Cataract City (12 page)

Late in the afternoon we entered a glade of enormous maples and oaks. It was dark and heavy in there; the forest greenness tinted the air. I ached all over and my ass stung and my thighs chafed with every step.

My foot had been bothering me the last hour. I sat on a tree sawed in half by lightning and unlaced my sneaker. A blister had spread across my heel, the dead white skin at its edges milky like fish gills while the flesh inside was tender-pink.

“That’s a doozy,” said Dunk.

I pulled the sock on gingerly. Socks, matches—items you generally possess in such abundance that you forget how valuable they are.

Isolated raindrops pattered the ground. Soon the sky opened and rain sheeted down. Water collected on the leaves, draining into the glade in ragged streamers. Rain hit the back of my hand and ran between my fingers. A wave of despair rocked me; I concentrated on the things tying me to the world. My favourite movie was
E.T
. The number one song on 97.7’s Top Nine at Nine countdown was “Pour Some Sugar on Me.” My bed at home had a Star Wars bedspread with a grape juice stain on C-3PO’s face.

We came upon an anthill that looked like a miniature volcano. It rose to a tall spouted opening, from which ants poured in abundance. They chained down the hill in the chlorophyll-green light, moving in dark shining braids like soldiers on the march.

“You figure the bird eats ants?” Dunk asked.

How would I know if a baby bird ate ants? Besides which, grubbing around in an anthill while the sun went down was a waste of time, and I said so.

But Dunk insisted. We got down on our knees and tried to catch a few. The hill’s caldera crumbled the instant my fingers touched it. Ants poured out in a mad frenzy, racing up our legs and down our sleeves. It was funny—their legs tickled as they picked along the soft hairs on our arms—until they started to bite.

I’d had no idea ants could bite
—sting
, to be exact. Fiery needles stabbed me. Dunk and I jumped up, shrieking and swatting ourselves. Ants were everywhere: my chest, my armpits. Each individual bite wasn’t so bad—yellowjacket stings were much worse—but they peppered me all over.

“My back!” Dunk said. “Slap my back!”

I did, raising puffs of dust from his T-shirt. He did the same for me. After what felt like an endless battle the stings lessened. I peeled my shirt off. My sweat-stung skin was dotted with inflamed bumps that itched like the devil. My body was smeared with ant anatomies: their thoraxes and antennae and abdomens and legs squashed all over.

“Holy hell,” Dunk said, breathing raggedly. “That was a
baaaaad
idea, Kemosabe.”

“I
told you
it was a dumb idea.”

“No you didn’t,” Dunk said with a bewildered smile. “You said you had no clue.”

“It was stupid.” I was spoiling for a fight by then, uninterested in logical arguments. “
Moronic
,” I said, a word I’d heard my father use in conversation with a drywaller who’d gypped him.

“Well,
sor-ree
,” Dunk said. He slanted his head at me quizzically—but the slant held an edge of menace.

“It’s not funny, man. My dad always says, Measure twice, cut once—which means think before you act.”

“Yeah? My dad says don’t be a fuckin’ pussy.”

“Your dad doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

Dunk’s chin jutted. “He knows as much as your dad does.”

“Then why isn’t he in an office at the Bisk instead of on the line? Why doesn’t he smell of aftershave instead of Chips Ahoy?”

Dunk rounded his shoulders and stuffed his bird-free hand in his pocket, where it balled into a fist.

“I’m not my dad, Owe. And you’re not your dad, either.” He chewed the inside of his cheek. His arms quivered all the way down to his fingers; the hand that held the bird shook it in its sock nest. Looking back, I can tell Dunk had to summon every ounce of self-control—otherwise he’d’ve punched the living shit out of me right then.

When the rain let up we exited the glade, Dunk leading and me trudging behind. Mist rolled over our sneakers, perfuming the air with the scent of every green thing.

Late-afternoon sun baked down, prickling the burn on my neck and the raw bites on my arms. Dunk and I were beyond tired now. It seemed as if every topic of conversation—our favourite TV show (
The Beachcombers
), our favourite gum (Gold Rush, which came in a cloth sack, the gum shaped like gold nuggets)—funnelled towards a senseless argument.

When you and your best friend start arguing about bubble gum, you settle on silence as the best policy.

The cave lay halfway up an embankment studded with straggly pines. The incline was rinsed with grey stones each the size of a baby’s fist. Dunk picked one up and tossed it into the cave. It plinked somewhere past the mouth, giving way to a series of soft tinkles.

