Cataract City (25 page)

“Holy shit!” I said when I spotted the ragged black ring around her lips, teeth black as stalactites.

“She’s full of beans,” Edwina said, wiping Dolly’s mouth with a paper towel.

“What’s in that stuff? Could it make her sick … could it make her
slow
?”

“Take a pill, Dunk. The tube was nearly empty.”

We arrived after eight o’clock. Owe was waiting in the parking lot with an envelope full of cash. The two of us had gone to the bank earlier that day to make our withdrawals. The teller had wetted her fingertips with a sponge in a dish and counted the bills with sleepy eyes, as though she worked with that kind of money all the time.

A silver pickup pulled up beside us. Drinkwater got out with a large man wearing engineer’s overalls. He shot Dolly a look. “She looks like shit—been eating it?”

The mascara had left a dirty ring around Dolly’s mouth. Ed smiled cheerily and said, “Go fuck yourself.”

Drinkwater smiled back. “Ooh, a smart-mouthed bitch from Cataract City. Never seen one of you before.”

Owe and Ed and I took Dolly inside. The Winning Ticket was shuttered, the stands empty. Spotlights shone down on the groomed dirt. Harry waved at us from the kennels.

“I dragged the smoother around twice,” he said. “The track’s pristine. Where’s Drinkwater?”

“Out in the parking lot.”

Harry’s brow creased. “Go on, take Dolly in back. I’ll be with you directly.”

We took Dolly to the prep room, where Ed babied her onto the scale. I considered writing her weight on her Bertillon card, but why bother? This evening’s event was like a pro boxer fighting a bare-knuckle match in a parking garage.

When Harry showed up, he paced the length of the prep room and said, “Did you keep an eye on Drinkwater in the parking lot? You got to mind that man, didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I?”

“What’s the matter?” I said.

“The man’s got no care for his dogs. They’re just motors to be gunned until they conk out. I already told you about the hot peppers, but there’s other tricks. One is using that boner pill, what’s it called?”

Owe said, “Viagra?”

Harry snapped his fingers. “The very thing. Stuff one of those down a dog’s throat and it’ll get the heart racing, open up the blood vessels and give it extra pace down to the wire.”

“Drinkwater’s in the parking lot feeding his dog
Viagra
?” said Owe.

Harry said, “I took a peek in the lot and the two of them, him and his buddy, they weren’t feeding that dog anything. I do believe they were
injecting
it.”

“Jesus,” Owe said softly. “So what—bet’s off?”

Harry offered his palms. “You got no grounds to welsh. No drug tests before or after. All you got are the suspicions of a half-blind old man.”

We met on the track. Drinkwater’s associate looked exactly like the sort of man who’d inject Viagra into a dog. War Hammer stood at the man’s side, body flexed tight as a railroad tie, unblinking, nostrils dilated, breath coming in whimpering gasps.

We loaded the dogs into the traps. War Hammer in trap 1, Dolly in 5. Drinkwater gave me a queer look: the outside trap meant
Dolly needed to cover more ground. War Hammer went into her trap robotically—she looked as if she might explode like a firecracker inside a tin can.

We retreated to the spectators’ rail while Harry climbed up the operator’s box. The mechanical hare warmed up, sparks popping off the electrified rail. I tasted it in the back of my mouth, sharp as ozone.

The hare sped off. At the thirty-yard mark it tripped an electrical circuit that sprung the traps.

The dogs shot out in a fury. Dolly stumbled out of the gate and I turned to Drinkwater thinking he’d rigged it somehow, greasing the dirt, but it was just a slip, a simple slip that could happen to any dog and might set them back half a step—nothing but a bit of bad luck.

War Hammer was ten yards ahead and accelerating. A terrifying mania ran through her limbs; she was totally out of control and fear-stricken: she ran as if pursued by wolves. The dogs stormed down the dirt, the thunder of their paws matching the thunder in my blood. Dolly dropped a level, spine flattening like a dancer going under a limbo stick.

That’s it baby, drink looooow
.

