Rust and Bone

by Craig Davidson

  He glanced at Jess’s clean-pressed OPP uniform hanging in the hall closet next to the winter coats and old Halloween decorations. “If you’re not gonna put it on, why not stuff it in the attic? Damn death shroud hanging there.”

  “Coming in, Sam?”

  “Since you asked.” He heeled his boots off and poked his nose into her glass. “Bit early for that, isn’t it?”

  “Feels about right. Fix you one?”

  “Better not. Ole liver’s bound to explode like a hand grenade, and I can’t afford the transplant.”

  Sam followed her into the kitchen, where she brewed a cup of tea. Seeing her fetch a fresh teabag, the wrinkles on Sam’s forehead bunched up. “Don’t have an old bag somewhere around?”

  “Nope.”

  “Awful waste, seeing as I take it weak anyhow. Toss one away lately? I’ll take that, so long as it’s lying on top yesterday’s newspaper.”

  “I don’t serve secondhand teabags.” She winked. “Besides, you’re worth it.”

  “Quit it, will ya.”

  Jess set the cup in front of him, with a plate of digestives.

  “You’re not looking good,” Sam said. “Look … worn.”

  “Last of the honeydrippers, aren’t you?”

  Sam Mallory was Jess’s uncle, her father’s brother. As was the case with many siblings, they were polar opposites: Sam was restrained where her father was flamboyant, straightforward where her father was circumspect, solidly rootbound where her father’s sail was set to every passing wind. When his brother vanished inside a tea chest twenty-five years ago, Sam assumed wardship of the children—their mother, Jeanne, having passed giving birth to Jess’s brother. A solitary and idiosyncratic man, Sam wasn’t the ideal surrogate father. But he’d always cared for his niece and nephew in the manner of a man with much love to give and no one to lavish it upon: fiercely and devotedly, yet ever at one step removed.

  What Sam knew about raising children could’ve fit comfortably on the head of a pin, with room left for a dancing angel or two. But, unlike his brother, he was willing to learn. Jess remembered rushing into the kitchen one morning to see him bent over a mixing bowl, whisking its contents into a froth. In a griddle on the stove, a sad misshapen lump sizzled fitfully.

  “What’s this?” Jess had woken with a dreadful certainty the house was on fire.

  Sam shielded the mixing bowl with his body, the way a mother caught wrapping Christmas presents might shield them from a nosy child. Blobs of yellowish batter clung to his wiry mesh of beard. “Can’t you see it’s breakfast?”

  Jess couldn’t recall her father ever fixing breakfast.

  “It’s the most important meal of the day, in case you didn’t know.” Her uncle spoke with a huffy knowledgeable air, as though this were a fact he’d recently read, quite possibly in a thick book.

  Jess sat at the table, upon which Sam brusquely deposited a plate. The pancake was a charred disk; a single mouthful probably contained enough carcinogens to dispatch an iron-lunged coal miner.

  “Tuck in,” he’d told her. “It’s brain food.”

  Sam’s small pink tongue now hunted for digestive crumbs in the bristly forest of mustache. “Been doing some reading.”

  Jess stared out at the backyard, where a raven and a squirrel quarreled over bread crusts Ted had scattered that morning. “Oh?”

  “Read about something called an Act of Erasure, Jess. Happens in the military, when soldiers lose touch with reality and don’t care about anything. Fellow puts himself in harm’s way when there’s no need. Trying to ruin himself, in a roundabout way.”

  “And that’s what you think I’m doing—erasing myself?”

  “Maybe I do.” Sam stirred a finger through his tea. “Not ruining, but … well, shutting yourself off. Take a look, Jess—you’re half-crocked at noontime. When’s the last time you stepped outside?”

  “You’re being overdramatic.”

  Yet Sam wasn’t entirely off base. Jess didn’t feel herself being erased, but she did feel something growing around her, like a shell. Sometimes she thought of it this way exactly: a shell forming over her body, hard and calcified, enrobing her arms, her legs. As time went by it became more impenetrable, layer gathering upon layer the way nacre forms about a speck of grit to create a pearl. Soon everything developed a gauzy translucent aura, as though she were enclosed by panes of warped, cloudy glass. Lately things had become darker and more indistinct, the outside world—her old job and friends, Sam, her husband, the incident itself—developing a distant, hollowed-out quality, as though these were people and events she’d once dreamed, many years ago.

