Rust and Bone

by Craig Davidson

  I imagine a houseful of miniature John Travoltas, or, worse yet, Don Fawkeses, running up and down the halls, sticky-fingered and greasyhaired, telling silly-awful jokes and asking if I love them. “I don’t think we need to explore that option.”

  “I’m thirty-three, Jay,” she persists. “Conception after thirty-five is basically a no-go.”

  A pup noses the toe of my loafer. I give it a boot, sending it skittering across the floor. “I’m thinking about scheduling a roll for Matilda.”

  “A roll? Now?”

  I set my empty glass down and pick Alison’s up.

  “Mattie’s barely a yearling,” she says. “You haven’t worked her properly …”

  “She’s the strongest dog I’ve ever seen. She’ll crucify anybody.”

  “There’s not an even-weight dog on the circuit she could be rolled against.”

  “I’d be matching her uphill.”

  “By how many pounds? Against who?”

  I raise her glass to my lips. Our eyes meet over the rim.

  “No way,” she says with dawning awareness. “The Rottweiler that bit you is double her weight.”

  “Matilda will eat that mutt up. Devour him.”

  Alison cradles a puppy in her arms, kneading its baggy skin between her fingers.

  “Stop coddling,” I tell her. “Make a cur out of it.”

  The puppy takes her finger in its mouth, gnawing, slobbering. “Matilda’s not ready.”

  “She’ll … whup him.”

  “Roll with Rodney, at least.”

  “Matilda’s ready.”

  She stands and walks to the window. With the night pressed against the window glass, the darkness reflects her face set in rigid lines. Alison doesn’t have the sort of features that become more attractive with anger, the high Latin cheekbones or bee-stung lips that, when flushed, evoke a certain male stirring. She is much prettier when calm and accommodating.

  “Matilda didn’t bite you. It’s not her fault.”

  “That’s not what this is about!” I sway unsteadily to my feet, chest puffed with righteous indignation. The glass slips from my grasp and shatters on the floorboards. Puppies rush at the yellow mess. I kick at them, “Watch the broken glass, you little shits!”

  Alison gathers double handfuls of newspaper and sops the spill. She’s ditched the OR scrubs for a paint-flecked crop-topped shirt and a pair of cutoffs—her “bumming around gear,” which she knows I find sexy in a slovenly, hausfrau-ish way. Her hair is combed out in feathered waves that I’d like to plunge my hands and face into. Her face seems suddenly pretty again, the face of the woman I married.

  “Honey. Listen.” I lick my lips and try to straighten my tie before realizing I’m no longer wearing one. “You know what? Hey, what— hey, what the hell was I thinking?” I’m in the boardroom, wheeling and dealing, soothing bruised egos, smoothing things over. “Matilda’s not ready. You’re absolutely right.” Sell it, baby. Sell it! “We’ll wait, okay? We’ll just wait.”

  Her features soften into something approaching belief. “I think it’s for the best …”

  “Sure. Sure, I think so.” I kneel beside her, picking up shards of glass. This triggers the discomforting memory of a fight we had months ago, a fight over … what? Finances, booze, assumed infidelities. The usual suspects. As the fight crested towards its predictable apex, I’d stormed into the den, plucked a blown-glass globe from the mantel—a gift from that honeydripping bastard Dr. Scalise, bartered from a legless peddler in Malta—and hurled it into the fireplace, where it exploded with a brittle tinkling sound.

  “It’s a good decision,” she says.

  “Sure.”

  “You think?”

  “Sure I think.”

  SOMETIME THAT NIGHT, after a bout of energetic but futile congress, I have a dream. In this dream, I stand stark naked in the middle of a cavernous auditorium. The tiered stands are packed. Not with people—birds. Bluebills and meadowlarks, flamingoes and penguins, turkey vultures, toucans, sandpipers, pelicans, even a dodo. The sounds they make are disquieting: feathers rustling, talons scrabbling, beaks digging ticks from molting plumage. The aviary smell of them—dust and millet and caked shit—clogs my nostrils. I clear my throat, unsure of how to address this throng, yet convinced it is expected of me. Beady dark eyes, thousands of them, stare down.

  “I’m sure you’re wondering why I’ve called this meeting …”

  Then my penis falls off. Not just my cock: balls, ball sack, pubes. The whole apparatus. My tackle doesn’t drop so much as float to the ground in a series of oscillating parabolas, light as tissue paper, settling gently on the concrete. Touch my plucked groin with a trembling hand. The skin is pebbled, like the rind of an orange.

