Cataract City

PART FOUR DONNYBROOK & LIONS IN WINTER

DONNYBROOK: DUNCAN DIGGS

That first night in the Kingston Pen I lay in the dark above my new cellmate, a huge specimen from Sioux Lookout named Nathan Bainbridge. Bainbridge gave off a billygoat odour: trans-3-methyl-2-hexenoic acid, in fact, which Bainbridge, a borderline schizophrenic, leaked out in his sweat. The poor bastard was plagued by night terrors. His legs thrashed wildly, rattling the bedframe we shared. Sometimes he unleashed piglet squeals, horrified by whatever creatures stalked his dreams.

I breathed shallowly, trying not to wake Bainbridge. Searchlights strafed the yard outside the window. I listened to the living engine of the prison: mice squeaking, inmates hacking wetly, screams that died soon after they were born. I’ll admit it freaked me out.

My own toughness wasn’t something I’d had cause to question. It was an aspect of my makeup, same as my black hair and the cleft in my chin. Still, I understood that I was Cataract City tough, with a head-down, fists-cocked grittiness that’d only get me hurt in here, where all a man really needed was ratlike cunning and a willingness to sink in the blade. In prison, every blind corner held a threat. I got used to it in time, the way a guy living beneath a flight path gets used to his windows rattling every time a 747 cruises overhead.

Night washed slowly into day. When sunlight began to creep over the floor Bainbridge rolled out of bed, walked to the commode and flopped his dick out of his PJs. While his piss hit the steel with a ringing tinkle, Bainbridge stared at me blankly and crooned Phil Collins: “It’s just another day/For you and me/In paradise.”

I’d killed a man. That much was known around the pen. That the man had been Iroquois earned me points in some quarters, hatred in others. I didn’t bother clarifying the facts to anyone; that night on the Niagara River had taken on a dreamlike quality in my memory — a nightmare of moon-silvered steel and blood the colour of tar.

At the trial the prosecution had submitted grainy photos of a man laid out on a riverbank. His body looked deflated, a tire with a pinhole leak, limbs wrenched at odd angles on the rocks.

Seeing those photos, a bony-fingered hand squeezed my heart muscle. I hadn’t wanted it — hadn’t meant for this to happen.

I got nine years for involuntary manslaughter in the killing of Igor Bearfoot, plus three and a half years for attempting to introduce a controlled substance across international borders. Which meant I earned statutory release after eight.

In his sworn testimony, Owen Stuckey stated the killing of Bearfoot had been a matter of life and death. At the time of the pretrial hearing the bruises on my throat had mushroomed into a purplish-yellow collar, testament to his claim. When asked to identify the suspect from the witness box, Owe’s eyes met mine unblinkingly. He’d fingered me with his right hand — his left was still heavily bandaged from his encounter with a pit bull, Bandit, owned by the deceased.

Bearfoot’s body was returned to the Tuscarora Nation, to be buried in keeping with Iroquois custom. No charges were levied against Lemuel Drinkwater.

Those first few years inside I punished myself.

The prison weight pen was available during out-of-cell hours — I got two daily — and I spent the first half of it curling ancient barbells and strapping heavy weight plates around my hips to grind out wide-grip chin-ups. I performed each move silently, my features wrenched into strained expressions; I could feel the thick veins radiating from my temples. I must’ve looked like one of those hooded monks in frescoes at the Sacred Heart church, stripped to the waist, lashed with iron-tipped whips — men dedicated to acts of extreme penance. Flagellants, my mom called those guys.

A boxing ring was set off the weight pen. In the second hour I’d smash my fists into the heavy bag so hard that the leather groaned against the hanging chain and the skin over my knuckles split open. Afterwards I wrapped my shredded mitts with prickly prison-issue toilet paper — even the TP was designed to remind us of our sins — and if I was lucky I’d fall into an exhausted sleep, riding those maddening night hours where time could draw itself out like a blade.

Often I’d jerk awake from dreams where I was adrift on the Niagara as Igor Bearfoot’s head swam out of the black water, eye sockets picked clean by sunfish.

One day while I was hammering the bag a young inmate ambled over. He was of medium height and build, with reddish-brown skin and hands graced with long, clever fingers. He flipped me a pair of hand-wraps.

“They’re my old ones,” he said. “Keep you from busting your mitts up any worse than they already are.”

Silas Garrow was a full-blooded Mohawk Indian from the Akwesasne rez. Other than me, he was the only inmate to make use of the boxing setup — Garrow had once been the Native American Boxing Council’s top-ranked middleweight.

“Twenty-one wins, three losses.” He gave his biceps a little pump. “A regular rambling rumbler — reservation-to-reservation, swinging TNT every place I went.” He held his fists under his chin. “These babies had ’em trembling in their teepees, limping back to their longhouses.”

But his boxing ambitions were cut short after he got pinched for smuggling.

“They caught me driving a rig of Bronco smokes across the Saint Lawrence in the middle of February,” he told me. “The ice broke, right? Soon the rig was just a-sinkin’. I was only twenty-two, my first run, so I flung the doors open and started hucking boxes out. Well, next the emergency crew rolls in and I’m still stuck … a skidoo, a skidoo, my kingdom for a skidoo! Even a pair of fuckin’ ice skates — throw a dog a bone!”

When I tried to explain my own situation, Silas held up one hand.

“I know all about the Tuscarora. Who was it? Dale Hawkwind? Lemmy Drinkwater?”

“Drinkwater, yeah.”

“There’s a verse we were taught in school,” Silas said. “Learn to be patient observers like the owl; learn courage from the jay, who will attack an owl ten times its size to drive it off its territory … I think that’s how it went. Anyway, Lem Drinkwater learned how to do business from Raven — the Trickster. You killed one of his men?”

“An accident …”

“Always is, man. What was his name?”

“Igor Bearfoot.”

“Igor? Sounds like an apple.”

“An apple?”

“Not a real Indian, man. Red on the outside, white on the inside.”

We started training together. I’d never truly learned to box: I just bulled forward, swinging lefts and rights, a tactic that tended to work against the tomato cans Drinkwater had thrown at me. But Silas was rangy and oh so slippery. I’d hem him into a corner, shutting down angles in hopes of landing a crushing shot. Silas would pop a few jabs in my face—yip! yip! yip! — with enough sting to either back me off or make him throw a clumsy haymaker. Next he’d slip out of the corner slick as oil.

A greased eel’s got nothing on this guy, I’d think — usually just before getting blitzed with another of Silas’s crisp jabs.

“The Great Spirit has conveyed tremendous power into these vessels,” Silas would say, kissing each of his fists. “He told me, Go forth, Silas Garrow, and wreak great havoc on the white man and all their wicked ways.”

“The white man? Silas, all your fights were against Indians.”

“Yeah? Well, they had it coming. We all do.”

I’d tsk-tsk. “You’re such a racist.”

“I’m a self-hating Indian, man. Learn to spot the difference.”

We sparred four days a week, and the other three I nursed my various hurts. Black eyes and fat lips and a hematoma on my forehead big as a boiled egg, the blood wrapped tight as a fist under the skin. One day my guard stopped by my cell and whispered, “We can’t help unless you tell us who does this to you.”

I said, “I ran into a doorknob.”

“Suit yourself, hard guy.”

Sometimes, without quite admitting the instinct, I’d lean into one of Silas’s shots — Silas was a pitty-patter fighter anyway, no real gas in his pistons — and let his fist fillet my face. Once or twice he got an inkling about what I was doing; he’d cut a hard look at me, yank off his gloves and say, “The point of boxing is to not get hit.”

“Keep it coming, man. One more round.”

“You think I like kicking a dog down the street?”

“Come on. Give it to me like you mean it.”

One day Silas simply refused to go another round. “Listen, man … we’re all in here for good reason. Everybody’ll tell you it was a judge on the warpath or crooked cops, but facts sit square against that. The only sunlight I see is this one ray coming through my window in the morning — and man, I put my face to that ray, drink that shit up like Kool-Aid. We all owe and we’re all paying. But you don’t got to pay extra, okay? And if you’re bent on it, fine, but don’t go making me your fuckin’ Shylock.”

Silas won when we sparred because Silas was naturally gifted, but I picked up a few nifty new tricks. Every once in a while I’d catch him with a sweet hook to the short rib; the natural red would fall out of his face, to be replaced with puréed chalk.

Afterwards we’d sit on the apron, faces flushed and leather-burnt. Silas would tap me companionably on the back of the head with his glove. Sometimes his expression became solemn — or mock-solemn? I could never tell. “Can’t believe I’m actually friends with a paleface. This is going to fuck my cred all to shit if they ever find out on the rez.”

Edwina visited me only once, a month after I entered the pen.

She looked as beautiful as I’d ever seen her. Believe me when I say this had nothing to do with the fact that all I saw otherwise was the pitted faces of long cons. Hers was a raw beauty, and any changes I could spot were minor: she’d done a little something to her hair or her skin, imparting a fresh lustre.

We sat in the visiting room around circular steel tables that looked like playground carousels. Rays of sunlight carved through the barred windows — heatless in here, as always.

The other inmates snuggled with their wives and girlfriends like high-schoolers under the bleachers, copping feels just to touch flesh that had touched the outside world. Ed and I sat at opposite ends of the table. Ed’s hands stayed on her lap.

“You shithead,” she said flatly.

“I’m a shithead,” I agreed.

She fed quarters into the vending machines and came back with a Coke, a Diet Coke and a honey bun wrapped in cellophane. She slid the Coke and bun across to me.

“Was there a reason you didn’t tell me?”

“About what, Edwina?”

“About all of it.”

“What would you have done if I had told you?”

Edwina had the same hard-boned face as a lot of women in Cataract City, but the difference was in everything going on under that calm surface, nuances expressed in the smallest movements and dilations. I smiled; it was so good just to be this close to her, to see the gold coins of light dancing in each of her eyes.

“Jesus, Duncan. You killed a man.”

The finality with which she spoke those words — it was as if the act itself had attached itself to my name like a cocklebur. I was a killer. Not a murderer, but definitely a killer.

“Did you ever think?” She stared searchingly into my face. “I mean, in a million years …?”

“No, Ed. Never in a million years.”

“How did it happen?”

But this was almost like asking somebody how they’d come down with cancer: you accumulated bad habits and bad luck, I figured, and the next thing you know, something takes root. You don’t set out to get cancer. And I’d never set out to kill a man.

Ed exhaled heavily, blowing a bang slantwise across her forehead. I wanted to reach across the table and tuck that lock of hair behind her ear.

Later, I found a single strand of Ed’s hair in my cell, laid across my pillow like dark thread. I don’t know how it got there — I’d been stripped and scrubbed before entering the pen; everything I’d owned had been taken from me. And we hadn’t touched once during her visit; not a hug, not a handshake. But it was her hair. I knew this simply by feel, the way a man knows the shape of his wife’s body in the dark. A single strand of hair; all I had left of her. I held on to it for years, if you can believe it. I’d lie awake at night twining it around my finger, desperately afraid it’d snap. It never did — I was always gentle with it. If my orange jumpsuit had had pockets, I would’ve carried it close to me all day. But since pockets were banned, I slicked the hair with saliva and smoothed it to the metal frame of my cot in a spot where it wouldn’t be disturbed when the sheets were changed. It lasted three years, that strand of hair. Then one day I reached for it and it was gone. I hunted madly, making Bainbridge get up so I could search the floor under his cot, but no luck. Maybe it simply dissolved from all my handling.

Next Ed said, “Do you actually think I’ll wait?”

No, I knew she wouldn’t wait for me — not because there wasn’t any love between us, but because she’d freely given me the chance to save myself, and I hadn’t taken it. I couldn’t bear to consider her question, and so my mind fled back to the night when we’d first danced.

It happened months after we’d first held hands at Sherkston Shores. I’d asked her to dance on the postage stamp of a stage at the Wild Mushroom bar. The bond had been there in the curve of our bodies as we leaned into the music, heads cocked as we stared at each other. We’d danced to a Beatles song, “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Ed held her hand out to me, her eyebrows raised in a silent question. I’d taken and kissed it, earning a round of desultory wolf-whistles from the rubber-necking barflies. Ed laughed and rolled her eyes. We’d danced to the next song, by the Tragically Hip, “Everytime You Go,” and I’d lip-synched the lines that ever since have been seared into my mind, meshed with the sight of Edwina’s hips swaying to the beat: My girl don’t just walk, she unfurls …

Afterwards we’d walked down Clifton Hill, which was nearly dark at that hour. Stars pinpricked the sky. We took sips from the can of Laker I’d cadged off the bartender at last call. We stood at the observation rail as water hit the cataract, sending up a mushroom cloud of spume. I’d slid my coat around her shoulders and told her about the things that had mattered to me back then: the motorcycle I’d planned to buy but never did, the cut on my hand I’d picked up on my first shift at the Bisk. She told me about the death of her father from esophageal cancer and the all-girl band she’d played in before getting into a fistfight with the lead singer.

I’d smiled, knowing I was hers now: all body, all soul. I’d been waiting to give myself to somebody that way ever since I could remember.

“I’m taking Dolly,” she said to me in the pen’s visiting room.

“Taking her where?”

“Just away, Dunk.”

I kept my head steady, my gaze calm, but my insides were chewing themselves to pieces. “Okay, sure. She loves you best, anyway.”

“Dogs love everyone the same.”

She stood up. Her jaw worked like she was going to say something else. She looked at the visiting room guard, flustered for a moment, then back at me. “You want another Coke before I go?”

That’s when I realized it was going to end this way: with the woman I loved awkwardly asking if I wanted another soda.

“It’s okay, baby. But thanks.”

She walked out and kept walking. She took Dolly and never looked back. Edwina did the one thing I’d never fully brought myself to do, despite all the dreaming and planning: she left Cataract City.

I grew my hair long, shaved my skull to bare scalp then let it grow again. My body fleshed out: I had thick striations across the chest and marbling on the delts, lats flaring in a noticeable cobra’s hood. I hammered the bag until my body was clad in a fine oil of sweat and every joint rolled smooth in its socket. I sparred with Silas and sat with him at dinnertime in companionable silence. I watched my hair go grey at my temples in the steel mirror above the shitter — everything in the pen was steel, and no reflection was quite right — and wondered if it was something about the character of the light that had given me a permanent squint.

Prison subtly ruins you. The grey cafeteria chow cored a hole through my insides. The pressure of living with five hundred caged animals carved deep lines in my flesh. I saw a man stabbed in the ear with a sharpened toothbrush. Saw another man kicked half to death with bare feet in the showers, his attackers slipping on the tiles as their cocks slapped their thighs. The only solace was that these victims probably deserved it, more or less.

After a time, I was no longer a new fish, but not an old fish. A middle fish, if there was any such thing. Sometimes I’d feel a click in my throat when I swallowed: Igor Bearfoot’s huge hands had partially crushed my Adam’s apple.

As the long-timers said: I worked my time and tried to make it work for me. I enrolled in correspondence English classes, completing the diploma program I’d started years ago. My verbiage improved considerably — the iron bars became ferrous shackles; a pretty actress on TV became a toothsome seductress … you’d never speak that way in the pen, of course, unless you wanted an ass-stomping. But I liked my newfound words, my bons mots — they pushed the walls back just a little, gave me space to breathe. When the book trolley came around I’d say, “Surprise me.” Police procedurals, horror pulps, outdoorsy narratives.

The Count of Monte Cristo—that one I asked for specifically.

Some days I figured I’d do my years quietly and earn my release and life would continue at a lower wattage. I’d stay with my folks and visit my probation officer, get a job — something I could do with my hands — go to the Cairncroft Lounge on Saturday nights for a wobbly pop with Sam Bovine, meet a woman who wasn’t put off by histories and scars. Get a little house off Drummond Road, have a few kids.

It wasn’t such a stretch, was it? Perhaps it wasn’t the life I’d envisioned — but who ever ends up with the life they imagine as a child? Screw anyone who does. What’s to say they hadn’t dreamed too small in the first place?

Other nights I lay in bed with the pads of my feet clenched tight as if I was teetering over a balcony ledge thirty stories up, terrified I’d get cancer and die in this strange grey place. Or maybe a vein would pop in my skull and I’d twitch to death in my sleep with Bainbridge squealing beneath me. Mainly, though, my worries echoed those of most cons: when I got out, what would be left for me? The world would have progressed and I’d have lost my fragile place in it. I’d already lost Edwina — what else was left?

Each New Year I stood in the common room wearing a goofy party hat as Dick Clark announced the ball drop on TV. It was the only way I bothered marking the passage of time. I didn’t count days anymore, or even weeks. They’d welded together, a polished steel rail that I could slide right over.

I awoke to each new day and let it carry me through a familiar routine. I sat at the same table for meals, met Silas at the appointed time for sparring, showered with the same faces, stuffed in earplugs and struggled to sleep. I even got used to Bainbridge’s smell.

In my sixth year Silas Garrow was released. The guards let him throw a little bash in the laundry room: a few bottles of Jack Daniel’s, a sandwich platter. Silas bequeathed me his collection of spank mags.

“Treat them with reverence, paleface.”

I held one up. Fifty and Nifty. “Really, Silas?”

“Older ladies need love, too. See you on the outside?”

“Of course.”

Were they true words? Silas would never leave the Akwesasne and I’d plant myself back in Cataract City. The only place we’d meet again was back inside these cold stone walls.

One night Bainbridge started shrieking and kicking up a mighty fuss. I said to hell with it, reached down and shook the huge man’s shoulder.

“Nathan, god damn it, wake up! You’re having a nightmare.”

Bainbridge blinked his cowlike eyes and spoke in the voice of a child. “Geez, what a crazy dream. There was this ugly witch with a wart on her nose and she was cackling like a loon and—” He swallowed heavily. “She was pulling on my … scrotum. Tugging so dang hard I thought she’d rip the dang thing off.”

“It’s okay, man. See? No witch.”

Bainbridge shuddered. “Thank you, Duncan. Sincerely.”

The rail narrowed and then, one day, it ended. On that day a guard handed over the items I’d been arrested holding: a handful of change, half a roll of cherry Life Savers. I peeled the paper and popped two of them in my mouth — the candies were stuck together with age. They tasted just about as good as I’d remembered.

I dropped two tarnished quarters into the prison’s pay phone. I called Owe.

And then I was out.

And now came payback.

THE DAY AFTER MEETING with Owe and Bovine at the Double Diamond and outlining my intentions, Owe and I drove across the river, through customs, and onto the Robert Moses Parkway. A bullet-pitted road sign said: ENTERING THE TUSCARORA NATION. Owe pulled into Smokin’ Joes. The steel warehouses where Drinkwater’s real business went down still stood behind a fence of electrified chain-link.

The shelves in Smokin’ Joes looked as if they’d been rifled by survivalists. The leather jackets were so old they’d lost their smell, dust collecting on their shoulders. We wandered around aimlessly. I saw the cashier pick up the phone.

Five minutes later Drinkwater pulled into the lot. His silver pickup was dinged and rusty. He stepped inside his store with a hulking, sallow-faced sidekick in tow. The awful thought struck me that the sidekick looked a lot like Igor Bearfoot.

“You’re out of jail, my pretty,” Drinkwater said when he saw me. “And look! You’ve brought your little dog, too.”

I said, “You look haggard, Lem.”

Drinkwater’s fingernail scritched the stubble on his chin like a wooden match pulled over a striking strip. “You look well, Diggs. Prison life must have agreed with you, uh? Three hots and a cot. Yeah, you’ll never get those years back, but you put on a few solid pounds of jail beef.”

