Cataract City (19 page)

Ed had some hellion in her, too, a wildness that reminded me of comic book vixens: Red Sonja, the Black Widow. Her long dark hair fell straight down and when the sun hit it right, it shone like a curved mirror. She swore like a dock worker and punched you on the shoulder to punctuate her sentences. Still, we thought of her as being different from her thuggish clan. She could be charming when it suited her.

Ed was almost criminally easygoing as a babysitter. Her rules were: No fighting, no drinking, no pills, no lighting fires. Other than that, open season. If Owe wanted Marshmallow Fluff for supper, Ed’s shoulders would lift and she’d say: “Going to rot your teeth out, hombre, but they’re your choppers.”

Sometimes when Owe’s folks were working late Ed would pick us up at school. We’d find her lounging against the flagpole sipping a bottle of Coca-Cola. The male teachers drank in greedy eyefuls of her, and her attitude suggested she didn’t blame them—looking was free, after all.

“Fine afternoon, isn’t it, Pete?” she’d say brightly as our grammar teacher hustled to his car. “It’s a hot, hot,
slut-hot
ol’ day.”

We’d walk home in the cooling afternoon, puppy-dogging Ed’s heels. She often stopped by Scholten’s Convenience on Abilene, rapping sharply on the back door with her knuckles. Mr. Scholten would slip her a carton of cigarettes, which she sold as singles to her classmates. Every city has hidden doors that require secret knocks. Ed knew a lot of doors. How had she learned the knocks? I knew better than to ask a magician how she did her tricks.

Ed smoked her own product, and her brand was the absolute
worst
: Export A, in the green deck. The Green Death.

“It’s my last one, boys. Promise,” she’d say.

“But you have another pack in your pocket,” Owe would insist. Ed would just smile.

I’d sleep over at Owe’s when Ed babysat. There was no such thing as a curfew. We could stay up until we heard the garage door rumble on its tracks, at which point we had to hotfoot it to bed and start sawing logs.

We’d watch the
MuchMusic Top 20 Countdown
, hip-checking each other along to Twisted Sister and the Beastie Boys. We introduced Ed to the Baby Blue Movie. She declared it wimpy and flicked channels way up to the 100s, where the scrambled pornos played in a never-ending loop.

We watched the grainy broken images and listened to the goofy dialogue—Female:
Are you the plumber?
Male:
That’s right, and I’ve got a biiig pipe to install
—set to cheesy
ohm-chaka
guitar riffs. Every so often the picture came clear in reverse polarity: we’d see a silicone-pumped tit looking like the huge eye of a squid or a man’s face frozen under a blue-white glare, teeth shining like halogen track lights. I found it a lot less sexy than the Baby Blue Movie: the images spoke of adult lust, the desperate kind that took place in murky peep theatres. Ed seemed to sense this and switched back to the Baby Blue.

“That’s too harsh for you boys,” she said, levelling a finger at us. “Don’t watch it again. I’ll kick your asses if you do.”

It was hard to take her threats seriously. Ed literally wouldn’t hurt a fly: she used to catch bluebottles buzzing against the windows and let them free outside. Once she found a brown bat in the toilet—it must have flown in through the open window. She fished it out with her bare hands: its body the size of a peach stone, wings thin as crepe paper. She rested it on the picnic table in Owe’s backyard, under a shoebox propped up with a stick. The bat dragged itself to the table’s edge and flew off.

“I was sure it was a goner,” she said, then asked herself, “Could I have handled that?”

Then, one night, Ed demanded we go to sleep at our regular bedtime. “You best hit the sack, buckaroos,” she said, hooking her thumb upstairs.

Soon after, I heard the front door. Ed walked up the stairwell with Tim Railsback, her boyfriend. They went into the bathroom. The bathtub ran. We got out of bed, curious. The bathroom door was open a crack. To this day I wonder if Ed left it that way on purpose.

Ed and Tim were stripping naked. Steam rose from the tub the way mist rises off lawns on a summer morning. Their bodies were silked with sweat. Railsback was very tall; the top of Ed’s head rose to where his collarbones came together. Her body had none of the hardness I’d see in Elsa Lovegrove.

They sat in the water, Ed between Tim’s parted legs. A dull surge of jealousy washed through me. The knobs of Tim’s knees rose above the tub like whitened stadium domes. His hands moved over Ed’s body without settling anywhere. His expression held many things: sadness and queasy expectancy, regret, hopefulness.

“What is it?” Ed said.

