Craig Davidson - Cataract City

“What’s going to happen to our dads?” I asked Mahoney.

“They’re spending a night in the nick,” Bruiser said, contorting himself into the front seat. His wide shoulders made it look as if a Kenmore fridge were occupying the space behind the wheel. “Buckle your seat belts.”

The van hacked to life. Mahoney drove with his headlights off. The plastic hula girl’s hips swayed as we bounced over the curb.

“It’s nothing serious,” Mahoney said. “Just grown men fighting. They’ll be out tomorrow no worse for wear.” He craned his head round and winked at us. “Every man ought to spend a night in the stony lonesome once in his life!”

He snapped on the radio. “Karma Chameleon” by Culture Club was playing.

“This glitzy fairy can really carry a tune,” he said, snapping his fingers.

We drove down Parkside and pulled up beside a 5.0 Mustang. A farmer-tanned arm hung casually out the open window. There was a tattoo of a wolf howling at the moon on that arm, except the skin drooped so that the moon looked more like a teardrop — which would be poetic, I guess, if it had been on purpose.

Mahoney pulled up closer. I caught a flash of the driver: in his mid-thirties, his face deeply seamed and his skin a queer off-yellow like a watery cat’s eye. He looked sick but probably wasn’t. It’s just how men grew up around here. My dad said Cataract City was a pressure chamber: living was hard, so boys were forced to become men much faster. That pressure ingrained itself in bodies and faces. You’d see twenty-year-old men whose hands were stained permanently black with the granular grease from lubing the rollers at the Bisk. Men just past thirty walking with a stoop. Forty-year-olds with forehead wrinkles deep as the bark on a redwood. You didn’t age gracefully around here. You just got old.

Mahoney pulled into the beer store, left the van running and said, “Be right back.”

“Do you think they’re okay?” I asked Dunk while Mahoney was inside the liquor store. “Our dads?”

“I guess so,” Dunk said. “Bruiser said so, right?”

Mahoney returned with half a flat of Labatt 50. He set it between the front seats and tore the cardboard open. The stubby was swallowed by his hand: only its brown neck protruded between his thumb and pointer finger. He upended the bottle, drank it, belched, sleeved the empty, popped the cap off a fresh one with the church-key dangling from the gearshift and veered onto the road.

“Need something to take the edge off,” he told us. “The Boogeyman took it out of me tonight, that rat bastard.”

“Where are we going?” Dunk said.

“What? You don’t like hanging out with the Bruiser? Your hero?”

He stopped at a red light, downed the second beer, wiped froth off his lips and cracked a third. “Don’t worry, boys. We’ll cruise around until the heat dies down, then I’ll take you home.”

The van barrelled down Clifton Hill where the multicoloured marquees of tourist booths and shops burned against the oncoming dark. Mahoney turned right and slowed past the Falls, unrolling his window to breathe the wet spray.

He drove down the river and pulled into an unfamiliar suburb. He circled one block three times, drumming his fingers on the wheel, before pulling into the driveway that divided a small fenced-in yard.

“Wait here, little warriors.”

He skipped up the steps to the house at the end of the drive, spinning balletically to shoot us with finger-pistols cocked at his hips. His knock was answered by a teenaged girl. After a moment’s hesitancy she let him inside.

“Do you know where we are?” I asked Dunk.

He leaned between the front seats and looked out the window. Then slumped back into the seat and lip-farted. Bruiser Mahoney came out of the house with the girl, holding her hand and pulling her the way you pull a dog away from an interesting smell.

He lifted her onto the passenger seat. “Ooh!” she said, laughing the way my mother did when we rode the Tilt-A-Whirl at the Falls carnival. Her long dark hair fell straight down her back and shone like metal in the domelight.

Mahoney clambered into the driver’s seat and gave her knee a chummy clap. “Look at you! You’re a pip — a real pip !”

The girl tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and stared out the window. Mahoney shot a look at us and waggled his eyebrows as if to say: We’re cooking now!

“Hello,” Dunk said.

The girl nearly jumped out of her skin. “Jesus!” she said to Mahoney. “Who are these — more of yours?”

The flesh crinkled around Mahoney’s eyes. “Mine? Do you think I have a brood in every town?”

“I don’t know why you’d think that might surprise me,” the girl said.

“Don’t be spiteful. These boys came to the show. They got separated from their fathers. I’m taking them home.”

The girl was a high-schooler — the pleated skirt gave it away. She smelled of Noxzema and cigarette smoke. “Separated from your father, huh? Join the club.”

We drove along the river. Mahoney pulled into a lookout along the water’s edge.

“Yeearrrgh!” He stepped out of the van and stretched his long frame. “That air! Takes years off a man.”

We sat at a picnic table under a canopy of spring leaves. The night air was moist like inside a greenhouse. Mahoney opened a beer and held it out to the girl.

“So,” she said to us, “you’re fans of the mighty Bruiser, I imagine?” There was a small, perfect coin of gold in the centre of her left eye.

“We are,” Dunk said solemnly.

“So serious!” She sipped her beer. Mahoney watched her with a crooked eye. “I suppose you’d like to hear stories of his greatest matches, wouldn’t you?”

“We would,” said Dunk.

“Well, Bruiser?” she said. “Care to indulge them?”

“Dearest heart,” he said, “what tale would you have me regale them with?”

The girl stroked her chin, considering. “How about Giant Kichi?”

Mahoney slapped the table. The crack of his palm caused a flock of nesting starlings to take flight.

“Aha! Giant Kichi, is it?” He rounded on us. “Kichi was the meanest wrestler on the Japanese circuit, one of twins born in Hiroshima. Their father was a madman. He raised cows on a patch of soil where the first bomb touched down, you see, and suckled his sons on the milk. When they were old enough, he had those same cows slaughtered and made his sons eat the irradiated meat. The radiation did something to those boys — lengthened their bones, gave them incredible strength. A pair of giants, the two of them!”

Mahoney upended his beer, then set one huge meathook on my shoulder and stared sorrowfully into my eyes.

“On their twelfth birthday, much the same age you are now, that madman led his sons into the woods. Whichever one of you comes out alive is my true son , he said, and left them there. Two weeks later, Giant Kichi came out. Torn up and scabbed and practically naked. Something had happened in those woods. He’d changed. Become a madman like his father.

“His father trained Kichi to become a wrecking machine. He brought in masters of each martial arts discipline. Wing Chun. Praying Mantis. Kung fu fighting. Everyone was doing it.” He winked at the girl. “Giant Kichi sucked it up like a sponge. Big and strong he was, but also nimble. He beat holy hell out of his masters, full of rage and bloodlust. Finally his father stepped up and said, How’d you like a piece of your old man? Giant Kichi said, I’d like that quite a lot, thanks , and snapped his father over his knee like a stick of wood!”

“He did, did he?” the girl said.

“He did indeed!” Mahoney grinned. “Giant Kichi popped up on my radar years ago. I’d been touring the Eastern Seaboard with Killer Kowalski and Spider Winchell, eking out a rough living in the squared circle and doing some pest elimination on the side. I heard that Tugboat Sims — one tough S.O.B. and the only man to have beaten the Plague — had taken the challenge of this crazy Jap wrestler. Giant Kichi beat him so bad that Tugboat pissed his trunks and begged for his mama. Well, wouldn’t you know it but two weeks later I’m at home dusting my knick-knacks when comes a knock at the door. I open it to see this little Jap fella with a wrinkly face like a cat’s clenched bunghole. It was RiJishi, Giant Kichi’s manservant. He hands me this funny scroll. It’s an invitation to fight Kichi in the Tokyo Dome!”