I pulled a Coke from the cooler and drank half in one go.

Drinkwater said: “Plan on paying for that?”

“Think I’d welsh on you, Lem?”

“I don’t know what you’d do — you’re an ex-con, Diggs. Better get used to people having trust issues.” He glanced at Owe, then back to me. “I would have thought you two might have trust issues of your own.”

“I want to fight again, Lem.”

Drinkwater drew back as if shocked. “Diggs! Need I remind you that you’re in polite society? Your animalistic ways don’t fly out here.”

Owe said, “How’s business, Lemmy? Lookin’ a little sluggish. You ought to rotate your merchandise.”

Drinkwater’s tongue played on the point of his eye tooth. “Like I said, Diggs — we’re not mixed up with fighting here. You’d almost think, coming over here with a member of the constabulary, you’re trying to … what’s it called? Entrap me.”

Owe plucked a bag of potato chips off the wire rack and dropped it on the ground. Drinkwater watched him with bright birdlike eyes. Owe set the toe of his boot on the bag. The cellophane squealed thinly before the bag popped, spraying chips over Drinkwater’s boots.

Pinching his jeans at the inseam, Drinkwater shook chips off his pant legs. “Now that,” he said, small veins braiding under his shirt collar, “that couldn’t have been an accident.”

Owe pointed at the security camera above the counter. “You’ve got me. So don’t say entrapment, okay? Not to mention which, I’m consorting with a known smuggler.”

Drinkwater laughed. “Ain’t my fault you don’t pick friends with a finer pedigree.”

“I’m talking about you, Lem.”

Drinkwater batted his eyes. “Why, Officer, you of all people know I’ve never been convicted. As I recall, a great deal of your time and efforts have funnelled down that empty hole.”

“You’re clean,” said Owe. “That doesn’t stop a lot of people from thinking you’re scum. Now that’s a fact, Lem. It’s the way you’re seen.”

Drinkwater’s jaw went hard. He swallowed in one sinuous movement.

“You want to fight, uh?” he said to me.

When I told him I wanted to fight three men, Drinkwater’s eyelids lifted from half-mast.

“One night,” I explained. “Any three men you want.”

“Think you’re the first swinging dick with a death wish who’s walked through these doors?” he said. “Anybody in particular?”

“Anyone’ll do. Whites, blacks, Natives.”

“No women and kids?” Drinkwater laughed softly. “I only ask because, well, I am talking to a man who cut another man’s balls off with a carpet knife, am I not?”

I said, “That’s not how it happened.”

“No? That’s the way everybody believes it went down around here. You snuck up behind poor Igor, slid a blade between his legs and slit him nuts to asshole. Were it not for the hard work of the police”—he turned to Owe, palms pressed together as if in prayer—“and bless you for that, Officer. Bless you. If not for the police you’d have gotten away clean.”

“If that’s the kind of guy you think I am, why not make it all Natives?”

Drinkwater said, “You’re asking me to assemble a war party? You got it, Pontiac. Three stout Indians, of heart proud and true.”

“I want to put a bet on myself, too.”

“Yeah?” said Drinkwater. “Well, nobody put me on this earth to talk grown men out of being stupid.”

The day before the fight I withdrew all but five bucks from my account at the Greater Niagara Credit Union. Edwina had sold our house while I was locked up and transferred my half into the account I’d opened as a ten-year-old to rathole the money I made mowing neighbourhood lawns.

The days leading up to the fight had passed quickly. I’d done plenty of running — I’d slacked off in prison, seeing as it made me feel like a hamster on a wheel. Now I ran at night. I’d wake up in the witching hours and drag myself to the bathroom. I’d open the cupboard and hunt out the bottle at the back with an old rag tented over it. Tuf-Foot. The tagline read: A dog is only as good as his feet.

I’d squeeze some goo into my hands and massage it into my joints. Afterwards my hands were stained brown and achy to the bones, but I needed them to stay together in the fights.

I’d yank on the heavy workboots I used to wear at the Bisk, a hooded sweatshirt, and enter the empty corridors of night.

The streets were pretty much deserted. The few guys I passed weren’t dangerous so much as desperate, broken by pills or inhalants or strong drink or the unstoppable craving for all those things. Every so often a face would jump out of a dark alley asking for something, or offering it, and I’d think: Jesus, I used to know you. We played baseball at Reservoir Park.

I’d run down Stanley Ave. as the bars emptied out, juking around drunk kids laughing their batshit laughter, finding myself a little terrified by that sound — it was the laughter of people who felt invincible because of their youth and promise and the wide-open future. Guys in prison didn’t laugh like that.

I’d run further down the block where other bars were letting out, the ones with dark windows and no signs where the hospital orderlies and tollbooth operators drank. Men would shoulder through black presswood doors with fixed expressions on their faces and cigs fixed between their chalky lips. I’d watch the fresh air smack them in the face, their pupils constricting as the realization dawned: Sweet Jesus, I’m not anywhere near drunk enough! Some of them gave me a slit-eyed look before nodding, but not chummily. These guys weren’t a lot older than me, their faces wrecked from drink or just the years piling up with brutal math.

A lot of nights I’d end up at the Falls, leaning on the observatory railing. There was always light by the Falls. It made no difference if there was a full moon or a sliver no thicker than a bone fish hook: moonlight hit the spray at the base of the Falls and the mist projected it back, an upside-down bowl of light. Baby birds peeped from their cliffside nests, a sound I found mysteriously comforting.

The night of the fight I packed my duffel, tucked the money order into my pocket and headed to a convenience store near my folks’ place. Owe pulled up. I tossed my duffel in the footwell. We drove along the river past the hydro station. Owe cracked the window and hung a cigarette off his bottom lip. “You mind?”

“We all got to die someday.”

He pulled up in front of a bar. Bovine slid into the back seat smelling like he’d spent the afternoon marinating in a vat of Famous Grouse.

“Just a few hand-steadiers,” he said as we drove away.

Trucks were parked ten deep at the warehouse behind Smokin’ Joes. A knot of seamed faces clustered round the door.

“You’ll be heading home with your scalp hanging out of your fucking mouth,” one of them said.

“That wig’s getting split straight down the middle,” said another.

The air hung hot and close inside the warehouse. Pigeons cooed in the rafters. When we entered the fighting area, a heavy silence fell. The Antichrist himself may as well have entered the building.

The fight box was the same as I remembered: a ring of sawhorses from a roadside construction site. Spectators ranged down them, the toes of their boots edging onto the fighting surface. They were drinking but nobody seemed drunk; they wanted to be sober to better witness the destruction.

Drinkwater stepped out of the crowd, laughing over his shoulder with someone. He eyed me up and down, and untucked a cigarette and a wooden match from behind his ear.

“What ya done brung me, son?”

I gave him the money order: as good as cash but easier to get past the border guards. Drinkwater struck the match on the tight denim draping his thigh, then lit the cigarette.

“That’s a significant wager” was all he said.

“If you can’t handle it …”

“Save your energy,” Drinkwater told me, oh so softly. “I don’t want anyone going home without their fill of blood.”

“Add this to it,” said Owe, pulling an envelope out of his pocket. “How much?”

“Why don’t you count it, Lem?”

“I never learned how. I went to a residential school run by the white man.”

“Ten.”

Drinkwater tucked it into his pocket. “Three-to-one odds.”

“Bullshit,” said Bovine. “Seven-to-one.”

Drinkwater stared at him. “Who knew shit could talk?” he said mildly. “Four-to-one.”

“Six,” said Owe.

“Five. And you can only throw the towel once per fight.”

Nobody bothered to shake on it. It wasn’t a gentleman’s agreement.

“Get your ass ready,” Drinkwater said to me. “We Natives are getting restless.”

I snapped my head sharply to one side to drain the sinus cavities, rolled my shoulders loose and said: “Pitter patter, let’s get at ’er.”

First up was the big sidekick I’d seen weeks back at Smokin’ Joes. Igor Bearfoot II. He was a skyscraper with legs, three hundred pounds, easy. Drinkwater wanted to tenderize me, so he’d brought in his biggest mallet. Once I made it past this one, I thought, Lem probably had a fillet knife lined up, ready to slice me to ribbons. A dandy plan, I had to admit.

Still, I was okay with facing this monster out of the gate. Stick and move, chop the guy down Giant Kichi-style. Hopefully I wouldn’t be breathing through a mask of blood by the end.

“Jesus,” said Bovine, watching the guy warm up.

We came out of our corners, me stepping lightly on the balls of my feet, keeping my shoulders rolling — a move I’d picked up in jail — staring at the big man out of the tops of my eyes.

My opponent fought stripped to the waist. His nipples sat in sunken wells of flesh. The skin above and below his bellybutton funnelled into a cleft in the centre of his belly, lapping over in delicate folds like the skin of a half-deflated balloon. At some point he must’ve lost a ton of weight, which left him with those Shar-Pei folds. A weird surge of compassion rolled through me.

The guy’s right shoulder dipped as his fist came around. I ducked it easily but I heard his arm rip the air above my head in a wide sweep, like a sailboat’s boom swung free. Pivoting on my heel, switching the power to my hips, I hammered my own right into the man’s ribs. His flesh rippled in a wave and he stepped off, his body buckling before righting itself.

I backed away, throwing yippy rights and lefts. A flash jab tore the skin over his left eye, and the blood flowed round his socket and down the angle of his jaw. He pawed at the blood, smearing it down his neck, and swung. It caught me on the shoulder — more of a slap than a punch, but it still rocked me sideways. I righted myself and tagged his nose with a smart shot. The crunch of cartilage sounded like the top snapping off an unripe banana.

A cigarette hit my chest and hissed in the sheen of sweat. I stomped on it while stepping forward, blitzing the big guy with jabs he caught with his elbows and forearms as he peered hesitantly at me through his upraised arms. His face was a horror show and the fight wasn’t even a minute old. Did this guy know how to fight? Would Drinkwater tilt me against a big cream puff with sixty thousand dollars on the table—

Bullrushing with surprising speed, the guy ducked his head and rose up with his hands hooked under my armpits. I had a crazy weightless moment, my legs kicking at nothing. Then I brought one fist down on the big man’s skull; it sounded like a coconut hitting a softwood floor. He hurled me at a sawhorse. Hungry faces hunched in at the edge of my vision and something sharp — a razor blade? an untrimmed fingernail? — sizzled along my hip bone. The guy bridged a forearm across my chest, cheating the air out of my lungs and bearing down with his claustrophobic bulk. His breath was equal parts Wintergreen Skoal and camphor. I noted the fine grey edge of lead around his dead canine tooth.

The man brought one world-eating fist down into my face and everything exploded in starlight riots, hollowness threading down my jaw as if nothing anchored it anymore: my face was only a mask, the contents of my skull obliterated.

I staggered forward as he swung again, reeling into the middle of the ring and punching instinctively, not at a face or even a shape but just at that onrushing warmth. My fist collided with something hard again—snap! — and that hardness split, becoming two separate things under a tight stretch of skin.

I got knocked down again, my knees mashed to jelly and the air whoofing out of my guts in a helpless gust. The big guy was on top now. Fear chewed into the wires of my brain, the insane lung-chaining fear you feel when trapped under a bigger man’s bulk while your life is slowly choked out of you. Four bloody knuckles dropped from a great height, a cloud-splitting Hand of God. There was a loud crunch inside my head as the back of my skull rang off the concrete, a shockwave juddering me spine-deep.

Then, miraculously, the weight lifted. A racking gasp tore out of me. My head lolled to one side and I spotted the towel on the floor. Bovine must have thrown it.

At Drinkwater’s, the white towel didn’t mean the end. A cornerman threw it as a time-out and the injured fighter could get his wounds licked before wading back in.

I dragged myself up and hauled my ass to the corner amidst catcalls and hoots.

“He took you out behind the woodshed, whitey!”

Owe and Bovine sat me in a bright orange cafeteria chair. Bovine held my face, scrutinizing the damage. I let my skull rest against his hands. He slapped a bag of ice on the back of my neck and had Owe hold it there while he worked.

“He lumped your forehead but bad, Dunk. Burst a blood vessel?”

The skin of my forehead was tight, an odd shadow looming at the upper edge of my sight. I was cut over my left eye. Bovine swabbed the cut with a Q-tip saturated with Adrenalin. The raw burn rode the nerve endings down the side of my face, cabling the tendons in my neck.

Glancing to the opposite corner, I saw the big guy’s nose was badly bust: cartilage crushed on one side, leaving the other side jutting straight and strange like a shark’s fin. Bright blood streamed from both nostrils but the man sat with an easygoing expression, taking dainty sips from a Hamm’s tallboy. His cutman hovered over him with a packet of Monsel’s solution — the filthiest trick in a cutman’s bag. Of course it was illegal — just not at Drinkwater’s fights.

The cutman applied solution to the big man’s cracked-open beak, shaking it on like he was salting popcorn. I smelled it — a cooked smell like a skirt steak drenched in battery acid.

“His ponytail,” Owe said. “The ponytail, Dunk.”

“That’s time!” Drinkwater called.

The crowd stirred as we surged out of our corners. The guy’s nose was predictably hideous: lips of bubbly flesh opened down to the gleam of buckled cartilage. He’d have to find a doctor to dig out that pavement of scar tissue with a scalpel — otherwise he’d be left with a second pair of deformed lips running vertically down his schnozz.

He came out like a grizzly awoken from hibernation. I came out nimbly this round, my attitude set in the register of give-a-fuck, moving side to side with my hands hipped like cocked pistols. The fight was in my blood now, and it was an ecstatic feeling; my senses had jacked in at last, operating on some dog-whistle frequency only I could hear.

The big guy clipped me with a looping cross, opening the cut Bovine had just closed. I shook my head, droplets spraying, and cuffed him with a clumsy left as the crowd rose to a quick roar. We circled out of a sloppy clinch where I caught a heat-seeking whiff of raw adrenaline coming out of his pores.

We clashed in the rough centre of the ring. The guy hauled in bulldog breaths, blood burping out his nose. His sweat-heavy trousers had slipped around his waist to expose his BVDs, which were a cheery shade of robin’s egg blue. He dipped his head and came on but this time I timed it and stepped aside, letting him rumble past like a subway on fixed rails. Next, I was able to make two small adjustments that pretty much put the fight to bed, and I was lucky enough to do them in one fluid motion — watching it happen, I guess you might think we’d choreographed the damn thing.

What I did was snatch the guy’s ponytail with my left hand, doubling it over in my fist and yanking back hard like I was bringing a big dog to heel, which forced his chin to tilt up. Then I torqued my hips and came round with the dynamite right, whipping my torso to propel my fist with all the juice my body could generate.

The punch struck the big man dead in the middle of his face. The sound was like two flat rocks spanked together. Everyone in that warehouse leaned back — it was like an explosion had gone bang in the ring.

For a second the whole world sat still: me with that grimy handful of hair, my fist flattened against the big man’s face. If you could have frozen that image, you would have seen my curled fingers resting flush with the poor guy’s eye sockets, his nose having turned into mash.

The big man let out a muffled moan, spraying red spittle. His hands came up in search of blood or pity, I couldn’t tell. And I reached down inside, crushed that tiny voice in my chest pleading for mercy, cocked my fist and drove it into the guy’s face again.

That was it. The man’s body hung slack, back bowed, held up by my hand in his hair — he looked like a dead shark on a dock with a gaffing hook sunk into his snout. I lowered him to the floor gently as I could, then found my chair and sat. The ice bag hit the back of my neck. Blissful cold washed down my spine like water trickling in a downspout.

“You got lucky,” a voice hissed somewhere to my left.

I blew at the fringe of blood-grimed hair plastered to my rapidly ballooning hematoma and thought, You got that right, buddy. I’m the luckiest man in all Creation.

Two men dragged the big fellow away by his heels like hunters lugging a dead bear out of the woods. My next opponent warmed up across the ring. As predicted, he was young and thin, with whiplike arms and legs that, if they were attached to a woman, you’d say went on for days, took a break at the knee and went a few days more. He had the empty, edgeless gaze of a psychopath.

Bovine took my right hand in his own. “Is it …?”

“Broke? Yeah.”

“I’ve got some cortisone.”

“Just leave it be.”

Before we got to it the kid stuck his hand out, wanting to shake. Bad sign: it meant he saw this as pure business, which meant he wasn’t any kind of dick-swinger. Drinkwater had found a pro. For him this was punching a clock. This particular shift, his job was to put me to bed. Thankfully I got the sense he’d do no more than was needed to reach that goal — but he would finish me.

The first shot impacted the mouse on my forehead with the mathematical precision of a laser-guided missile. The kid followed it up with a smart jab to my nose and another to my mouth. I reeled. My nose was so packed with blood I couldn’t breathe; my lungs emptied through my mouth in a ragged hiss, air singing over my newly chipped tooth.

The kid slipped in blood falling from my face. Lowering my chin, I threw a punch that came up over my shoulder and tabbed the kid where his collarbone met his neck. The concussive smack travelled up to the rafters, making the pigeons take flight.

The kid’s knees buckled and he backed off shaking his head, the glazed look in his pale brown eyes turning into something far more feral and crafty.

I shook my head too, droplets flying off the tips of my blood-quilled hair. How many pints did a man have in him? It felt like I’d bled out a few pints and swallowed another: my gut was heavy with the iron-tasting stuff that flowed down the back of my throat.

Our heads clashed with accidental violence. The shockwave of bone on bone telescoped around my skull, a high ringing note like an air-raid siren. Rocking on my heels, I threw a hopeful uppercut but nobody was home to receive it. A left cross stung in reply. Next a body blow landed like a mule kick and once again siphoned the air from my lungs.

I pressed forward on instinct. A brutal shot sheered off my jaw. The kid’s fist slammed the hematoma, again, again — he kept tagging it like some asshole pressing an elevator button. The mouse had swollen ridiculously: its Cro-Magnon curve dominated the crest of my sight.

I closed in and hit him twice to the body, intending to crush his liver and rupture his kidneys, bear-maul this kid and put him down. I cornered him against the sawhorses but my punch swung through clean air, missing horribly, and next I was face to face with a jeering man in the crowd. A fist slammed into my ribs and sent bile burning up my throat. Turning, I was met with a right that tabbed me flush. Black lights flash-popped before my eyes and I was falling backwards into a wonderful coolness that felt like ever-tumbling water, so cold, so sweet and—

I was in a cave. The ground was black and granular. A tree. No top, no bottom, roots braiding in both directions. A slit in the tree’s bark. A man’s face appeared in it. He unfolded himself from the tree with great care, like a contortionist from a glass box. Small, so goddamn small, his skin a pale translucence. He was incredibly old; just looking at him, I felt my eyes dry in their sockets. The man dug a hole. Sometimes his shovel blade made a sound like hissing snakes as it bit into the ground; other times, it sounded like raindrops. When the hole was finished the man cocked his head calmly as if to say: Well, son, it’s your choice. I climbed into the hole headfirst. Wonderful, warm and comforting. A ball of light bloomed, becoming larger, larger …

I was slumped on the chair with Owe snapping a towel at my face. My skull felt like it had been cracked open and blowtorched. My ears were plugged as if I’d been swimming and water had packed into my ear canals. The kid stared at me from across the ring with a look of mingled respect and pity. You dragged yourself up after being knocked down, that look said. But what’s the use when I’m just going to plant you again?