They blazed past us and it was as if the passage of their bodies sucked every sound from my ears: they now ran in a wrap of silence like dream animals, untouched by friction or gravity. When they hit the bend War Hammer was still in the lead. Their spines humped over the far rail for the first hundred yards before they both went low enough to vanish. Sound washed over me again as Owe and Ed hollered a single ongoing encouragement:

“Gooooooo!”

The dogs rounded back into view. Dolly was outside, banking high, screaming around the turn. Her stride was strangely even,
almost conservative—which is when I realized that she’d finally figured it all out. Her speed was there—hell, she was
faster
than ever—but she was under control. Somewhere on the far side of the track she’d dialled it in. And she was perfect. Perfect the way Owe had been on a basketball court, the way Dade Rathburn had seemed to be in the squared circle. War Hammer was a few yards ahead, but Dolly had saved a little something for the finishing kick. Her eyes bulged from their sockets in a way that might have seemed comical if not for the frothy ropes whipping from her open mouth. It was no longer a matter of who was faster—it was a matter of whether Dolly could catch War Hammer before she ran out of track.

With 125 yards to go, Dolly’s spine arched and her shoulders rose. She looked as if she was preparing to climb an invisible ramp. Her front legs—
was I really seeing this?
—appeared to push off from thin air.

I pictured Harry watching from the operator’s booth, whispering, “I
told
you it could happen.”

Another step, maybe two, and she’d have lifted off. I truly believed that would’ve happened.

And then—

One time at the Bisk someone dropped a screw into the gears of an industrial mixer. It pinged around the machine housing before sticking between the teeth of two huge tumblers. Nine times out of ten it wouldn’t have stuck: the gears would have spat it out or snapped it in two. But it got stuck fast and the gears seized—and the pent-up torsion tore the entire machine to pieces. Gears stripped off spindles and rotors burned out. Busted gears punched through the housing. The machine was a smoking ruins.

That was what I thought of watching Dolly break apart.

The simplest explanation is that Dolly’s rear right paw snagged
in her jersey. A thin nylon strap ran across her belly; Harry had snugged it tight but it must have loosened. Dolly’s paw got under the strap, where it was trapped between it and her stomach.

It could’ve happened a million other times and nothing would’ve come of it. Maybe it was the way she brought her leg down. Maybe it was the angle of her spine. When Dolly flexed into her next stride her foot remained snagged on the strap. Her leg kept going. The strap had no give—they aren’t designed that way. Dolly ran on the unshakable belief that her leg was going to come down again; she put all her weight into that belief, and in doing so she busted her own leg.

It went just like Harry said: a stick of spaghetti.

Her body flung forward, her leg flapping behind like a ribbon in the wind. She hit the track and unravelled.

My hips were already clearing the rail as War Hammer crossed the finish line. I sprinted to where Dolly lay in an awful tangle, snorting like she had pollen in her nostrils. She rolled onto her side and got up. Maybe I’d seen it all wrong—maybe she’d just twisted her limb? She put her right leg down to see if it might work. It hung like a limp thing with the paw twisted off at a horrible angle.

She lifted it up again—lifted her haunches which lifted her dangling leg—then tried to put it back down, lifting and putting it down with puzzled helplessness.

“You’re going to be all right, girl,” I said, because in my heart I still hoped.

I pulled Dolly into a hug, stroking her head like a father trying to soothe the fever of a sick child. Her body softened into mine and I knew some part of her acknowledged the situation or gave up. Or maybe she was just sick of running.

The following hours passed in a haze. I remember Ed taking Dolly’s muzzle in her hands and how Dolly licked her face crazily—startled
by Ed’s tears, maybe. And I remember Harry’s crestfallen expression, tears hanging in the cups of his eyelids as he said: “I should have tightened those straps. Should have known she’d run that jersey right off her back.”

I said there was no faulting anything he’d done, but I could tell Harry didn’t accept it. Some men can’t.

I remember barging into the vet’s office as they were closing. The vet injected Dolly with something that made her eyelids roll down like shutters before testing the leg with his fingers, feeling all the places where it had been ruined. He made a long incision down Dolly’s leg and as soon as it was opened shards of bone from her shattered leg simply fell out; they looked like crushed glass.

