Cataract City

PART THREE FIVE MILLION CIGARETTES

DUNCAN DIGGS

It was night again when I left my childhood bedroom. I slipped silently down the hall, avoiding the spots where the floor creaked, knowing my mother was probably awake anyway, her ears pricked to the sound of my socks whispering on the scuffed linoleum.

I pulled on boots and a dark hoodie, let the door click softly shut behind me. The air was cool, clean, laden with the alkaline taste of the river. I walked under the street lamps, many of them popping and fritzing — there was something permanently wrong with the city’s power grid. Brownouts, blackouts, phantom outages or surges. People would come home after a weekend away and find their fridge motors burnt out, their eggs gone rotten. My father kept the old Kenmore — nickname: the Green Meanie — going on compressors salvaged from the city dump. Nobody bothered petitioning the city hall about it: to live in Cataract City was to accept many disappointments.

I trekked down the hill to a quiet stretch of blocks off Bender Street. There was a pay phone near the Sleepy Eyes Motor Inn. I let the Plexiglas door swing shut, hunted the name out of the book and plugged quarters in the box.

Five rings later, a sleep-syrupy voice answered. “Yuh?”

“Hey, man. It’s Dunk.”

The phone line scratched with static as Owe moved around. He was sitting up in bed, maybe. A glassy knock was followed by deep swallowing sounds.

“I wake you?”

Owe yawned. “You figure?”

“Sorry. How are you?”

“I’m okay. Yeah, not bad. You?”

“Keeping on. Listen, I want to talk to you. I … It’s nothing I’m expecting of you.”

Another swallow, then Owe said, “How are you liking it so far, man? Some guys have a harder time adjusting, is why I’m asking.”

“It’s nice, yeah. The openness.”

“I figured,” Owe said. “Easier to breathe?”

I nodded, even though I knew he couldn’t see me. “Like I was saying …”

“You looking across the river right now, Dunk? Somewhere in the direction of the Tuscarora Nation, maybe? Are you thinking about who I think you’re thinking about?”

After a while I said, “I’m not putting you on the hook. I just—”

“I know what you just, man. You got blood in your eye?”

I thought about the past eight years, the nights without sleep and the constant edgeless terror; I thought about Edwina because my mind was never far from Edwina; I thought about the fact that cosmic fairness is a mysterious commodity, not something you can buy or sell, but sometimes that great wheel really ought to come around — and if it didn’t, you had to wrench it around yourself. I was a son of Cataract City, and around here we understand payback. You pay what you owe, or you’re made to pay.

“I’ve got a spot of blood in there, Owe,” I said quietly. “Yeah, I do. And it’s been screwing with the way I see for a while now.”

The next afternoon I sat in a booth at the Double Diamond with Sam Bovine, a good-ol’ shitkicker jingle playing on the Rock-Ola. It felt so roomy with no bull-necked guard looming on my blindside.

Bovine looked not bad, considering. His nose was threaded with busted veins and he had a sun-starved look about him, but that was sort of how I’d always pictured him at this age. I laid out my idea. Bovine set to poking holes in it.

“Three guys?”

“Or four,” I said. “If I get the first couple down fast and don’t take too much on the chin doing it. Three’s probably the max. He’s got to have at least three scratch fighters he can call, right?”

Bovine reached across the table to push up the fringe of hair over my forehead. I flicked his hand away.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking for the lobotomy scars, Dunk! Jesus, Lemmy Drinkwater? And why three? Why not, y’know, one?”

“That’s small beer, Sam. This’ll be a trifecta — triple the risk, triple the reward.”

“But it’s not triple the risk, is it? Triple the risk is fighting three guys over three nights, months apart, with time to heal. You’re talking about fighting three guys in a row, bang-bang-bang, the same night.”

I sipped beer and savoured it. Held the glass up to the light to watch the cascading bubbles.

“I guess you’re right,” I said. “Math isn’t my strong suit.”

“You seem remarkably put together for a man who could end up crunching on his own teeth like breath mints.”

Bovine had been with me for every fight at Lem Drinkwater’s place before I went to prison; I used to cross the river for a match every few months. Bovine had been a mortuary attendant by then, same as his pops, so he’d been comfortable around busted flesh.

The door banged open, throwing a shaft of late-afternoon sunlight across the floor. Owe slid into the booth. Bovine’s hands curled into fists.

“Relax,” I said. “I asked him to come.”

Owe put up with Bovine’s stink-eye; given our shared history, maybe he figured Bovine was allowed to be just a little bit pissed.

“What was it you wanted to talk about?” he said to me.

I told him the plan.

“The fights still go down over there,” Owe confirmed. “Every month or so.”

I said, “You still keeping an eye on him?”

“Me personally? No. Drinkwater’s a smuggler, and that cottage industry is down with the dollar’s hovering at about par. The whispers are he’s gone soft, lost his touch. I don’t believe it — Drinkwater could find the angle in a circle. Why are you even mixing yourself up in this? It’s none of my business—”

“That’s right,” Bovine said. “It’s not.”

Ignoring Bovine, Owe turned to me. “I got the impression you were going straight.”

“The road, she is a-bendy.”

“Only if you insist on bending it.”

Something swam up in my chest, a swirl of angry colours.

“Are you standing against me, then?”

Owe said, “Have I ever?”

NINE OR SO YEARS AGO, my phone rang. It was Bovine, clapped up in the drunk tank at the Niagara Detention Centre. This had put a real bug up my ass. I was fighting in a few hours and not only had Bovine agreed to drive, he was supposed to be my goddamn cutman.

“You got to spring me, Dunk.”

I could smell the Old Grouse drifting out of the mouthpiece. “Jesus, Bovine. I mean, seriously. Here I am dozing, trying to get my mind right—”

“Sorry, Dunk — didn’t I just say sorry? I’m not drunk, even,” he said sulkily. “Not that drunk.”

I sat on the edge of the bed, curtains pulled against the evening sun. The sheets smelled of the vanilla body butter Edwina wore.

“I can’t be released on my own whatever …”

“Recog—”

“Yeah, recognizance. But you spring me and I’ll pay you right back.”

I could have left him there. Bovine was no stranger to the drunk tank. He probably had his own cot, with monogrammed sheets. But what was I gonna do? I’d known the guy forever.

“Be there in a bit.”

I brushed my teeth. Some fighters don’t brush before a fight, a little fuck-you to their opponent. Other fighters, their breath stinks but it’s just the adrenaline souring in their mouths. Me, I bear my opponents no grudge. I’ll even slap on deodorant.

I filled my palms with water and ran it over my skull. My hair was cut short — just like everyone’s at the Bisk. The industrial flour got past the hairnets and stuck to your head; at shift’s end you’d take a shower and it was like lathering with plaster of Paris. So we shaved our skulls to the wood. The staff softball photos looked like recruitment posters.

Despite my fighting, I’d been lucky with my face. I had hairline scars under both eyes and one on the edge of my forehead that looked like a Y. But my nose had never been broke, and my cheeks neither.

My hands were another matter. We’re talking a pair of ugly bust-up mitts. The knuckles were all crushed, except for one: if I laid my hands side by side, that lonely knuckle looked like the final spike on the EKG machine before a heartbeat flatlines. In the places where I fight, you can go into the ring with open-fingered gloves, with wraps, with nothing. I bare-fist it. You tab a man flush on the button with a bare fist and it’s good night, Gracie. The problem is, my fingers tend to split over the joints.

Bovine was training to be a mortuary attendant by then, and when he was sober he was a decent cutman. He had this stuff called Negatan, a kind of formaldehyde gel that cauterizes the insides of a stiff’s nostrils and gums. The first time he used it on me it turned the skin on my hands to pig leather. It’d been scary to watch the skin go dry and hard as buckskin. But it killed the blood, so what did it matter? I wasn’t a hand model. I’d caught the other guy with an overhand right ten seconds into the next round and laid him down soft as a baby into bed.

I threw clean clothes into a duffel and went downstairs. Dolly’s head rose from her dog bed in the kitchen. She padded over, tail sweeping the lino, and tugged at my tearaway pants, popping a few snaps.

“Stop, you pest,” I told her, and fed her a meatball from last night’s supper as I rummaged for juice in the fridge. Ed hated it when I fed Dolly from the fridge.

I didn’t leave a note. Edwina would never tell me not to go — even if that was what she really wanted. Ed would never say anything because she was harder than me. Most of us in Cataract City were hard because the place built you that way. It asked you to follow a particular line and if you didn’t, well, you went and lived someplace else. But if you stayed, you lived hard, and when you died you went into the ground that way: hard.

I guess I was hard enough, but Edwina had always been harder. And so I found that you could love a person even more fiercely for their hardness.

Dolly nosed around the back door as I slipped on my sneakers. She was hoping I’d take her along.

“Sorry, girl. Not tonight.”

Best to keep your dog far away from Lemmy Drinkwater. Best to keep anything you loved far, far away.

The detention centre’s night-shift guard tipped his hat as I stepped inside. I nodded sheepishly, as if it was me who’d done wrong. One-hundred and fifty-three bucks later, Bovine sauntered out of the drunk tank. He made a point of shaking the guard’s hand.

“This is the last time you’ll see me.”

“You said that last time,” said the guard.

“This time I’m being sincere.”

The first thing Bovine did was hug me. It’s the first thing he always did. He stunk of rye and sweat and there were pinpricks of blood on his untucked shirt.

He did a soft-shoe number down the cracked stairs of the D.C., tripping over his feet and pitching onto the sidewalk. I didn’t bother asking what had landed him in detention this time. Seeing as he didn’t look super-drunk, I figured he’d been pinched for the “disorderly” half of “drunk and disorderly.” Why did I hang out with this fool? For one thing, Owe had toddled off to join the boys in blue. My circle of friends, never big to begin with, had shrunk.

Bovine reached into his pocket, produced a thick fold of bills and peeled off a mitt full. I took what he owed and gave the rest back.

“Aw, come on, Dunk. For pain and suffering.”

He knew I needed money. I was still trying to recover what I’d lost on Dolly’s race a few years back. Then last year Dolly had come down with a case of gastroplexy that nearly killed her; five thousand bucks and one stomach resectioning later, she was a healthy pooch.

We drove down Clifton Hill, past the teenybop meat markets, and crossed the Rainbow Bridge. The falls were lit with red spotlights; it looked like a spray of blood was frothing from the basin.

We cleared customs and headed up Niagara Street, past the OxyChem plant’s smokestacks pumping grey vapour. We turned right onto Packard, skirting the Love Canal. Bovine tossed a bottle out the window; it smashed on the pavement and the sound sent Velcro spiders scurrying up my spine — the fight was crawling into me.

We hit Saunders Settlement Road and crossed onto the Tuscarora First Nations land. I eased on the brakes and pulled into Smokin’ Joes Trading Post. I drove round back to the warehouses and parked beside a pickup truck with a giant novelty ball-sac hanging from the trailer hitch — it was that kind of crowd.

Bovine grabbed his cutman kit. Taking his face in my hands, I stared into his eyes. His pupils seemed about right.

“I don’t need a drunk working on my face.”

“Come on, Dunk. You know I’d never if I was shitfaced.”

The warehouse door was propped open with a cigar store Indian, a cigarette duct-taped in its mouth. A couple of guys were passing a flask outside the entrance.

“How you feeling tonight?” one asked.

“Buy the ticket, take the ride.”

Their rasping laughter followed me into the warehouse. Boxes and crates stacked high; the smells of patent leather and tobacco. We walked down aisles towards the light and buzz of a milling crowd.

A half-dozen sawhorses formed a ring on the shellacked concrete floor. A hundred-odd spectators stood or sat on stacked pallets. It was your standard fight crowd: fat and magpie-eyed, drinking Hamm’s tallboys. A few cheered at the sight of me: I guess they’d cashed in on my ass before.

Lem Drinkwater was dressed in his usual pegged blue jeans, a chambray shirt with pearl-snap buttons, his Crocodile Dundee hat with a ring of alligator teeth round the band.

“You feeling it?” he asked, eyeing me down his nose.

“All I want to feel right now is the bills in my hand.”

Drinkwater’s laugh wasn’t really a laugh, just bared teeth with air hissing through them: hsh-hsh-hsh! “You’ll get paid after.”

“That’s not how it worked before.”

“S’the way it works now. Roll with them punches, Diggs.”

I scratched behind my ear. “You got me over a bit of a barrel, Lemmy.”

“That’s not my aim,” he said — and maybe it wasn’t, but I also knew he didn’t give two sweet fucks whether anything he did happened to put me over a barrel.

“And if I walk out right now?”

He shrugged. “Plenty of warm bodies willing to step in, I’d say.”

