The Saturday Night Ghost Club by Craig Davidson

Author:Craig Davidson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2018-08-13T16:00:00+00:00

iii.

The following Saturday, the morning air held a hazy effervescence. I’d already shoved my snorkel and mask in my backpack and was in the kitchen making a PB&J sandwich when Dad came downstairs.

“Where are you off to this fine day?”

“Out with Uncle C and Billy.”

Dad thumbed a shard of sleep-crust from the corner of his eye. “Be safe. A lot of Bigfoot sightings hereabouts. The Loch Ness Monster’s cousin is lurking in the Niagara River, too.”

“Dad.”

“Only reporting what I’ve heard.”

The neighbourhood was waking up as I pedalled down the street. Sunshine hung in lambent curtains over the lawns. I imagined the heat circling like a restless buzzard: present, waiting, but not yet touching down.

Uncle C waited in front of the Occultorium. Lex wasn’t with him. Shouldering a huge backpack, he said, “Let us venture boldly forth.”

We rode down Clifton Hill. My uncle slalomed between the parking meters—the one time Uncle C looked graceful was when he was straddling a bike, where his limbs took on a heron-like elegance. We continued to the Niagara Parkway edging the river. The water shone through stands of poplar; the river was wide and sleek, mirror-calm on its surface while below, I knew, it rushed with furious menace.

The sun was starting to throw corridors of heat down the streets. Strips of hot-patch softened into gummy ribbons that sucked at my bike tires. We pedalled to the bend at Burning Spring Hill to reach Dufferin Island. The slack water ringing the island flowed into a series of oxbows, or small lakes created by water spilling over the riverbanks. They were shallow, warm, and we local kids got territorial over them. Certain clubs or groups of kids were known to colonize a given oxbow, turning it into a private fiefdom. It could get so that trying to swim in a “marked” oxbow was to invite a fist fight.

The oxbow we stopped at was the largest of the chain, too big for anybody to claim feudal rights. A bridge had once spanned it. Rusted jags of rebar snaked from crumbling concrete on the opposing shores.

The lake was quiet when we showed up, but as the day wore on the oxbow’s banks would collect families and young lovers and anglers with a taste for catfish. My uncle and I had staked out a spot on the shore when Billy showed up with Dove. My uncle unzipped his massive backpack and hauled out a dinghy. The black plastic was festooned with PVC patches, their edges bubbled with contact cement.

“She’s seaworthy, I promise,” my uncle said, inflating it with a foot-bellows.

It wouldn’t be a disaster if the dinghy sank. Oxbows rarely rose above neck-deep, except in their middle where they might dip to ten. Dove kicked off her shoes and dug her toes into the lake bank. The alluvial soil had a claylike feel under your toes.

Dove yanked a foot back. “Sheeeeeee—it.”

Her toe had been cut on a shard of glass from a shattered, buried Coke bottle. It was a grazing incision that could have been made by a surgeon’s scalpel.

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