Cataract City

PART ONE DOGS IN SPACE

OWEN STUCKEY

After dropping Duncan at his folks’ house, I drove south, stopping at a lookout a few miles upriver from the Falls. A spit of land arrowed into the river; the ground closest to shore was overhung with willows whose ripening buds perfumed the evening air. In the summer families would colonize the picnic tables, stoking fires in old tire rims, grilling tube steaks and corn on the cob. Children would splash in the river under the watchful gaze of their folks; the wild boys who swam from the shallows would earn a cuff on the ear from their fathers — the Niagara turned black and snaky twenty yards from shore, and the river basin was littered with the bones of men and boys who’d pitted their will against it.

Was this where Bruiser Mahoney had regaled us with the tale of Giant Kichi? If not, Dunk and I had surely been here before. As boys, we’d investigated every crest and dip in this city. No place was unknown to us.

I remembered the still pools behind the gutted warehouses on Stillwell Road teeming with bullfrogs — Dunk and I would watch tadpoles push themselves out of translucent egg sacs, their iridescent bodies glittering like fish scales. Bizarre to realize that a creature so large, carbuncled and fucking ugly could begin its life so tiny, so radiant.

The oxbow lake we visited must be west of here, but its exact location was lost to me now … it struck me that a man inevitably surrenders his boyhood sense of direction, as if it were a necessary toll of adulthood. Boys weren’t dependent on atlases or cross streets — a boy’s interests lay off the city grid, his world unmapped by cartographers. Boys navigated by primitive means, their compass points determined by scent and taste and touch and sense-memory, an unsophisticated yet terribly precise method of echolocation.

If I couldn’t find that oxbow now, I could still remember how afternoon sunshine would fill the slack water, which was bathwater-warm on high August afternoons. A car was submerged at the bottom of the lake; local legend held it was haunted: its occupants, a family from out of town, had been driving through a snowstorm and crashed through the ice. In the schoolyard it was whispered that at the stroke of midnight, three apparitions would hover over the water: the car’s damned occupants, who were rumoured to have been atheists — a filthy word in Cataract City — and probably vegetarians to boot. Having never received a godly Christian burial, their forlorn ghosts were damned to haunt the lake.

There was the starlit field behind Land of Oceans, a marine mammal park where the corpses of whales and sea lions and dolphins were heaped into mass graves. One night Dunk and I hopped the chain-link fence and kicked through dry scrub to the graveyard, finding nothing untoward apart from the smell wafting from the ground, earthy and fungal like certain exotic cheeses you couldn’t buy at the local Pack N’ Save. Duncan led us up what we both believed to be an isolated hummock until we were perched perilously at its lip, staring into a hole. At the bottom, curled like a smelt in a bowl, was Peetka, the performing bottlenose dolphin. Her body was stiffening with rigor mortis — I’d imagined the sly creak of floorboards in an abandoned house — a bloody hole in her head eight inches from the crusted blowhole where a veterinarian had excised a twitching nugget of brain. A dusting of quicklime ate into the milky blue of her eyes. When headlights bloomed over the curve of the earth we’d fled into the long grass, blood booming in our ears, not stopping until we were in the sheltering woods, where we’d collapsed in hysterical, adrenalized giggles — the only way to dispel that terrible pressure.

The two of us had barely spoken on the ride home from prison. My eyes kept skating off Dunk. Prison had reduced him in some unfathomable way. You wouldn’t know to look at him — he was freakishly muscular, a condom stuffed with walnuts — but a distance had settled into his eyes. He’d been banged up eight years. Ten percent of the average human lifespan. Ten percent he’d never reclaim. Ten percent that I’d stolen from him?

I drove back to the Niagara Parkway, swinging around the city hub and turning onto Sodom Road, motoring between grape fields in the alluvial shadow of the escarpment. My department-issued.38 dug under my armpit. I’d carved an X into the soft lead of each bullet, fashioning dumdum rounds. A year ago I’d barrelled through the cheap pressboard door in a lowrise apartment off Kaler to find some fucko smashed on bath salts pressing a carpet knife to his girlfriend’s neck. I shot him three times — textbook centre of mass, a neat isosceles in his chest — yet he’d still managed to nearly saw her head off. From then on I told myself I’d have stopping power, whether or not the department condoned it.

I pulled into a weedy cut-off. The land rolled away from me in swathes of deepening darkness; I spotted a trembling finger of flame burning someplace in the trees. I’d been here before — this exact spot, always at night. Some nights I’d lie in bed listening to my fingernails grow until I couldn’t stand the sound, then get up and drive through the heart of Cataract City. Past the Memorial Arena and down Clifton Hill, skirting the Falls that threw up their endless spray. I didn’t need that primitive boyhood sonar to guide me anymore.

Presently I stepped from the car and flexed my knee; it always throbbed in the springtime and lately it’d been acting up in the winter, too. The clean smell of the forest: cut-potato scent of earth, dry leaves leaving a taste of cinnamon on the tongue.

“Home again, home again, jiggedy jig.”

The wind curled under my trouser cuffs. Worried for no reason I could pinpoint, I glanced over my shoulder and saw the distant glimmer of Clifton Hill. The city makes you; in a million little ways it makes you, and you can’t unmake yourself from it.

When I was twelve I spent three nights in these woods with my best friend — Duncan Diggs. It wasn’t that we were assing around after dark and got waylaid far from our safe streetlit world — lost someplace in the lovely woods, dark and deep, like Frost wrote in that old poem. We were kidnapped: that’s what the papers would write and that was what happened, strictly speaking. But it didn’t feel that way. The man who did it … looking back, I can say he was thoughtless. His actions put us in danger; we could’ve died. But I wouldn’t say he was evil. He was just broken in the way some men can become broken, and failed to see how it might also break those around him.

Was I scared? Shit, yeah. We were lost and cold and hungry and terrified that we’d be torn apart by the makers of those soft, sinister noises that rebounded within the night pines. But I wasn’t scared of the man who’d brought us there. If you were to ask Dunk he’d say the same.

But all this happened a long time ago, when we were kids. If there’s one time in your life you want to remember fondly, it’s those years.

The man who took us into the woods was our hero, back when we were young enough to believe in those. Big heroes, you know? Larger than life. As you grow up you find most heroes are the same size as anyone else; their heroics are small, selfless and continual. Back then we believed in the ruddy breed of heroism depicted in the G.I. Joe comics we’d read on rainy afternoons in my basement, water trickling through the downspouts like clicking marbles. We believed heroes like that existed because the world seemed huge enough to hold them. The world still seems huge now, but in a sometimes depressing way that I can’t quite explain. As boys, it was only hugely unknown. Just because we’d never met such men wasn’t proof that they didn’t exist.

Then we met our first hero in the flesh. He was the sort of creature who didn’t seem like a man at all. He gave no sense of being made out of the same ever-failing parts that other men — our own fathers—were cobbled together from. He looked every inch the superhero, with muscles where there shouldn’t rightly be muscles. He inhaled the same air as we did, but I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out he had gill-flaps on his neck that helped him breathe under water or microscopic barbs on his fingertips that let him climb the tallest buildings without fear. He was perfection in the raw. A perfection that was undisciplined and maybe even unwanted: he’d occasionally frown during a match — a fleeting frown as if to say the expectations his perfection created were a small burden. But surely now and then even Superman wished he could ditch the red cape and settle down in the suburbs, right?

On the first Saturday of every month the two of us would head to the old Memorial Arena with our fathers. Our hero would high-step through a blistering fan of fireworks wearing a fur-edged robe, dark hair whipping round his face like a lion’s mane. You couldn’t have convinced me he was anything less than a minor god who, having disrupted the order of Olympus, had been cast down to earth for a thousand years of penance amongst the fallen.

His name was Bruiser Mahoney. Dade was the name his mother gave him. Rathburn is the name on his tombstone. But he told us to call him Bruiser.

It was Bruiser Mahoney who took us into these very woods. We went willingly. That’s what we mortals do with our heroes: we follow.

A bat flashed across the headlights, wings spread from its black walnut body, chittering on its way to the hunting grounds.

“Behold zee creatures of zee night,” I said, a bad Bela Lugosi. “Vhat bee-ootiful music zey make.”

My voice was a croak; I laughed, and the sound travelled past the headlights, hit a wall of darkness and echoed back at me. I sat back inside the car and cranked the heater against the chill that had settled into my flesh. The antenna pulled in a station south of Buffalo; the DJ cued up “Who’ll Stop the Rain.” The heat made me sluggish; I shut my eyes to the sound of Fogerty’s wounded baritone, letting it carry me back.

THE NAME ON MY BIRTH CERTIFICATE reads Owen Gregory Stuckey, but as a kid everyone called me Dutchie. Later it would become Dutch, but for the early years of my life there was always that extra ie.

People used to ask if I got the nickname because my family was from Holland, but that wasn’t it. Before I was even a year old I had a brown mop that grew straight down. Mom chopped it below my ears, so the thick ends looked like the bristles of a broom. Mom thought I looked like the little Dutch Boy on the cans of paint.

On the first day of school Mom introduced me to the kindergarten teacher: “This is my son, Owen, but everyone calls him Dutchie.” Never mind the fact that maybe I didn’t dig the nickname. I was five years old. It’s not like I cut my own hair or insisted it be styled into a horrible Prince Valiant, right?

The teacher called me Dutchie. Kids called me Dutchie. The die was cast. In the end, I didn’t really mind; it’s not like Dutchie was so much worse than Owen, which is kind of a nelly name. A few years later Mom named our new puppy Kyle. Our dog got a human name while mine was more suited to a dog.

Duncan was the one kid who called me Owen. But usually he shortened it to Owe. I called him Dunk, same as everybody else.

We grew up in Niagara Falls, also known as Cataract City — a nickname based on the Latin word for waterfall, I learned in class. But my mother, a nurse, said there was an above-average rate of actual cataracts in the city, the eye kind, which often led to glaucoma. For this reason Mom was in favour of legalizing medical marijuana. She’d never smoked pot herself but hated to see people in pain.

“The worst they’d get is a bad case of the munchies after smoking those doobs,” she once said, earning a raised eyebrow from Dad.

As a kid, I found it tough to get a grip on my hometown’s place in the world. What could I compare it to? New York, Paris, Rome? It wasn’t even a dot on the globe. The nearest city, Toronto, was just a hazy smear across Lake Ontario, downtown skyscrapers like values on a bar graph. I figured most places must be a lot like where I lived: dominated by rowhouses with tarpaper roofs, squat apartment blocks painted the colour of boiled meat, rusted playgrounds, butcher shops and cramped corner stores where you could buy loose cigarettes for a dime apiece.

When I was seven or so, riding the bus with my mom, I heard an old geezer rattling on about our city. He had webs of shattered veins in his nose and carried his anger like a pebble in his shoe. Later I’d discover that my city was full of men like him, haunting the Legion Halls and barbershops. I recall what he said verbatim — partly because of the weird mix of venom and resignation in his voice, and partly because of his inventive use of cuss words.

“You want to know how Niagara Falls came to be?” he said. “America swept all its shit north, Canada swept all its shit south, and the dregs of the dregs washed up in a string of diddly-ass border towns, of which Cataract City is undoubtedly the diddliest. Who else takes one of the seven wonders of the world — the numero uno wonder, the Grand Canyon can kiss my pimpled ass — and surrounds it with discount T-shirt shops and goddamn waxwork museums? May as well mount the Hope Diamond in a setting of dog turds. Can’t hack it in Toronto? Come to Cataract City. Can’t hack it in Buffalo? Cataract City’s waiting. Jumped-up Jesus Kee-rist! Can it get much sadder? It’s like finding out you can’t hack it in purgatory and getting your ass shipped straight to hell.”

He’d stared out the bus window, lip curling to touch his nose. “Welcome to hell, suckers.”

I remember, too, how nobody on that bus rose to the city’s defence.

My father worked at the Nabisco factory on Grand Avenue. The Bisk, as it was known. If you grew up in Cataract City and earned a university degree, chances are you left town. If you grew up in Cataract City and managed to finish high school, chances are you took a job at the dry docks, Redpath Sugar, the General Motors plant in St. Catharines or the Bisk. Plenty of the jobs were simple enough that any half-competent person could master them by the end of their first shift. One of my schoolmates’ dads filled sacks of iced tea mix. Another drilled holes in ignition-collar locks. The only question was whether you could do that same task eight hours a day for the next forty years.

The first seven years of my life, my father worked on the Nilla Wafers line. I don’t know what he did beyond that. When you’re a kid all you know is that your dad puts on his suit or overalls and vanishes from your life until nightfall. Sometimes my pops came back exhausted and scarlet-eyed, as if he’d been engaged in a low-wattage war someplace. If you asked how work was he might say: “Work’s work.” Unless your dad was an astronaut or a cowboy — and nobody’s dad in Cataract City had a gig like that — whatever he did for those hours held slim appeal.

Dunk’s father worked at the Bisk, too. Chips Ahoy line. Our dads carried the smell of their lines back home with them. It became a forever quality of their clothes. It crept under their skin and perfumed the sweat coming from their pores. I used to keep score at the Bisk’s company softball games; after a while I knew the batting order by smell alone: first up was Triscuits, second was Fig Newtons, third was Cheese Nips. The mighty Nutter Butter batted cleanup.

My father wasn’t ambitious by nature — a more aww, shucks man you would not meet — but he was willing to work his ass off, had a supportive wife and a working-class chip on his shoulder. That chip was a familiar accessory on a lot of Cataract City men, but unlike other guys my dad didn’t nurse his grudge impotently over beers at the Double Diamond. He looked at the men above him—literally: at the Bisk, management offices were glassed-in boxes overlooking the factory floor — and said to himself: Why not me?

He studied nights and by the time I was eleven he’d earned a business degree. He rolled this into a job as line supervisor, which led to a promotion to day-shift super.

Years later I asked him why he worked so hard to get that degree. He said: “I didn’t want to smell like a Nilla Wafer in my coffin.”

I wasn’t a popular kid. I wasn’t popular at any age, but in elementary school I’m not sure it mattered. The schoolyard hierarchy hadn’t quite solidified. If anything, I was human wallpaper during those years. Whenever I grafted onto the edge of some group I’d get looks that said: Oh, Dutchie — how long have you been standing there? I was such a non-entity that I wasn’t even teased.

On my report cards teachers wrote: Dutchie seems quite thoughtful. They didn’t mean I was selfless — more that I often appeared to be absorbed in thought. Which wasn’t really true. I had very little to say was all.

I first met Duncan Diggs when I was ten. We both lived on Rickard Street and went to the same school but had never spoken before. Dunk shared my loner spirit; he usually haunted the edge of the schoolyard by the tetherball poles in a jean jacket covered with iron-on rocker patches.

The day we met I’d been walking across the soccer field at recess when Clyde Hillicker tackled me from behind. Hillicker was a big dumb kid who’d grow up into a big dumb man, but at the time he was just puppy-clumsy and outweighed me by forty pounds. His fingertips were always stained Freezie-orange.

I crashed down with Clyde on top. My face hit the ground and my teeth gritted on a plug of dirt dug up by the aerator machine.

“Just lay there, Dutchie, okay?” Clyde said, all chummy. “I want to show Adam something.”

He was with his friend Adam Lowery, an anorexic-looking boy with a ginger bowl-cut. Clyde sat on my back and grabbed at my helplessly kicking legs.

“Don’t move,” he whined, as if I was ruining his good time.

“Get off!”

“Hammer him,” Adam said. “Hammer his face off!”

Clyde refused. “Bruiser Mahoney never punches. Bruiser Mahoney doesn’t need to punch.”

He grabbed my feet and tucked my ankles under his armpits. I lay face down with my body bent like a fish hook. A textbook Boston crab. Naturally, I screamed.

“Give up?” Clyde said.

“Yes!”

“He’s still fighting!” Adam hollered.

“Are you still fighting?” Clyde asked.

“No!”

“Get off him!”

This was Duncan. He shoulder-checked Clyde hard enough that Clyde landed on his hands and knees, scraping up his palms. I gasped and curled up like a potato bug.

Clyde held his bloodied palms out to Dunk as if he was displaying stigmata. “We were just playing,” he said. Dunk shrugged and kept his body in front of mine.

“We were just plaaayin’,” Adam said in a singsong voice. “Come on, Clyde. These babies don’t know how to have fun.”

After they left Dunk didn’t help me up, just hovered over me the way a lion does over a dead antelope. I dragged myself up and inspected the grass stains on my knees.

“Jeez. Mom’s going to kill me.” I didn’t say thanks. Was this something you thanked a person for? “You like Twisted Sister?” I said, pointing to a patch on his jean jacket.

“It’s my brother’s old jacket. A hand-me-down.”

“Cool.”

I couldn’t tell if he was amused or figured I was a shithead for thinking his twice-used clothes, which he probably hated, were cool. His T-shirt was old and there were holes along the hem as if mice had nibbled it.

Even though we were too young to have sorted out the true tough guys in the pack, Dunk struck me as someone you didn’t want to tangle with. He wasn’t big or strong. If anything, he was a bit skinny. But something in his eyes said whatever you started, he’d finish. Even if it took all day and left him a mess, he’d keep coming at you.

He was handsome, or at least he would grow to be, and his mom let him wear his hair long. It swept off the side of his skull in dark wings.

“Did it hurt?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Clyde’s real fat.”

Dunk laughed. “You’re lucky. If Clyde put that Boston crab on the way Bruiser Mahoney does, you’d be dog meat.”

“Who’s Bruiser Mahoney?”

“Bruiser Mahoney,” he said, like I must not have heard.

I just stared.

“Oh my god,” he said solemnly, his tone that of a doctor who’d diagnosed my rare affliction: terminal idiocy. “Come to my house after school.”

That afternoon I followed him home. He took me to the room he shared with his brother and showed me the faded poster on his wall.

That was all it took for me to become enraptured with Bruiser Mahoney. It was also all it took for me and Dunk to become friends.

Inseparable. That was me and Dunk. We’d both been looking for a person whose company we preferred to our own and once we finally found that person we practically lived in each other’s pockets.

We’d have sleepovers, even on weeknights. Our parents, who’d likely been worried we’d go our whole childhoods friendless, indulged us.

I often ate breakfast at Dunk’s house, even though his mom bought powdered milk that tasted like wallpaper paste. At our house we drank whole milk and ate real Corn Flakes. At Dunk’s house we’d eat cereal that came in a bright yellow box with “Corn Toasties” stamped on the label.

We’d stay up late in my basement reading comics. On Friday nights we watched the Baby Blue Movie on Citytv. These were usually in a foreign language where the men rolled their r’s and the women smoked stubby black cigarettes. On the upside, the women were often naked while they smoked. Or if not smoking, they were running around medieval castles with their apple-shaped asses hanging out. The point of any Baby Blue Movie, so far as I could tell, was to leave preteens all over Cataract City confused and slightly sweaty.

One kid who watched the Baby Blue Movie religiously was Sam Bovine. His last name was Italian, pronounced Boh-vee-neh, but everyone called him Bovine like the cow. A skinny boy with thin wrists and a too-big head for his body, for a while Bovine was best known as the Hair Lice Kid. Twice a year we’d all line up at the front of class while a Rubenesque nurse picked through our hair with a pair of sterilized chopsticks — and she’d always find them wriggling in Bovine’s hair.

“They’re practically building cities,” she’d say disgustedly.

Bovine enjoyed the attention but his folks were mortified. They bought special shampoo from the veterinarian that made his scalp smell like a freshly tarred road.

While no paragon of personal hygiene, Bovine was miles ahead of us in his knowledge of forbidden lore. He knew that if you spat on a hot light bulb it would explode in a shower of white glass and sparkling powder — which, Bovine claimed, would kill you if you inhaled it. He also knew that feeding a frog an Alka-Seltzer tablet would, in his words, “Make it blow up like a gooey green grenade.” Most carnal was his knowledge of women, their anatomies, and how to satisfy them.

“Did you see last week’s movie?” he’d ask Dunk and me at recess. “That girl who came out of the pond with her top off? Whoa! Some real humungoes.”

Neither of us knew what to make of Bovine. Being around him gave you that feeling you got after eating too much candy on Halloween: hyper and a little sick.

“You know what women with big bazooms like? If you squeeze them like kneading pizza dough. It drives them wild. They’ll rip all their clothes off if you squeeze their big knockers long enough.”

Our neighbourhood was small, but like most neighbourhoods possessed its fair share of mystery. One night we were watching the Baby Blue Movie when it started to snow. Dunk and I crammed onto a chair, balanced on our tiptoes, and peered out the basement window that overlooked my front yard. Big fat flakes fell through the street lights, eddying in the updrafts skating down our narrow street.

“Holy lick,” Dunk said. “Look.”

A woman was walking down the street. Slowly, with her arms upraised the way Pentecostals do in church. Not a stitch of clothing on her body. The naked woman walked upright as if the howling wind had no effect on her. For an instant I thought she was a ghost. She was as pale as chalk. She wasn’t shivering, either. My skin froze just looking at her.

Pressed together tightly on the same chair, I could see Dunk’s heartbeat through his wrist, hooked over the window ledge.

“That’s Mrs. Lovegrove,” he said. “She lives across the road, two down from me.”

Elsa Lovegrove’s body was similar to the bodies of other Cataract City women I’d unclothe years later. Her chest bones stood out like fingers under small breasts tipped with the dark rosettes of her nipples. She looked nothing like the women in the Baby Blue Movie — those women’s lush bodies were built for cavorting. Mrs. Lovegrove’s body appeared to be composed of pure bone.

The wind whipped her long hair up to frame her face: it looked as if she’d lain down in a still pool of water. She may have been laughing or crying, I couldn’t tell. Her husband rushed down the road and draped a blanket over Elsa’s shoulders. Later we’d find out that her son had been killed that night in a late-season funny-car accident at the Merrittville Speedway.

On the weekends we would stay up to watch the WWF Saturday Night’s Main Event, with “Mean Gene” Okerlund and Gorilla Monsoon broadcasting the action from exotic ports of call like the Pontiac Silverdome or the pearl of the Pacific, Honolulu’s Aloha Stadium.

