Cataract City

PART TWO DOLLY EXPRESS

DUNCAN DIGGS

The city feels strange to me now. Changed in a million tiny ways that, taken together, seem massive. It’s like not seeing your own face for eight years, then having someone hand you a mirror. Who is that guy? And then you realize: it’s you. It’s still you.

The day after they let me out of prison I awoke in the bedroom where I’d grown up. There wasn’t a clock at the bedside, but I knew the time: 7:33. That was when the prison’s halogens would snap on every morning, my eyelids snapping open with them. Would I wake up at that exact minute for the rest of my life?

I could’ve stayed in bed, which was warm, the mattress permanently sunken from the impression of my body — my teenage body, because I’d been that age the last time I slept in it — but I rose out of habit.

It was so strange to place my feet on carpet instead of cold lacquered concrete. And so wonderful to stand in the bars of honey-coloured sunlight that fell through the venetian blinds. Inside the pen, the sun had never felt the same as it did outside: it was as if the architecture of the place, or the compounds used to build it — the brick and steel and glass — leeched some part of the sunshine away. Not the heat — I could feel that — but its vitamins or the really nourishing part of it. When it had touched my skin in prison, it had felt as cold as the light from a bare bulb in a broom closet.

I stood in that bedroom sunlight for a long time. Drinking it in, the same way a plant does.

Could I open the bedroom door? I twisted the knob and, yeah, it swung open. It was stupid, but I’d been sure it was locked — even though the lock was on my side.

I took a long shower. It was the first time I’d showered alone in forever. Still, I glanced over my shoulder a couple times. The soap was Irish Spring, the soap my mother always bought. Cheap and reliable. It made a thick lather that perfumed the stall with the smell of … what was that smell? It made me think back to days I’d come home as a boy, filthy from the woods, with pine sap smeared on my hands; Mom would punt me into the shower, telling me not to come out until my hair squeaked.

When I went downstairs, Mom was sitting at the kitchen table in her uniform whites, her hands — her thin, birdlike hands — cupped around a ceramic mug. Her hair was salt-and-pepper: strands of jet-black threaded with coarser veins of iron-grey, pinned back behind her ears with silver clips.

“Coffee, Duncan?”

I nodded. “I’ll get it.”

I poured coffee into a ceramic mug. For eight years I’d drunk out of either six-ounce plastic cups or thick-bottomed plastic mugs with a handle big enough to fit a single finger — the kind of cheap, unbreakable dishware they used at summer camps. When those dishes broke, they left no sharp angles.

I added a tablespoonful of sugar, and after a moment, another. I could have as much as I wanted. In prison everything was rationed: a packet of sugar, a thimble of cream. Now I could add sugar until my teeth ached. Hah!

I sat across from Mom. Sipped. Jesus, that was too sweet.

“You look good, Mom.”

“Yeah?”

She touched her hair lightly with one hand. She’d visited me every month, just about — she and Dad both. The three of us would sit at a table bolted to the floor in the visiting room. Dad would drink a vending-machine Sprite. It was Coke for me, Diet Coke for Mom. A muted TV in a wire-mesh cage broadcasted old sitcoms.

We spoke during those visits, but it was surface talk. Sports, the weather — not that the weather made any difference to me. They never asked me what had happened. They knew what happened — everyone did — so only one possible question remained: was it necessary to take a man’s life?

“So,” Mom said with typical bluntness, “what now?”

“I haven’t really thought that far ahead.”

Her chin dipped. “Liar.”

For two weeks straight, I walked the city, re-familiarizing myself with it — and with the scale of the outside world. Everything seemed bigger, crazily so.

One night I stopped at a 7-Eleven and stared at the Big Gulp cups so long that the clerk asked me if something was the matter.

“Nah, nothing.” I shook my head. “People drink all of that?”

The clerk, adenoidal and bug-eyed, said, “All that and more. Free refills in the summer, right?”

Why was my confusion so surprising? Yes, it had been eight years, not a lifetime. Yes, I’d watched TV inside, read the newspaper.

I’d noted the shifts the world had taken. But that didn’t prevent the system shock.

Things tasted better. Milk tasted richer, a Snickers bar sweeter. I had no explanation for that, just as there was no evidence to support my sense that penitentiary sunlight was a watery facsimile of the real deal. It was as though I’d gone into a protective cocoon that had mummified my sight and smell and taste, and now, back on the outside, my senses were hyper-attuned.

One day I zoned out on the sidewalk under a maple tree, tracking the progress of a caterpillar across a branch. I picked a leaf, then rubbed its waxy surface until I wore it down to the veiny substructure, chlorophyll staining my fingertips dull green.

“You okay, bud?”

A man stood beside me, his arm raised in a gesture of cautious aid. I guess I’d been rubbing that leaf and staring off into space for too long.

“I’m cool.” I smiled, wondering if that was still what people said. “Just took a personal time-out there.”

I was gripped by a desperate urge to hand the man my leaf. Get a load of this leaf, man. It’s dynamite!

I walked a lot at night. I’d wake in my childhood bedroom, the shapes and smells all wrong. Sometimes I’d catch the wet, weeping smell of the cinderblock walls in the Kingston Pen. Or I’d reach for Edwina and never find her. That was the worst of it; I saw her ghost everywhere. I was back on familiar streets, and her shape was familiar to those streets. I’d catch the slope of her shoulders entering a doorway, or her legs folding into a stranger’s car. But Ed had achieved escape velocity. This city would never see her shape again — a fact I both knew and somehow didn’t, or couldn’t, believe. Not quite.

I gradually backtracked to spots I was familiar with. Some grisly compulsion carried me past the Bisk just as the shift whistle blew. Workers trooped in and out, their hair frosted white with flour. I spotted Clyde Hillicker, who looked a lot like his old man except for the deep dent in his right cheekbone. Hillicker had spent a few years in the stony lonesome, too — we finally had something in common.

I returned to places where I’d hung out with Owe and Edwina, mooning around like a lonely mutt. I’d stand on the ground we’d occupied together years ago, closing my eyes; weirdly, I could hear the whisper of their voices in my ear — but when I opened my eyes it was just me, alone in the dark.

One afternoon I walked down the Niagara Parkway, skirting Oak Hall golf course where early-morning duffers were shanking balls into the rough. I kept well off the fairways; the course marshal might’ve spotted me and called the fuzz. I tromped through stands of dense pines — and you know what? They whispered in the wind, just like in those old country and western songs.

I cut south at Upper Rapids Boulevard until I reached the river. A fine layer of mist clung to its surface, evaporating as the temperature inched upwards. A raccoon trundled through the bushes to my left, unafraid of me. I hunted for flat stones along the shoreline, skipping them. Me and Owe used to have skipping contests. Owe. I thought about him a lot. Almost as much as Ed. He’d visited me in prison only once, to clear up some lingering business. I can see why he kept his distance. He had every right. But I’d need his help soon — for the plan taking shape, growing stronger with every step I took through my city.

Would he help? He didn’t owe me anything. What we had together, those old loyalties — that was a long time ago.

“What’re you doin’?”

The girl had snuck up on me. She was tall and reedy, wearing orange shorts and a blue hooded sweatshirt with the sleeves hacked off. Her spindly legs rose out of a pair of vulcanized rubber boots. They looked like flower stems poking out of a pot.

“Just skipping rocks,” I told her.

She cocked her head. Her red hair coiled into ringlets that framed the wide angles of her face. Her eyes were green — made greener by the sunlight streaming through the canopy of trees — and they were wide and alert, but with an alertness different from the wary kind I was used to in the eyes of inmates. Her eyes were simply interested.

“I’ve never done that,” she said.

“It’s not that hard. You can watch me, if you want.”

She sat on a rock, eyeing me. My shoulders tightened slightly under her gaze. My first rock only skipped twice.

“I could do that,” she said.

She heeled her rainboots off. Her bare feet had the clammy look feet get when they’re wet and compressed: like turnips gone wrinkly in the bottom of the fridge. She dipped her toes in the water.

My next rock skipped seven or eight times, with a few dribblers at the end I didn’t count. The girl didn’t look too impressed.

“Your hands,” she said. “They’re pretty trashed.”

I stared down at them. “Trashed?”

“I mean, like, fucked up.”

I felt my brows beetling, the skin drawing inwards at my temples. I stuffed my hands in my pockets. “How old are you?”

She said, “Thirteen.”

“Oh. I thought you were younger.” She was about the age that Edwina’s kid would be — the one who’d left that scar on her stomach. The one she’d given up for adoption. “Anyway, that kind of language …”

She blew a ringlet off her forehead. “You can’t tell me how to talk.”

I lifted my shoulders. “I’m not telling you nothing. It’s just, I thought we were being friendly is all.”

She smiled. “Sure we are.”

I shifted my feet. The tips of my sneakers were wet from the river. “Anyway, you do as you like. I’m not your dad or anything.”

Her smile persisted. “You could be, for all I know.”

We walked together down the Parkway until we reached Burning Spring Hill Road. The Dufferin Islands rolled off to the north in a haze of overgrown sedge and water-rotted sycamores. The Derby Lane dog track was still there, but it had seen better days — although, now that I thought about it, had the place ever seen good days?

“This place is creepy,” the girl said as we walked past the grounds.

I could see why she’d think that. The swaybacked spectators’ gallery seemed to be collapsing into itself like a jack-o’-lantern left sitting on a porch until mid-November. Every single bulb in its marquee was busted, likely the work of punks with an obsessive streak.

“It used to be nicer,” I said. “A little, anyway. I had a dog. My friend and me, we both did. Greyhounds. We raced them here.”

“Bullshit,” the girl said cheerily.

“Not bullshit.” I walked across the lot, glass gritting under my soles. “Dolly Express. That was my dog’s name.”

“That’s weird.”

I acknowledged her complaint with a nod. “Racing dogs have silly names. We just called her Dolly.”

She touched her chin, eyes gazing skyward. “That’s an okay dog name. You okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Just thinking.”

We’d walked only a little further when the girl said, “This is me.”

A low-rent apartment block sat in the shadow of the escarpment. I watched while she climbed up the front stairs. She went ten steps, turned, and waved.

“See you.”

I waved back. “See you around, maybe.”

Her shrug said: anything’s possible. I watched until she was safely inside the building. She waved me off as if I was being stupid, she could handle herself.

I walked back to Derby Lane. Wind whipped off the river and howled around the marquee, singing off every point of busted glass. A burning ripcurl surged up from my stomach. This was a vital part of my life, right here. And it was gone now. I felt sick with nostalgia. Memory like a sickness, memory like a drug. I stood in the lengthening shadow of the lane, swallowed up by the black hole of my past.

BACK WHEN I WAS A YOUNG WORKING STIFF, I often sat on a bench in the locker room after my night shifts, soaking my hands in a bucket of warm water. A weird smell had started leaking out of my pores after my first few shifts at the Bisk, sweet and spicy like a Chinese bakery. I’d noticed that food tasted different, too: drinking a Diet Coke was like sucking on a battery. But I needed the money. Always, the money.

The regular night-shift mechanic had busted his leg falling off a stepladder in the deep-chill; now, whenever the rollers on the industrial conveyors went wonky, I had to tighten them with a three-foot pipe wrench. I wore heavy-duty work gloves but they didn’t stop the calluses: four dime-sized patches on each hand. Thick and hard, they put pressure on the nerves.

One night, same as most others, I’d scraped off the dead skin with a butter knife. It flaked away in curls, collecting in my palm. The new skin was pearly-white like cooked haddock; it turned pink with the rush of blood.

I dabbed on ointment, emptied the bucket and made my way past the factory lines to the exit. Machines stretched down the floor. I had to remind myself that we made cookies, the kind that kids liked.

Back then I used to dream about those machines growing into me — I mean, into my body.

The dream started with me tightening a lugnut on the conveyor belt, something I would do fifteen, twenty times a shift. Both hands on the wrench, torqueing my shoulder to feel the quiver of the machine across my stomach. Next the silver head of a screw pierces my skin. The tip’s winking in the middle of my hand. I’m like, huh? But no pain. I’m shocked, but because dreams are driven by their own weird logic, I’m not terrified.

The screw has driven through the wrench and through my hand, anchoring me to the machine. Pressure builds up my spine; I lean sideways, putting weight on my right foot. Which is when steel bolts punch through my Caterpillar workboot. Tink! Tink! Tink! When the concrete dust clears I see the bolts have twisted into a snarl that pins my foot to the floor. I laugh. It’s so strange, it’s funny.

