Cataract City (40 page)

For eight years my life was locked in stasis—I may as well have been frozen in a cryo-chamber. I became jaded, a stranger to myself: a desk sergeant with the Niagara Regional Police, tracking down child welfare beefs with a rotating cast of pantsuited social workers. Putting bad men in jail only to see them sprung by a showboating defence lawyer or some give-a-fuck judge. The system was broke—most systems were—and I was just one gear spinning imperfectly within it.

After work I’d hit one of the bars along Stanley Road, prop myself up on a stool with the rubadubs, listen to country music on the jukebox and inhale the sour whiff of spilled beer. Then I’d go home to the shoebox apartment, the unmade bed, empty bottles queued along the windowsill like giant bullets in want of a revolver, and the dripping faucet that I couldn’t quite rouse myself to fix.

Every so often I’d pick a convenient start point—New Year’s Day was popular—and say:
Time for a change, Stuckey!
Get a membership at the Y, show up for pickup basketball with the old men and high-school dropouts, can a few jumpers and get a little groove going. But soon the six pins and quartet of screws holding my knee together started to burn with smokeless heat; I’d gimp to the bench, my resolve already eroding.

I’d see old faces around. Duncan’s mother, Celia, waiting at the bus stop after her shift. Wearing a pencil skirt and support hose—hot date with the mister?—varicose veins bulging up the backs of her calves. I drove past without stopping, feeling the weight of her gaze on me. Sam Bovine would wash up in the drunk tank as reliably as the tide, usually around the holidays. He’d pass out in the holding
cell, tinselly Christmas garlands noosed around his neck. One night he showed up outside my apartment screaming incoherently, although the gist was clear:
you’re a turncoat, Stuckey, a scummer and a snake
. I rang Dispatch and when the cruiser arrived Bovine stared at my window, wounded and pissy. I had the officers drive his drunk ass home.

I saw Edwina once, a few months after Duncan’s arrest. Driving past their old house, ostensibly on a neighbourhood sweep, I’d spotted a
FOR SALE
sign on the lawn and a U-Haul trailer stacked with boxes. I slowed down, knuckles whitening on the wheel. Ed walked out the front door with a gooseneck lamp, Dolly padding at her heels. She’d held on to her wintry beauty—although it was flintier now—retaining that bodily wildness both Duncan and I had surrendered to.

A moment came back, plucked free of time. Ed and me in the coatroom at Derby Lane, the usual dog track smells—wet greyhound, cigar smoke and the alkaline tang of dog drool—overmastered by the smell of her: clean and electric and somehow witchy, the taste in your mouth as a thunderstorm darkens the horizon. Her body was dewy and obliging, which was odd seeing as she was so often distant, untouchable. But back then she had softened as I braced her against the wall, coat hangers jangling round our ears with a musical note. It was not at all how I’d imagined it but still good, so very good, the youth in our bodies electric—I thrummed with it, fumbling but sincere, nervous lightning popping off the tips of my fingers—as she socked her head into the crook of my neck, smelling of Noxzema and Export A cigarettes, of sweat and the dust of the track, biting my throat with her small, even teeth. Laughter bubbled up inside me—the hysterical, uncontrolled giggles that had plagued me as a boy, concentrating first in my belly and fluttering up my throat like
antic butterflies. The more I tried to tamp them down the worse they got—like when Bruiser Mahoney signed that Polaroid
BM
and that sick, insulting laughter had boiled up in me. I’d felt that same fear in the coatroom. You weren’t supposed to
laugh
when a woman nuzzled your neck, so I’d stifled it—
Shhht-SHHHT!
—the snort of a horse. Ed stared at me cockeyed for a second before we kissed—and it had been warm and spitty and sloppy like a first kiss ought to be.

She stopped halfway down the driveway, lamp in hand, gazing at me as I passed. There was no quiver in her eyes. She was stronger than fate—by which I mean she hadn’t imbibed the defeatism at the core of this city, the sense that each step of our lives had been plotted and our role was to follow those footfalls. Her lips moved but I couldn’t make out the words.

