Cataract City (28 page)

She drew on her cigarette and the room seemed to quiver, the red ember floating.

“Ed …”

“You win?”

I shook my head, but wondered if she could see my face.

“You get hurt?”

“Not bad. My hand.”

“Let’s take a look at you.”

She got up, snapped on the bathroom light and sat me on the toilet. She wore a shimmery black robe—irregular in some way I couldn’t see—that she’d bought at a clearance warehouse over the river. Perched on the tub’s edge, she drew on her cigarette, squinted into the smoke and traced her pointer finger over my butterflied brow; she brought her fingertip down slowly to touch the split in my lip.

She plucked the cigarette from her mouth and with that same strong, quiet hand reached over my shoulder—the ember singing the fine hairs on my earlobe—to snatch a Kleenex from the box on
the toilet tank. She set the cigarette between her lips, twisted one corner of the Kleenex into a rope and pressed it to the split.

Ed had a smooth, open, brown-eyed face with a spray of freckles over her cheeks. She was still as beautiful as when I’d first met her, but a harder breed of it: the dagger-sharp points of her cheekbones, the way the light threw itself off the straight edges of her teeth.

As she leaned forward over my swollen hand, my eyes fell upon her clavicle bone. I wanted to run my tongue along it—post-fight randiness—but I couldn’t just lean across and do it: you need permission for such things, if unspoken, even from those you love.

Ed gathered the front of her robe in one small, casual gesture. Then she put her head far back—very far back, almost like a contortionist—and shook her dark hair loose so that it hung free down her neck.

“Can I have a drag?”

“You don’t smoke,” she said.

“One drag.”

I pulled the cigarette from her lips and drew thinly. The paper tasted of cherry lip gloss. There was no stamp on the filter; everyone at the Bisk bought their smokes off-brand from a guy who sold them out of his trunk in the parking lot.

I turned my head to cough and spotted a lottery ticket on the sink ledge. Ed played them all: 6/49, Lotto Max, Dreamhome Sweepstakes, always ponying up for the Bonus, the Encore. She played with some girls at the Bisk, too. A year or so back they’d picked six out of seven and split a few grand. “If I’d been born on the fifty-sixth of January instead of the thirteenth, we’d have all quit on the spot,” she’d told me, laughing but not really.

She never used to play the lotto. For a long time our life together hadn’t been about waiting on a lucky ship to come in—it had been
about building that ship ourselves, with the toil of our own hands, and sailing wherever the hell we wanted.

She pinched the cigarette from between my lips, put it back between her own, then stood in front of the mirror. My gaze rode up her feet, which were strong-toed and callused from hours on the Nutter Butter line, up her calves roped with muscle, past the dimples in the back of her knees to her thighs, which were just starting to go. I stood behind her and my arms went to her hips … and when she didn’t protest, around her waist. The bathroom light reflected off the mirror, doubling itself, and for an instant I felt trapped: a man stunned in the motion-sensor halogens snapping alight along a prison’s barbwire fence.

Some questions you can look at two ways:
What might I have been without you?
One coin, yeah, but two sides. Ed must’ve looked at both sides of that coin, too.

When Wally Cutts called me up to his glassed-in office above the Bisk’s factory line, I knew what was coming.

I’d showed up early that morning to shower. The showerhead at home was calcified—the chemicals that were dumped into the city’s water supply crystallized, meaning many of us in Cataract City had to replace our showerheads every year. I’d stood under the nozzle as the water melted the remains of the fight from my skin and nerves, working my swollen hand under the hot water.

Then I’d dressed in my whites with the other men, each of us smelling of our lines, put on my hairnet and latex gloves and passed through the disinfectant chamber onto the factory floor. We stood in a loose semicircle while the safety inspector ran his tests. There was no sound but the ticking down of the giant grey units stretching deep into the factory. A haze of flour hung in the air—our lips were already whitened with it.

While we waited we limbered up using the exercises the productivity expert taught us: deep knee bends and hip swivels. We looked like an old-timers football team prepping to take the field. Knuckles and knees cracking, elbow joints popping—I could tell whose elbow or knee without even looking: each man’s body had its own sounds.

The red lights flicked green and the line leapt to life: worn canvas cloth chattering over steel pins,
chukka-chikka-chukka
. We inclined our heads over the line and tried to hold that pose for eight hours.