“I’d say. Same purse?”

“Same as same as.”

I waded through the railbirds into a small cement-walled room to warm up. A single bulb burned on the end of a cord. I did some jumping jacks and ran in place, high-legging my knees to touch my chest. Sweat beaded my upper lip and my breath fell into an easy rhythm. I rolled my shoulders and snapped out a lazy left jab — my teaser punch, my bait: look at it out there, pesky, a bothersome gnat … you won’t see the right steaming behind it to steal your lights away.

Fighting didn’t tickle my nuts, just happened to be something I’ve always been half-decent at. I swung my right hand and things went down. There were a million better ways to turn a buck with your hands but I wasn’t good at any of those.

I chased the money. And I preferred to fight men drawn to the money — money’s clean, money doesn’t have agendas or psychoses. Sometimes I fought men who’d fallen way down the ladder. It’s rough work, tussling with a guy who’s trying to claw back up to that bottom rung. Other men wanted to figure something out about themselves, so okay, I’d oblige.

And some men were just batshit crazy. Those guys were the worst. Those guys you just about had to kill.

I’d taken a few bad beats myself. The worst was to a fellow from right there, the Tuscarora Nation. Wasn’t a big guy, but he was fast and wiry and once he’d gone slick with sweat I couldn’t lay hands on him. He didn’t rough me up so much as whittle me down, peppering me with stinging jabs and hooks like a man with a small, sharp knife taking thin peels off a big log. After a while my chest was greasy with blood and I’d swallowed so much of the red stuff that I needed to puke. It was all I could do to grab and hold him close, waltzing with an unwilling partner. At one point I sent up a little prayer: Let him knock me cold, God. Take me out behind the shed and put one in the back of my skull.

But he just kept at it, quick and relentless. By the end the punches came in the dark — my eyes were two pissholes in the snow — and I felt like I was being beaten with a black sack over my head. That guy, he shaved me down until I was thin as a toothpick and then I just … snapped.

Everything comes back to that question of hardness. I came from a hard place, yeah — a place where shopkeeps sell loose cigarettes because by the time that third Thursday of the month rolls around, most of their customers can’t afford a whole deck. But that guy, he probably grew up in a tarpaper shack, sleeping on the floor with eight or ten brothers and sisters, and had a dog in the yard chained to a radial tire. That’s another level of hardness, and I couldn’t find the place in my heart to match it.

The door to the dressing room opened. My opponent tonight was about my size, maybe a bit taller. He didn’t look much older than nineteen, twenty. A kid, really. His eyes pinned me. I gave him a look that said: You don’t have to show me your dick’s bigger, okay? All that’ll sort itself out soon enough.

He wiped his nose and rolled his eyes to the ceiling as if to say he’d been expecting worse than he’d drawn. “You fight before?”

“Few times, yuh,” I told him. “You?”

“First time.”

“I’ll go easy.”

I leaned against the wall and watched him warm up. He was quick but gangly and it didn’t look like he could throw a straight right to save his skin — I started feeling sorry for him, then wiped those thoughts away.

“Know something?” he said. “You smell like Fig Newtons.”

His skin was drawn tight over his cheekbones. I reminded myself to aim for those spots.

Drinkwater opened the door. The bare bulb winked off the teeth on his hat.

“Let’s go, you pigs.”

The first punch tabbed me flush on the jawbone and that’s when I knew he didn’t have the ol’ boom-boom to put me away. Him and me were only dancing a little dance that would end with me landing a starcher that left him snuffling concrete.

The punch landed solid, and it lit my head up like a slot machine: Cherry — Pineapple — Star. Yeah, I’d have a fat lip, and yeah, I tasted blood in the chinks of my teeth, but he didn’t quite have the juice.

I spat warm blood and stared into the crowd: a couple of dudes with the stringy-haired, strung-out look of fairground carnies sat beside a young girl, frighteningly skinny, in a Megadeth shirt: Peace Sells … But Nobody’s Buying. Her eyes were riveted on my opponent.

Were they together? God, I sort of hoped not.

I circled left and let my right hand hang at my hip, like maybe he’d really stung me and I was trying to haul the scrambled shards of my brain back to where the neurons would start jumping the gaps again. He circled with me—come on, friend, just a little closer now, let me get one good clean look—and the muscles flexed up his side, tightening over the ladder of his ribs as he stepped into a clumsy uppercut.

I shifted so his fist could pass harmlessly between the outer edge of my shoulder and my neck and for a heartbeat it was there: the knockout button of his outthrust chin. I planted my leg and dropped my head. My right came up in a swift arc; my shoulder joint swivelled in its socket, well-oiled with adrenaline, and my fist passed my ear on its downward flight, falling fast, a bomb splitting the clouds. Hell, it may have whistled like a bomb.

It met his chin flush. Something broke deep down in my hand. The impact jangled up my arm and hummed like restless honeybees in the hollow of my shoulder socket. He sagged into me, our chests touching. I felt the shuddering beats of his heart through my skin.

Bah-dum … bah-DUM … bah—

The kid’s face had gone pale. Beads of milky sweat leaked from the skin under his eyes, which were rolled so far back in his skull that I saw the twitching, vein-threaded whites.

— DUM … bah-bah-DUM … bah-dum—

His heart beat out of true. An arrhythmia, could be. A year ago Jeff King, batch mixer on the Oreo line, just lay down in the lunchroom, shut his eyes and died. A heart murmur, I heard. King was 225 pounds with a pulse like a jackrabbit. It was nothing he could guard against; a defect in his nature, was all.

I felt it in this guy, too: a structural weakness knitted tight to his body. He wasn’t built for this kind of rough work. I was terrified that if we kept at it, he’d die in my arms.

I held him until the fog left his eyes and he was able to collect his feet under him. When he stood, staggering back, I raised my arms.

“I’m done,” I said. “You win.”

The guy, still stumblebum, swung at me and missed. He tucked his fists tight under his chin, swaying unsteadily as I backed off.

I found Drinkwater in the crowd and said, “There’s something the matter with him. His heart or something.”

“You’re hilarious,” he said. “Get your ass back in there.”

The railbirds hissed and catcalled. A plastic cup struck my shoulder, spilling Orange Crush down my shirt.

“Can’t do it, Lem,” I said. “If it goes sideways, we both got to carry that.”

“I’m not gonna carry a damn thing — and you, you’re just chickenshit.”

“Sure, Lem. That’s what it is.”

I looked at Bovine, jerking my chin towards the warm-up room. The kid stood in the centre of the ring, fists still tucked, as we walked away.

Lemmy Drinkwater shouldered open the presswood door and let it fall shut, muffling the din of the crowd. “You sure as fuck aren’t a people-pleaser, are you?”

I pulled my hoodie on, stuffed my feet into workboots. “You shouldn’t let that kid fight again, Lem. Something’s off with his ticker. I felt it.”

“Who are you, Trapper John?”

It was easy to hate Drinkwater, and I did. He was a killer — of dogs, at the very least — and a sadist. It tore me up to find myself in his service. Yet he seemed to me the sort of man who could do with his life exactly what he wanted, and I held some whipped-dog respect for that.

“I’m not paying you a red cent for that shitshow you just put on,” he said.

“I didn’t expect you would.”

He scrutinized me through a fringe of dark hair. “You just fight?”

“Just fight what?”

“I mean,” he clarified, “to make rent. Just fight?”

“I work at the Bisk … part-time now.”

“Tough times, I hear. Cutbacks.”

“Times are tough all over.”

Drinkwater nodded to say he understood this to be the way of my life, yet to indicate it wasn’t the way of his own. His eyes were coldly, darkly serious — I felt I was being measured for some future possibility, and in that instant I desperately wanted to show Drinkwater whatever it was he hoped to find. It sickened me, my need.

“Something’s coming up,” he said. “I need somebody on the other side.”

“Of?”

“Of the river. Off the rez. You can’t trust Nationers — they don’t know how to act with that kind of money.”

“What kind of money?”

Drinkwater knocked the air in front of him with his foreknuckle.

“No kind. I was just asking a question. If you were interested.”

“In what?”

Drinkwater looked as if I’d answered already. “Maybe we’ll talk,” he said.

As I walked away between walls of stacked boxes I heard the sound of dogs fighting, which wasn’t much of a sound at all: low, almost sexual yelps. It struck me that my own fight had been a curtain-jerker for a couple of mutts.

A knot of men stood beside the cigar store Indian in the parking lot. As we passed, one of them shouted, “Cracker candyass!” A bottle sailed over my shoulder and shattered against the warehouse wall, shards rebounding at me. A thick blade of glass whickered past my face, drawing a line of ice across my brow; I ducked instinctively, hands pawing the wound, feeling the quick rush of blood curving down my jawbone.

I turned and saw the men who’d done it. There were five of them — not one real specimen among them, but they stared back challengingly and I knew the beds of their pickups would hold bats and axe handles.

“Come on,” Bovine said.

We continued across the lot. My opponent was helping the girl in the Megadeth shirt into his car. The girl seemed sick, but beyond her thinness I couldn’t tell how. He was so gentle with her, taking her legs and folding them carefully inside the car, leaning in to kiss her cheek. I pictured the two of them driving to a small house on Chemical Row, near the OxyChem plant, where he’d fold her out of the car with the same tenderness. I didn’t know why he’d fought, whether for money or pride or sickness, but I could see he loved her and wanted to believe their life together was a happy one.

I got in my car, and Bovine checked out the cut over my eye. He decided I didn’t need stitches and slapped a butterfly bandage over it.

“Another memory to add to the Dunk scrapbook,” he said.

“There’s a million stories in there.”

“Nope, only one,” Bovine said. “Man takes on world, world wins. But you get to write it over the course of a lifetime — so you’ve got that going for you.”

“Oh, fuck off.”

Bovine howled.

Edwina was waiting in the dark.

She was lying on the couch in the room off the front hall — a room that had seemed so big when we’d moved in from her old house on Culp Street. It had seemed as if we’d never gather enough stuff to fill it.

She drew on her cigarette and the room seemed to quiver, the red ember floating.

“Ed …”

“You win?”

I shook my head, but wondered if she could see my face.

“You get hurt?”

“Not bad. My hand.”

“Let’s take a look at you.”

She got up, snapped on the bathroom light and sat me on the toilet. She wore a shimmery black robe — irregular in some way I couldn’t see — that she’d bought at a clearance warehouse over the river. Perched on the tub’s edge, she drew on her cigarette, squinted into the smoke and traced her pointer finger over my butterflied brow; she brought her fingertip down slowly to touch the split in my lip.

She plucked the cigarette from her mouth and with that same strong, quiet hand reached over my shoulder — the ember singing the fine hairs on my earlobe — to snatch a Kleenex from the box on the toilet tank. She set the cigarette between her lips, twisted one corner of the Kleenex into a rope and pressed it to the split.

Ed had a smooth, open, brown-eyed face with a spray of freckles over her cheeks. She was still as beautiful as when I’d first met her, but a harder breed of it: the dagger-sharp points of her cheekbones, the way the light threw itself off the straight edges of her teeth.

As she leaned forward over my swollen hand, my eyes fell upon her clavicle bone. I wanted to run my tongue along it — post-fight randiness — but I couldn’t just lean across and do it: you need permission for such things, if unspoken, even from those you love.

Ed gathered the front of her robe in one small, casual gesture. Then she put her head far back — very far back, almost like a contortionist — and shook her dark hair loose so that it hung free down her neck.

“Can I have a drag?”

“You don’t smoke,” she said.

“One drag.”

I pulled the cigarette from her lips and drew thinly. The paper tasted of cherry lip gloss. There was no stamp on the filter; everyone at the Bisk bought their smokes off-brand from a guy who sold them out of his trunk in the parking lot.

I turned my head to cough and spotted a lottery ticket on the sink ledge. Ed played them all: 6/49, Lotto Max, Dreamhome Sweepstakes, always ponying up for the Bonus, the Encore. She played with some girls at the Bisk, too. A year or so back they’d picked six out of seven and split a few grand. “If I’d been born on the fifty-sixth of January instead of the thirteenth, we’d have all quit on the spot,” she’d told me, laughing but not really.

She never used to play the lotto. For a long time our life together hadn’t been about waiting on a lucky ship to come in — it had been about building that ship ourselves, with the toil of our own hands, and sailing wherever the hell we wanted.

She pinched the cigarette from between my lips, put it back between her own, then stood in front of the mirror. My gaze rode up her feet, which were strong-toed and callused from hours on the Nutter Butter line, up her calves roped with muscle, past the dimples in the back of her knees to her thighs, which were just starting to go. I stood behind her and my arms went to her hips … and when she didn’t protest, around her waist. The bathroom light reflected off the mirror, doubling itself, and for an instant I felt trapped: a man stunned in the motion-sensor halogens snapping alight along a prison’s barbwire fence.