Bovine edged in on my right, a razor blade pinched between his fingers. “We’ve got to cut that thing,” he said.

He drew the blade along my forehead, slitting the bulging mouse. Blood sheeted down my face, blinding me. Owe mopped it, and Bovine swabbed the cut with Adrenalin — I could feel the Q-tip moving inside the pocket of swollen flesh — and painted it with Hemostop.

Owe leaned in. “Keep going, Dunk? You sure? You’ve fought like an animal, but this guy … this guy. It’s only money, man.”

Acid curdled in my gut. Only money. It’s always only money if you’ve always had it. I heaved myself up to meet the kid.

What happened next happened quickly, as things often do in fights. It was an accident, pure and simple: I stepped on the kid’s foot.

I was rabbiting in, trying to close the distance. The kid side-stepped deftly, his left hand coming around with awful intent. My right fist was fixed on a similar orbit, moving slower but with a lot more oomph. Coming forward, I stepped on the kid’s right foot. It was nothing purposeful or planned. The kid’s fist collided with my ear, pinching a vessel threaded through the cartilage. My own punch landed solidly enough to knock him off balance. As he went back his left foot slipped on a patch of sweat, pulling him into an awkward splits.

His Achilles tendon tore. His left leg crumpled. The kid tried to stand. Instinctively, I offered my hand to help him up. I squinted down, wobbly on my feet — then withdrew my hand sadly and said, “You ought to stay down.” The kid followed my eyes. The tendon had ripped off the bone, wadding up around his ankle like a loose tube sock. He nodded.

A few of the kid’s buddies stepped from the crowd. They picked him up and carried him past Drinkwater, who stood with a painful, pursed grin on his face.

I didn’t dare sit down; my legs would seize with scalding lactic acid. My broken right hand had mushroomed to double its size. I shuffled my feet like a man near the end of an epic dance marathon and waited for the next fighter. When he appeared, I smiled — not that anyone would have noticed since my lips were fat as sausages.

“Holy shit,” Silas Garrow said to Drinkwater. “You sure you want me to hit this guy? Why not give me a feather — that’ll knock him over just as well.”

It had all started with a letter. It had arrived at the Kingston Pen in an envelope with a stamp of Chief Big Bear in full headdress — treaty stamps, they were called, dispensed only on reservations to card-holding band members. The envelope had been slit, its contents inspected by the mailroom guard. The return address had been scribbled over with a black felt-tip; all I could read was the band number, 159. The Mohawks of Akwesasne First Nation.

Greetings, White Devil! I trust you are keeping up with your daily beatings, and I hope you have found a sparring partner who is as happy to administer them as I was. As I am aware that other eyes than yours will read this, I will only say that rockin’ is my business, and business is GOOD. I hear that one of our mutual friends — Mr. Guzzlesoda, let’s call him — has had troubles as of late. Some sticky-fingered thieves took advantage of him. What a shame! When you get out, make sure you look me up. I’m always looking for spare punching bags. Until then, I offer a thousand hosannas in your name.

Yours in Christ,

Silas Garrow

The day after my release I’d walked up the street to the motel pay phone, fed coins into the box and dialled.

“Akwesasne Import — Export Holdings,” said a female voice. “How may I help you?”

“Silas Garrow, please.”

After a snatch of elevator muzak, Garrow picked up.

“Import — Export, huh?” I said.

“We import lots,” Garrow said. “Teddy bears, Japanese soda pop. Why must you think so poorly of me, white man?”

“The big house hardened me.”

I sketched my idea for him. Garrow listened silently, then said: “It’s Diggstown, baby. It’s also just about the longest long shot I’ve ever heard.”

“Could you get yourself in?”

“Maybe. He generally invites tomato cans, doesn’t he? Hell, he invited you.”

“You’re a peach, Silas.”

“If I did this, I’d have to set this up so there’s no suspicion — that man’s a lot of things, but a fool he ain’t. And anyway, what makes you figure you’ll make it past the first two?”

“That’s on me. If not, it’s an easy night for you.”

Silas considered it. “On the one hand, it would be shit for my boxing cred — losing to a banana-footed white devil. On the other hand, it’s not like Don King’s knocking on my door, right?”

So Silas made the call, asking Drinkwater to set up a fight. Drinkwater said he’d keep Silas in mind. A few weeks later I’d laid the trap—“If that’s the kind of guy you think I am, why not make it all Natives?” And Drinkwater walked into it.

“I’ll have to hit you,” Silas had warned me. “Not just to salvage a shred of dignity, but because we can’t give Drinkwater a sniff of this being a tank job.”

Silas skipped out of his corner lightly, crossing his legs over, making a full circuit around me where I stood rooted in the centre of the ring. Silas shook his head at Drinkwater, said, “Shouldn’t I be wearing an executioner’s hood?”

Drinkwater’s lips were pressed into a whitened line. “Just get it over with.”

Silas pumped out a few air-jabs, showing off his speed. I could barely raise my hands to parry them. Silas stepped back, scoffing, playing up his role, then hit me four times: right to the body, left to the body, right to the body, left to the forehead as he was backing away. The violence was sudden and the blows stung like bullets — either my body had stopped pumping adrenaline or I was too hurt for it to have much benefit. But Silas knew where to hit: the guts, the forehead. He avoided my knockout buttons — a liver shot might put me down for good, but anywhere else I’d survive.

I reeled from the volley, only selling it a little — it hurt like hell, no faking needed. The air-raid siren kicked up in my head; I took a knee. Silas backed off. Drinkwater nearly stormed into the ring.

“Hit him,” I heard him cry. “Go on, quick! Keep at it!”

“Come on, Lem. He’s down. Standing eight-count.”

“This isn’t goddamn Vegas! Hit him and keep on hitting him!”

I gathered my feet but couldn’t quite find my balance: it was as if I was struggling in a fierce riptide. My body was approaching a cliff that my will couldn’t bridge — no amount of strength would salvage me, no guts or heart. I’d simply topple over. No shame in that, I guess.

Silas punched me in the belly the way a loanshark punches a deadbeat — straight on, no grace. I hinged at the waist, a long runner of bloody drool between my lips. When Silas pulled his fist away I was almost sad to feel it go. At least it had anchored me in a standing position.

The simple act of straightening my spine drained me. Silas slipped a punch past my skull, bringing our heads together.

“Make it real,” he whispered.

I did.

My left hand lashed into Silas’s ribs, then I tightened my right hand and brought it up into his chin. The impact was genuine. Silas’s eyes rolled back in their sockets. I broke another bone in my hand but that pain was no more than a sorrowful hum inside my flesh.

Silas went down on both knees like a man who’d been stabbed in the back, his hands clutching for the blade, then he fell face first onto the cement. His liquid snuffles filled the warehouse.

Drinkwater stared blankly at Silas Garrow, KO’d on the floor. He threw the white towel. It fluttered down on Silas’s back and I couldn’t tell if he was unconscious or selling it.

Ten seconds later, he hadn’t moved. The towel rose and fell with his deep breaths. The crowd stood dumbstruck. This was just the freshest in a long line of soul-sapping injustices.

I fingered Drinkwater as he shrunk into the crowd.

“My money, Lem.” I smiled, thinking it must be a sight to inspire nightmares. “Don’t make me get rough with you.”

I thought about the past eight years, the nights without sleep and the constant formless terror; I thought about Edwina because my mind was never far from Edwina; and I thought about cosmic fairness, how it is a mysterious commodity, but sometimes that great wheel really does come around.

I woke up blind.

My mattress was dented with the impressions of the bodies that had lain in it before me. My nose was swollen with crusted blood, but I could still smell industrial bleach on the sheets.

What had happened after the fight? I remember Drinkwater had balked at paying — as I was sure he would — shrugging his scarecrow shoulders and calling the second fight a draw because the kid hadn’t gone down under my fists. He offered our money back, plus a few extra bucks for my pain and suffering.

Owe and Bovine called bullshit. Drinkwater smiled his way-off smile and played his fingers along the knife sheathed at his waist. But then Silas peeled himself off the floor, rubbing the nasty lump on his jaw.

“You pay these men,” he told Drinkwater. “Every penny they’re owed.”

“That’s not your call,” Drinkwater said.

“It’s not,” Silas agreed, “but if you don’t I’ll make sure everyone on the Akwesasne knows about it.”

A wretched cornered-rat look darkened Drinkwater’s face. I held out my hand with dry insistence.

“Pay me, Drinkwater.”

“I’ll pay, god damn you. I’ll pay.”

I half remembered being carried out by Owe and Bovine, laid in the back seat of Owe’s car. Now here I was, blind in a strange bed. My hands rose instinctively to my eyes, but someone held them back.

“Don’t touch them.” It was Bovine. “They’re swollen shut. You’re swollen all over.”

I tried to say something but my lips were fused with a glaze of blood. Bovine wet his fingertips with water and ran them over my lips.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“Red Coach Inn. Jeez, what a dive. Red Roach Inn paints the better picture. But we couldn’t get you across the border looking like this.”

“Owe?”

“He left last night. You’ve been passed out almost two days. Your face is … Dunk, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

My body was levelled with pain: the sharp variety from the broken bones in my hand, the throbbing variety sunk deep into my face and the bone-deep kind every other place.

For the next three days I barely moved. Bovine was there for most of it, and Owen checked in. They smeared Polysporin on my wounds and made me drink litres of Pedialyte. I lay in a half-waking, half-resting state where nothing was entirely real. The hum of the ceiling fan, the murmur of daytime talk shows.

On the fourth day I gathered my legs and stood. The room was quiet; Bovine was down at the motel bar. I fumbled my way around the bed, barking my shin on the bedpost. Teetering into the bathroom, I ran one blind hand along the wall until my fingers brushed the switch.

My eyes were black balls in the bathroom mirror, nose a mangled knob, shattered capillaries threading over both cheeks. Bovine had stitched the mouse shut; the half-moon curve of the incision bristled with catgut, my forehead dark as an eggplant.

I trailed the fingers of my left hand down my chest and stomach, let them linger on the softball-sized contusions on either side of my ribs: dark purple at their centres, sickly yellow at their edges. My right hand was swaddled in bandages; if I so much as grazed it on a solid surface, a serrated edge of agony would rip all the way to my elbow.

“Fuck it, Duncan Diggs,” I told my reflection. “Were you ever really a handsome man?”

I rented the room indefinitely. Bovine returned to the mortuary. My days were spent reading, watching junk TV, taking epic showers. I sat on the balcony while the housekeeper changed the sheets, listening to the rumble of the Falls over the traffic surging down Buffalo Avenue. My bruises lightened. I could breathe through my nose again and no longer sounded like a tickhound with sinusitis.

One afternoon, there was a knock at the door. I opened it to find a Native teenager holding a duffel bag. The kid shoved it into my chest, spat on the cement near my feet and left.

Inside were stacks of fifties and twenties bound with elastic bands: $398,000, plus a single penny rattling at the bottom. Drinkwater had shorted us two grand. The note he’d slid in with the cash read: It will never buy back the years you lost.

“You’re right about that, Lemmy,” I said, with a laugh that hurt my sides. “But it’ll make the years I’ve got left a little sweeter.”

I slept soundly and awoke to a ringing phone.

“You bastard,” Silas said. “We said make it look real, for the love of fuck, not knock me into a coma!”

“I could barely stand,” I said. “Didn’t think—”

“I couldn’t think straight for a week! Still can’t remember where I left my car keys.”

“I’m sorry.”

Silas broke the lingering silence. “You were something up from the grave, Diggs. Remorseless — a zombie! A relentless killing machine! How’s your cabeza?”

Peering into the duffel, I said, “I’ll live.”

Silas grunted, unconvinced. “Get your ass back over here where the health care’s free.”

“Thanks, Silas. For everything.”

“My tenderfeet tell me that big payoff left ol’ Lemmy just about bust. You ought to talk to your cop friend — Drinkwater’s in a desperate frame of mind.”

I hung up and stared again at the money. It was more than I’d ever seen. For some it was nothing of consequence — a decent Christmas bonus for a Fortune 500 CEO — but to me it meant freedom. I just wasn’t sure yet what that freedom would look like. I felt an urge to spread the bills on the bed and roll around like bank robbers do in the movies.

I walked to the window, threw the curtains open. Late-afternoon sunlight bathed the treetops overlooking the cataract basin.

Owe stopped by with a sack of bearclaws and coffee in Styrofoam cups.

“How you feeling?”

“Can’t complain,” I said, tearing into a bearclaw. I was feeling like a bear myself, just stirred from hibernation — devouring everything I could lay my paws on, the sweeter the better.

Owe watched me dump six sugar packets into my coffee. His cop’s eyes were probably lingering over the skin that sat loose upon my frame, the muscle I’d earned in prison now melted away. I unzipped the duffel, tossed him a roll of bills.

“You go ahead, count it.”

“I don’t need to.”

“I’d like it if you did.”

Instead Owe snapped the elastic band off the roll, split the bills roughly in half, snapped the elastic band on one half and flipped it back. “I wasn’t looking at it as a money-making opportunity,” he said. “I just wanted to fuck with Drinkwater.”

I wasn’t about to argue. I nodded and dropped the roll back in the duffel.

“That last guy,” Owe said, one eyebrow raised. “He was looking like a world-destroyer … until you caught him.”

“Even the blind squirrel finds a nut, Owe.”

“I thought you might be interested to know — Drinkwater may be making a move.”

I watched him closely over the rim of my Styrofoam cup. “Yeah?”

Owen had heard the news from one of his fellow boys in blue, a district sergeant with the Niagara PD. The word through the grapevine was that Drinkwater wanted to get out of the cigarette-smuggling business.

“They say he’s trying to sell off his entire apparatus. Cig makers, packagers, labellers, whole shebang.”

“Who’s the buyer?”

“It’ll be a larger smuggling operation, which means either the Akwesasne or Kahnawake tribe.”

“You’re involved in the investigation?”

There was a moment of pent-up tension as the unspoken question lay between us: Would you tell me if you were involved, Owe, seeing as you didn’t the last time?

“No investigation,” he said, “just suppositions and scuttlebutt. My chief wouldn’t detach me, anyway. Drinkwater’s pretty much a dead issue around the precinct.”

“But not for you.”

Owe’s heavy-lidded gaze oriented on the window. “I buried that fucker’s dog, man.”

A week later I was back at my folks’ place, still thinking about what I’d do next. My nose was skewed at a fresh angle and a mottled scar was scrawled across my forehead. But Cataract City was a hockey player’s town; bust-up noses were commonplace, and I could always grow my bangs out.

Guilt settled over the dinner table and Mom’s bruised eyes avoided mine. She must be so ashamed, I thought. I wondered if my name came up at the Bisk, or during her bowling league night with her girlfriends — or had her friends learned to avoid the subject?

By this time, my post-fight euphoria had soured. I toted up the facts of my life: I was jobless, wifeless, childless, living with my parents, sleeping in the bed I’d slept in as a boy. I was an ex-con with a busted face whose joints ached on humid days.

One evening I sat with my dad at the Tannery on Stanley Avenue. We could pass hours in a silence that wasn’t uncomfortable. Every so often one of us might sit up on our elbows and lean forward in a way that invited conversation, only to signal the bartender for another draft.

“Dade Rathburn,” Dad said, frowning at the foam in his beer glass. “That time he took you and little Owen.”

His shoulders rose almost imperceptibly. I was struck by just how sharp his shoulder bones were, by the chip in his canine tooth he’d never bothered to fix. I thought back to that night in the parking lot when Dad fought Dean Hillicker — he’d been pure electric back then. But the electricity had mostly bled out of him now.

“We got in the car,” Dad said, “Cal Stuckey and me. Cal’s car, remember? The flashy Fifth Avenue he got after his promotion. We’d been sitting in the precinct with officers buzzing around, asking a lot of questions but not taking any action. We both knew it … if you weren’t found, it would have been over. I mean all of it. Don’t want to sound dramatic, but … how can you be overdramatic, talking about your twelve-year-old boy? We couldn’t have lived with ourselves, y’know? Our wives, your mothers, we couldn’t have looked them in the eye, or they ours. The most important thing on earth ripped away—on our watch.

“Anyway, we got in the car. Drove. Hoping, was all. Guess we figured we’d find you on the side of the road somewhere, lost, hugging onto each other, but safe and in one piece. Cal kept whispering this little prayer to himself, I remember, telling God he could take away everything else he’d ever given but just give Cal his kid back … You forget the details of these things. It’s a trick your mind plays. All you remember is that fear—that’s all you ever need to remember to make sure it never happens again.”

It was the longest speech he’d given in my presence since junior high, when he’d come to my room at Mom’s insistence, hands squeezed into white knots to fumblingly explain the birds and the bees.

“You never found us,” I said.

Dad laughed. “We ran out of gas. Neither of us was watching the needle. Cal had to call CAA.”

The Sabres were getting clocked by the Wings in an early-season game on the bar’s TV. Dead leaves skated up and down the eavestrough outside, a haunting sound.

“Some people say you make your own luck,” Dad said. “I’ve never believed in that. Luck is just something that happens. It’s nothing you can pull towards you. But I think if you get some, you do your best to make the most of it.”

“What luck have you ever had?”

Dad flinched as if I’d reached over and slapped him.

“I’ve had plenty,” he said hoarsely. “What kind of question is that? Jesus, wasn’t I just saying …?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Son, you’re out. That’s lucky. You’re in one piece. That’s lucky, too. You disappear a few weeks, come back with a busted face and a limp — you don’t need to explain nothing — and maybe that’s good luck or bad luck, I dunno. But your mom and me, we don’t want to see you go back where you’ve been. So take your luck and make something of it. A small something. Start with that.”

Eventually we walked home, Dad swaying ever so slightly. He tripped on the cracked tarmac leading up to the house, leaned into me and held that position, his head resting lightly on my shoulder.

The next night I returned to Bender Street and used the pay phone outside the Sleep Easy Motor Inn. Late-autumn midges clustered around the street lamps. Winter was threaded into the wind that wicked up from the Falls. A roll of quarters sat heavy in my pocket — I had taken some money from where I’d stashed it under the closet floorboards of my childhood bedroom — because who knew? Maybe we’d talk a while longer this time.

“You again.”

“Yeah. Me.”

I wanted to ask Ed why she’d kept this number, after all these years. I wanted to know how close she was; I knew she wasn’t in Cataract City, but maybe she wasn’t so far away. I wanted to know if she was happy and in love with someone else. I wanted to know if Dolly was lying beside her as she listened to me breathing down the line.

“It’s weird without you” is all I said.

She almost laughed, but caught herself. “Is that your idea of a charming pickup line?”

Ed knew I’d never had anything in the way of pickup lines, charming or otherwise. “I’m just telling you how I feel.”

“Well, you’ve had some practice of being without me by now. You should be used to it.”

“How could I get used to it, Ed? It’ll always be the worst.”

“You’ll live.”

Yeah, I would. But I wished she weren’t so hard — I wished she’d give, just the tiniest bit. Then again, I didn’t deserve her softness.

“I’d like to come find you.”

After a silence, she said, “I can’t stop you from trying.”

She knew differently, though. All she had to do was tell me to stop. But she didn’t.

LIONS IN WINTER: OWEN STUCKEY

I thought about it a lot during those years when Duncan was in jail. “The Point,” I guess you could call it.