It could have been “Bye, Owe.” Or it could’ve been “You owe.”

I did owe and I did pay, after a fashion. For eight years I drank too much, nursed a sullen emptiness and waited for something to change, all the while knowing this was the single biggest lie people told themselves: that change will eventually come on its own if you wait patiently enough for it.

I told myself:
When Duncan gets out, you make it right. However you can, in whatever way necessary. Make it right
.

And then, three months after Dunk was released from prison, and three months after his fight at Drinkwater’s, I was given the chance.

“
NEVER FIGURED I
’
D SEE THE DAY
where I was rigged to a wire … by a white man, no less.”

“It’s not a wire,” I said. “It’s all wireless nowadays. Welcome to the twenty-first century.”

Silas Garrow made a face. “Explain again how I let you talk me into this.”

We sat in an unmarked cruiser in the Niagara River spillway. I was in the back seat with Silas, affixing a tiny microphone to the furred hood of his parka. Duncan sat silently up front.

Silas was set to meet Lemuel Drinkwater on the frozen Niagara to negotiate a deal for Drinkwater’s Molins Mark 9 cigarette machines. After talking with his band elders, Silas had agreed to co-operate with the police.

Silas and Drinkwater would meet alone. A recent rash of thieveries and his bad luck at the fights had sown a seed of distrust deep inside Drinkwater—and apparently that seed had since flowered into a vine of runaway paranoia. He no longer spoke on cell phones, preferring to dispatch his orders via an ever-shrinking network of impressionable Native teens.

“This is just preliminary evidence gathering,” I told Silas. “Once we’ve got him on record, I’ll go to my chief and requisition manpower for when the actual deal goes down.”

Nobody knew about tonight’s activities. I’d signed out the surveillance equipment from the tactical ordnance officer, who handed it over no questions asked. It wasn’t uncommon for officers to pursue their own investigations—some even did freelance PI work, bugging the no-tell motels on Lundy’s Lane, ratting out philandering hubbies to their suspicious wives.

Silas said, “So what do you need?”

“Time, place, price,” I told him. “Most of all, intent. Just talk naturally. The information will come.”

The Niagara Peninsula was clad in sparkling snow. The crescent moon fell upon the iced-over river, its expanse like a polished razor. Silas straddled the skidoo he’d trucked up from the Akwesasne: a tricked-out model with a silenced exhaust that was
built to ferry sleds of cigarettes across the Saint Lawrence Seaway. “Should I have a gun?” he wondered.

“Do you foresee any need for one?” I asked.

“It’s Drinkwater,” Silas said simply.

I grabbed the police-issue Mossberg pump-action shotgun from the cruiser. Silas strapped it to the skidoo.

The rusty burr of a motor carried across the night-stilled air, climbing to a keen. Drinkwater was coming. Silas started his own skidoo and gunned the engine.

“Make it short,” I said. “Just the essentials.”

Silas nodded, the trace of consternation never leaving his face. He tore out of the spillway, down the alluvial slope of the riverbank into the river basin, accelerating now, his tail lights flaring bright red—the eyes of some predatory animal—then dimming as he navigated a rim of crested ice.

Duncan and I sequestered ourselves in the cruiser, listening to the microphone feed. At first we heard nothing but the hornet-drone of the skidoo motor and the wind raking the mic.

“Cold as a witch’s tit,” we heard Silas say.

The motor decelerated; there came the
tink-tink-tink
of metal treads crawling across the ice. From our vantage we could see a brief flare of the tail lights as Silas came to a stop about four hundred yards from shore. The moon cut a rift across the frozen river, glossing the torsional shapes of both skidoos. The crunch of boots on winter snowpack was punctuated by Silas’s ragged exhales.

SILAS: “You okay?”

DRINKWATER: “Why shouldn’t I be?”

“No reason. Look a little troubled, is all.”

“Meeting out on a goddamn winter river—why shouldn’t I be? Cloak-and-dagger shit. But you want something done right, do it yourself. I’d be a damn sight better if you hadn’t gotten your ass
handed to you by some over-the-hill pug. Where the hell’d you get those boxing titles? Out of a Cracker Jack box?”