Some questions you can look at two ways: What might I have been without you? One coin, yeah, but two sides. Ed must’ve looked at both sides of that coin, too.

When Wally Cutts called me up to his glassed-in office above the Bisk’s factory line, I knew what was coming.

I’d showed up early that morning to shower. The showerhead at home was calcified — the chemicals that were dumped into the city’s water supply crystallized, meaning many of us in Cataract City had to replace our showerheads every year. I’d stood under the nozzle as the water melted the remains of the fight from my skin and nerves, working my swollen hand under the hot water.

Then I’d dressed in my whites with the other men, each of us smelling of our lines, put on my hairnet and latex gloves and passed through the disinfectant chamber onto the factory floor. We stood in a loose semicircle while the safety inspector ran his tests. There was no sound but the ticking down of the giant grey units stretching deep into the factory. A haze of flour hung in the air — our lips were already whitened with it.

While we waited we limbered up using the exercises the productivity expert taught us: deep knee bends and hip swivels. We looked like an old-timers football team prepping to take the field. Knuckles and knees cracking, elbow joints popping — I could tell whose elbow or knee without even looking: each man’s body had its own sounds.

The red lights flicked green and the line leapt to life: worn canvas cloth chattering over steel pins, chukka-chikka-chukka. We inclined our heads over the line and tried to hold that pose for eight hours.

At the end of the shift I climbed the stairs to Cutts’ office and knocked.

“Come in, Duncan. Sit down.”

Wally Cutts was the line super — it was the same job Owe’s dad had once held. His degree hung on the wall, same as Mr. Stuckey’s had. At last summer’s corporate picnic the shop steward, a ratlike creature named Stan Lowery — Adam’s older brother — hung a piñata from the crotch of a tree: a leering burglar with a black mask over his eyes. Lowery had painted the burglar’s feet to look like workboots, just like those Cutts wore while walking the shop floor. Lowery stood with his gang of line-pigs, good ol’ boys with swollen wine-cask bellies, all of them laughing as their kids beat holy hell out of that piñata. Cutts stood there with his wife and young boy, chewing potato salad and ruffling his son’s hair as if this was a big lark and he was in on it.

“Hurt your hand?” Cutts said now.

I nodded.

“But you’re okay?”

My shrug indicated it was nothing he should bother himself about.

“Duncan … you know how it’s going, yes?”

I squinted at him dumbly, as if I didn’t, or couldn’t.

“First of all, production’s way down. Not because we can’t make the stuff, but because people aren’t eating it. It’s a healthier world, Duncan — and that’s fine and dandy, unless you’re baking cookies.”

Cutts was chubby-edging-into-fat with a beery face that broke into laughter at a great many things that weren’t funny. He’d walk the line filling a paper sack with warm Chips Ahoy, plucking them off the moving belt.

“How old are you, Duncan?”

“Twenty-five.”

“Twenty five,” he said, as if it was impossible for him to recall ever having been so young. How the hell old was he — thirty? I could’ve happily murdered him in that moment. “We’re letting you go.”

“Just like that?”

He saw I was smiling and said uneasily, “It’s a seniority thing, pure and simple. You had a lot built up, you’ll recall, but then you took that year off to go to college — that put you back down near the bottom.”

Cutts showed me his palms like I was a dog who figured he was hiding a doggy treat. “We’re offering a month in lieu. Most guys are taking that.”

“The pension plan I’ve paid into?”

“Duncan, retirement age is sixty-five. You’ve got forty years left to get a good pension under you. Edwina’s job is safe, I promise.”

We shook. His hand felt like boiled suet stuffed into a surgical glove. When I got back downstairs Stan Lowery was waiting.

“We’re going to grieve it!” he told me, sounding like a teacup chihuahua yapping at the mailman. “We’re grieving this fucker all the way up, Diggs, you set your watch to it.”

He’d made the same promise to the guys turfed before me — and most of them now spent their nights patrolling hotel parking lots with a flashlight. I nodded to a few guys on the way out. It dawned on me how little I knew them. I’d worked at the Bisk for six years, yet I couldn’t recall most of their wives’ names.

“Well,” Bovine said, “I’m sure she was nice on the inside.”

The woman was old — how old I couldn’t really say. She lay on a steel table in a white-tiled room in the basement of the Harry Bohnsack Mortuary, a white sheet draping her from neck to toes. She may have been pretty once.

“Let’s get that pesky blood out of you, dear heart,” Bovine said sweetly.

I’d spent the afternoon at the Blue Lagoon, pumping Jack and Cokes into myself. Ed was working, Dolly was sleeping, and anyway, I liked watching Bovine work.

He wore painter’s overalls and a black vulcanized apron. He shook out a length of surgical tubing and fitted one end to a long, thin needle. He fitted the other end to the toaster-oven-sized recovery unit — a funny euphemism for a machine that sucked blood out of dead folks.

Bovine worked briskly, whistling “The Old Gray Mare” while rolling a blue drum with Nestlé Formalin written on it. How strange that a company known for its chocolate syrup would be a leading producer of formaldehyde. One whiff and I was back in grade ten science class on frog-dissection day. Bovine threaded a surgical tube into the drum, clipped it with surgical shears and attached a stent, joining it with two more lengths of tube. One end of the tube went into the recovery unit; the other end was fastened to a second needle, which Bovine slid into the big vein in the woman’s neck.

He flicked the machine on. Yellow formalin flowed up one tube. Black blood trickled down the other, collecting in a plastic jug. While the woman drained, Bovine used a pair of industrial clippers to cut her hair off, then her eyebrows.

“Don’t worry, my dear,” Bovine said, hunting through a bin of sterilized wigs. “Only your hairdresser will know for sure.”

At first I’d found it creepy that Bovine talked to them. But then I figured we all had our coping mechanisms. He opened a tackle box, the kind you’d keep fishing lures in, and grabbed a pair of ocular suction cups.

“You going to look away, pussy?” he said.

“You want me to throw up on the poor girl, ruin all your hard work?”

Bovine took a swig from a beaker of gin and tonic on the steel slab and eased the woman’s left eye open. The cornea had gone milky as if it had been bleached. What’s worse, it had taken some sort of awful elevator to the basement of her skull.

“The brain shrinks from lack of moisture,” Bovine said. “Eyeballs get sucked into the cranial vault.”

He peeled the sticky-tab off a suction cup, attached it to her eyeball and pulled. That sound always got to me: it was like hearing a rubber boot pulled out of thick mud. The eyeball popped into the socket. Bovine ran a bead of glue down the eyelids and pressed them together.

“Just once I’d like to leave the eyes wide open,” he said. “See the guy peering up out of the casket like: The fuck you looking at?”

The buzzer rang.

“That must be Dr. Jekyll,” said Bovine, in a lispy Vincent Price voice. “He’s bringing more carcasses …”

While he answered the door I stood over the body. Blood still dripped from the tube into the collection jug, dark as tar. A dead person’s blood smelled a little like silver polish. The formaldehyde had put some life back into her: she could’ve just put her head down for a nap.

Bovine said, “Check out what the cat dragged in.”

I looked up and there was Owe. He was about twenty pounds heavier than last I’d seen him, but the eyes and chin were the same.

“I saw this guy propping up a bar stool the other night,” Bovine said, “and thought, Jesus, that bastard looks a lot like another bastard I used to know. And it was that very bastard!”

“How are you, man?” Owe smiled, displaying a big chip in his front incisor.

“I’m hanging on.” I hadn’t seen him in what, four years? The last I’d heard he was living out west. Calgary? Edmonton? “What brings you back?”

“Change of scenery? The mountains were getting stale.”

“How long you been back?”

“Not long.”

“You’re still on the force?”

A quick nod. “Caught on with Niagara Regional. I just want to do something valuable with my life, Dunk.”

The sarcasm escaped him like a poisonous mist. He scanned my damaged hand and the new scab bristling along my eyebrow. His eyes had a peculiar movement: snapping back and forth, taking things in while his face remained impassive. That was the first real difference I noticed: those insurance adjuster’s eyes.

“Stuckey’s back in toooown,” Bovine sang to the tune of “Mack the Knife.” “He’s taken an oath to protect we noble savages of Cataract City.”

Owe nodded towards the body and said: “You dressing her up for a date, Bovine?”

Owe and I smiled at each other in the old familiar way and I felt myself relax, the old rhythms taking hold.

“I guess you want to know why I’ve called this meeting,” Bovine announced grandly. “I’ve come up with an extracurricular project for you wastes of skin.”

He led us into a storage room stacked with heavy-duty cardboard sheets. A few of them had been folded into coffin shapes.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Owe said.

“What?” said Bovine. “Our budget burials.”

“People get buried in cardboard?”

Bovine said: “Once you’re in the ground, who cares?”

“You don’t put them out for display in one of these things — right?”

“We’ve got rental caskets, all the nice ones. Evermore Rest, Celestial Sleeper, The Camelot, The Eternal Homestead. We display bodies in a rental, then bury them in cardboard.”

“That’s just so weird,” said Owe.

“Who buys a tux you’re only going to wear one night?” Bovine said equitably.

“Okay, Bovine, but who wants their mother buried in a shoebox like a hamster?”

“Dutch, tell me. On garbage day, do you see people putting ornate wooden boxes with little brass handles out on their curbs?”

“What do you do for a headstone — tape two Popsicle sticks together?”

Bovine said, “When I die, stuff me in a Hefty sack, drag me through the parlour while the organist plays ‘Dust in the Wind,’ on out the back door into an open grave. Bingo, bango, bongo.”

The storage-room door opened into a garage that housed a pair of Cadillac hearses. Bovine pointed to the old model. “That’s mine now, free and clear.”

“Congratulations,” I said. “You’ll have no problem picking up at goth bars.”

Bovine mimed whacking off. “You’re hilarious. I’m thinking we smash it up. Merrittville Speedway, y’know? Demolition Derby night.” He slapped the hearse’s wide back end. “Just keep backing this baby up into the other cars. Reduce ’em to rubble.”

I said, “Where would we fix it up?”

“The auto shop at the high school,” said Bovine. “I talked to Finnerty and he said sure, so long as we do it at night.”

The first day of what would become an informal but binding “situation” between Lemmy Drinkwater and myself ended with me holding the bloodied body of a pit bull named Folchik — Mohawk for “Little Hunter”—in my arms.

The dog was shivering uncontrollably, shiny with blood under the sodium vapour lamps overhanging the fighting box. Her foam-flecked tongue lolled out the side of her mouth, warm as cooked liver on my forearm.

Little Hunter had fought like a monster but her opponent, a blue-nose pit bull up from the Carolinas named Seeker, had been just that little bit slicker. Seeker sat with her owner: a fat dog breeder wearing a train engineer’s cap and hacked-down combat boots. The dog’s two-tone eyes — one blue, one yellow — were riveted on Little Hunter. Seeker’s sides expanded like a bellows as the blood from her own wounds leaked down her legs to the rosined floor.

It shocked me, how fast it had happened. Only minutes ago Folchik had been a whole creature, full of blood and life. Next? Nothing but a connection of exhausted muscle and torn flesh, opened up in ways no creature ever should be. I felt her heart shuddering under my fingertips at an insane gallop and smelled her adrenaline — the same smell in dogs as it was in men.

The day had begun with me waking next to Edwina.

I had lain still while the bedroom fell into place around me, listening to Ed breathe: long, slow inhales, smooth exhales. She faced away from me but I figured she was awake, as she usually was at this hour: eyes open to watch the sun spread across the bottom of the windowsill, immersed in her own unknowable thoughts.

I curled into her, slipping an arm down her rib cage. When we were dating she’d once said I didn’t know how to cuddle right. Your body doesn’t fit itself properly to mine is how she’d put it. At that age I was worried about being a decent lover — the fact that I might’ve been a piss-poor cuddler never entered my mind.

It’s true that we’d started living together young, but that was how people did things here, as if we were ticking off boxes in an exam called Life. But I knew I’d found the real thing with Ed: the spark, that unquestioned connection. So I’d held tight. I regretted nothing and could only hope Ed didn’t, either.

Ed sat on the edge of the bed and stretched. The tendons in her back flexed and she worked her fingers loose as she did every morning — after years of picking busted Arrowroots off the conveyor, it looked as if tiny balloons had been inflated inside her finger joints.

I lay still while she showered. She whistled “The Log Driver’s Waltz”: It’s birling down a-down white water / A log driver’s waltz pleases girls completely. She dressed in the thin yellow light and clipped her photo ID to her overalls.

