Craig Davidson - Cataract City

She stopped halfway down the driveway, lamp in hand, gazing at me as I passed. There was no quiver in her eyes. She was stronger than fate — by which I mean she hadn’t imbibed the defeatism at the core of this city, the sense that each step of our lives had been plotted and our role was to follow those footfalls. Her lips moved but I couldn’t make out the words.

It could have been “Bye, Owe.” Or it could’ve been “You owe.”

I did owe and I did pay, after a fashion. For eight years I drank too much, nursed a sullen emptiness and waited for something to change, all the while knowing this was the single biggest lie people told themselves: that change will eventually come on its own if you wait patiently enough for it.

I told myself: When Duncan gets out, you make it right. However you can, in whatever way necessary. Make it right .

And then, three months after Dunk was released from prison, and three months after his fight at Drinkwater’s, I was given the chance.

“NEVER FIGURED I’D SEE THE DAY where I was rigged to a wire … by a white man, no less.”

“It’s not a wire,” I said. “It’s all wireless nowadays. Welcome to the twenty-first century.”

Silas Garrow made a face. “Explain again how I let you talk me into this.”

We sat in an unmarked cruiser in the Niagara River spillway. I was in the back seat with Silas, affixing a tiny microphone to the furred hood of his parka. Duncan sat silently up front.

Silas was set to meet Lemuel Drinkwater on the frozen Niagara to negotiate a deal for Drinkwater’s Molins Mark 9 cigarette machines. After talking with his band elders, Silas had agreed to co-operate with the police.

Silas and Drinkwater would meet alone. A recent rash of thieveries and his bad luck at the fights had sown a seed of distrust deep inside Drinkwater — and apparently that seed had since flowered into a vine of runaway paranoia. He no longer spoke on cell phones, preferring to dispatch his orders via an ever-shrinking network of impressionable Native teens.

“This is just preliminary evidence gathering,” I told Silas. “Once we’ve got him on record, I’ll go to my chief and requisition manpower for when the actual deal goes down.”

Nobody knew about tonight’s activities. I’d signed out the surveillance equipment from the tactical ordnance officer, who handed it over no questions asked. It wasn’t uncommon for officers to pursue their own investigations — some even did freelance PI work, bugging the no-tell motels on Lundy’s Lane, ratting out philandering hubbies to their suspicious wives.

Silas said, “So what do you need?”

“Time, place, price,” I told him. “Most of all, intent. Just talk naturally. The information will come.”

The Niagara Peninsula was clad in sparkling snow. The crescent moon fell upon the iced-over river, its expanse like a polished razor. Silas straddled the skidoo he’d trucked up from the Akwesasne: a tricked-out model with a silenced exhaust that was built to ferry sleds of cigarettes across the Saint Lawrence Seaway. “Should I have a gun?” he wondered.

“Do you foresee any need for one?” I asked.

“It’s Drinkwater,” Silas said simply.

I grabbed the police-issue Mossberg pump-action shotgun from the cruiser. Silas strapped it to the skidoo.

The rusty burr of a motor carried across the night-stilled air, climbing to a keen. Drinkwater was coming. Silas started his own skidoo and gunned the engine.

“Make it short,” I said. “Just the essentials.”

Silas nodded, the trace of consternation never leaving his face. He tore out of the spillway, down the alluvial slope of the riverbank into the river basin, accelerating now, his tail lights flaring bright red — the eyes of some predatory animal — then dimming as he navigated a rim of crested ice.

Duncan and I sequestered ourselves in the cruiser, listening to the microphone feed. At first we heard nothing but the hornet-drone of the skidoo motor and the wind raking the mic.

“Cold as a witch’s tit,” we heard Silas say.

The motor decelerated; there came the tink-tink-tink of metal treads crawling across the ice. From our vantage we could see a brief flare of the tail lights as Silas came to a stop about four hundred yards from shore. The moon cut a rift across the frozen river, glossing the torsional shapes of both skidoos. The crunch of boots on winter snowpack was punctuated by Silas’s ragged exhales.

SILAS: “You okay?”

DRINKWATER: “Why shouldn’t I be?”

“No reason. Look a little troubled, is all.”

“Meeting out on a goddamn winter river — why shouldn’t I be? Cloak-and-dagger shit. But you want something done right, do it yourself. I’d be a damn sight better if you hadn’t gotten your ass handed to you by some over-the-hill pug. Where the hell’d you get those boxing titles? Out of a Cracker Jack box?”

“That guy had stones in his hands. What can I say? Wasn’t my night.”

“ Your night?”

“Lemmy, listen — I didn’t come out here to cry over spilt milk.”

Lingering pause.

DRINKWATER: “What’s that ?”

SILAS: “What’s what, Lem?”

“ That , you goddamn shitbird! That … that !”

A finger of light bloomed on the night river, followed by the report of gunfire.

Dunk and I put boots to snow, racing down the slope, slipping on the ice-slick stones. We found Silas laid out on the ice, staring up at the sky with a serene look on his face.

“He shot me,” he managed. “He saw the shotgun. Police issue, isn’t it?”

I unzipped his parka. The bullet had sheared through his shirt and the meat of his biceps. “Clean through.”

Wincing, Silas said, “So that’s what —good ?”

I said, “The bullet’s not stuck inside of you. Didn’t ricochet off your bone, otherwise it would have snapped. Let’s get you back to the cruiser.”

“No way,” Silas told me. “No police, no doctors.”

“You’ve been shot,” said Duncan.

“Thanks for the update. I’ve been grazed , right? I got you all the evidence you need, right?”

I said, “We’ve got him on attempted murder now.”

“So go get him . Another five minutes, that man will be nothing but a vapour trail. You’ll never find him.”

I exchanged a look with Duncan. A profound, impossible worry sparked in his eyes.

“You’ll be okay?” Duncan asked Silas.

“I have people nearby. We Injuns have people everywhere .”

Duncan drove. Silas’s skidoo shot across the river so fast that the speed squeezed tears from my eyes, all of which vaporized before reaching my ears.

Drinkwater’s sled tracks cut south, back towards the States, until the ice began to groan ominously — I spotted a black lapping edge where the river wasn’t yet frozen. Then the tracks cut back north.

The skidoo engine buzzed like honeybees trapped in a tin can. Now Drinkwater’s tracks veered sharply towards the northern shore. I squinted at the banks, dark beneath the pines. No street lamps or bridge lights or car headlights flashed through the trees. The only man-made light came from Clifton Hill: a gauzy bowl of whiteness that was dimming by the second.

Duncan angled his body into a turn, following the line Drinkwater had carved. The night was clean and clear. No snow to cover up the tracks. He was driving too fast, amped up on adrenaline.

“Throttle down, Dunk.”

He drove parallel to the riverbank, bloodhounding Drinkwater’s tracks. They zagged towards the shore as if Drinkwater had been debating whether to enter the woods. Winter-naked trees and snow-draped shrubs blurred into a thick wall of foliage.