What was the Point? That place in time where you’d been led, ceaselessly and unerringly, since the day you could first remember. The place you’ll see sometimes in dreams, as familiar as if it belonged to your everyday life, that disappears the moment you rise into waking, its imprint washed away like footprints in the advancing tide. Then one day you’ll see some aspect of it in the filigree of a leaf or the knitted steel of a suspension bridge, and that old dream will collide with reality so perfectly that it creates the whiplash we know as déjà vu.

In dreams I often found myself in the middle of what, in my waking hours, I knew to be the Niagara River. But this was a different river, I understood — a river of dreams, and it acted according to its own logic. When I kicked for shore a ripcurl would run under my feet, pulling me back to where I’d started. So I just drifted, treading water, but the shore drew no closer and pulled no further away. My sightline never changed: a hawk sat stunned above me, pinned to the blue sky like a butterfly in an entomologist’s book.

In this dream, it dawned on me that nothing I did made any difference. As hard as I’d kick, that sly ripcurl always drew me back. When I treaded water, the current anchored me in place. My position was fixed — the river muscled and shoved and buffeted me into the exact spot where I was always supposed to end up — and nothing I did could ever alter that.

The Point is your specific place in the world. And not just your place: your moment. An instant in time, measurable in seconds, that acts as the hinge for everything you’ve ever done. Everything feeds into that moment: your backlog of experience and behaviours determine how you enter that moment and how you’ll walk away from it afterwards. Every way you’ve ever been hurt, every grievance nursed, every secret fear, those moments where you’ve stood up or stepped down and all the love in your body — it all matters when you reach the Point. It is all brought to bear.

And you’ll look back in the aftermath, trying to piece together how A met B, but you know what? The threads are tangled, yet the links exist in ways you can’t even imagine. And whatever you owe, you pay.

The Point. It’s in the water; it’s in the sky. Things collapse into it, things spring from it. We’re all either moving towards it or walking away from it.

THE DOG, A PIT BULL NAMED BANDIT, had been owned — much as anyone can own such an animal — by Igor Bearfoot, presently deceased. It nearly tore my hand off.

I’d trailed Bearfoot’s Taurus down a side road and pulled into the cut-off a minute after its tail lights dimmed. The car was parked under a naked maple. I’d watched Bearfoot step out with Duncan. I’d been easing down a hill carpeted in dead leaves, pursuing them, when the dog attacked.

I felt it coming: a swift-moving something springing forward on my right side. It came low, submarine-style, hitting me at the hips in a frenzy of teeth and muscle. For an instant I thought it was a wolverine but then I saw the metal studs glinting on its collar.

It slammed me broadside and we tumbled down the slope, the dog angling for my windpipe. I’d thrust one arm between its forelegs as its jaws sank into my wrist through the thin fabric of my jacket. I kicked it away but its paws dug into the ground, yanking me flat. I scrambled to my knees, slipping on the mouldy layer of leaves, and the dog let go of my arm and went for my skull. There came a fibrous tearing on the top of my scalp, then the piss of blood as warmth trickled down my temples.

My un-mauled hand scrabbled for the revolver in its holster — by then I was turtled on the ground with the dog tearing at my shoulder, trying to worm underneath to rip at my face.

I drew the gun from its holster and reared back; the dog’s body glowed in the moonlight falling through the branches. I levelled the barrel at the centre of that perfect mass and pulled the trigger.

The dog jerked backwards. A mist of blood hung in the air for an instant before dissolving.

The ER doc had taken one look at my mitt and sent me up to the ORs. They called in a big-city blade to do the microsurgery — finger reattachment, skin grafts, nerve pathway and blood vessel reconstruction. My pinkie and ring fingers have a little feeling — the skin permanently prickling with pins and needles, like I’ve slept on them funny — and the skin is vaguely purple, but I can still make a fist.

I’d stayed at the hospital for two weeks; my folks visited often. Mom was retired by then but she knew most of the docs, and one of them, a myopic thoracic surgeon, flirted with her shamelessly until Dad caught on, finally, and told him to knock it off.

One afternoon Dad visited with a pair of hoagies in a sack. “Thought you’d like something other than hospital chow.”

My right was heavily bandaged so I ate with my left, non-dominant hand; a tomato slid out the ass-end of the sandwich, dropping in my lap.

“Hey,” Dad said, as if the fact had just slapped him. “You were born here. Two floors up, in Labour and Delivery. Such a little peanut. Six pounds, three ounces. You came three weeks early and your umbilical cord was wrapped round your waist. You got stuck in the birth canal. One minute everything was tickety-boo and the next machines were beeping and flashing, the room was full of doctors and your mom was whisked to the operating room. Emergency C-section. Back then they didn’t usually let the fathers in, but your mother was known in these halls.

“They had this sheet up, y’know? Mom’s head on one side, delivery docs on the other. I was on your mom’s side and told myself: don’t look on the other side of that sheet. They got you out and slapped your butt and put you in my arms so Mom could kiss you. That’s the unfair part. Your mom goes through sixteen hours of agony and they won’t let her hold you first. What had I done to deserve that gift?

“They told me to wait outside and as I’m leaving, my eyes drift over the sheet. Your mom was open, Owen, wide open. I’m sorry, but if I needed any more proof that your mom was the toughest person I’d ever met — tougher than I’ll ever be — well, I had it then.”

We’d finished the sandwiches and balled the waxed paper, flipping them into the trashcan. Dad made his shot, then retrieved my miss and dropped it in. Stepping into the hall, he glanced left and said, “Three doors down … four? That’s where you stayed after that whole thing in the woods.” He shook his head, eyes on the floor. “Lord, those days. Jerry and me driving around scared out of our skins, hoping to Christ we’d find you. Never again have I felt so purely helpless, and thank God for that.”

He’d returned to the room, sat again and patted my knee under the bedcovers. “After all that, Jerry and I basically stopped talking. I’d pass him in the parking lot — but we were on different levels at work, so it was easy to ignore each other. We kept you and Duncan apart, too — you were still young enough that we could dictate your friends. Maybe everything would have happened the way it did anyway, but I carry the guilt with me. Jerry too, I’m sure. You two kids were tight, and maybe that’s not such a rare thing in boyhood — but it’s an exceptionally rare thing in life.”

He gripped the sheet, fretting with threads frayed from much washing. “This thing that happened on the river with the cigarettes … you talked to Duncan about it?”

I’d wondered: Had I warned Dunk? That was Dad’s real question. The answer was twisted. I had and I hadn’t. Yes, I’d seen him at Smokin’ Joes from the jumpseat of a helicopter, then later I’d spotted him on the Niagara through a pair of high-powered binoculars: Dunk and Drinkwater and Igor Bearfoot on a puntboat, me watching from the bluffs. I’d thought: How much is he paying you, Dunk? A few thousand bucks? There are a million other ways to escape, man. Don’t thin your chances until you’ve only got one.

But Dunk had gone ahead and I’d caught him — my oldest friend. And for what? The cigarettes would keep coming anyway. A man was dead. Dunk would end up going to prison for it. And I’d be the one who sent him.

Had it been my duty to stop him? Maybe Dad thought so. Maybe it was Cataract City Code, Man Code, some bullshit code.

The thing is, I’d wanted to talk to Dunk. About what he was doing, yeah, but about so much more. I wanted to tell him about how the digitized shriek of the precinct phone killed something inside me, as did the fire sprinklers cowled in old spider’s webs. It all made me sick deep into my guts; I see-sawed between wanting to wreck everything and wanting to curl into a ball under my desk and flinch at the hard-soled shoes stomping past. I wanted to tell him how damn little I’d learned in the years since we were boys. It boiled down to this: it’s a lot harder to love than to hate. Harder to be there for those you love — to see them get older, get sick, be taken from you in sudden awful ways. Hate’s dead simple. You can hate an utter stranger from a thousand miles away. It asks nothing of you. It eats you from the inside out but it takes no effort or thought at all.

When the hospital released me, I hadn’t returned to my apartment. What was waiting for me there? One toothbrush in a plastic cup on the sink. A telephone that I’d stare at as if my slit-eyed gaze might cause it to ring.

Instead I went to Clancy’s on Stanley, ordered a shot of rye and a Hed. The man sitting across from me had a scar on his neck: thick and bunched up, the skin as smooth and pink as carnival taffy. His hands trembled as if he was forcing them to do so. A layer of sweat shimmered to the surface of my skin. Why was something always wrong with the men around here? I’d never noticed it as a kid. Why so many missing fingers? The men around here put their hands at the service of a mean utility. Those hands got crushed between rollers at the Bisk, melted to stumps by arc-welding torches at the shipworks. I wanted none of it, was humiliated by it in some untranslatable way. But here I was — part of the fabric again.

Later, when I staggered home, I saw that a fire had been stoked in front of my apartment door. Twigs and random trash remained, plus the stink of kerosene. The fuel had burned off without igniting much else; there was nothing but a twisting scorch mark up the door. Bovine? It seemed like the kind of half-assed statement he’d make.

The landlord charged me for a new door. His reasoning: the damage had been perpetrated by my enemies, whom I’d rightly earned and whose reprisals were both unsurprising and — in his unvoiced but palpable view — completely justified.

Eight years went by, the passage of time conspicuous only by the sly pressures it exerted — the lines carving around my eyes and the yellow tinge to my teeth most noticeable when I shaved, my cheeks silked in white foam. One morning while flossing I’d caught a carbolic stink off the waxed floss and wondered: was this how you became acquainted with the smell of your sick, aging self?

I often woke from nightmares that drained from my brainpan like glue, scratching the undersides of my eyelids like motes of fibreglass. The most common one involved dogs flying out of an unending greyness, same way sharks appear out of silty water. Sometimes every one of those dogs was Fragrant Meat, his head bashed in from a truck’s grille.

Sometimes I hated this damn city. The sense of omnipresent failure triggered a breed of nausea in me. With it came that feeling of being inside a prison cell with elasticized walls. If I wanted to leave again, Cataract City would let me go — happily, in all likelihood — but if I stayed, it would constrict: an anaconda squeezing me until I couldn’t draw breath.

I came to sense a sinisterness about the city, too. It wasn’t anything you could pinpoint — how could a city be evil? A city was just concrete and steel and glass, feeling no pain, retaining no memories. But then houses are made of the same stuff, and people go around claiming they’re haunted all the time.

At first I’d told myself it was just me. I’d been away too long, returning under a dark cloud. But as the days bled past I recognized that it wasn’t me — or was me, partially at least, because I’d inhabited these streets before, bearing the infection I’d harboured since birth.

I’d stay up at night, imagining a vast sea of poison underneath the city. A churning sea of lampblack-coloured ichor burbling, leaching into the soil as it spread the infection.

Part of that was the job. Want to see the ugly side of any city? Start carrying a badge. I would cruise ours at night, an embalmed moon throwing its light upon weed-strewn lots and sagging rowhouses long vacant of human habitation. I’d listen to the wind whistle through those empty skeletons, singing off exposed nailheads and around flame-thinned beams with a low mournful sound. Empty houses have this look to them, or at least they do in Cataract City: like faces ravaged by leprosy. Shattered bay windows resemble leering mouths; punched-out second-storey windows look like avulsed eyeballs. Darkness had a way of transforming everyday sights into nightmarish apparitions. It did the same when Dunk and I spent those nights in the woods.

Sometimes I’d drive into the farmland on the outskirts of town. A rot-toppled silo lay in the fields to the north, isolated beside a decaying granary. A long, dark tube softening into the earth like a giant earthworm half smashed under a boot. It had torn up rags of fibrous earth when it fell; the rags, still attached to the silo’s hull, fluttered like curtains as the wind blew over a carpet of withered seeds: a sound like the pattering of tiny feet.

If I squinted, sometimes I’d see odd movement in the silo, deep in that brooding darkness. I’d think so, anyway. Who—what? It’s not something I’ve investigated. Or ever will.

Something’s the matter with Cataract City. To live here is to be infected with it. And you don’t even know how sick you are. How can you, when we all share the same poison?

For eight years my life was locked in stasis — I may as well have been frozen in a cryo-chamber. I became jaded, a stranger to myself: a desk sergeant with the Niagara Regional Police, tracking down child welfare beefs with a rotating cast of pantsuited social workers. Putting bad men in jail only to see them sprung by a showboating defence lawyer or some give-a-fuck judge. The system was broke — most systems were — and I was just one gear spinning imperfectly within it.

After work I’d hit one of the bars along Stanley Road, prop myself up on a stool with the rubadubs, listen to country music on the jukebox and inhale the sour whiff of spilled beer. Then I’d go home to the shoebox apartment, the unmade bed, empty bottles queued along the windowsill like giant bullets in want of a revolver, and the dripping faucet that I couldn’t quite rouse myself to fix.

Every so often I’d pick a convenient start point — New Year’s Day was popular — and say: Time for a change, Stuckey! Get a membership at the Y, show up for pickup basketball with the old men and high-school dropouts, can a few jumpers and get a little groove going. But soon the six pins and quartet of screws holding my knee together started to burn with smokeless heat; I’d gimp to the bench, my resolve already eroding.

I’d see old faces around. Duncan’s mother, Celia, waiting at the bus stop after her shift. Wearing a pencil skirt and support hose — hot date with the mister? — varicose veins bulging up the backs of her calves. I drove past without stopping, feeling the weight of her gaze on me. Sam Bovine would wash up in the drunk tank as reliably as the tide, usually around the holidays. He’d pass out in the holding cell, tinselly Christmas garlands noosed around his neck. One night he showed up outside my apartment screaming incoherently, although the gist was clear: you’re a turncoat, Stuckey, a scummer and a snake. I rang Dispatch and when the cruiser arrived Bovine stared at my window, wounded and pissy. I had the officers drive his drunk ass home.

I saw Edwina once, a few months after Duncan’s arrest. Driving past their old house, ostensibly on a neighbourhood sweep, I’d spotted a FOR SALE sign on the lawn and a U-Haul trailer stacked with boxes. I slowed down, knuckles whitening on the wheel. Ed walked out the front door with a gooseneck lamp, Dolly padding at her heels. She’d held on to her wintry beauty — although it was flintier now — retaining that bodily wildness both Duncan and I had surrendered to.

A moment came back, plucked free of time. Ed and me in the coatroom at Derby Lane, the usual dog track smells — wet greyhound, cigar smoke and the alkaline tang of dog drool — overmastered by the smell of her: clean and electric and somehow witchy, the taste in your mouth as a thunderstorm darkens the horizon. Her body was dewy and obliging, which was odd seeing as she was so often distant, untouchable. But back then she had softened as I braced her against the wall, coat hangers jangling round our ears with a musical note. It was not at all how I’d imagined it but still good, so very good, the youth in our bodies electric — I thrummed with it, fumbling but sincere, nervous lightning popping off the tips of my fingers — as she socked her head into the crook of my neck, smelling of Noxzema and Export A cigarettes, of sweat and the dust of the track, biting my throat with her small, even teeth. Laughter bubbled up inside me — the hysterical, uncontrolled giggles that had plagued me as a boy, concentrating first in my belly and fluttering up my throat like antic butterflies. The more I tried to tamp them down the worse they got — like when Bruiser Mahoney signed that Polaroid BM and that sick, insulting laughter had boiled up in me. I’d felt that same fear in the coatroom. You weren’t supposed to laugh when a woman nuzzled your neck, so I’d stifled it—Shhht-SHHHT! — the snort of a horse. Ed stared at me cockeyed for a second before we kissed — and it had been warm and spitty and sloppy like a first kiss ought to be.

She stopped halfway down the driveway, lamp in hand, gazing at me as I passed. There was no quiver in her eyes. She was stronger than fate — by which I mean she hadn’t imbibed the defeatism at the core of this city, the sense that each step of our lives had been plotted and our role was to follow those footfalls. Her lips moved but I couldn’t make out the words.

It could have been “Bye, Owe.” Or it could’ve been “You owe.”

I did owe and I did pay, after a fashion. For eight years I drank too much, nursed a sullen emptiness and waited for something to change, all the while knowing this was the single biggest lie people told themselves: that change will eventually come on its own if you wait patiently enough for it.

I told myself: When Duncan gets out, you make it right. However you can, in whatever way necessary. Make it right.

And then, three months after Dunk was released from prison, and three months after his fight at Drinkwater’s, I was given the chance.

“NEVER FIGURED I’D SEE THE DAY where I was rigged to a wire … by a white man, no less.”

“It’s not a wire,” I said. “It’s all wireless nowadays. Welcome to the twenty-first century.”

Silas Garrow made a face. “Explain again how I let you talk me into this.”

We sat in an unmarked cruiser in the Niagara River spillway. I was in the back seat with Silas, affixing a tiny microphone to the furred hood of his parka. Duncan sat silently up front.

Silas was set to meet Lemuel Drinkwater on the frozen Niagara to negotiate a deal for Drinkwater’s Molins Mark 9 cigarette machines. After talking with his band elders, Silas had agreed to co-operate with the police.

Silas and Drinkwater would meet alone. A recent rash of thieveries and his bad luck at the fights had sown a seed of distrust deep inside Drinkwater — and apparently that seed had since flowered into a vine of runaway paranoia. He no longer spoke on cell phones, preferring to dispatch his orders via an ever-shrinking network of impressionable Native teens.

“This is just preliminary evidence gathering,” I told Silas. “Once we’ve got him on record, I’ll go to my chief and requisition manpower for when the actual deal goes down.”

Nobody knew about tonight’s activities. I’d signed out the surveillance equipment from the tactical ordnance officer, who handed it over no questions asked. It wasn’t uncommon for officers to pursue their own investigations — some even did freelance PI work, bugging the no-tell motels on Lundy’s Lane, ratting out philandering hubbies to their suspicious wives.

Silas said, “So what do you need?”

“Time, place, price,” I told him. “Most of all, intent. Just talk naturally. The information will come.”

The Niagara Peninsula was clad in sparkling snow. The crescent moon fell upon the iced-over river, its expanse like a polished razor. Silas straddled the skidoo he’d trucked up from the Akwesasne: a tricked-out model with a silenced exhaust that was built to ferry sleds of cigarettes across the Saint Lawrence Seaway. “Should I have a gun?” he wondered.

“Do you foresee any need for one?” I asked.

“It’s Drinkwater,” Silas said simply.

I grabbed the police-issue Mossberg pump-action shotgun from the cruiser. Silas strapped it to the skidoo.

The rusty burr of a motor carried across the night-stilled air, climbing to a keen. Drinkwater was coming. Silas started his own skidoo and gunned the engine.

“Make it short,” I said. “Just the essentials.”

Silas nodded, the trace of consternation never leaving his face. He tore out of the spillway, down the alluvial slope of the riverbank into the river basin, accelerating now, his tail lights flaring bright red — the eyes of some predatory animal — then dimming as he navigated a rim of crested ice.

Duncan and I sequestered ourselves in the cruiser, listening to the microphone feed. At first we heard nothing but the hornet-drone of the skidoo motor and the wind raking the mic.

“Cold as a witch’s tit,” we heard Silas say.

The motor decelerated; there came the tink-tink-tink of metal treads crawling across the ice. From our vantage we could see a brief flare of the tail lights as Silas came to a stop about four hundred yards from shore. The moon cut a rift across the frozen river, glossing the torsional shapes of both skidoos. The crunch of boots on winter snowpack was punctuated by Silas’s ragged exhales.

SILAS: “You okay?”

DRINKWATER: “Why shouldn’t I be?”

“No reason. Look a little troubled, is all.”