“So,” she said. “What’s your schedule today?”

I smiled wolfishly. “Today I find my ass a new job.”

She nodded as if this was firmly within my abilities.

The Port Weller dry dock was a cathedral of rust.

There wasn’t one exposed strip of scaffolding not pocked or slashed with it. The hulls of ships in the shelf docks were so eaten through that the metal would crumble in your hands like schist. Skycranes tilted against the black-shouldered cliffs of the escarpment, ferrying girders caked in marine paint. Even the air had teeth: a million tiny fangs gnawed at the exposed skin above my collar.

I walked through the main gates along a strip of canal that shone silver in the new day. Sunfish snatched at zebra mussels clinging to snarls of rebar jutting from the seawall. Gulls circled; they must have followed these hulks in from sea and now, their meal ticket gone, the air was alive with their confused screeches.

The foreman waited at the punch clock: a solid guy with an oily, pancake-flat face.

“You Diggs?”

“Thanks for meeting with me.”

“Part of my job.” His head jerked to indicate I should follow.

We passed over batboards to a walkway alongside the flank of a ship rooted in deep dock. I trailed my fingers over the metal, which trembled under an assault of air-hammers and riveting guns. An arc-welding torch snapped alight above; a soft blue glow streaked the hull, following the roll-lines of the steel. A spray of golden sparks cascaded off the tin overhang, touching the arm of my denim jacket and leaving scorch marks almost too small to see.

We stepped through a porthole door into a small, dark, rust-smelling chamber. A smelter was working beneath us: sweat instantly popped along my brow. Around us were chains and pulleys rimed with dark, granular grease. The points of naked hooks swung in front of my eyes, their chains clanking like wind chimes.

The chamber broke onto a narrow footpath spanning the ship’s hull. Men worked thirty feet below: all I could see were the yellow plugs of their hardhats. The sun broke through the ship’s unfinished angles, glinting off the aluminum gangplanks.

The foreman led me into a makeshift office. “Go ahead and go sit down.”

I took blueprints off the chair facing his and set them carefully on the floor. He pulled my crumpled resumé from his pocket.

“The Bisk, huh?”

“Cutbacks. A couple guys I used to work with said I should try here.”

“Yuh, they been through already.” His snort seemed to say we’d been fools to throw our lots in with a multinational conglomerate while he’d had the good sense to stick with ships. “English Literature certificate?”

“I took some classes up at Niagara College.”

“Why?”

When I didn’t reply the foreman massaged his forehead with the stump of his pointer finger — I wondered if he was doing this to call attention to the missing digit.

“Can you weld?”

“I’ve spot-welded.”

“Spot we don’t need. Mig? Tig? Acetylene?”

I shook my head.

“Can you run a Wheelabrator?”

I shook my head.

“Plasma cutter?”

I shook my head.

“Oxy-fuel cutter?”

I shook my head.

“Profile burner?”

“No.”

“Metal lathe?”

“No.”

“Boring mill?”

“I can learn.”

“Just about any walking stiff can. Only takes a year’s apprenticeship up at the college. Same one that taught you those English classes.” He pronounced it clarsis.

“Listen, I need the work and I’ve got a strong back—”

“What do you think we do, haul sacks a cement? This is a skilled labour site. What’d you do at Nabisco?”

“Batch mixer, mainly. A bit of line maintenance.”

“That’s not a skill we’re in need of. Sorry.”

He didn’t look one damn bit sorry. Maybe he was one of those men who enjoyed pressing his heel into the back of his fellow man’s neck. I squinted at his ID badge, which was melted and heat-scorched. Sonny Hillicker. One of that clan, then.

“You related to Clyde?”

“My kid brother.”

“I know Clyde.”

“Yeah. Clyde knows you, too.”

Jesus — wasn’t that just Cataract City? The old snake-ball. Fighting just to fight, even when the battle’s long been lost.

“You smell like a cookie,” Sonny Hillicker said, and he laughed. “Alla you Biskers do.”

Hot coals burned at my temples. But beneath the fire was the insistent scrape of desperation: the dull edge of a knife down the back of my neck.

An hour later I was in the Coffee Time off Drummond eating a cruller that tasted of cigarette smoke and flipping through the job ads. The cell phone buzzed in my pocket.

“Yeah?”

“Diggs.”

“Yeah.”

“Where are you?”

“Who’s this?”

“Drinkwater. Sounds like you’re someplace busy.”

“Coffee shop.”

I picked up a weird abrasion on the line — Drinkwater’s stubble grating on the mouthpiece? Dogs barked in the background.

“You healed up?”

“I’d be okay to go. Anything happening?”

“Why don’t you come over.”

“My cutman’s at work.”

“Don’t need him. Just you.”

“This a job?”

“This isn’t anything if I’m on the phone with you another five seconds.”

“What do you know about fighting dogs, Diggs?”

“I know I wouldn’t want to fight one myself.”

“Smart, paleface.”

Drinkwater had showed up at Smokin’ Joes in a chromed-up Silverado Crew Cab. Joes was the size of a small-town supermarket and sold everything from motorcycle jackets to authentic Tuscaroran birdhouses, but I’d yet to see anyone come out with anything except suds or cigs.

Drinkwater, as always, was all sharp angles and unforgiving bone. I took in the raised pink scar that fish-hooked from his hairline around one ear. He wore the same stovepipe jeans I’d seen him in since the first day I met him, the kind you had to work in like a catcher’s mitt. He retrieved a pit bull from the truck bed, wrapping the leash around his fist.

“Get your ass in gear, Diggs.”

We passed through a gate into an acre-wide impound housing six U-barns: corrugated tin scabbed with rust, the sort of things built to shelter twin-prop airplanes. The far north warehouse was the fight house. The other five? I had no clue what they held.

Drinkwater met with four men inside the gates. They had the same look: the old-style blue jeans, jackets with knotted fringes of fur, the wide-brimmed black bowler hats with partridge feathers stuck in the band. They spoke with their backs to me.

Thunder kicked up over the flatlands. A sleek black helicopter rose over the earth’s hub, hovering over the compound. The air swam with rotor wash, the shimmer of gas fumes. The smell of industrial bearing lubricant hit my nose: it was the same cherry-scented lube we used at the Bisk to grease gears. The chopper rode too high for me to make out its occupants — all I saw were sunglasses whose tinted lenses shone like lynx eyes in the reddening sun.

Drinkwater and the other men held their bodies stiff against the blade-wind as it rose to a fierce howl, ripping fans of dust off the ground. The helicopter banked southward over the band centre and the squat architecture of the rez.

Drinkwater didn’t say anything about the helicopter as we walked the ruddy scrub behind Smokin’ Joes, down a row of fenced-in pens. At the sound of Drinkwater’s voice, dogs tore out of their cheap plastic doghouses to leap and claw at the chain-link.

They were pit bulls — some black, some brindle-coated, some the glossy grey of a luxury sedan. And they all had the same physique: a dark heart-shaped nose, black eyes canopied by a jutting forehead, docked ears and a jaw that looked to have been worked into shape by chewing an India rubber ball. Their musculature flared like a cobra’s hood down their ribs, which were prominent when the dogs held certain positions; those bones looked like giant skeletal fingers flexed under the flesh. The males’ penises were sheathed in folds of skin that lay nearly flat against their stomachs like the hood scoops on muscle cars. None of the dogs looked more than sixty-five pounds but they seemed monstrous. It was as if they were made out of well-matched chunks of stone wrapped in jeweller’s velvet.

“There is no breed to match the pit bull,” Drinkwater said. “Americans love two tons of Detroit rolling iron and supersizing everything, so of course breeders used to figure the biggest dogs were the toughest. German shepherds, Dobermans, Rottweilers, Great Danes, Tosa Inus — all hat, no cattle.”

Dogfighting was big on the rez. Dogmen came up from the Carolinas and as far south as Florida to fight Drinkwater’s studs. He’d set up a closed-circuit TV link; the fights were broadcast in Vegas and drew heavy wagering.

Drinkwater bashed a stick against a pen. The dog inside leapt and yowled. Its neighbours did the same, biting at the fence and leaving runners of saliva dangling from the metal.

“This is my million-dollar gal,” he said. “Folchik. My Little Hunter.”

I remembered War Hammer, another one of Drinkwater’s million-dollar gals. When he opened the pen door, Folchik bounded out. She looked not much different than the others. I told Drinkwater as much.

“It’s not the look,” he said. “It’s the game. Game is the dog that won’t quit fighting — the dog that’ll fight with two broken legs! Game is the dog that will toe the scratch knowing it’s already dead. Game is crazy, but game dogs taste more of life because they have no fear of death. And Folchik is dead game.”

Drinkwater stick-whipped the dog’s ass. The blow sent seismic ripples down the dog’s flanks, but Folchik didn’t register it at all.

“Another breed, that would be abuse,” Drinkwater said.

I ran a hand down Folchik’s hide. Muscle throbbed under her skin, strands lapping each other like tight-woven wicker. Her coat held the reflective sheen of the tinted windows of a downtown high-rise, like nothing possible in nature.

“They’re good with people,” said Drinkwater, “but murder on other dogs.”

“We had a bull mastiff for a while growing up, before I got Dolly.”

Drinkwater shook his head as if this was the saddest news he’d heard all day. “Some guy brought a mastiff round for a roll. Neapolitan variety — I guess they’re supposed to be bad-asses. Hundred-fifty pounds and jowly, folds of skin hanging off its muzzle. Disgusting thing! I refused to roll my stock — wasn’t that dog’s fault it had a moron for an owner. Another guy had a beat-up old pit bull cur that was practically a bait dog — one you chuck in with the gamers just to keep them lively — but still, a pittie. That little scrap of shit tore the mastiff’s throat right out. The mastiff’s owner bawled his guts out.”

Drinkwater leashed Folchik and together we walked to one of the tin-sided sheds. Inside was a treadmill with a two-foot-tall metal cage over the track. Drinkwater swatted Folchik inside the cage and knotted her leash to the treadmill panel. He ramped the elevation to max and cranked it. Folchik fell into a quick run as the treadmill’s belt ripped round the rollers.

“I want to show you something,” Drinkwater said.

“We’re leaving her here?”

“She can run for days.”

We walked to a warehouse dominated by a giant machine, green like a ’7os-vintage fridge. It was working at a furious pace, well-worn parts ticking with the sound of silenced bullets shot from an automatic rifle.

Drinkwater walked me down the line. Bricks of tobacco went into a shredder on one side, cigarettes spat out the other. The cigarette filters chittered down one funnel, where they were attached to the paper, rolled with the tobacco and fastened with a golden band. The machine was manned by chain-smoking Natives; they picked fresh cigs out of the hoppers and lit them off the stumps of their last. One guy smoked like a Frenchman, holding his cig between his third and fourth fingers.

Drinkwater eyed me down his nose. “You wouldn’t squeal on your old pal Lem, wouldya?”

When I didn’t reply he led me outside, back to the shed where Folchik was still running strong — if anything, stronger. Her tongue hung out of her mouth, thick and pink.

“She’s rolling tonight. Got to taper my baby down.”

He took her out and scratched her ears and under her chin with all the tenderness of a man clawing at a tick bite. The clipped nub of Folchik’s tail wagged gratefully — and Drinkwater cuffed her head so hard that her snout bounced off the dirt. Folchik’s lips rippled along her gums to expose her teeth but she didn’t bite.

“Good girl,” Drinkwater said softly. “You build the aggression by antagonizing them, see? Turn them into a stick of TNT with a very short fuse, yeah? Come with me.”

A bearlike specimen waited by Drinkwater’s truck: he was fifty pounds heavier than me, with a dewlapped face. His nose was mobbed with broken veins. He stood spread-legged against the bumper dressed in the same deep-blue dungarees Drinkwater wore and a wifebeater. “Diggs,” Drinkwater said. “This is Igor.”

“Igor? You’re joking.”

Neither man spoke so I said, “Hey, Igor.”

“Hiya,” Igor said, deadpan.

Folchik rode in back. I rode bitch. Drinkwater pushed the big truck up to eighty down unpaved roads, throwing up a rooster tail of dust. We gunned past houses that weren’t much more than huts held fast by L-clamps and the grace of God. Soon even those were gone: only the uncluttered scrub of the rez where, as they say, a man could watch his dog run away for days.

Drinkwater said, drily, “What bounty you’ve given us, paleface. What beauty to behold. I guess you’d like it if we were gone — yeah? Sure. We give you heap big headaches. But the ol’ typhoid-infested blanket trick didn’t work, did it? The firewater, though. That was a smart move.”