  “What is it about you and Herbie,” Sam said. “Both of you hiding away from the world?”

  Jess went to the cupboard and pulled down a bottle. That she refused to rise to his challenge, her utter lack of spirit, troubled Sam more than anything.

  “Did you come for a reason,” she said, “or just to question my mental state?”

  “That’s not fair, Jess. Not fair at all.”

  Jess gazed out the kitchen window at the patches of lifeless brown grass crushed by the lawn furniture. It made her think of a little churchyard in some hamlet she’d passed through with her father. She remembered a tidy cemetery and her father guiding them between the gravestones. The knife-edged wind blowing across the flat endless prairie, the corroded flag holders and warmth of her father’s hand, tiny pink flowers bright amidst the browned grass.

  “There was a reason I stopped by.”

  “Uh-huh. And what’s that?”

  “Your brother called. Wants to talk to you.”

  “He’s got a phone.”

  “You know Herbie.”

  “I know Herbie.” As soon as she’d said it, Jess realized the lie. She hadn’t spoken to her brother in nearly two years. “What’s he want?”

  Sam walked his cup to the sink and rinsed it out. He looked up and for a moment she caught something in his eyes. Then he hugged her the way Jess imagined a man trapped in a foxhole rocked by mortar fire might hug the man beside him: with a rough embarrassed ardency. She couldn’t remember the last time he’d done it—her wedding, maybe? He wiped his nose and walked to the door.

  “Sam? Hey, Sam?”

  She caught up with him in the front hall. “Come on. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s a hard time.”

  “That’s no excuse for me acting like a bear.”

  “It’s alright.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Ah, quit it, will ya?”

  Sam shuffled down the driveway and hoisted himself into the pickup. He looked comical behind the wheel: a tame black bear some enterprising soul had taught to drive.

  “What did Herb want?”

  “Didn’t say exactly,” Sam called through the open window. “Wanted you to stop by, but …”

  Fakery #6: The Fraudulent Flatline. This tired ruse took root in India, where similar dime-store “miracles” are sufficient cause to bestow sainthood. The robed charlatan—for this fakery, the more aged and desiccate, the better—sits cross-legged on a busy street corner. Once a gallery of gullible rubes has assembled, someone is asked to check the charlatan’s pulse. It’s normal. Then, palms upturned and mouth closed, eyes staring like a lobotomy victim, his body trembles. Keen showmen emit white foam from the sides of their mouths, accomplished by secreting of a tab of bromoseltzer between lip and gum. The trickster’s pulse slows, slows … stops altogether! He has died before their very eyes! Yet, as if on cue, the rogue’s eyes open, and his heart beats fiercely once more. The deceit: by squeezing a small smooth stone in the crook of his armpit, applying pressure on the axillary artery to stem the blood flow, the man’s pulse “magically” disappears.

  [3]

  Herbert T. Mallory, Jr.’s house occupied a barren patch of scrubgrass on the banks of the Welland Canal. A towering Gothic monstrosity adorned with carving and scrollwork, parapet flanked by a pair of hideous granite gargoyles, it was truly
more castle than house. The yard was fenced in by a crumbling brick wall topped with iron pikes and, at the front, a massive gate closing in the middle to form the letters HTM, the T splitting in half when the gates opened. The tangle of satellite dishes strung around the topmost parapet resembled toadstools sprouting from a tree stump. It seemed very much the kind of looming, creepy place children would delight in visiting on Halloween, but unfortunately Halloween was among the many holidays Herbert now refused to celebrate.

  Jess parked her Jeep TJ on the rough shale outside the gates. Away to her left, the canal lift-locks rattled and groaned. How could Herbert bear that noise?

  Thin rosy sunlight washed the stricken brown lawn and reflected off the cardinal-red paint job of Herbert’s Jaguar X80—though, to the best of Jess’s knowledge, her brother didn’t drive. A tentworm-infested elm, shrouded from trunk to highest branch in gray cobweb skin, shadowed the car. The mummified tree brought to mind images of a cocoon on the verge of birthing some enormous prehistoric bug. The infestation had progressed for years, Herbert not lifting a finger in opposition: the concept of a large imperious entity destroyed by a swarm of unrelenting smaller entities suited his socialist leanings.