“Meeting out on a goddamn winter river — why shouldn’t I be? Cloak-and-dagger shit. But you want something done right, do it yourself. I’d be a damn sight better if you hadn’t gotten your ass handed to you by some over-the-hill pug. Where the hell’d you get those boxing titles? Out of a Cracker Jack box?”

“That guy had stones in his hands. What can I say? Wasn’t my night.”

“Your night?”

“Lemmy, listen — I didn’t come out here to cry over spilt milk.”

Lingering pause.

DRINKWATER: “What’s that?”

SILAS: “What’s what, Lem?”

“That, you goddamn shitbird! That … that!”

A finger of light bloomed on the night river, followed by the report of gunfire.

Dunk and I put boots to snow, racing down the slope, slipping on the ice-slick stones. We found Silas laid out on the ice, staring up at the sky with a serene look on his face.

“He shot me,” he managed. “He saw the shotgun. Police issue, isn’t it?”

I unzipped his parka. The bullet had sheared through his shirt and the meat of his biceps. “Clean through.”

Wincing, Silas said, “So that’s what—good?”

I said, “The bullet’s not stuck inside of you. Didn’t ricochet off your bone, otherwise it would have snapped. Let’s get you back to the cruiser.”

“No way,” Silas told me. “No police, no doctors.”

“You’ve been shot,” said Duncan.

“Thanks for the update. I’ve been grazed, right? I got you all the evidence you need, right?”

I said, “We’ve got him on attempted murder now.”

“So go get him. Another five minutes, that man will be nothing but a vapour trail. You’ll never find him.”

I exchanged a look with Duncan. A profound, impossible worry sparked in his eyes.

“You’ll be okay?” Duncan asked Silas.

“I have people nearby. We Injuns have people everywhere.”

Duncan drove. Silas’s skidoo shot across the river so fast that the speed squeezed tears from my eyes, all of which vaporized before reaching my ears.

Drinkwater’s sled tracks cut south, back towards the States, until the ice began to groan ominously — I spotted a black lapping edge where the river wasn’t yet frozen. Then the tracks cut back north.

The skidoo engine buzzed like honeybees trapped in a tin can. Now Drinkwater’s tracks veered sharply towards the northern shore. I squinted at the banks, dark beneath the pines. No street lamps or bridge lights or car headlights flashed through the trees. The only man-made light came from Clifton Hill: a gauzy bowl of whiteness that was dimming by the second.

Duncan angled his body into a turn, following the line Drinkwater had carved. The night was clean and clear. No snow to cover up the tracks. He was driving too fast, amped up on adrenaline.

“Throttle down, Dunk.”

He drove parallel to the riverbank, bloodhounding Drinkwater’s tracks. They zagged towards the shore as if Drinkwater had been debating whether to enter the woods. Winter-naked trees and snow-draped shrubs blurred into a thick wall of foliage.

At last the tracks rose up an incline into the forest. Why had Drinkwater chosen this entry? Had he heard us coming and panicked? Or was he lying in wait a few hundred yards past the treeline?

I pointed to an orange trail marker spiked atop a rusted pole. “He followed a trail. Hiking path, maybe an old surveyor’s line.”

“You figure he knows where he’s going?”

“He’s done plenty of business on this river.”

Pins and needles shot up my spine. We’d been searching for forty-five minutes. The river snaked eastward, its whiteness dissolving into the remote darkness of the horizon. Moonlight ghosted the trees, shining on their ice-encased branches — but the light didn’t touch the forest floor, which was carpeted in smooth-running shadows. Apart from the hum of the muffler, the silence was enveloping.

I thought about how we forget there are still places on earth where you can move so easily from the safety of known roads to the solitude of nature. If you’re not paying attention, you might not even know you’ve crossed that line.

“Go on,” I said. “He’s running, not waiting.”

“He’s still Drinkwater.”

“You’d rather turn back?”

Dunk opened the throttle, carrying us over the river’s lip and into the woods. Drinkwater’s tracks veered wildly through the snowpack. These trails hadn’t seen use in years. Trees here rose high into the night, oaks and birches nourished by the alluvial silt kicked up from the river. Their trunks were furred with old man’s beard that shone with hoarfrost.

We nosed into a tributary. Skeins of ice shattered under the treads with the sound of busted light bulbs. Drinkwater’s tracks disappeared. Maybe he’d cut further down the inlet?

Duncan switched off the engine. The summer woods were host to many sounds, but in the winter woods, sounds were rare, and those that remained took on a haunting note: the hoot of snowy owls, the green-stick snap of a tree limb under the weight of snow, the booming crack of ice fissuring under tremendous pressure.

Faintly, the whine of a motor — to the north, further down the inlet.

Duncan forded the tributary, which branched eastward, narrowing, hemmed by shaggy spruces. Soft, hand-shaped spruce fronds lapped our shoulders.

We surged into a snowy chute that tapered to a flat expanse. Drinkwater’s tracks cut straight ahead, aiming for the thick forest looming against a scrim of winter sky. Duncan charged full-bore, the muffler’s silencer failing, the motor issuing a band-saw buzz. The night moved as winter nights so often do: in soft crests and eddies, plays of moonlight and starlight. Soon Drinkwater’s tracks bent sharply — so sharply that they seemed to disappear. The snow was abruptly trackless.

I barely sensed the threat.

Years later I’d return to this spot, a steep decline that lay some four hundred yards shy of the forest. It fell sheer, almost twenty feet straight down. It would take me some time to locate, even in daylight. But then, at night, running flat out, it was nearly impossible to see: the snow and shadows made it look as if the land continued on an even plane.

Too late, I sensed the outcropping where the snow crusted in a ragged edge. Dunk squeezed the brake levers instinctively but our momentum was unstoppable. We went over the crest at thirty-five miles per hour. A giddy weightlessness gripped my guts, the kind you feel on a roller coaster the instant before the tracks drop from under you.

The skidoo free-fell, then slammed into a powdery drift. One tread bit, differentials howling, metal shearing apart and spitting off in sharp spears. What I remember of the impact exists in polar flashes. My chin slammed into Duncan’s shoulder, teeth colliding with a brittle snap. My knees popped as I was jolted off, following a broken flight path. With dreamlike clarity I saw Duncan’s chest crush the handlebars; his neck snapped forward, face bashing the hood. His body kicked over the bars and he was sailing free, his arms pinned to his sides like a man kicking furiously towards the water’s surface.

I came to with pain singing down my arm: an aria, the type sung by sopranos with voices capable of shattering crystal stemware.

I lay in a drift. I blinked away the flaming birds that flocked before my eyes, focusing on a pine tree to my left. Had I hit it, my skull would’ve been crushed. Pulling my knees in, I struggled to stand. At this I failed.

I held my arms out. The right was heavy. I let it fall a few inches. A rivulet of blood ran out of my parka sleeve. The pain was duller now, its knife edge gone.

What had happened? I remembered the headlights falling off the cliff, remembered clinging to Duncan tightly, figuring — with that childlike hope that attaches itself to fearful moments — that if I held on to him the way I had as a boy, everything would work out.

“Dunk? Man, you okay?”

Silence. Running the fingers of my left hand over my right arm, I could feel a small surgical incision in the fabric above the elbow. I prodded two fingers through the slit until they met something soft, warm, pulpy. Hinging my arm at the elbow, I felt something stuck in my flesh near the bone.

Shock: this, too, came from far away. I must be in shock. When I pulled my fingers out they were chalk-white to the second joint, after which they turned red.

“Dunk?”

Fear seeped into my chest when this second call went unanswered. I noticed that a fingernail was ripped off my right hand. My phone! Patting my pocket, I felt its comforting shape. But when I dug it out, its face was spidered. The liquid crystal leaked through the cracks like oil.

A fingernail-slice of moon hung over the pines. The only light came where it reflected off veins of quartz in the cliff face: these shone like rivers on a map. The skidoo lay twenty yards off. One tread had shredded off; shards of metal winked in the snow.

That’s when I saw him. Duncan lay thirty-odd feet beyond the wrecked skidoo. His body was heaped near a rocky outcropping. Fear thrummed down my neck.

Be okay — god damn it, you be okay, Dunk.

I staggered around the skidoo and drew near to Duncan. Now I saw that it wasn’t rocks he was sprawled across: it was bare bracken, as black as obsidian. He rolled over, groaning weakly. His face appeared to be covered in molasses. His nose had exploded. The cartilage was shoved off to the right and blood bubbled out of his nostrils.

“Breathe through your mouth,” I said. “Your nose is … bad.”

Duncan must’ve heard me; he quit bubbling. His limbs jutted at the proper angles: no green-sticks or feet facing the wrong direction. His hands were a mess, skin rasped off the remaining knuckles. One of those hands rose instinctively towards my face, moved over my chin, the pits of my eyes. Satisfied, Dunk let it drop back into the bracken.

“Jesus, Owe. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. I didn’t see it either. Your nose …”

“Bad. You said that already.” He pawed at his face and said, “Yeah, it’s bust … it’s been bust worse.”

I had a hard time believing that. “We got lucky. The good Lord watches over drunks, fools and skidooers.”

Duncan rose to his knees, then stopped abruptly, clutching at his chest.

“What’s the matter?”

His fingers crawled over the front of his parka. “I don’t know … That hurt, though.”

I couldn’t recall a time Duncan admitted that anything hurt.

“Can you stand?”

Duncan did. “You said something about your arm?”

“It’s fine for now. Do you have a phone?”

He shook his head. “I was meaning to get one, but …”

We hobbled to the skidoo and hunted through the emergency satchel: two flares, a Leatherman tool, protein bars, duct tape and a medical kit. No phone.

Duncan unzipped his parka. His fingers roamed under his sweater, investigating his chest. “Sorta like heartburn. Worst case ever.”

Starlight reflected off the curved metal jutting from his waistband.

I said, “What’s that? Tucked into your pants.”

His gaze met mine, the momentary quiver in his eyes hardening. He lifted his sweater to show me Bruiser Mahoney’s gun.

“Mind telling me why you’re carrying that?”

“I wasn’t planning to shoot Drinkwater, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“You carry a gun, Diggs, you ought to have a reason.”

“Gee, thanks, pops.”

We stared at each other evenly. The blood on Duncan’s face was freezing to a shiny glaze.

“I’m not asking that you hand it over …”

“But you’d highly recommend it?”

“This is still a police investigation, Diggs.”

Duncan pulled the sweater over the gun and zipped his parka up.

We stripped the skidoo. Duncan detached the oil reservoir and dumped the oil. Next he used the Leatherman to cut the length of rubber hose connecting the air intake to the carburetor, unscrewed the gas cap and slid the hose down. He sucked until his mouth flooded with gasoline, retched, and siphoned gas into the reservoir.

I unscrewed the mounts and tore out the twelve-volt battery, along with a few connecting wires. I slit the nylon straps mooring the shotgun to the frame and pulled it free.

Drinkwater’s tracks were gone. He must have edged his way down west of here, where the incline descended more gently. He’d be miles away by now. Back over the river, maybe, in his truck driving towards some sleepy border crossing.

We weren’t far from the river — fifteen miles, tops. But the incline was too steep to retrace our path. Possibly our best bet was to stay put. If a search helicopter swept past, it might spot our fire — providing we’d retained enough of our Boy Scouts fire-craft skills to build one.

Standing shoulder to shoulder, we peered into the forest. My eyes had become accustomed somewhat, but human eyes were not built for this kind of dark. Here and there I caught — sensed? — sly shiftings and shadings, movement tracing over the rocks and trees. I squinted at the luminescent hands on my watch. It was past 2 a.m. On a typical Friday night I’d be … drunk, probably. Passed out in bed. My warm, soft bed.

I gestured into the heart of the woods. “Got to be something. A road, a logging route, an old trapper’s shack.”

“Something. Sure.”

Duncan hitched the satchel up on his back. I slung the shotgun over my shoulder. We entered the blackness of the woods.

A winter forest is pure whiteness rolled flat. Austere endless white that dissolves every landmark. Imagine trying to find your bearings on the moon.

It’s tough going, especially without snowshoes. Each footstep breaks through the snow crust, miring your boots in the soft powder. Before long the eyelets and uppers are iced over and heavy. Envy of chipmunks and dormice sets in: weightless creatures who skitter across the crust.

Cold radiates from that whiteness, borne on slinking winds that curl under pant-legs and down collars. Coldness wraps around your skull, encasing the brainstem in ice. You get foggy-headed with it, and it dawns on you that all you want to do is sit. Your boots are so heavy it’s like hauling anvils. The snow is soft and inviting. People who freeze to death are often found with faint smiles on their faces: during those last moments they occupy a different geography in their minds. You have to fight the urge to just … sit … down.

We trod lightly, bodies tilted against the wind, carving a path between the poplars. The naked branches knit together, a latticework of angles shielding the winter sky. We were tired and achy but the adrenaline hadn’t yet burned off. A snowy owl watched from a low branch, eyes shining in the ruffled oval of its face. It hooted — a trilling, melancholy note — and took flight, white wing-tips trailing into the darkness.

We’d barely covered a mile before we came across Drinkwater’s skidoo. Its hood had crumpled against a lightning-felled oak, and one ski had snapped off and stuck in the bark. The right tread had sheared off its runner.

I set a gloved hand on the muffler. “Still warm.”

Fifteen feet past the fallen tree we could make out the spot where Drinkwater’s body had hit. There was a dark stain on the snow the size of a dinner plate. I inspected the skidoo’s empty webbing and untied straps, figuring Drinkwater must have scavenged it. Dark coins dotted the snow around the machine. From there, Drinkwater’s footsteps advanced into the woods in a determined line.

I pulled Duncan down behind the skidoo. “He could be out there. He’s got a gun.”

I imagined Drinkwater hunched a hundred yards off, eyeing us down a rifle’s sights. Worse, I pictured Drinkwater bleeding out somewhere in the dark, stubbornly refusing to call for help.

“Lemmy!” Dunk shouted, as if channelling my thoughts. “You all right?”

“Shut it,” I hissed. “What’s the sense of that?”

Duncan didn’t answer. The effort it took to shout doubled him over. “He’s running,” he managed to say through gritted teeth.

“You don’t know that.”

“He’s hurt and he’s running, Owe. He could die out here.”

“We could, too.”

We sat with the possibility until I said, “Twenty years later … Finnegan, begin again.”

Duncan smiled. “Same shit, different day.”

We shared a gravedigger’s laugh. The cold locked around our joints, crimping our nostrils shut with each inhale.

“We should make a fire,” Dunk said.

“He could see us.”

“If he doesn’t make one himself he’ll freeze to death, anyway.”

We cleared a spot next to the skidoo, scraping with our boots until we hit the frozen earth. We snapped twigs off the fallen oak. Duncan doused the heap with gasoline and pulled a flare from the satchel.

“Not that,” I said. “We may need it later.”

I sat the twelve-volt battery on my lap, stripped the plastic coating off two wires and twisted one around the negative coil and the other around the positive coil. When I touched the wire-tips, they glowed. I rubbed them over the kindling pile until a spark caught the gasoline.

We sat on the skidoo seat, hands held to the licking flames. The twigs crackled and glowed, sending up a grey coil of smoke. I thought about how making this fire didn’t have the same life-or-death quality it had when we were kids down to one paper match with the darkness chewing at our backs. But it still felt like a distinctly human act that set us apart from the surrounding wilderness.

I peered across the flames, following Drinkwater’s footsteps into the gloom. Was there a faint flicker out there? A wavering orange dot? It could have been a few hundred yards off, a mile, or a trick of my fatigued mind.

“You think he’s out there?” Dunk asked.

“He’s a survivor. I heard Native boys used to get sent out into the woods for a week, no food, no nothing — a quest, to find their spirit animal. A raven, a wolf, a bear. Once they’d found it, they returned to the tribe and were accepted as warriors. I’m not saying that happens anymore. It’s a survivor culture is all I’m thinking. Hey, what if you found out your spirit animal was a weasel?” I laughed. “What if a worm came to you in your dreams?” Laughing even harder. “I’d lie my ass off. Tell the chief, Oh, yeah, I saw a moose. Big mean bastard.”

Dunk found a shard of clear ice and bit into it as if it was peanut brittle. We both ate a protein bar. We had three guns between us, but no rifle. I wondered if Dunk would try to shoot something with Bruiser Mahoney’s old pistol, just like Mahoney had shot that poor raccoon.

Warmth prickled my skin, bringing the pain roaring back down my arm. It was sharper now, an edge of glass raked across raw bone.

“What’s the matter?”

“This arm … something must be in it.”

“If something’s in there, Owe, we ought to get it out.”

Gingerly, I unzipped my parka. The right side of my shirt was dark and heavy red. Duncan helped me peel it off. My right sleeve was stuck to my wrist with a gummy collar of blood. Duncan used the Leatherman to cut the sleeve near my shoulder. He slit it down my biceps and wrist, and the material fell off my arm like a shed snakeskin.

“It’s deep,” Duncan said, “but clean. Not wide … but yeah, deep.”

“See anything inside?”

“Just a sec … uh.”

“What?”

“Just a glint. I can get it.”

“How?”

Duncan unfolded the Leatherman, brought the prongs of the needlenose pliers together: snick-snick. “Meatball medicine.” He cut a length of canvas rigging off the skidoo and tied it around my arm. With the tourniquet in place he held the pliers over the flame.

“Not too long,” I said. “I don’t want to be cauterized.”

Duncan plunged the pliers into the snow. The hot metal hissed. “Just sterilizing them, man.” He angled the wound into the firelight, debating. “How about I get hold of it and just, uh, wiggle a little?”

“Sounds magical.”

He worked the tip of the pliers into the slit. My arm jerked involuntarily, but Duncan gripped my wrist to keep me steady, nosing the pliers deeper. The coagulated blood at the edges of the cut gave way; fresh blood dripped into the snow. Then the pliers brushed against something hard, too shallow to be bone.

Dunk closed the pliers’ jaws around whatever it was and squeezed them together — then came a sharp click as the pliers slipped off a metallic edge and snapped shut.

“Fffffffffffffffffff—!”

“Sorry,” Dunk said. “Got to get a good grip.” He handed me a thumb-width piece of kindling. “Bite.”

I jammed the stick between my teeth and bit down so hard that my jaw trembled. Duncan wiped away the blood and probed again. The pliers gritted against whatever was embedded in my flesh, a metal-on-metal rasp. The pain was monstrous. My entire skeletal system lit up like a Christmas tree. The stick went snap between my jaws. I spat out the splinters and said, “Just go. Just keep … keep oh oh god keep going.”

Steadying his free hand on my wrist, Dunk pulled carefully. “Got it.”

He held it up to the firelight: a shard of metal in the shape of a diamond — one of the interlocking diamonds that made up a skidoo tread. He dropped it into the fire. The stink of fried blood rose off the coals.

The bleeding slowed to a trickle. Duncan found the med kit, slathered some gauze with Polysporin and told me to poke it as far into the wound as I could bear. He stuck a Band-Aid over the gauze, then wrapped surgical tape around my elbow to keep everything in place.

“Good enough?”

I said, “Yeah, good. Thanks.”

He settled back against the skidoo. His exhales were syrupy and bubbly, as if he was forcing each breath through an inch of pancake batter. I hoped it was just the busted nose, which would make breathing hard. He’d probably swallowed a lot of blood, too. I stared skywards, flakes of snow scrolling above the flames.

