Rust and Bone

by Craig Davidson

  I never see the dummy right uppercut that catches me flush on the knockout button. My legs crumple beneath me and blackness pours in.

  I COME TO SOMETIME LATER. The kid’s gone. So is my wallet and training kit. Don’t know how long I’ve been out because my watch is missing. Upper lip split to the septum and jaw not working properly. I don’t know what to do. A lot of blood. Pick myself up and walk out to the street.

  The city is alien in a way I’ve never known. Small torn-eared dogs fight over knots of gristle flung behind a curry stall. A figure passes whose sex I cannot determine; he or she smells of cocoa and lemongrass and something else and carries a small colored parcel. I lean on the wall of the Royal Jubilee Palace beneath a scrawl of graffiti, a battle cry or revolutionary slogan. Blood soaks the front of my shirt and something is broken on the left side of my face. From an open window of a nearby tenement I hear the last notes of “Let It Be,” by the Beatles. A shoeless boy stares at the old farang shivering in the heat.

  The night Starkley died, a writer of no small eminence eulogized: As he took those eighteen punches something happened to everyone within psychic range of the event. Some part of his death reached out to us. One felt it hover in the air. He was still standing in the ropes, trapped as he had been before, he gave some little half-smile of regret, as if he were saying, “I didn’t know I was going to die just yet,” and then, his head leaning back but still erect, his death came to breathe around him. None of this happened, though somehow I wish it had. Nothing reached out. I saw no smile, regretful or otherwise. Starkley’s mouth was slack, mouthpiece hanging halfway out, saliva-stuck to his upper teeth on the left side, eyes rolled back in his skull. I didn’t feel his death breathe around me. He died twelve hours later at Cedars-Sinai of a ruptured blood vessel in his brain. He’d been clear-headed, chatty I’m told, until, complaining of a little headache, he lay down and never got back up. It was an accident. It happens.

  But, those last few punches—I knew something very ugly was happening. I was fully aware. I see it all so clearly now. His left arm held out, trembling, Please. My arm swiveling smoothly in its shoulder socket, the pressure of his face against my gloves, the shockwave coursing through the bones of my fingers, wrist, arm—I feel it to this day. And it felt good. Christ, it sickens me to say, but there it is. Good. Where did it come from, that urge? Starkley never did a thing wrong. He was a fair fighter. A professional. In the training room afterwards, Moe said, “Those uppercuts you landed near the end … the Kid couldn’t protect himself.” I said, “I know.” Moe said quietly, “I think you mighta killed him.” I said, “I think so.” The fact Starkley stayed up gave me all the license I needed. Why wouldn’t he just go down? It seemed so strange. Why did he give me the chance? I never wanted that chance.

  To my left the mouth of a narrow alleyway runs between the arena and the burnt-out building beside it. The brick of the building is charred and words are scratched into the blackness. In the alleyway’s dim light men ring an oildrum fire, passing a bottle of Mekong. They are laughing and I wonder at what. One reaches across the flames to touch another’s laughing face.

  THE APPRENTICE’S GUIDE TO MODERN MAGIC

  Fakery #17: The Reanimate Fly. An illusion popular among street-corner mountebanks. Purporting to spot an expired fly on the sidewalk, the “magician” will bet a passerby he can resurrect it from the dead. The cunning fraud sets the fly in his palm and launches into his “act,” muttering garbled incantations, rolling his eyeballs about, frantically flailing his limbs, other shameless hocuspokery. After a minute the fly stirs, then buzzes away. The deceit: the fly is placed in a freezer, whereupon the cold stuns it into a state of suspended animation. The crafty sod then drops it on the sidewalk and waits on a rube. The heat of his palm raises the fly’s internal temperature, bringing it miraculously back to life … or so it seems.

  —Excerpted from Hexers, Charlatans, and Miracle Mongers: An Exposé, by Herbert T. Mallory, Sr.

  [1]

  ST. CATHARINES, ONTARIO. JUNE 5, 1979.

  The Knights of Pythias’s seventy-third annual Spring Salubritorial was in full swing. Banquet tables littered with congealed puddles of gravy and beer bottles smirched with greasy fingerprints were pushed to the corners of Lodge #57, chairs lined in haphazard rows facing a raised stage. The membership of the fraternal brotherhood milled about in aimless, meandering circles, bumping into one another, shaking hands, exchanging trivialities about children, jobs, the day’s unseasonable fogginess.

