Cataract City (22 page)

The college offers were revoked. He ended up signing a ten-day look-see contract with Lotto Delmonte, a Mexican team run by the banana kingpins. They thought he might have something left in the tank. He didn’t. They cut him loose. He spent a few months drifting and drinking around Marina del Ray. Word spread that Dutch Stuckey, Basketball Boy Wonder, was a bust. Beneath the sadness and resignation, lurking like a foul pocket of mud in a riverbed, was relief. Owe’s failure re-established the status quo in Cataract City.

When he returned from his wandering, Owe threw a prolonged party at Sherkston Shores, a trailer park bordering Lake Erie. He rented the largest trailer on his folks’ dime and invited everyone to stay.

His body was deeply tanned, his eyes a washed-out Windex blue. He reminded me of a scarecrow that had hung too long in a desolate field. The only creature who didn’t seem to notice the change was Fragrant Meat; he was also the only creature capable of bringing a real smile to Owe’s face.

During the day, Owe drank vodka and soda, a habit he’d picked up down south. He sat on the beach, staring out over the slate-grey water and sky welded together without a joint, piling warm sand
over his knee. “It’s Ayurvedic medicine,” he’d say cryptically. “The Swami Vishnu gave me the
secret
.”

At night he’d switch the soda for Jolt Cola and become beet-faced and weird. We’d stoke big bonfires, driftwood piled in a rickety heap. Owe doused it in kerosene and lit it, shrieking giddily as the fire ate the bleached sticks.

“Remember?” he said to me one night over the flames, his grin a grim rictus. “In the woods? What we’d have done for a fire like this, huh?
Hah!”

He acted as if the last few months of his life, everything post-injury, had never happened. He’d brought a bunch of stuff to the trailer with the intent of giving it away: old jerseys, a laminated four-leaf clover, photos he’d snapped during a camping trip in Banff. “I brought this just for you,” he’d say, pressing something into someone’s hands as if the item had specific meaning to its recipient. But I’d watched him try to give the same things to different people.

His buddies from Ridley showed up, guys with names like Thad and Chad and Bradley-not-Brad, girls with names like Pris and Elle whose tennis skirts danced around their thighs. They drove ragtop Beemers, drank Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers and smoked skunky dope. They came, stayed awhile, filled themselves with the unshakable sense that something was deeply the matter with Owe and left. Owe waved from the beach as they drove off, his hand floating above his head, loose as a balloon on a string.

I kept visiting, though, and Ed was there the whole time. She’d been rehired at the Bisk; she used up all her vacation days to be with him.

But Owe wasn’t
there
in the truest sense. During the day, his eyes would dart along the sand as if he were tracking a sand crab or a shred of litter. But there was no crab, no litter. At night, he’d flinch as if sparks from the fire were popping in front of his face. I’d stay
up in the trailer, listening for his voice. Sometimes I’d hear him: a low acid chuckle rising from the beachhead, lapping over and over with the waves.

Ed tried to rouse him. But it was like trying to transport sand with a sieve. When he was happy it was with a manic-sick happiness; his smile sat on his face like a Halloween mask, twitchy-dark things beneath. When he was sad, the melancholy seemed bottomless and incurable. He was never just Owe, the Owe we knew.

At night Ed stumbled into the trailer and fell asleep alone in the woodsmoke-smelling darkness. I wanted to go to her, comfort her in whatever way I could. But I didn’t.
Couldn’t
.

One night we sat together on the beach. Owe had been drinking all day and was zonked in the trailer.

“He’ll get back to himself,” Ed said, as if she had the power to make it happen.

I said, “He won’t stay this way forever.”

“You’re solid, Dunk.” She peered at me in the glowing remains of the bonfire. “You know? You’re not too high, not too low. You’re solid … safe.”

“I don’t know how safe I am.”

“Oh, very safe. Trust me.”

“Well, I don’t plan on being here my whole life.”

Her eyebrows took on a troubled slant. “What’s so wrong with right here?”

I couldn’t frame an answer. There was the moon casting its glow on the water, breeze curling off the shore. There were Edwina’s legs stretched out, toes smoothing the warm sand at the fire’s edge.

“Nothing, I guess,” I conceded. “It’s pretty … perfect.”