I sink to one knee. Aaaaahh. Feels great to take a load off. The moment I do so, small hooks — like fishing hooks but with a crueller curve, the hooks surgeons use to tug catgut through an open wound — pierce my trousers and sink into my skin. Each hook is attached to a leader like the ones my father used to catch steelhead: braided wire, so the fish can’t rip through with their hacksaw teeth. My dream-skin tears easily. My flesh is chalky and full of holes, like Wonder bread. Still, nothing hurts too much and there is never any blood, a fact that seems more sinister when I’m awake.

I begin to notice the other men around me — the generic Cataract City guys you see around. Their heads sprout like cabbages along the line. They’re talking over each other, babbling away.

“… saw him down at the Hillcrest Tavern and knocked his dick in the dirt …”

“… knocked her up and now she’s figuring to have the damn kid …”

… gonna put a supercharger in it. It’ll blow your doors off, sonnyboy …”

I try to remember just how I got there but the lines don’t meet up, the teeth don’t groove. How did this happen? The way everything does, I guess. One thing follows another, naturally.

After my shift that night I met Edwina in the parking lot. She was heading inside dressed in flour-caked overalls and a hairnet but she was beautiful for all that — or more beautiful because of it. The lot lights burned against the night, making golden rings around her irises. I wanted to paw at her like a lusty dog but I knew she wouldn’t stand for that. She was older — as she often reminded me — and more experienced, as she also reminded me.

“Your hands?” she asked, taking them into her own.

“They’re going to have to come off, Ed,” I told her, fake-sad. “I’m cutting them off at the wrist.”

“I’ll kiss them all better.”

There were places in Cataract City where you could buy a cold beer at seven in the morning. Two blocks north on Lindy a sleepy-eyed Mexican was still serving icy Sols out of an orange picnic cooler; he could be handing me one in five minutes and I knew just what he’d say: Wrap your leeps around a cold one, partner.

I was a working man, unlike a lot of guys my age — Owe, for one, who was off at college earning his police services diploma. So I drank, sure. Not at campus bars where girls wore perfume that smelled like a Mounds bar. At the Double Aces and Blue Lagoon, where women sat with their elbows polishing the bar alongside the guys and everyone ordered “a shot and a Hed”: a shot of rail rye and a glass of Hedley Springs, cheapest beer on tap.

A shot and a Hed, a shot and a Hed, a shot and a Hed, and you wake up feeling like you’ve been shot in the head!

Instead I drove to the house Ed and I rented on Culp Street. I caught a whiff of vanilla — I’d spilled concentrate on my hand the other week on the Nilla Wafers line and the smell had crept under my skin. I smelled like a cookie, same as every other long-time stiff at the Bisk.

Dolly met me at the door, her tail tucked between her legs. Dolly’s a greyhound. I found her in a Dumpster. I was fifteen, maybe. Sixteen?

I’d been riding my bike to the Bisk; my dad had forgotten his lunchpail. The sun was just up, the city asleep. I was coasting past the Food Terminal when a cube van went screech-assing past, laying rubber. A couple of townies who had been ridding their guts of last night’s piss-up behind the supermarket, was my guess. I dropped Dad’s lunch off and rode back, slaloming lazily between the shopping carts in the Food Terminal lot. At first I thought the yips were just gravel popping under my tires. I braked, ears straining. Were they coming from the Dumpster?

I cracked the lid and found two puppies on a flattened Del Monico tomato box. They mewled when the sunlight touched their skin. Another few hours and they would have broiled to death. They were so damn small; I remember feeling their heartbeats through their skin — or was that my own heartbeat pulsing in my hands?

I can’t tell you why, exactly, I took them to Owen’s house.

I showed up on his doorstep breathing hard from the ride. Sweat dripped off me in pints, which freaked me out because I was in Cardinal Gardens. The houses all looked pretty much the same, and they were real swish: the lawns a checkerboard green you could only get with a riding lawn mower, the bushes trimmed into leafy bells. I figured the Neighbourhood Watch was going to come along and say: Son, don’t you think you ought to bust your ass back to where you belong?

I knew where Owe lived, even though we hadn’t talked for years, since the Mahoney thing. Our dads had made that choice. But by the time I showed up at Owen’s house I had my learner’s permit in my pocket and I even knew a guy, Slick, who’d buy me a six-pack of Black Label from the beer store (at double the retailer’s suggested price). All I’m saying is, I had some freedom — I didn’t always do what Dad said anymore.

I popped the kickstand and shrugged off my backpack. The puppies were nestled on a bed of torn-up Pennysavers, the pack’s zipper halfway open so they could breathe.

Mr. Stuckey answered the door. He wore a striped shirt with Pearlite buttons, and a slice of buttered toast was clamped between his teeth.

“Good morning, Master Diggs,” he said around the toast, in an English-butler voice. “How ya been?”

“Okay, Mr. Stuckey. Owe around?”

For a sec I figured Mr. Stuckey was going to slam the door. I knew nobody would nominate me for sainthood but still, I’d never had the “bad influence” tag slapped on me. That was for guys like Sam Bovine, who’d been caught selling single pages of his father’s old fuck-book—The Well-Spanked Farm Girl—for a quarter a page. Adam Lowery had ratted Bovine out; Adam bought two pages and was pissed that all he got was four paragraphs about some chick milking cows and the autumn twilight settling across the prairies — but was it Bovine’s fault that a spank-book writer had literary dreams?

“Come on in,” Mr. Stuckey said after forever.

I waited in the hall, soaking up the air conditioning. The window unit at my house had gone balls-up that summer; we had a half-dozen fans stirring the humid air around. The backpack squirmed against my sweaty skin.

Owe came downstairs rubbing sleep from his eyes. Last I’d seen him was about a year before. My dad had been driving me home from baseball practice and we saw him with some buddies. One guy had a crewneck sweater knotted around his neck.

“Your old friend is palling around with yuppie twerps,” Dad said, frowning.

Owe went to Ridley Academy, a private school. The school — sorry, the Acchaaaadhemy; in my head I always heard it spoken in a windbaggy British accent — had a fleet of rowing boats, called “sculls,” which the “oarsmen” raced at the Henley Regatta. I’d pictured Owe in one of those old-time rower’s getups: striped bathing suit like the ones women wore in the 1920s, a goofy straw hat perched on his head. Which I admit was a shitty thing to think. Could Owe help it if his folks could afford better?

“What’s up?” he said.

“Hey, man. Can we talk somewhere quiet?”

Owe glanced over his shoulder, where his parents sat at the kitchen table pretending to read the newspaper. “Okay … downstairs.”

The basement was unfinished. Dusty exercise equipment was heaped in a corner. Owe looked freaked. Did he think I was going to slug him, or confess I’d been having kinky dreams about him?

I shrugged the backpack off and unzipped it.

“Holy shit,” Owe said. “Where did you—?”

“In the Dumpster behind the Food Terminal. Someone … they threw them out like trash, man.”

The puppies were so small you couldn’t tell what breed they were: just wrinkly things with closed eyes. Their flopped-over ears were the size of fingernails and their paws were bright pink, like a human baby’s hands.

“What should I do with them?”

Owe said: “Keep them?”

How could my parents say no? It wasn’t like I was begging for a dog from the pet store. This was more like a humanitarian intervention.

“There’s two,” I said. “I was thinking maybe …”

“I don’t know,” Owe said. “My folks …”

“It’s okay,” said Owe’s mom, who’d crept down the stairs. “It’s the right thing to do.”

After heeling off my workboots, I walked into our unlit kitchen. Dolly padded softly behind me. I set my lunchpail on the counter — it was my dad’s old pail, covered in Chiquita Banana stickers — opened the fridge, shook the milk carton. Only a few mouthfuls left; I gulped straight from the carton, bachelor-style. Then I tore rags of dark meat off a rotisserie chicken. Dolly ate them in that weird, gluttonous way dogs do: snapping her head back and flinging the meat down her throat.

“You hog,” I said softly. She watched me, eyes shining in the fridge-light.

I showered, towelled off, lay in bed. The clean light of morning pulsed behind the curtains. Dolly hopped up, settled her head on my hip. Her heart beat hard, driving the blood through her veins.

Next week she’d race her first A-Class event. She was unbeaten in her career.

And there was a part of me that really hoped she’d lose.

You know when you’re driving on a hot day and there’s heat-shimmer on the road? As a kid you figure you’ll catch up to it if your folks drive fast enough. Eventually you realize it’s nothing that can be caught because it doesn’t stay put.

A greyhound … now a greyhound will chase that shimmer until its heart explodes, and right up to that very moment it will believe, with every atom of its being, that it’ll catch the thing.

They’re all muscle, greyhounds, all go fast muscle. Their legs are triple-jointed, and in full flight all twelve joints are at work: a smooth piston-like pump, pump, pump. Sometimes I figure it’s nothing but wind shear that keeps them on the ground, y’know? There is no other animal on earth whose skull looks more like it ought to be coming down the barrel of a gun.

Racing greyhounds have got a heart the size of a fist, double the size of a Labrador retriever’s. But they’ve also got heart in the fighter’s sense: a greyhound’s got the deepest bucket of any dog. They’ll run themselves to death if you let them, because that’s what they want to do — what they’ve been made for. But to be a real runner means you must be faster than anything else … which means you’ve got to be forever alone at the head of the pack.

When pure racers spring from the starting traps and hit the straightaway, some of them whine. They’re going so fast that you might mistake the sound of their bodies slicing through space for that of a low-flying jet.

A lot of people want a dog who is always happy to see them. Who’ll sit in their laps. But that’s not a fair hope with a greyhound. You’ve got an animal who is a Ferrari with a brick permanently weighting its gas pedal. The lives of greyhounds are all open stretches and endless horizons.

Of course, neither Owe nor me knew a thing about greyhounds when we found them. And it was a steep learning curve. I mean, Jesus, how would we have known about milking a puppy? That’s what the veterinarian called it: milking.

“They’ll have to accept milk that doesn’t come from their mother,” he told us as our puppies squirmed on his examination table. “They’re still whelps. You’ve got to feed them as their mother would.”

He sent us home with Esbilac, a formula especially for pups. Dolly needed constant feeding. I’d be up at four in the morning when she whined in the shoebox beside my bed. I’d pluck her from her cotton-batten nest, feed her until she burped, and fall asleep until she whined again.

“No eating my newspaper, no tearing up my carpet, no shitting on my floor” were the ground rules my dad laid out for the animal he called the Amazing Dumpster Dog.

I named her Dolly. My great-grandmother’s name. She’d come up from the South, Mom said, to marry a man she’d fallen in love with at a revival gathering. When that love faded she’d met my great-grandfather, ditched the other guy, remarried, and that love stuck fast.

“People didn’t get divorced back then,” Mom had told me. “Oh, god, it was the very mark of shame. But Dolly didn’t care. To hell with all that, she figured. It took guts.”

My Dolly had guts, too. She’d been ripped away from her own mom and chucked in a Dumpster. For a few terrifying days she couldn’t keep the Esbilac down and became so weak she couldn’t stand. One morning I came downstairs to see a pale blue box on the kitchen table; it had once held a Hummel figurine my father had bought for Mom on a whim.

“If the poor nipper goes,” Dad said, “we’ll bury her in that. Out in the backyard.”

Mom came downstairs, spotted the box and my wounded eyes.

“Jesus, Jerry. Do you have a brain rolling around in that thick head of yours?”

“What did I do?” my dad said, genuinely shocked. “It’s the nicest box we own.”

Fact is, Dad cared about that dog. He’d hunker over her shoebox cooing softly, same as he’d probably done with me in my cradle. Later on, when Dolly was ripping up his sneakers and his flowerbed, Dad was much less kind. “That goddamn mutt won’t see her first birthday!”

When she was only weeks old I got permission to bring Dolly to school. She lay in her shoebox beside my desk as I slogged through trig and chem. In shop class I sat her atop the tool caddy while rinsing crusty gunk out of ancient carburetors.

Nobody ragged me about bringing a puppy to school. I already had a rep as a rough ticket. I didn’t really enjoy fighting, but I wasn’t afraid of getting hit and dealt a hard lick. If anybody was making jokes about Duncan Diggs, Dog Boy of Westlane High, it was strictly behind my back.

Meanwhile, girls who had no clue I’d even existed were suddenly stopping by my desk to ogle Dolly. Even Francisca Bevins, head cheerleader and a shoo-in for the Total Bitch All-Stars, was charmed enough by the Amazing Dumpster Dog to pass the time of day with me.

The dogs brought Owen and me back together. I’m not saying that was my aim. But when I found those creatures in the Dumpster the first thought through my mind was: Owe.

Owe’s greyhound was a boy. He named it Fragrant Meat.

“It’s what they call dogs in Mongolia,” he told me. “The ones they eat. At the supermarket, that’s what they label it.”

“Why would you name him that?”

“A dog doesn’t know any different. Fragrant Meat. Shithead. Ass-licker. As long as you say it with kindness.”