  Jess climbed the worn stone steps. Music through the screen door, a gloomy dirge.

  “Who is it?” a voice answered her knock.

  “Jess.”

  After a formidable pause: “Door’s open.”

  She walked down the tight hallway strung with photographs of her brother levitating with Doug Henning and bending spoons with Uri Geller, astraddle one of Siegfried and Roy’s white Bengals. Hung amidst the photos were posters advertising Herbert’s stunt spectaculars: The Water Torture Cell Escape, The Vanishing CN Tower, and the ill-fated Buried Alive. Music came from everywhere and nowhere at once; judging by the mournful caterwauling, Jess speculated the composer was prone to fits of deep depression.

  The kitchen was a high-ceilinged room smelling of Cup-a-Soup and old newspapers. Greasy wallpaper and dull wooden molding transformed any light into gloom, and the tall narrow windows, smudged with lampblack, allowed little sunlight to filter through anyway. The air was dank and smoky, unnaturally so, as though a fog machine were pumping away in secret. A pyramid of television sets tuned to different stations climbed the right-hand wall.

  “Good afternoon, sis.”

  Herbert sat at a table strewn with piles of candy: jujubes and jellybeans, licorice whips, gummy bears. His slender frame was draped in a fur-trimmed robe; a tawny thatch of hair sprouted from the robe’s open throat, matching the unruly mop atop his head. A few ropes of hair were plastered wetly to his skull, as if, hearing Jess’s knock, he’d hurried to make himself presentable. Silver-rimmed glasses gave his face an antique aspect at odds with his age: thirty-three. He peered at Jess with the doleful expression of a man who’d recently quit drinking and, life robbed of whatever false pleasure it once held, now existed in a state of perpetual sorrow.

  Jess sat. “Sam said you wanted to talk.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I do.”

  Herbert tented his fingers and pressed them to his lips. His fingers were long and tapered though quite gnarled, recalling the braided roots of a mangrove tree. He reached out and plucked a red jellybean from a pile, turning it over the way a gemologist might inspect a fire opal.

  “And …?”

  “I’m getting to it.”

  Jess felt a familiar anger rising.

  No creature on earth was more self-absorbed than a magician. Trust-fund beneficiaries, dowager princesses, prima donnas of every stripe—not in the same league. It was a lifelong predisposition, a certain stirring in the bosom of an infant boy as he witnessed his nose plucked from his face and wiggled between someone’s fingers. Boys who grew up to be magicians learned the power of mystery early on, became brokers in secret knowledge. The problem was, they tended to overindulge this power, which led, in Jess’s case, to an endless procession of scenes similar to this one in 1976:

  “Pass the pepper, Dad.”

  “What pepper, Jessica darling?”

  “The pepper that was on the table a minute ago.”

  “Well, it’s not there now, is it?”

  “You palmed it.”

  “Palmed it? My dear, palming’s a shameless trick practiced by street-corner hustlers.”

  “Fine. You made it vanish.”

  “Perhaps so. Say the magic word and I’ll make it reappear.”

  “Please.”

  “The butcher says please, darling. The garbage man says please.”

  “Ugh. Floobidoo.”

  Moments later she’d feel the pepper mill’s sudden weight in her pocket. The first time was amusing. The second time, less so. Times three through three thousand were abject misery. Which was why, as her brother milked the moment as her father had, Jess snapped, “Turn this horrible music off.”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “Another minute and I’ll slit my throat.”

  Herbert hunted through the jumble of remote controls at his elbow, found the corresponding unit, pushed a button.

  “Now,” Jess said, “what the hell is going on? ”

  Herbert rooted through a sagging tower of newspapers—copies of the St. Catharines Standard, New York Post, Calgary Herald, a dozen more—coming up with a section of the Sault Ste. Marie Star. “Look.”

  The local news headline read: Magician Dazzles Patients at Institution. A grainy black-and-white snapshot captured a tuxedo-clad man in mid-flourish, a loose horseshoe of housecoat-clad and wheelchair-bound spectators gathered round. She squinted at the photograph intensely, until the image dissolved into its composite black-and-gray dots.