Dunk liked the high-fliers: Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka and Ricky “the Dragon” Steamboat. I liked the guys with a flexible moral code like Jake “the Snake” Roberts. He was flat-footed, wore a greasy T-shirt and carried a seven-foot python in a sack. He wasn’t friends with anybody, but he wasn’t a backstabber either. And when he cinched up his DDT move, your ass was grass and he, as Bovine would say, was the lawn mower.

Saturday afternoon wrestling was different. On those shows, you’d see marquee wrestlers matched up against jobbers — ham ’n’ eggers, as Bobby “the Brain” Heenan called them. Poor saps like “Leaping” Lanny Poffo, “Iron” Mike Sharpe and the Brooklyn Brawler would get squashed by main eventers. But Saturday nights, the Main Event? No jobbers allowed.

On Saturday nights we’d get Randy “Macho Man” Savage and Miss Elizabeth. André the Giant squaring off against King Kong Bundy — the irresistible force meeting the immovable object. Meddling managers like Jimmy “the Mouth of the South” Hart. Scheming villains like “Rowdy” Roddy Piper. Otherworldly creatures like George “the Animal” Steele. Gorilla Monsoon saying: “This place has gone bananas!” or “Ladies and gentlemen, Madison Square Garden just literally exploded!”

The only wrestler we hated was Hulk Hogan. Mister “Train, say your prayers, eat your vitamins, be true to yourself and your country — be a real American!” How cheeseball could you get?

To Dunk and me, wrestling made sense in an elemental way. Everything was defined and sensible within that squared circle. There were your heels and your babyfaces. Cheaters would cheat, schemers would scheme, but ultimately you paid what you owed. We understood the crest and ebb of a match, its rising and falling action. Even at ten years old we could appreciate the perfect finality to it all. When the Macho Man launched his flying elbow off the top rope, it was over. When Hulk Hogan dropped the big leg. When the Brain Busters hit their spike piledriver.

One Saturday night my dad came downstairs in his housecoat. It was around the time he’d been promoted to supervisor. Our house had been egged the week before; there was a suspicion that some guys at work had done it, though I found it impossible to believe forty-year-olds would do such a thing. Dad sat with a sigh that seemed to come less from his lungs than his bones.

“Wrestling, huh?” he said. “Those fellas can sure fill out a pair of tights.”

Hulk Hogan was fighting “Mr. Wonderful” Paul Orndorff in a steel cage match. Hulk Hogan bodyslammed Mr. Wonderful, then cupped his ear to drink in the roar of the crowd. We cheered our guts out for Mr. Wonderful, even though he was the heel.

“The Hulkster looks unstoppable,” Dad said with a sly smile. “Something tells me he’s going to win.”

“Bruiser Mahoney would beat the crud out of Hulk Hogan,” Dunk said. “Bruiser would eliminate him.”

“This Bruiser Mahoney sure sounds like something,” Dad said.

“Mr. Stuckey, Bruiser Mahoney is the greatest wrestler who has ever lived,” Dunk said with a bone-deep earnestness that my father surely found funny. “He’s fighting in two weeks at the arena.”

“Can we go?” I asked Dad.

“Is your father taking you, Duncan?”

“Yes, sir. We’ll be sitting in the front row.”

Dad nodded. “Let’s go watch some wrasslin’.”

And so the first Saturday of every month became father-son wrestling night. When the lights dimmed and Bruiser Mahoney’s voice boomed over the loudspeakers—“You’re cruisin’ for a bruuuuuisin’!”—the place went electric.

Bruiser would storm down the Zamboni chute, sprinting to the ring so fast that his robe unfurled behind him like crimson wings. Vaulting over the ropes, he’d start to swing pure dynamite. He was untamed and breathtaking. His opponent didn’t know what the hell hit him. Neither did I.

“That Bruiser Mahoney really is something,” my father said that first night.

After that, Dunk’s father began to drop by on Fridays for a beer with my dad. Mr. Diggs would bring Dunk with him, or Dunk would already be over. One beer turned into five, plus a shot or two of Famous Grouse, which ran seven-fifty a bottle over the river. Our fathers would talk while we horsed around in the backyard with Sam Bovine, who had a tendency to latch onto us like a burr for days at a time. The boom of the Falls carried over the treetops to merge with the hiss of beer can pull-tabs and our fathers’ heavy, smoke-roughened laughter.

Physically they were different, my father and Mr. Diggs. Dad was taller but stoop-shouldered. As the years wore on, that stoop became more pronounced: his back bent until his body looked a little like a slender tree branch with a ripe apple hanging from it. Mr. Diggs was shorter, with the same dark hair that his son inherited; his body gave off this constant vibration, and I imagined the air closest to his arms and shoulders blurring the way it did around a hummingbird.

Other differences were harder for me to pinpoint, at least back then. One spring my father bought a new Chrysler Fifth Avenue with power locks and leather upholstery. When Mr. Diggs — who drove a second-hand Dodge Aspen — saw it, he rubbed one finger along his forehead.

“Jeez, isn’t she a beaut.”

My dad looked pained. “It’s nothing special, Jerry. The bank owns most of it.”

That same spring Dunk and I got our kits for the Kub Kar Rally. Our parents had forced us to join Cub Scouts the year previous; we both agreed it sucked rocks. Apart from one-match fires and knife ownership, Cubs was for shit. We’d sit around the school gym singing along to our leader’s acoustic guitar. That, or were forced to hear what berries we couldn’t eat if we got lost in the woods. Our sashes were almost naked. I got one measly badge for housecraft. Dunk earned one for … knots?

For the Kub Kar Rally we were each given a block of wood, four plastic wheels and axle pins. Our dads were allowed to help, but as my mother said: “I love your father, Dutchie, but as a handyman he’s about as useful as tits on a bull.”

Most men on our street had a tool room: a tight space in their basements where you’d find red vises, coffee cans full of nails and bolts, and corkboards with the outlines of tools marked in black Sharpie. Our basement had dusty boxes of exercise equipment my father had become frustrated trying to put together. “Some Assembly Required” was, so far as my father was concerned, the most deceitful phrase to ever be printed on a box-flap.

Still, he tried. He took a few experimental hacks at the wood block with a saw. Next he set his hands on his hips and frowned at me.

“Well, what’s your idea for this puppy?”

The next week we showed up at the rally with a lime-green thing that deviated only slightly from the block my Scout leader had given me. Dad wore a bandage between the webbing of his thumb and finger.

Thirty other boys were there with their fathers. Their cars had been lathed and routered and polished to a high shine.

“They should rename it the Daddy’s Car Rally,” my father said.

Bovine’s car was a piece of crap, too. His dad was a mortuary attendant and apparently just as clueless as mine. At least he’d been allowed to write Babe Magnet on his block of wood.

“I can’t wait to get my licence,” he whispered. “If my car’s a-rockin’, don’t you come a-knockin’.”

When I asked what he meant, Bovine shook his head as if I was too dumb for words.

I spotted Clyde Hillicker and Adam Lowery. Their dads worked at the Bisk, too. Mr. Hillicker resembled a Saint Bernard with a beer gut. Mr. Lowery looked like a weasel that had learned how to dress itself.

“You help him build it, boss?” Mr. Lowery asked my father. He said “boss” the way other people say “asshole.” “I guess some things you can’t learn in books, huh?”

“I let him figure it out for himself,” my father said. “We’re not going to be around their whole lives, are we?”

Dunk’s car had a flat black finish and flames licking off the front. He didn’t seem that proud of it.

“That’s a hell of a thing,” Dad said appreciatively. “A real fire-baller.”

“Thanks,” Dunk said. Mr. Diggs smiled sheepishly.

My car came in dead last in its first heat. A wheel spun off in the next heat, disqualifying me.

“Good to see you’re earning that big salary,” Mr. Lowery said to my father, as if one thing had anything to do with the other.

Dunk’s car came first in its preliminary heat and second in the next. Mr. Diggs sprayed WD-40 on the axle pins. It rallied past Clyde Hillicker’s car in the semi-finals.

The final came down to Dunk and Adam Lowery. Their cars raced down the incline, plastic wheels clattering on the polished ramp. When Dunk won, Mr. Lowery downed his glass of McDonald’s Orange Drink like it was a shot of Jack Daniel’s, crushed the wax-paper cup and sidled over to our Scout leader.

Our leader — an ashen-faced man with a prominent Adam’s apple — came over to Dunk and his father. Mr. Lowery and Mr. Hillicker flanked him.

“Mr. Diggs, these men are …” Our leader adjusted the knot on his scarf. “Well, they suspect a lack of fair play on your part. They think …”

“That car’s heavy,” Mr. Hillicker said. “It’s heavier’n wood, that’s for sure.”

As soon as Hillicker said it, I knew he was right. The truth was there in Mr. Diggs’ eyes. “I don’t … didn’t think …” he stammered. “You’re saying there’s some rule against …”

I’d never seen a full-grown man struggle so badly with his words. He shrunk two full sizes right there in the dusty gym.

Adam Lowery snatched Dunk’s car off the track and handed it to his dad. Mr. Lowery flipped it over and scratched its black finish with a pocketknife.

“Mmm-hmm,” he said. He sunk the knife’s tip in and popped off a square of carpenter’s putty. Out fell a cube of solid metal, landing with a metallic clink. In the ensuing silence you could have heard an ant trundle across the wooden floor.

“You cheat,” Adam said to Dunk. He pointed at Mr. Diggs and said: “Cheaters, the both of you.”

A collective gasp went round from one boy to another. You could rag another boy about his weight or the fact his mom made him wear suspenders or just about anything, really, but you never, ever ragged on a grown man — especially to accuse him of cheating. Even if it appeared that was exactly what he’d done.

Mr. Diggs spoke in a thick, choked voice. “My son didn’t know a thing about it.”

“You can only use what comes in the kit,” our leader said softly. “Plus paint and varnish. Did you read the instructions?”

Mr. Diggs ran the flat of one hand over his flushed face. Dunk was gripping his other hand so hard that his fingertips had turned white.

“I guess I didn’t. Not properly.”

“Cheating at a Kub Kar Rally,” Mr. Lowery said. “Jesus, Jerry. Of all the skunky—”

“Just a second now, Stan,” my father said. “The wheels on your son’s car are thin as pizza cutters. Been bevelled, haven’t they? You shaved them down right fine — or your boy did.”

Mr. Lowery’s lips pressed into a thin white line. His fingers twitched below the worn hem of his deerskin jacket.

“Well?” my father said to our leader. “Is that legal?”

After a moment our leader said: “Strictly speaking, no.”

“You can’t mean …” Mr. Lowery said. “The wheels are right out in the open. You can see them.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything, but rules are rules,” my dad said. “That’s something I learned in a book, Stan.”

The rally was won by Kevin Harley, who’d come in third. Kevin’s father kissed the stupid trophy and held it above his head, beaming, as if he’d just won the Stanley Cup.

Afterwards I overheard some of the other fathers talking about Duncan. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree …

Two weeks after the rally, as spring shaded into an early summer, the Eastern Wrestling Alliance returned to town.

The Memorial Arena was filling by the time I showed up with my father. I pushed through the turnstile, pulling on Dad’s hand like a dog straining against its leash. Dad was still in his work clothes, tie hanging from his neck like a wet noose.

“Come on, Dad.”

“Hold your horses, Dutchie.”

The ring was bathed in a halo of light thrown by a mesh-enclosed lamp burning above. Dunk waved at us from the fifth row, wearing his Bruiser Mahoney T-shirt.

“We had front row but we couldn’t save enough seats,” he told me.

“You could’ve stayed,” I said.

“Nah,” he said. “Better to sit together.”

The curtain-jerker was between Disco Dirk and the Masked Assassin. Dirk swivelled his hips and preened for the ladies, which was wasted effort seeing as there weren’t more than a handful of them there. The Assassin caught Dirk with a pumphandle slam and pinned him, much to everyone’s relief.

A few more matches, then an intermission. We stood in line at the concession stand. Further back stood Mr. Lowery and Mr. Hillicker with their sons. Mr. Lowery jutted his chin at my father and said something to Mr. Hillicker; their dark laughter drifted up the queue.

Our fathers bought two draft beers apiece, clinking their plastic cups with unambiguous grimness. Dunk was hopping from foot to foot.

“Bruiser’s up next.”

His opponent was the Boogeyman, who stalked down the aisle with his lizard-green face, stepped through the ropes and stalked around the ring flicking his bright red tongue.

“Let’s go up close,” Dunk said, tugging my sleeve. “It’ll be okay. Trust me.”

We ran down the aisle as Bruiser Mahoney’s music began: John Henry was a Steel-Drivin’ Man.

“Somebody is cruisin’ for a bruuuuuisin’!”

The crowd rose to a thunderous roar as Bruiser Mahoney burst through a rainbow of sizzling fireworks. He ran with a high-kneed and almost clumsy gait, robe billowing off his heels. His face was set in an expression of controlled wrath — of joy. You could imagine a Spartan warrior running into battle with that same teeth-gritted, cockeyed look.

“Bruiser!” Dunk cried, stretching one arm over the barrier.

Bruiser Mahoney slapped Dunk’s palm on the way past. It sent Dunk reeling into me. He just sat there with a blissful expression, staring at his reddening hand.

Bruiser Mahoney booted the Boogeyman in the breadbasket, stunned him with a shot to the solar plexus, flung him into the ropes and tagged him with a dropkick, then hauled him up and delivered a mat-shaking German suplex. The crowd was mad for blood and Bruiser was happy to oblige.

Looking back now, I could see why the guys we watched those nights never hit the big time — even Mahoney, who’d wrestled for six months in the WWF as Jimmy Falcone, working as a trail horse: a guy whose sole job is to lose and make his opponent look good while doing so. After that stint the promotion sent him packing to the carnival-tent and county fair circuit.

It wasn’t that guys like Mahoney were any less muscular than the men who made their livings in the big league; it was more that their bodies lacked the requisite speed and grace. Their limbs seemed slightly disconnected from their brains. They moved at a plodding pace, more like durable tractors than souped-up race cars. And sure, there would always be a place for tractors, but it was not under the bright lights of Maple Leaf Gardens. The Garden City Arena in St. Catharines with its two-thousand-seat capacity was a better fit.

But we were too young to understand how men might be held back by their physical limitations — we figured these guys were fighting each other because they hated each other. We were fortunate that this was the arena they’d chosen to settle their blood feuds.

It was a see-saw of a match. The Boogeyman sprayed poisonous green mist — in fact, lime Jell-O — into Mahoney’s face, then smashed him with a powerbomb. Normally that would be enough to put away the stoutest challenger, but the crowd rallied Mahoney back. He blocked the Boogeyman’s double axe-handle chop and slung him into the ropes, tagging him with a crippling lariat clothesline on the rebound. He climbed the top turnbuckle. The lights hit every contour of his superhuman physique. Mahoney paused in that silvery fall of light — a showman aware of the moment — before spreading his arms and leaping.

He was only ten feet off the ground but from my vantage he could have had wings. For a moment he remained motionless — the whole world did — then the gears clicked and everything accelerated and Bruiser Mahoney slammed the Boogeyman, spiking him to the canvas.

One. Two. Three.

Bruiser Mahoney grabbed the microphone. “Yeah?” A wild cheer went up. He grinned. “Ohhh yeeeeah!”

The cheer was louder this time. It rose up and up, the sound of three thousand lungs emptying towards the roof beams.

“And I’ll be here, I’ll … be … right … here,” Bruiser said, stomping his foot on the mat. Three thousand mouths repeated his words — we all knew his mantra by heart. “I’ll be here for you, fighting for you, always with you!”

Bruiser Mahoney’s head swivelled towards the ceiling as he unleashed a mad-dog howl.

“Thank you! Good night!”

Next we were filing down the aisles, feet crunching over stale popcorn and paper cups. Lifeless, inert, shuffling like zombies under a buzzing Orange Crush sign.

Our fathers bought another beer as the arena emptied. I saw Mr. Hillicker lingering beyond the arena doors. He glanced inside, spotted my father, then turned over his shoulder and spoke to someone I couldn’t see.

“Hey,” Mr. Diggs said to my father, nodding towards the dressing room door. “You figure Bruiser Mahoney’s in there?”

Dad chuckled. “I’d guess so.”

“How would you like to talk to the Bruiser?” Mr. Diggs asked the two of us. “He’s just a man.” I caught an edge of irritation in his voice. “A man like any other man.”

“Like us,” my father said.

Saying this, he turned and walked towards the dressing room, striding purposefully albeit with a noticeable wobble, pulling me behind him.

The wrestlers sat on folding chairs arrayed haphazardly around a wide tiled room. Here and there were open duffel bags, knee braces, piles of sodden towels and grimy balls of tape. The room was foggy from the steam billowing out from the shower stalls. It smelled of Tiger Balm and something to which I could give no name.

“Hey, can I borrow your deodorant?” Disco Dirk said to the Masked Assassin.

“I wouldn’t give it to him,” one of the Lucky Aces said. “He’s got that rash on his dick he picked up in the Sioux.”

“Ah, go fuck your hat,” Disco Dirk said as the other men roared.

One by one they took notice of us. None made any effort to cover up. The Brain Smasher brushed the tangles out of his hair, naked in front of the mirror.

“Bruiser,” he said. “I think somebody’s here looking for you!”

“Is it Estelle?” came Bruiser’s voice from the showers. “I told that one it was once and no more. I’m no tomcatter.”

“It isn’t,” the Brain Smasher said.

“Well who in hell is it?” Bruiser said, stepping into the room with a towel wrapped round his waist.

Maybe it was his wet hair hanging down his shoulders in dark ropes instead of the wild mane I was accustomed to. Or maybe it was the water glistening in the concavity between his chest muscles that I’d never seen before. Or the plastic cup with an inch of piss-coloured liquid in it that he downed quickly before tossing the empty cup into the showers. Or was it simply the shock of seeing Bruiser Mahoney in a locker room surrounded by naked men, amidst piles of spangly boots and neon tights? Whatever it was, he looked shockingly human for the first time.

“Mr. Mahoney,” my father said, finding his voice. “This is my son, Dutchie.”

“And my son, Duncan,” Mr. Diggs said, guiding his boy forward. “They’re your biggest fans.”

“Oh, are they now?” Bruiser Mahoney said. “I must say they ought to be, that you’d bring them into this snakepit with these vipers!”

He laughed and strode forward, offering a hand that swallowed my father’s own. He shook Mr. Diggs’ hand next, then knelt down before me and Dunk like a man preparing to accept a knighthood.

“Look at you. My wide-eyed little warriors.”

Up close his eyes were blue, terrifically blue, the skin around them scored with little cracks like the fissures in alabaster. He smelled of carbolic soap. The cleft in his chin bristled with untrimmed stubble.

“Welcome to the bestiary.” He smiled. The point was broken off one eye tooth. “Fancy joining the carnival, boys?”

It was overwhelming to be so close to him, to all these men. I still struggled with the notion that the Masked Assassin might lend Disco Dirk his deodorant. Was it possible that any of these men actually wore deodorant, or stood in line at the post office to mail a parcel or behaved in any way like normal people? How could a creature like the Boogeyman have a job, a mortgage, a wife? It was impossible to imagine him grilling steaks in his backyard, his lizard-green face grinning above a Kiss the Cook apron. I had figured these men vanished behind the curtain after a match and lived in some nether-realm, squabbling amongst themselves like petulant demigods until they stepped back through that curtain to settle their grievances the next month.

“You’re my favourite wrestler.” There was a quaver in Dunk’s voice. “You’re sort of … well, perfect.”

Bruiser Mahoney laughed. His breath washed over me. I caught the same smell that I’d once caught coming off my father when he’d stepped into my room late one night, watching me silently from the foot of the bed.

“Perfect, he says. You hear that, fellas? It’s like I keep telling you!”

“A perfect boondoggle,” Outbacker Luke cracked.

Bruiser Mahoney took our fathers aside.

“… come by your house, do the dog-and-pony,” I heard him say. Our fathers sunk their hands into their pockets and smiled politely. “… reasonable rate … wouldn’t gyp you fellas …”

My father rested his hand on Mahoney’s shoulder, patting it the way you might pat a dog. Next he reached for his wallet. Mahoney’s big hand went to my father’s wrist, trapping his hand in his pocket.

“Later,” he said softly. “Either of you have a stick of gum?”

When he came back his breath smelled of spearmint instead of whatever had been in the plastic cup. He grabbed a Polaroid camera from his duffel, handed it to Disco Dirk.

“Take a shot of me with these little Bruisers,” he said, kneeling to grab us around the shoulders. His power was immense: it was like being hugged by a yeti.

To Duncan and Dutchie, Mahoney wrote on the still-developing photo. Two warriors in the Bruiser Mahoney armada.

He signed it with his initials—Yours, BM—and for an instant I was terrified I’d laugh. Sometimes my mom would warn me through the bathroom door: “If you’re taking a big BM, Dutchie, make sure you flush twice or you’ll plug the pipes.”

When Bruiser handed the photo to Dunk, Dunk stared at him gratefully and said: “I want to grow up to be just like you.”

For a moment Mahoney’s expression slipped. Under it was the face of a creature who was old, haunted and lost.

“Ah, you’ll grow up, boy,” he said. “You’ll learn.”

When we got out to the parking lot Mr. Lowery and Mr. Hillicker were there with their sons and some other Bisk men. They sat on the tailgates of their pickup trucks drinking cans of Natural Light.

“Look who it is,” Mr. Lowery said. “The cheat and the gasbag.”

My father gripped my hand. “Just keep walking, Dutchie.”

The men hopped off the tailgates. Mr. Hillicker came towards us, bobbing on the toes of his boots while Mr. Lowery skulked low. They formed a semicircle of bleached denim, cigarette smoke and booze fumes.

“What’s the matter?” Mr. Hillicker said to my dad. “Too big to talk to us grunts?”

“That’s nothing to do with it,” my father said. “It’s been a long night, Dean. I’m taking my son home.”

“And we’re stopping you?” said Mr. Lowery. His teeth shone like tiny white spears under the lot lights. “Take him home, Stuckey. Mister Stuckey.”