It bothered me that Owe chose that name. Sure, the dog wouldn’t know, but wasn’t it disrespectful all the same? Owe eventually shortened it to Frag; he probably got sick of explaining it to people.

Frag developed a life-threatening kidney problem. One morning he stumbled into Owe’s bedroom disoriented, bumping into the walls. When Owe picked him up, Frag burped up warm, white foam.

“Frothy, same as a milk shake,” I remember him telling me.

For a few days it was touch and go. Puffy red rings were permanently fixed around Owe’s eyes. But Frag pulled through. The vet put him on a special diet; Frag had to guzzle a gallon of water a day to flush his kidneys.

We used to take our dogs on walks along the river or down in the valley of the escarpment — always keeping the road firmly in sight. We talked about tons of stuff. Girls, of course, but also our friends and whatever might be waiting for us out in the great wide world — the casual bullshit that makes up the bulk of all conversations.

The dogs brought us together when a lot of things could’ve pushed us apart. We went to different schools. In the summers I worked on the horticulture crew at Land of Oceans. Those same summers Owe was at basketball camps in the Carolinas, scrimmaging against future ACC and Big Ten recruits.

That’s an important part of this story, too: how Owen “Dutchie” Stuckey became known in Cataract City simply as Dutch. For a while people knew him by that one name, the way divas are known. Cher. Whitney. Dutch.

He earned the moniker for one simple reason: the boy was straight-up murder on a basketball court.

Before his talent blipped on the city’s radar screen, Owen was Dutchie. Little Dutchie Stuckey with his cowlicked hair, the joints of his limbs like knots in a rope. Then Dutchie shot up a full foot and began to drain twenty-seven-foot jumpers with a defender’s hand in his face. After that he was Dutch.

His skills were an unsolvable riddle to me. I’d grown up with spazzy, knock-kneed, tangle-foot Owe. Whiff-at-kickball Owe. But put him on a basketball court and that clumsiness went away.

Dad and I went to the last game of his junior year, at the height of Dutch mania. He’d posted some crazy averages that season: thirty points, twelve assists, four steals, five rebounds, one and a half blocks. We sat on risers in the Ridley Multiplex, crammed shoulder to shoulder with spectators. The crowd was ritzy: lots of elbow-patched blazers and Hush Puppies. The gym was so packed that sweat and breath caused hazy halos to form around the sodium vapour lights.

On the first play after opening tip, Owe caught the ball on the wing. He dribbled once, got his defender to bite, crossed left, got his defender going back that way and crossed back right — an ankle-snapper, they call that move. His defender went down on his ass as Owe pulled up for a silky-smooth jumper. The nylon gave that sweet stinging snap it makes when the ball barely grazes the iron.

The crowd raised a foghorn cry: “Duuuuuuuuuuuutch.”

I’d never seen a human being move the way Owe did back then. Tall but still gawky — the body of a muscular stick insect. He didn’t bull through defenders: he flowed around them like mercury, squirting through the tiniest seams until he was at the rim for an underhand scoop, or whipping the ball to a teammate parked at the three-point arc for a wide-open look.

This will sound crazy, but even his eyes were a different colour on the court. They’d always been blue, but on the court they seemed brighter and colder — I don’t mean unfeeling, just the purest cold imaginable: like ice in the polar icecaps.

He went off for fifty-three points that night. After showering and giving a quote to the local hack for the morning edition, he hopped in the truck with me and Dad.

“Hell of a game,” Dad said.

“We ran up the score,” Owe said. “I asked Coach to bench me to start the fourth. Game was in the bag, right? But the college scouts were up from the States — it was my showcase game. So he kept me in, kept running plays to goose my total.”

I remembered the frown that had darkened Owe’s face after he’d canned each late-game shot. As if he wanted to miss, but couldn’t.

“It’s the zone,” he said. “When you’re in it, the hoop gets as big as a barrel. Any old junk you toss up goes in. It’s like … white light. Sounds stupid, I know, but it’s the only way to explain it. This very bright light at the edges of your vision, crowding everything out until it’s only the ball and the hoop. No sound, no distractions. It’s so easy in the zone.” He smiled helplessly. “To be honest, I’m happy when I come out of it. I really don’t think humans are meant to live too long in the zone.”

“Dutch Stuckey,” my father said dreamily after we’d dropped him off. “That boy’s going to put this city on the map.”

There was awe in Dad’s voice — probably at the fact that anyone from Cataract City could be so good at anything.

Looking back, it’s easier to spot the signs. I remember one afternoon when we were at Valour Park, shooting on the hoops. We’d taken Dolly and Frag for a meandering walk and they were leashed to the bench next to the court, lying contentedly in the shadow of an oak tree.

I’d always been athletic and even became a half-decent slotback for our football team, but I was no great shakes at basketball. I could set screens and rebound — I’d happily do the grunt work. Owe was good but he hadn’t yet made the leap. His shot was there already, though: this smooth arc that hung forever at its peak, unbothered by gravity, before falling crisply through the net.

He’d dusted me at H-O-R-S-E when Adam Lowery and Clyde Hillicker showed up. They went to my school but I never took notice of them anymore; they were just two guys I vaguely disliked floating through the halls with the jocks and stoners, the skids and skells.

“Hey, shitheads,” went Adam.

My shot hit back iron and bounced over to Clyde. He tucked it under his arm.

“Finders keepers.”

“Throw the goddamn ball back,” I said, in no mood.

Adam took it from Clyde and lofted a shot. The ball dropped nicely through the rim and rolled back to him. Bouncing it on the tips of his fingers, he said: “We’ll play you for it.”

Adam considered himself a JV basketball badass. The coach, Mr. Weaver — everyone called him Mr. Weave because he wore a noticeable hairpiece with frosted tips — must’ve blown some top-end smoke up Adam’s butt.

Owe said, “Sure. Play you for my ball.”

We agreed that the first to seven points wins, all baskets counting as one point. I matched up with Clyde, who was six inches taller and fifty pounds heavier than me. Thankfully he was built like a pile of Goodwill parkas, meaning I could muscle him around.

Owe and Adam guarded each other. As soon as Owe checked the ball, Adam shot. Swish. Owe checked the ball again, and again Adam shot. Swish. Owe checked the ball but this time he closed out, forcing Adam to pass. Clyde caught the ball and brought his elbows around, clipping the bridge of my nose. Red lights popped in front of my face and my brain hit Tilt. Clyde spun clumsily and clanged the ball in off the backboard.

“First one’s free, Clyde,” I said, rubbing my nose. “The next one’ll cost you.”

They were up 3–0. Adam dribbled left, nearly had it stolen, and hoisted up a clumsy jumper that barely grazed the iron. I collected the rebound and fired it out to Owe, who immediately fed it back to me. I pump-faked Clyde, who bit, then blew past him only to bank the ball too hard off the backboard.

Adam took the ball at the top of the key, passed inside, got it back, stutter-stepped right and hoisted a rickety jumper that toilet-bowled around the rim and in. 4–0. A clumsy fadeaway by Clyde — he tossed it just over my outstretched fingertips — made it 5–0. We were getting skunked.

On the next possession Owe checked the ball, timed Adam’s jumper and blocked it cleanly.

“Foul,” Adam said.

“Bullshit!” I shouted.

“Honour the call,” Owe said.

Clyde missed a desperation hook shot. I collected the rebound and passed it out. Owe passed it back in. I whipped it out and growled, “You take it.”

It was as if he’d been waiting for permission. He jab-stepped Adam, got some space and lofted a shot that dropped through. 5–1.

“Lucky shot,” said Adam.

Owe took the ball at the top. That coldness I would come to know well was in his eyes. He crossed Adam over, sending him sprawling. He drove and kicked the ball to me under the rim. I banked the open shot in off the backboard. 5–2.

Adam’s road-rashed knees wept blood. He got right up in Owe’s face, barking, “Take that shot, punk. Go on and shoot that weak-ass shit.”

Owe dribbled back until he was thirty feet from the hoop. Adam put his hands on his hips. “You really going to take that?”

Owe did. The ball barely grazed the back iron as it fell through. 5–3.

Next, Owe dropped a pair of long bombs and a fadeaway that banked in softly. His second shot led to a dispute: it dropped through the netless rim so cleanly that Adam argued it was an airball. Owe just shrugged and canned his next shot from the exact same spot.

“Was that an airball, too?” he asked Adam.

“Fuck off, Stuckey.”

After a nifty up-and-under move where he faked both Adam and Clyde out of their shorts, he shovelled the ball to me for a final easy bucket.

Final score: 7–5.

Adam snatched the ball after the game-winner. “We’re keeping it, anyway. You fuckers cheat.”

“You can leave with the ball,” I said evenly, “or you can leave with your teeth.”

Our dogs were barking at the commotion.

“Shut up, you fucking mutts,” Adam hissed.

I punched him in the gut and he fell back like he’d been pole-axed, dropping the ball. Clyde stepped in uncertainly and when I cocked my fist he flinched like the big marshmallow he was.

Owe collected the ball. Adam grabbed at his chicken-chest like an old woman clutching her pearls. A venomous look came into his eyes. He scrounged a nickel out of his pocket and flipped it onto the concrete.

“Take that home to your daddy,” he wheezed. “You two melt it down, win yourselves another Kub Kar Rally.”

The incident with the Kub Kars was years past — but because this was Cataract City, it may as well have happened yesterday. The city’s got a wet-sidewalk memory: press something into it and the impression remains forever.

Things were gearing towards a scuffle when Owe noticed Dolly had slipped her collar. It lay empty on the grass beside the bench. The park bordered the heavily trafficked Harvard Avenue. I knew greyhounds had zero road sense — most of them figured they could outrun a car.

I sprinted over the grass, shouting her name. “Dolly! Do-lly!”

I ran down the sidewalk, dodging people, imagining every horrible outcome: she’d been hit by a car; she’d been attacked by another dog, a raccoon, a skunk; she’d been stolen by a dog-thieving prick in a white cube van.

I rounded the corner where Harvard met Brian Crescent and there Dolly was, cradled in the arms of Edwina Murphy.

“Lost something, Diggs?” she said, laughing as Dolly licked her chin. “She’s a quick little bitch. You ought to race her down at Derby Lane.”

Our mothers had a nickname for Edwina Murphy: the Jezebel.

Owe and I first got to know Edwina — everyone called her Ed — when she was fifteen, three years older than we were at the time. Owe’s folks hired her to babysit.

Ed lived down the street, in a house of boys. The Murphy brothers were known hellions; more than a few nights I’d wake to the light of police cherries washing my bedroom windows as one or more of the Murphy boys was dropped off or picked up.

Ed had some hellion in her, too, a wildness that reminded me of comic book vixens: Red Sonja, the Black Widow. Her long dark hair fell straight down and when the sun hit it right, it shone like a curved mirror. She swore like a dock worker and punched you on the shoulder to punctuate her sentences. Still, we thought of her as being different from her thuggish clan. She could be charming when it suited her.

Ed was almost criminally easygoing as a babysitter. Her rules were: No fighting, no drinking, no pills, no lighting fires. Other than that, open season. If Owe wanted Marshmallow Fluff for supper, Ed’s shoulders would lift and she’d say: “Going to rot your teeth out, hombre, but they’re your choppers.”

Sometimes when Owe’s folks were working late Ed would pick us up at school. We’d find her lounging against the flagpole sipping a bottle of Coca-Cola. The male teachers drank in greedy eyefuls of her, and her attitude suggested she didn’t blame them — looking was free, after all.

“Fine afternoon, isn’t it, Pete?” she’d say brightly as our grammar teacher hustled to his car. “It’s a hot, hot, slut-hot ol’ day.”

We’d walk home in the cooling afternoon, puppy-dogging Ed’s heels. She often stopped by Scholten’s Convenience on Abilene, rapping sharply on the back door with her knuckles. Mr. Scholten would slip her a carton of cigarettes, which she sold as singles to her classmates. Every city has hidden doors that require secret knocks. Ed knew a lot of doors. How had she learned the knocks? I knew better than to ask a magician how she did her tricks.

Ed smoked her own product, and her brand was the absolute worst: Export A, in the green deck. The Green Death.

“It’s my last one, boys. Promise,” she’d say.

“But you have another pack in your pocket,” Owe would insist. Ed would just smile.

I’d sleep over at Owe’s when Ed babysat. There was no such thing as a curfew. We could stay up until we heard the garage door rumble on its tracks, at which point we had to hotfoot it to bed and start sawing logs.

We’d watch the MuchMusic Top 20 Countdown, hip-checking each other along to Twisted Sister and the Beastie Boys. We introduced Ed to the Baby Blue Movie. She declared it wimpy and flicked channels way up to the 100s, where the scrambled pornos played in a never-ending loop.

