Craig Davidson - Cataract City

It could be done: slide a needle into Dunk’s lungs, drain the blood. The needle looked up to the task: long, with a wide gauge. A hog-sticker. The tip didn’t look especially sharp. Would it pierce the chest plate? Was there an actual plate of bone behind the rib cage, or just durable cartilage? The needle could pierce cartilage, surely. But I’d have to drive it hard into Duncan’s chest.

A foolproof plan? Hardly. The needle could break. There was that. Or not quite reach his lungs. Or Dunk’s blood might be too coagulated to flow, and it would be like sucking wet sand through a cocktail straw. Those problems didn’t seem important when I considered that Dunk would surely die if I did nothing at all.

“I could try to drain the blood.”

Duncan cracked one eye and saw the needle. “With that?”

I nodded. “I’ve seen it done.”

“Where?”

“Can I be straight with you? I saw it in a movie.”

Duncan smiled. Blood shone on his teeth. “Which one?”

“Don’t remember. It had Mark Wahlberg in it.”

“Marky Mark?”

“I don’t even know if it’ll work, Dunk. Plus I guess it could snap. Infection’s a possibility — who knows what Mahoney used this thing for. Worst-case scenario is, you end up with a needle sticking out of your chest.”

Duncan shook his head. “W-worst-case scenario is …”

“We know the worst-case scenario, don’t we?”

Dunk let his eye slip closed. “So try.”

I dipped the needle in gasoline, shook off the excess and held it to the flames. A tongue of fire lapped the metal. I held it until the heat blistered my fingertips, then doused it in the snow.

I screwed the needle back onto the hull, debating. Ultimately I elected to straddle Duncan’s hips so I could bear down with my full weight. Running my fingers across his chest, I hunted for the separation between his ribs. The skin was too swollen to make it a certainty. I found the spot where Duncan’s heartbeat was strongest; I guess I’d aim someplace to the right of that? Couldn’t push too hard — if the needle hit bone and snapped, there went our chance. I’d have to slide it in real nice and slow.

“Ready?”

“Go.”

I positioned the needle on the perimeter of blackened skin. Shoulders hunched, I bore down with even pressure. Duncan’s skin dimpled slightly before the tip pierced; he grunted as the needle slid through layers of tissue into pectoral muscle. It hit an unflexing hardness. Bone? I let go of the needle, left it jutting from Duncan’s chest. I felt my own chest. My ribs were closer to the surface, I was sure of it — I must’ve hit Duncan’s chest plate.

I gripped the hull again and pushed. The cartilage buckled like a sheet of plastic. A burbling noise came out of Duncan like a sewer backing up. A bubble of blood formed between his lips, bursting wetly. My arms flexed. My elbow wound tore open, and blood streamed down my forearm.

The noise the needle made punching through Dunk’s chest plate would have been familiar to any schoolchild: a three-hole punch crunching through a sheaf of construction paper. The shaft sank into the softness of Duncan’s lungs. Blood geysered out.

Dunk inhaled a huge lungful, then his breathing rapidly settled into a normal rhythm. After the initial eruption the blood settled to a steady trickle that ran down and around his hip bones. We lay together listening to his lungs drain.

“Turn on your side,” I said. “That could help.”

In time he sat up. Blood lay dark on his chest. It had soaked into his jeans, and it dribbled out of the syringe like a drippy faucet. He unscrewed the glass hull so just the needle protruded from his chest.

We sat with our legs dangling off the bumper, feet kicking as if we were kids perched on a railing. The wind had tailed off now, and the snow fell in big soft flakes.

A wolf sat beyond the firelight, nearly invisible in the snow. In the night stillness I heard it breathing, smelled the gamy oil of its coat.

“Go on,” I said. “Scat. Skedaddle.”

The wolf stayed, but I didn’t mind. It wasn’t aggressive — just curiously opportunistic, like any wild animal.

“Tell me a story,” Dunk said.

“What?”

“The last time we were out here — remember? The … the dogs living on that giant meatball. Or the one about the man who lives behind the Falls.”

I could barely remember telling those tales. “I haven’t told a story in years.”

I found two Coke cans, cut the tops off, packed them with snow and set them near the embers. Once the snow had melted I handed one to Duncan. The water was icy-cold, clean and sweet. We drank, burped, repacked the cans.

Duncan said, “I have a story.”

“Yeah?”

“Well, not so much a story as this dream I’d have in prison. It always started at the end. Ed would be standing there and I’d be going away from her … being pulled, more like. And I’d say, ‘I’m coming back. To you, to everyone — Mom, Dad, Owe, everyone. I’m not gone long. This is just the wandering time.’” His expression was perplexed. “ The wandering time? And Ed, she’s not upset or angry. All she says is, ‘I won’t be here when you get back.’ Which crushes the hell out of me, y’know? And what I say is: ‘I’ll find you.’ After that it’s nothing … it’s whiteness. Ongoing white, like out there.” He pointed into the snow. “And I’m gone in it, right? For how long I really can’t say. I wake up staring through white, like someone has poured milk on my eyes. But I always think I’m almost back where I belong. Just before I wake, I believe I’m almost out of the white.”

The first edge of dawn broke along the bottom of the eastern sky and the wind picked up out of the trees.

We’d dozed fitfully. In the witching hour something settled softly upon the roof. It bore a musty smell, like hay in a barn. I stared up at it through the heavy grey. A metallic scriiiitch . A trio of dark sickles — talons, I realized, likely belonging to an owl — hooked through rust holes in the roof. Perhaps this was something this particular owl did often — a nightly observance? It took flight again, its heavy wing-beat carrying over the night’s tranquility.

There is a silence particular to the wilderness at dawn: every creature still sleeping, the earth resting, too. The rising sun reflected off the fresh-fallen snow, postcard-pretty. I sat on the bumper, staring bleary-eyed across the grey light of the clearing. The wolves were gone. My feet were swollen inside my brogans.

I pulled the shoes off, wincing. My socks were tacky and crusted — they appeared to be fused to my feet. I rolled the left one down to my ankle, noting how the skin beneath was fish-belly pale. Then I gritted my teeth and peeled it all the way off.

The sock made a gluey sound, like a strip of ancient duct tape coming off cheap upholstery. Translucent webs of fluid pulled away from the pink blister on my heel; it was as big around as the mouth of a teacup, peeled down through several layers of skin, edges curled up like the caldera of a volcano. A puck of milky skin was stuck to the inside of my sock. There was another deep blister on the pad of my foot, but the worst were my toes. The skin over the phalanges was an ulcerated, shiny red; higher up, the flesh had sloughed away to disclose my nail beds. The skin near the tips had a crystallized, wooden look, like a slab of steak forgotten in a deep-freeze. The end of each toe was black — not blood-blister black, but a terrifying withered black that indicated the flesh was past the point of regenerating.

Four toenails had fallen off. I touched the one that remained on my big toe. The nail sank into the flesh. A substance resembling blood-strung Vaseline oozed around the nail, which slid easily out of its bed — no less shocking than if I’d reached into my mouth and effortlessly pulled a tooth out. I brought the toenail to eye level, stuck to my fingertip, studying it with horrified wonder.