“You lay off, Stan,” Mr. Diggs said with ice in his eye. “I’m telling you to just lay off.”

Mr. Lowery showed Mr. Diggs his palms like a magician performing some dizzying sleight of hand. “I’m laying easy as a blind bitch in her bed, chum.”

Clyde Hillicker and Adam Lowery watched from the truck. Adam’s eyes were every bit as narrow and flinty as his father’s; it was a scary thing to see in a boy my own age.

An awful electricity zipped among the older men. Shoulders jostled. Hands balled. Next the air was full of swinging fists.

Mr. Diggs’ right shoulder dipped and his hand came up, crunching into Mr. Hillicker’s nose. Mr. Hillicker stutter-stepped back on his heels, toes pointed up like in a Three Stooges routine; it would have been comical if not for the new dent in his nose and the blood that lay stunned across his cheeks.

My father pushed me out of the way as Mr. Lowery surged at him, low and sidewinding. It seemed unreal: Dad in his penny loafers and corduroy slacks fighting Adam Lowery’s father in his chambray work shirt. Mr. Lowery hit my father in the stomach. The air whoofed out of him—“Dad!” I cried — then my father, who I’d never seen throw a punch, brought his fist around in a sweeping roundhouse that clipped Mr. Lowery on the chin.

A pair of cop cars had been idling at the Country Style Donuts across the street. Now they crossed silently, skipping the curb and rolling into the lot. Four uniformed officers stepped out. They stood with their hands on their hips, smirking, not quite ready to get involved.

A hand grabbed my jacket and jerked me backwards. My shoulder collided with Dunk’s — we were both gripped at the end of two huge muscular arms.

“Stay out of the fray, boys,” Bruiser Mahoney said. “You’re liable to lose something.”

He sat us on the pavement and rucked into the fray. “Stop this mess!” he cried, towering like a colossus. He grabbed one of Mr. Hillicker’s buddies by the scruff of his neck and rag-dolled him across the asphalt. “Cease and desist!”

Another man fell out of the scrum clutching his arm. Blood squeezed between his clenched fingers. “He cut me!” he shrieked.

I could have seen a flash of silver in Mr. Diggs’ hand — something that shone like a sliver of moonlight.

“Break this shit up!” the cops shouted, wading in with their batons swinging. “Give it up, you bastards!”

Bruiser Mahoney stepped away, panting just a bit. Beads of sweat dotted his brow.

“Come on, boys.” His hands gripped our forearms. He half led, half lifted us: only my toes touched the ground.

“My dad …” Dunk said.

“Your dad’s in a whack of trouble, son. Nothing to be done for it.”

The brawl raged on. The cruiser’s lights bathed the scene in blue and red flashes. In hindsight, it was shocking that neither our dads nor the police saw us being led away by a goliath wrestler in scuffed cowboy boots and a buckskin jacket. Equally shocking was the fact that neither Dunk nor I called out to our fathers.

Bruiser Mahoney’s brown cargo van was parked around back of the arena near the Dumpsters. He popped the side door and said: “Hop in, boys.”

We sat hip to hip on the ripped bench seat. The van smelled of sweat and turpentine. The left side of the windshield was milky with cracks. A plastic hula girl was stuck to the dash. In the back were a few army duffels, boxes of bodybuilding magazines, sleeping bags and about a million empty Coke cans.

“What’s going to happen to our dads?” I asked Mahoney.

“They’re spending a night in the nick,” Bruiser said, contorting himself into the front seat. His wide shoulders made it look as if a Kenmore fridge were occupying the space behind the wheel. “Buckle your seat belts.”

The van hacked to life. Mahoney drove with his headlights off. The plastic hula girl’s hips swayed as we bounced over the curb.

“It’s nothing serious,” Mahoney said. “Just grown men fighting. They’ll be out tomorrow no worse for wear.” He craned his head round and winked at us. “Every man ought to spend a night in the stony lonesome once in his life!”

He snapped on the radio. “Karma Chameleon” by Culture Club was playing.

“This glitzy fairy can really carry a tune,” he said, snapping his fingers.

We drove down Parkside and pulled up beside a 5.0 Mustang. A farmer-tanned arm hung casually out the open window. There was a tattoo of a wolf howling at the moon on that arm, except the skin drooped so that the moon looked more like a teardrop — which would be poetic, I guess, if it had been on purpose.

Mahoney pulled up closer. I caught a flash of the driver: in his mid-thirties, his face deeply seamed and his skin a queer off-yellow like a watery cat’s eye. He looked sick but probably wasn’t. It’s just how men grew up around here. My dad said Cataract City was a pressure chamber: living was hard, so boys were forced to become men much faster. That pressure ingrained itself in bodies and faces. You’d see twenty-year-old men whose hands were stained permanently black with the granular grease from lubing the rollers at the Bisk. Men just past thirty walking with a stoop. Forty-year-olds with forehead wrinkles deep as the bark on a redwood. You didn’t age gracefully around here. You just got old.

Mahoney pulled into the beer store, left the van running and said, “Be right back.”

“Do you think they’re okay?” I asked Dunk while Mahoney was inside the liquor store. “Our dads?”

“I guess so,” Dunk said. “Bruiser said so, right?”

Mahoney returned with half a flat of Labatt 50. He set it between the front seats and tore the cardboard open. The stubby was swallowed by his hand: only its brown neck protruded between his thumb and pointer finger. He upended the bottle, drank it, belched, sleeved the empty, popped the cap off a fresh one with the church-key dangling from the gearshift and veered onto the road.

“Need something to take the edge off,” he told us. “The Boogeyman took it out of me tonight, that rat bastard.”

“Where are we going?” Dunk said.

“What? You don’t like hanging out with the Bruiser? Your hero?”

He stopped at a red light, downed the second beer, wiped froth off his lips and cracked a third. “Don’t worry, boys. We’ll cruise around until the heat dies down, then I’ll take you home.”

The van barrelled down Clifton Hill where the multicoloured marquees of tourist booths and shops burned against the oncoming dark. Mahoney turned right and slowed past the Falls, unrolling his window to breathe the wet spray.

He drove down the river and pulled into an unfamiliar suburb. He circled one block three times, drumming his fingers on the wheel, before pulling into the driveway that divided a small fenced-in yard.

“Wait here, little warriors.”

He skipped up the steps to the house at the end of the drive, spinning balletically to shoot us with finger-pistols cocked at his hips. His knock was answered by a teenaged girl. After a moment’s hesitancy she let him inside.

“Do you know where we are?” I asked Dunk.

He leaned between the front seats and looked out the window. Then slumped back into the seat and lip-farted. Bruiser Mahoney came out of the house with the girl, holding her hand and pulling her the way you pull a dog away from an interesting smell.

He lifted her onto the passenger seat. “Ooh!” she said, laughing the way my mother did when we rode the Tilt-A-Whirl at the Falls carnival. Her long dark hair fell straight down her back and shone like metal in the domelight.

Mahoney clambered into the driver’s seat and gave her knee a chummy clap. “Look at you! You’re a pip — a real pip!”

The girl tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and stared out the window. Mahoney shot a look at us and waggled his eyebrows as if to say: We’re cooking now!

“Hello,” Dunk said.

The girl nearly jumped out of her skin. “Jesus!” she said to Mahoney. “Who are these — more of yours?”

The flesh crinkled around Mahoney’s eyes. “Mine? Do you think I have a brood in every town?”

“I don’t know why you’d think that might surprise me,” the girl said.

“Don’t be spiteful. These boys came to the show. They got separated from their fathers. I’m taking them home.”

The girl was a high-schooler — the pleated skirt gave it away. She smelled of Noxzema and cigarette smoke. “Separated from your father, huh? Join the club.”

We drove along the river. Mahoney pulled into a lookout along the water’s edge.

“Yeearrrgh!” He stepped out of the van and stretched his long frame. “That air! Takes years off a man.”

We sat at a picnic table under a canopy of spring leaves. The night air was moist like inside a greenhouse. Mahoney opened a beer and held it out to the girl.

“So,” she said to us, “you’re fans of the mighty Bruiser, I imagine?” There was a small, perfect coin of gold in the centre of her left eye.

“We are,” Dunk said solemnly.

“So serious!” She sipped her beer. Mahoney watched her with a crooked eye. “I suppose you’d like to hear stories of his greatest matches, wouldn’t you?”

“We would,” said Dunk.

“Well, Bruiser?” she said. “Care to indulge them?”

“Dearest heart,” he said, “what tale would you have me regale them with?”

The girl stroked her chin, considering. “How about Giant Kichi?”

Mahoney slapped the table. The crack of his palm caused a flock of nesting starlings to take flight.

“Aha! Giant Kichi, is it?” He rounded on us. “Kichi was the meanest wrestler on the Japanese circuit, one of twins born in Hiroshima. Their father was a madman. He raised cows on a patch of soil where the first bomb touched down, you see, and suckled his sons on the milk. When they were old enough, he had those same cows slaughtered and made his sons eat the irradiated meat. The radiation did something to those boys — lengthened their bones, gave them incredible strength. A pair of giants, the two of them!”

Mahoney upended his beer, then set one huge meathook on my shoulder and stared sorrowfully into my eyes.

“On their twelfth birthday, much the same age you are now, that madman led his sons into the woods. Whichever one of you comes out alive is my true son, he said, and left them there. Two weeks later, Giant Kichi came out. Torn up and scabbed and practically naked. Something had happened in those woods. He’d changed. Become a madman like his father.

“His father trained Kichi to become a wrecking machine. He brought in masters of each martial arts discipline. Wing Chun. Praying Mantis. Kung fu fighting. Everyone was doing it.” He winked at the girl. “Giant Kichi sucked it up like a sponge. Big and strong he was, but also nimble. He beat holy hell out of his masters, full of rage and bloodlust. Finally his father stepped up and said, How’d you like a piece of your old man? Giant Kichi said, I’d like that quite a lot, thanks, and snapped his father over his knee like a stick of wood!”

“He did, did he?” the girl said.

“He did indeed!” Mahoney grinned. “Giant Kichi popped up on my radar years ago. I’d been touring the Eastern Seaboard with Killer Kowalski and Spider Winchell, eking out a rough living in the squared circle and doing some pest elimination on the side. I heard that Tugboat Sims — one tough S.O.B. and the only man to have beaten the Plague — had taken the challenge of this crazy Jap wrestler. Giant Kichi beat him so bad that Tugboat pissed his trunks and begged for his mama. Well, wouldn’t you know it but two weeks later I’m at home dusting my knick-knacks when comes a knock at the door. I open it to see this little Jap fella with a wrinkly face like a cat’s clenched bunghole. It was RiJishi, Giant Kichi’s manservant. He hands me this funny scroll. It’s an invitation to fight Kichi in the Tokyo Dome!”

Mahoney paced round the picnic table, stabbing his fingers through his hair.

“I took a steamship and trained as it sailed. Long hours in the boiler room, flinging lumps of coal into the greedy engine, my skin stained as black as night with the dust. The ship hooked past Greenland. I ran round the deck until icicles formed in my hair and jangled like castanets. I got bigger, stronger, as I knew I must to stand even a snowball’s chance. And I swear, boys, I swear I heard Kichi’s voice on the salt wind, calling me, haunting me, tormenting me.

“Maaahoney,” Bruiser mimicked. “Maaahoney, I kirr you, Maaahoney. Well, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a shredded bag of nerves by the time I reached the land of the rising sun. A rickshaw ferried me to the Tokyo Dome and next I’m being led into the ring. A hundred thousand faces screaming for blood—my blood!”

Mahoney’s expression darkened. He hooked his thumbs into his belt loops and shook his head.

“Ah, anyway. Let’s talk about something else.”

“No!” Dunk and I said in unison.

“Don’t be a tease,” the girl said.

Mahoney cocked a Spockian eyebrow. “I’m not boring you?”

She sighed. “Go on, you ham.”

“Visualize it, then, boys. Set the picture in your mind. Giant Kichi — he was a man only in the way Goliath was a man. His head swept the rafters. You think I’m big? Oh, I was a guppy compared to this guy. But I’d vowed to lock horns, a deal had been struck, and then as now I honour my commitments.”

The girl blew a raspberry.

“Yes, he was big,” Mahoney said, after a searching look at the girl. “And his eyes … the darkest, most light-eating things I’d ever seen. I could tell right off he was nutty as squirrel turds, a whole flock of bats in his belfry, but I stepped through the ropes and scuffed my feet in the rosin all the same. Now boys, the first time Kichi hit me”—he slammed his fist into his open palm: RAP! — “I thought he’d caved my chest in. The crowd roared. I peeled myself off the canvas before he could land the finishing blow. I figured a man that big was like a tree: once he went down, he wouldn’t get back up. So I chopped at him like a tree. Quick leg kicks, then scooting away. Chop! Chop! Chop! Chop!

“Kichi growled like an animal and lunged, but I managed to squirt away. Chop! Chop! I felt him weaken. Chop! Chop! The sound of my foot striking his leg was like an axe hacking into wet wood. When he went down — and yes, Giant Kichi did go down — it was with a cry that sounded like a gigantic baby sucking its first breath. He crashed into the mat with a rattle, the whole stadium shaking. I looked at him curled on the mat, helpless … and I couldn’t finish it. He was raised a beast and that’s what he became. So I left him there, may the Lord bless and keep him. And that, boys, was Giant Kichi.”

The girl clapped. “Bravo!”

“Did it really happen?” I said.

Mahoney said, “Ask her. She was there.”

The girl said, “It’s true. Every word.” She turned her bottle upside down, beer sloshing onto the dirt.

“What a waste!” Mahoney said.

“I’ve got to get back home,” she said.

“Ah, come on. Another story.”

“Another time.”

Mahoney stared an instant, then rubbed his nose harshly with his palm. “Yeah, okay. Another time.”

We drove back. Bruiser reached into the case. The girl briefly set her hand on his. He let go of the bottle, goosed the accelerator and said: “Is it to be like this, then? Is it?”

“I don’t know what other way you figured it to be.”

“Did you get the money I sent?”

“I don’t need the money. Neither does Mom.”

“The letters, then. You read them?”

She said: “I read them, yes.”

“Everything I wrote, I meant.”

“Sure you did. But that dog’s not going to hunt.”

For a moment Mahoney rested his hand lightly on the girl’s knee. “We had some high times, now, didn’t we?”

“You’re a hell of a good time. Nobody would deny it.”

“Are you telling me we didn’t have some high ol’ times?”

The girl offered him a distressed smile. “Why would I tell you anything when you already know it all?”

Bruiser drove back down the river route. The sky had lowered over the river, which had turned the colour of lead. Reaching across the armrest, Bruiser took the girl’s hand. It covered her own like a tarantula clutching a cat’s eye marble. She patted his hand with her free one, the way you’d stroke a tame animal: a toothless old bear maybe, the ones that rode tricycles in Russian circuses.

Mahoney appeared aggravated with this treatment; the tenderness of it, I figured. Or maybe the fact she stroked his hand as a mother would stroke her child’s? He tore his hand away and punched the roof.

The girl’s laugh said she’d seen this song and dance before. She turned to us and said, “Big Bruiser maaaad! Bruiser make heap big thunder!”

“Don’t encourage her, please,” Bruiser told us as we laughed. He sucked on his skinned knuckles and said, “If you encourage her she’ll never grow up.”

The girl stuck out her tongue at him. “I grew up like a thief, didn’t I? Always out of your sight.”

He beheld her with reproachful eyes. “When did you get so cold, girl?”

She stared straight ahead at that. I got the sense it was some kind of act, in which she was playing the hard girl. It didn’t suit her, but she played it well enough.

We arrived at the house with the small fenced-in yard. The girl kissed Mahoney on the cheek.

“He’ll get you home safe,” she assured us. “You’re in good hands.”

When the girl left, it was as if she took some part of Bruiser Mahoney with her. Dunk and I watched in silence as he popped the glovebox and recovered a bottle of pills. He shook a few out and dry-swallowed them and jammed the bottle into one of the many pockets of his coat. Then he drove on. The only sounds were the loose muffler rattling against the undercarriage and the muted clink of bottles.

“Ah, Jesus,” Mahoney said hoarsely, mopping his brow as a man with a high fever might. “Ah, Jesus, Jesus.”

Dunk leaned forward to touch Mahoney’s slouched shoulder. Mahoney flinched.

“God damn it.” He unrolled the window, cleared his throat and spat. “I’m not perfect. Never claimed to be. Made mistakes — who hasn’t? Look at you two. Your fathers get in some silly brawl and let a monstrous stranger walk away with their kids. That’s good parenting? Smelling like damn cookies, the pair of them. What in hell’s that about?”

“They work at a cookie factory,” I said.

Mahoney’s head rocked back on the stump of his neck. Maybe he was picturing it as I once had: a tree full of lumpen cookie-making elves, like in the commercials.

“I bet your dads have never taken you camping, have they?”

Dunk said: “We went to a cottage once.”

“Great galloping goose shit!” Mahoney said. He pawed through the case for a fresh beer, opened it and swigged deeply. It clearly rejuvenated him. “Never gone on a camp-out? A couple of fine nellies you’ll turn into.”

“What’s a nelly?” Dunk said.

“A pansy. A goddamn bed-wetter! That tears it — I’m taking you boys to the woods. It’ll put some bark on your trees!”

We pulled onto the highway. Mahoney fled down the two-lane stretch, hair whipping round his head like snakes from the wind through the window. His face crept closer to the windshield; he crouched over the wheel, and I imagined him squinting at the yellow broken lines blurring under the hood.

A police car fled past in the opposite lane, lights ablaze and sirens blaring. When it was gone Mahoney laughed, a creaky-hinge sound.

In some dimmed chamber of my heart I realized I ought to be terrified. Yet I wasn’t. Dunk grinned into the wind that screamed through the van, tugging at his clothes and stirring the drifts of soda cans behind us.

“Ever pitched a tent, boys?” said Mahoney.

Dunk said: “Never!”

“Ever baited a trap?”

“We lit a one-match fire in Cubs.”

Mahoney snorted. “Your fathers should be bloody ashamed of themselves.” He wrenched the wheel. We were off the main road — off pavement entirely — bouncing down a rutted dirt path. Long grass glowed whitely in the headlamps. I may’ve seen lights burning in the distance, the lights of an isolated farmhouse maybe, but soon those vanished.

We drove over the crest of some empty land, very flat, the path running as straight as a yardstick, and then came a stand of apple trees hung with winter-withered fruit that shone like nickels at the bottom of a well. Next came pine trees that dropped and kept on dropping. I was sure the van would rattle to pieces. My teeth chattered in my mouth. Bushes whacked up under the frame.

Mahoney remained hunched over the wheel, his face lit up by the dashboard’s greenish glow. “Now we’re getting somewhere.” His voice possessed the mad certainty that the leaders of doomed polar expeditions must have held.

The path kept eroding. Soon it was only the phantom of a road; the woods loomed. Stones pinged off the frame. Branches yawned over the trail, raking the windows like skeletal fingers.

The van hit a lip. Metal shrieked as we bottomed out. I was thrown forward, shoulder striking the passenger seat before I slumped to the floor, dazed. Dunk helped me back onto the seat.

“Buckle your seat belt, man.”

But we weren’t moving anymore. Mahoney mashed the gas pedal, snarling through skinned-back lips. The wheels spun until the sound of smoking rubber reached the pitch of a gut-shot animal. Steam boiled from under the hood. Mahoney climbed out, stumbled in front of the headlights to survey the damage.

“We’re here,” he said, as if this had been our destination all along. He popped the van’s back doors and flung out an army surplus tent, a blackened cooking grill, sleeping bags.

“You boys find some firewood,” he said merrily. “Beat the ground in front of you, though — snakes out at this hour.”

We explored the clearing that fringed the woods.

“Wait!” Mahoney called us back, removing a collapsible Buck knife from his pocket. After considering us at length, he handed it to Dunk. “Just in case,” he said.

“I already got one,” Dunk said, showing Mahoney the Swiss Army knife he always carried.

Mahoney pressed his knife into my palm. Warm from his flesh, the brass fittings greased with sweat.

We picked our way through the trees searching for sticks. An owl nested on a low branch, eyes shining like lanterns. The darkness of Dunk’s hair blended with the blackness under the trees; he seemed as much a part of this wilderness as the owl. I fit my thumbnail into the groove on the Buck knife and pulled it open. The blade clicked smoothly into place — I could smell the oil in the mechanism. Moonlight played off the tiny hairline abrasions along the blade where Mahoney must’ve sharpened it on a whetstone.

When we returned from our mission Bruiser Mahoney was sitting cross-legged, assembling a tent in the van’s headlights. One of the tent poles was bent at a broken-backed angle in his huge hands. Growling, he flung it into the bushes.

“Goddamn Tinkertoys.”

He managed to get one tent up before the van’s battery conked out. We built a ring of rocks and heaped wood inside. Mahoney doused the sticks with turpentine and lit a match.

“Phwoar!” he cried as the flames roared up.

Sap hissed and knots popped in the burning wood. Mahoney reached for a beer but the case was empty. He stood up the way a baby does — hands braced in front of him, walking his heels up to meet them — and shuffled to the edge of the woods. He pissed for a minor eternity — his urine sounded heavy, as if threaded with molten lead; I imagined it flattening the weeds and snapping twigs. His body swung around and he returned to the van, hunting through it. He sat back down with a bottle of white liquor and a big silver handgun.

“I won it in a bet,” he said. “Or I lost a bet and had to take possession of it. I forget now. We might need it tonight.”

“Why?” I asked.

“You think we’re the only creatures out here?”

As the night wore on, Mahoney was coming to resemble an animal himself. I peered through the flames at this shaggy man-beast fumbling with a loaded pistol. He looked like a bear trying to play the piano. The cylinder popped open. Bullets fell into his lap. He pinched them between his fingers and thumbed them back into their holes, then took crooked aim at the trees.

“Bang,” he whispered.

He handed me the bottle. When I hesitated he said: “Your father never gave you a belt of rum? It’s pirate medicine, son.”