  “So?”

  “So? It’s him! The magician—Dad!”

  “I can see that.”

  “Oh, I see. You don’t care, is that it?”

  Why should she care? He’d forsaken them. It took two years to convince Herbert he hadn’t banished him to a horrible parallel universe, two years during which Herbert suffered nightmares of his doomed pater reeling and shrieking in a fathomless void. Jess had developed a pragmatic outlook: some fathers skipped out for cigarettes and never came home; her father stepped into a tea chest and vanished. Though carried off with more panache than the average abandonment it remained a crude and everyday act. “Same shit, different dad,” she’d told friends.

  “You have no desire to contact him? None whatsoever?”

  “He’s no part of my life. He left us.”

  “The man had his reasons.”

  “Don’t start on that again.”

  “He did,” Herbert persisted. “He was driven into hiding by vengeful magicians upset about the book.”

  That damn book. The only renown Herbert T. Mallory, Sr., ever garnered came with the publication of Hexers, Charlatans, and Miracle Mongers: An Exposé. A compendium of “fakeries,” the book revealed the science and deception behind illusions practiced by inner-city con men, India’s famed god-men, and famous stage magicians. It was purchased by skeptics, hustlers, and the type of people who delighted in peeking through keyholes or leafing through strangers’ diaries.

  “What are you talking about? What did anyone ever do? ”

  “Well,” Herbert picked a fluffball off his robe, “what about the prank phone calls? And the time our house was egged?”

  Jess tried to envision the ridiculous scene: a carful of magicians rumbling down the block decked in rhinestone vests and peacock feathers and bright satin turbans with cut-glass gems set in the centers, slewing around a hairpin curve, screeching curses and incantations while hurling eggs at their dilapidated bungalow.

  “He abandoned us, Herbert. He’s a coward.”

  “Believe what you want,” he said, chin set at a supercilious angle. “You don’t want anything to do with him, fine. I do.”

  “Then hop in your car and drive.”

  “You know I can’t.”

  She shrugged and went to the fridge. Every
rack and tray was stocked with cans of something called Sagiko Chrysanthemum Drink.

  “Don’t have any beer?”

  “It’s Korean. Very refreshing.”

  Jess cracked one and took a sip. “Delightful.” She scraped her fingernail over a grimy windowpane, letting in a weak sickle of sunlight. “So, if you’re not leaving the house, how …?”

  “Well, I thought maybe you’d track him down—”

  “Oh, is that what you thought? Herbert’s little errand girl?”

  “No, not like that—”

  “I don’t care whether the man lives or dies—”

  “Jesus, would you let me—”

  “If you want to see him so bad, take off that ridiculous robe and leave this hermitage—”

  “You’re one to talk!”

  “At least I’ll set foot outside my door!”

  Herbert pushed out of his chair and came at her. Jess flashed back to the days when he’d wrestle her to the ground, straddle her chest, and rap his fingers on her breastbone until she named ten chocolate bars— the dreaded rooster peck. Her only defense had been the fearsome purple nurple, which she administered with the sadistic glee of a gulag torturer. She wondered if this would end with them rolling about on the floor, pecking and pinching.

  But he pulled up short, eyes filled with an uneasy mingling of shame and resentment. He turned his hand over in the weak sickle of light.

  Jess looked at his fingers. Long and tapered, nails bitten to the quick. She’d seen those fingers do things no other fingers on earth could do, make cards and coins and tiny Egyptian swallows appear and disappear with the flickering swiftness of stop-motion photography. Yet taken out of their element and set to mundane tasks, those same fingers were inept and clumsy.

  After his father’s disappearance, Herbert threw himself into magic. He carried a deck of cards everywhere, practicing tricks in the schoolyard, on the bus, in the bathtub. He bought a straitjacket from a medical supply company and learned how to dislocate his shoulders; Jess vividly recalled the meaty tok of his clavicle popping from its cup of bone. Soon he had cups and saucers, even the pot roast vanishing from the dinner table. Although Sam lauded Herbert’s abilities, as he felt was his role, it was with the disconcerting sense one gets watching history repeat itself.