I drifted into a half sleep, snapping awake to spot mouselike shapes racing round the edge of the fire’s light, too fast to track. A thicker dark fell around us, airless and isolating. We fed the flames and pulled our collars tight and got used to the phantom movements beyond the fire. I told myself they were nothing but the play of starlight on wind-sculpted snow.

Before dawn those movements coalesced into permanence — a group of shapes all roughly the same size and moving with the same low-slung lope. Thirty yards from the fire, circling clockwise.

“Dunk … hey, Dunk.”

Duncan cracked one eye, followed my pointing finger. Sight wasn’t needed — you could smell them: like wet dogs, only more primal.

I said, “Coyotes.”

One of them let loose a high mocking gibber. This was answered by a series of excited yips.

I rooted a flare out of the satchel and tore the igniting strip. An umbrella of red light draped us both, flecks of molten phosphorus spitting in elegant arcs. We saw them clearly: a pack of coyotes ringing the fire, hackles raised, fur running down their spines on a band-saw edge.

I tossed the flare to scatter the pack. It sailed end over end to land on a patch of black ice behind them.

“Jesus,” Duncan said.

Three timberwolves stood illuminated in the fan of flare-light. Bone-white, almost indistinguishable from the snow. Only their black snouts gave them away. They stood in a casual threesome — the largest wolf standing, the other two hunched on either side. Their legs were shockingly long, strangely thin: a herbivore’s legs, almost, carrying their torsos high off the ground. The biggest wolf opened its mouth — its jaws enormous — and licked its chops.

The coyotes scattered, baying plaintively. I picked up the shotgun. Duncan laid Bruiser’s pistol across his lap. Was there enough wood to last through to daylight? The flare guttered, guttered. The wolves stayed in place, watching.

Dawn took forever to come.

A light snow had fallen overnight. The temperature rose slightly as the sun crawled above the horizon. It remained sub-zero, though, and neither of us was properly outfitted. I wore uninsulated police-issue brogans, the leather cracked along the soles. Amazingly, my knee didn’t hurt that much. Sure, I could feel the pins and screws — fine needles like icy worms knitted with the flesh and bone — but the physical sensation wasn’t that painful. It felt good, almost: a dull throb that drew attention away from sharper pain in other parts of my body.

I’d chosen wool pants — a stroke of luck — but my shirt was now missing its sleeve and there was a rip in my parka where the metal diamond had pierced. Duncan had on warm boots, jeans with a rip in the knee, a heavy sweater and coat. He’d also found a flimsy pair of Magic Gloves in his coat pocket — I pictured his mom stuffing them in there, one of those protective things mothers do.

We set off at daybreak. Blood from Duncan’s broken nose was crusted like rust in the seams of his face. I’d patched my parka with a strip of tape from the medical kit. Duncan hacked the upholstery off the skidoo’s seat with the Leatherman, rolled up the padded material and stuffed it into the satchel.

Drinkwater’s bootprints were faint traces in the snow.

“Follow them?” said Duncan.

“What makes you think he knows where he’s going?”

Duncan shrugged.

“Maybe he’s got a phone.” I said. “He could call someone. A bunch of guys. What if he’s looking for us?”

“Doubt it.”

I held my arms out. “What better place? We’re miles from anywhere. Put us down, one shot in the back of the head. Boom. Easy. The coyotes will eat most of us, the birds will take what’s left. By spring thaw there’ll be nothing to know us by.”

“So what’s your idea?”

I puffed breath into my cupped palms. “Follow his tracks, not him. We’re not after Drinkwater anymore, okay? Let’s just get out of this.”

Before setting off I cut four sheets out of the silver Mylar emergency blanket. I flipped a hot ember out of the fire into each sheet and crimped them into balls, placing two in my coat pockets and giving two to Duncan.

We followed Drinkwater’s bootprints, our hands sunk into our warm pockets, walking directly into the sun as it bathed the snow in a reddish glare. I took the lead, feet sinking deeper into where Drinkwater’s had been. Duncan followed, breathing heavily.

We found Drinkwater’s fire, its embers still flaring with the wind. He’d fashioned a lean-to, the ends of which he’d whittled and slotted flush. He must have draped it with an emergency blanket and hunkered inside — he may have even gotten an hour or two of sleep. It was the campsite of a seasoned outdoorsman, assembled with ease, abandoned quickly.

A frozen pool of blood lay next to the fire. The blood had a matte look, platelets frozen to a dull gloss. I chipped at it with my thumbnail. It wasn’t frozen solid, the way water freezes; it was softer, the consistency of a Fudgsicle. I tweezed a needle out of the blood, attached to a hank of black thread. Had Drinkwater stitched himself up?

“He knows we’re following him,” Dunk said.

“How do you figure?”

He pointed ten yards past the fire. Drinkwater had unzipped and relieved his bladder, scrawling a message in the snow.

F.U.

“He even got the periods in there between the letters,” Duncan marvelled.

The sun climbed a cloudless sky, lacking the wavering edge it held on summer days: looking at it was like staring into a blast furnace through a hole cut in blue Bristol board. Still, it was better to look into the sky or straight ahead. Staring down brought on the oddest vertigo, the snow sizzling like a lake of fire.

Duncan began to cough. He pressed a fist to his chest as it built to a rumbling thunder rolling through his lungs. I could tell he was in serious pain, his face wrenched into a tortured expression — he looked as if a thousand fish hooks were tugging inside his chest. He doubled over, palms braced on his knees. He coughed until tears rolled down his cheeks. When the coughing finally tapered he tried to stand up, but his boots skidded in the snow and he fell to his knees, then forward onto his hands. He spat. A red splotch hit the snow. He tried to cover it up so I wouldn’t see but the blood just churned into the snow, making it pink.

After a while I said, “Need a hand up?”

“If I can’t get up on my own, we’ve got trouble.” He rose unsteadily, and we carried on.

Drinkwater’s tracks cut through the snow on a determined line — looking at them, you’d think they’d been made by a man who knew exactly where he was going, or at least had no fear of what lay ahead. In my mind I imagined an animal travelling on four legs rather than two. Drinkwater’s nose was the black of a dog’s nose. One of his eyes was milky, the result of some past scrap. We were following a cunning old lion — and he knew he was being followed.

The land unfurled in terrifying swathes of arctic whiteness to every point on the compass. My toes had gone numb without my realizing. Idly, I wondered how long it would take for frostbite to set in. I’d seen a TV show about mountain climbers trapped on a cliff during a snowstorm. One of them, a smiling blond Swede, lost eight toes and seven fingers to frostbite. He kept them in a mason jar. The amputated digits were black, as if they’d been spray-painted. The sunny Swede said they’d just snapped off, especially the toes. He’d taken his boot off to find them rolling around in the heel like black licorice jujubes. He was incredibly well adjusted to his loss.

As we walked, I sang old camp songs. It wasn’t wise to announce our whereabouts, but the tunes kept the oppressive silence at bay.

“Land of the silver birch,

home of the weasel,

Where still the mighty moose

wanders at will.

Blue lake and rocky shore,

I will return once more.

Boom diddy-yaa daa, boom diddy-yaa daa,

Boo-hoo-ooo-hooo-oom.”

Duncan said: “Pretty sure it’s ‘Land of the silver birch, home of the beaver.’”

“Really? I like weasel better.”

Drinkwater’s tracks stopped, went forward again, seemed to hesitate (judging from the depth of the imprint), then backtracked fifty yards to veer into a dense thicket. The shrubs were bare where Drinkwater had picked his way through; snow sifted off their limbs. I wondered what had caused him to change course.

The snow ran deep between the shrubs, almost knee high. We hit a natural laneway between the foliage, about two yards wide. There were animal tracks in the snow, roughly the size of a dog’s paw prints. Drinkwater’s bootprints were not as deeply impressed here: for a few steps they were barely visible at all before re-establishing themselves on the far side of the laneway. I stepped forward and—

“Stop!”

Duncan’s hand was hooked in my collar.

“It’s a fox run,” he said. “Silver foxes, probably.”

“So?”

“Don’t move.”

He dug in the satchel for the battery and lobbed it at the faintest of Drinkwater’s bootprints. The trap sprang out of the snow, teeth colliding with a metallic schnik.

Duncan pointed at a ring of dull yellow spray-painted around the trunk of a poplar tree. “A trapper’s marker. Drinkwater must have seen that, found the baited trap, sprung it, reset it, covered it with snow. Then he stepped past the fox run, walked back down his own bootprints — he probably walked backwards, looking over his shoulder to make sure his boots came down exactly where they’d been — then took off one of his boots and made a print in the snow right over the trap.”

I could picture it perfectly: Drinkwater balanced on one leg with his socked foot outstretched.

Duncan said, “Christ, he’s crafty.”

“It didn’t work, you prick!” My voice rose into the icy altar of sky, going out and out. The sound settled into silence — at which point another voice may have come back, a soft, wavering note.

It will — ill — ill — ill …

It was that point in winter where afternoons were non-existent. First there was morning, sun twinkling off the snow. Next came a terminal grey interregnum, after which twilight swiftly fell.

The sun began to set, very red and cold. The twilight was growing teeth by the time we came upon a steep ridge. Our shadows stretched across the snow, outlines liquefying into the dusk. Wind scrawled the ridge’s whitened edge, helixes of snow spiralling. Darkness locked the cold into our bones; the Mylar-wrapped coals in our pockets were long dead. Drinkwater’s footprints picked a cautious path down the ridge. At a depth of twenty yards they, too, softened into the encroaching dusk.

Duncan’s breaths were ragged and phlegmy; he’d been stopping often to hack up blood. Twice in the last hour he’d collapsed, coughing helplessly. Not one familiar signpost had carved itself out of the terrain. I found it remarkable that two men could live nearly their whole lives in one place and still be completely disoriented by the wilderness that surrounded it. A band of fear tightened round my heart.

Clouds scudded the horizon. A snowflake touched the nape of my neck. We didn’t want to be stuck atop this bluff when night came down.

“Lower ground’s better, Dunk. Even if we manage to make a fire up here, it could blow out.”

“Long way down,” Duncan said, his body angled against the wind as it howled up the ridge.

“Not from where I’m looking.”

The decline was clad in shadows, the basin nothing but a grey gulf — it wasn’t a long way down so much as an indeterminate way down. Our heels dug into the ridge. In the summer it’d be treacherous, but now, the rocks encased in ice, it was deadly. Saplings clung to the snow-clad shale. I grabbed one and stumbled back as it tore out of the ground, its roots as flimsy as threads.

Snow fell with sudden aggression, filling in the prints we were desperately following. A rough path presented itself: a series of rocky shelves switchbacking down and down. One misstep would send us tumbling over the edge. We inched down with hesitant stutter-steps. Sheaves of snow threw crystalline lancets at my eyes. I squeezed my eyelids shut and opened them as another gust raced away with my breath. Blood beat hotly at my temples yet I was colder than I could ever recall. It was no surprise to discover frost crystallizing on my face.

Drinkwater’s tracks became two solid rails in the snow. The cold had locked itself so deeply around my brain that it took a while to realize what Drinkwater must’ve done.

“He started crawling, Dunk.”

We got down on all fours, too. Rocks dug into my kneecaps and the butt of the shotgun banged my tailbone. The sky was only slightly lighter than the rocky scrim. Halfway down yet? No, but still far enough to seal the decision. Here and there shrubs protruded from the snow, their branches clad with frozen berries as pretty as Christmas tree ornaments.

We found a rock carved into a recessed pocket with an overhang to keep out the snow. We stopped and huddled inside, bodies pressed tight, legs drawn into our stomachs. Duncan heaved like a sheepdog with a busted septum and we both shivered uncontrollably: the cold had sunk so deep into our chests that we couldn’t stop our teeth from rattling.

My fingers were waxy looking, the swollen skin stretched tight. Cold ulcers. Next came frostbite. The sunny Swede … what had he said happened when a body froze? On TV or in the movies, a body found in a meat locker was usually pasty-white, little icicles dangling from its chin. But in real life the skin would be black, wouldn’t it? Frostbite bursts the surface blood vessels. Your blood freezes black.

“Are you g-good to g-go?” I asked.

Duncan wiped the blood off his lips and nodded.

We set off at a tormented crawl. Full darkness had fallen, which was a relief in its way: as we could no longer see the basin, we weren’t dispirited by how far away it remained. A blade-edged wind tore down the rock face; I curled my hands into fists, plodding like a mule. My equilibrium was shot; half the time it felt like I must be climbing uphill. I stared skywards at a freak meteor shower: thousands of streaks through the air. I blinked. The meteors vanished.

The next time I put a hand down, the earth wasn’t there. The path had hit an unseen edge. I lurched forward with a squawk, outflung arms grabbing for something, anything, closing around a sapling growing at the lip; the sapling stripped through my hand like burning rope, flaying skin. Something clutched at my hips — Duncan’s hand clawing for my belt — but his fingers tore free and I was falling, too startled to scream, shocked that it could happen like this, no chance to say goodbye.

I came to in a deep drift, snow swirling above me like lunar moths in a dark vault. I patted my body down to check if anything was obviously broken or leaking. My fingers were so numb it was hard to tell what, if anything, was wrong. Running my hands over my own body felt no different than running them over the hood of a car.

Duncan elbowed through straggly pines, his face plastered with blood.

“Stay st-still,” he said. “Can you f-feel your feet? W-wiggle your t-toes.”

I almost laughed. For all I knew my feet had snapped off at the heels. Duncan offered his hand. The fact I could stand stunned me. Something may have been ruptured inside but the cold acted as a natural novocaine.

The snow blew nearly sideways, pinging off my skin as if off glass. The eyelashes of Duncan’s left eye were frozen. He wet his fingers with the blood pooling in his mouth and massaged his lashes until they unstuck. Then he pulled the final flare from the satchel, popped it alight.

Had anything been watching from a godlike vantage, hovering miles above, it would’ve seen a wavering ball of red light moving with agonizing slowness through the night. That ball was surely the only light to be seen for many miles.

Trees filled in around us; soon we were sidestepping them, stumbling over buried sticks and branches: should we collect them, build a fire and hunker down? The very idea of shelter was silly — what would we build, an igloo? You couldn’t hide from this cold.

My worldview winnowed to a pinprick of intent: keep … moving … forward. My breath came in shallow gulps but miraculously I’d stopped shivering; a calm had settled into my bones. I felt like sitting down. A cheery, sensibly gruff voice in my head told me to do whatever I felt like.

Take a load off, son. … sit your ragged ass down.

We struck it in unison: a ringing metallic wall. Duncan tripped back as the hollow reverberation trailed into silence, and squinted at the boxy obstacle in our path. Was this it — had we reached the edge of the universe?

My mind was so numb that I couldn’t puzzle out how to get around it, whatever it was. Maybe we would have kept bashing into it like flies into a window had Dunk not given it a half-hearted kick. A sheet of snow dislodged from the underlying metal.

A van. A very old van.

A very old brown van.

Bruiser Mahoney’s old brown van.

We burned the seats first.

The upholstery had been picked at by animals, the stuffing stolen by birds. We tore out what was left in spongy handfuls, hacked the leatherette upholstery with hands now trembling not from the cold but in anticipation. We piled it outside the van’s rear doors, doused it in gasoline and lit it with the flare.

It ignited with a hugely satisfying whoomph. Duncan’s hands were nearly in the fire: neither of us could properly feel the heat. I wanted to cup the fire like water, splash it on my face and up my arms.

By the time my fingertips were prickling with sensation the flames had burned dangerously low. It took the greatest effort to haul ourselves away and scavenge in the van for anything else that would burn.

We hacked ragged Xs into the passenger seat and harvested every scrap of foam. We tossed water-fattened bodybuilding magazines on the guttering fire, laughing like children as the flames devoured the veiny beefcakes.

Duncan tore hunks of radial tire off rusted rims: they peeled in long curls like monstrous black fingernails. They hit the flames and smouldered, sending up a noxious stink. I found the emergency spare under the bench seat and heaved that on, too.

The temperature inched upwards. Our faces were swollen and windburnt. Cold blisters burst on my fingers and oozed down my palms. My mind started to tick again, but the flames were already dipping. I crawled to the front of the van and tore the stuffing out of the driver’s seat. A small wooden box hidden within the seat coils fell to the floor. Curious, I dumped the box’s contents — ancient vials filled with piss-yellow liquid and a reusable syringe — then returned to the fire. The box was made of cheap presswood; the flames devoured it greedily.

I crawled under the van and found a log big enough to burn through the night. Once its icy encasement melted, the fire crept along the wood with grasping orange fingers.

Duncan lay with his legs dangling over the bumper. His hitching, shallow breaths sounded a lot like hiccups. He looked helpless, a fish asphyxiating to death on the beach.

“It’s your lungs,” I said. “Blood in them. Can I take a look?”

Dunk gave a vague shrug. I unzipped his parka, rucked his sweater up. His chest was nearly black from nipple to nipple, the skin tight-swollen. There was a horrible dent on the heart side of his chest near his abdominals.

“Broken rib … punched into your lung? Jesus, Dunk. How did you make it this far?”

Duncan closed his eyes. Blood dripped out the side of his mouth. If we couldn’t get the blood out of his lungs, he’d choke to death on it.

I crawled to the front of the van, searching for the contents of that wooden box. I found the vials first. Their labels were faded, but one I could make out: Testosterone ethanate. The other read: Equipoise. Bruiser’s travelling ’roids case? I rooted under the seat until my hand closed on the syringe. Old, Victorian-looking; I envisioned genteel addicts in deerstalker hats funnelling opium into their veins with the thing.

It could be done: slide a needle into Dunk’s lungs, drain the blood. The needle looked up to the task: long, with a wide gauge. A hog-sticker. The tip didn’t look especially sharp. Would it pierce the chest plate? Was there an actual plate of bone behind the rib cage, or just durable cartilage? The needle could pierce cartilage, surely. But I’d have to drive it hard into Duncan’s chest.

A foolproof plan? Hardly. The needle could break. There was that. Or not quite reach his lungs. Or Dunk’s blood might be too coagulated to flow, and it would be like sucking wet sand through a cocktail straw. Those problems didn’t seem important when I considered that Dunk would surely die if I did nothing at all.

“I could try to drain the blood.”

Duncan cracked one eye and saw the needle. “With that?”

I nodded. “I’ve seen it done.”

“Where?”

“Can I be straight with you? I saw it in a movie.”

Duncan smiled. Blood shone on his teeth. “Which one?”

“Don’t remember. It had Mark Wahlberg in it.”

“Marky Mark?”

“I don’t even know if it’ll work, Dunk. Plus I guess it could snap. Infection’s a possibility — who knows what Mahoney used this thing for. Worst-case scenario is, you end up with a needle sticking out of your chest.”

Duncan shook his head. “W-worst-case scenario is …”

“We know the worst-case scenario, don’t we?”

Dunk let his eye slip closed. “So try.”

I dipped the needle in gasoline, shook off the excess and held it to the flames. A tongue of fire lapped the metal. I held it until the heat blistered my fingertips, then doused it in the snow.

I screwed the needle back onto the hull, debating. Ultimately I elected to straddle Duncan’s hips so I could bear down with my full weight. Running my fingers across his chest, I hunted for the separation between his ribs. The skin was too swollen to make it a certainty. I found the spot where Duncan’s heartbeat was strongest; I guess I’d aim someplace to the right of that? Couldn’t push too hard — if the needle hit bone and snapped, there went our chance. I’d have to slide it in real nice and slow.

“Ready?”

“Go.”