Whatever was in the bottle blistered my throat. I coughed convulsively and would’ve puked but there was nothing in my stomach.

Dunk took the bottle. Not only did he keep it down, he took another sip.

“It does taste like medicine,” Dunk said.

“When I was your age I believed totally in the power of medicine,” said Mahoney. “One time my grandfather was coughing. I gave him a cough drop. My grandfather had lung cancer. By the end he was hacking up spongy pink bits.”

“Teach me to wrestle,” Dunk said.

“A fucking cough drop … What?”

“To wrestle,” Dunk said. “Teach me.”

“Why? You want to grow up to be like me?”

“I do.”

Mahoney sucked at the bottle and then wiped the shine off his lips. His teeth were the colour of old bone in the firelight.

“Up, then!” he cried. “Stand and fight!”

He leapt across the flames and landed nimbly. Dunk was crab-walking away on his palms and heels. Mahoney hauled him up with no more effort or regard than a man lifting a sack of laundry.

“Lock up,” he snarled, setting himself in a wrestling pose. “Damn you, you wanted to learn so lock up with me!”

Mahoney got down on his knees. He grabbed Dunk’s hands and slapped one on the back of his neck and the other on his shoulder.

“Like that,” he said, settling his hands on Dunk’s own neck and shoulder. “You control the other man this way, see? Now control my head.”

The muscles flexed down Dunk’s arm. Mahoney’s head sat on his neck like a tree stump, moving nowhere. Dunk linked his fingers around the back of Mahoney’s neck, screwed his heels into the ground and pulled as hard as he could.

“Has a butterfly settled on me?” Mahoney asked acidly.

“Owe,” Dunk said, his face contorted with effort, “help.”

I wrapped my arms around Mahoney’s bull neck. He wore the same aftershave my father did, the one with the blue ship on the bottle. The hairs on the back of his neck were as soft as the white spores on a dandelion before they blow away in the wind.

Mahoney said: “You’re huuuurting meeee …”

His hands shot up, grabbing a fistful of our shirts. He pushed us backwards and we landed hard on our asses and elbows.

“Oldest trick in the book,” he said, whapping dirt off his knees. “Never trust the wounded dog, boys.”

Dunk’s elbow was torn open, blood trickling to his wrist. His hands flexed into fists at his sides. Mahoney was by the fire, bent over his bottle. When he stood up Dunk was right there.

“What?” Mahoney said.

Dunk showed Mahoney his elbow. Not for sympathy, just so the man could see what he’d done.

“Sorry about that,” Bruiser said. “Let’s patch it up.”

Mahoney found a box of Band-Aids in the glovebox and stuck one on Dunk’s elbow. He took the bottle of pills from his pocket, shook a quartet into his palm and chased them with rum.

“That’s wrestling, boys. Want to see what it earns you?” He rolled his trouser up past his knee. “I always wear tights in the ring. Now you see why.”

His kneecap was shattered. The two halves of it lay under his skin with one half twisted to one side, the other sunk beneath his knee joint. It looked like a lunar landing photo. The cratered surface of the moon.

“A steel chair. Whappo. Some kind of no-holds-barred contest. The promoter didn’t bother explaining it too well. He was drunk. Anyway, so was I. The guy who chair-shotted me, the Sandman, he was drunk too. I heard the bone crack. Sounded like a starter’s pistol—pow!” Mahoney shook his head. “That was Texas. Never wrestle in Texas, boyos.”

He ran his hands through his hair, parting the dark locks. A scar ran across the top of his skull. Pink, ribbed and shockingly thick — it looked like a garter snake frozen under his scalp.

“Razorwire,” he said. “Some kind of crazy thing in Japan. Opened me up to the bone. Blood pissing all over the mat. That’s how they like it over there. Messy. I kept wrestling. The both of us greasy with blood. I passed out. Came to in the emergency room with a sweet slant-eyed nurse stitching my head up.”

Everywhere Mahoney had gone left a mark on him. The most crucial testament of his perfection — the fact that he’d come from outside of Cataract City, the great unknown where perfection was still a possibility — was the very thing that had ruined him.

Dunk said: “Did your dad teach you to wrestle?”

“My dad was a great man,” Mahoney said. “A beast! When I was a boy he’d pinch my shoulders and say, ‘Look at those tiny trapezius muscles of yours — they’re mousetraps! You should have bear traps like mine! And your neck’s thin as a stack of dimes — what use is a man who can’t even support the weight of his own skull?’ I was a small boy. Sickly. Born premature. Not much bigger than a kaiser roll, my mother said. She hardly realized I’d come out.

“I got picked on as a boy. Yes! After school I’d make it home a few steps ahead of my tormentors and hide. Then my dad would come home. He was a butcher. His days spent quartering hogs. He’d drag me outside to face the other boys. But before that he’d wad up his apron, still wet with pig blood, and stuff it in my face. ‘Smell it!’ he’d say. ‘It should make you crazy! A mad dog!’ And so I went out with my face smeared with blood and I’d fight. It made me a better man, and I think every boy should … Did you … Did you …?”

Mahoney was peering into the trees. He closed one eye like he was peering through a magnifying glass, then reared back as if he’d sniffed something foul.

“Did you see that?”

Dunk looked. I looked. There was nothing.

“What is it?” said Dunk.

“I … I can’t quite say. But do you know who’s out there?” He screwed his palms into his eye sockets and blinked furiously. “Every manner of psycho and degenerate. Where do you go when polite society rejects you? The woods. Eating skunks, biding your time, waiting for your opportunity.”

Mahoney worked his jaw. The interlocking bones clicked beneath his ear. He scrounged the gun out of his jacket pocket. A log cracked in the fire. He wheeled about in a crazy circle, strafing the trees with the barrel.

“Who is it? Rotten-ass bastard, show yourself! I’ll plug one between your eyes!”

We cowered as the pistol swung on wild orbits. Mahoney drank and wiped his lips with the back of the hand gripping the gun.

“There’s no need for this.” His voice took on a pleading note. “Come sit by the fire. We can—”

A rustling arose beyond the trees and for an instant I swore a face materialized. White as milk apart from the lips, which were as red as blood from a freshly torn vein. Teeth filed to crude points. A ravenous ghoul stalking us from the darkness past the fire.

Mahoney howled—“Reeeeaaaggh!”—and fired. Flame spat from the gun to illuminate the fear-twisted contours of his face.

“Weasels,” he snarled. “Cowardly punks.” He raked his fingernails down his cheeks. “Think they can dog me out like that? You let a man dog you even once and he’ll dog you until your last breath! Come on, boys.”

“Where?” said Dunk.

Mahoney pointed to the trees.

Years later I’d wonder if it could possibly have happened as I remembered it.

The woods were black and cold, but not as cold as they would become later. I recall a lack of friction between my body and the things surrounding it — the trees, the spongelike quality of the topsoil — as if I was floating. I remember thinking I was in a place where none of my daily habits carried any impact. I tried to picture my bedroom with the wallpaper my father had put up: a panorama of the earth, small and bright and blue-white as photographed from the moon.

I slipped my finger through Dunk’s belt loop, anchoring him to me. The long muscle that ran up Dunk’s shoulder and neck to his hairline quivered with a nervous, tentative strength. Prickberry bushes tore gashes in my arms. The pain and adrenaline came together in my legs and fingers and head: a cool tingling under my skin, a hot buzz in my skull.

Bruiser Mahoney stalked ahead of us, a huge rumpled shape barely distinguishable from the darkness. He followed the silver finger of the gun barrel, his breath filling the space under the leaves. When he coughed the sound was that of an old refrigerator shutting down, the ancient tubes and fittings rattling against one another.

A serrated leaf feathered my cheek. I brushed it aside, startled by the whiteness of my fingers in the night, then walked through a spider’s web strung between two saplings. The gossamer snapped over my lips and eyelids and for an instant I felt the hollow weight of a spider against my throat, but by the time I’d gathered my breath to scream it was gone, rappelling down my shirt.

“Take heart, lads,” Mahoney whispered. “Fortune favours the brave.”

My eyes adjusted. The woods took shape. Trees rose out of the black loam of the forest floor, bark covered in frost that glittered like pulverized salt. Streamers of fog snaked along the ground; I tasted the mineral wetness of it in the back of my mouth. We made no noise at all — even Mahoney, whose grace had otherwise deserted him — our feet sliding silently over the moist leafless earth.

“Wolverines out here,” said Mahoney. “A wolverine gets hungry enough, it’ll creep into your tent and eat your face off. Wolves, too.”

As soon as he said that, I saw them: hunched shapes moving between the trees, much bigger than dogs, white-tipped fur bristling along their spines. Their smell rode the breeze, the stink of meat rotting between their fangs. My fingers tightened in Dunk’s belt loop, which I guess made me a pussy but I was too freaked to care.

A stealthy clawing kicked up behind us. Mahoney whirled and fired. I fell to my knees, ears covered against the thunder. There was blood on Mahoney’s cheek where the gun’s hammer had gouged his flesh.

“It flanked round behind us, the sneaky bugger.”

Mahoney trudged off in the direction of his gunfire. We found him bent over a small broken shape. Blood shone in a pool round its spike-shaped head.

“A coon.” Mahoney laughed without mirth. “We’ve been chasing a damn raccoon.”

The animal reeked of blood and piss. Its gums were already hardening, black lips drawn back from yellowed teeth. It looked like it had died very confused. Mahoney bent to pick it up by a hind leg. Back at the fire, he laid the dead animal down with reverence.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Who was he apologizing to, us or the raccoon?

“Hand me my knife,” he said.

Mahoney unfolded the blade and slid the point into the skin between its front legs and sawed down its belly. The raccoon opened up in the firelight.

“If you kill an animal and don’t eat it, you’re cursed forever. Earl Starblanket told me that. He was a pureblood Navajo who used to wrestle as Big Chief Jackdaw.”

Mahoney hacked through the gleaming knots of the creature’s insides. The smell was indescribable. I couldn’t imagine putting it in my mouth.

Dunk said, “We didn’t kill it.”

Mahoney looked up sharply. His hands were black with blood. “We all did. We were a hunting party.”

Dunk shook his head. “Owe and me were just there.”

“That’s right, you were. You witnessed it. Do you want to put your mortal soul in jeopardy?”

Mahoney cut off a strip of meat. He gathered up the raccoon, holding its split body together the way a prim woman holds a purse, humped over to the trees and flung it away. He settled the metal grate over the coals and laid the meat down.

“You don’t eat much,” he said. “Just a bite or two, to honour the animal.”

The meat sizzled. Mahoney speared it with the tip of his knife and turned it over. His lips shone with drool. He crunched some more pills. When the meat was cooked he hacked it into steaming chunks.

“Eat it,” he said darkly.

It was burnt, which was a blessing: I assumed the taste of char was better than the taste of raccoon. Mahoney ate in silence, backhanding the juice that dribbled down his chin.

We lay in the grass. I was exhausted but couldn’t let myself fall asleep next to Bruiser Mahoney — cold snakes squirmed in my belly just thinking about it. The stars were bright in a way they never were in my suburb. The moon was perfectly halved, like a paper circle folded over. The sky so clear that I could see calligraphic threads on the moon’s surface.

“Did you know,” Mahoney said, “that the Russians sent dogs into space? My mother told me this when I was a boy. Nobody knew the effects of space on a body, you see, so they sent dogs first. They found two mongrels on the streets of Moscow. Pchelka, which means Little Bee, and Mushka, which means Little Fly. They went up in Sputnik 6. They were supposed to get into orbit and come right back. But the rockets misfired and shot them into space.

“Whenever I look at the night sky, I think about those dogs. Wearing these hand-stitched spacesuits, bright orange, with their paws sticking out. Big fishbowl helmets. How … crazy. Floating out and out into space. How bewildered they must have been. Freezing, starving, dying from oxygen deprivation. For what? They would have happily spent their days rummaging through trashcans.

“For all anyone knows those dogs are still out there. Two dead mongrels in a satellite. Two dog skeletons in silly spacesuits. Gleaming dog skulls inside fishbowl helmets. They’ll spin through the universe until they burn up in the atmosphere of an uncharted planet. Or get sucked into a black hole to be crushed into a ball of black matter no bigger than an ant turd.”

Bruiser Mahoney laughed. The sound sent a shiver through my gums. His laughter rolled out and out into the wilderness; the sound didn’t touch anything I could recognize or draw hope from.

“Who are you?” I asked — the most searching, most innocent question I’ve asked in my life.

Mahoney propped himself up on one elbow. His fingers were black with dried raccoon blood.

“What do you mean?” he asked, a child himself. When he caught the aim of my question his lips curled back from his teeth. “Am I not still your hero?” he said, deathly soft. “The mighty Bruiser Mahoney? Ooh, you’re a smart boy. You’ve figured me out, haven’t you? Unmasked me. Well then, I guess that makes this the hour of truth. Let’s lay all the cards on the table, hmm? Card one: I’m not Bruiser Mahoney. My name is Dade Rathburn. I was born in Orillia, Ontario. Before becoming a wrestler I was a janitor at a box factory. I’ve spent time in jail — once for beating a man half to death outside a bar, and once again for passing phony cheques. Mahoney? I don’t have a drop of Irish blood in me! I’m a fake, boys.” Coldness crept into his voice. “And I’ll slap down card number two: wrestling’s fake, too.”

Dunk made a helpless noise in his throat, like the tweet of a small bird.

“Oh, yessss,” Mahoney hissed. “Fake as a three-dollar bill! Fake as Sammy Davis Junior’s eye! The matches are bunko. I win because we draw it up that way. The punches and kicks don’t hurt — hell, most times we don’t even touch each other. It’s a big scam, and you bought into it.”

“You be quiet,” Dunk said. “You just shut up.”

Mahoney laughed in Dunk’s face.

“My opponent tonight, the Boogeyman? His name is Barry Schenk. Used to be a math teacher. Good guy. We head to the bar after our matches and have a laugh. We’re friends.”

Dunk twisted into a wretched ball. Mahoney’s expression softened abruptly. He reached out and put his fingers on Dunk’s shoulder. Dunk withdrew from his touch.

“I’m sorry, son,” Mahoney said. “You shouldn’t pay me any mind. I’m a drunk and a clown. You ever see an old clown, boys? No. Old clowns don’t die, though.”

He stood. His eyes shone like glass.

“Be like your fathers,” he said. “Work a solid job. Build a family. Smelling like a cookie’s a small price to pay for ordinary happiness.”

A hellish noise kicked up in the woods: a high gibbering shriek that tapered to an ongoing moan. Mahoney spun on his heel, pistol jerked high.

“God rot you! I’ll have your guts for garters!”

For the next several hours, until the sky lightened in the east, Mahoney blundered around in the forest. Every so often came the splintering of wood or a low animal bellow. Dunk and I lay together by the dying fire, dew silked to our skin.

At some point Mahoney emerged. His clothes were torn and mud-streaked, his face badly scratched and his hair stuck with burrs.

“Goddamn bastards … thought you had me but I outfoxed you … didn’t I, Daddy? Stinking of pig blood but I won. I won.”

He shambled over to the tent, which was much too small for him. His cowboy boots stuck out the flaps.

I rose with the sun scraping the treetops. I’d fallen asleep on my side and woke up tucked close to Dunk. He was sleeping still. His spine bowed with each breath, touching my stomach.

My arm was pins and needles. I flexed my fingers, which felt full of static. My mouth tasted of burnt meat. The clearing was washed in new sunlight. Nothing in the trees except a chipmunk nibbling on a nut. Dunk rolled onto his side, blinking at the sun.

“You okay?”

“I want to go home,” I told him simply.

He stood and stretched, catlike. We scratched our itchy bits and rubbed the dirt out of our hair.

I said: “Should we wake him up?”

“My dad doesn’t like to get up after he’s been drinking.”

“So what are we going to do?”

Dunk stared at the sky as if he could tell the time by where the sun sat. “Okay, let’s wake him up,” he said finally.

Bruiser Mahoney’s cowboy boots still jutted out of the tent. The toes were covered with muddy grass as if he’d been kicking holes in the earth. Dunk tapped one of them with his sneaker.

“Hey, Bruiser. We got to go home.”

Dunk kicked harder. Bruiser’s foot barely moved. His boot could have been filled with concrete. Dunk pulled back the tent flap. His nose wrinkled. “He must’ve puked.”

Bruiser lay on top of his sleeping bag. His hands were covered in raccoon blood; it had dried and split, making his skin look like lizard scales. Dunk crawled inside the tent. I tried to grab him but he was already halfway in.

The smell was the same as when my dad had found our neighbour’s cat under our porch, eaten by beetles. “That would gag a maggot,” he’d said. Sunlight streamed through the tent’s metal eyelets, picking up the dust above Mahoney’s chest. His skin pale through the rips in his clothing. Quite suddenly I realized how still things were. Nothing but our own timid movements and the floating dust.

“Bruiser,” Dunk said softly. “Hey … you awake?”

My knee knocked into Bruiser’s leg. It was hard, like a mannequin leg. I pulled away, spine pressed against the tent’s canvas. Mahoney’s fingers were curled back in defiance of their bones. They reminded me of the Wicked Witch’s shoes in The Wizard of Oz. I thought Mahoney might be taking a long breath. I held mine until my heart thudded at my temples. When I let it out he still hadn’t taken a breath of his own.

Dunk leaned over him.

“Bruiser?” Shouting it: “Bruiser!”

Mahoney’s face was the colour of the moulding clay we used in art class. His eyes were wide open, his eyeballs milky, snaky with burst vessels. White stuff that looked like dried shaving cream was crusted at the sides of his mouth. There was something the matter with his face. His upper teeth were ejected past his lips, connected to a strip of dingy pink plastic.

“Dentures,” Dunk said quietly. “My grandpa wears them too. When he goes to bed he puts them in a glass of buttermilk.”

Dunk pressed his thumb to Mahoney’s teeth and tried to push them into his mouth. They wouldn’t go. He pulled on Mahoney’s chin until his mouth opened a bit. The sound was like a rubber band snapping. His dentures fell back into his mouth with a terrible slunk, the sound of an un-oiled drawer sliding shut.

Dunk pushed Bruiser Mahoney’s dentures back under his lips and tried to pinch them gently together. But his teeth were too big for his mouth. Either they had grown — which was impossible, right? — or his skin had shrunk.

“Is he …?”

“I think so, yeah,” Dunk said.

My heart was a wounded bird flapping inside my chest. I wanted to scream but the sound was locked up somewhere under my lungs.

“Should we close his eyes, Owe?”

“Is that what you do?”

Dunk nodded. “So the soul can go to heaven.”

You think that’s where it’s going? I almost asked.

Dunk put two fingertips on Mahoney’s eyelids and pulled them down. When he let go they rolled back up like window shades. One of Mahoney’s eyes pointed towards his nose as if the muscles behind it had given up, letting the eyeball roll towards the lowest point on his face. It made him look comical and stupid.

“Fuck,” said Dunk.

Outside the tent I wept. I wept because a man I’d idolized without really knowing him — it dawned on me that maybe this was the only way you ever really could idolize anybody — was gone and I was miserable because he’d died overnight, alone, in an army surplus tent with his boots on. And I wept because Dunk and I were in the middle of a big nowhere now. I wept because the only person who could have got us out of this was dead, his eyeball lazing into the centre of his face, and he’d left two dumb scared kids a million miles from anywhere.

Dunk opened the van door and sat in the driver’s seat. He gripped the wheel so tight his knuckles went white, then punched it. The horn made a low blatt.

“Should we bury him?” he said.

I wiped scalding tears off my cheeks. It was the most serious question I’d ever had to answer. “We don’t have a shovel.”

Dunk nodded; he’d already registered that fact.

After some thinking, I said: “Could we burn him? That’s what Bovine’s dad does at the funeral parlour. There’s a big oven down in the basement, Bovine says. The coffins go in on a conveyor belt. His dad sweeps the ashes into a metal vase.”

“A vase?”

“I guess, like you’re supposed to put it in your living room. Over the fireplace?”

“Where you hang stockings at Christmas?” Dunk said.

It was weird. I didn’t tell Dunk that Bovine also told me that sometimes his father pried the gold fillings out of a dead person’s teeth before putting the body in the oven. He gave the gold to the next-of-kin, who usually melted it down, Bovine said, turning it into earrings or doo-dads on a charm bracelet. People were weird about death. Looking at Bruiser Mahoney’s boots sticking out of the tent, I could see why.

“How would we burn him?” Dunk said.

“We could stuff sticks inside the tent and light it.”

“What about the sparks? They could fly off and set the woods on fire.”

“We could build a ring of rocks around the tent.”

Dunk touched his lip to his nose, considering it. “Would it get hot enough to turn him into ashes? Last summer we had a cookout along the river and my brother dropped his hot dog in the fire. In the morning it was a shrivelled black stick, like charcoal.”

I pictured Bruiser Mahoney the same way: the meat cooked black on his bones, his body laid out like a stick figure. What would we do then? Snap his limbs over our knees — I imagined each break sending up a puff of sparkling black dust — and stack Bruiser Mahoney in our arms? We’d have to carry him out of the forest like firewood.

Dunk climbed out of the van and walked to the tent.

“What are you doing?”

“Getting some things,” he said.

He rummaged inside the tent. The points of his elbows strained against the canvas. Was he rolling Mahoney over? Rooting through the dead man’s pockets? A series of loud pops, like shots from a cap gun, fired quickly. I wondered if it was the trapped air popping between the knobs of Mahoney’s spinal cord.

That sound opened a hidden trap door in my head and quite suddenly I was staring at my own body in a coffin, my face propped up by a shiny satin pillow. I lay in a parlour with stained-glass windows; “Nearer, My God, to Thee” was playing. My father and mother were there, plus a few of my teachers and some aunts and uncles I hardly ever saw. My face was yellow from that chemical they pump into your veins to replace your blood — the same stuff our science teacher used to preserve dissected frogs. Stitches circled my head; the undertaker had brushed my bangs down to cover them, but not totally. I wondered if they had taken my brain out and if so, why? Maybe evil aliens had stolen it, like the ones in that television show Dunk and I watched late one night: Invasion of the Brain Snatchers. If my brain was gone, what was inside my head now? Packing peanuts like the ones that Dad’s hi-fi equipment had come in? Some balled-up pages out of the Niagara Falls Pennysaver?

