Free Cataract City by Craig Davidson Page A

them into his mouth. They wouldn’t go. He pulled on Mahoney’s chin until his mouth opened a bit. The sound was like a rubber band snapping. His dentures fell back into his mouth with a terrible
slunk
, the sound of an un-oiled drawer sliding shut.
    Dunk pushed Bruiser Mahoney’s dentures back under his lips and tried to pinch them gently together. But his teeth were too big for his mouth. Either they had grown—which was impossible, right?—or his skin had shrunk.
    “Is he …?”
    “I think so, yeah,” Dunk said.
    My heart was a wounded bird flapping inside my chest. I wanted to scream but the sound was locked up somewhere under my lungs.
    “Should we close his eyes, Owe?”
    “Is that what you do?”
    Dunk nodded. “So the soul can go to heaven.”
    You think that’s where it’s going?
I almost asked.
    Dunk put two fingertips on Mahoney’s eyelids and pulled them down. When he let go they rolled back up like window shades. One of Mahoney’s eyes pointed towards his nose as if the muscles behind it had given up, letting the eyeball roll towards the lowest point on his face. It made him look comical and stupid.
    “Fuck,” said Dunk.
    Outside the tent I wept. I wept because a man I’d idolized without really knowing him—it dawned on me that maybe this was the only way you ever really
could
idolize anybody—was gone and I was miserable because he’d died overnight, alone, in an army surplus tent with his boots on. And I wept because Dunk and I were in the middle of a big nowhere now. I wept because the only person who could have got us out of this was dead, his eyeball lazing into the centre of his face, and he’d left two dumb scared kids a million miles from anywhere.
    Dunk opened the van door and sat in the driver’s seat. He gripped the wheel so tight his knuckles went white, then punched it. The horn made a low
blatt
.
    “Should we bury him?” he said.
    I wiped scalding tears off my cheeks. It was the most serious question I’d ever had to answer. “We don’t have a shovel.”
    Dunk nodded; he’d already registered that fact.
    After some thinking, I said: “Could we burn him? That’s what Bovine’s dad does at the funeral parlour. There’s a big oven down in the basement, Bovine says. The coffins go in on a conveyor belt. His dad sweeps the ashes into a metal vase.”
    “A vase?”
    “I guess, like you’re supposed to put it in your living room. Over the fireplace?”
    “Where you hang stockings at Christmas?” Dunk said.
    It
was
weird. I didn’t tell Dunk that Bovine also told me that sometimes his father pried the gold fillings out of a dead person’s teeth before putting the body in the oven. He gave the gold to the next-of-kin, who usually melted it down, Bovine said, turning it into earrings or doo-dads on a charm bracelet. People were weird about death. Looking at Bruiser Mahoney’s boots sticking out of the tent, I could see why.
    “How would we burn him?” Dunk said.
    “We could stuff sticks inside the tent and light it.”
    “What about the sparks? They could fly off and set the woods on fire.”
    “We could build a ring of rocks around the tent.”
    Dunk touched his lip to his nose, considering it. “Would it get hot enough to turn him into ashes? Last summer we had a cookout along the river and my brother dropped his hot dog in the fire. In the morning it was a shrivelled black stick, like charcoal.”
    I pictured Bruiser Mahoney the same way: the meat cooked black on his bones, his body laid out like a stick figure. What would we do then? Snap his limbs over our knees—I imagined each break sending up a puff of sparkling black dust—and stack BruiserMahoney in our arms? We’d have to carry him out of the forest like firewood.
    Dunk climbed out of the van and walked to the tent.
    “What are you doing?”
    “Getting some things,” he said.
    He rummaged inside the tent. The points of his elbows strained against the canvas. Was he rolling Mahoney over? Rooting