off the roll, split the bills roughly in half, snapped the elastic band on one half and flipped it back. “I wasn’t looking at it as a money-making opportunity,” he said. “I just wanted to fuck with Drinkwater.”

I wasn’t about to argue. I nodded and dropped the roll back in the duffel.

“That last guy,” Owe said, one eyebrow raised. “He was looking like a world-destroyer … until you caught him.”

“Even the blind squirrel finds a nut, Owe.”

“I thought you might be interested to know — Drinkwater may be making a move.”

I watched him closely over the rim of my Styrofoam cup. “Yeah?”

Owen had heard the news from one of his fellow boys in blue, a district sergeant with the Niagara PD. The word through the grapevine was that Drinkwater wanted to get out of the cigarette-smuggling business.

“They say he’s trying to sell off his entire apparatus. Cig makers, packagers, labellers, whole shebang.”

“Who’s the buyer?”

“It’ll be a larger smuggling operation, which means either the Akwesasne or Kahnawake tribe.”

“You’re involved in the investigation?”

There was a moment of pent-up tension as the unspoken question lay between us: Would you tell me if you were involved, Owe, seeing as you didn’t the last time?

“No investigation,” he said, “just suppositions and scuttlebutt. My chief wouldn’t detach me, anyway. Drinkwater’s pretty much a dead issue around the precinct.”

“But not for you.”

Owe’s heavy-lidded gaze oriented on the window. “I buried that fucker’s dog, man.”

A week later I was back at my folks’ place, still thinking about what I’d do next. My nose was skewed at a fresh angle and a mottled scar was scrawled across my forehead. But Cataract City was a hockey player’s town; bust-up noses were commonplace, and I could always grow my bangs out.

Guilt settled over the dinner table and Mom’s bruised eyes avoided mine. She must be so ashamed, I thought. I wondered if my name came up at the Bisk, or during her bowling league night with her girlfriends — or had her friends learned to avoid the subject?