“It’s just … it’s happening real fast.”

Ed laughed. “It’s okay, boy. We don’t need to do anything.”

Ed was the kind of girl who’d call grown men
boys
. Me and Owe stood trembling, our eyes shining in the doorway. Ed turned her head until her face met Tim’s. Something in her eyes said
Don’t make me ask for it. Just tell me
.

Tim said, “I love you.”

And he must have. Almost everyone who spent any time with Ed came to love her. It made her careless, the way people can be when such a hard-won thing is given over so effortlessly. But I think
she loved him, too, at least in that moment. Ed needed a lot of love—but she’d give it, too.

None of us heard the garage door. Owe and I
barely
heard the back door shut, and the warning gave us just enough time to dash back to his room and dive under the sheets.

Ed and Tim weren’t so lucky. Owe’s folks caught them bare-ass.
In my house! Under MY roof!
Owe’s mom shooed them out, cursing as they fled into the night. Tim wore only his underwear; he left his Letterman jacket on a bathroom hook.

Of course Owe’s mom called my mom and related the sordid tale. Which is how Ed became the Jezebel.

That night at Owe’s was the last time I’d see Edwina until the afternoon years later, on the corner of Harvard and Brian, when she stood in front of me cradling Dolly in her arms.

“You got to keep an eye on this one.” She tsked, handing the dog over as Owe rounded the corner with Frag.

“Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber,” Ed said. “You two still attached at the hip? And you’ve bought matching dogs, too. How cute.”

Owe said, “Dunk found them in a Dumpster.”

This set Ed back for a beat. Then she said, “Who says you can’t find treasure in the trash? You ought to take them to Derby Lane, see if they can run.” She rubbed her thumb and fingers together, giving us the international sign for moolah. “You could be sitting on a mint. I know a guy there, Harry Riggins. Runs the kennels. He can tell you if they’re any good and if not,
hey
! Still one hell of a pet.”

The Derby Lane racetrack was a lot like Tinglers, the porno shop on Leeming Street—I mean, everyone knew it was there but only a certain type of guy actually
went
.

Derby Lane had been around since the seventies. As my dad said: “Used to be an okay fallback if you were looking to wager a few bucks on animals running in circles and didn’t have the energy to make it down to Fort Erie to catch the ponies.”

But with the casino going up on the Boulevard with its
tinkle-tinkle
of one-armed bandits and $5.99 buffet, the dog track was dead as disco. It only attracted the saddest of the sad, lonely old men in shiny-elbowed blazers and Florsheim shoes that had been stylish forty years ago. It was the sort of place that mocked the very idea of luck; even if you won, it was by Derby Lane standards, which meant parlaying a 100-to-1 shot into a measly payoff.

Me and Owe showed up on a Sunday morning. Sam Bovine dropped us off in his dad’s old hearse—he was an apprentice mortician by then, a calling that I thought didn’t suit him but that Bovine embraced with gusto.

“I’d stay,” he said, “but I’ve got to get back to the stiffs or else they may wander away,
Living
Dead–style.”

Owe said, “Three’s a crowd, anyway.”

Bovine bristled. “Ah, screw you two. And screw your dogs, too. Get them out of the casket croft—they’re stinking up the upholstery.”

We waved as Bovine swept the hearse around in a wide arc, flipping us the bird as he tooled off. We walked the dogs across the lot, which was empty except for one ancient pickup truck. The sun glinted off metal flarings outlining the park’s dingy marquee. As we passed the pickup truck I noticed the bed was carpeted with dried-up dog turds. They looked like stubbed cigars.

We walked through the Winning Ticket Lounge, crossing a threadbare paisley carpet that gave off the stink of fry oil and wet dog. We passed down a line of ancient Silver Chief penny-slots, most of them unplugged, cords wrapped around the levers.

“Our family came here for Chipped Beef Friday,” I said. “Before, y’know, the kitchen got shut down. Roaches? Mice? I think roaches.”

Huge windows smudged with oily fingerprints overlooked the track. Ashtrays were set into the armrests of the gallery seats. The track itself was an oval surrounded by billboards for the Flying Saucer restaurant, Murphy’s Pegleg Tavern and other local haunts.

We made our way to the track. Litter drifted around the empty risers. Dolly strained at her leash as we crossed to the far left of the track, passing a row of metal boxes with a swinging grate attached overtop. The starting boxes?

The kennels were in a boxcar-shaped building with tin siding. I remember thinking that it must get deadly hot come summertime. Owe knocked. When nobody answered he toed the door open.