She laughed. I loved the sound rolling alongside the lake, easing softly into the other night sounds. I thought how I could listen to
it for the rest of my life. Dolly trotted over and stretched out between us.

I was just nineteen, but nineteen wasn’t young in Cataract City. I knew that a moment comes when you’ve got to make your best hand and stand pat. I’d always felt Ed and me were the right fit—but did that doom her in some weird way?

I also knew that she might never love me the way she loved Owe. And Owe was my very best friend. He was sick and he needed me.

But I loved Ed, and sometimes love makes you helpless.

I held my hand out. If Edwina hadn’t put her hand in mine I wouldn’t have blamed her one bit. I wouldn’t have chased it any further.

But she did, y’know? She put her hand in mine.

We told Owe in Lions Club Park. He was wearing a pair of grey sweats with a Dijon stain on the left knee. His cheeks were furred with stubble. He watched us approach from the bleachers with his head cocked, as if he’d read our intentions on the breeze.

“Hail, hail, the gang’s all here.”

A T-ball game was in progress, and our walk towards Owe was punctuated by the metallic
tink
of an aluminum bat striking a stationary ball. The stands were packed with parents who seemed a little
too
keen, as if they expected their five-year-old to launch a moonshot over the outfield fence. The day was warm and sunny, and kids were buying Ghost-cicles and Rocket Pops from a Dickie Dee man.

When Ed told him the news, Owe’s face set in a leering grin.

“You figured you’d tell me out in public so I wouldn’t make a scene?” he seethed. “I don’t give a
fuck
what any of these assholes hear!”

Ed and I stood there; in Owe’s eyes we must’ve been Hester Prynne and Benedict Arnold. He jerked himself up, ignoring the
hissing scolds of the parents—the game had come to a standstill, kids staring gape-jawed at the sloppily dressed guy who’d been the city’s saviour scant months ago—as he gimped down the stairs, giving it the full Quasimodo treatment so we’d feel like even bigger heels.

“You’re a bum, Dutch!” an enormous woman catcalled, her butt spreading across the risers like dough. “You got no heart. You never did!”

Others in the crowd voiced their approval. These were the same people who’d cheered Owe wildly not long ago. They’d loved him and now they hated him—and they
loved
hating him.

Ed went after Owe. He shrugged her off viciously, knocking her down. She sat on the clipped grass watching him hump away.

“Jesus,” she said. “
Not
how I pictured it happening.”

That was all we heard of Owen until a letter arrived.

Now that pissed
me
off. When I hammered on the door of Owe’s house late the next afternoon, Mr. Stuckey answered, same as he’d done years ago when I showed up with two baby greys in my backpack.

“Come in, Dunk.”

I went inside with Dolly. A half-hour later Owe dragged his ass out of the basement. Eyes bloodshot, jowls furred with a scraggly beard, but skin so milky I figured he hadn’t seen daylight for a week. Frag padded obediently at his side.

“What do you want, man?” He sounded exhausted.

“Let’s go walk the mutts.”

He stared blankly. “Okay.”

It took him nearly an hour to get dressed, and even then the attempt was half-assed. One white sock, one black. It’d do.

Thanks, Duncan
, Mr. Stuckey mouthed as we left.

Owe walked with a cane. He’d chosen it himself—a giant gnarled stick like a wizard’s staff with a grey rubber stopper on the end. It accentuated his disability, which I’m sure was his aim.

Dolly and Frag nipped playfully at each other; they hadn’t roughhoused together in a long time. Owe shuffled along, cane going
phunk
on the sidewalk. He stank. I told him so.

“Ran out of deodorant, man.”

“You can never technically run out of deodorant so long as you’re committed to the idea of, y’know, buying more of it.”

Owe gave me a wry smile. “That was a very scholarly bit of ball-busting.”

“Not bad for a zero-IQ blob, huh?”

The knee brace made him look like a cybernetic monstrosity cobbled together in a secret government lab.

“You really need that thing, Owe?”

“Eh. It’s a pain to take off.”

“You were never
that
fast on the court, anyway.”

