Cataract City (24 page)

“I guess we’ll never know.”

“Guess we could,” Drinkwater said. “I’ll put her up against your slippery little greaser any time. Do it right here, after hours. Harry can set it up, can’t you, Hare?”

“I’m not getting involved,” Harry said.

“You already are,” said Drinkwater. “Let’s put some money on it, why not?”

My gaze drifted into the stands, where Ed watched Dolly take her victory lap. In a two-dog race Dolly could go wide and blow the doors off Drinkwater’s mutt.

It was a foolish bet. But there was a need in me that ran deep. I couldn’t finger the root of that need, but it ripped at the dearest parts of me with phantom teeth. It had something to do with the rumble of the Falls inside my Cataract City bones; something to do with the fingernail of rust on the wheel well of my pickup and how the sight of it chewing into the paint brought an invisible weight crashing down on me.

Drinkwater named a bet. Twenty thousand. My heart rate spiked.

“Sounds fine,” I said, calm on the outside.

“I don’t take food stamps.”

“And I don’t take loose cigarettes.”

Drinkwater said, “Shake on it?”

I offered my hand. Drinkwater reached into his mouth, took out the wad of gum he’d been chewing and stuck it in my open palm.

I almost punched him. But I’d seen the bone-handled knife sticking out of his boot and Drinkwater struck me as a guy who’d know how to use it.

The days leading up to the race passed strangely. Not in a dream, exactly, although I did feel disconnected from the fabric of the world. The only constant was the zing of electricity in my blood.

I worked nights at the Bisk. Heat filled my arms on the line, and an odd feeling echoed through my jawbone on those nights—not panic, because there was no immediate danger; more like a taste of faraway lightning under the tongue. After work I’d drive through the early-morning fog, listening to the Falls, that sound in the background of my entire life. I tried to imagine myself someplace absent of that sound and could not: it followed me like a lost dog.

Edwina knew about the race but not the size of the wager. Twenty thousand dollars; where would I find that?

“I’m in,” Owe said when I floated the idea. We met on a weekend when he’d come down from college. He looked good: healthy, with muscle back on his bones. He walked with a cane but at least it
was
a cane; the wizard staff was gone.

I said, “Just like that?”

He shrugged. “Sure, why not? Dolly’s a killer, right?”

“It’s not a sure thing.”

“You trying to talk me out of this?” He laughed. “You’ve made your sale. I’ll bet the last of what that Mexican banana impresario gave me for, y’know, stripping me of my athletic dignity and so forth.”

A part of me had hoped he’d say:
Dunk, it’s a stupid idea, put it out of your mind
. Still, it was great to see the old Owe back. Maybe the wounds between us had healed for good.

Meanwhile, I spent a lot of time at Derby Lane with Harry, who kept Dolly loose on the practice loop.

“Things can happen,” he said. “A dog can pull up lame, cramp up or spring a hole in their bucket when the traps open.”

We watched Dolly sprint down the rail in pursuit of the bunny, which zipped to the end of the circuit and stopped. She raced past, breaking into a run that carried her around the bend.

“Scientists say that in fifty years or so, Olympic records will quit being broken,” Harry said. “Humans will have hit our limits. Only so fast a man can run, right? That’s what these eggheads figure. But when I see a greyhound run, I think one day a greyhound’s going to fly. One day a greyhound’s going to find a nice flat stretch and break into a full-out
scream
. It’ll be like a plane taking off. Higher and higher till it’s just a speck in the sky.”

Harry grinned, enjoying the possibility. “It could happen, gravity notwithstanding. Why? Because a racing dog doesn’t know it’s
not supposed
to fly. And if I own the dog that finally does it I’ll holler,
Go on, you crazy bastard! Send me a postcard from China!
”

Dolly blazed around the near bend, gobbling up great bites of the track. Harry said, “You’ve got to be mindful, though, seeing as any creature who fails to accept its limits can be a danger to itself.”