We watched the grainy broken images and listened to the goofy dialogue — Female: Are you the plumber? Male: That’s right, and I’ve got a biiig pipe to install—set to cheesy ohm-chaka guitar riffs. Every so often the picture came clear in reverse polarity: we’d see a silicone-pumped tit looking like the huge eye of a squid or a man’s face frozen under a blue-white glare, teeth shining like halogen track lights. I found it a lot less sexy than the Baby Blue Movie: the images spoke of adult lust, the desperate kind that took place in murky peep theatres. Ed seemed to sense this and switched back to the Baby Blue.

“That’s too harsh for you boys,” she said, levelling a finger at us. “Don’t watch it again. I’ll kick your asses if you do.”

It was hard to take her threats seriously. Ed literally wouldn’t hurt a fly: she used to catch bluebottles buzzing against the windows and let them free outside. Once she found a brown bat in the toilet — it must have flown in through the open window. She fished it out with her bare hands: its body the size of a peach stone, wings thin as crepe paper. She rested it on the picnic table in Owe’s backyard, under a shoebox propped up with a stick. The bat dragged itself to the table’s edge and flew off.

“I was sure it was a goner,” she said, then asked herself, “Could I have handled that?”

Then, one night, Ed demanded we go to sleep at our regular bedtime. “You best hit the sack, buckaroos,” she said, hooking her thumb upstairs.

Soon after, I heard the front door. Ed walked up the stairwell with Tim Railsback, her boyfriend. They went into the bathroom. The bathtub ran. We got out of bed, curious. The bathroom door was open a crack. To this day I wonder if Ed left it that way on purpose.

Ed and Tim were stripping naked. Steam rose from the tub the way mist rises off lawns on a summer morning. Their bodies were silked with sweat. Railsback was very tall; the top of Ed’s head rose to where his collarbones came together. Her body had none of the hardness I’d see in Elsa Lovegrove.

They sat in the water, Ed between Tim’s parted legs. A dull surge of jealousy washed through me. The knobs of Tim’s knees rose above the tub like whitened stadium domes. His hands moved over Ed’s body without settling anywhere. His expression held many things: sadness and queasy expectancy, regret, hopefulness.

“What is it?” Ed said.

“It’s just … it’s happening real fast.”

Ed laughed. “It’s okay, boy. We don’t need to do anything.”

Ed was the kind of girl who’d call grown men boys. Me and Owe stood trembling, our eyes shining in the doorway. Ed turned her head until her face met Tim’s. Something in her eyes said Don’t make me ask for it. Just tell me.

Tim said, “I love you.”

And he must have. Almost everyone who spent any time with Ed came to love her. It made her careless, the way people can be when such a hard-won thing is given over so effortlessly. But I think she loved him, too, at least in that moment. Ed needed a lot of love — but she’d give it, too.

None of us heard the garage door. Owe and I barely heard the back door shut, and the warning gave us just enough time to dash back to his room and dive under the sheets.

Ed and Tim weren’t so lucky. Owe’s folks caught them bare-ass. In my house! Under MY roof! Owe’s mom shooed them out, cursing as they fled into the night. Tim wore only his underwear; he left his Letterman jacket on a bathroom hook.

Of course Owe’s mom called my mom and related the sordid tale. Which is how Ed became the Jezebel.

That night at Owe’s was the last time I’d see Edwina until the afternoon years later, on the corner of Harvard and Brian, when she stood in front of me cradling Dolly in her arms.

“You got to keep an eye on this one.” She tsked, handing the dog over as Owe rounded the corner with Frag.

“Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber,” Ed said. “You two still attached at the hip? And you’ve bought matching dogs, too. How cute.”

Owe said, “Dunk found them in a Dumpster.”

This set Ed back for a beat. Then she said, “Who says you can’t find treasure in the trash? You ought to take them to Derby Lane, see if they can run.” She rubbed her thumb and fingers together, giving us the international sign for moolah. “You could be sitting on a mint. I know a guy there, Harry Riggins. Runs the kennels. He can tell you if they’re any good and if not, hey! Still one hell of a pet.”

The Derby Lane racetrack was a lot like Tinglers, the porno shop on Leeming Street — I mean, everyone knew it was there but only a certain type of guy actually went.

Derby Lane had been around since the seventies. As my dad said: “Used to be an okay fallback if you were looking to wager a few bucks on animals running in circles and didn’t have the energy to make it down to Fort Erie to catch the ponies.”

But with the casino going up on the Boulevard with its tinkle-tinkle of one-armed bandits and $5.99 buffet, the dog track was dead as disco. It only attracted the saddest of the sad, lonely old men in shiny-elbowed blazers and Florsheim shoes that had been stylish forty years ago. It was the sort of place that mocked the very idea of luck; even if you won, it was by Derby Lane standards, which meant parlaying a 100-to-1 shot into a measly payoff.

Me and Owe showed up on a Sunday morning. Sam Bovine dropped us off in his dad’s old hearse — he was an apprentice mortician by then, a calling that I thought didn’t suit him but that Bovine embraced with gusto.

“I’d stay,” he said, “but I’ve got to get back to the stiffs or else they may wander away, Living Dead — style.”

Owe said, “Three’s a crowd, anyway.”

Bovine bristled. “Ah, screw you two. And screw your dogs, too. Get them out of the casket croft — they’re stinking up the upholstery.”

We waved as Bovine swept the hearse around in a wide arc, flipping us the bird as he tooled off. We walked the dogs across the lot, which was empty except for one ancient pickup truck. The sun glinted off metal flarings outlining the park’s dingy marquee. As we passed the pickup truck I noticed the bed was carpeted with dried-up dog turds. They looked like stubbed cigars.

We walked through the Winning Ticket Lounge, crossing a threadbare paisley carpet that gave off the stink of fry oil and wet dog. We passed down a line of ancient Silver Chief penny-slots, most of them unplugged, cords wrapped around the levers.

“Our family came here for Chipped Beef Friday,” I said. “Before, y’know, the kitchen got shut down. Roaches? Mice? I think roaches.”

Huge windows smudged with oily fingerprints overlooked the track. Ashtrays were set into the armrests of the gallery seats. The track itself was an oval surrounded by billboards for the Flying Saucer restaurant, Murphy’s Pegleg Tavern and other local haunts.

We made our way to the track. Litter drifted around the empty risers. Dolly strained at her leash as we crossed to the far left of the track, passing a row of metal boxes with a swinging grate attached overtop. The starting boxes?

The kennels were in a boxcar-shaped building with tin siding. I remember thinking that it must get deadly hot come summertime. Owe knocked. When nobody answered he toed the door open.

The howls began at once — like a dozen busted foghorns going off. The kennel was bright white, clean and well lit. Industrial fans rotated above the dog pens. To the left was a deep basin sink and a big steel hook hung with leather leashes. Beside it was a hamper of dog muzzles and another of neatly folded racing jerseys.

A man entered through a side door, yelling, “Shush it! Shush!” He was in his late seventies, short and pot-bellied, wearing carpenter’s overalls and orange galoshes.

Edwina followed him, waving sunnily. “Here’s the Bobbsey Twins!”

The old man ambled over and stuck out his hand. “Harry Riggins at your service, boys.” He edged his glasses up his nose. His eyes were watery behind thick, scratched lenses. “I take care of the dogs. Feed ’em, exercise ’em. I also work the mechanical hare on race nights. You know much about greyhounds?”

“They run pretty fast,” Owe said.

“They can run, that they can.” Harry knelt, opened Frag’s mouth and ran one squared-off finger along his gums. His other fingers roamed up Frag’s face and opened his eyelids. “Eeesh. Too much pressure behind this one’s eyes. Makes them bulge out. Quirk of the breed. You happen to know their bloodlines?”

I said, “I found them in a Dumpster.”

“Oh,” Harry said. “That does happen. Some trainers … goddamn slugs.”

Ed said briskly, “Well, let’s see if these mutts got any pep in their step.”

The dog runs were hundred-yard-long fenced enclosures laid out behind the kennels. Greyhounds dashed down the nearest run, skidding to a stop at the fence before barrelling back the other way.

Harry said, “Let’s put your two in with this wild bunch, see if they can ruck in.”

Frag and Dolly tried to join the racing pack. Almost immediately they got tangled up and hit the fence; the chain-link made a strained musical note as it was stretched back against the posts—phimmmm! — like an overtuned banjo string. They tumbled across the dirt, scrambled to their feet and raced to rejoin the dogs.

“Yikes,” said Ed.

“They’re young yet,” Harry said. “The bitch seems game.”

I didn’t like Harry calling Dolly a bitch. He didn’t mean anything by it — I knew that, technically, it described what she was — but the term put a burr under my ass.

I’d never seen Dolly running with a greyhound other than Frag. Now I observed how muscle was packed in fat balls where her chest met her front legs. She ran with abandon: legs outflung, mouth wide open in the closest thing to a smile that a dog can manage.

“They ain’t much as pets,” Harry told us. “Lap dogs, I mean. You probably figured that out already. Looking to sell them? Probably get a couple hundred for the bitch. The male’s more of a giveaway.”

“They don’t want to sell, Harry,” said Ed. “They want to race.”

Harry cocked his head at Ed. Stubble glittered along his jaws like flaked mica.

“Come on now, Edwina.” He turned to us. “You just finished telling me you aren’t any kind of dogmen, right?”

“We’ve never raced dogs,” I admitted.

Harry said, “Then I’d urge you to sell. Still some decent dogmen at this track. They’ll treat the nippers well enough, maybe even turn the bitch into a decent B-leveller … Could you really want to keep them as pets?”

Ed said, “Harry, why not let’s just see what these dogs have got?”

He looked leery but said, “For you, darlin’? Anything.”

Minutes later Harry met us at the track. Leashed at his side was a young greyhound with a coffee-cake coat.

“Steadfast Attila,” he told us. “I didn’t name him. He’ll race in D-Class soon. That’s the lowest level at the Lane. Attila’s a stayer — he’ll race right to the line.”

Harry left Steadfast Attila with Ed and approached the mechanical hare. It wasn’t a hare at all — just a ratty teddy bear lashed to a five-foot buggywhip pole. Harry pulled a squeeze bottle out of his overall pocket and sprayed down the bear.

“Rabbit piss,” he said. “Don’t ask how I get it.”

We led the dogs over to the hare and let them take a sniff. Steadfast Attila started pogo-sticking on his hind legs. Fragrant Meat sat on his haunches and gnawed on his own ass.

“That’s not an encouraging sign, son,” Harry told Owe.

Dolly just cocked her head at the hare, and I figured she knew exactly what it was: a piss-soaked teddy bear on a pole.

Fragrant Meat raced Steadfast Attila first. Owe and I lined up the dogs at the start line. Steadfast Attila barked madly, screwing his haunches into the dirt. Fragrant Meat flattened himself out with his tail straight as a ramrod.

Harry hauled himself into the operator’s seat. “When it gets thirty yards out, let ’em go.”

The mechanical hare zizzed down the rail, spitting blue sparks. The dogs tore off, kicking clods of dirt back into our faces. Fragrant Meat’s rear legs had a noticeable sideways kick. Steadfast Attila worked the outside edge, his brindle coat a beautiful brownish blur against the rust-coloured dirt.

Fragrant Meat held the lead when they hit the turn, but Steadfast Attila pulled into a dead heat around the hundred-yard mark and outdistanced Frag down the stretch. Frag kicked hard to the finish, though; there wasn’t an ounce of quit in that dog.

“I don’t like to dismiss dogs on their first offering, but he’s got the sidewinder legs,” Harry said to Owe, a doctor delivering sad news.

“Sidewinder legs?”

“It’s like hip dysplasia,” Harry told him. “There may not be a lot on your dog, but greyhounds are like precision instruments — even a little is too much when you’re talking about races won by a fraction of a second.” He clapped Owe’s shoulder companionably. “The boy’s got sass. But it’s like running with a clubfoot.”

“He does have sass,” Owe said. “He ran his guts out.”

“A good dog only loses because his body can’t compete,” said Harry. “That’s the difference between greyhounds and men — a man’s mind’ll fold, even if he’s got all the tools to win. Some say a dog won’t quit just because dogs are dumb animals. I don’t subscribe to that theory.”

Harry lashed a fresh teddy to the whip. He had a burlap sack full of them: teddy bears and rabbits, pigs and penguins. “I get them from a carnival supply company,” he said. “Used to go to the Goodwill but they’d give me weird looks.”

He led Steadfast Attila to the kennels and returned with a fawn-coloured greyhound who walked with the high, hopping gait of a show horse.

“Trix Matrix,” he said. “Didn’t come up with that name, either. I call her Trixy. She’s earmarked for great things, I’m told. She’ll earn foreign interest — some of our best dogs are bought by Irish breeders to run at the top tracks overseas.”