  Every bird in the auditorium takes flight; the sound of their wings fills my ears like a stiff, storm-bearing wind. They swoop down, the flurry of their beating wings messing my meticulously styled hairdo. White gobs of guano pelt my face and chest. An army of birds descend upon my penis. I squawk, a birdlike sound, pushing through the feathery mob to recover it. A thousand beaks pecking, two thousand clawed feet raking, air thick with feathers. “That’s mine!” I scream. A yellow goose with Xanax eyes hisses and bites at my fingers. A hummingbird with Tippi Hedren’s face flies up my nose, flitting about behind my eyes. “No!” I scream pitifully. “I need that!”

  The birds take flight en masse, flying up through a hole in the auditorium ceiling, vanishing into the vast pewter sky. Apart from the downy drifts of tail feathers, the floor is bare.

  A BLACK SMUDGE marks the cement approaching the processing plant’s loading bay doors. Years ago, after his Doberman bitch dropped a brutal roll to a wrecking-ball presa canario, some owner doused his dog with kerosene and set it on fire. The Doberman, leg-broke and missing skin from its face and haunches, ran in herky-jerk circles, biting at the flames climbing down her throat and igniting her lungs. She lay down, then lay still as a stone and burned to blackness on the concrete.

  I step over the smudge and into the warehouse. Matilda’s crate hangs at the end of my left arm, the dog dozing inside. Alison trails behind, lugging a diaper bag packed with narcotics, needles, catgut, gauze. She’s here solely for Mattie’s sake.

  The morning after my bird dream, I told Alison in no uncertain terms that Matilda would be fighting Biscuits as soon as it could be arranged. She stared at me, toothbrush jutting from her mouth, lips frothy with paste. She shook her head, “I should have known.” I said, “Hey, Mattie will kill that rottie!” and pinched the pudge girding her waistline. She slapped my hand away with a closed fist, called me a name. Bastard? Fucker? Her mouth was full of toothpaste.

  Unaware of her opponent’s trainer, the fat hillbilly—Lola Snape, the matchmaker told me—agreed to match Biscuits against Matilda. I wade through a crowd of dogmen, gawkers, and fight bums to the weigh-in. One guy wears a Russian fur hat and an electric-blue seersucker suit with hand-sewn bolts of red-and-purple lightning down each sleeve. He heels, on a shoestring leash, a peanut-sized pomeranian with a streak of red-dyed fur running skull to tail-tip.

  Lola and her husband wait at the scale. She appraises me for a good twenty seconds before a flicker of recognition crosses her cow eyes.

  “How’s that leg, misser?” She pronounces leg as laig.

  The weighmaster sets Matilda’s crate on the scale. After subtracting fifteen pounds for the kennel, Matilda’s official weight is fifty-three pounds.

  I clip a lead onto Matilda’s collar and draw her from the crate. Her body is a canine anatomy chart, every tendon group and connective ligature clearly visible beneath a thin sheath of skin. Her legs are roped with thickly dilated veins. She squats on her haunches and scratches behind her left ear, gaze never leaving the hulking rottie.

  Biscuits tips the scale at a buttery ninety-three pounds. I am heartened to see his pendulous gut and bony forelegs, deficiencies I failed to note on our first encounter. His back and flanks are deeply scarred where he�
��s been bitten, or more likely beaten. He growls at Matilda, upper lip rippling to expose canines the size and color of large cashews.

  Their weights are chalked on a tote board, next to their records— Biscuits a surprising 11-1. The line is established at 3-1 against Matilda on account of her weight, greenhorn status, and murky lineage. The line excites a good deal of betting.

  As we lead our dogs to the pen, Lola leans over and says, “Fat chance your little yapper’s gonna beat my Biscuits.” Days later, lying bandaged and in a hospital bed, a late-blossoming riposte of Churchillian wit will come to me—You, madam, are the fattest chance I’ve ever laid eyes on—but at the moment I simply entreat her to fuck off. She looks to her haystack-haired hubby in hopes he’ll defend her honor, but the weevil-legged woodhick is engrossed by his gumboots.

  “It’ll be alright,” I tell Alison, assuming she’s noticed Biscuits’s shortcomings.

  “Whatever.”

  “Matilda will demolish him.”

  “Whatever.”

  We usher our dogs into the pen. I’ve got hold of Matilda’s scruff over the chicken-wire; her body thrums like a high-tension powerline. A dwarfish man with phony hair rings the bell for round one.