Staring at my own dead face didn’t fill me with horror or sadness or much of anything, probably because I couldn’t really imagine being dead. The whole scene felt like a joke — and then my dad began to bawl hysterically, soaking a platter of cucumber sandwiches with his tears, and the daydream fell apart.

Dunk came out of the tent with Mahoney’s gun and knife and laid them on the driver’s seat.

“Want a piece of gum?”

“Where did you get it?” I asked.

“You want it or not?”

We chewed gum. Dunk pulled the van’s key out of his pocket and slid it into the ignition. The motor went whirr-whirr-whirr. Dunk popped the hood — it shocked me that he knew how — and peered into the engine compartment.

“It’s fried,” he said, and spat in the dirt.

Tracks of crushed grass ran out behind the van’s tires. I didn’t know how long we’d driven off the road, but it hadn’t seemed all that far last night.

“Can we follow them out?” I said.

“Or wait here for someone to find us.”

“Do you think anyone’s looking?” My eyes drifted to the tent. Mahoney was laid out on his frayed sleeping bag, eyes open, dentures poking past his ashy lips. I was terrified he’d sit up. “Let’s go, Dunk.”

We found an old backpack in the van. Also a few cans of Coke, half a bag of barbecue chips, a Three Musketeers bar, some rags and a bottle of vitamin caplets big enough to choke an elephant. Glossy magazines with pictures of muscled-up men; other magazines of naked ladies — Dunk put one of those in the pack. We left the pills and empty beer bottles.

Dunk found a box of bullets in the glovebox and fiddled with the pistol. I was afraid it’d go off accidentally, leaving a smoking ring in his forehead. The cylinder fell open. Dunk picked out the spent cartridges, slotted in fresh ones and thumbed the safety. He put it in the backpack and gave the Buck knife to me.

What about the tent? We could burn it, or leave it open for the animals to find Bruiser. He had dragged us out here, got drunk, gone mad and died. What did we owe him?

“We could … roll him up in the tent? Put some stones on to hold it down.”

Dunk sawed his arm across his nose. “He’s just worm food now, anyway.”

The stones were still warm from the fire. We rolled the biggest ones to the tent. Dunk kicked the tent poles away. It collapsed with an outrush of foul air as the canvas sagged over Mahoney’s body. I could make out his face where the material lay across the hawklike bridge of his nose.

We heaped stones on the tent’s edges. Dunk lifted the biggest one, cradled it to his gut, and dropped it. Mahoney’s body bent at the waist — heels raising up, nose straining against the canvas — then lay flat.

Dunk shrugged the pack onto his shoulders and we followed the tire tracks out of the clearing.

The woods were alive with movement. Here a spooked rush of limbs. There a flurry of wings. All of it was timid. Funny to think that, in daylight, a pair of kids could be lords of the forest.

The only creatures who didn’t fear us were the insects. Mosquitoes helicoptered around my ears, giving off a maddening whine. One drew so close that I was sure it would fly straight into the canal and then into my brain to suck the blood out of the grey matter. When it landed on the hard little hump above my eardrum I pinched it between my fingers; the bastard crumpled with a satisfying feel, like softest metal. The satisfaction was short-lived, as the bugs had found us by then: they were everywhere, crawling and whining and buzzing, drinking our blood and sipping our sweat. Soon my arms were covered in angry whitened bites.

The day was cool beneath the leaves. Shafts of sunlight sparkled, dizzyingly bright, moving in squiggly patterns on the ground as the wind stirred the trees. Gnats meshed above puddles of water, coiling up in bug tornadoes. The heat evaporated the morning’s dew and gave the air a sweet green smell.

Dunk moved confidently, head down, thumbs hooked under the backpack straps. The scabs on his elbows shone like obsidian. Our breath came lightly as our feet flashed over the earth. We seemed to be making decent time, though our finish line was unknown.

We came to a break in the trees. A falcon circled in the sky, the white tips of its wings standing out sharply against the edgeless blue.

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” said Dunk. A squashed gnat was stuck to his front tooth. It looked like a poppy seed.

A stream trickled across the path. Minnows like tiny silver arrows darted and settled in the glassy water, which ran around the rocks in eddies.

Dunk scooped his hand along the stream’s edge and came up with a mudpuppy, an eel-like creature with stunted appendages like mouse paws. It thrashed in Dunk’s palm, whipping back and forth in spine-snapping spasms. Dunk returned it to the water; we watched it squirm under a flat, sandy rock, turn and peer up at us from its muddy bunker.

The slime-covered rocks above the water’s surface reminded me of Chia Pets. Dirty collars of foam surrounded most of them, and the water smelled funky: a waft of sulphur from a struck match.

“Be careful,” Dunk said. “I don’t want to carry you if you twist an ankle.”

“You think I want to carry you?”

Dunk hopscotched across the rocks easily. I followed him but slipped on the last rock and got a huge soaker. “Fuckballs!”

Dunk hooted. My socks squelched, mud squeezing out of the eyelets. I flicked water at him off the toe of my sneaker.

“Hey, watch it!” Dunk skipped aside, still laughing.

It pissed me off. Dunk always beat me. In our two-man contest I always took the booby prize.

An expanse of sun-baked clay unfurled past the stream. The van’s tires had left no impression in it. We walked to a spot where the clay gave way to a drywash. There was nothing but polished stones and nappy scrub that would have sprung right up after the van had gone over it, leaving no clue.

Dunk wiped the sweat off his forehead with the hem of his T-shirt. His hip bones stood out above his belt, as pronounced as ears. My wet shoe baked in the sun, its rotten-algae smell infiltrating my nose. I stood on my tiptoes, straining for sounds of civilization, the silky shrriiip of car tires on the road. Something. But there was nothing except nature, dominated by the throaty gurgle of the stream. For the first time in my life I found this to be a scary sound.

Dunk said, “Which way?”

I slapped a mosquito. It left a spiky blot of blood on my wrist above the big blue vein. I pointed. “That way looks flatter.”

Dunk said, “Okay … but what did our Scout leader say about following a stream?”

I rubbed my temples, massaging the skin the way Mom did for Dad when he came home after a frazzling day. It stimulates the thinking muscle, she’d say.

“He said a small stream leads to a bigger stream, which leads to a river which leads to a lake which leads to a road,” I said.

The streambed carried on for a few hundred yards before hooking around a clump of green bushes. A rime of earth ran along the stream’s edge, making the side sun-cracked but passable.

Duncan said: “Let’s follow it.” He took a rag out of the backpack and tied it to a tree branch. “If we need to come back and go the other way, we’ll know this was where we were … or if we come past this again, we’ll know we’re not very good at orienteering.”

The stream meandered through the woods, a path of least resistance, splitting around molehills to leave small grass-topped islands. Water boatmen paddled in still pools, their bloated bodies moving in clumsy circles. Water skimmers zipped here and there. I’d once asked my father why they didn’t sink and he’d told me they were so light that they could dance along the water without falling into it. “There’s a skin on the water, like the skin that forms on top of pudding,” he’d told me. “A water skimmer’s body is lighter than water, believe it or not, so they can walk on the water just like you or I walk on a floor.”

The temperature rose. Trickles of sweat cut down my face; wet patches formed under my arms. A dark T appeared on the back of Dunk’s T-shirt. The sun dipped behind a bank of grey clouds but it didn’t get any cooler — if anything it was hotter, as if the sun, beating down on those rain-packed clouds, threw a blanket of broiling air over us.

Dunk held a steady pace, hitching his pack up on his back, hopping instinctively over spots where the shore threatened to crumble into foot-soaking pockets of mud — pockets that I would’ve stepped in had he not been guiding. The stream grew steadily narrower. We followed it down a long slope through a glade of low-hanging willows whose branches dipped right into the water; it was like walking through a series of doorways strung with beaded curtains.

The stream was now narrow enough that Dunk could straddle it, his feet on either side. And now the woods changed, too. Where before everything was bright green, shot through with the gold of sunlight through the leaves, by afternoon it changed to the denser, darker green of pine needles so thick the light could not penetrate: the sunlight lay on top of the needles, making it feel as if we were insects picking our way across a saw blade.

We followed the stream, which by then — as we’d probably both admitted to ourselves but hadn’t dared vocalize yet — was only a sad trickle as it cut through a stand of pines. Big grey spiders suspended themselves on webs between the conifers. Dunk touched his finger to the centre of one web. A spider picked its way down like an inverted tightrope walker, the gossamer bowing with its weight. It stopped before reaching Dunk’s finger, thrown off by the heat maybe, then danced onto his fingertip. Dunk held it in his palm: a bead of swirling, concentrated smoke.

“It’s not poisonous,” he said, returning the spider to its web.

“How do you know?”

“Well, it didn’t bite me.”

After that we didn’t worry about walking through the webs. It felt nasty stomping like Godzilla through Tokyo, but we wanted to get back to our homes. The pines thinned to a stretch of waist-high bushes hung with bright red berries — the kind our scoutmaster called bird berries, because only birds could eat them. I was so hungry. All I could remember eating last night was licorice at the arena and a chunk of raccoon. I stared longingly at the berries hanging in plump bunches — couldn’t I try just a few? But I pictured my stomach swelling and splitting, my red-tinted guts spilling out like a frog’s who’d been force-fed Alka-Seltzer.

The air was shimmery with mosquitoes. Could you die of mosquito bites? I pictured my body full of tiny pinpricks where mosquitoes had pierced me, an empty skin-coloured balloon blowing in the breeze. Would a hiker find me, fold me up like a love letter, slip me in an envelope and mail me back to my parents?

Dunk shrugged the pack off. The straps left creases in his shoulders. We sat on a lichen-covered rock. The stream — what was left of it — trickled around the rock and down a shallow slope, disappearing into a series of puddles dulled with pond scum and alive with bugs.

We split the barbecue chips, which had been crushed into shrapnel during the hike. Dunk gave me one of the Cokes, warm and salty-tasting. I drank it too fast and got a head-rush. I belched and put the can in the pack. Maybe we could fill it with water later.

Dunk took the nudie magazine out. Its pages were greasy, as if they’d been sprayed with vegetable oil. The women were different than in the Baby Blue Movies. They had bruises. Some had weird scars on their bellies and others had black bars over their eyes. The women without bars stared with dead expressions, spreading their pinkish parts open.

Dunk said, “That girl has a black eye.” He threw the magazine on the ground.

The sun slid across the sky to hang above the blue hills to the west. I shut my eyes and saw my parents at the kitchen table. My father was wearing black-and-white-striped overalls, the kind prisoners wore in old movies. My mother’s fingers steepled under her lips, as if she were suffering in some manner I couldn’t name.

Dunk reached down for the nudie mag and stuffed it back inside the pack. “We can use it to start a fire.”

There was no choice but to keep going in hopes the stream would pick up again. The ground was as soft as stale sponge cake and the bugs were now everywhere—midges, maddening brainless midges that rose in seething clouds and flew up my nose, into my mouth and ears. They weren’t even worth slapping; it worked best just to wave at them, batting them away from my face.

My sneaker punched through a stable-looking scrim of dirt into a syrupy pit of stinky mud. I reefed my foot back but the greedy mud held on to my Chuck Taylor, pulling it halfway off my foot; mud flowed over the lip and into the toe. I leaned on a sapling — it cracked when I put my weight on it, rotted roots bulging out of the ground — and pried my sneaker up. Mud spattered to the ground like black pancake batter. I wiped out my sneaker with a handful of yellowed grass and put it back on. “My mom’s gonna kill me for mucking up my new shoes,” I said.

We were standing in the middle of a lowland marsh, what my dad called a muskeg. All around were dead trees, many of them split in half by lightning or snapped crossways under their own weight. Their bark was stripped and their trunks Swiss-cheesed by termites or woodpeckers. It struck me that the swampy ground was no more than a thin crust covering a vast pool of decay: a mulch of rotted trees and vegetation and the carcasses of whatever idiotic creatures might willingly inhabit such a place. Rising from still pools of water were more Chia Pet hummocks tangled over with vivid purple, ivy-like weeds. The air sang with midges and the dragonflies who dined on them.

“What now?” Dunk asked.

I squinted against the iron-grey sky. Was that a hint of greenery beyond the dismal grey? Maybe the stream re-established itself?

I took a tentative step, putting weight on my forward foot. My toe sunk down like it would on a soccer field soaked with a week’s worth of rain; dingy water filled the depression. Up rose that horrid gassy stink.

Dunk stepped past, hitching the straps on his backpack. “Come on,” he said grimly.

By the time we were deep into the muskeg — and it didn’t take long — we couldn’t have turned back if we’d wanted to. We hopped from one hummock to the next, clambering over blowdowns carefully so we wouldn’t stab ourselves on the sun-bleached sticks. Before long those maddening flashes of green were visible in every direction — we may have even turned ourselves around, looking back at land we’d already traversed.

Dunk’s shoulders hunched with the determined gait of a mule plodding into a stiff wind. I wished he’d taken a second to think before offering us both up to this awful grey netherworld, but Dunk didn’t operate that way.

He hopped from an oozy patch of ground onto a hummock that wasn’t a hummock at all — more a toupée of grass covering a sinkhole. Watching him sink through was comical, as pratfalls can be: his hands flew up like a supplicant at church. Hallelujah, Lawd! He tilted, grabbing for a jutting branch and bellowing in frustration when it snapped in his hand. He fell into a patch of dead sedge bristling with insects and lay there for a second. Drawing his arms under him, he performed a clumsy pushup. His foot loosened from the muck with a sucking plop. His leg was dripping with black sludge all the way to his crotch, his sock hanging off his foot.

“Sweet fuckity fuck.”

He rolled his sleeve up, exhaled heavily and plunged his arm into the black hole. His eyes squeezed shut, lips skinned back from his teeth. Dribbles of muck speckled his chin. He rooted around in the blackness, his arm jerking spastically: either he was tearing through roots and sifting through brittle insect carapaces or else he’d felt something brush against his arm — something that lived down there, which I hardly wanted to envision.

When he withdrew his sneaker, it didn’t look like a sneaker at all; more like a dead, black-encrusted rodent. A thick stream of goo ran out of the heel, resembling the old motor oil Dad drained from his car. Dunk ripped a spongy beard of moss off a nearby tree and swabbed off his sneaker, then stood and surveyed our position. Just hummocks and shattered trees and whatever lurked under the ground.

I pictured the muck beneath us becoming deeper and more treacherous. Would it get deep enough to suck us under? What lived in those festering black pools? The creatures who did were probably blind — no light down there, right? Blind but tenacious, as you’d need to be to live in sludge. Blind and tenacious and hungry.

The sun slanted through the dead trees, creating gasoline rainbows on the oily water. Bugs coiled from tufts of boggy grass and crawled out of shattered tree trunks. They were all colours, but mainly that strange grey that suited a muskeg — bugs so grey they were almost translucent, an indication that these bugs were barely living, possessing no organs or brains. Creatures of idiotic instinct that pinged ceaselessly off my arms and neck. After a while I didn’t even flinch as they danced around my head in a maddening corona.

An hour passed, then two. My mood soured as the ground grew swampier. I got a drencher as my foot slipped off a hummock into a moat of brown water. I earned another on my next footstep, sneaker sinking into a pocket of puddinglike mud that moulded to my foot so perfectly you’d think it had been custom-fitted just for me.

“Ah, shit-sticks,” I said, too tired to care. “Crap on a cracker.”

We decided it was best to take our sneakers off, reasoning that before long we’d sacrifice one or both to the sinkholes. We sat on a bleached log and pulled them off, knotted the laces and wrapped them around our fists the way boxers do with hand-wraps, their wet tongues lapping our knuckles. Some debate was given to whether we should doff our socks, too, but the idea of walking barefoot through the syrupy pools was too disturbing.

We began hopping gingerly, jeans rolled past our kneecaps. Shards of dead grass poked through my socks, stinging like nettles. We went from one hummock to the next, hoping each would withstand our weight, steadying ourselves with branches and the sick trees that pushed out of the earth like whitened spears. When those weren’t close at hand we simply held our arms out for balance — a pair of dirty, inelegant Flying Wallendas.

I ran my tongue over my chapped lips — I was deliriously thirsty — and got a taste of the mud I was tromping through. Pure putrid, like biting into a carrot that had sat in a vegetable crisper until it turned droopy, wrinkled, brown.

At last we reached a spot with no hummocks within jumping distance. Fatigue hived in the dark half-moons under Dunk’s eyes. We steeled ourselves and then stepped into the stagnant water, stirring up a platoon of water skimmers and releasing a reek of boggy rot. We sank until the white orbs of our kneecaps shone above the water. My feet squished through cold, congealed gravy. Bubbles quivered up through the water to burst with a sulphury stink; black shrapnel that looked like cockroach exoskeletons swirled and settled back under the water.

We trudged in lurching strides, looking like a couple of Dr. Frankenstein’s monsters. The water’s surface was dotted with green blooms like baby lily pads. They detached from their moors along the edges of the hummocks, trailing thin filaments that reminded me of bean sprouts; these eddied round our legs like stingless jellyfish.

The ground under the water was solid — or at least it wasn’t getting any less solid. It felt as if I was walking on a carpet of cow intestines, the kind they sold at the butcher shop as “honeycomb tripe”—I knew because Dad had come home with a plastic bag of them one afternoon, so fresh that blood had pooled in the bag; he’d hoped Mom would fry them with onions, a dish he’d eaten as a child, but Mom said she’d just as soon eat boiled toenails.

Half-rotted sticks jabbed the soft webbing between my toes. There were phantom stirrings against my skin, like the tails of inquisitive fish — then they were gone. Worst of all, I wasn’t certain we were making headway. Moving, yeah, but to what purpose? I could see nothing ahead but dull grey edged by that maddening, elusive band of green.

My foot brushed something hard and covered in slime — a log, maybe. Or a petrified Burmese python …

… probably a log. No, definitely a log.

The afternoon wore into evening. A rock of despair settled on my chest. I couldn’t imagine being stuck in the muskeg as darkness fell, forlornly perched on a hummock like a frog on a toadstool. The insects would drive me insane. But a glint of hope emerged as the band of green thickened towards the horizon.

“There,” Dunk said, as much to himself as to me. “See? See?”

Our pace quickened; we’d grown accustomed to the cold custard underfoot. My feet got ahead of my body — I tripped over a root and pitched out full-length, splashing and sputtering. Brackish water surged past my gritted teeth and I gagged helplessly, tasting barbecue chips at the back of my throat. I was scared I’d swallowed bog water teeming with mosquito eggs. Would they hatch in my stomach and drain me from the inside out? No, I decided, settling on it as a simple article of faith. Absolutely not possible.

Dunk helped me up. We plodded on, sneakers thumping hollowly at our hips. The water got shallower: it sank to our shins, then to our ankles. Quite abruptly the land was firm. Greenness assaulted our eyes after what felt like a month of permanent grey.

We found a boulder. Dunk set his hands on it and pushed, halfway convinced it too would topple into a sinkhole. We sat and consulted over the state of our socks, which had torn off our feet — one of Dunk’s was now a sweatband around his ankle.

We dried ourselves with the rags in the backpack. Dunk wrapped one around his foot, a poor substitute for his ruined sock. We pulled our shoes on with aching slowness — they were cold and clammy, and they reminded me of pulling on still-wet swim trunks for early-morning swimming lessons — and continued into the darkening day.

Twilight transformed the landscape. Everything blended into every other thing, the ground and bushes and rocks layering over themselves. My neck tingled. I’d managed to burn myself in the bog. Usually my mom never let me go out without a slather of sunscreen, plus a stripe of zinc oxide on my nose.

The wind curled across the earth, licking at the sunburn and the wet cuffs of my jeans and chilling me to the core. I thought back to that Coke I’d drunk about a hundred years ago. My tongue ballooned in my mouth, a dry sponge covered in raspy white bumps.

A shrill peep-peep-peep came from the bottom of a tree with yellow bark. Each peep sounded like a whistle being blown, as if whatever was making those peeps was using its whole body to make them. Hunting in the grass, we found a baby bird. I almost stepped on it — head tucked, it looked like a pinky-grey rock. “Jeez!” I yanked my foot back, cringing at the thought of its nutlike body pulped under my sneaker.

“He must have fallen out of his nest,” said Dunk.

It didn’t even look like a bird, or something that might turn into one. It had no feathers. Its wings were the colour of my grandfather’s fingernails, its legs tiny thumbs. Its beak was the bright yellow of a McDonald’s straw, splitting its dark blue head in half. When it peeped, the edges of its beak fluttered like tissue paper. You could see through its skin like through a greasy fast-food bag: the dark pinbone of its spine, the weird movement of its guts. There was a milky ball of fat where its tail would pop out.

When Dunk reached to touch it I grabbed his wrist.

“You can’t. If it gets human smell on it, its mom won’t take it back. It’ll smell like us, not like a bird. Its mom’ll be scared. She won’t feed it.”

“That’s stupid.”

“It’s, like, a scientific fact.”

Dunk hunted through the backpack and found a dry rag. He slipped it over his hand and picked the bird up in the same way you’d pick up a dog turd. The creature peeped crazily before settling. Dunk rolled the rag into a little nest with the bird in the middle.

“Stupid mamma bird,” he said.

Crickets chirped in the green gloom. Through the trees, the sky was bruising towards purple. It’s scary the way night falls in the woods: more abrupt, unsoftened by headlamps or street lamps. The only light comes from stars that bloom in the velvet sky, sharpening as darkness closes around each shining pinprick. Night in the forest falls like a guillotine blade: quick and sharp, cutting you off from everything.

The woods changed. Where before there was only the sound of our footsteps and breathing, now there were sly rustlings from all angles. Yet if I were to turn and peer into those black pools linked by long shadows, I’d see nothing. Whatever stirred would pause, hold its breath, melt into the landscape until I turned away — at which point it would stalk us again. A sense of desolation settled within me: a cold, slimy stone lodged under my lungs. There was nothing happy about the woods, I thought, especially at night.