We led Dolly to the wash station. Harry hosed dirt off her paws, massaging her pads to release the grit. Dolly rested her chin on his skull, looking like a boxer receiving a rubdown from his trainer.

“Guess it’s too late to tell you that Drinkwater’s a nasty piece of work,” Harry said. “Rumour is he once fed a fistful of Mars Bars to a greyhound his own dog was set to race. It got real sick, chocolate being the worst thing for a dog, and ended up dying on the track. Other awfulness, too.”

“Like what?”

“He runs that shop on the Tuscarora Nation, Smokin’ Joes. Cheap cigs, booze, that sort of thing. Makes a small mint. But he loves his dogs, or loves what they earn him. Not just racing dogs, either. He breeds fighters. Pit bulls. Fights them in the warehouses out behind his shop, though I’d never watch such a thing. And it’s not only dogs who do the fighting. Word is, men fight there. But you’ve got to be one desperate soul to tussle for Lemmy Drinkwater.”

“So you figure he’ll welsh?” My half of the wager was mostly drawn from the college fund my folks had set up. They’d put away a little nut out of every paycheque for years. They’d let me know that if I said to hell with it and went to work at the Bisk, that was okay, but they wanted me to have the chance.

Harry shook his head. “Lemmy’ll square your bet if he loses, but I wouldn’t put it past him to stack things in his favour. All I’d say is, don’t risk anything you’re not willing to part with.”

The day before the race we almost lost Dolly.

Edwina and I took her for a late-evening walk on a path running parallel to the canal. Dolly’s retractable leash snarled around a rusted metal pole, raking a sharp spur. The leash sliced in half clean as a thread drawn across a razor blade.

The severed end of the leash whipped back into its holster. Dolly looked at us, head cocked at a quizzical angle. When Ed called her name—
“Do-lleee”
—it sounded like a moan. Dolly bolted. Her rear leg kicked over a hummock in a crazy flailing motion of pure joy.

We sprinted after her. There was nothing but brush and long grass for two miles until you hit the canal. My feet flashed over sedge and crabgrass as the clouds thickened and night came down. To the north the skyway bridge bent against the sky, pale sunlight winking off its spine. I splashed through puddles shimmering with gasoline rainbows—the land had once been a dumpsite and old poisons were still bubbling up.

I became aware of all the little noises around and inside of me: blood rushing in my ears like a buried river, the hot thrum of crickets in the grass, the ongoing
cree-cree-cree
of starlings and somewhere, far away, a barking dog—but not Dolly.

Edwina and I split up. She went in the direction of the bridge, I went south towards the subdivisions edging Queen Street. My limbs had loosened and I ran in an easy rhythm, making small adjustments, relaxing my shoulders and swinging my head side to side to scan for encouraging signs.

I was ninety-nine percent positive I’d find her; then ninety-eight percent. Soon a persistent doubt burrowed under my skin like a chigger. I knew there are holes buried in the fabric of every ordinary day that can swallow you up. My feet flashed over the darkening
earth as I hunted, finding nothing but coils of rusted metal and the shattered bottoms of old soda bottles that shone from the ground like huge glass eyes. Blisters burst on my heels, shooting waves of coin-bright pain up the backs of my calves. I was nearly hyperventilating, but this had nothing to do with exhaustion. Part of my concern was generalized: Dolly was a dumb dog and she was lost and probably didn’t know it yet. And part of my fear was particular: Dolly was more than just a dog. Dolly had become
our
dog, a special dog.

Water ran darkly down a narrow streambed. The light of a fresh moon winked where it rippled around the rocks. I strained my ears, hoping a telling sound might separate itself from the maddening noises of nature. When none did I picked a clumsy path across the stream. My shoes slipped on a wet rock and I plunged into the knee-deep water. The chill crawled up my legs and thighs past my balls to my gut, where it collided with the fear, shattering into silvery minnows that zipped around my belly.

She’s gone
, said a voice inside my head—a terrible, nasty voice that I hadn’t heard since I’d been lost in the woods with Owe.