He hurled the truck round a blind corner, wheels flirting with the ditch. The momentum threw me against Igor’s unyielding bulk.

“But you let us hang around, you white devils with your white devil guilt, and now we’re dug in deep.”

The dirt road gave way to tarmac. The tires bit down and we screamed off the rez into the world of concrete light stanchions, dotted yellow lines and Piggly Wigglys. Drinkwater took us down a switchback hill that emptied into the Niagara river basin. He stopped in front of a puntboat tied along the shore.

“Let’s see what you can do with this tub,” he said.

The river was greenest at the shore, greying as it went out and black where it ran deepest. It was five hundred yards wide where we stood, and hooked sharply a half-mile down, around an outcrop of Jack pines. The sun carved over the trees on the far shore, glimmering off a million leaves so that it seemed as if the distant banks were on fire.

We picked across jags of rock slick with algae at the waterline. An insane glittering of gnats danced above the greenness. We each scooped up a handful of cold river water and ran our fingers over our teeth until we heard the squeak. It was something all men did around here.

My uncle used to take me fishing for steelhead in a puntboat before the bank took it away. Drinkwater’s boat was a long, flat-bottomed pug with rings of rust around every rivet. He and Igor stood at the bow while I shucked the tie-downs and slid us off.

Once we’d floated free of the rocks I pull-started the old Evinrude and guided us into the deepest seam of the channel. The current held a complex urgency: breaking around rocks and into sucking crevices, forming again, fighting against itself like a thing made of many strings being pulled different ways at once.

Drinkwater watched me without watching me. Igor’s face remained stony as an Easter Island idol as the dying sun lit it from behind: he looked sandblasted, with divots of shadow on the places he must’ve had acne as a teenager.

Drinkwater shifted his hips and I saw the curved bone handle of his knife sheathed where his belt ran round his spine. I thought that you didn’t need to be strong or skilled to slide a knife into someone — you only had to core that worm of mercy out of your heart. That was the hardest line, one I couldn’t cross; it put me at a disadvantage with guys like Drinkwater.

“Cut the motor,” he said.

We drifted. Igor whispered into Drinkwater’s ear; Lem laughed without mirth.

“What I need of you …” he said to me, still laughing.

“How many?” I said.

He wasn’t laughing now. “How many what?”

“How many cigarettes and what’s my cut?”

Drinkwater squinted. “Five million cigarettes. More maybe, next time. No cut. Flat rate. Ten K.”

In Cataract City, as in any border town, smuggling was common. Most of it penny-ante, done for a cheap thrill. When I was a kid, Bovine’s dad had installed an extra-large windshield-washer-fluid reservoir in his Impala. He’d drive over to Pine Street Liquor and fill it with Comrade Popov’s potato vodka — five gallons of the swill. Anything to declare? the border guard would ask. Just that you’ve got yourselves a real swell country over here, Bovine’s dad would answer with a shit-eating grin.

“Fine, I’ll do it.”

Drinkwater picked his fingers along the teeth in his hatband. “Just like that?”

“Just like that. I want half now.”

“I’ll give you two now.”

“Fine.”

“Igor will be going with you.”

“When?”

“When you do it.”

“Igor’s okay with that?”

“Igor’s okay with anything I tell him to be okay with.”

“When do we do it?”

“I’ll let you know when it becomes critical.”

“Let’s head back. You give me the two now and call when you need me.”

“What, you don’t enjoy my company?”

“Not really, Lem.”

Drinkwater’s lips skinned back from his teeth and he doubled over, laughter sobbing out of him in a high, breathless wheeze. Straightening up, he flicked away tears from under his eyes with one finger.

“Hell, ain’t that a shame. I like you well enough.”

We returned to the Tuscarora without speaking. Once we’d slipped past the razorwire fence, Drinkwater said, “I’ll pay you after the fight, which I need to get back for.”

“I’m not watching two dogs maul each other.”

“If that’s all you see you aren’t watching close enough. Anyway, cash doesn’t leave my pocket until the roll’s over.”

Inside the warehouse, in the same spot where I usually fought, sat a plywood pen. It was waist-high, roughly seven foot by seven. The crowd was mostly Native men in dungarees and jean jackets; a pall of cigarette smoke floated over the fighting box. The men who’d thrown that bottle at me might’ve been there, but I couldn’t remember their faces. The old man who smoked like a Frenchman was there, watching with eyes like peach pits sunk in the net of wrinkles on his face.

A trio of white men huddled on the far side of the pen, all three of them fat — southern deputy fat. They wore overalls, train engineer’s caps and Caterpillar boots. They had handkerchiefs in their back pockets and they stood on pigeon toes in a rough circle around a dog crate.

“No dog beats a pittie,” Drinkwater said to me. “The only fact left up for debate is which pit bull bloodline is best. Folchik’s a red nose — best, I say. Those boys came up from Carolina with a blue nose bitch whelped by Grand Champ Negrino, the original slaughterhouse on four legs. So I guess we’ll see.”

I thought about how, right now, people were looking into problems of great importance. Curing cancers, puzzling out how to make a combustion engine run on orange peels and egg shells, stuff like that. Those kinds of people didn’t live in Cataract City, though. Here were the things my people investigated: which type of dog was the best at killing all other types of dogs. The better I got to know Lemuel Drinkwater, the more I came to see he’d built a laboratory for himself. He was a scientist, you could say, and his field of study was suffering. And now I’d made myself a part of that, too. I was another one of his lab rats.

One of the fat dog-breeders came over with his cap in his hands, nervously rubbing the hatband’s sheen with his hammerthumbs.

“I ‘preciate the opportunity,” he said, showing teeth that were shockingly white and straight.

Drinkwater said: “So who’s this one you brought?”

“She’s a game bitch,” the man said. “Green, yuh, but plenny game. This yours?”

“She is,” said Drinkwater. “Folchik.”

“You rolled her ever?”

Drinkwater pointed to her flank and said, “Figure she got those scars shaving?”

The man set the toe of his boot between Folchik’s front legs. “Lotta space between them legs. Blue noses is narrower across the brisket.”

Drinkwater said, “They must tip over easy.”

“I ain’t never rolled no tippy dog, mister.”

The fat breeder’s pit bull, Seeker, was sleek and streamlined. She had terrifying aerodynamics: she didn’t move so much as flow like grey water. Her skull was a wedge trimming towards her snout, and she had a small overbite — the points of her canines protruded below her top lip.

The dogs were lifted into the pen. Their noses touched. Seeker licked Folchik’s chin.

“Razor them,” Drinkwater said.

Both men made a cut in their dog’s flanks — Drinkwater with the bone-handled knife, the fat breeder with a box-cutter clipped to his overalls. They wet their fingers with the blood and rubbed it onto their own dog’s nose first, then the other dog’s. Folchik snuffled blood up her nose and sneezed, spraying red on the shellacked concrete.

The dogs nosed up at the scratch-line. The blood had jacked the fight into them. They lunged, forelegs battling, teeth daggering in the smoky air. And still they made no sound: only the soft hiss of breath escaped their lungs.

“God damn,” the breeder said with real admiration. “That’s a gamer.”

The dogs were drawn back to their corners, held tight by their scruffs. Seeker yowled and snapped at the air. Folchik sat still as stone.

“Release,” said Drinkwater.

The dogs flew at each other like stones from a catapult. Folchik closed the distance and leapt; Seeker dropped levels, flattening as Folchik sailed overtop. For a split second their teeth flashed: Seeker’s head twisting sideways and darting upwards to snap at Folchik’s belly, Folchik’s head straining down to rip at her opponent’s flanks as she passed overhead.

Folchik’s paws hit the cement and skidded, leaving milky scars in the rosin. As she wrenched her body awkwardly around, claws seeking purchase on the slick floor, her haunches slammed into the plywood with a thump that shook the pen and her rear paws kicked off the barricade to slingshot back at Seeker, who was spinning to meet her.

Folchik bulled forward, angling for the killshot, skull snaking side to side — but she found nothing except air as Seeker backpedalled smartly, feinting, dodging, her throat half an inch from Folchik’s gnashing teeth. Folchik backed Seeker up to the pen’s edge, trying to bully her into a corner but failing. Seeker slipped to one side, batting Folchik’s head with her paw, then tilted her head slightly and arrowed in at the spot just behind Folchik’s jaw.

It took an instant. Less. When Seeker’s head came away there was a shiny pink disc on Folchik’s throat. It rapidly filled with red that dripped down the dog’s leg.

The fight found its truth in that moment. Seeker’s manoeuvre was that of a picador baiting a bull, making it believe in its own invulnerability before sinking his little dagger, the pica, into the bull’s neck.

The dogs met in the centre of the pen. Both rose on their hind legs, forelegs locked over each other’s shoulders like waltzers in a death-dance. Folchik’s mouth was a blur of enamel; ropes of saliva hung from her jaws, stretching and snapping with the crazed movement of her head. Seeker held her own head aslant, parrying Folchik’s crazed thrusts, crow-hopping lightly on her hind legs. Her head stabbed forward when she found an opening, clinical cobra-strikes that opened the skin around Folchik’s jaw and shredded what was left of one docked ear.

The noise that came out of Folchik caused my guts to contract: it was a confused whine like that of a child confronted with a puzzle she cannot solve.

Folchik torqued her body and jerked her head to strike at Seeker’s belly. Her jaws fastened onto Seeker’s brisket, but as Folchik was rucking in for a better grip Seeker leapt off her hind legs, tucked her head smartly and flipped over Folchik’s back. Her haunches hit Folchik’s spine and she spun to the side with eerie grace; her head ended up even with Folchik’s back legs. Now Seeker’s teeth flashed like razors — she didn’t need an instant to orient herself; she knew exactly where she was — two quick strikes into Folchik’s right rear leg. By the time Folchik spun round to fend off the attack, Seeker had ducked clear. What looked like a nest of wet red wires hung from a deep wound in Folchik’s thigh.

“Break!” cried Drinkwater. “Time!”

Drinkwater and the fat breeder climbed inside the pen to fetch their dogs. Seeker licked Folchik’s bloodied flank lightly, the way she might have licked one of her newborn pups.

In the corner Drinkwater petted Folchik with great tenderness, whispering, “My beautiful, my beautiful.” He had a bag much like Bovine’s and from it he removed a packet of Monsel’s solution, which he painted onto the dog’s wounds with a wet Q-tip; Folchik stood silent as her flesh hardened into brown jerky.

In the other corner the fat breeder filled a bowl with Gatorade for Seeker. He saturated a cottonball with Adrenalin 1:100 and eased it up Seeker’s rectum with one squashed-flat thumb.

My gaze drifted into the crowd. The old Native guy was working his jaws around another cigarette — his lower lip came up too far for him to have teeth. I hated having anything to do with these ugly men whose stomachs were falling through the shiny denim of their jackets and whose skin hung like wet laundry off the warped dowels of their bones. But I knew we shared one thing: we were fascinated by these creatures, who were perfect in some exquisite, unknowable way — and we would probably watch one of them die.

Folchik limped to the scratch-line. Her eyes were marble-hard and tacky as peeled grapes; she wasn’t blinking anymore. Seeker ebbed out of her corner like liquid.

“Release!”

Folchik tore in at Seeker, who backpedalled madly, seemingly unsure of herself for the first time; the Little Hunter’s rush had the grey dog’s paws scrabbling under her belly, losing traction, at which point Folchik faked a strike at Seeker’s leg. Seeker ripped at Folchik’s head except her head wasn’t there anymore. Folchik had reversed to strike at Seeker’s opposite leg, picking it up and wrenching it sideways, flipping the fat man’s dog onto her side, and for a harried second Seeker’s throat was exposed: the killshot. Folchik was straining madly for it and I was sure she’d end it right there—wanted her to, because a part of me hated the silky perfection of the other dog — and the crowd rose to a quick roar, sensing the hometown favourite was making her move as the dogs’ fangs buzz-sawed the air. But then Folchik reared back and it was clear something had gone wrong: her muzzle was shredded like cheesecloth to expose the pink rack of her gums and the blood-flecked pegs of her teeth. Seeker sported a long rip down one side of her face but her throat was unhurt.

“Pick her up,” the fat breeder told Drinkwater. “She’s close to dead.”

He refused.

“What’s the matter with you?” I said.

Suddenly, it was as if Folchik had lost her heft: the iron had been ripped from her spine. Seeker bullied and harassed her, striking at her retreating forelegs, tearing pink gouges into her coat and rag-dolling her across the pen.