  Norman Greene, newly elected Grand Chancellor of the Judea chapter, stepped hesitantly onstage. Beneath a fall of snowdrop-white hair, a pair of tri-focal glasses sectioned Norman’s eyes into dull brown strata resembling ever-darkening layers of soil.

  “Welcome, brothers.”

  No one noticed Norm until Hal Stapleton spied him out of the corner of his eye and said, “Sit down—show’s about to start!”

  The group seated themselves with giddy expectation. With their faces shadowed by the stage footlights, they resembled choirboys at midnight mass.

  “Welcome, brothers,” Norman, used to repeating himself, repeated. “Without further ado, may I introduce Herbert T. Mallory—The Inimitable Cartouche! ”

  A man materialized through folds of thick velour draped behind the stage. A tall figure, suave as a toreador, with strong sharp features and eyes of flawless emerald. His hair was sculpted back with mint brilliantine, face clean-shaven save a neatly clipped Mephistophelian Vandyke. Wearing a spotless tuxedo with a frilled olive cummerbund and polished wingtips, he opened an alligator-skin valise to remove a flattened black disk, transforming it into a top hat with a brisk flick of his wrist.

  Sid Tuttle, more than slightly tipsy after four Harvey Wallbangers, elbowed Hal’s ample gut. “What’s this four-eyed fool spent our dues on?”

  Two smaller figures stepped through the velour, a boy and a girl. The girl, a few years older than the boy, crossed the stage in lurching, timid steps on account of the high-heeled shoes she wore. Her taffeta dress was held up with thin spaghetti straps, arms clad in evening gloves that sagged off the ends of her fingertips like withered petals. The boy was a miniature version of the magician. Tall for his age and thin, he wore an immaculately tailored tuxedo with matching olive cummerbund; his chin sported a grease pencil Vandyke. The boy strutted about in a manner that might have been seen as arrogant had he been a few years older—instead, it was merely precocious.

  “What’s all this?” Hal was baffled: last year, when he’d been in charge of the evening’s entertainment, he’d lined up an exotic dancer, Countess Carissa, who’d bounded out of a packing crate wearing tasseled pasties and a smile. She got those tassels spinning like the propellers on a Piper Cub, twirling them one way then back the other to upbeat boom-boom music. “Where’s the … the real entertainment?”

  “You know what they say, Hal,” Norman mumbled. “Variety … ah—spice of life.”

  The truth was slightly less philosophic: Norman’s wife—who’d gotten wind of the Countess’s performance last year—warned her husband that if she discovered an entertainer of similar ilk had taken the stage this year, well, he’d better buy a warm toque, because it’d be damn cold sleeping in the garage.

  “This is a … travesty!” Sid Tuttle moaned. Sid’s wife, a stern Pythian sister, only let him out of the house once or twice a month— frittering away a precious evening on magic was sacrilege! He shook his bald head, which, being shiny and oddly planed, reflected thin blades of light like the facets of a poorly cut gemstone.

  “Come on, Norm!” Hal’s fingers compassed his nipples in concentric spirals, a reminder of the Countess’s considerable charms. “This is a man’s night, not some kid’s birthday party!”

  “Yeah,” a shrill voice piped up. “I want magic, I’ll watch Circus of the Stars! ”

  “Oh, my god!” someone else sputtered. “What next—a pinata? Loot bags? ”

  “He’d better be pulling a naked lady out
of that hat!”

  “Where’s my coat? I’m going home.”

  “Silence!”

  The magician’s assistants had erected various stage props: two chairs with a wooden board balanced on the backrests, three black cubes stacked one atop the other, a scarred tea chest.

  “I find your communal behavior boorish,” the magician said. “How would you like it were I to arrive at your places of business and ridicule you?” He glared down upon the grumbling throng. “I am the Inimitable Cartouche. For the next hour I will dazzle you with feats that will cause you to disbelieve your own eyes.”

  The Pythians settled into a state of muttering acquiescence. A few even looked mildly excited. A voice from the back asked, “What sorta tricks d’you do?”

