Cataract City (32 page)

The delivery van collided with a Dodge Aspen; the plastic chicken sailed off the roof to explode like a snow globe on the Dodge’s hood. Wrenching the wheel, I swung the hearse into a sloppy arc as the little Micra caromed off my bumper and pinballed like a BB.

I threw my arm over the passenger seat and cranked my neck over my shoulder. The purple Buick fell directly in my crosshairs: it sat in the centre of the bowl, fishtailing on two flats. I punched the gas and shot downhill—the pink behemoth charged past my front bumper in pursuit of a lime-green Gremlin—lining up the hearse’s trunk with the Buick’s mannequin hood ornament, which swelled in the rear window until—
CRANCH!

The impact threw me forward. My face bounced off the wheel; flaming spiders scuttled before my eyes. The mannequin’s head bounded off the hood and burst under the passing tires of the delivery van. I jerked the transmission into D and goosed the gas; my bumper was snarled with the Buick’s fender and the unlocking of all that twisted metal was accompanied by a metallic shriek that set my teeth on edge. The air above the oval was blue with exhaust; my head swam with the fumes but my adrenaline was redlined. Absolute clarity settled over me, a sensation I’d felt only once or twice in my life.

The hearse accelerated up the oval; I spun the wheel casually, using just two fingers, blood on the back of my hand in perfect red droplets. I must have bloodied my nose when it hit the wheel but never mind, this was a hell of a time. The big car swung around at the top of the oval as if on autopilot, back wheels flirting with the fence; the thunder of the hearse’s muffler trip-hammered against my eardrums while I paused at the height of the incline to survey the madness below. I selected the delivery van that was meshed with the Aspen; their back tires smoked as they tried to separate. My foot mashed the gas and the view expanded, blown up big as all outdoors, before shrinking to a pinprick as I shot the gap and
SHRRAASH!
barrelled into the van, hitting it broadside and rocking it up on its side.

For an instant I thought I’d tipped the van over but soon gravity took hold and it smashed back down, axles snapping, hood
jackrabbiting up and a torn fan belt hurtling skyward like a bird. I took in the green piss of antifreeze and the stink of cooked wiring and screamed in triumph, tasting blood between my teeth.

That was when the hearse rattled and died. I gripped the wheel, white-knuckled, laughing as I twisted the key. Nothing. Laughing harder now, these hysterical giggles, I jammed the transmission collar into P and reefed the key. The hearse coughed to life and I let loose a war whoop as the Micra blazed down the decline and ran straight into me.

The collision jolted me—each knob of my spine was robed in cold flames—as a glowing-hot lugnut pinged off the roof and hit the passenger seat, melting through the upholstery and sending up tiny curls of smoke. I peered groggily over the hearse’s hood at the Micra, which was folded up like an accordion, the driver laughing like a hyena with the flesh split above his brow. I was laughing, too—“You’re a wildman!” I shouted, and he must’ve heard because he grinned as if to say,
Buddy, you don’t even wanna know!
He threw the Micra into reverse, backed clear and went after the pink behemoth.

When I dropped the tranny into D, the hearse whined like a sick animal. The stink of broiled creosote seeped through the vents. I navigated a wasteland of shorn metal and cracked engine blocks hissing steam to the low side of the oval. A busted car horn emitted an endless high-pitched honk—the
whooonk
of a terrified goose. I gunned the hearse up the track incline, gears grinding, unsteady on tires shredding from their rims, then swung around and scanned the field. The Micra was rammed into the ass-end of the Aspen. The pink thing’s trunk was torn off and there was a huge dent in its left side, but it still moved. It angled round until we faced each other, three hundred yards apart. My heart swelled up to fill my chest.

I stood on the gas pedal. The big block V8 shrieked as the hearse leapt like a scalded cat. The pink car was boogying, too: vaporous
streamers of smoke peeled back from its crunched hood. The spotlights shone off the still-bright chrome of the dash, which glowed with its strange circular geometries, and I inhaled the mustard leatherette of the seat and thought about the bodies that had occupied the berth behind me, laid out in coffins with their formaldehyde-stiff skin white as candle wax, wounds sewn tight with black thread, and then I braced my hands on the wheel as the pink car blasted into me.

A crash of earthbound thunder. Our hoods were welded with the weirdest metallic symmetry. Steel buckled, the alloy became liquid: it tumbled off the front of the hood in silver waves like steel-tinted winter water over the Falls, throwing me against the wheel so hard that I’d wake the next morning with the bright welt of its shape on my chest.

