Cataract City (15 page)

“I’ll sit out here, ma’am,” Dunk said.

The woman nodded. “You do whatever you’d like. I’m going to … make a call. I’ve got blankets and—oh!
Colin!
” she shouted. “It’s those boys!”

“Who?” came a man’s voice from inside.

“The boys on TV. The lost boys!”

“Jesus!”

I sat on the steps with Dunk. The porch light snapped on, so much harsher than the gilded light of the moon. Dunk shook his head slowly, smiling as you would at a joke that’s only half funny. His hands trembled and so did mine. I heard footsteps and craned my head to see a big man with one huge carpenter’s hand clapped over his mouth, watching us in awe.

Dunk cupped the baby bird, his features set in mute confusion. Its body looked as hard as soap. Dunk touched it gently with one finger. It rolled over weightlessly, like a thing carved from balsa wood.

Dunk’s head dipped to touch his knees. His body shook. Huge gulping sobs tore out of him, ripped out of his throat as if about to rupture his vocal cords, the most wretched noises I’d ever heard. I put my arm around his shoulders and felt the tension: it was like grasping a railroad track in advance of the onrushing locomotive. I didn’t tell him everything was okay, because I knew even then that it probably wasn’t. Not really, not ever again. I just let him cry.

“What the hell’s the matter?” the big man said. “You’re safe, boys.” A mystified, barking laugh. “Don’t you get it? You’re
safe
.”

There’s a photograph of me and Dunk taken shortly after we wandered out of those woods to find the house—which was owned by Irene and Colin Harrington, a third-grade teacher and a construction foreman with a taste for isolation. It was shot by a reporter with the
Niagara Falls Review
who arrived with the emergency crews, no doubt
alerted by the police-band scanner in his newspaper’s bullpen. It’s a tight shot, just our shoulders and heads, and the composition is off balance—by then there was a crush of firemen and ambulance attendants, so the reporter had to fire off a hurried snapshot in the scrum.

We are captured in close-up, in black-and-white, which amplified the stark slashes of blood on our shirts and the scrapes on our faces. My eyes shine like headlamps in the black pits of my sockets. We look like we’ve been released from a concentration camp, wearing expressions of grim futility. That sort of hopelessness grits into your face and posture, becomes a visible part of you.

In the photo my hand is up, covering Dunk’s eyes. He was still crying. His head is tucked into the space where my shoulder meets my neck. The framing echoes something you’d see on the courthouse steps: a lawyer shielding his client from the hungering shutterbugs.

If you were to hypothesize about the events of those three lost days from that photo alone, you’d think it was me who dragged Dunk out of the woods. That I was the protector and he the protected. Which is why you should never trust photos to tell the entire story.

Our parents had arrived in police cruisers. They looked as haunted and haggard as we did. My mom gathered me in a bear hug that just about crushed the life out of me. Years later she got drunk at a cousin’s wedding and told me she’d have left my dad if we hadn’t been found. “I love your father, but I wouldn’t ever have forgiven him. Getting into some stupid fight while his son’s abducted. Celia Diggs would have done the same.”

“Found?” I remember saying, a little drunk myself. “Mom, nobody
found
us.”

Dad never spoke about that night outside the Memorial Arena when he’d punched Adam Lowery’s father, but his regret expressed itself in other ways. To this day he will grab my hand in busy parking lots, even though I’m old enough to have kids of my own. He
will stare at our clasped fingers and shrug sheepishly, but he won’t let go. Which is okay by me.

We were taken to the hospital, where our guts were discovered to be full of worms. The doctor figured it was the raccoon meat. We were severely dehydrated and covered with more bites and stings than anyone could count. I was put on an IV drip and didn’t take a dump for a week. Nothing inside me.

Dunk and I were put in separate hospital rooms. At night I’d roll over in a dreamy fugue thinking I’d feel him next to me. I’d find nothing but the over-bleached hospital sheets like spun glass against my cheek.