Harry led Trixy over to Dolly. The dogs stood nose to nose. Dolly nuzzled her snout into Trixy’s throat. Trixy snapped at Dolly, who whipped her head aside to avoid Trixy’s canines, dancing back, paws stuttering as if the ground was hot as glowing coals.

“She’s got moxie,” Harry said, a smile touching the edges of his mouth. “But plenty of scrubbers do.”

Dolly toed the line beside Trixy. She stood stock-still, rear legs flared, front paws spaced with one slightly in front of the other. Her pulse raced under my fingertips. She looked back at me with a quizzical expression. You don’t have to hold me so tight, the look seemed to say.

When the hare raced down the rail, Trixy bolted — god, that dog could boogie. You didn’t have to know much about greyhounds to see she was a true racer: the fibre of her being spoke through her running form.

And Dolly? Well, Dolly just stood there.

“Girl?” I whispered.

Then I felt the run building inside her body: all the little parts gathering momentum, energy coursing through her skin. It was like a giant muscle contracting before it flexed into action. Her entire body recoiled — legs pistoning backwards, haunches dipping low — and there was this awesome tension, every fast-twitch muscle committed to the goal of forward motion. Then she was gone.

At first Dolly’s strides were clipped and violent, paws churning up chunks of dirt until she hit the seventy-yard mark. There she lengthened out into a powerful running motion, her streamlined skull bobbing with each stride.

Trixy ran high, head up, spine bowed. Dolly ran low: head on the same plane as her shoulders, spine prone, slicing through the air like a ballistic missile. She managed to get the same leg-spread as Trixy, though, with her lower gait: her legs scissored under her, tucked paws brushing her belly before they jackknifed out again, barely grazing the dirt.

Trixy held the inside position when they hit the turn; she angled her shoulder towards the rail, steering like a stock car around a high-banked oval. Dolly’s paws skidded for purchase as she muscled herself back into position, her shoulder colliding with Trixy’s; their heads came together, teeth flashing, fighting with each other even as they fought desperately for position.

They raced round the bend. Me, Ed and Owe ran to the rail. The dogs were so close that I couldn’t separate one from the other: there was just an elongated shape, two dogs fused together. They disappeared behind the tote board.

They shrieked around the turn and hit the final stretch. Dolly had flared out to the right, far from the rail, meaning she’d have to cover more ground. Trixy pounded down the track, head upflung, mouth open and tendons flexed down her throat and across her brisket: she looked like she was screaming. Dolly’s legs pumped so hard it was like watching a machine reaching the point of failure, spindles trembling as it threatened to fling itself to pieces. A red berry was splotched on her coat — Trixy must have bitten her hard enough to draw blood.

They tore down the homestretch. Dolly angled across the track, closing in at the rail. Her form was slipping: her front legs speared wide as her head jerked up and down. Still, she drew even with about forty yards to go. Trixy kept pace for another ten yards before Dolly blazed past with a vicious finishing kick, accelerating over the line.

Harry ambled down from the operator’s box. He scratched his belly through his overalls and smiled in the way old men do when they see something fresh and exciting — with an element of bewilderment.

“She’s a real dandy, son. And what a low drinker.”

“Low drinker?”

“Old dogman’s saying,” Harry told me, “for a dog that goes down real deep in their running stance, so low their belly’s almost dragging the dirt. They look like they’re crouched by the river lapping up water.”

Ed slapped my back. “Looks like you won the lottery.”

When I went to pick up Dolly she was hopping around, favouring one of her paws.

“What is it, girl?”

She whined thinly, babying her paw in that confused way animals do, as if they can’t quite believe their bodies might break down or fail. She’d run so hard that sand was compacted between her paw-pads. Must’ve hurt like hell.

“It happens when they start racing,” Harry told me. “Buy a bottle of Tuf-Foot — it’ll harden them right up.” And he suggested I take her to the vet.

When the vet instructed me to help Dolly onto the examining table, she buried her snout into the soft spot between my clavicle and neck. Her breath had the ironlike tang of raw liver, which I took to be the smell of pure animal fear. She shook when the vet flushed her paw with peroxide, but she didn’t nip — just beheld him with tragic, injured eyes.

The Tuf-Foot worked. Dolly never had that problem again. But I was worried, and that worry never did go away.

Every time Dolly raced she’d enter the zone, the same as Owe did on a basketball court. And like he said, human beings aren’t meant to exist there for too long. Why should dogs be any different?

But it was Dolly’s element, you know? Blazing down the track so fast her skin must’ve screamed. She was happiest there.

Owe and I became fixtures around the kennels. We’d help Harry sweep out the cages and dole out kibble. There was a fair amount of turd collection, too — it required a wheelbarrow and a shovel. In return, Dolly and Frag got to run with the others. They’re group animals, greyhounds; they do best in a pack.

Sometimes Harry let them rip around the oval. Frag was a scrubber — damn those sidewinder legs. Still, that dog loved to run. Dolly was something else. She had the gift, Harry said. But after seeing her almost self-destruct in that first test against Trixy, I worried a little about racing her seriously — and anyhow, I couldn’t legally register as her owner until I was nineteen, since Derby Lane was a wagering circuit.

This was how Ed fell back into our lives, too — fell into Owe’s life, specifically. Something kindled between them. I don’t know how it began, but by the time I found out, it was blazing hot.

One night I came off the track into the Winning Ticket Lounge. It was empty, but I heard soft noises from the coatroom. I walked over expecting to find the janitor. Instead, Owe and Ed were pawing each other in the gloom. Owe was taller by then; his shoulders jingle-jangled on the empty hangers, a strangely musical sound. His hands cupped Ed’s breasts forcefully, pressing her up against the plywood wall. Ed’s eyes were closed and her hands were clenched in Owe’s hair and her tongue was in his mouth.

A gutshot feeling rocked me as I turned away soundlessly. I’d thought that, if anything, Ed was more suitable for me. Our families still lived on the same block. Our ambitions seemed more in keeping … But what the hell did I know of Ed’s ambitions? I felt like a creep, catching them. It reminded me of the night we’d spied on Ed in the bath with Tim Railsback.

But I couldn’t help thinking: Hadn’t Owe already had enough goddamn good luck in his life?

“You’re a good kisser,” I heard Ed say in a husky voice.

Owe laughed, breathless. “Beginner’s luck?”

When they came back outside I saw different things. In Ed I saw something more than simple lust. I got the sense that she had scared herself — as if she wanted to reach for Owe’s hand but didn’t quite dare.

Owe looked bemused. As if he was thinking: Hey, that was pretty cool. Wouldn’t mind doing that again if I had a chance.

One day, when Ed left us at the track to go to her job, we followed.

This was almost a year after I’d seen her and Owe in the coatroom. Owe was in the midst of his breakout basketball season. The two of them weren’t dating, exactly — I don’t know who was keeping who at arm’s length, but I suspected it was Ed keeping Owe at bay. Or maybe I just wanted to believe that.

She was working part-time at the Bisk. Ritz line. But she also worked at a bar. She wouldn’t tell us which one. So one night Owe and I followed her.

“Why bother?” I’d asked him earlier.

“She thinks we’re kids, Dunk. Screw that! I say we go cadge drinks off her.”

We followed her in Owe’s father’s car, a late-model Olds. Ed’s Mercury Topaz went down Rickard to Ellesmere, turning left up Stanley to Lundy’s Lane. The night was cool with the smell of creosote and the hum of crickets.

She pulled in at the Sundowner. She wore jeans ripped at the knee and an oversized Flashdance sweatshirt. She went in through a black door set into a dingy brick wall.

“Huh” was all Owe said.

The bouncer was a huge black man with a greying goatee. Seeing Owe, he mimed shooting a jump-shot. “You’re that boy with the sweet shot, am I right?” He ushered us inside without ID’ing us.

The Sundowner existed in a purplish, glittering perma-twilight. Winking lights ran along the floor like the ones marking the edges of airport runways. The place was packed: well-heeled guys, construction workers, prowling sex tourists, college students nursing pitchers of twenty-dollar draft. An elevated stage swelled into a bulb, where a brass pole shone up to the ceiling. Half-naked women drifted around us like shimmery butterflies. I figured half the world’s supply of body glitter was concentrated right there.

We lucked into a stageside table just as two other guys were leaving. There was a pit in the middle of the table where a girl would dance if you paid. A DJ’s voice piped up: “Gentlemen, put your hands together for Shah-Shah-Shah-Shasta!”

The Scorpions’ “Rock You Like a Hurricane” blasted. A woman stepped through the tinsel curtain. She was gorgeous but clearly also drunk or stoned or both. She waggled her ass and stepped out of her bikini bottoms the way kids do: by yanking them down to her ankles and stomping until they came off. She strutted down the catwalk, skidded in her high heels, almost fell, didn’t fall, then tossed her hair around like a boat propeller. Her face was blank as a test pattern.

“Yeeeeeah!” someone went.

My mind spun: Ed might be the bartender, right? Or a waitress — and they didn’t take their clothes off, did they?

A girl sat between us. Cute and thin with boobs that didn’t belong on a frame her size, drinking a Corona through a bendy straw. “Wanna dance, sweetheart? Champagne room. Fifty bucks each.”

All I had in my wallet was seven dollars. I said, “You’re very pretty, but—”

“Stow it,” she said. “It was a yes or no question.”

She pulled a cigarette out of her purse. It was five inches long and looked like it would take a year to smoke.

“Fucking hot in this sonofabitch,” she said, lighting it with a platinum Zippo. “I’m from the Sioux. Cooler up there.”

“I’ve heard it’s nice.”

“It’s a shithole. My ex is from the Sioux. He beat a man half to death with a skillet.” She batted her eyes, pixie-like. “A skillet, dude.”

The DJ said: “Gentlemen, put your hands together and welcome to the stage Dah-Dah-Dah-Disneeeeeeee!”

Edwina stepped through the tinsel. She knelt and placed her cigarettes and pack of Dentyne on the edge of the stage — would they have been stolen backstage, I wondered through my shock — and strutted down the stage with scissoring steps. The black lights shone on her legs, sleek as cobalt. She didn’t even see us. I’d heard what girls do at these places is pick a spot on the wall and focus on that. Who’d want to focus on all that desperate need howling up at them?

Owe laughed — a brittle, brutal sound. It stole above the sound of Springsteen’s “Hungry Hearts.”

Ed’s gaze snapped towards us. Her hands flew briefly to her mouth — then she hopped down nimbly, gave our ears vicious twists and marched us out.

“Fucking hell, Ed!” Owe said. “That hurts!”

The crowd catcalled as Ed bulled us through the club and out the front door. “You bastards!” she screamed, shoving us into the parking lot.

I saw tears in Owe’s eyes but it was hard to tell if they were from his laughter or from Ed’s fingers: she’d pinched my ear so hard that a line of blood trickled down my jaw.

“What the fuck, Lou?” she said to the bouncer. “You check ID or just stand there looking pretty?”

Lou held his hands up. “Boss wants numbers, baby. Butts in seats.”

She stood in the parking lot in a spangly G-string, a dental-floss bikini and teetery stripper heels. Tourists ambling down the strip stared pop-eyed.

“You little pricks. This your idea of fun?” She got right up in Owe’s face, chest thrust forward. “This what you came to see?”

Owe gripped Ed’s shoulders gently. It struck me as strange how high he loomed over her.

“Listen, I’m sorry. I just … you said you were a bartender.”

“I told you I worked at a bar,” she said fiercely. “I didn’t lie.”

“I’m not saying you … I’m not angry, just surprised. You do whatever you want, Ed.”

I saw terror leech into Edwina’s eyes — she could tell Owe meant it. He really didn’t care.

“It’s a temporary thing.” The cups of her eyelids were brimming. I’d never known Ed to cry.

Owe lifted his hands off her shoulders, holding them up like he was being threatened at gunpoint.

“Ed, listen, I don’t know why you’re getting so upset. I’m sorry we came. That was wrong. I won’t do it again.”

“I just don’t want you to think …” She brushed a palm across her eyes, smearing her mascara. “The Bisk … layoffs, okay? I was lowest on the totem pole. A girlfriend of mine used to dance here. She said … What the fuck?” She hammered a fist into Owe’s chest. “Why do I have to explain it? I didn’t want you to know because …” She threw her hands down her body, a taa-daa motion. Her lips were pressed tight, her chin dimpled like a golf ball. “You know? It’s nothing. Doesn’t mean that I don’t …”

She looked at me with pleading hopefulness, as if I might know what to say. And I’d have done anything for her if I’d only known what she could possibly need.

“Ed, it’s cool,” Owe said. “It’s aaall cool, yeah? Me and Dunk are gonna go now. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

Her jaw went hard, like she was struggling not to say the word. But she did. “Promise?”