Next I was stepping over the boards into the fighting box. It was an involuntary reaction, like breathing or blinking my eyes. When I elbowed Seeker clear, she lunged, her teeth ripping into my forearm with enough force to pierce the flesh, but only once — whether this was a matter of training or because she had no interest in hurting me, I couldn’t tell. She backed off and sat on her haunches, eyeing her breeders.

I bent beneath those staggered faces under the vapour lamps, wrapping my arms around Folchik, who was shivering uncontrollably. I picked her up, cradling her head in the crook of my bloodied elbow. She buried her face in my armpit. Her bladder let go in a warm trickle that went down my side and soaked the band of my jeans.

I stared at the men ranged round the box. Not disapprovingly, not for sympathy, but to see what they’d make of it. I didn’t see anything other than dark-eyed stoniness. Men with their hands in their pockets stared back at me with no knowable emotion; I could have done what I’d done or not, it mattered very little to them. The only man who seemed to care was Seeker’s primary keeper — he inclined his head at me, the smallest of nods.

Drinkwater stepped into the box with his knife out. He held it low, tip pointing at my belly.

“Put my dog down. We’re not finished.”

“I think so, Lem. I really think this is finished.”

He brought the knife up, the edge pressed to my neck. He raked it against the grain of my stubble, the vibration radiating along my collarbones.

“Lot of witnesses, Lemmy.”

“I own every eye looking at you.”

“People know where I am. It’s a whole lot easier to make a dog disappear than a man. White man, especially.”

Drinkwater squeezed one eye shut. He put the knife back in its sheath.

“Bad dog,” he said softly. “Bad, bad dog.”

Edwina was asleep, or pretending to be. I slid past the bed and stashed the two thousand dollars in the toe of an old workboot.

When I turned, Ed had shifted up on one elbow, face glossed by the moonlight falling through the window. The sight made a small sweet hole in me.

“You find anything?” she said.

“They weren’t looking at the dry docks. Something’ll come up.”

“Why are you dressed like that?”

I wore my overalls, the only clothes I’d had in my truck. The ones I’d been wearing were covered in blood. After the fight I’d wrapped Folchik in my shirt and left the warehouse. Nobody bothered trying to stop me. I’d driven around town with the dog in the passenger seat; the street lamps shone through the windshield, picking up the sheen of blood on her coat. She’d pawed at the seat with what little energy she had — it dawned on me that she was trying to climb down into the footwell, where it was darker, which was I guess where a dog would prefer to die.

“Hold on, girl,” I’d whispered. “Just a little while longer, okay?”

I’d stopped at a pay phone on an unlit block. The receiver was ripped off but the book was intact. After hunting up the address, I’d driven down Lockport Road, skirting the airport — shark-coloured planes were lifting into the twilight, reminding me of when I’d ride my bike to the Point as a boy and watch them ghost out of the clouds — and pulled into the SPCA.

It was closed, but a sign read EMERGENCY SERVICE and an arrow pointed round back. I left the truck idling and gathered Folchik in my arms, worried that she’d bite — she must have been terrified, delirious, confused — but she only whimpered as I lifted her. She weighed nothing at all.

I stepped from the truck with Folchik in my arms. I smelled raw adrenaline dumping out of the dog’s pores and below that, the smell of warm pavement. I banged on the door hard enough to strip the skin off my knuckles. The woman who answered was in her late sixties — a volunteer, I figured. She wore glasses on a beaded string and when she saw me standing there, they slid down her nose to rattle on her chest.

“I found her on the side of the road,” I said. “You have to take her.”

“Oh Gaad,” she said with a strong upstate accent. “What happened?”

“I don’t know … someone might’ve hit her with their car.”

“Savages. Why wouldn’t they have stopped?”

“Jesus, listen — I don’t know.” I held Folchik out to her. “She’s real bad off. Do you have a vet on staff?”

She nodded. “Always one on call. I’ll have to—”

“Call whoever it is. Hurry up, you have to—”

The woman stepped aside, waving me in. Beyond the door lay a small, clean, white-tiled room dominated by a steel examining table.

“Lay the dog down,” she said. “I’ll call the police, too. We have to file a report. You’ll have to talk to them.”

A quick scan of the room told me there was no phone. I said, “Go make the calls.”

“Okay, yes. Oh Gaad,” she said, hurrying out.

Blood had soaked through my shirt. Folchik had been breathing shallowly, but her inhales seemed steadier now.

I left before the woman returned. I drove to an all-night carwash on Pine Street and cleaned my truck out, scrubbing the upholstery until my hands turned a chapped red. I changed into my overalls and drove to the Tops Market, where I bought bandages and peroxide in the pharmacy and grabbed a case of Hamm’s from the cooler. In the parking lot, by the glow of the truck’s domelight, I debrided and bandaged my arm where Seeker had bit me. The punctures were ragged, throbbing with a dull, bone-deep heat. I hoped they wouldn’t get infected.

I’d driven back to the border, where I declared and paid full duty on the beer. Then I wound through the quiet streets of my city, drank four beers real quick at the end of my block and finally rolled up the driveway with the headlights off.

“You been drinking?” Edwina said.

I stared at the beer at the end of my arm. “Bovine bought a couple cases over the river. I bought one off him.”

I was shocked at how easily the lie came to me. Dolly padded over and nosed around my legs, snaffling the exposed skin at my ankles. Her tail stiffened.

“Have you been seeing other dogs?” Ed asked.

“A stray wandering around the shipworks.” Another effortless lie.

“Hmm. Dolly’s jealous. Come here,” Edwina said.

We lay in the moonlight. The breeze played on the wind chimes hanging in the window: it was hammered bronze and shaped like tumbling water. A friend of Ed’s had bought it for us at a tourist trap on Clifton Hill. Might as well buy wooden shoes for a Dutchman.

“There’s something on your neck,” Ed said. “Is that blood?”

“Oil, probably. From the docks.”

She rubbed my thigh … then rubbed higher. I liked her this way, all coy and mothering. I needed her to carry me away from the sight of Folchik broken open on a warehouse floor. Maybe she needed it too, really needed it, like me, instead of just wanting it to satisfy the urge.

Lately when we made love, I’d been seeing Ed as someone else. She’d angle her head as she lay on the pillow and the outline of her bone structure would seem more purely arousing to me. But then I’d realize it was still Edwina — just a younger version. Her hair not yet leeched by the bleached flour that constantly hung in the air at the Bisk. Her forearms not yet twisted with thick blue veins. And I’d look at my own hands and they were no longer ruined things, either. It was as if our young selves reappeared … the strangest thing.

But those younger, other selves are never really gone, are they? All their possibilities. Why would they be? They’re only waiting for you to chase them down and reclaim them, right?

Who’d have figured wrecking a hearse could be so much fun?

Owe, Bovine and I drove it to Westlane High School, where, as promised, the auto shop teacher let us use the tool bay. We jacked the meat-wagon on a pneumatic hoist and tore it apart.

It was just the three of us drinking Lakers and busting the hell out of the hearse. We took a sledgehammer to it. We stomped the windshield until the Saf-T-Glas webbed, caved and folded into the front seat. We loosed war whoops while crowbarring out the side windows, which broke with such a sweet tinkling. I crawled into the back and ripped down the velvet curtains—pik-pik-pik! — off the brass hooks.

Bovine popped the hood. We stood around it.

“Well,” Owen said. “I’m pretty sure that’s an engine.”

At least Bovine had half a clue what to do. He purged the gas tank and rerouted the flow to a hose fed through the glovebox and then into a jerry can duct-taped to the back seat.

“Can’t be any gas in the tank during a demo derby,” he said. “Unless you want a field of flaming fireballs.”

One night I cracked the door leading into the hallway and when the alarm didn’t blare we walked into the darkened school. Our boots squeaked on the tiles, that haunting sound echoing down the hallways.

“Darla Dinkins,” Bovine said, tapping his beer bottle on a locker. “Ol’ Double D. I asked her out dancing at the Blue Lagoon — I had fake ID. Ah, god, did she shoot me doooown.”

“She works at the Shoppers Drug Mart on Portage,” I said. “Married to Doug Kirkwood, who sells Chevys at Mullane Motors. Two kids … one’s named Ekko, I think.”

We passed the trophy case, our bodies reflected amidst the golden armatures. The three of us looked younger in the half-light, relieved of the years sunken into our flesh — the effect was so compelling I found myself reaching out to touch our faces where they lay trapped in the glass.

Back in the tool bay we spray-painted THE DEVIL’S DUE down each side of the hearse. Bovine hacked down the muffler with an acetylene torch — miraculously without melting his fingers off. The big hulk howled like the hounds of hell.

On the night of the derby we flicked on the hearse’s hazard lights and crept down the back roads to the Merrittville Speedway.

Bovine had spent the afternoon stuck down a bottle, so I drove. Bovine hummed softly in the back seat as wind rushed through the empty windows to carve the hair back from his widow’s peak. The narrow road shone like a runway in the moonlight. Stars salted the sky above the escarpment. I fiddled with the radio and pulled in “Take Me Home Tonight” by Eddie Money.

“Beee mah little bay-bee,” Bovine crooned in a drunken falsetto.

The Speedway shone under a ring of spotlights. I pulled into the grassy staging area teeming with chopped-down derby rides. The inspector did a circuit around the hearse, casually snapped the antenna off and said, “Got a helmet?”

“No,” Owe said.

“You can rent one over there. Ten bucks.”

“That’s highway robbery!” Bovine cackled from the back seat.

“That guy better not be driving,” the inspector said.

Owe begged off, seeing as his knee was held together with Silly Putty and carpenter’s glue. Bovine slapped me on both cheeks and gave me a woozy hug. “Steady on, Highlander!”

While Bovine and Owe made their way to the bleachers, I scoped the competition: a rusty delivery van with a giant plastic chicken on its roof; a slab of Detroit rolling iron, cotton-candy pink, with THE SHOCKER on the hood; a purple Buick with an armless, legless mannequin lashed to the grille. Two guys sat on the Buick’s hood passing a flask; their laughter floated up towards the stars.

Drivers hopped into our cars. The air was soon hammering with pistons, thick with exhaust fumes. The inspector waved a red flag. I pulled out behind a Nissan Micra that must’ve been some masochist’s idea of a swell ride. We drove a lap past the stands. The lights shone down with the intensity of tiny suns. Owe and Bovine stood, beers in hand, cheering their guts out. I blew them kisses.

The cars idled on the sloped oval, grilles aimed into the centre. When the air horn blatted, I threw the tranny into reverse and tromped the accelerator; the tires stuttered, spitting loose stones against the undercarriage until finally they bit, rocketing the hearse up the slope and away from the fray.

The delivery van collided with a Dodge Aspen; the plastic chicken sailed off the roof to explode like a snow globe on the Dodge’s hood. Wrenching the wheel, I swung the hearse into a sloppy arc as the little Micra caromed off my bumper and pinballed like a BB.

I threw my arm over the passenger seat and cranked my neck over my shoulder. The purple Buick fell directly in my crosshairs: it sat in the centre of the bowl, fishtailing on two flats. I punched the gas and shot downhill — the pink behemoth charged past my front bumper in pursuit of a lime-green Gremlin — lining up the hearse’s trunk with the Buick’s mannequin hood ornament, which swelled in the rear window until—CRANCH!

The impact threw me forward. My face bounced off the wheel; flaming spiders scuttled before my eyes. The mannequin’s head bounded off the hood and burst under the passing tires of the delivery van. I jerked the transmission into D and goosed the gas; my bumper was snarled with the Buick’s fender and the unlocking of all that twisted metal was accompanied by a metallic shriek that set my teeth on edge. The air above the oval was blue with exhaust; my head swam with the fumes but my adrenaline was redlined. Absolute clarity settled over me, a sensation I’d felt only once or twice in my life.

The hearse accelerated up the oval; I spun the wheel casually, using just two fingers, blood on the back of my hand in perfect red droplets. I must have bloodied my nose when it hit the wheel but never mind, this was a hell of a time. The big car swung around at the top of the oval as if on autopilot, back wheels flirting with the fence; the thunder of the hearse’s muffler trip-hammered against my eardrums while I paused at the height of the incline to survey the madness below. I selected the delivery van that was meshed with the Aspen; their back tires smoked as they tried to separate. My foot mashed the gas and the view expanded, blown up big as all outdoors, before shrinking to a pinprick as I shot the gap and SHRRAASH! barrelled into the van, hitting it broadside and rocking it up on its side.

For an instant I thought I’d tipped the van over but soon gravity took hold and it smashed back down, axles snapping, hood jackrabbiting up and a torn fan belt hurtling skyward like a bird. I took in the green piss of antifreeze and the stink of cooked wiring and screamed in triumph, tasting blood between my teeth.