  “I’ll perform no tricks! You will be privy to acts of mystery and wonderment that will shake the very bedrock of your belief concerning the laws of nature and the spiritual realm.”

  “Oh, that’ll do nicely,” the voice chirped.

  While the Pythians had been bickering, Cartouche surreptitiously dipped his left hand into his pocket, rubbing palm and fingers with potassium permanganate. Next, he’d slipped his right hand behind his back, where the boy sprayed it with a fine mist of glycerine from a bottle stashed in his cummerbund. When the magician clapped his hands the chemicals reacted, sending twin cones of red fire up from his palms, while smaller tongues leapt off his fingertips.

  “That was quite something,” Sid Tuttle had to admit.

  “Smoke and mirrors,” Hal muttered.

  Cartouche led the Pythians through a host of standard illusions with the air of a man scattering pearls before swine. First he levitated the boy, passing a Hula Hoop over and above his hovering form—the magician’s hand obscured the hoop’s missing portion, allowing it to pass around the black iron pipe supporting the board. Next he performed the Zigzag: after locking the girl in an upright rectangular box with sections cut out for her face, hands, and one foot, he thrust wedges of sheet metal through. Dislodging the middle section, he made it appear as though the girl were divided in three. Though bent nearly double to effect the illusion, the girl managed to smile gamely, wriggling her toes and waving the red silk hankies clutched in each hand.

  “I received this trunk,” Cartouche said, indicating the tea chest, “from an aged swami in the hills of Vindhya.” This was a considerable embellishment: he’d traded it for a crystal radio and a ship in a bottle at the Stittsville flea market. “Anyone who enters is transported to a dimension the polar opposite of our own, where black is white and hot is cold, where men toil under the light of the full moon and sleep in daylight, where—”

  “Where droning windbags turn into big-breasted strippers,” Hal offered.

  “Silence!” Cartouche knelt before the young boy. “Well, son?” he whispered. “Think you can do this without screwing it up?”

  The boy nodded without meeting his father’s eyes. Cartouche said, “Alright, then. I hand you the reins.”

  The girl pried the heavy lid up. Cartouche stepped inside. She clasped the lock as the boy waved his hands over the chest.

  “Floobidaa, floobidoo, floobidee …” the boy chanted.

  Standing off to one side, the girl watched and listened carefully. She did not hear the soft snik as the hidden latch disengaged, or the gathering outrush of air as the chest’s false back levered down. She’d watched her brother practice this escape for hours in the basement, amidst the mismatched golf clubs and dusty boxes piled to the ceiling beams, and, no matter how many times he’d repeated it, he’d never effected a silent escape: the latch would snap audibly or not open at all, his head would bump the lid or the false back would strike the floor with a clatter. She didn’t see the magician scurry from the box, or the drapes part even slightly in the wake of his passage.

  The boy tapped the lid three times. “I banish you from this realm!” He nodded to the girl. “My assistant will now open the lid.”

  She shot her brother a compressed acid look. She lifted the lid. The chest was empty.

  “Feast your eyes—banished!”

  “Whoop-de-doo,” said Hal.

  “Now to bring him back,” the boy said, brandishing the wand like a fencer’s épée, tapping the chest three times. “Return to this realm!”

  When the girl opened the lid, the chest was still empty.

  Hal said, “Good riddance.”

  The boy glanced at his sister. Desperation twisted his features. “Jess, what …?”

  The girl slipped behind the curtain. The magician was nowhere in sight. She pushed through a swinging door into a narrow kitchen, hating the clumsy sound of her heels on the glossy tiles, turning the knob on another door opening into a narrow alleyway.

  “Daddy?” she called softly. “Dad?”

  The girl stood in a jaundiced sheet of light cast through the kitchen door, the warm humid night pressed to her temples. Her father’s Datsun was still parked at the mouth of the alley, next to four or five garbage cans dragged to the curb for tomorrow’s pickup. She smelled, or believed she could, a lingering trace of his cologne, a foreign brand ordered in ten-bottle lots.

  He was gone. He’d … vanished.

  A great clamor suddenly arose from the Pythian congregation. She hurried back through the kitchen and slipped through the curtains.