I still see Mr. Hillicker and Mr. Lowery around. They haven’t aged well; eyelids drooping around their eyes like two sick hounds. I’d assumed they wouldn’t feel much guilt for what happened, and I was right. To this day I think they ought to be thankful it wasn’t Clyde and Adam who Mahoney decided to light out with. Not to brag, but odds are those two bastards would have ended up as clean-picked skeletons in a wolf den.

The police retraced our route from our hazy descriptions and the physical markers of our trek: a few blackened firepits. We’d covered over thirty-five kilometres, a twisting, doubling-back route that would shame any outdoorsman. Despite this, our scoutmaster claimed that we embodied the very pinnacle of wilderness survival.

We’d taken a wrong turn almost immediately. Had we gone east we’d have made it back to Stevensville Road by mid-afternoon. Instead we went northwest, into the forested territory fringing Old Highway 98 east of Bethel. But if we were unlucky early, we got lucky late. The Harrington house sat three kilometres from its nearest neighbour. Had Dunk not seen its roof we would have continued into the empty land south of Brookfield junction.
Nothing there but scrub pine and desolation, fifty miles to the nearest anything.

The wilderness took its toll on Bruiser Mahoney, too. The police found him where we’d left him, in a clearing some thirty miles north of Lake Erie. Through Sam Bovine I heard that his legs had been chewed off. Coyotes were the likeliest culprit.

“My dad used old mannequin legs from the women’s wear department at Sears to fill out the casket,” Bovine told me.

The rock on Mahoney’s stomach may’ve been all that stopped the coyotes from making off with the rest of him. Or it could be that his taste didn’t suit them.

The toxicologist said he’d died from an overdose of Clozaril, a knock-off of clozapine, an antipsychotic drug. The pills belonged to El Phantoma—birth name: Miguel Lopez—a Mexican wrestler with a history of bipolar disorder whom Mahoney had driven to a match in Gravenhurst the week before. Lopez had forgotten the pills in the glovebox and Mahoney had mistaken them for his pain medication. The Clozaril reacted badly with the alcohol to cause, in the toxicologist’s opinion, “free-floating delusions, uncontrollable anxiety and a possible psychotic break with reality.”

All of which seems about right to me.

Dunk and I went to Dade Rathburn’s funeral. People figured it was some kind of Stockholm syndrome, or else we wanted to spit on the corpse. The big church was mostly empty. The girl was there, the one with the black hair and gold-coin eyes. It turned out she was Rathburn’s daughter—one of many. He’d salted his seed liberally over his territory. She was crying. She hugged us both and apologized. “I said you’d be safe with him. I thought you would be. He wasn’t a bad …”

“Anyway, it’s not your fault,” Dunk told her.

Dade Rathburn looked weird in his coffin. A deflated pool toy packed up for winter storage. His dentures were snug, at least, and his eyes were closed. Bovine said his dad had to cut the muscles under his eyelids so they’d roll down, then crazy-glue them shut.

I remember everyone watching us. I had no urge to spit on Rathburn. Whatever I felt was far too complicated to ever express.

After the funeral my father told me he’d prefer it if I didn’t hang out with Dunk anymore. Dunk’s dad was of the same mind. It seemed unfair, as if we were the victims of our fathers’ guilty consciences. Had I been seventeen I would have told Dad to suck an egg. But I was twelve, and soon enough Dunk and I just drifted apart. I couldn’t say how it happened. That strong childhood magnetism that draws one boy to another—sometimes that magnetism abruptly switches polarities, flinging those same boys away from each other, setting them on new trajectories.

My family moved to Cardinal Gardens, a suburb in the city north. Our new house had an in-ground pool and a two-car garage. The day the moving truck came, Dunk stood on the sidewalk dribbling a balding basketball.

“So you’re moving, huh?”

“Is it that obvious?”

I’d meant it as a joke. He blew the hair out of his eyes—it was even longer than when I’d met him, the ends almost touching his nose—and smiled into the sunlight.

“You can always come visit,” I said.

“And you can always visit back here.”

That was the last I saw of Duncan Diggs for many years.

The next week I was in our new home flicking through TV channels and came upon an episode of
Superstars of Wrestling
. It shocked me how fake it looked. Punches and kicks missing by a mile. I watched a few minutes, then flipped to another channel.