We unpacked our belongings under a sweep of elms. What had seemed like plenty that morning now looked pitiful. A chocolate bar, a dirty flannel blanket, a book of matches from a club called Pure Platinum, a nudie mag and a gun and two empty Coke cans.

We built a ring of rocks. Dunk tore pages out of the magazine. I stacked a teepee of sticks over the paper. Five matches in the matchbook. The match-heads were a dull crumbly red. The striking strip was shiny-smooth.

We huddled over the firepit to keep the wind at bay. Dunk ran a match down the strike-strip. The paper shaft bent. The match didn’t catch. He pressed the match to the strip with his thumb. It burst into flame. A fragile flame cupped in Dunk’s palm. I held my breath as he touched it to the paper.

The wind snuck between us. Whuff. Darkness. Something rustled in the tree above, followed by a deep-throated cackle that ascended through several octaves before tapering to a weird shattering sob.

“It’s a bird,” Dunk said. “A stupid little bird.”

He tore another match. “Get close,” he said, scratching it on the striking strip. The shaft tore nearly in half. He struck it again. The match-head went up in a hot spark and instantly burned out.

I hated everyone who’d had anything to do with those matches. Whoever made them, sold them or thought they were good for much at all.

Dunk handed them to me. “You try.”

I tore one out and folded the book closed. The match felt worthless: flimsy, already damp with my sweat. It was the first time I’d ever really needed something to work. Sometimes your whole life came down to some silly little thing you never thought could matter, not in a million years. A stupid match.

I hunched so far over the firepit that I nearly nosedived into it. If I lit the match as close to the paper as possible, the wind wouldn’t get a chance to snuff it. I ran it down the strip, flicking my wrist like I’d seen men do at the Bisk on their smoke breaks.

It caught. Dunk cupped his hands around mine. Light broke between our fingers in golden spears so bright they seemed solid, as if they might snap like icicles. I touched it to the paper. Flame leapt from match to paper. Relief washed over me.

Wind curled into the pit and between my fingers, silky-cool. Whuff.

Darkness — or not quite. A half-moon burned at the paper’s edge, a fine orange band no bigger than a fingernail clipping. Then it went out.

“Fucking wind.”

“Scouts taught us how to light a one-match fire, right? We’ve still got two left.” Dunk was smiling. His teeth glowed like chips of phosphorus. It amazed me that he’d find anything funny about this.

I blew on my fingertips to dry them, then tore out the second-to-last match. It had to light. Not because the law of averages said so, or because if it didn’t we’d be stuck in the dark with that cackling thing in the tree. No, the match had to light because we were two scared kids lost in the woods. The universe owed us that much, didn’t it?

It flared on the first strike. I stretched towards the paper, fingers steady. Wind licked at the flame, blowing it sideways but not quite out. I held it to a ragged edge where the paper had been torn from the magazine, the threadlike fibres oh so flammable, please please please, and the match burned down to my fingertips as the heat intensified, becoming unbearable, please please PLEASE, and the flame took hold along that edge, timid at first but becoming greedy, devouring the paper and Dunk let out a giddy whoop as the fire burned up and up, releasing oily smoke, eating a hole through the crumpled face of a girl with a black bar over her eyes.

We built the fire into a blaze, heaping wood up and laughing until we were out of breath, dancing a crazy jig round the flames.

The burning wood fell inward with a soft, cindery sound that sent a great coil of sparks up to extinguish on the overhanging leaves. The coals brightened and dimmed in the wind. The baby bird peeped softly.

“Do you think it’s hungry?” Dunk said.

“I’m hungry.”

“Me, too.”

I found the bottle of vitamins in the backpack. Each was three times the size of the Flintstones vitamins Mom used to make me take at breakfast. They smelled like a barnyard, of hay and horses. It seemed wise to take them, like medicine.

“Do you think we can survive on vitamins?” Dunk said.

“We probably need other things, like … steaks and eggs and potatoes. Vitamins are just one thing.”

“Popeye lives on one thing. Spinach.”

“No, Popeye eats spinach to get strong so he can save Olive Oyl. He probably eats lots of other stuff — just not on camera.”

“Oh.”

I unwrapped the Three Musketeers bar, broke it in half and held the pieces out to Dunk. “You pick.” The chocolate was stale with a whitened waxy film but still, it was the best thing I’d ever eaten. Once the rush wore off I realized how hungry I still was, and thirsty, and scared.

We lay down and stared at the sky. Dunk held the bird on his chest, wrapped in the rag. A red light flashed across the sky.

Dunk said: “Plane or satellite?”

“I don’t know. Which goes faster?”

“I’ve never been in a plane,” Dunk said. “Or a satellite.”

“We took a plane to Myrtle Beach on vacation,” I said. “And to Disney World.”

“I used to ride my bike to the Point, where the river bends out before the Falls, y’know? I watched the planes come in. Some you couldn’t see until they were just about on top of you. They came out of the clouds real low, a big whooosh and there they were. Sort of like sharks, you know? A shark coming at you in the water — you can’t see it until it’s just about in front of you. The grey planes looked especially like sharks. Scary but kind of cool.”

The baby bird went up and down on his chest with each heavy inhalation. “Hey, Owe?”

“Yeah?”

“You think it’s true what Bruiser said?”

“About what?”

“Those dogs.”

“In the satellite?”

His face was still held by the sky, but I could tell this was pretty important to him. Could be he’d been sitting on it all day.

“Maybe, Dunk. I don’t know … but not for sure.”

“No?”

“How far is another planet from here? Real far from where we’re looking, but maybe not. And a satellite goes pretty fast. Maybe they just drifted through space and landed on another planet.”

“You think they could have?”

“Why not? A planet we don’t even know about. Maybe it’s sunny all the time there. Maybe the water’s red.”

“Red?”

“Or purple or gold. Anything but blue. Maybe the sun is blue. Maybe meatballs grow on trees.”

He laughed. “Meatball trees.”

“Or maybe it’s a lot like here, but a long time ago. Like back in caveman times. Or … or nobody and nothing. Just the two of them.”

“I guess they’d be scared.”

I bent my knees and wrapped my arms around them. “But they’d already travelled through space, right?” I said, resting my chin on my kneecaps. “They climbed out of that broken satellite and breathed that fresh air and I bet it was pretty great. Mahoney said they were mongrels, right? They never had someone to feed them. They could hunt and kill and drink water from streams.”

“Gold water.”

“Yeah, gold.”

“What would they hunt?”

I turned to face Dunk, resting my cheek on my knees. “I guess the same things they would hunt here. Rabbits and rats. Squirrels.”

“You think they’d have rabbits on that planet?”

“Maybe. Or maybe there the rabbits are big as cars. Maybe bears are small. Maybe you could hold a shark in your palm there.”

“So they would run away from giant rabbits.”

“And hunt tiny bears. Or maybe there are animals we’ve never seen.”

“Things with tentacle faces. Things with lots of teeth.”

“Harmless things, too. Things that look like baby chicks, only ten feet tall.”

“A ten-foot-tall baby chick?”

“No, just a yellow fuzzy thing who happens to be ten feet tall.”

“Can it talk?”

“I guess, but not in a language dogs would understand.”

I tried to think about fuzzy ten-foot baby chicks, but I kept thinking about things with tentacle faces and lots of teeth.

“Owe?”

“Yeah?”

“You think things might hunt them?”

“… I guess so. But they travelled far and they were still alive. That has to count for something, right? So yeah, things hunt them. So what? Things hunted them here, too. The dog catcher, right? They just kept on going.”

“Kept going, mmm, yeah.”

“And maybe they found someplace safe. Or I don’t know, maybe the whole planet is run by dogs. They get to be, like, kings of Dog Planet.”

“Why would they be kings? They just showed up.”

“Well, whatever. Maybe one of them gives a very inspiring speech and they make him the president.”

“Of the whole planet?”

I shrugged: why not?

“Hey, Owe?”

“Yeah?”

“Meatball trees would be awesome.”

“Totally. Eat them like apples.”

“Oh, man! Big greasy apples … We shouldn’t talk about food.”

I rolled onto my side. If I curled up and held my stomach, maybe it wouldn’t growl so much. Sounds came out of the darkness. Some like nails clawing into rotten wood. Others like the click-click of naked bones.

A slow, steady breathing wrapped around my shoulders then went out again, hugging the trees and sliding along the ground like the never-ending exhale of some huge creature with lungs the size of football stadiums. The heart of the woods beat through me: a soothing thack, a giant underground muscle pumping green blood through every root and into every tree, everything connected to everything else under the dirt.

I dozed and woke with Dunk settled next to me. He’d draped the blanket over us. His breath feathery on the back of my neck.

I fell into a deeper sleep and awoke with Dunk’s fingers clutching my chest.

“Something’s out there.”

The worry in his voice sent a spike of ice down my spine. The fire was dead. My feet were swollen and numb inside my sneakers, the blood pooled.

“Listen,” Dunk said urgently. “Can you hear it?”

The pressure of my held breath pressed against my eardrums, making it hard to hear anything. I forced myself to let it out in a shuddery hiss.

There were the usual clickings and rustlings that I’d almost gotten used to. But another sound, too. A soft noise atop those familiar ones, and beneath them at the same time.

“What is it?” I whispered.

Dunk blew on the coals, stirring the embers. An orange shine lit his face and gave me some confidence. He reached into the backpack. The light of a solitary star winked off the pistol’s silver barrel.

The sound approached then drifted away, switching places to come at us from a new angle.

It’s Bruiser Mahoney.

The thought snagged in my mind, a sticky black ball covered in fish hooks. Bruiser Mahoney was out there, alive but not really. He’d stalked all day and night and finally caught up. Sniffing us like a bloodhound, lumbering on all fours with his spine cracked out and shining like a half-buried centipede through the dead grey skin of his back. His dentures shoved past his sun-blistered lips and his face swollen with blood, his eyeballs two rotted grapes staring out of the piggy folds of flesh to make him look like a giant prehistoric slug. His fingernails matted with shreds of the tent he’d clawed free of. He’d followed us without stopping, blundering at first but becoming more aware, strides lengthening as he pursued us through the undergrowth. And now he was here.

You ever see an old clown, boys? Clowns don’t die. But sometimes they come back … oh, yessss …

“It’s him,” I said. “It’s Bruiser.”

“It’s not. It’s something, but not that.”

Except it was Mahoney. His hair hung in tangled, mud-clotted ropes. His stomach ballooned up with gas and his joints twisted with rigor mortis. Bones sticking out of his skin where he’d broken them on rocks, not noticing that he’d done so or not caring. The sounds suddenly made sense. The first was the rubber-band sound of Mahoney’s naked muscles: with the skin stripped off his arms and legs, his tendons had cured in the sun and now they creaked when he flexed them. The sucking sound was Mahoney’s rotted lungs.

God rot me, boys …

His lungs were filling and emptying — not because he needed to breathe, but because his body was still mindlessly doing what it had always done.

God’ll rot you, too, soon enough …

Would he eat us? Or just tear us apart? His rage seemed so unfair. We couldn’t have taken him with us — he weighed a million pounds.

The sticks caught. Firelight pushed back the darkness. Dunk stood, baby bird in one hand, gun in the other. Did he even know how to shoot? You could only learn so much from watching The Equalizer and Magnum, P.I.

Firelight bled to the edge of the clearing, flickering against the thickets. My heart was pounding so hard, my body so keyed up, that I saw everything in hyper-intense detail. Every dew-tipped blade of grass. The knife-edge serration of every leaf. My eyes hunted for the gleam of Bruiser Mahoney’s black eyes, my nose probing the breeze for his decaying stench. A gun would do nothing against him. It might chip off a little hide but you couldn’t kill something that was already dead.

“Over there,” Dunk said.

It skulked out of the bushes, sleek body pressed to the ground. Its fur shone like pewter. Its skull was a sloped wedge like a doorstop, eyes midnight-black, the yellow tips of its canine teeth showing.

“Just a coyote,” said Dunk. “A stupid coydog.”

I’d never seen one up close. It was about the size of a springer spaniel. But there was nothing doglike about it, at least not like the floppy-eared, slobbering, ball-chasing dogs in our neighbourhood. This creature was built for wild living, a coiled tension in its every movement. It didn’t run circles around the kitchen yelping for kibble: what it caught, it ate, and if it didn’t catch anything it starved. A ball of muscle was packed behind its jaw, built by cracking bones to lap up the marrow. It made no sound at all: its next meal could be anywhere, so it had learned to creep silently.

“Go on,” Dunk said sharply.

It melted into the darkness.

I woke with razor blades slashing my guts.

Air hissed between my teeth in a tea-kettle shriek. The slashing gave way to a steady pulse and grind: a clock’s worth of rusted gears meshing in my stomach.

I crawled to the bushes. Dots burst before my eyes in crazy gnat-swarms. My gut kicked and I puked so hard that everything went black. My nostrils filled with bile, thick strings of drool swaying from my lips. I’d hardly thrown up anything, just a sad yellow mess in the clover. It was awful, feeling sick and starving at the same time.

I sat cross-legged, knees hugged to my chest, listening to terrible wet retching sounds from the trees. Dunk walked out wiping his lips. The skin around his eyes was butter-yellow and his hands were shaking.

“Must have been something I ate,” he said, and managed to laugh.

The sun tilted over the scrub and tinder-wood, glinting off shards of granite in the rocks but not giving any heat. I was so thirsty. I wiped sticky white paste off my lips and smeared it on my jeans. I ducked behind some bushes and unzipped my fly. The colour of my urine shocked me: dark yellow, like I was pissing tea. I didn’t know if I was sick or if it was the extra vitamins my body was getting rid of, the ones it couldn’t use.

Dunk breathed heavily, bending over and bracing his palms on his knees.

“We should get going, Owe.”

“I’m so thirsty.”

“Me, too. Maybe there’s a stream soon, like the one we crossed yesterday.”

I thought about that stream with its Chia Pet rocks and muddy bottom. I wouldn’t have drunk from it then, but if that same stream were running in front of me now I’d guzzle it dry.

We packed everything up, though there wasn’t much left. The baby bird lay on its side in the rag, peeping softly.

“Must be hungry,” Dunk said. He picked it up.

“What does a baby bird eat?”

“No idea. Let’s go.”

He walked ahead, hopping over rocks and stomping through low bushes. I had to pump my legs to keep up. Even if Dunk was sick — and he was, at least as sick as me — it wouldn’t slow him down. He had that same machinelike intensity I’d seen the day we’d met in the schoolyard. He’d keep pushing until his body broke to pieces. It didn’t matter if his opponent was another kid or Mother Nature herself.

The sound of rushing water was so sly at first — an almost imperceptible gurgle that knit with the rustle of the leaves. Dunk pushed an armload of whiplike willow branches aside and there it was.

The stream was much narrower than the one we’d crossed the day before. It was clear with an undernote of heavy blue, which might have been the darkened reflection of the sky on its surface. It bent like a gooseneck around an outcrop of ragged-edged rocks and continued on through some willows.

It looked like heaven.

We stood by the bank, dumbfounded. Dunk turned and gave me a sideways smile.

“It’s probably okay to drink,” I said.

“Aren’t we supposed to boil it?”

“That’s only water that’s not flowing, like a pond or a lake.”

It was as if, since there were no adults around, we had to try to act like grown-ups and make the grown-up choice. Which was stupid because we were kids and we’d make a kid’s choice: we would drink the water no matter what.

We dipped our Coke cans, our hands trembling with anticipation. It was all I could do not to plunge my head in the stream. I tilted the can to my lips and tasted the water behind my molars: clean and sweet with the residue of Coke at the bottom of the can.

Had water ever tasted this good? Had anything? It hit my stomach like iced lead. I threw some up, took two deep breaths and forced myself to keep drinking. The buzz inside my head subsided.

We drank until our bellies were swollen and let go of giant, watery belches. Dunk wet his fingertips and let a few droplets fall into the baby bird’s mouth.

We hopped over the stream, water sloshing in our guts. I was still starving but I felt a thousand times better. I spotted a heron downstream, balanced on one leg like a ballerina. White tail feathers and a monstrous air sac pulsating from its blue breast. Seeing me, it made a hoarse stuttering cry full of pips and croaks like rust in a pivot. It muscled itself into the air, arrowing into the lightening blue, and a part of my heart went with it, wanting to see what it saw, to know if we were near a house or a road or if — as I feared — there was nothing but marsh and scrub and hungering bugs.

Late in the afternoon we entered a glade of enormous maples and oaks. It was dark and heavy in there; the forest greenness tinted the air. I ached all over and my ass stung and my thighs chafed with every step.

My foot had been bothering me the last hour. I sat on a tree sawed in half by lightning and unlaced my sneaker. A blister had spread across my heel, the dead white skin at its edges milky like fish gills while the flesh inside was tender-pink.

“That’s a doozy,” said Dunk.

I pulled the sock on gingerly. Socks, matches — items you generally possess in such abundance that you forget how valuable they are.

Isolated raindrops pattered the ground. Soon the sky opened and rain sheeted down. Water collected on the leaves, draining into the glade in ragged streamers. Rain hit the back of my hand and ran between my fingers. A wave of despair rocked me; I concentrated on the things tying me to the world. My favourite movie was E.T. The number one song on 97.7’s Top Nine at Nine countdown was “Pour Some Sugar on Me.” My bed at home had a Star Wars bedspread with a grape juice stain on C-3PO’s face.

We came upon an anthill that looked like a miniature volcano. It rose to a tall spouted opening, from which ants poured in abundance. They chained down the hill in the chlorophyll-green light, moving in dark shining braids like soldiers on the march.

“You figure the bird eats ants?” Dunk asked.

How would I know if a baby bird ate ants? Besides which, grubbing around in an anthill while the sun went down was a waste of time, and I said so.

But Dunk insisted. We got down on our knees and tried to catch a few. The hill’s caldera crumbled the instant my fingers touched it. Ants poured out in a mad frenzy, racing up our legs and down our sleeves. It was funny — their legs tickled as they picked along the soft hairs on our arms — until they started to bite.

I’d had no idea ants could bite—sting, to be exact. Fiery needles stabbed me. Dunk and I jumped up, shrieking and swatting ourselves. Ants were everywhere: my chest, my armpits. Each individual bite wasn’t so bad — yellowjacket stings were much worse — but they peppered me all over.

“My back!” Dunk said. “Slap my back!”

I did, raising puffs of dust from his T-shirt. He did the same for me. After what felt like an endless battle the stings lessened. I peeled my shirt off. My sweat-stung skin was dotted with inflamed bumps that itched like the devil. My body was smeared with ant anatomies: their thoraxes and antennae and abdomens and legs squashed all over.

“Holy hell,” Dunk said, breathing raggedly. “That was a baaaaad idea, Kemosabe.”

“I told you it was a dumb idea.”

“No you didn’t,” Dunk said with a bewildered smile. “You said you had no clue.”

“It was stupid.” I was spoiling for a fight by then, uninterested in logical arguments. “Moronic,” I said, a word I’d heard my father use in conversation with a drywaller who’d gypped him.

“Well, sor-ree,” Dunk said. He slanted his head at me quizzically — but the slant held an edge of menace.

“It’s not funny, man. My dad always says, Measure twice, cut once — which means think before you act.”

“Yeah? My dad says don’t be a fuckin’ pussy.”

“Your dad doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

Dunk’s chin jutted. “He knows as much as your dad does.”

“Then why isn’t he in an office at the Bisk instead of on the line? Why doesn’t he smell of aftershave instead of Chips Ahoy?”

Dunk rounded his shoulders and stuffed his bird-free hand in his pocket, where it balled into a fist.

“I’m not my dad, Owe. And you’re not your dad, either.” He chewed the inside of his cheek. His arms quivered all the way down to his fingers; the hand that held the bird shook it in its sock nest. Looking back, I can tell Dunk had to summon every ounce of self-control — otherwise he’d’ve punched the living shit out of me right then.

When the rain let up we exited the glade, Dunk leading and me trudging behind. Mist rolled over our sneakers, perfuming the air with the scent of every green thing.

Late-afternoon sun baked down, prickling the burn on my neck and the raw bites on my arms. Dunk and I were beyond tired now. It seemed as if every topic of conversation — our favourite TV show (The Beachcombers), our favourite gum (Gold Rush, which came in a cloth sack, the gum shaped like gold nuggets) — funnelled towards a senseless argument.

When you and your best friend start arguing about bubble gum, you settle on silence as the best policy.

The cave lay halfway up an embankment studded with straggly pines. The incline was rinsed with grey stones each the size of a baby’s fist. Dunk picked one up and tossed it into the cave. It plinked somewhere past the mouth, giving way to a series of soft tinkles.

“Sounds empty,” he said.

The cave fell away in layers of flat grey rock. We stood under the overhang taking in the scent of our own stink, sweat and grime mixed with wood sap and smoke and dirt and dead bugs. I was aware of my body in ways that a twelve-year-old boy probably shouldn’t be. My guts were full of hardening concrete. Moon-slices of blood rimmed my fingernails.

We spent the next half-hour gathering firewood. I wondered if we ought to build the fire outside the cave, in the open where someone could see it. A helicopter maybe, searching for two lost boys. Late that afternoon I thought I’d heard the whuppa-whuppa of helicopter blades; they sounded incredibly close, just overhead, and a part of me actually believed that I’d look up and see it: a helicopter just like the one rich tourists rented out to get a bird’s-eye view of the Falls, the one that had its own landing pad on the roof of the Hilton Fallsview hotel.

But when I’d peered above me, the sky was empty. Maybe what I’d heard was the drone of mosquitoes. Afterwards the notion was one I continued to fixate on: hundreds of searchers looking for us. Perhaps hikers had stumbled across Mahoney’s van after it had showed up on a police all-points-bulletin sheet. If so, the cops and a small citizen’s brigade might be stomping through the woods right now. They’d have dogs with incredible noses hot on our scent; they’d be armed with walkie-talkies and bullhorns. If the wind died down and I strained my ears, I’d probably hear the distant barks of the search dogs.