“Sounds empty,” he said.

The cave fell away in layers of flat grey rock. We stood under the overhang taking in the scent of our own stink, sweat and grime mixed with wood sap and smoke and dirt and dead bugs. I was
aware of my body in ways that a twelve-year-old boy probably shouldn’t be. My guts were full of hardening concrete. Moon-slices of blood rimmed my fingernails.

We spent the next half-hour gathering firewood. I wondered if we ought to build the fire outside the cave, in the open where someone could see it. A helicopter maybe, searching for two lost boys. Late that afternoon I thought I’d heard the
whuppa-whuppa
of helicopter blades; they sounded incredibly close, just overhead, and a part of me actually believed that I’d look up and see it: a helicopter just like the one rich tourists rented out to get a bird’s-eye view of the Falls, the one that had its own landing pad on the roof of the Hilton Fallsview hotel.

But when I’d peered above me, the sky was empty. Maybe what I’d heard was the drone of mosquitoes. Afterwards the notion was one I continued to fixate on: hundreds of searchers looking for us. Perhaps hikers had stumbled across Mahoney’s van after it had showed up on a police all-points-bulletin sheet. If so, the cops and a small citizen’s brigade might be stomping through the woods right now. They’d have dogs with incredible noses hot on our scent; they’d be armed with walkie-talkies and bullhorns. If the wind died down and I strained my ears, I’d probably hear the distant barks of the search dogs.

But as shadows thickened and the colour drained out of the sky until only black was left, I heard no dogs. The mental image of a search faded. I trudged into the cave, where I made a teepee of sticks with the scrounged wood.

“We can’t do it there,” Dunk said. “Smoke will fill the cave and we’ll get affix … affix … affixated.”

“Asphyxiated.”

“Whatever. We’ll be
dead
.”

“So why don’t we light it here and move it out front? We only got one match.”

“Whatever.”

Dunk dug the matchbook out. The match looked so pitiful, half bent with red phosphorus flaking off the head. I almost didn’t care if it lit. If it didn’t we’d probably die tonight. If it did, we were simply granted another day. The sun would rise and our lot would be the same: starving, thirsty, alone and lonely. We’d be more lost, more bitten and scratched and burnt under the merciless sun, and tomorrow night we wouldn’t bother building a fire. We’d sit in the dark and freeze to death. Or the things in the woods with us would sense our weakness and take their due. Either way, we died. The only difference was that we’d suffer a little longer. Now or tomorrow or the day after. It was going to happen, right?

Dunk lit the fire. One match.
Textbook
. Our Scout leader would have shit a brick. We moved flaming sticks to the mouth of the cave. The fire sent up an orange cone that obscured everything beyond it, locking us in with its warmth and light. For the first time all day, I felt safe.

Dunk rooted through the pack. We both knew there was nothing in it. He pulled out the candy bar wrapper—it seemed like we’d eaten that about a billion years ago—and inspected it for leftover crumbs of chocolate. Finding none, he flicked it into the fire. The heat caved it in like a flower blooming in reverse. He picked up a pebble and put it in his mouth.

“Dad says if you suck on a stone it gets the saliva flowing so you don’t feel as thirsty.”

I put a pebble in my mouth, relishing its coolness beneath my tongue.

“Banana cream pie,” I said.

“What?”

“My mom says that if you, um, really concentrate and pretend you’re
eating
your favourite foods, you feel as full as if you’ve actually eaten them.”

“Yeah?”

“She says.”

Dunk scratched the ant stings on his legs—the heat was irritating my stings, too—and said: “Shepherd’s pie.”

“Tootsie Rolls.”

“Tollhouse cookies.”

“Sour cream and onion chips.”

“What brand?”

“Pringles.”

“Nice,”
said Dunk. “Hungarian goulash.”

“Hawaiian pizza.”

“Kraft caramels.”

“Ballpark franks.”

Dunk dropped his head between his legs. “I don’t think it’s working.”

“Are you
thinking
about them? I mean,
hard
? You really have to picture it.”

“I’m
seeing
them … it just doesn’t work for me, Owe. Sorry.”

You have a wild imagination
. That was what my parents said to me all the time. Having a wild imagination wasn’t so hot sometimes. I spat my pebble out.