I positioned the needle on the perimeter of blackened skin. Shoulders hunched, I bore down with even pressure. Duncan’s skin dimpled slightly before the tip pierced; he grunted as the needle slid through layers of tissue into pectoral muscle. It hit an unflexing hardness. Bone? I let go of the needle, left it jutting from Duncan’s chest. I felt my own chest. My ribs were closer to the surface, I was sure of it — I must’ve hit Duncan’s chest plate.

I gripped the hull again and pushed. The cartilage buckled like a sheet of plastic. A burbling noise came out of Duncan like a sewer backing up. A bubble of blood formed between his lips, bursting wetly. My arms flexed. My elbow wound tore open, and blood streamed down my forearm.

The noise the needle made punching through Dunk’s chest plate would have been familiar to any schoolchild: a three-hole punch crunching through a sheaf of construction paper. The shaft sank into the softness of Duncan’s lungs. Blood geysered out.

Dunk inhaled a huge lungful, then his breathing rapidly settled into a normal rhythm. After the initial eruption the blood settled to a steady trickle that ran down and around his hip bones. We lay together listening to his lungs drain.

“Turn on your side,” I said. “That could help.”

In time he sat up. Blood lay dark on his chest. It had soaked into his jeans, and it dribbled out of the syringe like a drippy faucet. He unscrewed the glass hull so just the needle protruded from his chest.

We sat with our legs dangling off the bumper, feet kicking as if we were kids perched on a railing. The wind had tailed off now, and the snow fell in big soft flakes.

A wolf sat beyond the firelight, nearly invisible in the snow. In the night stillness I heard it breathing, smelled the gamy oil of its coat.

“Go on,” I said. “Scat. Skedaddle.”

The wolf stayed, but I didn’t mind. It wasn’t aggressive — just curiously opportunistic, like any wild animal.

“Tell me a story,” Dunk said.

“What?”

“The last time we were out here — remember? The … the dogs living on that giant meatball. Or the one about the man who lives behind the Falls.”

I could barely remember telling those tales. “I haven’t told a story in years.”

I found two Coke cans, cut the tops off, packed them with snow and set them near the embers. Once the snow had melted I handed one to Duncan. The water was icy-cold, clean and sweet. We drank, burped, repacked the cans.

Duncan said, “I have a story.”

“Yeah?”

“Well, not so much a story as this dream I’d have in prison. It always started at the end. Ed would be standing there and I’d be going away from her … being pulled, more like. And I’d say, ‘I’m coming back. To you, to everyone — Mom, Dad, Owe, everyone. I’m not gone long. This is just the wandering time.’” His expression was perplexed. “The wandering time? And Ed, she’s not upset or angry. All she says is, ‘I won’t be here when you get back.’ Which crushes the hell out of me, y’know? And what I say is: ‘I’ll find you.’ After that it’s nothing … it’s whiteness. Ongoing white, like out there.” He pointed into the snow. “And I’m gone in it, right? For how long I really can’t say. I wake up staring through white, like someone has poured milk on my eyes. But I always think I’m almost back where I belong. Just before I wake, I believe I’m almost out of the white.”

The first edge of dawn broke along the bottom of the eastern sky and the wind picked up out of the trees.

We’d dozed fitfully. In the witching hour something settled softly upon the roof. It bore a musty smell, like hay in a barn. I stared up at it through the heavy grey. A metallic scriiiitch. A trio of dark sickles — talons, I realized, likely belonging to an owl — hooked through rust holes in the roof. Perhaps this was something this particular owl did often — a nightly observance? It took flight again, its heavy wing-beat carrying over the night’s tranquility.

There is a silence particular to the wilderness at dawn: every creature still sleeping, the earth resting, too. The rising sun reflected off the fresh-fallen snow, postcard-pretty. I sat on the bumper, staring bleary-eyed across the grey light of the clearing. The wolves were gone. My feet were swollen inside my brogans.

I pulled the shoes off, wincing. My socks were tacky and crusted — they appeared to be fused to my feet. I rolled the left one down to my ankle, noting how the skin beneath was fish-belly pale. Then I gritted my teeth and peeled it all the way off.

The sock made a gluey sound, like a strip of ancient duct tape coming off cheap upholstery. Translucent webs of fluid pulled away from the pink blister on my heel; it was as big around as the mouth of a teacup, peeled down through several layers of skin, edges curled up like the caldera of a volcano. A puck of milky skin was stuck to the inside of my sock. There was another deep blister on the pad of my foot, but the worst were my toes. The skin over the phalanges was an ulcerated, shiny red; higher up, the flesh had sloughed away to disclose my nail beds. The skin near the tips had a crystallized, wooden look, like a slab of steak forgotten in a deep-freeze. The end of each toe was black — not blood-blister black, but a terrifying withered black that indicated the flesh was past the point of regenerating.

Four toenails had fallen off. I touched the one that remained on my big toe. The nail sank into the flesh. A substance resembling blood-strung Vaseline oozed around the nail, which slid easily out of its bed — no less shocking than if I’d reached into my mouth and effortlessly pulled a tooth out. I brought the toenail to eye level, stuck to my fingertip, studying it with horrified wonder.

“Don’t bother looking at the other foot,” said Duncan, propped up on his elbow.

After shaking the toenails out, I put the sock back on, which was far more painful than pulling it off. Duncan cut vents in the sides of my brogans so I could slip my swollen foot inside. He cut swathes from the skidoo upholstery and lashed them round my shoes with duct tape. When he was done my feet looked as if they’d been dipped in pewter.

“You look cheery,” I said.

“I feel a hell of a lot better. Sure, it’s weird — a spike of metal skewering me like a moth on a pin, but I can breathe almost full.”

“Should we risk it?” I said. “We could stay here, keep the fire going. We’ve got all day to gather wood. You have to assume someone’s looking for us by now, right? A search helicopter’s sure to spot the smoke.”

“What about food?”

“We might be able to kill something. Anyway, I heard a body can go awhile without food. A week at least.”

Duncan didn’t disagree in words. He simply packed up our meagre supplies and crossed beyond the guttering fire.

“It can’t be that way,” he said, pointing towards the steep incline we’d crawled down the night before. “And it can’t be anywhere that way, either,” he said, gesturing to where the van’s hood was pointing. Eventually he pointed east, where the whitened crest of escarpment merged into the cloud-strung horizon. “That way.”

“Okay, Dunk. But how far?”

“Four hours? Six? We can make it out before night falls.”

“You’re sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Such confidence! You’re an odd one, Duncan Diggs.”

“Odd as a cod, Owen Stuckey.”

We set off through the morning silence, boots crunching through the hardpack. The wind pushed gently at our backs. Our bodies were damaged, but the pain was manageable. We walked for half an hour before stumbling upon Drinkwater’s bivouac.

At some point in the night, with darkness falling and the snow swirling, he’d found a huge oak snapped in half. Its insides had been eaten away by termites and dry rot, leaving a hollowed-out bowl. The wood inside the bowl was scorched in spots. We sniffed the mingled smells of charcoal and urine.

“He … he slept in here?” Dunk said. “Holy shit.”

I doubted Drinkwater had slept. He’d probably scooped out the snow, hunkered down and capped himself in. He’d waited out the storm inside a tree trunk. He must be carrying a butane torch; he’d obviously set fire to the termite-softened wood.

“Look at this,” Dunk said.

A firepit lay ten feet from the tree, its coals still warm. A gutted carcass lay nearby. The smell gave it away.

Duncan said, “You ever hear the phrase ‘I’m so hungry I could eat a skunk’s asshole’? Drinkwater actually did.”

One of the skunk’s back legs was snapped and gored. Had Drinkwater found it in the fox trap he’d set for us? If so, that meant he’d carried it around for hours, trudging through the snow with a dead skunk strapped to his back.

Drinkwater’s tracks set off in a direction opposite to where we were headed. I considered: Drinkwater was exhausted, cold, probably injured. Depending on the freshness of that skunk, he might have food poisoning. Was he delirious? Did he even want to escape the woods? Maybe he wanted us to follow him like dogs chasing a coyote, running us in maddening circles. Was he happy enough to die if it meant killing us, too?

“We stick to our line,” I said.

The sun charted a course behind banks of iron-grey clouds. Though not especially bright, the day was unseasonably warm. The snow lost its glitter and took on a gleaming quality: long bands of light ran across its surface the way light fills the slack water between ocean waves. A booming crack rolled across the earth as dead timber split under a weight of heavy snow. A low pattering filled the air as clumps melted and dripped off branches.

I craned my ear over that pattering, searching for the thucka-thucka of helicopter blades. I desperately wanted to believe a search party had been dispatched. At the very least, surely Silas Garrow would have wondered about us by now? Or Dunk’s parents, when he hadn’t come home?

Quicksilver shapes fled along the periphery of my vision. At first I figured they were chimeras born of sleeplessness and frayed nerves, but I focused and saw the wolves were back. Had they ever left? Loping a few hundred yards to either side — the two smaller ones, probably females, on the left, the big male on the right. Ghost wolves, I thought.

We reached a meandering creek. The snow had melted along its banks to expose dark brown mud. I wondered if it was the same stretch of water where Dunk had held a thrashing mudpuppy in his palm years ago. We navigated the frozen creek bed, boots whispering over the ice. I scanned for signs of human intervention: fence posts, trail markers, a moonshiner’s still. Nothing. Even the rusted pop cans and plastic bags — tumbleweeds of the modern world — were buried under the snow.

As the day entered afternoon, a rifle crack carried out of the woods. Both of us ducked instinctively, but my heart leapt. Could it be a hunter or trapper who knew how to get to a road? Next a hollow scream rose above the trees. It wasn’t a human scream but the sound of a creature dying in agony or fear.

“What the hell was that?” Duncan said.

This was followed by a wild sobbing howl: a sound made by a human, yes, although the voice box must’ve been nearly torn apart from the strain. The howl fled into the icy sky, climbing steadily before dropping, only to climb again: the vocal equivalent of an air-raid whoop. It was the howl of a madman, and it belonged to Drinkwater.

“You figure he’s following us now?” I said.

“Could be.”

A gassy, fetid stink rose out of the earth. The ice took on a sickly yellow tinge. Duncan put his foot down. The ice cracked; water surged through glassy fissures. It was the hue of an alcoholic’s piss with webs of blackly rotted matter suspended within it. My mind made a terrifying leap: could this be the same miserable grey muskeg we’d walked through as kids, the one that sucked the sneakers off our feet?

There are plenty of muskegs out here, I told myself. It’s low country. Water collects at the bottom of the escarpment.

And I believed this, at least partially. That is the greatest trick of survival: making yourself believe the best-case scenario. It was when you started to believe the worst-case scenario that you were doomed. I breathed shallowly, trying not to vomit. The stink rising off the ice was nauseating. I couldn’t afford to lose whatever precious nutrients remained in my stomach.

“Hold up a minute,” I said, leaning heavily on a tree. My gorge throbbed against my Adam’s apple. The tree snapped, and I clutched desperately at the rotted trunk as I fell, splinters driving under my fingernails. My knees hit the ice, which spiderwebbed under my kneecaps. Rancid water seeped through to soak my trousers. A gas pocket ruptured, bubbles popping lazily through the ice. The stink was indescribable. Black dots swam before my eyes. I vomited helplessly into my mouth. It took every ounce of self-control to breathe deeply through my nose and swallow it.

“You okay?” Duncan asked.

Dark slivers lay under my fingernails. My knees were soaked with reeking water. I’d thrown up and swallowed stomach acid.

“Let’s just go.”

We left the muskeg and its sad shattered trees. The sunlight was fading and the snow took on a granular, slate hue. The chill crawled back into our bones.

The outline of a radio tower carved against the horizon. We progressed towards its lacework of man-made angles. Maybe it’d have a telephone or at least an emergency switch to pull … but no. It was only criss-crossed metal escalating to a cell-phone dish. Why would it have an emergency phone?

I slumped at the base of the tower, racked with an exhaustion that was almost comical. Maybe Duncan could roll me up like an old carpet and carry me over his shoulder.

“We could chuck rocks at the dish,” I said at last. “Maybe there’s a sensor that trips an alarm when it’s wrecked.”

The dish was over a hundred feet up. Could either of us heave a rock even halfway? Duncan hacked wetly; blood burped out of the needle. “Come on, Owe,” he said.

I barely heard him. I was thinking about the plastic vent on the side of my childhood house, the one that connected to the clothes dryer. In the winter, I’d come home after tobogganing and see white plumes coming from the vent. Crouching beside it, I’d rub my hands in the warm air. It smelled the way my mother did in dreams: of fabric softener and dryer sheets. The basement window sat next to the vent. One time I’d seen Mom hiding Christmas presents above the heating ducts, something that had made me sad: I hadn’t believed in Santa — Bovine had spilled the beans about the jolly fat man on the playground, ruining everything — but still, I wanted to believe.

“Get up,” Duncan said roughly. “We got to keep going.”

“In a minute.”

“No minute, man. Now.”

“Jesus Christ, Dunk.” I hated the timorous, whiny sound of my voice. It reminded me of when we were younger, how I’d always buckle to Duncan’s subtle commands. “I’m not fucking ready, okay?”

“If we don’t keep moving we’re going to seize up. Do you want to make it out of here today or not?”

“Where the hell are we? You said we’d be out of here in a few hours.”

“I said four, maybe five.”

“You see that swamp? Pretty sure it’s the same one we dragged our asses through as kids! Weren’t you thinking the same thing?”

“It could be a different one.”

“Oh bullshit, man. Bullshit. Look, I’m not putting this on you—”

“Really? ’Cause it’s sorta sounding that way.”

I stood. If this was going to happen, I needed to be squared up, looking my old pal full in the eye.

“I’m not putting this specifically on you,” I said. “The decision to leave the van, I mean. If we’re miles from safety — and yeah, I think we are — well, hey, that’s on me, too. I made that decision with you. But the fact that we’re here in the first place …”

“What are you saying?”

“Don’t give me the fucking thickhead routine, Dunk. I’ve sweated out smarter guys than you. I’m saying this whole thing with Drinkwater. This vendetta you’ve got against him.”

“I’m sorry? Weren’t you raging about having to bury his dog?”

“I want him, yeah. But you’ll chase him to Siberia.”

Duncan held his hands out as if presenting me with a fragile gift. “Don’t I have good reason, Owe? Eight years, man. I’m not saying I didn’t deserve it. And this whole thing — you helped set it up!” He fixed me with a baffled, pleading expression. “How is this not both of us?”

“Because it wasn’t both of us, was it?” I said, my eyes feeling hard as stones. “Never has been. You make it out like there’s some kind of equality between us. Maybe you even halfway believe it. But the order’s always been pretty clear: first you, then me.”

I knew I was charting dark territory here — old resentments burbling up. “What was your big idea, Dunk? Hop on the skidoo, chase Drinkwater down and what, drag him back to the sheriff? We fly off into the night, driven by your all-consuming need for … for what? Justice?”

Duncan ran his hand through hair that was oily-slick, matted with the residue of burnt radial tires. “Just … fairness, man. That’s it.”

“Fairness? Oh, for fuck’s sake. Fairness? What world do you live in? Doesn’t the situation we’re in right now — doesn’t the sum total of your life—hasn’t it taught you that there’s no such thing? Fairness and luck are for other people, man.”

“You’re wrong, Owe. I’ve been very lucky in my life.”

I could only stare at him, gape-jawed. “Oh, really?”

“Not as lucky as some, but … we got lucky the last time we were out here, didn’t we? We’ll get out this time, too.”

“And that’s just it, isn’t it?” A terrible calm settled over me. “You’re always just so … so fucking sure of yourself.”

Duncan said, “You didn’t have to come, man. You could’ve stayed put. I wouldn’t have blamed you. So why come?”

My pulse beat in every broken inch of me. This was the deepest part, wasn’t it? The part I could hardly bring myself to contemplate, let alone voice.

“Maybe because of … I don’t know, my anger at you all these years, that I thought was buried … Maybe I let you hang yourself that night on the river.” It was my turn to hold my hands out, a wretched, out-of-place smile on my face. “I can’t say for sure, Dunk. I mean, how well do any of us know ourselves? You paint a picture of the man you hope you are and pray that circumstances never challenge it. And I mean, if I did, if I let you walk right into it and did nothing … what does that make me? You’re my best friend.”

“It wasn’t on you,” Duncan said after a long pause. “Over the years I thought about it and I followed it back, too. You gave me fair warning. You painted the picture. I just didn’t see it, or didn’t want to.”

“If your friend’s got his neck in a noose, you don’t kick the chair from under his feet.”

“I kicked it myself.”

Suddenly I was flooded with immense gratitude. I wanted to reach out and touch Dunk’s face. But it was impossible — impossible now to find the effortless touch of our twelve-year-old selves who’d slept with our bodies pressed tightly together, spooning like young lovers, perhaps on this very spot.

“Want to know what I was thinking about?” I said. “The dryer vent at my old house. I used to crouch beside it on winter nights. It was warm, smelled nice. This one time I saw my father smoking in the basement. He’d promised Mom he’d quit, right? He smoked with quick little puffs, waving madly at the smoke, then dropped the butt down the flood drain. It was strange seeing him so worried, so rabbity. It was my dad, y’know? The toughest man in my little universe. But now every time I see him he looks older, frailer.

“There’ll come a day when he slips in the shower and won’t be able to get up. He’ll be ninety, I hope to God, but it’ll happen. And it will shock me, because I’ll remember him in times when he was so strong. And all that strength will be gone, and he’ll probably be angry and confused about it. So I’ll need to be there for him. I owe him that. Mom, too. I’ve got to be there to pick them up when they’re too weak to do it themselves, like they did for me all those years ago when I fell on my butt as a baby.”

I shouldered the shotgun. “We’ve got to get ourselves out of this, you get me?”

“I get you,” Dunk said.

The daylight held out longer that evening. The sky was low with a hazy sheen, the sun buoyed by heavy clouds. It hung above the horizon, a diffuse orange ball, edging the trees with a persistent mellow light. Every so often a noise bubbled up from behind us: the stealthy crack of a stick or a distant crazed holler. Drinkwater was back there somewhere, tracking us.

Just before dusk the heavy throb of helicopter blades washed over the landscape. The sound swelled, swelled … then steadily receded. It was probably the sightseeing helicopter that lifted off from the roof of the downtown Hilton; the Falls were especially beautiful at dusk, although I’d never seen them from the air.

The forest thickened. The land sloped upwards and narrowed to a natural bridge of sorts, thirty yards wide. The trees below were thin and bone-white, the tusks of enormous buried mammoths. We charted the incline and came upon a massive deadfall: a fallen oak with the smaller tusklike trees piled over and around it. The oak had fallen directly across the path; the rock drew steeply down on either side into a forest of those bony trees; if we fell, chances were we’d impale ourselves on them.

Small saplings grew out of the oak. It was a nurse tree: as it rotted, it provided nourishment for smaller trees. But it was a poor nurse: the tusks grew up from the dead oak only to topple over, dead. Their limbs lay at splintered angles, making the deadfall all but impassable.

Duncan said, “Turn back?”

I chided him. “You of all people.”

Duncan clambered onto the oak. The bark collapsed under his boot and his leg punched into the rotted tree. He clutched his chest. I wondered if the impact had jarred the needle loose. He pulled his leg out, brushed petrified wood off his thigh and peered into the hole. “Huh. Could be easier to just go through.”