But as shadows thickened and the colour drained out of the sky until only black was left, I heard no dogs. The mental image of a search faded. I trudged into the cave, where I made a teepee of sticks with the scrounged wood.

“We can’t do it there,” Dunk said. “Smoke will fill the cave and we’ll get affix … affix … affixated.”

“Asphyxiated.”

“Whatever. We’ll be dead.”

“So why don’t we light it here and move it out front? We only got one match.”

“Whatever.”

Dunk dug the matchbook out. The match looked so pitiful, half bent with red phosphorus flaking off the head. I almost didn’t care if it lit. If it didn’t we’d probably die tonight. If it did, we were simply granted another day. The sun would rise and our lot would be the same: starving, thirsty, alone and lonely. We’d be more lost, more bitten and scratched and burnt under the merciless sun, and tomorrow night we wouldn’t bother building a fire. We’d sit in the dark and freeze to death. Or the things in the woods with us would sense our weakness and take their due. Either way, we died. The only difference was that we’d suffer a little longer. Now or tomorrow or the day after. It was going to happen, right?

Dunk lit the fire. One match. Textbook. Our Scout leader would have shit a brick. We moved flaming sticks to the mouth of the cave. The fire sent up an orange cone that obscured everything beyond it, locking us in with its warmth and light. For the first time all day, I felt safe.

Dunk rooted through the pack. We both knew there was nothing in it. He pulled out the candy bar wrapper — it seemed like we’d eaten that about a billion years ago — and inspected it for leftover crumbs of chocolate. Finding none, he flicked it into the fire. The heat caved it in like a flower blooming in reverse. He picked up a pebble and put it in his mouth.

“Dad says if you suck on a stone it gets the saliva flowing so you don’t feel as thirsty.”

I put a pebble in my mouth, relishing its coolness beneath my tongue.

“Banana cream pie,” I said.

“What?”

“My mom says that if you, um, really concentrate and pretend you’re eating your favourite foods, you feel as full as if you’ve actually eaten them.”

“Yeah?”

“She says.”

Dunk scratched the ant stings on his legs — the heat was irritating my stings, too — and said: “Shepherd’s pie.”

“Tootsie Rolls.”

“Tollhouse cookies.”

“Sour cream and onion chips.”

“What brand?”

“Pringles.”

“Nice,” said Dunk. “Hungarian goulash.”

“Hawaiian pizza.”

“Kraft caramels.”

“Ballpark franks.”

Dunk dropped his head between his legs. “I don’t think it’s working.”

“Are you thinking about them? I mean, hard? You really have to picture it.”

“I’m seeing them … it just doesn’t work for me, Owe. Sorry.”

You have a wild imagination. That was what my parents said to me all the time. Having a wild imagination wasn’t so hot sometimes. I spat my pebble out.

Dunk lay on the cave floor and shaped his body around the fire. The cave stones glittered around his head, firelight making them move like insects.

I said: “You shouldn’t sleep with your ear on the ground. Bovine …”

I laboured over it — one simple word, two syllables: Bovine. Bovine the word was attached to Bovine the person, who was attached to many other things: schools and malls and phones and pizza parlours and my parents … and to policemen who helped kids who’d lost their way. And all those things were so, so far away.

“Bovine what?”

“Bovine says that earwigs crawl in your ears when you sleep. Said his dad had to bury a guy whose whole brain was eaten away by earwigs.”

Instinctively, Dunk cupped a hand over his ear. “How?”

“An earwig just crawled into the guy’s ear. Guy didn’t even know. Our brains don’t feel any pain, right? No nerves. If it was just one earwig, no big deal. But it was a female earwig, man — she laid eggs. They hatched inside the guy’s head and they started eating. Like, a giant buffet.

“But guess what? We only use ten percent of our brains, so it took a long time. Like, he’d forget where his car keys were. He was blinking all the time and couldn’t stop. Finally he couldn’t even remember his dog’s name. When he died Bovine says his dad took the body into the funeral parlour to prepare it for the casket. When he touched the guy’s face it caved right in. A million earwigs ran out of the eye sockets and nostrils and mouth. His dad almost went crazy on the spot, but he smoked a cigar to calm down.”

Dunk pulled his hand away from his ear and laid his head down again. “Bovine’s full of shit.”

He was right, of course. Bovine was so full of shit he squeaked. I don’t know why I’d even told the story. Maybe I’d wanted to scare Dunk just a little.

I’d been worried more or less permanently since Bruiser Mahoney turned off the main road into the wilderness. The worry had sunk so deep inside that I could only feel it now when it surged up from my bones: fear bitter in my mouth, thrashing behind my rib cage like a bird in cupped hands — but it was a needful terror and perhaps the last truly childlike instance of terror I’d ever feel.

As you get older, the texture of your fear changes. You’re no longer scared of a dead wrestler stalking you through the woods — even if your mind wants to go there, it’s lost the nimbleness to make those fantastic leaps of imagination. Your fears become adult ones: of crushing debts and extra responsibilities, sick parents and sick kids and dying without love. Fears of not being the man you thought you’d become back when you still believed wrestling was real and that you’d die in convulsions if you inhaled the white gas from a shattered light bulb.

“Hey, Owe?”

“Yeah?”

“Want to tell another story?”

“What kind of story?”

“Like last night. The dogs.”

“That wasn’t really a story,” I said. “Just something silly.”

“Anyway, if you wanted.”

I thought about it. The gears in my head meshed with a clicka-clicka-click, and soon the story was gushing out of me.

“There’s a place behind Niagara Falls, okay? Behind the water. Back there the rock is dark and dripping … it shines in the water that’s always falling. A man lives there. He’s been there since the Falls have. He’s old as the dinosaurs — older maybe. He’s short as a kindergartener. You can see his elbows and his knees and knuckles through his skin, which covers his bones like Vaseline. His body glows like those fish in the deepest parts of the ocean, the ones you can only see through submarine windows, right? He has no hair and his head is big and bulgy. Veins twist over it, but they’re not blue like the veins on my grandma’s arms because … there’s no blood. The man is filled with something else. He can’t hear anymore. The crash of water, it broke his eardrums. His eyes are milky marbles but he can see very well. The man doesn’t have a name because he comes from a time before anyone was around to give him one.

“There’s a tree behind the Falls, too. It grows out of the rock. The bark is the colour of fingernails and the branches reach high into the rock above. The tree has no top or bottom. It grows at both ends. The man sleeps in the tree … Actually, he doesn’t sleep. But he slips into a hole in the tree, which is hollow, and stands inside. This is the only place he can hear. He listens to the water rushing on the surface, the buzz of bugs and birds flapping their wings and fish flipping their tails.

“A shovel is leaned against the tree. The blade is old and chipped. Behind the tree is a patch of dirt … except not dirt. Black rock, like the charcoal that comes in those bags you buy at Canadian Tire … You know people go over the Falls, right? They used to do it in barrels. Other people got lost in the dark and fell or got drunk and … or they jumped. Most of them, you can’t even find their bodies. People think they get torn apart or trapped between rocks with the water pounding down. But they’re not lost. He finds them.

“The man has a net,” I said, “made from the thinnest threads. Thinner than fishing line or even spider’s web. He walks to the edge of the water and throws it. He pulls in the bodies of those who went over. It takes him a long time. His face crunches up and the veins swell on his skull. It is hard work, and very lonely.

“The bodies don’t always look so good. They are broken in many places. Sometimes he’s got to throw the net more than once. When he has all the pieces he digs a hole in that splintery rock and buries the body upside down, legs facing up and head pointing down. Only the feet poke out.

“It’s a special garden. Whatever’s planted grows the wrong way, down instead of up. The feet keep going down into it — first the ankles then the heels then the toes. It’s a swallowing garden. Before long it’s empty again.”

Dunk said: “Where do they go?”

“Wherever’s under the Falls. Nobody has ever come back … except one. That was a man who went over the night before he was supposed to get married. Everyone thought he’d died in the plunge. His parents had a funeral. They put sacks of flour in the coffin. But five years later … he was naked, the way Mrs. Lovegrove was that one time. Walking down the low road along the river. His body was perfect. Not a scratch. He looked younger than when he’d gone over. He was smiling at first, but soon he started to cry. The loudest and scariest, the most awful-sad cry you’ve ever heard. When a car stopped and the driver asked what was wrong, he said, ‘I wandered away. Why did I do that? It was so, so … perfect.’ Next his heart blew up. It popped like a balloon in his chest and he died.”

“What was so perfect?”

After a while I said, “Who knows?”

“That’s cheating.”

But even back then I knew cheating was a big part of telling a story.

“That’s BS, Owe,” Duncan persisted. “Sincerely.”

“How can you ask someone to tell a story then call BS when it doesn’t turn out the way you want?”

“Aw, maaan. What a gyp.” Dunk stirred the coals with a stick and grinned crookedly across the flames. “Still, cool story. A swallowing garden. Creepy.”

I closed my eyes. Firelight wavered against my eyelids. I thought about how I could fall asleep right there on the rocks — but if I did and if things stayed perfectly quiet, if the fire died and I felt nothing, I might never wake up. Whatever it was that usually pulled me back into the waking world just wouldn’t be there. I’d be too deep in dreams. And that didn’t really seem so bad.

“Hey, Owe?”

“Yeah?”

“I knew about the lead in the car.”

“What?”

“In the Kub Kar. I was there when my dad cut the hole. We melted the lead down in one of Mom’s old pots. It splashed Dad’s hand and left a red mark.”

“Why?”

“… I wanted Dad to win. He wanted me to win. It seemed really important to both of us, but when I think about it now I can’t remember why.”

The resigned slump of his shoulders reminded me of Dunk’s father when Mr. Lowery took his penknife to their car, flicking the metal cube onto the gym floor.

“People aren’t ever gonna let it go,” he said.

Which was true. Cataract City didn’t surrender such things so easily. Dunk Diggs, the boy who’d cheated at the Kub Kar Rally. Son carrying the sins of his father — but what had Mr. Diggs done, really, that all the other fathers hadn’t? You could’ve hacked apart any one of those cars and probably found it pumped full of lead. It was just Dunk’s bad luck to get caught.

“Everyone’s gonna forget, man.”

“Nobody ever really forgets, Owe. They just pretend to.”

Noise came from below: a steady scrape and grind, drawing closer. It wasn’t an animal — although how could I be so sure? Was I so locked into the rhythms of the woods that I could now recognize their sounds? It wasn’t Bruiser Mahoney, either — by then I lacked the energy to summon horrors that weren’t real and immediate. I knew Bruiser Mahoney was where we’d left him, dead in a tent with a rock on his gut.

A shape solidified. A man was clambering up the steep grade, boots gritting on the stones.

“It’s just little ol’ me,” he said.

His head just about brushed the top of the cave. His legs and arms seemed to have more joints than they ought to, as if extra kneecaps and elbows lurked under his faded, streaked clothes. His hands hung from frayed sleeves that stopped halfway up his wrists, below which his long fingers twitched like a puppeteer’s working a marionette. His face seemed to rotate in many directions. There was a yellow catlike tinge to his eyeballs.

“A voice told me to step into the light, so here I am.” He dropped his pack and sat, grabbing each ankle and drawing them under his thighs. He smelled of dust and of something I couldn’t name, something sweetly foul like the glop at the bottom of a carnival trashcan. “What are you doing out here all alone?”

“We’re not alone,” Dunk told him. “Our fathers are coming soon.”

“You mean your father the cheater? Cheater, cheater, pumpkin eater?” The man diddled his earlobe. “The woods have ears and so do I.”

“What are you doing here?” said Dunk.

“Do you own this fuckin’ cave, kid?” The man thrust his sick-looking face forward. Bands of brown gunk edged each of his teeth. “Is this your forest?”

“I’m just asking if you’re lost,” Dunk said.

The man laughed. A dark chattering sound full of razor blades, broken bones and crawly things.

“Me? I’m never lost. Wherever I go, there I am!”

At first I’d been glad to see this man. He was an adult. He could get us out of here. But now I couldn’t stop thinking about our next-door neighbour’s dog.

Finnegan was a beagle. Mr. Trowbridge, our neighbour, would let me take him for walks. Poor Finnegan got bit by a raccoon and got rabies. Contracted was the word my mother used, as if rabies was something you’d sign for on a dotted line. The disease raced into his brain and made him go mad. Not angry-mad: mad-mad, like the old man at the bus station who yelled at pigeons. Mr. Trowbridge had to lock Finnegan in the backyard. I watched him through a knothole in the fence. Finnegan’s muzzle was caked with yellow foam and there were squiggly veins shot through his eyes. He walked in dopey circles, head swinging side to side. “Finnegan,” I called. He tore across the grass, growling and slobbering, hurling himself at the fence so hard the slats splintered. He smelled of vomit and of the shit caked in his fur. The dog catcher slid a dart gun through the fence and shot Finnegan. The dog lay down and died with a little shudder. Mr. Trowbridge cried in the driveway.

This man reminded me of Finnegan. The eyes. The stink. But Finnegan was a dog driven mad by disease. This man may have been born that way.

He threw his arm over me. A cold python slipping across my shoulders. “Now you—you tell great stories. Will you tell me another?”

Dunk grabbed my leg, pulled on it. “Sit over here,” he said.

The man let his arm slide off me the way a child will let go of a toy he knows he can get back any time he wishes.

“So you’re lost, uh? Happens a lot out here. You walk around for days, seeing things, losing your bearings, crying out for God. But He can’t hear you. You can scream and scream but nobody’ll ever hear you.”

The man threw his head back and howled. “Aaaah-whoooo!” Tendons cabled on his neck as his voice echoed out and out into the night. “That isn’t going to touch one set of ears.” A wink. “Human ones, anyway.”

He reached into his pack and pulled out a can of beans. Saliva squirted into my mouth at the sight. He set it in the V of his split legs.

“You must be starved enough to eat a bear’s asshole. Or maybe any old asshole, huh?”

He tapped the tin with one finger, ran his ragged fingernail around the rim. He rucked up his jeans and took a knife out of his boot. The blade was thick, sharpened on both sides. It looked about a foot long.

“Don’t got no can opener.” He slid the blade into the banked coals. “Want some?”

“Yes,” I said, unable to help myself.

The man cocked his head, staring at me. His tongue flicked out of the wet cave of his mouth, snakelike, to caress his canine tooth. “Well okay, but I can’t just give it to you. It’s worth something — a lot, by the looks of you. So you do for me and I’ll do for you.”

“Do what?”

“Oh, I dunno … You a dancer? Stand up and give me a twirl.” He adjusted his position, pressing on his crotch with the heel of his palm. “I bet you just strut, don’t you? Take your shirt off and swing it over your head. Twitch them hips. Tease me.”

Dunk said, “No.”

Their gazes fought above the fire. The man threw up his rubber-band arms in mock defeat.

“Can’t blame a guy for trying, right? Jeez, it’s not like I can make you do anything you don’t want to … right?”

“You sure do look lost,” Dunk said.

The man’s gaze narrowed. A vein pulsed along his jaw.

“Ever play hide-and-seek, kid? I’m hiding now. Sometimes you’ve got to hide for a while. That’s okay. I’m good at it. You know what else I’m good at? Seeking.” He covered his eyes with his hands. Opened them like cupboard doors. “Peek-a-boo. I see you.”

His knife slid through the coals, its tip glowing like magma. I wondered how it’d feel sinking into my stomach: would I feel much at all or would I only watch, dumbfounded, as the moon-sheened quicksilver slid into me, my skin parting like curtains? This man might not think two ways about it; he could have been sticking the knife into a brick of butter. He chewed the air, snapping big bites out of the darkness. His teeth snicked shut, opened, snicked again.

“I’m the rogue wolf. Know what a rogue is, kiddies? A wolf that doesn’t play by the rules of the pack. He does what he likes. What feels gooood. Now the pack, they don’t like the rogue. They try to pull the rogue in line.” His lips twisted into an exaggerated pout. “Waaah. So the rogue, he takes five. Hits the powder room. But that’s just fine and dandy, because a rogue doesn’t need much … But even a wolf’s got needs, yeah? His little taste of meat.”

A knot of terror seized my stomach. I was prepared to die at nature’s unfeeling hands; Mother Nature was unforgiving but at least she carried no agenda. But this man … if he hurt us, it would be brutal, careless, and he’d show no regard for our bodies. I’d be okay dying of frostbite or by falling off some rocks and snapping my spine, but not at this man’s hands.

Wind whipped into the cave, howling round our shoulders and exiting with an outrush that batted down the fire: only trembling fingerlings of flame licked from the charred logs. In that instant I saw the man change form. His face elongated, nose and mouth pushing out from the windburnt flatness of his face, nostrils arching upwards before spreading and blackening into a rubbery texture. His face made awful noises as it melted and lengthened — the splinter of ice cubes in a glass — his skin stretching like fairground taffy. His hands curled into solid masses bristling with coarse dark fur; black claws slit through, each as wicked as a crow’s beak. His skull crumpled into his forehead, deflating like an inner tube packed with shattering light bulbs, the bone solidifying again, as sleek and aerodynamic as a bullet. His ears crept up the side of his head, tapering into arrowheads fuzzed in grey fur. His jaw unhinged with the crack of a starter’s pistol, mouth widening down each side as the skin tore across his muzzle with a silken noise, the edges upturned to make room for the new teeth crowding his mouth. Fangs pierced through his gums, as sharp and pale as bleached bone. The man was a wolf in all ways but his eyes: his sockets were empty, withered like two cored-out tomatoes.

When the flames kicked up, the gun was in Dunk’s hand.

The man saw it pointed at his chest. He blinked, as if that might make it go away. When it remained in Dunk’s hand he seemed baffled, an emotion that darkened into annoyance, then shaded into restrained anger.

“Where did you get that?”

“I took it off a dead wrestler.”

The man laughed but stopped when neither of us joined in.

“You did, did you? You even know how to shoot it?”

“Is there that much to it?” said Dunk with a tilt of his head.

“Give it here. Let me see if the safety’s on.”

“No thanks.”

“Come on, kid. You’re liable to blow your hand off.”

Dunk kept the barrel squarely on him. His hands didn’t shake. The safety was on. I reached over and flicked it off.

“Cock it,” I said.

Dunk thumbed the hammer back. The man gave me a look to melt bones.

“Listen, you want me to get you out of here? Take you home? I can, okay? I know the way. All that before? I was just blowing off steam. You think I was going to leave you out here? What kind of guy would I be if I did that?”

Dunk said: “A fucking psycho hiding in the woods.”

The man worked his jaw side to side, grinding his molars to dust.

“Right. Which I’m not. So just hand it over and we can get going …”

He reached across the fire, fingers closing in on the gun. Dunk raised the barrel until it pointed at the man’s head. I figure it must’ve been like peering into a very deep, dark tunnel.

The man’s eyes rolled up to the top of his skull, oriented on the spot on his forehead where the bullet would drive in. He fidgeted, and I was convinced he’d lunge. I was equally convinced Dunk would shoot him. The man realized that, too. He’d caught that unwavering something in Dunk’s eyes.

“Here’s the difference between a knife and a gun,” the man said. “A gun has many working parts that can jam up or misfire. A knife is foolproof. In tight quarters you get one chance with a gun. A knife … well, a knife can go as long as you’ve got strength to stick it in, right? A gun’s for cowards. A knife’s up close. Blood running down your knuckles. And if you get shot with a gun, you die. It’s quick. With a knife, the pain goes on and on and on. With a gun you die once. With a knife you die a thousand times.”

Dunk said: “I really don’t give a shit how many times you die, so long as you’re dead.”

The man shook his head. He put the beans back in his pack. Uncrossed his legs. I watched for his calves to tense, any sign he’d spring.

“You boys have lost a chance to make a lifelong friend and benefactor.”

“We’re kids,” said Dunk. “We’ll make more friends.”

The man withdrew his knife from the fire and stood up. “You’re never getting out of here. You know that, don’t you? You little fucks are going to die. Die without your parents and friends. With shit in your pants and your tongues sticking out like clowns. Alone. By the time anyone finds you the birds will have pecked out your eyes. Maggots overflowing your bust-open bellies. And me? I’ll be laughing like a bastard … Well, toodles.”

He picked his way down the slope gingerly, knife tip weaving a faint orange trail through the darkness.

Dunk held the pistol for hours, pointed out into the night. His shoulders must have ached. His wrists surely must have seized up. But he never put it down. The barrel never even dipped.

It rained overnight. It began as a sing-sing pattering on the leaves and rocks, moon-whitened needles falling like shards of starlight. By the time a grey dawn washed over the hillsides it was sheeting down. Thunderheads crowded the steely sky; every now and then a giant flashbulb would go off inside one of them, turning them translucent like tadpoles and showing the swirling purple-silver nimbus within. We edged under the overhang and drank the water that collected in our cupped palms.

The forest spooled out in the misty-hazy morning, spruces and pines holding a blue tint. The downfall had doused the fire. We sat shivering.

My hunger had fled overnight. All that was left was a dull gnawing in the bowl of my belly. My stomach was eating itself, I figured, or the nearby organs. I pictured a toothy split opening in my stomach as it devoured my liver, pancreas, spleen. Maybe that was why starving people had swollen bellies: their stomachs had eaten everything else inside them. The thought made me laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Dunk said.

“Nothing,” I said, because in fact there was nothing funny about starving to death.

I must have closed my eyes — that, or my consciousness was stolen away for a few minutes — because when I snapped to, Dunk was staring at a spider’s web in the corner of the cave. A grasshopper was caught in it. Its body was the green of a twig snapped off a healthy tree. Each time it thrashed, another part of it got glued to the web. The sticky threads vibrated like guitar strings.

A spider exited a hole in the cave wall. Its legs came first, flicking tentatively before spreading out like the metal ribs of an umbrella opening. It was as black as an oil bead, with red bell-shaped shadings. It picked its way down the web, walking upside down on a single strand before reaching the heart of the web where it spread its legs further. The grasshopper flung itself around madly. The spider paused as if in wonderment at the bounty it had been given.