The howls began at once—like a dozen busted foghorns going off. The kennel was bright white, clean and well lit. Industrial fans rotated above the dog pens. To the left was a deep basin sink and a big steel hook hung with leather leashes. Beside it was a hamper of dog muzzles and another of neatly folded racing jerseys.

A man entered through a side door, yelling, “Shush it!
Shush!
” He was in his late seventies, short and pot-bellied, wearing carpenter’s overalls and orange galoshes.

Edwina followed him, waving sunnily. “Here’s the Bobbsey Twins!”

The old man ambled over and stuck out his hand. “Harry Riggins at your service, boys.” He edged his glasses up his nose. His eyes were watery behind thick, scratched lenses. “I take care of the dogs. Feed ’em, exercise ’em. I also work the mechanical hare on race nights. You know much about greyhounds?”

“They run pretty fast,” Owe said.

“They can run, that they can.” Harry knelt, opened Frag’s mouth and ran one squared-off finger along his gums. His other fingers roamed up Frag’s face and opened his eyelids. “
Eeesh
. Too much
pressure behind this one’s eyes. Makes them bulge out. Quirk of the breed. You happen to know their bloodlines?”

I said, “I found them in a Dumpster.”

“Oh,” Harry said. “That does happen. Some trainers … goddamn slugs.”

Ed said briskly, “Well, let’s see if these mutts got any pep in their step.”

The dog runs were hundred-yard-long fenced enclosures laid out behind the kennels. Greyhounds dashed down the nearest run, skidding to a stop at the fence before barrelling back the other way.

Harry said, “Let’s put your two in with this wild bunch, see if they can ruck in.”

Frag and Dolly tried to join the racing pack. Almost immediately they got tangled up and hit the fence; the chain-link made a strained musical note as it was stretched back against the posts—
phimmmm!
—like an overtuned banjo string. They tumbled across the dirt, scrambled to their feet and raced to rejoin the dogs.

“Yikes,” said Ed.

“They’re young yet,” Harry said. “The bitch seems game.”

I didn’t like Harry calling Dolly a bitch. He didn’t mean anything by it—I knew that, technically, it described what she was—but the term put a burr under my ass.

I’d never seen Dolly running with a greyhound other than Frag. Now I observed how muscle was packed in fat balls where her chest met her front legs. She ran with abandon: legs outflung, mouth wide open in the closest thing to a smile that a dog can manage.

“They ain’t much as pets,” Harry told us. “Lap dogs, I mean. You probably figured that out already. Looking to sell them? Probably get a couple hundred for the bitch. The male’s more of a giveaway.”

“They don’t want to sell, Harry,” said Ed. “They want to race.”

Harry cocked his head at Ed. Stubble glittered along his jaws like flaked mica.

“Come on now, Edwina.” He turned to us. “You just finished telling me you aren’t any kind of dogmen, right?”

“We’ve never raced dogs,” I admitted.

Harry said, “Then I’d urge you to sell. Still some decent dogmen at this track. They’ll treat the nippers well enough, maybe even turn the bitch into a decent B-leveller … Could you really want to keep them as
pets
?”

Ed said, “Harry, why not let’s just see what these dogs have got?”

He looked leery but said, “For you, darlin’? Anything.”

Minutes later Harry met us at the track. Leashed at his side was a young greyhound with a coffee-cake coat.

“Steadfast Attila,” he told us. “I didn’t name him. He’ll race in D-Class soon. That’s the lowest level at the Lane. Attila’s a stayer—he’ll race right to the line.”

Harry left Steadfast Attila with Ed and approached the mechanical hare. It wasn’t a hare at all—just a ratty teddy bear lashed to a five-foot buggywhip pole. Harry pulled a squeeze bottle out of his overall pocket and sprayed down the bear.

“Rabbit piss,” he said. “Don’t ask how I get it.”

We led the dogs over to the hare and let them take a sniff. Steadfast Attila started pogo-sticking on his hind legs. Fragrant Meat sat on his haunches and gnawed on his own ass.

“That’s not an encouraging sign, son,” Harry told Owe.

Dolly just cocked her head at the hare, and I figured she knew exactly what it was: a piss-soaked teddy bear on a pole.

Fragrant Meat raced Steadfast Attila first. Owe and I lined up the dogs at the start line. Steadfast Attila barked madly, screwing
his haunches into the dirt. Fragrant Meat flattened himself out with his tail straight as a ramrod.