DAWN EASED OVER THE ESCARPMENT
, sunlight glimmering like a sine wave across the curve of the earth. I stretched my legs inside the car, wincing as the familiar pain cupped my kneecap. Fogerty’s “Who’ll Stop the Rain” had segued into Henley’s “Boys of Summer,” which had segued into a late-night call-in show about paranormal phenomena.

I had zoned out, lost myself down the memory hole, and now the dashboard clock was reading 5:26 and the gas tank was near empty. I stepped out of the car and began to walk.

The cut-off was fringed by long grass bent by a forceful night wind. Sun lightened the eastern fields. The world was cool, wind bearing the smell of burning grapevines. I had nothing on but a thin jacket, yet I didn’t feel cold. Sunlight sparkled the tips of pine trees struggling through soil determined to spit them out.

I walked until the path began to collapse at its edges. It dipped and I followed … until at last a million tiny cogs seized in every part of my body and I stopped. The woods were closing in on me. Still, I didn’t feel terrorized like I had as a boy. I took in the silky rustle of leaves, that cut-potato smell of the soil. Felt an odd jangle in my nerve endings. I couldn’t quite leave behind the sight of a thin curvature of sunlight on the Lincoln’s hood, so metallic and man-made and
human
. Couldn’t abandon myself entirely to those woods.

Maybe if Dunk were here … or maybe there are some paths you can never go down again. I headed back to the car, laughing at my cowardice.

I dropped the Lincoln into gear and reversed down the cut-off. Back to the world as it existed. But it was good to remember that,
long ago, it had been just Dunk and me, the two of us. Two boys in the woods. How far had we fallen from that?

I drove to the nearest gas station, filled the tank and paid the sleepy-eyed attendant slumped inside his bulletproof Lexan cube. It was rare for me to be up so early—under normal circumstances I’d be inert while my liver filtered whatever I’d drunk the night before—but I relished it. Soon enough the sun would climb to its familiar position, illuminating the sadly familiar sights of the city and ruining the sense of possibility. But until then, there was the lovely silence, the fresh, indescribable smell of a new day—if pure
possibility
had a smell, this was it—fledgling sunlight washing the grape fields and the rippling surface of the river.

Staring at that swift, dark-running water, a fresh memory hit me with the force of a ballpeen hammer.

I must have been seven years old—or eight? Anyway, I was in that human-wallpaper stage of my existence. My father had taken me to the river. We’d go every so often to skip rocks and hunt for crayfish. One afternoon while Dad was taking a whiz I’d spotted a Hefty trash sack bobbing at the river’s edge. It had been sucked into a pool where the current swirled endlessly between the rocks; the pool was edged with the froth that built up at certain spots, crusty and opaque like the scum atop a pot of boiled pork.

The bag was of the heavy-gauge plastic you’d find wrapping scrap lumber in construction-site Dumpsters; the top was crudely knotted. I remember wondering what was inside, and tearing it open, driven by sudden wild curiosity—there was something about the placement of the bag, I guess; the
sullenness
of it bobbing in the shallows. At first I’d just stared, head cocked, profoundly puzzled. The contents looked like soggy balls of yarn, the kind Mom used to make macramé potholders and tiered flower holders. Except there was nothing vibrant about the colours: mixed muddy
browns and washed-out whites. Then I caught a glimpse of a little arrow shape tufting from one of those balls and it was like when you stare at one of those 3D portraits just right—your eyes adjust and you see the sailboat or the train or whatever. When I saw the whole picture I reared back, horrified at a bone-deep, subcellular level.

Kittens. I could tell by that one tiny ear. How many? Four, five. I didn’t look long enough to know. Kittens stuffed in a trash sack and hurled in the river. Even at that age, it struck me that they almost certainly hadn’t drowned: the sack was so thick and the kittens almost weightless, so it’d probably just bobbed on the surface, too light to sink; perhaps the person who’d done it had watched the sack drift down the Niagara and said, “Huh.” With awful clarity I imagined the kittens tearing at the sack with their little claws. But the plastic was too durable. They would have suffocated.