Afterwards Owe drove to Queenston, to a footbridge that arced out over the river. Clouds of midges gathered under the bridge lamps.

“It’s not such a big deal,” I said.

“Not really,” he agreed. “Did it surprise you all that much?”

“Sure it did.”

In time he said: “Okay, me too. But … did you see that scar on her stomach?”

I’d seen it. A twisting milky thread rising above the hem of her G-string like a cobra from a fakir’s basket.

“She had a kid a few years ago,” Owe said. “C-section.”

“She did? With who?”

“Not my business.”

I wondered if Ed had tried to make it his business, share that secret part with him. Maybe he’d told her not to bother. He’d have put it in gentle terms, but still he would’ve said it.

“She gave it up for adoption. Hasn’t seen the baby since.”

I said, “Does it matter?”

Owe’s blue eyes glittered like the moonlit water along the quay. “Does what matter?”

“That she had a kid. That she gave it up.”

“That’s her thing. Y’know, I just want what makes her happy. I’m out of here soon,” he said. “Scholarship offers pouring in. Once I sit down with Coach and make that choice, I’m gone. A vapour trail. Hasta la vista, Cataract City. Ed’s smarter than you and me put together, Dunk.”

It was true. But even back then I knew that intelligence and hope run on different rails. Ed was a relic of Owe’s old life: back when he was Dutchie, not Dutch. He was becoming something else. His body moved with new smoothness, joints lubricated by the magical oil of self-confidence. He was coming into his own while Ed remained what she was: a tough girl from a rough brood whose body moved like pure sex under the black lights.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out a piece of newsprint. I’d unfolded and refolded it so often that the paper was splitting at the edges. I showed Owe the For Sale ad circled in red ink. “Honda CB550 motorcycle,” I said. “Hundred K on the odometer, but Hondas run forever. Five hundred bucks.”

A smile creased the deeply tanned skin around Owe’s eyes. “Where would you go, Dunk?”

“Don’t know.” Away wasn’t a place so much as a goal, was it? “It would be nice to motorvate, you know? Yesterday is history, tomorrow’s a mystery.”

I wanted Owe to know there were a million ways out. That I could do it, too. But then I had a sudden vision of myself as I knew I’d be in a few years — a vision of such unflinching truth that my mind settled around it with shocking ease: I was sitting at some local wet-spot, the Four Hearts or The Gate. My legs were kicked out, toes pointing up, and I slumped in my seat, mimicking the way men sat around here — each of us carving his little plot. I wore overalls dusted with flour from the Bisk. My hair was clipped short and was white at the roots. I was drinking a Hed and a shot, smoking counterfeit cigarettes. My wife worked at the Bisk, too. For a holiday we’d rent a room at the Mist-Eye Motel on the other side of the river; we’d swim in the unnaturally blue pool wearing the irregular bathing suits from the factory outlet centres on Military Road. When the sky was clear we’d be able to see back across the river and catch a glimpse of our own fucking house.

I said: “I’m glad you’re going, Owe. Not glad-glad, but …”

You can’t hate your best friend for taking the opportunities he’d been given. That would be the worst sort of hate, wouldn’t it? Because it would mean you hate yourself, too.

After that night, I saw less of Owe for a while. It was a familiar drift — we’d done that slow fade out of each other’s lives before. The first time, our fathers had instigated it; this time it felt more natural. It’s weird how two guys can grow up on the same street and share the same everyday sights, sit in the same classrooms with the same teachers, roam the same woods, like the same girls … then one zigs, the other zags, and soon enough they’re strangers to each other.

But you have to understand this: Cataract City is possessive. The city has a steel-trap memory, and it holds a grudge.

Nothing that grows here is ever allowed to leave.

On the night that changed Owe’s future, Edwina found me in the lunchroom at the Bisk. I was a trainee by then, working on the line with my old man. The two of us were sitting next to the Coke machine, eating the PB-and-banana sandwiches Mom had packed.

“Mr. Diggs,” Ed greeted my father.

Dad knew about the Jezebel business but had never held it against Ed. We could tell by her face that something real bad must’ve happened.

“Dunk, it’s Owe. He’s in the hospital.”

A bite of sandwich stuck in my throat, dry as wormy wood. “What?”

She squeezed her eyes shut. “I don’t know … my friend’s the intake nurse at Niagara Gen. She called to say he’s been admitted.”

I set a land-speed record driving my dad’s pickup to the hospital. Owe was laid out on a bed with his right leg elevated in a contraption whose many braces, straps, pulleys and lacings drove a spike of dread into me. His mom sat beside the bed in her nurse’s whites.

“He called out for you,” she said to Ed, her eyes dull with shock. “I dropped the dosage. He surfaced for a minute. He called for me, for his dad … and for you.”

Two bags of fluid hung on a metal pole and drip-drip-dripped down a tube into a needle poked into his arm. Owe’s right knee was black and swollen to twice its size: it had a rotten shine to it, like the skin of a fruit that’s about to split apart and leak its insides. The kneecap was swivelled so that it now sat under his leg like a giant tumour.

He’ll never play basketball on that knee again was my first thought. My second was: Never walk properly, either.

Ed cupped Owe’s face. His eyelids fluttered.

“Whoa, Nelly,” he said with a loopy smile. “I got a doozy of a lump, huh?”

“What happened?” I said.

His endless smile terrified me. “I was coming out of the A.N. Myer gym — playing some pickup, right? Walking down O’Neil to the bus stop, dribbling my ball … This car or truck or I don’t know what …”

He swallowed. His throat made a dry click. Edwina gave him water to sip through a straw.

“… this car skipped the curb and whap!” Owe clapped his hands with sudden violence. The sound ricocheted off the eggshell walls. “Then whoosh. Guess they drove off. I heard … laughing? Laughing, man.”

He licked his lips and stared at the wreckage of his leg. His worry seemed mild at best; whatever was dripping into his veins spared him the full extent of the horror.

Ed took his hand. “It’ll be—”

Owe snatched his hand back with casual brutality. “Gonna need a cane, man!” he said in a druggy singsong. “Gonna need a solid gold caaaane to get me down the street!”

By the time he passed out again I was already moving out the door.

I’d kill them.

A curtain of blood had dropped over my vision. It was all I could see, all I could smell.

I drove. Edwina sat in the passenger seat. At first I’d told her not to come but she refused to listen. Fair enough. She deserved blood as much as I did.

She said, “You know who did it?”

“I have an idea.”

“You know why?”

“No good reason.”

“Drive faster.”

“You gonna pay the fucking ticket, Ed?”

I knew where they drank: the Gunnery, a dive on Dorchester. I knew because everyone knew where everyone else did their drinking in this city. You pick your watering hole and cling to it the rest of your life like a drowning rat to a bit of Styrofoam bobbing in the sewer.

I doused the headlights as I turned into the lot and parked next to Adam Lowery’s shitbox Tercel. The thing shone like fresh blood in the moonlight, drops of water drying on its hood. He’d probably gone to the Coin-Op carwash on Philbrook and given it a good scrub. The front bumper was crushed on the passenger’s side. I pictured Lowery flipping on the high beams at the last instant, pinning Owe in the glare.

The Gunnery hosted some rough customers. The Murphy boys bent their elbows there. The chimes above the door tinkled as I stepped through, Ed right behind me. Her brothers gave her confused smiles from their corner table. Beer-warped floorboards creaked under my feet. The Rock-Ola jukebox was playing a Smiths tune.

Clyde Hillicker turned on his stool, squaring his shoulders. The curtain of blood darkened until I could see only his outline like a charcoal etching on the sidewalk.

I cut fast across the distance between us. Clyde threw a punch that caught me on the neck with a flat smack like a double-cut pork chop slapped on a marble slab. I stepped through it and lowered my head, bringing my right hand up from below my belt.

I won’t claim it was a thing of charm or grace. It was a mean punch, a pure ugly one, and I summoned it from the blackest depths of my soul.

It clocked Clyde on the chin. He fell and his skull hit the rail with a sweaty thud as my momentum carried me over his sagging body into the bar. Nobody offered to pick him up.

Ed slit her eyes at her brothers and mouthed, Where?

Her eldest brother hooked his thumb at the toilets, smiling out the side of his mouth. Ed grabbed a pool cue from the rack and crept to the men’s door.

“Any of you see Adam Lowery,” I said loud enough so he’d hear, “tell him we have issues to discuss.”

I booted the bar door open but stayed inside the bar. The chimes tinkled as the door closed.

Adam Lowery cracked the bathroom door a titch and poked his head out. Ed swung the cue into his face. It landed flush, shattering his nose. Adam squawked; his hands flew up as he fell back through the door. The Murphy brothers laughed.

Ed followed Adam into the bathroom, hitting him with the cue as the door swung back and forth on its bat-wing hinges. Adam was on the floor with his hands up to ward off the blows, but then his hands fell and the cue broke and she went to work with her feet. The door stopped swinging. Ed didn’t step out for a while. Adam was lucky Ed was wearing flip-flops.

She came out breathing heavily. Her brothers offered a round of applause as if she’d finally fulfilled her familial obligations.

We drove away fast. I still couldn’t cope with the idea that Owe’s dreams were toast. And over what? A stupid blood-grievance nurtured since childhood — the sort that festered all over this city — acted upon in a moment of opportunity. We were snakes. A knot of venomous rattlesnakes balled up under a rock. If one of us made a break for daylight the ball constricted, every one of us tightening, pulling that rogue snake back in.

“He could rehab it,” Ed said.

“Sure he could,” I said. “Sure.”

The knuckles of my right hand were split: the skin had opened in crude Xs like the tips of dumdum bullets. The fight hadn’t solved a goddamn thing. It hadn’t even felt good. Clyde would suck his dinner through a straw for a week or two. Adam might need a transfusion but then he’d be fine.

Those facts didn’t un-fuck Owe’s ruined prospects one bit.

Clyde Hillicker earned a five-year hitch at the Kingston Pen for the hit-and-run, the maximum punishment under the law. Apparently he’d been behind the wheel — although it wouldn’t surprise me to hear Adam convinced him to take the rap. Adam was dumb but cunning. Clyde was just dumb.

Adam spent nearly a month laid up. His nose is still so flat that his nostrils run horizontal to his face. They look like coin slots.

Owe never played basketball again. Not at the level he had, anyway. His knee healed as best it could but after six or seven surgeries, the steel pins and bone-screws, his joint had to be fused. The docs outfitted him with a bulky brace.

After a too-short rehab Owe tried to make a comeback. But in basketball, you really need to be that half-step ahead. Owe still had the IQ and that sweet jumper, but he’d lost the speed to make defenders fear him. They stuck tight to his jersey, suffocating him. He got victimized on the defensive end by speedier guards.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t know how safe I am.”

“Oh, very safe. Trust me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hail, hail, the gang’s all here.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear skunks:

Enjoy each other. Trash attracts trash, right? I leave you to your trailer-park lives. I hope you pop out a brood of revolting, zero-IQ blobs, as nature surely intended. You have my blessings!

Yours most sincerely,

Owen Jeremy Stuckey

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

“Come in, Dunk.”

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

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

“Let’s go walk the mutts.”

He stared blankly. “Okay.”

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

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

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

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

“Ran out of deodorant, man.”

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

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

“Not bad for a zero-IQ blob, huh?”

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

“You really need that thing, Owe?”

“Eh. It’s a pain to take off.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Of course not. You do them both?”

“Whoever did that probably had help.”

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

“No, you do not.”

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

I laughed. “You? Johnny Law?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The racers were led onto the grassy infield by the Niagara Falls chapter of the Young Jaycees, giving bettors the chance to eye the dog flesh. The tote board flashed betting lines — Dolly had gone off at 12–1; she looked stringy and bandy legged compared to her competition.

We herded Dolly into her trap. She’d been slotted in number 3. Along with traps 2 and 4, they’re known as coffin boxes: the dogs in these traps are hemmed in by the rail-runners and wide-runners, meaning they can’t open up down the stretch.

The traps flew open as the mechanical hare zipped down the rail. Four greyhounds went pounding down the track like the hammers of hell.

Dolly remained in her trap. One second ticked by. Another. The other dogs were already twenty yards gone and accelerating fast.

Come on, girl, I thought. One foot in front of the other …

An explosion of fur and flesh blasted out of the trap. Dolly launched herself wide, banking round the high side of the track. I remember a whistling inhale — the sound of breath caught in a hundred throats — as hardened railbirds and casual dog fanciers alike leaned forward in their seats.

Dolly went wide on the first bend. There was something gyroscopic in the way she ran the track: banking high around the turn only to arrow in on the straightaway. She covered more ground than she needed to, but she’d also ramp up to a faster max speed. Maybe that’s why she’d waited in the traps: she wanted to avoid the jostling of the pack so she could blow by on the homestretch.