That was when the hearse rattled and died. I gripped the wheel, white-knuckled, laughing as I twisted the key. Nothing. Laughing harder now, these hysterical giggles, I jammed the transmission collar into P and reefed the key. The hearse coughed to life and I let loose a war whoop as the Micra blazed down the decline and ran straight into me.

The collision jolted me — each knob of my spine was robed in cold flames — as a glowing-hot lugnut pinged off the roof and hit the passenger seat, melting through the upholstery and sending up tiny curls of smoke. I peered groggily over the hearse’s hood at the Micra, which was folded up like an accordion, the driver laughing like a hyena with the flesh split above his brow. I was laughing, too—“You’re a wildman!” I shouted, and he must’ve heard because he grinned as if to say, Buddy, you don’t even wanna know! He threw the Micra into reverse, backed clear and went after the pink behemoth.

When I dropped the tranny into D, the hearse whined like a sick animal. The stink of broiled creosote seeped through the vents. I navigated a wasteland of shorn metal and cracked engine blocks hissing steam to the low side of the oval. A busted car horn emitted an endless high-pitched honk — the whooonk of a terrified goose. I gunned the hearse up the track incline, gears grinding, unsteady on tires shredding from their rims, then swung around and scanned the field. The Micra was rammed into the ass-end of the Aspen. The pink thing’s trunk was torn off and there was a huge dent in its left side, but it still moved. It angled round until we faced each other, three hundred yards apart. My heart swelled up to fill my chest.

I stood on the gas pedal. The big block V8 shrieked as the hearse leapt like a scalded cat. The pink car was boogying, too: vaporous streamers of smoke peeled back from its crunched hood. The spotlights shone off the still-bright chrome of the dash, which glowed with its strange circular geometries, and I inhaled the mustard leatherette of the seat and thought about the bodies that had occupied the berth behind me, laid out in coffins with their formaldehyde-stiff skin white as candle wax, wounds sewn tight with black thread, and then I braced my hands on the wheel as the pink car blasted into me.

A crash of earthbound thunder. Our hoods were welded with the weirdest metallic symmetry. Steel buckled, the alloy became liquid: it tumbled off the front of the hood in silver waves like steel-tinted winter water over the Falls, throwing me against the wheel so hard that I’d wake the next morning with the bright welt of its shape on my chest.

The impact shocked the air from my lungs. My next inhale was tortured, the sound you make after being under water so long it has almost killed you. I sucked in the steam roiling off the hearse’s engine block — the taste of a blowtorch’s blue flame. As the motor rattled down I smelled gas — on me? — and watched as small flames licked from under the pink car’s hood.

“Hey! You okay, buddy?”

The derby inspector hung his big fat melon through the window. I blinked my eyes and tried to focus.

“Derby’s over, man. You got yourself a bloody nose.”

“I’ll be okay. Say, did I win?”

The inspector shook his head. “The Micra took it.”

When I burst out laughing, the inspector insisted I check in with the on-site medic: unprovoked laughter was a symptom of a concussion.

After the race we took a cab to the Blue Lagoon. A pair of gay divorcees danced together on the postage stamp of a dance floor. Their pancake makeup shone under the black lights, making them look like lost mimes.

I drank a pint of Laker and soon the plugs of Kleenex stuffed up my nostrils were wet with beer foam. Bovine had kept himself well lubed on two-dollar drafts at the derby and showed no signs of flagging. Pinpricks of sweat glittered in the hollows of his eyes, and his hair looked like a half-deflated soufflé.

“Take it easy,” I told him. “You don’t have to drink your body weight.”

Bovine said, “Who are you — my mother?”

He staggered onto the dance floor, grinding up on the divorcees. Arms above his head, a highball glass in one hand and a pint in the other. When the women abandoned the floor, Bovine danced by himself in the strobes, thrusting his crotch.

Owe winced, fished in his back pocket and tossed a deck of cigarettes on the table.

“You smoke?”

Owe shook his head. “Sitting on them funny, is all. Screwing with my spine. They’re evidence, actually.” He exhaled casually. “Know much about cigarette smuggling?”

“Nothing. Why, should I?”

Owe tore the cellophane off the package, tapped one out. “These’re counterfeits, but they look and taste almost like the real deal.” He rotated the cigarette with his fingertips. “The band’s a little different — the only way to tell. Dull yellow instead of glossy gold. It’s big money.”

“That so?”

“Half a billion a year — can you believe that? Mainly on the reserves down in Cornwall. The Akwesasne Mohawks in the U.S., the Kahnawake tribe on our side. When the Saint Lawrence freezes they hoof ’em over the ice. In the summer it’s speedboats.”

I said, “And nobody arrests them?”

“You can’t walk onto a rez and start slapping on cuffs. The Six Nations never ceded to the Crown. They’re a sovereign people who walk the path as brothers and equals under the law — but our laws don’t apply. They can cross the border freely. No guards. No duty. They got their own police force, but …”

“It’s complicated?”

“Ever been down to the Akwesasne? Right out of Mad Max, man. Where does the money go? Not into infrastructure. Tough tickets, the Mohawks.” Owe smiled as if to say, Crazy, huh? His insurance adjuster’s eyes slid over the slope of my shoulder to my nose, the plugs of bloodied TP, his gaze resting comfortably on mine. “Our old pal Drinkwater’s neck-deep in it.”

“That so?”

“It is a fact,” said Owe. “Makes him a whole lotta wampum. That’s racist. Sorry. He smuggles across the river into Canada. A risky game, but his rake is huge. Plenty of money on both sides of the river — in Drinkwater’s pocket on that side, in the distributor’s pockets over here. But the river itself … that’s where the smugglers operate. They’re low-level mules, totally expendable. Here in Cataract City, you can’t walk five feet without tripping over one of those poor fools.”

My bladder tightened. I got up and went to the toilets, and stared at my reflection in the fly-spotted mirror. Did Owen know? Had he seen or heard or somehow read the thoughts bouncing inside my head? Owe was smart — smarter than me. I couldn’t outfox him. He’d give me a heads-up, wouldn’t he? Let me know which way the wind was blowing?

A quickie vacation — that’s how I floated it to Edwina. Don’t ask where the money came from. Don’t ask me to justify it. Just say you’ll come.

We’d planned a similar trip years ago, to New Orleans. We’d made it to Kentucky before my old pickup’s engine blew, which was just as well — something burned deep inside my bones the further I’d gone from the city.

But I remembered even the smallest details from that trip: Ed’s feet on the dashboard, the chipped candy-apple of her nail polish. How we’d sat in a café in West Virginia eating eggs whose yolks were the size of quarters — pigeon eggs, Ed had called them — with sunlight falling through the yellowed windows. How Ed had grabbed my hand impulsively and bit the knuckles. I still had knuckles back then.

She had sat on the bed in one of those no-tell motels along the interstate, cupping her breasts, laughing and telling me casually, “I really like my tits.” Later that night, dehydrated and ravenous, we’d ransacked our pockets for quarters and wrapped our naked bodies in the motel duvet and crept out to stock up on cold Cokes and Ho Hos, giggling like kids in the glow of the vending machines.

During that trip I’d realized you can’t have it all in a relationship. Constancy and the ability to thrill — these rarely dwelled within the same person. So you took the best of what you could reasonably expect, made your choice and held to it.

This time we drove north into Pennsylvania Dutch Country. The grey sky held a perpetual hesitancy, as if it could open up at any moment. The exit signs fascinated me. Turn off at any one and the possibility existed that you could be somebody else entirely. The miles dropped under the hood and tension eased out of my chest. In Cataract City everything was a struggle. It knit itself deep inside you. What was the most awful thing about living as an adult on the same streets where you grew up? It’s so easy to remember how perfect it was supposed to be. Reminders were always smacking you in the face. Good things happened — sure, I knew that. They just happened in other places.

“Am I a gift?” Ed asked me one night in an interstate motel. “Because you’re a gift, Duncan Diggs. And I treasure that gift. Really, I do.”

“So do I, Ed. I treasure you, too. Why wouldn’t I?” But the refrain in my head said, Just tell me not to do it, Ed. Whatever it is, whatever you think, just tell me not to go through with it — and I won’t. I swear to you, I won’t.

But she wouldn’t say anything about how I’d managed to find the money for the trip or what I might be planning. It wasn’t Ed’s way. Looking back, I believe she was making plans even then. The trip had that end-game undercurrent.

We drove back through unending rain. My cell rang outside Buffalo.

Drinkwater said, “How’s it going, paleface? Get your sea legs ready.”

The night before the job, Owe called.

“Got a minute?”

“Sure, always.”

He was drinking — a slurred tempo to his words. I pictured him in his well-ordered cop apartment drinking whatever cops drank.

“You never asked me about Fragrant Meat, man. You never asked how my dog was doing.”

I sat by the window overlooking the street. Dolly’s head rested on my lap. I scratched her ear flaps and said, “How is he?”

“Dead.”

The fact hung between us—dead—like a squashed bug on the sidewalk. Owe laughed, the same mirthless, thousand-yard laugh he’d started using after his knee surgeries.

“I’m sorry, man. I knew you really cared about—”

“No, no. Just listen, okay? Listen.” When I didn’t say anything he carried on. “So a stupid fuckhead gets off his stupid fuckhead job on Friday afternoon. The stupid fuckhead has a few too many drinks with the other stupid fuckheads he works with and then hops in his truck and goes screaming down a neighbourhood street at ninety K. That neighbourhood was my neighbourhood. Southern edge of Calgary — I couldn’t see the Rockies from my house, the angle wasn’t right, but the area felt safe, Dunk, and that mattered because I never really felt safe on the job, right?”

The clatter of glass, the sloppy gloh-gloh-gloh of liquid sloshing out of a bottle. A heavy exhale, then two convulsive swallows — I heard the click of his Adam’s apple. He’d reached that state of drunkenness where cold clarity settled in. He spoke fluidly.

“I was walking Fragrant Meat. But I didn’t call him that anymore. Wasn’t any sort of name for a creature you loved, right? He slept on my bed, which was fine seeing as the ladies weren’t exactly lining up to share it with me. I heard the truck before seeing it. The grrrrrr of its engine. It rounded the bend, skipped the grassy strip dividing the street, hopped the curb and … there was no time to do anything. I tell myself that now, Dunk, and … really, that’s the truth I think. But it felt like I had all the time in the world. But that’s only because time slows down in a crisis — that’s what everyone tells me, anyway.

“The fuckhead hit Frag so hard his collar snapped — the impact knocked the blood through him in a wave, the vet told me, bulging his veins and snapping the collar. All I felt was a slight tug as the leash followed the movement of Frag’s body — like a big fish biting the bait off your hook before the line goes slack.”

I could hear Owe moving — had he stood up, was he stumbling around? I listened to the familiar squeak of the brace on his knee: an awkward contraption he never bothered to oil. Then came a crash, the squeak of shoe heels on linoleum and a tortured outrush of air.

“Jesus.” He hissed through his teeth. “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.”

“You okay?”

“I’ll live. Unfamiliar surroundings.” His breathing calmed, then he said, “I didn’t see Frag go airborne. But when I close my eyes, Dunk, sometimes I do — Frag tumbling over and over in the air as if he’s rolling up an invisible hill before gravity inevitably takes hold. His legs tucked stiff to his body like he’s already dead, rigor mortis setting in. And y’know, I hope he was dead. I hope the impact knocked the life right out of him.

“The fuckhead’s truck smoked on down the sidewalk. To this day I have no idea if he even knew. Frag was slumped halfway under an ornamental shrub on somebody’s front lawn. His flesh was split right through his coat, man. Can you imagine the pressure?”

My eyes drifted to the house across the street. It’d been vacant a few months. The owners had defaulted on their mortgage — happened a lot, even in low-rent neighbourhoods — and the bank hadn’t resold it. It sagged into itself the way neglected homes tend to, as if, vacant of life, the wood and brick surrender their strength and the whole works sinks slowly like a mammoth into a tar pit. The windows were dark but I could see something moving behind the glass.

“Engine coolant had bled down the street,” Owe said. “I followed it. The truck was parked in an alleyway covered in a blue tarp, the kind you drape over cordwood to keep out the damp. The front headlight hung from its mount. Frag’s collar was meshed with the grille. That’s when I felt it, man. The snap. I’d heard that term around the precinct. The snap is that moment, that sight, that breaks a cop. One guy snapped when he found a baby stuffed into a vacuum cleaner bag by its drugged-out father. He unzipped the bag and saw an ash-grey little face clung with lint and cat hair and … For me, it was a dog collar stuck in the grille of a Dodge pickup.