The impact shocked the air from my lungs. My next inhale was tortured, the sound you make after being under water so long it has almost killed you. I sucked in the steam roiling off the hearse’s engine block—the taste of a blowtorch’s blue flame. As the motor rattled down I smelled gas—on me?—and watched as small flames licked from under the pink car’s hood.

“Hey! You okay, buddy?”

The derby inspector hung his big fat melon through the window. I blinked my eyes and tried to focus.

“Derby’s over, man. You got yourself a bloody nose.”

“I’ll be okay. Say, did I win?”

The inspector shook his head. “The Micra took it.”

When I burst out laughing, the inspector insisted I check in with the on-site medic: unprovoked laughter was a symptom of a concussion.

After the race we took a cab to the Blue Lagoon. A pair of gay divorcees danced together on the postage stamp of a dance floor. Their pancake makeup shone under the black lights, making them look like lost mimes.

I drank a pint of Laker and soon the plugs of Kleenex stuffed up my nostrils were wet with beer foam. Bovine had kept himself well lubed on two-dollar drafts at the derby and showed no signs of flagging. Pinpricks of sweat glittered in the hollows of his eyes, and his hair looked like a half-deflated soufflé.

“Take it easy,” I told him. “You don’t have to drink your body weight.”

Bovine said, “Who are you—my mother?”

He staggered onto the dance floor, grinding up on the divorcees. Arms above his head, a highball glass in one hand and a pint in the other. When the women abandoned the floor, Bovine danced by himself in the strobes, thrusting his crotch.

Owe winced, fished in his back pocket and tossed a deck of cigarettes on the table.

“You smoke?”

Owe shook his head. “Sitting on them funny, is all. Screwing with my spine. They’re evidence, actually.” He exhaled casually. “Know much about cigarette smuggling?”

“Nothing. Why, should I?”

Owe tore the cellophane off the package, tapped one out. “These’re counterfeits, but they look and taste almost like the real deal.” He rotated the cigarette with his fingertips. “The band’s a little different—the only way to tell. Dull yellow instead of glossy gold. It’s big money.”

“That so?”

“Half a billion a year—can you believe that? Mainly on the reserves down in Cornwall. The Akwesasne Mohawks in the U.S., the Kahnawake tribe on our side. When the Saint Lawrence freezes they hoof ’em over the ice. In the summer it’s speedboats.”

I said, “And nobody arrests them?”

“You can’t walk onto a rez and start slapping on cuffs. The Six Nations never ceded to the Crown. They’re a sovereign people who
walk the path as brothers and equals under the law—but our laws don’t apply. They can cross the border freely. No guards. No duty. They got their own police force, but …”

“It’s complicated?”

“Ever been down to the Akwesasne? Right out of
Mad Max
, man. Where does the money go? Not into infrastructure. Tough tickets, the Mohawks.” Owe smiled as if to say,
Crazy, huh?
His insurance adjuster’s eyes slid over the slope of my shoulder to my nose, the plugs of bloodied TP, his gaze resting comfortably on mine. “Our old pal Drinkwater’s neck-deep in it.”

“That so?”

“It is a fact,” said Owe. “Makes him a whole lotta wampum. That’s racist. Sorry. He smuggles across the river into Canada. A risky game, but his rake is huge. Plenty of money on both sides of the river—in Drinkwater’s pocket on that side, in the distributor’s pockets over here. But the river itself … that’s where the smugglers operate. They’re low-level mules, totally expendable. Here in Cataract City, you can’t walk five feet without tripping over one of those poor fools.”

My bladder tightened. I got up and went to the toilets, and stared at my reflection in the fly-spotted mirror. Did Owen know? Had he seen or heard or somehow read the thoughts bouncing inside my head? Owe was smart—smarter than me. I couldn’t outfox him. He’d give me a heads-up, wouldn’t he? Let me know which way the wind was blowing?

A quickie vacation—that’s how I floated it to Edwina. Don’t ask where the money came from. Don’t ask me to justify it. Just say you’ll come.

We’d planned a similar trip years ago, to New Orleans. We’d made it to Kentucky before my old pickup’s engine blew, which was
just as well—something burned deep inside my bones the further I’d gone from the city.