We watched silently, hunched close, Dunk’s head cocked, chin balanced on his fist. It didn’t enter our minds to save the grasshopper. We would never have thought of kicking a dog or tossing firecrackers at a tomcat, but we watched nature in all its fascinating forms — as boys should watch, I think now, unapologetically, a right and ritual of childhood.

The spider raised its front legs like a bucking horse, then clambered nimbly over the grasshopper’s head and sank its fangs into one convex eye. Its thorax pulsed as it pumped in venom. The grasshopper went still. Next the spider was log-rolling the grasshopper, spinning its body rapidly, cocooning it in gossamer.

“Sucks to be him,” Dunk said softly.

My heart pounded behind my eyes, each beat a miniature earthquake. I phased in and out of consciousness, sometimes rocking forward and other times snapping out of a dream state where the world was not so much different than this one, just slightly warmer and safer.

Eventually, the sun fought through heavy clouds to speckle the valley with light that pricked my eyeballs. I nodded my head at the world outside our cave. “We should try,” I said.

“Okay,” Dunk said docilely.

He set the gun’s safety and snugged it in his pocket. The baby bird was sitting on his lap. It was still alive, breathing shallowly inside the rag.

The smell of sweet potato seeped out of the earth, which was raw and cold and flushed green from the rain. A curtain of mist was strung across the horizon. I inhaled the heavy musk of a deer’s scat, rich with whatever it had digested. Worst of all I smelled Dunk and myself: sweat, sickness and desperation.

We came to a forest of tall pines through which the light slanted in dusty beams like rays falling through the stained-glass windows of an old cathedral. The ground was carpeted in layers of brown needles; it felt like walking on a horsehair mattress. At one point Dunk turned to me, distressed. He held his empty palm out, the one not carrying the bird.

“My knife,” he said. “It’s gone. It was in my pocket and now it’s not.”

He walked in a circle, lead foot stabbing out as though he was going to set off in one direction, then stepping back in, his free hand hitching at the loose hem of his jeans without seeming to realize it, round and round in a circle.

“It’s okay, Dunk. How long do you think since you lost it?”

“I don’t know,” he said, staring at me as though I was a stranger — but no, it wasn’t that: he was just stunned, the way I was the time Sam Bovine accidentally kicked a soccer ball into my face. “I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know.”

“It’s okay, okay? Want to go back and look for it?”

“My dad gave me that knife — not for Christmas, Owe, not for a birthday, just gave it to me. I don’t get things just ’cause, man. He’s going to kill me.”

I couldn’t remember ever seeing him so freaked, and over what? A pocketknife. I didn’t like seeing Dunk like this, antsy and weird, running a hand nervously through his tangled hair so continuously that he’d surely strip it out at its roots.

“Listen, man, your dad’s not going to kill you. He’s going to put you on a leash so you can’t ever get out of his sight again. My dad, too. All he’s going to think is how happy he is to have you back, right? Your mom, too, and my mom, and everyone else we know … except maybe Clyde and Adam, but screw those shitballs.”

Dunk’s pacing slowed and after a while he stopped, bouncing gently on the balls of his feet. He let out a shuddery breath and then laughed.

“Yeah, okay. It’s just a knife. We’ve still got the other one.”

“Totally. We’ve still got a knife if we need it.”

“And my dad …”

“Your dad won’t even remember the knife.”

“You think?”

“Yeah, I think.”

We kept walking. We found a stream and followed it until it emptied into a bog that gave off a sweet mulch smell that reminded me of the garden centre on Tamarack Road. Our sneakers squelched, footprints filling with grey water, so we headed for higher ground.

My muscles couldn’t prop me up anymore — they were nothing but frayed balls of twine under my skin. I was constantly stumbling on stones and slipping on wet grass. My jeans were soaked from the brush of leaves. I walked with my chin tucked into my chest, hands flung out in front of me. I tripped on an exposed root and tried to get up, leveraging myself on a fallen tree limb close at hand — it splintered in my hands, rotted through with damp. I squawked as I toppled towards the broken end, turning my head so it wouldn’t pierce my throat. My nose slammed into another exposed root, forcing stinging tears out of my eyes. I lay on the ground, staring at the woodlice squirming from the rotted branch in revolted fascination and thinking: If I don’t move soon those things will fall right onto my face — my mouth.

I curled onto my side without quite realizing I’d begun to cry. My chest unlocked and the sobs doubled me over like punches. I thought my ribs might splinter but I couldn’t stop. Dunk walked a short distance away; I saw him watching me through the fractured, watery prisms that sat over my eyes, standing with his hands in his pockets.

After a while he said, “Come on, Owe. Get up. Please.” He offered me his hand.

I wouldn’t take it. He sat on a fallen log and exhaled, chest caving in below his slumped shoulders. My sobs became sniffles. I wiped my nose on my sleeve and said: “He was right.”

“Who?”

“That guy. We’re going to die out here.”

“Maybe,” said Dunk. The fact he’d finally acknowledged it made me want to cry all over again. “But I don’t want to die yet. I want … I want to see brake lights again.”

“Brake lights?”

He nodded. “Last year Dad took me to a Blue Jays game. On the way home there was a line of cars down the highway. All these brake lights were lit, a bright red chain through the dark. Around it were the lights of skyscrapers and the CN Tower. I thought how each one of those lights equalled at least one person. I hoped they were doing something cool with someone they loved, like I was with my dad.” He searched my face and when he didn’t see what he was looking for, he said, “I guess that’s pretty stupid … You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Want me to spit in your mouth?” He grinned. “You probably dried yourself out with all that bawling.”

“Man, that’s just gross.”

Things seemed sinister even in daylight now. I wasn’t afraid of being pursued by the ghoul of Bruiser Mahoney or even the wolf-faced man. My unease came from the land itself, which had stopped changing: a flat stretch of swale grass studded with windblown trees extending to every vanishing point. The unchanging vastness of the land—that was sinister. It seemed to be running on huge hidden spindles, like a treadmill; the earth went round the spindles, the trees and prickerbushes trundling beneath the earth only to come up again in front of us. We walked the same endless expanse, bitten by the same mosquitoes while trudging through our old footprints. I cocked my ear for the sound of the Falls — the same sound that had backgrounded my entire life, reminding me (sometimes maddeningly) where I was from. I couldn’t even hear that. The space above the treetops was still and noiseless.

We came upon a drywash and picked our way down the flinty shale. Dunk tripped, holding the bird up like the Statue of Liberty raising her torch. He slid on his knees, crying out. When I reached him his jeans were torn open, kneecaps already leaking red. We were both a mess of blood: it dotted our shirts from the ticks and blackflies and ants, which were joined by longer slashes from nettles or twigs.

We were a pair of wind-up toys close to winding down. I thought that eventually we’d come upon some impassable junction, a high rock wall or cliff. But the land was sievelike. We had to step around stagnant pools or small rock piles, but were met by no conclusive barriers. We kept walking into the blue day, one foot here, the other there.

Black specks peppered my sightlines. I couldn’t tell if they were insects or just spots of delirium chewing into my vision. The urine in my bladder turned hot and painful so I let it go, which felt incredibly good. I cried off and on but the tears were largely involuntary by now, constant as my own breathing. They didn’t slow me down at all.

Dusk rolled over the plain; bat-wings of shadow arched off Dunk’s shoulders. Full dark would come in an hour, maybe less. I didn’t know what we’d do then. It didn’t bear thinking about.

A half-hour later, cold, moving gingerly through a field of thorns, fully aware of my entire body, my hands, my mouth, my eyes stuffed with looming darkness, my ears buzzing with insects or simply my own disconnected thoughts, Dunk stopped and pointed.

“See that?”

Squinting, I saw a point. A triangle of black construction paper taped to the horizon. It stood out because it didn’t belong to nature. Its angles were either too perfect or not quite perfect enough.

We walked towards this trembling apparition, this point, half expecting it to vanish. We went down a small rise and the trees closed in, making it harder to find that point in a maze of treetops. But we found something even better: a path. At first it didn’t seem much of anything at all — a trail through the grass that could have been tamped down by deer — but soon it became more pronounced, right down to the dirt, and Dunk laughed wildly.

Light bloomed ahead, a glimmer in the dense woods. It was gone then back again, like a blinking eye. My heart expanded with joy and fear at once: joy that it was there, fear that it could vanish at any moment. We approached cautiously, barely breathing for fear we might blow it out like a match. I don’t know how long we followed that light, but it grew and took shape: a square.

The trees broke into a clearing. A house. The light was coming from its window. Electric light, so much different than firelight. It looked impossibly inviting, as if you could connect with all of civilization simply by placing your hands on the glass.

We crouched in the cover of the woods. Something held us back. Maybe we were half animal by then — part of the forest. Feral creatures of liquid eye, fur and claw and antler, skittish and curious at once.

Wind rustled the leaves as the night came alive with its little motions and stirrings. We broke from cover and crossed the yard — the grass had been cut and seemed too orderly to me, every blade perfect. We went round the front. A blue Chevrolet parked on the gravel drive. A garden gnome with a chipped porcelain face. So ridiculously normal. Such happiness ripped through my chest that I thought it would stall my heart.

Dunk knocked on the door with one grimed, blood-flecked hand. A middle-aged woman stood in the frame, light from the kitchen falling over her shoulders.

“It’s you,” she said. “The boys … those boys.”

She rocked forward. I thought she might faint. She opened the door. The warmth of the house hit me, almost melted me.

“They’ve been looking for you everywhere,” she said. “The police. Search teams. How did you …?”

“I’ll sit out here, ma’am,” Dunk said.

The woman nodded. “You do whatever you’d like. I’m going to … make a call. I’ve got blankets and — oh! Colin!” she shouted. “It’s those boys!”

“Who?” came a man’s voice from inside.

“The boys on TV. The lost boys!”

“Jesus!”

I sat on the steps with Dunk. The porch light snapped on, so much harsher than the gilded light of the moon. Dunk shook his head slowly, smiling as you would at a joke that’s only half funny. His hands trembled and so did mine. I heard footsteps and craned my head to see a big man with one huge carpenter’s hand clapped over his mouth, watching us in awe.

Dunk cupped the baby bird, his features set in mute confusion. Its body looked as hard as soap. Dunk touched it gently with one finger. It rolled over weightlessly, like a thing carved from balsa wood.

Dunk’s head dipped to touch his knees. His body shook. Huge gulping sobs tore out of him, ripped out of his throat as if about to rupture his vocal cords, the most wretched noises I’d ever heard. I put my arm around his shoulders and felt the tension: it was like grasping a railroad track in advance of the onrushing locomotive. I didn’t tell him everything was okay, because I knew even then that it probably wasn’t. Not really, not ever again. I just let him cry.

“What the hell’s the matter?” the big man said. “You’re safe, boys.” A mystified, barking laugh. “Don’t you get it? You’re safe.”

There’s a photograph of me and Dunk taken shortly after we wandered out of those woods to find the house — which was owned by Irene and Colin Harrington, a third-grade teacher and a construction foreman with a taste for isolation. It was shot by a reporter with the Niagara Falls Review who arrived with the emergency crews, no doubt alerted by the police-band scanner in his newspaper’s bullpen. It’s a tight shot, just our shoulders and heads, and the composition is off balance — by then there was a crush of firemen and ambulance attendants, so the reporter had to fire off a hurried snapshot in the scrum.

We are captured in close-up, in black-and-white, which amplified the stark slashes of blood on our shirts and the scrapes on our faces. My eyes shine like headlamps in the black pits of my sockets. We look like we’ve been released from a concentration camp, wearing expressions of grim futility. That sort of hopelessness grits into your face and posture, becomes a visible part of you.

In the photo my hand is up, covering Dunk’s eyes. He was still crying. His head is tucked into the space where my shoulder meets my neck. The framing echoes something you’d see on the courthouse steps: a lawyer shielding his client from the hungering shutterbugs.

If you were to hypothesize about the events of those three lost days from that photo alone, you’d think it was me who dragged Dunk out of the woods. That I was the protector and he the protected. Which is why you should never trust photos to tell the entire story.

Our parents had arrived in police cruisers. They looked as haunted and haggard as we did. My mom gathered me in a bear hug that just about crushed the life out of me. Years later she got drunk at a cousin’s wedding and told me she’d have left my dad if we hadn’t been found. “I love your father, but I wouldn’t ever have forgiven him. Getting into some stupid fight while his son’s abducted. Celia Diggs would have done the same.”

“Found?” I remember saying, a little drunk myself. “Mom, nobody found us.”

Dad never spoke about that night outside the Memorial Arena when he’d punched Adam Lowery’s father, but his regret expressed itself in other ways. To this day he will grab my hand in busy parking lots, even though I’m old enough to have kids of my own. He will stare at our clasped fingers and shrug sheepishly, but he won’t let go. Which is okay by me.

We were taken to the hospital, where our guts were discovered to be full of worms. The doctor figured it was the raccoon meat. We were severely dehydrated and covered with more bites and stings than anyone could count. I was put on an IV drip and didn’t take a dump for a week. Nothing inside me.

Dunk and I were put in separate hospital rooms. At night I’d roll over in a dreamy fugue thinking I’d feel him next to me. I’d find nothing but the over-bleached hospital sheets like spun glass against my cheek.

I still see Mr. Hillicker and Mr. Lowery around. They haven’t aged well; eyelids drooping around their eyes like two sick hounds. I’d assumed they wouldn’t feel much guilt for what happened, and I was right. To this day I think they ought to be thankful it wasn’t Clyde and Adam who Mahoney decided to light out with. Not to brag, but odds are those two bastards would have ended up as clean-picked skeletons in a wolf den.

The police retraced our route from our hazy descriptions and the physical markers of our trek: a few blackened firepits. We’d covered over thirty-five kilometres, a twisting, doubling-back route that would shame any outdoorsman. Despite this, our scoutmaster claimed that we embodied the very pinnacle of wilderness survival.

We’d taken a wrong turn almost immediately. Had we gone east we’d have made it back to Stevensville Road by mid-afternoon. Instead we went northwest, into the forested territory fringing Old Highway 98 east of Bethel. But if we were unlucky early, we got lucky late. The Harrington house sat three kilometres from its nearest neighbour. Had Dunk not seen its roof we would have continued into the empty land south of Brookfield junction. Nothing there but scrub pine and desolation, fifty miles to the nearest anything.

The wilderness took its toll on Bruiser Mahoney, too. The police found him where we’d left him, in a clearing some thirty miles north of Lake Erie. Through Sam Bovine I heard that his legs had been chewed off. Coyotes were the likeliest culprit.

“My dad used old mannequin legs from the women’s wear department at Sears to fill out the casket,” Bovine told me.

The rock on Mahoney’s stomach may’ve been all that stopped the coyotes from making off with the rest of him. Or it could be that his taste didn’t suit them.

The toxicologist said he’d died from an overdose of Clozaril, a knock-off of clozapine, an antipsychotic drug. The pills belonged to El Phantoma — birth name: Miguel Lopez — a Mexican wrestler with a history of bipolar disorder whom Mahoney had driven to a match in Gravenhurst the week before. Lopez had forgotten the pills in the glovebox and Mahoney had mistaken them for his pain medication. The Clozaril reacted badly with the alcohol to cause, in the toxicologist’s opinion, “free-floating delusions, uncontrollable anxiety and a possible psychotic break with reality.”

All of which seems about right to me.

Dunk and I went to Dade Rathburn’s funeral. People figured it was some kind of Stockholm syndrome, or else we wanted to spit on the corpse. The big church was mostly empty. The girl was there, the one with the black hair and gold-coin eyes. It turned out she was Rathburn’s daughter — one of many. He’d salted his seed liberally over his territory. She was crying. She hugged us both and apologized. “I said you’d be safe with him. I thought you would be. He wasn’t a bad …”

“Anyway, it’s not your fault,” Dunk told her.

Dade Rathburn looked weird in his coffin. A deflated pool toy packed up for winter storage. His dentures were snug, at least, and his eyes were closed. Bovine said his dad had to cut the muscles under his eyelids so they’d roll down, then crazy-glue them shut.

I remember everyone watching us. I had no urge to spit on Rathburn. Whatever I felt was far too complicated to ever express.

After the funeral my father told me he’d prefer it if I didn’t hang out with Dunk anymore. Dunk’s dad was of the same mind. It seemed unfair, as if we were the victims of our fathers’ guilty consciences. Had I been seventeen I would have told Dad to suck an egg. But I was twelve, and soon enough Dunk and I just drifted apart. I couldn’t say how it happened. That strong childhood magnetism that draws one boy to another — sometimes that magnetism abruptly switches polarities, flinging those same boys away from each other, setting them on new trajectories.

My family moved to Cardinal Gardens, a suburb in the city north. Our new house had an in-ground pool and a two-car garage. The day the moving truck came, Dunk stood on the sidewalk dribbling a balding basketball.

“So you’re moving, huh?”

“Is it that obvious?”

I’d meant it as a joke. He blew the hair out of his eyes — it was even longer than when I’d met him, the ends almost touching his nose — and smiled into the sunlight.

“You can always come visit,” I said.

“And you can always visit back here.”

That was the last I saw of Duncan Diggs for many years.

The next week I was in our new home flicking through TV channels and came upon an episode of Superstars of Wrestling. It shocked me how fake it looked. Punches and kicks missing by a mile. I watched a few minutes, then flipped to another channel.

DAWN EASED OVER THE ESCARPMENT, sunlight glimmering like a sine wave across the curve of the earth. I stretched my legs inside the car, wincing as the familiar pain cupped my kneecap. Fogerty’s “Who’ll Stop the Rain” had segued into Henley’s “Boys of Summer,” which had segued into a late-night call-in show about paranormal phenomena.

I had zoned out, lost myself down the memory hole, and now the dashboard clock was reading 5:26 and the gas tank was near empty. I stepped out of the car and began to walk.

The cut-off was fringed by long grass bent by a forceful night wind. Sun lightened the eastern fields. The world was cool, wind bearing the smell of burning grapevines. I had nothing on but a thin jacket, yet I didn’t feel cold. Sunlight sparkled the tips of pine trees struggling through soil determined to spit them out.

I walked until the path began to collapse at its edges. It dipped and I followed … until at last a million tiny cogs seized in every part of my body and I stopped. The woods were closing in on me. Still, I didn’t feel terrorized like I had as a boy. I took in the silky rustle of leaves, that cut-potato smell of the soil. Felt an odd jangle in my nerve endings. I couldn’t quite leave behind the sight of a thin curvature of sunlight on the Lincoln’s hood, so metallic and man-made and human. Couldn’t abandon myself entirely to those woods.

Maybe if Dunk were here … or maybe there are some paths you can never go down again. I headed back to the car, laughing at my cowardice.

I dropped the Lincoln into gear and reversed down the cut-off. Back to the world as it existed. But it was good to remember that, long ago, it had been just Dunk and me, the two of us. Two boys in the woods. How far had we fallen from that?

I drove to the nearest gas station, filled the tank and paid the sleepy-eyed attendant slumped inside his bulletproof Lexan cube. It was rare for me to be up so early — under normal circumstances I’d be inert while my liver filtered whatever I’d drunk the night before — but I relished it. Soon enough the sun would climb to its familiar position, illuminating the sadly familiar sights of the city and ruining the sense of possibility. But until then, there was the lovely silence, the fresh, indescribable smell of a new day — if pure possibility had a smell, this was it — fledgling sunlight washing the grape fields and the rippling surface of the river.

Staring at that swift, dark-running water, a fresh memory hit me with the force of a ballpeen hammer.

I must have been seven years old — or eight? Anyway, I was in that human-wallpaper stage of my existence. My father had taken me to the river. We’d go every so often to skip rocks and hunt for crayfish. One afternoon while Dad was taking a whiz I’d spotted a Hefty trash sack bobbing at the river’s edge. It had been sucked into a pool where the current swirled endlessly between the rocks; the pool was edged with the froth that built up at certain spots, crusty and opaque like the scum atop a pot of boiled pork.

The bag was of the heavy-gauge plastic you’d find wrapping scrap lumber in construction-site Dumpsters; the top was crudely knotted. I remember wondering what was inside, and tearing it open, driven by sudden wild curiosity — there was something about the placement of the bag, I guess; the sullenness of it bobbing in the shallows. At first I’d just stared, head cocked, profoundly puzzled. The contents looked like soggy balls of yarn, the kind Mom used to make macramé potholders and tiered flower holders. Except there was nothing vibrant about the colours: mixed muddy browns and washed-out whites. Then I caught a glimpse of a little arrow shape tufting from one of those balls and it was like when you stare at one of those 3D portraits just right — your eyes adjust and you see the sailboat or the train or whatever. When I saw the whole picture I reared back, horrified at a bone-deep, subcellular level.

Kittens. I could tell by that one tiny ear. How many? Four, five. I didn’t look long enough to know. Kittens stuffed in a trash sack and hurled in the river. Even at that age, it struck me that they almost certainly hadn’t drowned: the sack was so thick and the kittens almost weightless, so it’d probably just bobbed on the surface, too light to sink; perhaps the person who’d done it had watched the sack drift down the Niagara and said, “Huh.” With awful clarity I imagined the kittens tearing at the sack with their little claws. But the plastic was too durable. They would have suffocated.

I stepped away, the horror so thick in my gorge that I thought I’d throw up. The bag shifted and I saw something else: the greenish plastic head of a glow-in-the-dark Jesus. A snatch of song came to me: Well, I don’t care if it rains or freezes / Long as I have my plastic Jesus / Riding on the dashboard of my car. Whoever had done this must’ve been queerly religious, or else had a warped sense of humour. Jesus’s head was shattered at the top, just above his crown of thorns. One of the kittens must’ve bitten it off.

I slumped back in the car seat, assaulted by the memory. But that’s my city in a nutshell — or a trash sack. People around here think if they stuff their problems in a bag, huck it in the water, well, end of problem. And that theory has borne out, for the most part. In my line of work I see proof, over and over.

I drove home in the warm light, my mood curdling further when three police cruisers shrieked past in the opposite lane. I unlocked my apartment, stared for a moment at the empty dog bed in the kitchen, un-holstered my pistol and popped two pills to quiet the pain singing in my kneecap. I fell into a troubled, profoundly exhausted sleep.