“So fuckhead’s sitting on a lawn chair in the backyard, smoking a Chesterfield with a freshly cracked beer. Bloodshot eyes, blood down his shirt: he’d busted his nose on the wheel. I showed him my badge. He goes: I’ve got my rights, don’t I? After the evidence crew showed, I wrapped Frag up and carried him home. I laid him on the kitchen table. Where else … where do you put a dead dog? You’d think that’d be the end of it, right?”

He lapsed into silence. I didn’t break it. He rustled around, stood up maybe. Next came the grating scrape of a lighter’s flywheel being flicked.

A trembling flame lit the bay window of the house across the street, illuminating a figure standing in the darkness.

I listened to a ragged inhale, a prolonged hack.

“You smoking?”

“I don’t, as a rule,” Owe said. “Only on stakeouts.”

My heart double-tapped — two solid mule kicks behind my rib cage.

“Big case, uh?”

“Not really, man. Penny-ante, to tell the truth. But guys get themselves shut away for nothing sometimes. But then it’s not my job—”

“To talk people out of being stupid?”

Silence again.

“Fuckhead’s lawyer got him house arrest. Ultimately he got two years for drunk driving. It was only a dead dog, right? He stood before the judge and was all, I have a disease. Look into your heart. Three priors — a pair of DUIs and another for driving with a suspended licence. Your garden-variety fuckhead driven by garden-variety demons. Anyway, here’s the part you need to know. The fuckhead who killed my dog went for a smoke every night. Right before bed. He turned in late — two in the morning. How did I know he smoked, Dunk?”

I didn’t say anything. The answer was obvious: because he’d watched him.

The line was so quiet I could hear the paper of his smoke crackle as it burned.

“Four nights I watched from my car in the alley. At one o’clock on the fifth night I got out with an iron pipe. Fuckhead smoked in the backyard, under the patio’s bare bulb. I crept into his yard, unscrewed the bulb so the contact points weren’t touching. Then … well. Next day Chief calls me into his office. Said nobody would be trying all that hard to find the guy who assaulted fuckhead, shattering his kneecap and crushing his orbital socket … but maybe police work wasn’t my bag.”

The ember brightened in the dark house across the road. Owe’s breath feathered the mouthpiece, gently rasping.

“And I’ll tell you, because why the hell not … there are moments you realize that when you carry through with a given plan of action, you’re gonna come out a changed man. Won’t be noticeable on the outside but you’ll never be the same behind the eyes. Standing in the dark in fuckhead’s yard, waiting, a small part of me kept yammering: this isn’t you. But who are any of us, really? We inhabit different states of being. Some are fleeting and some become permanent. Sometimes what we are, or who, or … it’s just a question of circumstance, y’know? How far would you go? How much does it mean to you? How much do you need it?”

Dolly whined thinly, then heaved herself up and padded into the kitchen. I listened to the dry click of nails on the linoleum, the dry crunch of kibble between her molars.

“Anyway, that’s Frag. I cremated him and scattered his ashes on his favourite walking trail … favourite, I think, because who can tell a dog’s mind? It’s hokey as hell, but whatever. I loved him, uh?”

“I know you did.”

“He was sorta stupid but I love stupid things. Like you, Dunk.”

“Awww, aren’t you a peach.”

“Don’t do it, man.”

I said, “Do what?” but the line was dead.

I sat watching the figure across the road. The figure watched me back.

At some point Ed returned from work.

“What are you looking at?”

“Nothing, beautiful. The stars.”

The next night I didn’t say goodbye to Ed, just slipped into my boots and left her sleeping. I flagged down a cab at the top of the street and told the driver to hit the casino. It rolled down Clifton Hill, the neon-lit marquees watery behind a curtain of rain. I bought a ticket for the casino shuttle. A couple of old warhorses in Sansabelt slacks stumbled on the bus, moaning about the rigged slots.

At the Rainbow Bridge a bored-looking border guard checked my passport. The shuttle headed east along the river and turned right at the aquarium before heading up Pine Street.

The driver stopped at the Piggly Wiggly. I stepped out, jacket pulled tight around my shoulders. The night seemed colder on this side of the river.

The bell chimed as I stepped inside the store. The clerk was eighteen, zitty, tending to the hot-dog rotisserie. I headed to the dairy case, grabbed a quart of full-fat milk. Moo juice, as my mom called it. The bell chimed. I turned to the pastries, craving something sweet and body-wrecking. A Hostess Choco-Bliss, maybe.

“Dunk?”

Owe stood behind the swinging glass of the soda cooler. He let it fall shut and squared his shoulders. His expression betrayed nothing.

“Hey, Owe.”

“Fancy seeing you here.”

“Yeah, fancy that.”

I picked up a cellophane-wrapped bearclaw and rubbed the serrated edge of the wrapper against my chin.

“What are you doing over here?” he said.

“Meeting somebody.”

“Anyone I know?”

“Don’t figure so. We met after you left town.”

“Where you going?”

I said, “What are you doing here?”

Owe smiled sheepishly. “Pizza and wings at Sammy’s.”

“By yourself?”

“Why — want to come with? I don’t like eating alone.”

“Sorry, but like I said. Plans. Another time.”

A car pulled into the lot. The horn honked.

“You can’t go halfway down the rabbit hole, Diggs,” Owe said before turning away.

I paid for my milk, walked across the lot and got into the grey Ford Taurus. Igor was squashed behind the wheel. He pulled out, driving with the squinty determination of the elderly.

A pit bull sat in the back seat. It was about the same size as Folchik, white with a black stripe across its eyes.

“That’s Bandit,” Igor said. “Don’t pet him.”

“Where’s Drinkwater?”

“Not coming,” Igor said. “Never does.”

“Just you and me?”

“On this side. Others, other side.”

“You got my money?”

Igor’s head swivelled slowly, as if his neck was operated by a balky crank. When he didn’t answer I glanced over my shoulder. Stuck hadn’t followed. He couldn’t possibly know where we were going — even I didn’t know that.

Igor said, “What’s your problem?”

We hit the I-190 and out across the night river where it split at Navy Island. The street lights vanished as we drove through Buckthorn Island, then came back as we hit the Red Carpet Inn off Grand Inland Boulevard. The wheel looked as thin as copper wire in Igor’s meathooks. I felt the shape of the box-cutter in my pocket. I was ashamed to have brought it — a Dollar Store weapon, something a punk would carry.

We hit the West River Parkway and swung round the traffic ring into Beaver Island State Park. Light stanchions shone on an empty road glittering with frost. Igor tapped the brakes and eased onto an unlit corduroy road. Bushes whacked up under the car, rattling the coins in the cup holders. Igor pulled under some trees, cut the engine and unrolled the back window enough so Bandit could hop out.

“We walk from here.”

The long, open rush of the river and the dampness of the woods crawled up the back of my neck. We trudged through leaf mould that collapsed beneath our feet, boots sinking into the twisted roots that clawed up through the earth.

Igor moved slowly, tripping once and whistling air between his teeth. Trees with bladelike leaves, willows maybe, grew thickly along the bank. I pushed them clear with hands numb from the cold. The river opened before us.

It was black, as all night water was — as if the night dissolved directly into it, filling it with the same nothingness that must exist between stars.

“Those are them,” Igor said.

I peered at one puntboat, one swift-looking Zodiac. The puntboat was a wide-bottomed hulk topped with a tarpaulin. Under the tarp sat cardboard boxes stacked high, flaps fastened with packing tape.

“You in this one.” Igor pointed to the punt. “I follow in the Zodiac.”

The cry came from somewhere behind the willows. Owe. I knew it instinctively, because although years had passed and we were now double the age we were back then, and Owe’s voice had changed and deepened, when we scream — any of us, when we are truly shocked and scared — we sound like boys. Owe screamed as he had when we were boys lost in the woods.

Instinctively I leapt from the puntboat and moved towards him — which was when Igor smashed a fist into the side of my head. The night swung out of balance, stars pinwheeling as I crashed on the rocks with Igor’s bulk following to crush the air from my lungs.

“Knew you were dirty …”

His hands clamped round my throat. My legs thrashed uselessly as Igor hipped himself up on my chest, bearing down with all his weight, shoulders torqueing forward, hands constricting to crush my windpipe.

Darkness hemmed my vision, a deeper and more profound darkness than night. I brought a fist up and cracked Igor in the mouth but my strength was fleeing, my reflexes too, and I don’t think he even registered it. I slid a hand between his thigh and my stomach, feeling for the box-cutter that lay trapped against the tight denim of my pocket. I clawed for it, my tongue thickening as the pressure of blood swelled behind my eyes.

My hand closed on the plastic shaft of the box-cutter and I thumbed the mechanism convulsively. I jerked my arm, the box-cutter slicing through my pocket as my hand came up under Igor’s thigh — there was a sensation of things coming apart, a terrifying new looseness — and next my hand was free and in it lay three inches of glinting razor.

Igor’s hands clenched my throat tighter. White balls burst in front of my eyes. Then warmth was spreading across my chest. Igor’s grip loosened. He stared down with a look of befuddlement. His jeans were dark, as was my shirt and jacket.

“Wha—?” he said.

He stood with difficulty. A clean, straight slit ran through his jeans, two inches to the left of his zipper. Blood ran along each edge. His hands trembled at the wound. He pushed as if he might somehow push the blood back inside. He staggered towards the water, still ten or twelve feet from the shore.

Igor got down carefully on his knees; blood splashed the stones, or was it the splash of water? Part of me wanted him to die, but that same part knew I was doomed if he did. That part also knew it was beyond my power to control now.

Igor crawled to the river. He was moaning somebody’s name, I believe, yet the sound came out as a hateful hiss. He fell face first into the water. I staggered to the waterline, rolled Igor over. His eyes were already glassy like a doll’s.

Run, said a rabbity voice inside my head. It’s all you can do now. RUN.

The Zodiac ignited with an easy rumble. I piloted it onto the river, skipping across lapping wavelets, swallowing compulsively because it was hard to breathe. Where was I going? I had no idea. My mind said, Just go.

The Zodiac’s motor stripped out across the water. I angled towards the Falls, charting the bend of the river by the solitary lights hovering above the scrim of the shore. Red and blue lights flashed in the low-lying blackness on the Canadian side, disappearing as the cruisers dipped down a hill and reappearing as they crested it.

A trap door opened in my stomach. Edwina. Owe.

I cycled the motor to surge upriver. There were the lights of Clifton Hill. The Falls were lit with red and green spotlights, and a white bowl of mist foamed up from the basin. The sound was loudest here: a pressurized thrum against my eardrums. I thought fleetingly: You forget how powerful some things are. You take their beauty for granted.

A helicopter rose up from the Falls basin, blades whirring over the tumbling water. Its spotlight illuminated the river. I almost laughed. I spun around and cut back downriver. I screamed into the cold air that wicked off the water, let it fill my mouth with the taste of wet steel. The taste of home.

The searchlight crept across the river until it found me. A cone of light shone down like the finger of God himself. The chopper dropped low; water foamed over the Zodiac’s gunwales. A bullhorn-amplified voice shouted something, but I had no idea what.

Then the puntboat slid out of the darkness in front of me, Owe at the wheel. His skull was clad in a helmet of blood. Jesus, was he okay? I cut the motor and floated forward. The noses of our boats touched, then bounced gently away.

I showed Owe my palms like a magician following some sleight of hand. Ta-daa. The helicopter’s searchlight cored a circle of whiteness out of the night.

“I’m sorry I had to run you down,” he might have said, but his words were carried away by the rotor wash of the helicopter.

“You never had to do anything,” I may have said back.

“You made me.”

“No, Owe. You made yourself.”

We floated in that perfect halo of light. Cataract City men, fully made.

IT WAS NIGHT AGAIN WHEN I LEFT my parents’ house, walking to a quiet stretch of blocks off Bender Street. I’d thought about taking the folks’ car, but my licence had expired while I was in prison and I was done taking stupid risks. Almost done, anyway.

There was a pay phone on the street, near the Sleep Easy Motor Inn. I stepped inside, let the Plexiglas door swing shut, plugged quarters in the box and dialled.

I hadn’t tried the number in years. Would she have kept it?

One ring. Two. Three. Four. Five.

I was getting ready to hang up when a voice said, “Hello?”

My breath hitched. I felt my heart as a discrete part of me, shuddering in my chest. I couldn’t speak; my voice was lodged tight and hard as a fist somewhere below my lungs.

“Duncan?”

After an endless gulf during which I was certain she’d hang up, I squeaked, “Yes.”

A pause, then a long exhale. “So,” she said, “are you going to try to find me?”

“Depends,” I answered. “Do you want to be found?”

She laughed — a husky, frayed-edge sound. The most beautiful sound in the whole world.