Cataract City Read online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Get off!”

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

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

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

  “Give up?” Clyde said.

  “Yes!”

  “He’s still fighting!” Adam hollered.

  “Are you still fighting?” Clyde asked.

  “No!”

  “Get off him!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Cool.”

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

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

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

  “Did it hurt?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Clyde’s real fat.”

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

  “Who’s Bruiser Mahoney?”

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

  I just stared.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Holy lick,” Dunk said. “Look.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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