A solid few kicks broke a hole. The insides were hollow, wood pulp glittery with frost. I pushed my shoulders inside the tree, inhaling a fusty sawmill smell. Chains of fibrous wood hung down, clung with insect chrysalises that looked like translucent seeds; it felt like being inside a pumpkin. My skull brushed those fibrous chains; a few snapped and fell down my neck, cold as icicles. I reminded myself it’d be far worse in the summer, the tree alive with squirming insects. I pushed at the far side of the dead tree. My palm broke through with ease. I cracked the bark away in jigsaw sections, opening a hole big enough to crawl through.

Dunk spied an overhang to our left, carved into the base of a steep cliff that spilled into an alluvial floodplain. There was room under the rocky shelf for both of us.

We gathered wood from the deadfall and kindled a fire with the last drops of gasoline, sitting on the stony wash as night rolled in. Dunk’s face had a loose, distant quality born of physical exhaustion and mental fatigue. I’m sure my face looked much the same.

“A village once sat at the high side of the Falls,” I said, beginning the story I’d been thinking about all day. “Did you know that?”

Duncan smiled wanly. “I did not.”

“Centuries ago, okay? An unknown plague struck the village. At night, the graveyard was dug up and the bodies devoured — no, not devoured but sucked dry. The villagefolk—”

“Villagefolk,” Duncan said dreamily, rolling the word around in his mouth like hard candy. “I like that.”

“Yeah, so they believed something evil must live in the caves under the Falls. It must creep up the cliffs while they slept to feed on the dead. So they loaded up a canoe with succulent fruits and sailed it over the Falls. But the next night the graves were cracked open again, bones strewn across the ground. The village elders decided to send a virgin over the Falls.”

“Those elders always figure a virgin will do the trick, don’t they?”

“So they grab this poor girl and plunk her in a canoe. But once she’s sailed over the Falls the elders get a bit of buyer’s remorse. They go to the best warrior in the village and say, ‘Hey man, will you go down and get her?’ And he gives them a long look and says, ‘Nah, fuck it.’”

“Really?” Duncan said. “Nah, fuck it?”

“I’m paraphrasing, but yeah, that’s the gist. But the youngest warrior, he’s always had a crush on the sacrificial maiden. He volunteers to go. The elders shrug and say, ‘Fill your boots, kid.’ So he clambers down the cliffs and finds a seam in the rock leading behind the Falls. It’s dark in there. He hears the trickle of water on rock. And just underneath that trickle is another sound, soft — a whimper.

“The young warrior creeps into a honeycombed cave under the Falls and he sees … it. His heart quivers. It’s huge. It’s revolting. It’s … a spider. The virgin is cradled in its eight furry legs, each as big as a fence post. Its fangs are dark elephant tusks. Its eyes are black boiled eggs, hundreds of them crammed into the nightmare of its face.”

“Oh, jeez. That’s so gross.”

“What could the young warrior do? A buffalo he could handle. A bear, even a moose. But this? He has to out-think it. So he backtracks out of the cave. He sees the spider’s tracks going up the Falls — strands of gossamer as thick around as ropes swung from the rock face. He notices the spider’s path scrupulously avoided the water. Is it scared of water?”

“Then why’s it living under the Falls?”

“Maybe,” I said, fixing Duncan with a sidelong look, “the spider was born there. Maybe it doesn’t know any better. Or maybe it was rent-controlled and he was a penny-pinching, miser spider. Fact is, this particular spider didn’t care for water.”

“Ah.”

“The warrior gathers strands of sticky gossamer and lashes them to an outcropping above the spider’s exit hole, high enough that he’d have to jump to reach them. The rocks around the exit he coats with bear grease to make them slippery … except he leaves a few patches dry. Then he creeps back into the cave and yells, ‘Hey, bug!’”

“Is that so?”

“It is so. Spiders hate being called bugs seeing as, technically, they are not. The spider flings the maiden aside and pursues the warrior. They scramble up the cave, the warrior a mere half-step ahead. Venom drips from the spider’s fangs. A drop strikes the warrior’s skin and burns painfully.

“He races out of the cave, steps nimbly on the ungreased rocks and leaps, grabbing a gossamer rope. The spider races out over the cliff, slips and falls. It hits the bottom of the Falls with a splash. The young warrior returns to the cave and finds the maiden. They marry — such was the custom at the time — and have many children.”

“What happened to the spider? Did it drown or what?”

“Probably. Let’s assume so.”

“What do you mean, probably?”

“You’re never satisfied, are you? Every ‘i’ needs to be dotted.”

“That’s right.”

“Fine … know what? The spider was fine. It floated down the river and found another village and sucked everybody dry as a bone. Then it laid eggs in their mummified skulls, which hatched into a brood of huge pissed-off super-spiders who laid siege to the land. Many, many innocents were senselessly slaughtered. An epic bloodbath.”

“Jesus, Owe!”

“Next time don’t ask.”

“How smooth is the language of the whites,” a new voice said, “when they can make right look like wrong and wrong like right.”

We reached for our weapons.

A guttural, mocking laugh creased the air. “I could’ve shot you both if that had been my aim.”

A sickle of light bloomed on the far side of the deadfall. Drinkwater’s face hovered in a flashlight’s beam. Stubble glittered in the sunken pockets of his cheeks and dark matter was caked around his mouth. His eyes were deep holes in his face.

I said, “Why follow us?”

“Why not? You’ve been following me. Turnabout is fair play.”

“You tried to kill us.”

“When?” Drinkwater said, confused.

“The trap.”

“The what?”

“The fox trap. Remember?”

Drinkwater waved his hand. “Kill? You were hunting me like a dog. Dogs bite when they’re pursued, don’t they? Nothing evil to that.”

Duncan came around the fire until he was facing Drinkwater.

“You have a gun?”

Drinkwater nodded. “You, too?”

Duncan nodded. “Are you cold?”

The flashlight beam shifted, providing a momentary glimpse of Drinkwater’s eyes. Bloodshot, jittery. Those eyes painted a picture of a man barely holding on to his life and sanity.

“My butane torch ran out,” he said, “and the dark … the dark is hungry.”

Duncan pulled a burning stick from the fire. I watched, not saying anything, as he handed it through the deadfall. Drinkwater’s face registered pathetic gratefulness. He lit a small fire. Soon there arose the smell of cooking meat.

“Want any?” Drinkwater asked.

“No,” we said in unison, thinking about the skunk.

We listened as Drinkwater tore into leathery meat. Almost immediately afterwards came the sound of agonized heaving, followed by the stink of bile.

“Can’t keep it down,” Drinkwater said. “Full of worms. First the meat, now me.”

All three of us sat in silence for a while, laying our grievances aside for tonight.

Finally Drinkwater said, “I have a story. A traditional tale my father used to tell.”

“Knock yourself out,” Dunk said.

“Once there were two brothers. Wolf, the elder, and Horse, the younger. Wolf was married to an evil woman. A real bitch! She lusted for Horse and wanted to see the younger brother ruined. She made seductive advances towards Horse, who always told her to bugger off out of love for his brother.

“One day Wolf came home and found his wife’s clothing ripped and her hair in a tangle. The salmon-jawed witch told him Horse tried to have his way with her. Wolf was livid and sickened to hear it. But Wolf was also a snake — he resolved to kill his brother by stealth.” Drinkwater paused. “You two ever fight over a woman?”

Duncan hesitated before saying, “No.”

“Huh. You sure?”

“Why do you care?”

“No reason. Anyway, every summer the waterfowl would moult. They left feathers on the surface of the lake Wolf lived beside. The two brothers got into a buffalo-hide boat and paddled to an island in the middle of the lake to collect feathers to fashion fletching for their arrows. That summer, while Horse gathered feathers, Wolf paddled away, leaving his brother to die alone on the island.

“The lake was deep, prone to sudden storms. Flight from the island was impossible. Deeply hurt, Horse looked into the water and began to cry. He prayed to the nature spirits for help. He called on the Moon and Planets to vindicate him. Along came a friendly Beaver. Beaver said, ‘Why the long face?’ Hah!” Drinkwater slapped his knee. “Get it? When Horse told Beaver his sad tale, Beaver was outraged. He invited Horse to live in his dam. They lived happily together through the winter and spring.

“In the summer Wolf returned, expecting to find his brother’s bones. While Wolf was looking around, Horse crept down the shore, stole his boat and paddled off. Wolf grovelled, ‘Come back, bro! A misunderstanding!’ But Horse smelled his brother’s bullshit a mile away. When Wolf’s wife saw the boat returning with Horse in it she fled into the forest, never to be seen again. The end.”

Duncan said, “Kind of anticlimactic, Lem.”

“A traditional Native tale,” Drinkwater said stiffly. “We don’t give a fuck about your Hollywood endings.”

After a while I said, “You know we’re going to take you in, Drinkwater. You may have killed a man.”

“Just one? Can’t you let me off with a warning?”

“It’s all over, Lem.”

Drinkwater’s laughter held a wavering edge of spite. “Okay, mistuh officer. Whateva you say, mistuh officer.”

Duncan said, “Good night, Lem.”

Drinkwater spoke no more. We tended our fires, sleeping a little but none very well.

I rose with the drowsy half-light of dawn. The sun hummed against the horizon while the moon hung in its western altar like the last melancholy guest at a dinner party, too lonely to leave.

Varied parts of my body cracked, popped or crunched as I shuffled past the fire’s embers. My skin was rubbed raw around my waist, which had shrunk significantly over the past two days. The ultimate diet plan, I thought grimly.

Drinkwater lay on the other side of the deadfall, curled in fetal position. The heel was broken off one of his cowboy boots, his coat was torn and bloodstained, his hair crowned his head in a messy bird’s nest. I caught a smell, rank and rotten, and figured it was him — though who knew? Could have been me. All three of us were filthy and sick.

I walked a little way into the bush and unzipped. The morning was warm, even springlike. I squinted across the clearing as I unburdened my bladder, a small pleasure. The purple stole out of the sky as noiselessly as it had set in the night before. As my urine splashed the snow I scanned to my right and saw a deer standing fifteen yards away.

A doe. Her head was cocked at an inquisitive angle, her expression one of two that deer always wore: blithe or shit-scared. She seemed supremely unconcerned — why shouldn’t she be, facing this human shipwreck in a tattered parka? Yet I felt the weight of my pistol in its holster and realized: I was dangerous.

Its eyes were the colour of a wet branch, its ears pricked up to the breeze stirring through the trees. Suddenly, the doe’s ears pinned back. Her hind end went down and she sprang across the clearing with gangling pogo-stick strides.

The wolf passed by so close that I smelled the adrenal stink of it and saw the dark tufts of fur on its pistoning shoulders. It was the biggest one, the male. It dropped into a running stance that reminded me for a moment of Dolly. But the wolf ran with predatory zeal, covering the snow in reckless lunges that lacked a greyhound’s grace.

There were flashes of movement in the trees on either side of the clearing. The other two wolves had appeared soundlessly, as hunters do. They were closing in from both sides: a classic scissoring move, a tactic as old as predator and prey.

The deer sprang forward, head darting from side to side, sensing the threat but not seeing it yet. The big male closed in, hackles bristling in the deer’s blind side, ropes of saliva whipping back from his open jaws.

I drew my pistol. I’d fire into the air, scatter the hunting party. Thwarting the natural laws of nature? Sure, but I couldn’t bear to witness it. I raised the pistol and—

The sound came from behind me: a whistling gasp, like the final breath of a dying dog. I slanted my chin over my shoulder, not wanting to take my eyes off the deer. Drinkwater was on top of Duncan, knees pinned to his hips. I caught the blade in Drinkwater’s hand: the same bone-handled knife he always carried. Duncan’s arms were up, forearms crossed in front of his face: that intuitive defensive posture a person takes just before a car hits them.

The knife slashed. Blood leapt into the still morning air. I lowered the pistol and fired. The bullet whined off the rocky outcropping. Drinkwater rolled off Duncan and fled into the brush before I could squeeze off another round. My gaze flashed briefly to the deer. The big male had his jaws locked round her shoulder, bearing her down under his weight.

I rushed to Duncan, who’d rolled onto his knees. Blood spilled between his tightly clenched fingers, shockingly red.

“Must’ve crawled through the deadfall,” he said. “Suddenly he was on me.”

He pulled his hand away from the wound. The slash went up his forearm, connecting his elbow to his wrist. It was near-surgical — layers of severed flesh, each with their own distinct banding like age rings in a tree.

“God damn that man,” Duncan said. “God damn him.” He stood. Blood flowed down his hand, split into four streams and dripped off each finger. “I’m going to kill him,” he said simply.

Next he was running—fast—through the glittery dawn world, the air cool and fresh. I realized this was all Duncan had been waiting for: an overt display of aggression. Drinkwater had finally assaulted him directly — with a knife, tried to slit his throat. Thank God! Duncan must’ve figured. Now I can kill him. He’d let his rage and pain carry him over. It’d be as easy as breathing.

No. I would not let it happen.

I pursued, losing ground. My boots were still covered in duct tape, making running difficult. Drinkwater appeared suddenly, dashing through the trees. Duncan clawed for Bruiser Mahoney’s old pistol, freeing it, digging his heels into the snow and accelerating.

Drinkwater wheeled clumsily. His hand exploded with light. A slug drilled a tree five feet to Duncan’s left. Duncan raised his own gun, but didn’t fire. Was it jammed? I saw him stare at it, still running. Was the safety on? He fiddled with it, then fired. The pistol bucked in his hand, throwing his arm up. The bullet snapped a twig off a branch directly above Drinkwater’s head. A little lower and the slug would have put a permanent crease in his forehead.

Drinkwater turned and fled again.

I ran, too, but after a few minutes, Duncan was so far ahead that he’d become part of the woods. The trees peeled away abruptly, spitting me out onto a smooth expanse. My boots hit it and skidded. An unbending flatness, with enormous firs edging the northern shore. We had reached the river. We actually had looped around and hit it again, further downstream.

I cocked my ear to the rush of the Falls … yes, yes, it was there. We only had to follow the river towards the sound, hug the shoreline, and soon we’d see signs of human industry: rolls of red-painted snow fencing, a slick strip of bare road, maybe a solitary truck ferrying a couple of ice-fishermen to their shack. We could hitch a ride. Might take a while to convince someone to pick us up, wrecked as we were, but the heart of Cataract City was huge. All we had to do was—

A bullet chipped the ice ten yards ahead, throwing shards into the air. Squinting against the sunlight flooding the frozen river, I saw Drinkwater toss his pistol aside. He and Duncan were thirty yards from shore, staggering like men nearing the end of a death march.

The shadow of a cloud slipped across the sun; in the fragmentary gloom I noted Drinkwater’s knife was unsheathed and he was beckoning Duncan forward with it. Blood lay bright on Drinkwater’s coat. Had Duncan winged him?

“Don’t do it!”

Duncan mustn’t have heard. He threw Bruiser Mahoney’s pistol aside, lowered his head and charged at Drinkwater.

I saw it happening before it happened. It came as a premonition — something that, until then, I’d never believed possible. At the station, people showed up all the time who claimed to “know” they’d be involved in a car accident days or hours or minutes before it happened, or people who “knew” their loved one was missing because some harbinger, some dream, some dread instinct told them so.

I’d never believed those people until I pictured the ice cracking before it actually did. I heard the fault line split the surface — the sound of an aluminum can tearing in half — before it appeared. And I saw Duncan vanish as the plates of ice snapped beneath him, dropping him into the river as neatly as a sprung trap door, all a split second before it happened.

The next moments unfolded in brilliant slow motion, as if the world were a 78 rpm record played at a laid-back 33. I ran past the hole, steering wide, but the shatter lines radiated towards me, causing me to leap back with a yelp. Duncan was a spiderlike apparition under the ice — the white water ripcurled round his body, making it look as though he’d grown extra limbs.

Hot wires of fear twisted in my guts as I followed Duncan upriver, passing Drinkwater, who sat slumped on the ice. How to get at Duncan? May as well reach through aquarium glass and catch a swimming fish. I imagined the river crawling into Duncan’s lungs with icy fingers, the familiar mineral taste of the Niagara filling him. The river flowed north from Lake Erie into Lake Ontario, passing through low country strung with willows whose branches drank from its fast-running flow, over a dolestone bottom and through the hydroelectric plant, which conferred its steely alkaline tang. I had a flash of how Dunk and I used to jump off the old train trestle upriver and the water would shoot straight up our noses; we’d surface with throbbing sinuses, spitting the water out, laughing like hell and kicking for shore.

A terrifying resonance carried across the frozen plate, the sound of a fist thumping a solid oak door. I believed it was Duncan, punching the ice. I had no real clue where he might pass — the Niagara’s currents were notoriously tricky. My only choice was to guess and then hope. Racing twenty yards ahead of Duncan’s shape, I pulled my revolver and shot a quartet of holes through the ice, which webbed as the bullets drilled through; gouts of freezing water spurted through dime-sized holes.

I stomped hard. The ice flexed and water spurted, but the surface didn’t break. Duncan was ten yards off, on track but drifting right. I unloaded a fifth round and stomped hard enough that my boot cracked through, making a foot-wide hole. Brown water sucked the smallish plates of ice away.

I spread my arms and jumped in, dropping to my waist before hitting the rocky river bottom. Blistering cold twined round my legs. I reached under the ice, grasping madly for Duncan as he passed by. The Niagara clutched greedily, buffeting my hips. My duct-taped boots skidded on the slick rocks.

C’mon, Dunk, be there …

It felt like being bitten by a big fish. Duncan’s hands were so frozen and rigid that I nearly jerked away in fright, and in so doing I’d have lost him. But instead some instinct made them tighten spastically and I gripped back, as if to fuse our flesh together.

Duncan’s body rolled with the water. For a long moment it was like a fishing line lying slack in the water. Then came a jerk as he passed further downriver, forcing me to anchor him against the current. My chest shuddered against the jagged crust of ice, knocking the air from my lungs. Digging my feet into the rocks, I realized that if I slipped I’d be under the ice too, both of us dragged into the depthless channels of the river to die amongst the brook trout and catfish locked in their winter stupor. Duncan’s hands gripped mine tightly — was it just nerves now? Did fingers keep gripping after life had fled the body, the same way hair and nails kept growing? Bovine had once said that a corpse’s hair kept growing up to four months after death. It’s true, man. You could dig up a grave and find an old businessman with a mullet.

I managed to grab Dunk’s elbow and gave a convulsive jerk, not caring if I broke the bone. Bones healed. Brains stayed dead. Gripping his collar, I drew him to me. His hands appeared over the icy lip. They remained outstretched for an instant, livid … then they tightened.

Duncan’s head appeared, his eyes wide open. For a long moment he did not breathe. Then his mouth flew wide and he drew in a massive choking inhale. I dragged him up, laid him on the ice. Blue veins stood out on his forehead, like on a baby’s head.

My gun was where I’d dropped it. One round left. I staggered downriver, the water already crackling on my trousers, and found Drinkwater in a spreading pool of blood.

“Give me your coat, Lemmy.”

“No,” Drinkwater said.

“Now.”

“No,” he repeated.

I grabbed his coat, aiming to take it from him as you would from a truculent child. He fought back fiercely. Something fell out of his pocket. It lay on the ice, its shiny casing winking in the sun.

I blinked, disbelieving my own eyes. A cell phone.

I picked it up. It worked. The signal displayed five full bars.

Drinkwater pulled his legs to his chest, encircling them with trembling arms. “You can’t trust anyone,” he said.