  The rottie comes out strong, thinking Matilda will be easy to stop in the first round, only Matilda isn’t there. She feints left on Biscuits’s lead-off charge, ducks under his advancing left foreleg, fastens onto the hanging meat of his abdomen. The bigger dog back-pedals madly, yelping, biting down at Matilda’s thrashing head.

  Lola hollering, “Get that little shit! Bite her! Get off, get off ! ”

  The rottie twists his body sideways and Matilda tumbles across the pen with a chunk of Biscuits in her mouth. A rude bloody hole in the rottie’s gut but he’s still very much game.

  The dogs square around as the crowd clusters close to the pen, leaning in for better views. Biscuits steps from left foreleg to right, then right to left, a boxer’s shuffle. Matilda stands stock-still, mouth open, haunches quivering.

  The rottie rushes again, crouched low, head tucked. Flashing teeth tear his ear to shreds before he smashes into Matilda’s stifles, barreling her into the chicken-wire. Alison pokes her fingers through the wire, fingers clenched. Biscuits has Matilda pressed against the pen— Matilda pivots, lashing out with her hind legs, aiming for the gutwound. Jaws come together, two or three splintered teeth skittering across the ground. With a level of cunning I wouldn’t have guessed at, Biscuits fakes a strike at Matilda’s throat, reverses and bites down on the rear right haunch. Matilda emits a shrill yowl.

  “That’s it, boy! Get at her!”

  Teeth sunk deep into Matilda’s flank, Biscuits drags her away from the chicken-wire. Matilda’s body whips side to side, paws scrabbling uselessly. Alison’s grip on the wire tightens as Biscuits shakes his head, neck tendons bunching. Blood pours down Matilda’s brindled coat.

  The bell rings. Men reach over the pen with blunted baling hooks to pry the dogs apart.

  Matilda trots stiffly to the corner, rear right leg tucked close to her chest. I snap a muzzle on and grip her barrel chest as Alison goes to work. “Easy, Mattie baby,” Alison whispers to the squirming dog.

  She cleans away the blood and debrides the cuts with a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and rubbing alcohol. Peering down through the layers of meat, she winces.

  “Severed veins.”

  “Do what you do.”

  After swabbing the deep tissues with a thick coagulant, she sprays the topmost layers with Granulex. Then she spreads the wounds’ lips and cauterizes them with ferric acid. Matilda squeals against her muzzle. I glance at the other corner, where Lola runs a bead of Crazy Glue down Biscuits’s ear before pressing the split halves together. The rottie’s upper canines are busted to the gumline but he sports an enormous erection.

  Alison swabs Matilda’s nose with adrenaline chloride 1:1000 to jack some energy into her through the mucous membranes. When I remove the muzzle she nips at my hand.

  Both dogs toe the scratch. The bell rings.

  Biscuits slinks forward like a cat, protecting his gut. Matilda circles right, her bloodied flank resembling a port wine stain. The rottie cocks his head and goes for Matilda’s throat. With blinding speed Matilda dodges back, the rottie’s jaws snapping closed over vacant air, and counterattacks. Biscuits howls as Matilda’s teeth open huge wounds on the right side of his face, skin folding down in a single flap, high cheek to jowl.

  “Yes!” I holler. “Get him! Get at him!”

  Matilda presses the retreating rottie, who is blinking to clear his blood-blind eyes; spectators at pen-side shield themselves from the flying blood. She hammers her head into Biscuits’s chest and flews.

  The rottie casts his eyes around like a lost child.

  “Eat him up, Mattie!”

  Near the end of the round Biscuits worries his head inside Matilda’s guard, bites into her chest, lifts the smaller dog up and smashes her to the ground. Matilda’s skull snaps off the concrete and the sound of her ribs cracking is like a boot squashing a periwinkle. The bell rings.

  Matilda staggers to the corner. Her left side is dented like the hull of a galleon hit by cannon fire. Blood drips in thin rills from her ears.

  “She’s bleeding inside,” Alison says. “Those busted ribs are pressed up against …”

  “Do what you do.”

  “Pick her up. Another round could—”

  “Just do what you do.”

  “This is such bullshit. You are such bullshit.”

  She injects procaine into Matilda’s ribs before tending to the dog’s other wounds. I feel Matilda pushing against me, eager to get at Biscuits. She is in a great deal of pain, and could die shortly. All she wants to do is fight. I remember what the dogman from whom I’d purchased my first pit bull told me: These dogs are bred for a mean utility. They are bred to fight and live only for the fight. It’s all they know. I wonder at a life so singular of purpose, a utilitarian existence no different from that of a hammer or shovel.