“That guy had stones in his hands. What can I say? Wasn’t my night.”

“
Your
night?”

“Lemmy, listen—I didn’t come out here to cry over spilt milk.”

Lingering pause.

DRINKWATER: “What’s
that
?”

SILAS: “What’s what, Lem?”

“
That
, you goddamn shitbird! That … 
that
!”

A finger of light bloomed on the night river, followed by the report of gunfire.

Dunk and I put boots to snow, racing down the slope, slipping on the ice-slick stones. We found Silas laid out on the ice, staring up at the sky with a serene look on his face.

“He shot me,” he managed. “He saw the shotgun. Police issue, isn’t it?”

I unzipped his parka. The bullet had sheared through his shirt and the meat of his biceps. “Clean through.”

Wincing, Silas said, “So that’s what
—good
?”

I said, “The bullet’s not stuck inside of you. Didn’t ricochet off your bone, otherwise it would have snapped. Let’s get you back to the cruiser.”

“No way,” Silas told me. “No police, no doctors.”

“You’ve been shot,” said Duncan.

“Thanks for the update. I’ve been
grazed
, right? I got you all the evidence you need, right?”

I said, “We’ve got him on attempted murder now.”

“So go
get him
. Another five minutes, that man will be nothing but a vapour trail. You’ll never find him.”

I exchanged a look with Duncan. A profound, impossible worry sparked in his eyes.

“You’ll be okay?” Duncan asked Silas.

“I have people nearby. We Injuns have people
everywhere
.”

Duncan drove. Silas’s skidoo shot across the river so fast that the speed squeezed tears from my eyes, all of which vaporized before reaching my ears.

Drinkwater’s sled tracks cut south, back towards the States, until the ice began to groan ominously—I spotted a black lapping edge where the river wasn’t yet frozen. Then the tracks cut back north.

The skidoo engine buzzed like honeybees trapped in a tin can. Now Drinkwater’s tracks veered sharply towards the northern shore. I squinted at the banks, dark beneath the pines. No street lamps or bridge lights or car headlights flashed through the trees. The only man-made light came from Clifton Hill: a gauzy bowl of whiteness that was dimming by the second.

Duncan angled his body into a turn, following the line Drinkwater had carved. The night was clean and clear. No snow to cover up the tracks. He was driving too fast, amped up on adrenaline.

“Throttle down, Dunk.”

He drove parallel to the riverbank, bloodhounding Drinkwater’s tracks. They zagged towards the shore as if Drinkwater had been debating whether to enter the woods. Winter-naked trees and snow-draped shrubs blurred into a thick wall of foliage.

At last the tracks rose up an incline into the forest. Why had Drinkwater chosen this entry? Had he heard us coming and panicked? Or was he lying in wait a few hundred yards past the treeline?

I pointed to an orange trail marker spiked atop a rusted pole. “He followed a trail. Hiking path, maybe an old surveyor’s line.”

“You figure he knows where he’s going?”

“He’s done plenty of business on this river.”

Pins and needles shot up my spine. We’d been searching for forty-five minutes. The river snaked eastward, its whiteness dissolving into the remote darkness of the horizon. Moonlight ghosted the trees, shining on their ice-encased branches—but the light didn’t touch the forest floor, which was carpeted in smooth-running shadows. Apart from the hum of the muffler, the silence was enveloping.

I thought about how we forget there are still places on earth where you can move so easily from the safety of known roads to the solitude of nature. If you’re not paying attention, you might not even know you’ve crossed that line.

“Go on,” I said. “He’s running, not waiting.”

“He’s still Drinkwater.”

“You’d rather turn back?”

Dunk opened the throttle, carrying us over the river’s lip and into the woods. Drinkwater’s tracks veered wildly through the snowpack. These trails hadn’t seen use in years. Trees here rose high into the night, oaks and birches nourished by the alluvial silt kicked up from the river. Their trunks were furred with old man’s beard that shone with hoarfrost.