It happens. Things you love fall off the face of the earth. Nobody ever knows what became of them. And that would be worse, I thought, than if Dolly were to die. At least then we’d know she was gone. Lost is an infinitely more terrible idea. Lost was the most unsolvable puzzle: a mess of possible outcomes like a movie missing its final reel.

“Dolly!
DOLLY!
”

I crashed through the underbrush, branches gouging my rib cage and nettles raking my face, eyes burning in my sockets like heated ball bearings. The fear shot through me now, bright green and juicy-bitter as the chlorophyll in an April leaf. My dog was gone. Ed and me had been talking, in a not-so-serious but sort-of-serious
way, about having a kid. How could we, when we couldn’t even keep a dog safe?

The trees opened onto a strip of concrete along the canal. Wilderness gave way to civilization, that abrupt mash-up that sometimes happens in cities. My eyes scanned frantically but twigged on nothing more than the sidewinder movement of a snake sweeping upriver against the current. Squares of light burned along the escarpment. The moon shot veins of white across the water. I smelled summer in the air, wood resin and horsehair and the greasy smell of barbecue briquettes bursting into flame.

I moved west or maybe north, disoriented for the first time since that night with Bruiser Mahoney. As I walked along the salt-whitened quay my mind drifted for an instant—one of those instants big enough to hold your entire life. I saw how a city could sink into you, trapping its pulsing heart inside your own heart—except it never feels like a trap. A trap snags you out of nowhere, violently and without warning. But I knew every inch of my trap, didn’t I? I knew the dirt path that led down under the Whirlpool Bridge to a fishing hole stocked with hungry bass. How to jump off the old train trestle in Chippewa and hit the rip of slack water so I could paddle safely to shore. Cataract City was like those fur-covered handcuffs you could get at Tinglers—Ed had come home with a pair of them after a stagette party, embroidered with the phrase
Prisoner of Love
. The city of your birth was the softest trap imaginable. So soft you didn’t even feel how badly you were snared—how could it be a trap when you knew its every spring and tooth?

I heard it then: a thin whine drifting across the water. At first I mistook it for the sound of my own wheezy breaths rolling across the water only to hit some unseen barrier and rebound back. My feet stuttered to a halt and I held my breath.
There
—the sound was
hidden somewhere within a stand of pines canted at a crooked angle where the quay crumbled into the canal.

I picked down the incline, pine sap smeared on my palms and the rustlings of the timber above, stiff-arming through snarled branches to the polished rocks gleaming at the shore.

Oh, Dolly. She stood at the water’s edge stamping her feet. She dipped one paw and withdrew it, growling restlessly.

It dawned on me: she was upset that it stopped her from going forward.

I crept to her quietly, certain that she’d bolt. Ten feet … seven … five … She turned, but I’d already hemmed her in: rocks to each side, water behind her.

“It’s okay, baby. It’s just me.”

Her haunches dipped and she began to shake. I grabbed her collar in one hand and wrapped the other around her neck. When I felt her in my arms I reared back and swatted her backside.

“Bad dog.
Bad
.”

It was the first and only time I’d ever hit her. And I knew it was wrong of me. She’d only taken advantage of an opportunity that any dog would. I hadn’t struck her out of anger, but just to burn off that pent-up fear.

Dolly shivered against me. Her flesh pressed to mine, but I realized with a small shock that there was no real closeness—a wall had been set between us, thin as crepe paper but solid as brick.

Later, as a weary and relieved Ed and I watched Dolly run laps in her sleep, I wondered, What do greyhounds dream about? Endless open fields, I supposed. Escape velocities. I thought of those Russian dogs in the satellite. I knew that if Dolly had been in that satellite, she wouldn’t have felt a shred of fear. She’d have experienced speed at its purest, a gravitational pull slingshotting that satellite around the curve of the earth fast enough to make it glow hot. I pictured
Dolly in the cockpit as she hurtled into deep space. Loving it. And that scared me.

Dolly’s spirits were high the night of the race. So much so that she got into Ed’s purse and chewed up a tube of her mascara.