  “Oh, no …”

  Her brother had decided to push on with the show. He’d dipped

  into his father’s valise, where the chemicals and powders for his most stirring illusions were hidden. He’d obviously attempted the Fiery Orb, in which a golden fireball explodes from the magician’s chest towards the audience, extinguishing mere feet from their faces. Expertly performed, the trick is thrilling: spectators experience a brief but disconcerting heat as a fireball rocketed at their eyes. But the novice conjurer hadn’t anticipated the remarkable combustive properties of powdered camphor.

  The front row was in sad shape. The men’s faces were flushed red, clear globes of perspiration clinging to their foreheads. Leaning slightly forward in anticipation, Sid Tuttle had gotten the very worst of it: a merry golden flame danced atop the flat peak of his tarboosh.

  The boy looked at his sister, at the red-faced Pythians, back at his sister.

  Then he started to cry.

  Fakery #59: Mister Sweet Touch. The practitioner approaches his target in a busy thoroughfare, ideally an open-air café. Before the rube sugars her tea, the swindler snatches the cup, inquiring how many teaspoons she favors. Depending on the answer, he dips his fingers into the cup for up to five seconds (only if very sweet tea is desired). Urged to drink, she will discover that, magically, the tea is sweet. If further demonstration is required, the rascal may touch anything—the table, the parasol, his target’s skin—all rendered cloyingly sweet. The deceit: the magician washes his hands in a strong solution of saccharine, a compound five hundred times sweeter than sugar. For hours afterwards, anything he touches turns sweet. Beware the counterfeit Midas with his sugary touch. Beware! Beware!

  [2]

  ST. CATHARINES, ONTARIO. OCTOBER 29, 2003.

  Jessica Heinz glanced at the red digital numbers on the bedside clock. Quarter past eleven. Late morning sunlight streamed through the limbs of the backyard maple, broomstick-thin rays falling across the sheets. Squirrels dashed along the buttonbush hedge, cheeks fat with nuts. Her neighbor was burning leaves and the acrid smell wafted through an open window.

  There seemed very little reason to get up. The time one rose was largely dictated by the amount of work one intended to complete during a given day. The fewer duties each day presented, the less reason one had to rise at a reasonable hour. Six months ago Jess would’ve risen at six-thirty to watch the line in the sky separating night from day peel away in ever-lightening shades, a thin band of gold touching the rooftops and telephone poles. Now she’d become accustomed to the position of the sun at her present waking hour, its bottom convex barely visible below the eaves.

 
On the kitchen table, a note in Ted’s pushed-together handwriting read: The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. Her husband left similar inspirationals each morning, cut out of magazines or copied out of books. She often thought he’d missed his calling as a motivational speaker.

  Ted wanted desperately for her to be happy again. After the shooting—the Incident, as it was referred to at the precinct—after the TV reports and newspaper articles, after the Ontario Provincial Police placed her on voluntary suspension, she and Ted sat before the fireplace, talking about the places they might go and what they might do. In the darkness Ted spoke of a future she could no longer conceive of, planning the furnishings of their new house in a new city, the Persian rugs they would buy, the brass lamps and calfskin sofa, the exact shades of paint with names like Crab Bisque and Big Sky and Postal Green. Even though these things were unreal and unattainable, he endeavored to make them possible. What he didn’t understand was that Jess no longer felt deserving of that happiness. It was as if she could no longer comprehend happiness; its shape and texture, once so familiar, now possessed jagged edges and thorns, impossible to grasp. She sat before the fire listening to Ted’s voice, the reassuring and resolute words washing over her, burying her.

  Jess sat on the sofa with a glass of orange juice laced with Belvedere vodka, watching the street through a bay window. Two laburnums were shedding their withered flowers in the opposite yard, the once-golden petals now shriveled and brittle. Seeing Sam’s Chevy pull into the driveway, she picked up her glass and went to the door.

  “Good lord, Jess, just drag yourself out of bed?”

  Sam Mallory, all five-foot-four of him, stepped through the door. Sam’s most striking feature was his spectacular bristliness, both physically and in manner. A tangled bush of beard covered most of his face, thick and lush, fanning out in all directions and resembling an inverted fright wig. His knuckles, ears, nose, and the V of his openthroated shirt were similarly hirsute. “Son of Sasquatch,” her brother called him. In the few places where the skin was bald—the palms, forehead, below his eyes—it was paper thin and drawn tight to the bone, saddleworn leather.