But I remembered even the smallest details from that trip: Ed’s feet on the dashboard, the chipped candy-apple of her nail polish. How we’d sat in a café in West Virginia eating eggs whose yolks were the size of quarters—pigeon eggs, Ed had called them—with sunlight falling through the yellowed windows. How Ed had grabbed my hand impulsively and bit the knuckles. I still had knuckles back then.

She had sat on the bed in one of those no-tell motels along the interstate, cupping her breasts, laughing and telling me casually, “I really like my tits.” Later that night, dehydrated and ravenous, we’d ransacked our pockets for quarters and wrapped our naked bodies in the motel duvet and crept out to stock up on cold Cokes and Ho Hos, giggling like kids in the glow of the vending machines.

During that trip I’d realized you can’t have it all in a relationship. Constancy and the ability to thrill—these rarely dwelled within the same person. So you took the best of what you could reasonably expect, made your choice and held to it.

This time we drove north into Pennsylvania Dutch Country. The grey sky held a perpetual hesitancy, as if it could open up at any moment. The exit signs fascinated me. Turn off at any one and the possibility existed that you could be somebody else entirely. The miles dropped under the hood and tension eased out of my chest. In Cataract City everything was a struggle. It knit itself deep inside you. What was the most awful thing about living as an adult on the same streets where you grew up? It’s so easy to remember how perfect it was supposed to be. Reminders were always smacking you in the face. Good things happened—sure, I knew that. They just happened in other places.

“Am I a gift?” Ed asked me one night in an interstate motel. “Because you’re a gift, Duncan Diggs. And I treasure that gift. Really, I do.”

“So do I, Ed. I treasure you, too. Why wouldn’t I?” But the refrain in my head said,
Just tell me not to do it, Ed. Whatever it is, whatever you
think,
just tell me not to go through with it—and I won’t. I swear to you, I won’t
.

But she wouldn’t say anything about how I’d managed to find the money for the trip or what I might be planning. It wasn’t Ed’s way. Looking back, I believe she was making plans even then. The trip had that end-game undercurrent.

We drove back through unending rain. My cell rang outside Buffalo.

Drinkwater said, “How’s it going, paleface? Get your sea legs ready.”

The night before the job, Owe called.

“Got a minute?”

“Sure, always.”

He was drinking—a slurred tempo to his words. I pictured him in his well-ordered cop apartment drinking whatever cops drank.

“You never asked me about Fragrant Meat, man. You never asked how my dog was doing.”

I sat by the window overlooking the street. Dolly’s head rested on my lap. I scratched her ear flaps and said, “How is he?”

“Dead.”

The fact hung between us
—dead
—like a squashed bug on the sidewalk. Owe laughed, the same mirthless, thousand-yard laugh he’d started using after his knee surgeries.

“I’m sorry, man. I knew you really cared about—”

“No, no. Just
listen
, okay? Listen.” When I didn’t say anything
he carried on. “So a stupid fuckhead gets off his stupid fuckhead job on Friday afternoon. The stupid fuckhead has a few too many drinks with the other stupid fuckheads he works with and then hops in his truck and goes screaming down a neighbourhood street at ninety K. That neighbourhood was my neighbourhood. Southern edge of Calgary—I couldn’t see the Rockies from my house, the angle wasn’t right, but the area
felt
safe, Dunk, and that mattered because I never really felt safe on the job, right?”

The clatter of glass, the sloppy
gloh-gloh-gloh
of liquid sloshing out of a bottle. A heavy exhale, then two convulsive swallows—I heard the click of his Adam’s apple. He’d reached that state of drunkenness where cold clarity settled in. He spoke fluidly.

“I was walking Fragrant Meat. But I didn’t call him that anymore. Wasn’t any sort of name for a creature you loved, right? He slept on my bed, which was fine seeing as the ladies weren’t exactly lining up to share it with me. I heard the truck before seeing it. The
grrrrrr
of its engine. It rounded the bend, skipped the grassy strip dividing the street, hopped the curb and … there was no time to do anything. I tell myself that now, Dunk, and … really, that’s the truth I think. But it
felt
like I had all the time in the world. But that’s only because time slows down in a crisis—that’s what everyone tells me, anyway.

“The fuckhead hit Frag so hard his collar snapped—the impact knocked the blood through him in a wave, the vet told me, bulging his veins and snapping the collar. All I felt was a slight tug as the leash followed the movement of Frag’s body—like a big fish biting the bait off your hook before the line goes slack.”