At the end of the shift I climbed the stairs to Cutts’ office and knocked.

“Come in, Duncan. Sit down.”

Wally Cutts was the line super—it was the same job Owe’s dad had once held. His degree hung on the wall, same as Mr. Stuckey’s had. At last summer’s corporate picnic the shop steward, a ratlike creature named Stan Lowery—Adam’s older brother—hung a piñata from the crotch of a tree: a leering burglar with a black mask over his eyes. Lowery had painted the burglar’s feet to look like workboots, just like those Cutts wore while walking the shop floor. Lowery stood with his gang of line-pigs, good ol’ boys with swollen wine-cask bellies, all of them laughing as their kids beat holy hell out of that piñata. Cutts stood there with his wife and young boy, chewing potato salad and ruffling his son’s hair as if this was a big lark and he was in on it.

“Hurt your hand?” Cutts said now.

I nodded.

“But you’re okay?”

My shrug indicated it was nothing he should bother himself about.

“Duncan … you know how it’s going, yes?”

I squinted at him dumbly, as if I didn’t, or couldn’t.

“First of all, production’s way down. Not because we can’t make the stuff, but because people aren’t eating it. It’s a healthier world, Duncan—and that’s fine and dandy, unless you’re baking cookies.”

Cutts was chubby-edging-into-fat with a beery face that broke into laughter at a great many things that weren’t funny. He’d walk the line filling a paper sack with warm Chips Ahoy, plucking them off the moving belt.

“How old are you, Duncan?”

“Twenty-five.”

“Twenty five,” he said, as if it was impossible for him to recall ever having been so young. How the hell old was he—thirty? I could’ve happily murdered him in that moment. “We’re letting you go.”

“Just like that?”

He saw I was smiling and said uneasily, “It’s a seniority thing, pure and simple. You had a lot built up, you’ll recall, but then you took that year off to go to college—that put you back down near the bottom.”

Cutts showed me his palms like I was a dog who figured he was hiding a doggy treat. “We’re offering a month in lieu. Most guys are taking that.”

“The pension plan I’ve paid into?”

“Duncan, retirement age is sixty-five. You’ve got forty years left to get a good pension under you. Edwina’s job is safe, I promise.”

We shook. His hand felt like boiled suet stuffed into a surgical glove. When I got back downstairs Stan Lowery was waiting.

“We’re going to grieve it!” he told me, sounding like a teacup chihuahua yapping at the mailman. “We’re grieving this fucker all the way up, Diggs, you set your watch to it.”

He’d made the same promise to the guys turfed before me—and most of them now spent their nights patrolling hotel parking lots with a flashlight. I nodded to a few guys on the way out. It dawned
on me how little I knew them. I’d worked at the Bisk for six years, yet I couldn’t recall most of their wives’ names.

“Well,” Bovine said, “I’m sure she was nice on the inside.”

The woman was old—how old I couldn’t really say. She lay on a steel table in a white-tiled room in the basement of the Harry Bohnsack Mortuary, a white sheet draping her from neck to toes. She may have been pretty once.

“Let’s get that pesky blood out of you, dear heart,” Bovine said sweetly.

I’d spent the afternoon at the Blue Lagoon, pumping Jack and Cokes into myself. Ed was working, Dolly was sleeping, and anyway, I liked watching Bovine work.

He wore painter’s overalls and a black vulcanized apron. He shook out a length of surgical tubing and fitted one end to a long, thin needle. He fitted the other end to the toaster-oven-sized recovery unit—a funny euphemism for a machine that sucked blood out of dead folks.

Bovine worked briskly, whistling “The Old Gray Mare” while rolling a blue drum with
Nestlé Formalin
written on it. How strange that a company known for its chocolate syrup would be a leading producer of formaldehyde. One whiff and I was back in grade ten science class on frog-dissection day. Bovine threaded a surgical tube into the drum, clipped it with surgical shears and attached a stent, joining it with two more lengths of tube. One end of the tube went into the recovery unit; the other end was fastened to a second needle, which Bovine slid into the big vein in the woman’s neck.

He flicked the machine on. Yellow formalin flowed up one tube. Black blood trickled down the other, collecting in a plastic jug. While the woman drained, Bovine used a pair of industrial clippers to cut her hair off, then her eyebrows.