Dunk lay on the cave floor and shaped his body around the fire. The cave stones glittered around his head, firelight making them move like insects.

I said: “You shouldn’t sleep with your ear on the ground. Bovine …”

I laboured over it—one simple word, two syllables:
Bovine. Bovine
the word was attached to Bovine the person, who was attached to many other things: schools and malls and phones and pizza parlours and my parents … and to policemen who helped kids who’d lost their way. And all those things were so, so far away.

“Bovine what?”

“Bovine says that earwigs crawl in your ears when you sleep. Said his dad had to bury a guy whose whole brain was eaten away by earwigs.”

Instinctively, Dunk cupped a hand over his ear. “How?”

“An earwig just crawled into the guy’s ear. Guy didn’t even know. Our brains don’t feel any pain, right? No nerves. If it was just one earwig, no big deal. But it was a female earwig, man—she laid
eggs
. They hatched inside the guy’s head and they started eating. Like, a giant buffet.

“But guess what? We only use ten percent of our brains, so it took a long time. Like, he’d forget where his car keys were. He was blinking all the time and couldn’t stop. Finally he couldn’t even remember his dog’s name. When he died Bovine says his dad took the body into the funeral parlour to prepare it for the casket. When he touched the guy’s face it caved right in. A million earwigs ran out of the eye sockets and nostrils and mouth. His dad almost went crazy on the spot, but he smoked a cigar to calm down.”

Dunk pulled his hand away from his ear and laid his head down again. “Bovine’s full of shit.”

He was right, of course. Bovine was so full of shit he squeaked. I don’t know why I’d even told the story. Maybe I’d wanted to scare Dunk just a little.

I’d been worried more or less permanently since Bruiser Mahoney turned off the main road into the wilderness. The worry had sunk so deep inside that I could only feel it now when it surged up from my bones: fear bitter in my mouth, thrashing behind my rib cage like a bird in cupped hands—but it was a needful terror and perhaps the last truly childlike instance of terror I’d ever feel.

As you get older, the texture of your fear changes. You’re no longer scared of a dead wrestler stalking you through the woods—even if your mind
wants
to go there, it’s lost the nimbleness to make those fantastic leaps of imagination. Your fears become adult ones: of crushing debts and extra responsibilities, sick parents and sick kids and dying without love. Fears of not being the man you thought you’d become back when you still believed wrestling was real and that you’d die in convulsions if you inhaled the white gas from a shattered light bulb.

“Hey, Owe?”

“Yeah?”

“Want to tell another story?”

“What kind of story?”

“Like last night. The dogs.”

“That wasn’t really a story,” I said. “Just something silly.”

“Anyway, if you wanted.”

I thought about it. The gears in my head meshed with a
clicka-clicka-click
, and soon the story was gushing out of me.

“There’s a place behind Niagara Falls, okay? Behind the water. Back there the rock is dark and dripping … it shines in the water that’s always falling. A man lives there. He’s been there since the Falls have. He’s old as the dinosaurs—older maybe. He’s short as a kindergartener. You can see his elbows and his knees and knuckles through his skin, which covers his bones like Vaseline. His body glows like those fish in the deepest parts of the ocean, the ones you can only see through submarine windows, right? He has no hair and his head is big and bulgy. Veins twist over it, but they’re not blue like the veins on my grandma’s arms because … there’s no blood. The man is filled with something else. He can’t hear anymore. The crash of water, it broke his eardrums. His eyes are milky marbles but he can see very well. The man doesn’t have a name
because he comes from a time before anyone was around to give him one.

“There’s a tree behind the Falls, too. It grows out of the rock. The bark is the colour of fingernails and the branches reach high into the rock above. The tree has no top or bottom. It grows at both ends. The man sleeps in the tree … Actually, he doesn’t sleep. But he slips into a hole in the tree, which is hollow, and stands inside. This is the only place he can hear. He listens to the water rushing on the surface, the buzz of bugs and birds flapping their wings and fish flipping their tails.

“A shovel is leaned against the tree. The blade is old and chipped. Behind the tree is a patch of dirt … except not dirt. Black rock, like the charcoal that comes in those bags you buy at Canadian Tire … You know people go over the Falls, right? They used to do it in barrels. Other people got lost in the dark and fell or got drunk and … or they jumped. Most of them, you can’t even find their bodies. People think they get torn apart or trapped between rocks with the water pounding down. But they’re not lost.
He
finds them.