He told us the best he could do was amputate—that, or euthanize her. I almost strangled the man.

Ed and I smoked too many cigarettes while the vet operated. Ed cried on and off. When it was over Dolly hobbled out on three legs with a plastic cone around her head, woozy from the anaesthesia.

On the drive home she snoozed on Ed’s lap, her chest rising and falling in the moonlight that fell through the windshield. An immeasurable weight lifted from my own chest.

There are things I didn’t see, but I do know they happened. I know that War Hammer died shortly after the race from whatever toxic brew Drinkwater had shovelled into her. Owe told me that she’d staggered into the finishing pen, turned a few wonky circles and collapsed. He also told me he’d handed Drinkwater what we owed him—a bet was a bet—and that Drinkwater stuffed the envelopes into his pocket and walked to the parking lot.

Harry and Owe buried War Hammer in the soft loam along the river, five hundred yards behind Derby Lane. “You got to bury them deep,” Harry said. “Otherwise the shore freezes in the winter and
they get spat up out of the earth in the spring thaw.” When Owe asked how he knew that, Harry said simply, “I’ve buried a lot of dogs, son. Only a few of them my own.”

Dolly never quite found her old footing: she could walk just fine, a funny little hop-step, and developed strong shoulders from putting more weight on them. Ed called her Tripod. She even became a little fat, like an athlete gone to seed. When Ed and I were still together, we’d take her for walks in the park. Ed would toss a tennis ball. Sometimes Dolly would tear after it and I’d see her body drop into that old stance, her belly nearly brushing the clipped blades of grass. But then she seemed to sense it, too, that natural runner rearing up inside her. She shut it down to a trot, no longer wishing to access that old aspect of herself.

I’d never say I was happy for what happened that night at Derby Lane. The sight of Dolly flipping end over end … sometimes it’ll pop into my mind and I’ll shudder. But here’s something I’ve never told anyone: the accident made Dolly more touchable. Afterwards, I could hold her—just for a few minutes, but that was something. She allowed me to show her love and accepted it as much as her nature allowed. Her breath would fall into a calm rhythm as I stroked her coat. That nub of bone poking my thigh … it always wrecked me. But then I would feel her big heart beating at almost the same tempo as my own and think:
Maybe it was for the best
.

“
WHAT ARE YOU STILL DOING HERE?
”

I craned my head over my shoulder and saw the red-haired girl in the rubber boots. The girl who’d been so unimpressed with my rock-skipping skills.

“I’ve been watching from my window,” she said, hooking her thumb at her apartment block. “You’re standing here like a zombie.”

The wind gusted, blowing ancient litter around the Derby Lane lot. The door of the Winning Ticket Lounge blew open and banged shut on its rusted hinges, issuing a thin squeal. How long had I been standing there? Too long for the girl’s taste, clearly.

“I was thinking.”

“About what?”

“Personal stuff.”

The girl unhinged her jaw, letting her eyes roll back.
“Laaaame.”

I bristled, aware that she was a child but unable to help myself. “You’re not very nice, you know. Not as long as I’ve known you.”

“We just met,” she said evenly.

I kicked a rock, sent it skittering across the tarmac. “Well, anyway. I’d better get going now.”

“You’re too sensitive.” The girl set her hands on her hips in a schoolmarmish gesture. “This city is going to eat you alive.”

I waved goodbye to her and walked down the Parkway, heading towards Clifton Hill. Edwina and I used to walk Dolly down here sometimes, but I hadn’t seen either of them in nearly eight years. I wouldn’t be seeing them any time soon, either.

As I walked, I thought back to that night at Derby Lane—those fleeting moments on the homestretch when Dolly almost flew. I used to see her in a dream, which replaced the one with the hooks and screws. In that dream she was perfect, yet never more so than she was that night. She lived so well in that dream simply because she really could have stepped right out of it, blitzing down the backstretch like coiled thunder.