She caught up with ninety yards to go and slingshotted past the pack, winning by four lengths. Her breakneck running style, late dash from the traps and wonky manoeuvring had the crowd buzzing.

Hell, I was buzzing. I turned to Ed in the Winning Ticket Lounge and said, “Will you move in with me?”

I lived on my own by then, in a teensy apartment overlooking the Fairview Cemetery. It was barely big enough for me and Dolly, but I had a steady job at the Bisk — the Fig Newtons line — and nursed a hope for something bigger.

Ed threw her head back and laughed — a tinkling sound like glass wind chimes in a high breeze. “Dunk, you live in a shoebox with a view of the boneyard. If we’re going to do this, you’re moving in with me.”

I told my landlord the very next day; he was happy to see the back end of the high-strung dog that left scratch-marks on the linoleum. I loaded my few possessions into Bovine’s hearse and drove to the house Edwina rented on Culp Street — which happened to overlook a boarded-up middle school. It wasn’t much better than overlooking a graveyard, but I kept this opinion to myself.

Dolly was elevated to B-Class for her second race soon after that — and the tote board listed her at 2–1 odds. She won. Then she won two more races in that class. And that’s when she was deemed ready for A-Class.

A few days later, Ed and I watched as Dolly smoked her A-Class debut over Silent Cruise, who had been tabbed as a world-beater. Afterwards an old gaffer sauntered up to me and in a deep Irish brogue asked, “Is that great galloping bitch for sale?”

He had associations back in Tipperary, he claimed, and was an informal scout for punters at the famous Thules dog track. “She may not always win,” he said of Dolly, “but Lo’, she puts on a rollicking show. The yobbos back home would love ’er.”

He hadn’t been surprised to hear Dolly wasn’t for sale.

“You’re smart to hold on to a bitch like thaa. A gold mine on four legs!”

How much longer would I let her race? The way she ran made it a huge risk every time the traps sprung. I couldn’t live with myself if she got hurt. I’d have stopped if not for the fact that Dolly seemed happiest in full flight.

By the time we got home that evening, the heat had set in. There were rolling blackouts across the city and our A/C was on the fritz. Edwina was edgy. We lay on the sofa reading by the light of tea candles. Her legs thrummed across my thighs. She screwed a knuckle into my ribs and play-slapped me.

“What’s up with you tonight?”

“Just feeling silly.”

The sticky warmth lay thick inside the walls. We had been sweating just to breathe. She stood up, pulling me into the bedroom. It may simply have been a way to break the heat inside of her, the same way a good thunderstorm will break a heat wave. She undressed in the moonlight falling through the window. Her body seemed carved out of that moonlight — a part of it, and distant in the same way. Before Ed, I’d had no experience with women. Sure, I’d kissed Becky Longpre on the Lions Club baseball bleachers, got my hand up her shirt before she protested about being a good Baptist girl, but that was it. My breath always quickened with Ed. My heart beat so fast I felt it over every inch of my body.

It was always a struggle to control myself, but Ed sensed that. She’d brace her hands on my shoulders and ease the shakes out of me, eyes telling me to take it slow. I only had to listen to her and obey.

I wondered what she was thinking in those moments. Part of her, maybe the deepest part, was locked off — even then, when we were that close. I figured a woman can’t be understood the way a man can. Women have purposes men can’t even imagine.

And then I felt that sweetness coming up from the balls of my feet. It wasn’t just the physical part; it was the body-closeness I would come to crave. But it’s never enough, is it? Two people can’t share the same heart, can they?

Afterwards she let out a jittery breath. “That was nice. You always try real hard, Dunk. A girl appreciates that.”

A girl appreciates that. It was as if she was giving me advice for down the line, when I’d find myself in bed with someone else.

Early the next morning I’d awoken for no reason I could name. Dolly’s head was perched on the edge of the bed, inches from my face. The weight of her skull spread her dewlap across the mattress. Had I been talking in my sleep? Had I called out to Dolly?

She snuffled softly and licked my cheek. Her tongue smelled of shaved iron. It wasn’t her style; Dolly was a standoffish creature.

Maybe something about the stillness of night had rewired the circuits in her brain, drawing her to me? I lay motionless, not wanting to break the spell.

Three weeks after Dolly’s A-Class win, a murmur passed through the Winning Ticket as Ed and I entered. The punters had pegged me as the owner of the mutt with the million-dollar legs. Ed slapped me on the shoulder and whispered in my ear: “You’re basking in the reflected glory of a dog. Drink it up, big shot.”

A weedy fellow in boater shoes and a brushed velvet coat wormed out of the crowd.

“The number four bitch in tonight’s final heat — yours, yeah? Is she well?” he asked. “Not got the shits, I hope? Should I put a ten-spot on her to be first on the bunny, first over the line?”

Other dogmen pressed in, twisting their racing forms in white-knuckled fists, waiting for my reply.

“She’s not shitting any differently than usual, if that helps.”

They peeled away like buzzards from a clean-picked carcass, grumbling as they drifted over to the betting wickets.

Harry waited for us in the kennels with Dolly. “This is the big time,” he said. “Open Class welcomes dogs from all over. The purse is decent enough that you’ll get dogmen coming up from New York and as far east as Maine. Your girl better not make her customary late dash — these dogs’ll be too quick for that.”

“Do you know any of the other dogs?” Edwina asked.

“Not so much the dogs as owners. Teddy Simms from Cheektowaga’s got one in trap two, a bitch named Hurricane Jessie. Simms works with some fast bloodlines. Lemuel Drinkwater’s here, too. He breeds over at the Tuscarora Nation outside Buffalo. A real bottom-liner, is Lemmy — loves a winner, no use for a loser. A couple years back he got DQ’d for the season. The vet was giving one of his winners the usual post-race once-over and wouldn’t you know it if a jalapeño pepper didn’t slide out of the poor dog’s ass.”

Harry took in our shocked expressions.

“Old dogman’s dirty trick. Slit a hot pepper with a razor blade, get those juices leaking out, stick it up your dog’s fanny. You better believe it’ll get him hopping.”

“Why is he still allowed to race?” I said.

“You take a look around this place? Not exactly a hive of morality, son.”

We sat in the stands for the prelims. The spotlights beat down on the red dirt of the track. Midges and no-see-ums rose from under the risers, dancing in the gathering dark. The tote board chittered as the odds rose and fell.

Railbirds clustered along the finishing stretch with tickets clutched in their sweaty fists, pounding the spectators’ rail as the dogs thundered down the final leg of each race. Afterwards the winners crowed—“I knew that boy was a mucker!” or “What a stayer, just like I told you!”—as the losers tossed their stubs on the blacktop alongside cigarette butts and crumpled beer cans.

Before Dolly’s heat I went down to the lockout kennel where the dogs were housed before each race. Harry stood with a tall man in his early thirties. The man wore pegged blue jeans and a jean jacket, his red-brown face shadowed by the brim of an Australian out-backer hat; fake crocodile teeth were strung around the brim like bullets in a bandolier. He reminded me of Billy Jack, the star of those seventies action flicks, except he didn’t have that actor’s face.

“Duncan,” Harry said, “meet Lemuel Drinkwater.”

We shook. Drinkwater’s hand was dry and chilly; it was like gripping cold muscle. He smiled but there was no kindness in it, no heat or nastiness either: he had a perfectly blank expression, reflecting nothing.

“We were jawing about your dog.” Drinkwater pronounced it darg. “How’d you train her to run that way, wide all the time?”

“I didn’t do anything. Just how she runs.”

He nodded the way a man does when he doesn’t believe you. But some men figure everyone’s lying to them all the time.

“She’s a quick dog,” Harry said. “Whoever chucked her in the garbage as a pup must be kicking themselves.”

Drinkwater shrugged. “Garbage is the best place for some of them.”

Harry pursed his lips like he wanted to say something but wouldn’t.

“Guess I got lucky, then,” I said.

“You know what they say,” Drinkwater said breezily. “Even the blind squirrel finds a nut.” He swaggered off, cowboy boots pink-a-pinking on the cement floor.

“What a dick.”

“He’s got his qualities,” Harry said diplomatically.

Harry handed Dolly over to the lead-outs and we headed to the traps.

“That’s Hurricane Jessie, Teddy Simms’ girl.” Harry pointed to a muscular greyhound with Dalmatian markings on her coat. “And that’s Drinkwater’s entry, War Hammer.”

War Hammer was jet black with a frost of white hair fringing her muzzle. Her ears were pinned flat to her skull and she had the mincing gait of a boxer during his ring walk. She moved like a creature that wanted to outrun its own skin.

Dolly drew trap number 4. Hurricane Jessie was in number 5, the outermost. War Hammer would run the rail from the 1 spot, with Primco Posy and Tilda’s Vinton filling out the other traps.

The mechanical hare zipped down the electrified rail. The traps sprung open, unleashing a fury of muscle and bone. At first it was difficult to separate one dog from an other: they were nothing but a mad blur of limbs like smears of paint on a canvas.

The crowd rose to a quick roar as the hounds hit the front stretch. War Hammer led with Primco Posy running outside her heels, boxed in on the outside by Tilda’s Vinton. Hurricane Jessie had established her spot on the far right. Dolly was in last place, a yard or so behind Tilda’s Vinton.

She was running higher than usual; she couldn’t find room to open up. Hurricane Jessie had the long body to make a wide break difficult, plus Dolly would sacrifice too much distance against War Hammer on an outside pass attempt.

She rolled her shoulders and ducked in at Tilda’s Vinton, trying to squeeze past. The dog met her charge nimbly: Dolly’s head snapped off Tilda’s haunch, killing her pass attempt.

The dogs hit the turn. War Hammer rode the rail so close you’d think she was zippered to it; her positioning ensured she kept her lead over Primco Posy, who ate a faceful of dirt. Hurricane Jessie eased into her turn, running smartly but dropping her speed. Suddenly an opening presented itself.

Dolly shot the gap between Hurricane Jessie and Tilda’s Vinton. She gunned up the high side of the track, finding open space. She angled her shoulder to the bend, banking like a fighter plane on a make-or-break manoeuvre and battling every inch of the way.

I hopped on the rail hoping for a better view but all I could make out was the dogs’ cresting shoulders. I stared into the stands at Ed, trying to gauge the race from her face. Her fists were clenched, her mouth open in a frantic O.

The bunny rocketed down the homestretch. The lead dog was War Hammer. Next came Dolly, wide on the outside, fully into her stride.

Then a funny thing happened: War Hammer went low. Not as low as Dolly, but her body flattened and became streamlined like a street racer tapping the nitrous oxide for the final kick. But Dolly was just naturally faster, plus she’d done her work early in the race — she was running flat out.

Dolly and War Hammer hurtled down the last fifty yards. Their strides were so long that they covered seven, eight yards at a go. Dolly’s head was down, eyes fixed on the finish line. She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

They crossed the line at a dead heat. The results went out over the loudspeakers: Dolly had won by a quarter of a second — razor-close, even by dog-racing standards. A small cheer went up from the stands.

Harry shook my hand like I’d had something to do with it. “A magical dog,” he said. “Merlin on four legs!”

Drinkwater collected War Hammer. He smacked her ass hard enough to rattle the poor thing’s bones, and shot me a challenging look—What, you’re going to do something about it? He said, “Talk about your bullshit luck.”

I should have resisted, but I couldn’t. “Winners win and losers go home.”

“This one’s won plenty,” Drinkwater told me, stroking War Hammer’s skull so hard that the skin peeled back from her bulging eyes. “Why else would I keep her around? She’s beaten far better than your jumped-up sidewinding bitch.”

“I guess we’ll never know.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t take food stamps.”

“And I don’t take loose cigarettes.”

Drinkwater said, “Shake on it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

I said, “Just like that?”

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

“It’s not a sure thing.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Like what?”

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

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

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

The day before the race we almost lost Dolly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Dolly! DOLLY!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s okay, baby. It’s just me.”

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

“Bad dog. Bad.”

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

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

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

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

“Holy shit!” I said when I spotted the ragged black ring around her lips, teeth black as stalactites.

“She’s full of beans,” Edwina said, wiping Dolly’s mouth with a paper towel.

“What’s in that stuff? Could it make her sick … could it make her slow?”

“Take a pill, Dunk. The tube was nearly empty.”

We arrived after eight o’clock. Owe was waiting in the parking lot with an envelope full of cash. The two of us had gone to the bank earlier that day to make our withdrawals. The teller had wetted her fingertips with a sponge in a dish and counted the bills with sleepy eyes, as though she worked with that kind of money all the time.

A silver pickup pulled up beside us. Drinkwater got out with a large man wearing engineer’s overalls. He shot Dolly a look. “She looks like shit — been eating it?”