“Is this some kind of radical therapy, you prick?” He shook his head, smiling. “But yeah, no, I never was that fast. I was never even”—he lowered his voice mock-conspiratorially—“that
good
. Good for Cataract City. Good even for some Div One programs. But
good
-good? NBA good? Nah. Not even Euroleague good. Too slow, too short, no hops.”

“Ah, come on. I wasn’t trying to say—”

He held a hand up to shush me. “You asked, didn’t you? There
was one skills camp down in Indiana. I was matched against this redheaded point guard. Skinny enough that he might slip down the drain in the shower. The first few plays I victimized him. Easy layups and long threes. But then this guy started timing me, figuring out my moves and getting a hand in my face. I wasn’t air-balling shots but I was missing consistently. Meanwhile he’s playing steady dee, hitting his open j’s and dishing to his slashing power forward. A slow, steady demolition. Out-hustling me, outsmarting me—and that’s what
I
did, Dunk, to all the athletic guards with their pogo-stick legs. That guy got a scholarship at Wake Forest. Div One, yeah, but not Duke, not Kentucky. If he’s lucky he’ll play a few years in Europe. And he
killed me
.”

We watched Frag and Dolly, not speaking. The day had darkened into evening. Stars salted the sky.

“You know what I miss?” he said. “I never thought I’d say it, but I miss the zone. I used to hate it, you know? I couldn’t breathe … or I could breathe
too much
. But that feeling of the outside world and everything in it collapsing into a perfect point, everything within that point coming so fucking
easy
 … I miss that.”

After a stretch of silence he said, “I didn’t mean what I said to Edwina.”

“Owe, listen … I love her. Have for a while.”

He nodded. “I could tell. And before, I would’ve been happy to let you have her. You’re the better fit, you two. Plus I figured I’d be dating sorority chicks. But all this happened and I … I freaked. Everything narrowed. I grabbed at what was there.”

“So what now? I love the hermit look you’ve got going on, real corpselike and greasy, but that can’t go on forever.”

He smiled distantly. “I heard what you did to Lowery and Hillicker.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Of course not. You do them both?”

“Whoever did
that
probably had help.”

His smile widened. “You don’t want to fuck around with Miss Edwina Murphy.”

“No, you do
not
.”

“Hey,” he said after we’d walked half a block in companionable silence, “there’s a police services course at Sir Sandford Fleming College.”

I laughed. “You? Johnny Law?”

“It’d be a big change. But after what happened … righting wrongs isn’t the worst job on earth, is it?”

My life remained in Cataract City. It was a small, contained existence—the kind I preferred. Edwina and Dolly and me: a closed circle I was wholly content to stay within. But this city being what it is, me being who I am, things were bound to go sideways.

It started with Dolly. I had raced her four times since I’d turned nineteen, the age that I legally qualified to be her trainer. That was also the year I’d started to date Ed seriously, and the year Owe went off to college. You take the good with the bad.

For years I’d brought Dolly to the track just to hang out. She enjoyed running with the pack, and Owe and I liked spending time with Harry Riggins. But as she got older and came into her body, Dolly began to consistently outrun the pack on the practice loop—even the pure-bloodline dogs.

“You should race her,” Harry said one afternoon. “You’re old enough, Dolly’s old enough.”

“Ah, I don’t know. She’s just a house dog, really.”

“She doesn’t run like a house dog, son. What’s the harm?”

She first ran in the D-Level sweeps, the lowest on offer at Derby Lane racetrack. The Winning Ticket Lounge showcased its usual
sad collection of rum-soaked schemers that day—women with bleached high hair, and nickel-betters with their trousers pulled past their bellybuttons.

“I’ve probably contracted lung cancer just looking at them,” Edwina remarked, nodding at the divot-cheeked smokers under a pall of bluish smoke.

We’d met Harry earlier, in the corral. He’d filled out Dolly’s Bertillon card: her length from haunch to brisket, weight and bloodlines (Ed wrote:
unknown
). And we’d given her a proper racing name: Dolly Express. It was Harry’s idea: a takeoff on the Daily Express, the VIA Rail line that once connected Niagara Falls to Hamilton.

Harry had snugged a racing jersey around Dolly’s legs. “Needs to be tight,” he’d said, “otherwise she might get a leg trapped under the straps in full flight—at that speed a dog will snap a leg just as easy as you’d snap a stick of spaghetti.”