“Don’t worry, my dear,” Bovine said, hunting through a bin of sterilized wigs. “Only your hairdresser will know for sure.”

At first I’d found it creepy that Bovine talked to them. But then I figured we all had our coping mechanisms. He opened a tackle box, the kind you’d keep fishing lures in, and grabbed a pair of ocular suction cups.

“You going to look away, pussy?” he said.

“You want me to throw up on the poor girl, ruin all your hard work?”

Bovine took a swig from a beaker of gin and tonic on the steel slab and eased the woman’s left eye open. The cornea had gone milky as if it had been bleached. What’s worse, it had taken some sort of awful elevator to the basement of her skull.

“The brain shrinks from lack of moisture,” Bovine said. “Eyeballs get sucked into the cranial vault.”

He peeled the sticky-tab off a suction cup, attached it to her eyeball and pulled. That sound always got to me: it was like hearing a rubber boot pulled out of thick mud. The eyeball popped into the socket. Bovine ran a bead of glue down the eyelids and pressed them together.

“Just once I’d like to leave the eyes wide open,” he said. “See the guy peering up out of the casket like:
The fuck you looking at?
”

The buzzer rang.

“That must be Dr. Jekyll,” said Bovine, in a lispy Vincent Price voice. “He’s bringing more carcasses …”

While he answered the door I stood over the body. Blood still dripped from the tube into the collection jug, dark as tar. A dead person’s blood smelled a little like silver polish. The formaldehyde had put some life back into her: she could’ve just put her head down for a nap.

Bovine said, “Check out what the cat dragged in.”

I looked up and there was Owe. He was about twenty pounds heavier than last I’d seen him, but the eyes and chin were the same.

“I saw this guy propping up a bar stool the other night,” Bovine said, “and thought, Jesus, that bastard looks a lot like another bastard I used to know. And it was that very bastard!”

“How are you, man?” Owe smiled, displaying a big chip in his front incisor.

“I’m hanging on.” I hadn’t seen him in what, four years? The last I’d heard he was living out west. Calgary? Edmonton? “What brings you back?”

“Change of scenery? The mountains were getting stale.”

“How long you been back?”

“Not long.”

“You’re still on the force?”

A quick nod. “Caught on with Niagara Regional. I just want to do something
valuable
with my life, Dunk.”

The sarcasm escaped him like a poisonous mist. He scanned my damaged hand and the new scab bristling along my eyebrow. His eyes had a peculiar movement: snapping back and forth, taking things in while his face remained impassive. That was the first real difference I noticed: those insurance adjuster’s eyes.

“Stuckey’s back in toooown,”
Bovine sang to the tune of “Mack the Knife.” “He’s taken an oath to protect we noble savages of Cataract City.”

Owe nodded towards the body and said: “You dressing her up for a date, Bovine?”

Owe and I smiled at each other in the old familiar way and I felt myself relax, the old rhythms taking hold.

“I guess you want to know why I’ve called this meeting,” Bovine announced grandly. “I’ve come up with an extracurricular project for you wastes of skin.”

He led us into a storage room stacked with heavy-duty cardboard sheets. A few of them had been folded into coffin shapes.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Owe said.

“What?” said Bovine. “Our budget burials.”

“People get buried in
cardboard
?”

Bovine said: “Once you’re in the ground, who cares?”

“You don’t put them out for display in one of these things—right?”

“We’ve got rental caskets, all the nice ones. Evermore Rest, Celestial Sleeper, The Camelot, The Eternal Homestead. We display bodies in a rental, then bury them in cardboard.”

“That’s just so weird,” said Owe.

“Who buys a tux you’re only going to wear one night?” Bovine said equitably.

“Okay, Bovine, but who wants their mother buried in a shoebox like a hamster?”

“Dutch, tell me. On garbage day, do you see people putting ornate wooden boxes with little brass handles out on their curbs?”

“What do you do for a headstone—tape two Popsicle sticks together?”

Bovine said, “When I die, stuff me in a Hefty sack, drag me through the parlour while the organist plays ‘Dust in the Wind,’ on out the back door into an open grave. Bingo, bango, bongo.”

The storage-room door opened into a garage that housed a pair of Cadillac hearses. Bovine pointed to the old model. “That’s mine now, free and clear.”