  “Bad inter-cranial swelling,” Alison says. “Blood’s leaking out her eyes.”

  I use the adrenaline to swab Matilda’s gums, her nostrils, her eyes covered with a thin film of blood and blinking uncontrollably. The dog’s body strains mindlessly.

  Biscuits drags himself to the scratch. His face, which Lola has unsuccessfully attempted to glue back in place, is a gummy mess.

  The bell rings. Matilda goes for the rottie’s leg but something’s wrong, she can’t see right, misses by a mile, jaw hammering off the concrete. Biscuits sidesteps, clawing at Matilda’s eyes, ripping the forehead open. Matilda’s turning a drunken circle, trying to draw a bead, unable to. She’s yowling, but whether in pain or frustration I can’t tell.

  “Stomp it, boy!” Lola’s yelling. “Stomp that mutt!”

  “Pick her up, Jay. She’s dying in there.”

  “She’s a deep gamer. She’ll be …”

  The rottie flanks Matilda’s blind spot—Christ, she’s all blind spot— and mounts her, massive jaws clamped over her neck. Matilda’s squirming, yammering, unable to move. Her bladder lets go with a stream of blood-red piss. Biscuits pins her to the concrete and lowers his body like he’s taking a shit but he’s not taking a shit, that red raw rock-hard dick—

  “That’s it, boy!” Lola, apoplectic. “Throw that little bitch your dirty laig! ”

  … and it comes to you in the sleepless witching hours, a question bracing in its simplicity: Do I deserve? In the clean sane light of day such notions are so easily dispelled, but with dawn’s awakening light filtering through the venetian blinds, quartering your face into corridors of day and darkness, the question takes on looming weight. What is essentially a biological question acquires critical moral import—a question of weakness so ingrained as to exert its sway on a cellular level. And you wonder if you are capable. Can you meet the world with fists raised, moving forward, fearless? All revolves within this. Advance. Retreat. Weakness. Streng
th. If you are capable, then so you are deserving. If not, not. At some point we all must answer to this. At some point we must stare it down. Am I capable? Do I deserve? She sleeps beside you, the woman you love, her steady exhalations raising the bedsheets by shallow increments, you thinking, Do I? Do I? and then …

  I’m launching myself into the pen, slicing my hands open on snarled chicken-wire, tripping, stumbling, dragging myself up, calf stitches breaking open with a sick internal tear and the pain has me gagging but I throw myself at the rottie, shoulder-blocking it in the ribs and falling on top of Matilda, the crowd exploding in shocked disbelief, Matilda beneath me hot and tensed and shivering, whisper it’s okay, okay-okay-okay and then the rottie on me, ripping at my rubber-bandy legs, at my neck, trying to get at Matilda but I turn into him, shielding my dog and Matilda licking my fingers and I look to Alison and the way she’s staring at me, Christ, I haven’t seen that look in years, the kind of look a guy can build on then baling hooks are out and digging into the dogs, digging into me and something explodes inside my skull, a combustive fireworks display, boom, boom, boom, starbursts and fractured light pinwheeling before the red curtain of my tightly shut eyelids as one pure thought loops through my fritzing, blown-apart brainpan: so this is fatherhood.

  ROCKET RIDE

  SOME CHICK in the fourth row’s giving me the eye. Slim and pale with wide blue eyes, ass-length ponytail pulled through the back of her baseball cap, she sits in the shadow thrown by a woman wearing a straw hat on the verge of collapsing under a weight of plastic fruit. Her shockingly blue eyes meet mine, then skate across the show pool’s surface. She’s being coy about it, but I’ve seen The Look a thousand times.

  I’m straddling the concrete wall dividing the wait pool from the show pool. Sunlight arcs over the amphitheater’s zigzagged metal roof, yellow spears quivering the afternoon air. Stands packed with sunburnt tourists in their vacation finery: tank tops and flip-flops and sansabelt slacks, wifebeaters and board shorts. I spot a sallow-chested shirtless man: the unshakable maxim seems to be those with the most revolting physiques are inevitably those most keen to bare them. Blue inflatable dolphins, red seals, black-and-white killer whales bob amidst the crowd. Tinny upbeat music lilts from recessed speakers. Seagulls wheel and spiral against the unbroken blue sky.