The mascara had left a dirty ring around Dolly’s mouth. Ed smiled cheerily and said, “Go fuck yourself.”

Drinkwater smiled back. “Ooh, a smart-mouthed bitch from Cataract City. Never seen one of you before.”

Owe and Ed and I took Dolly inside. The Winning Ticket was shuttered, the stands empty. Spotlights shone down on the groomed dirt. Harry waved at us from the kennels.

“I dragged the smoother around twice,” he said. “The track’s pristine. Where’s Drinkwater?”

“Out in the parking lot.”

Harry’s brow creased. “Go on, take Dolly in back. I’ll be with you directly.”

We took Dolly to the prep room, where Ed babied her onto the scale. I considered writing her weight on her Bertillon card, but why bother? This evening’s event was like a pro boxer fighting a bare-knuckle match in a parking garage.

When Harry showed up, he paced the length of the prep room and said, “Did you keep an eye on Drinkwater in the parking lot? You got to mind that man, didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I?”

“What’s the matter?” I said.

“The man’s got no care for his dogs. They’re just motors to be gunned until they conk out. I already told you about the hot peppers, but there’s other tricks. One is using that boner pill, what’s it called?”

Owe said, “Viagra?”

Harry snapped his fingers. “The very thing. Stuff one of those down a dog’s throat and it’ll get the heart racing, open up the blood vessels and give it extra pace down to the wire.”

“Drinkwater’s in the parking lot feeding his dog Viagra?” said Owe.

Harry said, “I took a peek in the lot and the two of them, him and his buddy, they weren’t feeding that dog anything. I do believe they were injecting it.”

“Jesus,” Owe said softly. “So what — bet’s off?”

Harry offered his palms. “You got no grounds to welsh. No drug tests before or after. All you got are the suspicions of a half-blind old man.”

We met on the track. Drinkwater’s associate looked exactly like the sort of man who’d inject Viagra into a dog. War Hammer stood at the man’s side, body flexed tight as a railroad tie, unblinking, nostrils dilated, breath coming in whimpering gasps.

We loaded the dogs into the traps. War Hammer in trap 1, Dolly in 5. Drinkwater gave me a queer look: the outside trap meant Dolly needed to cover more ground. War Hammer went into her trap robotically — she looked as if she might explode like a firecracker inside a tin can.

We retreated to the spectators’ rail while Harry climbed up the operator’s box. The mechanical hare warmed up, sparks popping off the electrified rail. I tasted it in the back of my mouth, sharp as ozone.

The hare sped off. At the thirty-yard mark it tripped an electrical circuit that sprung the traps.

The dogs shot out in a fury. Dolly stumbled out of the gate and I turned to Drinkwater thinking he’d rigged it somehow, greasing the dirt, but it was just a slip, a simple slip that could happen to any dog and might set them back half a step — nothing but a bit of bad luck.

War Hammer was ten yards ahead and accelerating. A terrifying mania ran through her limbs; she was totally out of control and fear-stricken: she ran as if pursued by wolves. The dogs stormed down the dirt, the thunder of their paws matching the thunder in my blood. Dolly dropped a level, spine flattening like a dancer going under a limbo stick.

That’s it baby, drink looooow.

They blazed past us and it was as if the passage of their bodies sucked every sound from my ears: they now ran in a wrap of silence like dream animals, untouched by friction or gravity. When they hit the bend War Hammer was still in the lead. Their spines humped over the far rail for the first hundred yards before they both went low enough to vanish. Sound washed over me again as Owe and Ed hollered a single ongoing encouragement:

“Gooooooo!”

The dogs rounded back into view. Dolly was outside, banking high, screaming around the turn. Her stride was strangely even, almost conservative — which is when I realized that she’d finally figured it all out. Her speed was there — hell, she was faster than ever — but she was under control. Somewhere on the far side of the track she’d dialled it in. And she was perfect. Perfect the way Owe had been on a basketball court, the way Dade Rathburn had seemed to be in the squared circle. War Hammer was a few yards ahead, but Dolly had saved a little something for the finishing kick. Her eyes bulged from their sockets in a way that might have seemed comical if not for the frothy ropes whipping from her open mouth. It was no longer a matter of who was faster — it was a matter of whether Dolly could catch War Hammer before she ran out of track.

With 125 yards to go, Dolly’s spine arched and her shoulders rose. She looked as if she was preparing to climb an invisible ramp. Her front legs—was I really seeing this? — appeared to push off from thin air.

I pictured Harry watching from the operator’s booth, whispering, “I told you it could happen.”

Another step, maybe two, and she’d have lifted off. I truly believed that would’ve happened.

And then—

One time at the Bisk someone dropped a screw into the gears of an industrial mixer. It pinged around the machine housing before sticking between the teeth of two huge tumblers. Nine times out of ten it wouldn’t have stuck: the gears would have spat it out or snapped it in two. But it got stuck fast and the gears seized — and the pent-up torsion tore the entire machine to pieces. Gears stripped off spindles and rotors burned out. Busted gears punched through the housing. The machine was a smoking ruins.

That was what I thought of watching Dolly break apart.

The simplest explanation is that Dolly’s rear right paw snagged in her jersey. A thin nylon strap ran across her belly; Harry had snugged it tight but it must have loosened. Dolly’s paw got under the strap, where it was trapped between it and her stomach.

It could’ve happened a million other times and nothing would’ve come of it. Maybe it was the way she brought her leg down. Maybe it was the angle of her spine. When Dolly flexed into her next stride her foot remained snagged on the strap. Her leg kept going. The strap had no give — they aren’t designed that way. Dolly ran on the unshakable belief that her leg was going to come down again; she put all her weight into that belief, and in doing so she busted her own leg.

It went just like Harry said: a stick of spaghetti.

Her body flung forward, her leg flapping behind like a ribbon in the wind. She hit the track and unravelled.

My hips were already clearing the rail as War Hammer crossed the finish line. I sprinted to where Dolly lay in an awful tangle, snorting like she had pollen in her nostrils. She rolled onto her side and got up. Maybe I’d seen it all wrong — maybe she’d just twisted her limb? She put her right leg down to see if it might work. It hung like a limp thing with the paw twisted off at a horrible angle.

She lifted it up again — lifted her haunches which lifted her dangling leg — then tried to put it back down, lifting and putting it down with puzzled helplessness.

“You’re going to be all right, girl,” I said, because in my heart I still hoped.

I pulled Dolly into a hug, stroking her head like a father trying to soothe the fever of a sick child. Her body softened into mine and I knew some part of her acknowledged the situation or gave up. Or maybe she was just sick of running.

The following hours passed in a haze. I remember Ed taking Dolly’s muzzle in her hands and how Dolly licked her face crazily — startled by Ed’s tears, maybe. And I remember Harry’s crestfallen expression, tears hanging in the cups of his eyelids as he said: “I should have tightened those straps. Should have known she’d run that jersey right off her back.”

I said there was no faulting anything he’d done, but I could tell Harry didn’t accept it. Some men can’t.

I remember barging into the vet’s office as they were closing. The vet injected Dolly with something that made her eyelids roll down like shutters before testing the leg with his fingers, feeling all the places where it had been ruined. He made a long incision down Dolly’s leg and as soon as it was opened shards of bone from her shattered leg simply fell out; they looked like crushed glass.

He told us the best he could do was amputate — that, or euthanize her. I almost strangled the man.

Ed and I smoked too many cigarettes while the vet operated. Ed cried on and off. When it was over Dolly hobbled out on three legs with a plastic cone around her head, woozy from the anaesthesia.

On the drive home she snoozed on Ed’s lap, her chest rising and falling in the moonlight that fell through the windshield. An immeasurable weight lifted from my own chest.

There are things I didn’t see, but I do know they happened. I know that War Hammer died shortly after the race from whatever toxic brew Drinkwater had shovelled into her. Owe told me that she’d staggered into the finishing pen, turned a few wonky circles and collapsed. He also told me he’d handed Drinkwater what we owed him — a bet was a bet — and that Drinkwater stuffed the envelopes into his pocket and walked to the parking lot.

Harry and Owe buried War Hammer in the soft loam along the river, five hundred yards behind Derby Lane. “You got to bury them deep,” Harry said. “Otherwise the shore freezes in the winter and they get spat up out of the earth in the spring thaw.” When Owe asked how he knew that, Harry said simply, “I’ve buried a lot of dogs, son. Only a few of them my own.”

Dolly never quite found her old footing: she could walk just fine, a funny little hop-step, and developed strong shoulders from putting more weight on them. Ed called her Tripod. She even became a little fat, like an athlete gone to seed. When Ed and I were still together, we’d take her for walks in the park. Ed would toss a tennis ball. Sometimes Dolly would tear after it and I’d see her body drop into that old stance, her belly nearly brushing the clipped blades of grass. But then she seemed to sense it, too, that natural runner rearing up inside her. She shut it down to a trot, no longer wishing to access that old aspect of herself.

I’d never say I was happy for what happened that night at Derby Lane. The sight of Dolly flipping end over end … sometimes it’ll pop into my mind and I’ll shudder. But here’s something I’ve never told anyone: the accident made Dolly more touchable. Afterwards, I could hold her — just for a few minutes, but that was something. She allowed me to show her love and accepted it as much as her nature allowed. Her breath would fall into a calm rhythm as I stroked her coat. That nub of bone poking my thigh … it always wrecked me. But then I would feel her big heart beating at almost the same tempo as my own and think: Maybe it was for the best.

“WHAT ARE YOU STILL DOING HERE?”

I craned my head over my shoulder and saw the red-haired girl in the rubber boots. The girl who’d been so unimpressed with my rock-skipping skills.

“I’ve been watching from my window,” she said, hooking her thumb at her apartment block. “You’re standing here like a zombie.”

The wind gusted, blowing ancient litter around the Derby Lane lot. The door of the Winning Ticket Lounge blew open and banged shut on its rusted hinges, issuing a thin squeal. How long had I been standing there? Too long for the girl’s taste, clearly.

“I was thinking.”

“About what?”

“Personal stuff.”

The girl unhinged her jaw, letting her eyes roll back. “Laaaame.”

I bristled, aware that she was a child but unable to help myself. “You’re not very nice, you know. Not as long as I’ve known you.”

“We just met,” she said evenly.

I kicked a rock, sent it skittering across the tarmac. “Well, anyway. I’d better get going now.”

“You’re too sensitive.” The girl set her hands on her hips in a schoolmarmish gesture. “This city is going to eat you alive.”

I waved goodbye to her and walked down the Parkway, heading towards Clifton Hill. Edwina and I used to walk Dolly down here sometimes, but I hadn’t seen either of them in nearly eight years. I wouldn’t be seeing them any time soon, either.

As I walked, I thought back to that night at Derby Lane — those fleeting moments on the homestretch when Dolly almost flew. I used to see her in a dream, which replaced the one with the hooks and screws. In that dream she was perfect, yet never more so than she was that night. She lived so well in that dream simply because she really could have stepped right out of it, blitzing down the backstretch like coiled thunder.

In that old dream Dolly scorched the earth with such fierceness that I swear sparks snapped off her paws. No earthly creature was meant to go that fast, but she did. Strange wonder she didn’t burst into flames. In the last few seconds of her racing career Dolly broke free of physics. She broke free of my understanding of them anyway, and in that way she entered the dream.

I can only imagine it was a scary place to have gone. It asked everything of you and could break you to pieces so easily. I guess Dolly figured the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze.

Maybe it’s the same with Owe. In all the years since his knee was shattered, I don’t think he’s picked up a basketball more than a few times. He didn’t even teach kids at the summer skills camps, despite the frequent invitations.

I only remember seeing him on the court again once, a few months after he’d returned from Mexico. I was driving home after a late shift at the Bisk. It was just past midnight, and as I skirted Lions Club Park I saw a solitary figure shooting hoops. His gait was a bit wonky — there was a hitch in his giddy-up, as they say around here — but that form was unmistakable. The ball travelled through the sparkling midnight mist trapped under a lone spotlight, effortlessly beautiful.

Swish.

I idled in darkness under the trees, watching. Sweat gleamed on Owe’s brow. His shot dropped through that net as if guided by pure mathematics or pure grace: the ball mapping God’s own perfect angle.

In that light, in that moment, Owe looked like a kid again. And I wished we could be kids again, just for a while. Revoke for just one day our breaking bodies, our tortured minds. I would have given anything to spend one more day as we once had, even if it was one of those piss-away afternoons reading comic books in Owe’s basement while the rain clicked in the downspout like marbles.

Owe had tucked the ball under his arm. Regret was carved into every crease of his face. I figure if I’d looked in the rear-view mirror I’d have seen it in mine, too.

He left the court. I let him go.