Rust and Bone

by Craig Davidson

  Twenty fingers did so.

  “I see.” Herbert was more bemused than upset. “Well, isn’t that … odd.”

  Herbert retreated down the hallway, pale body glowing in the thin nocturnal light. As he walked past the casement windows, burnt orange light of a harvest moon slanting through the glass, Jess noticed something odd: the moonlight did not touch upon the curvature of his arms and shoulders, did not touch his skin at all. It seemed to fall through him.

  Fakery #77: The Possessed Apple. This ploy was first practiced in medieval days. An opportunistic rogue set an apple on the cobbles of the village square, claiming the ability to move it using only the precipitous powers of his mind. As he bore down with a look of fierce concentration, the apple would indeed begin to tumble over the stones. The ruse: the man cored an apple and placed a large beetle inside, then plugged both holes using potter’s glue and the remains of the core. The agitated insect tossed and turned within its mealy cell, causing the apple to move about. Humorous note: a few practitioners, touring this act through superstitious backwoods shanty-towns, were marked as warlocks and burnt at the stake.

  [5]

  IT WAS NEARLY eight o’clock when they left Sleighton. Dr. Iyer offered directions to the Regal Lodge—actually not a lodge at all, just five or six moss green cottages clustered on a rocky promontory jutting into Whitefish Bay. Their cottage had two cots and a stone fireplace. Stuffed largemouth bass hung on the walls, walleyed and glassy.

  Jess sat on the porch beneath a tarpaper awning, looking out over the bay. The moon and stars stood on their exact reflections on the surface of the night-darkened water. A fish jumped in the center of the moon, the image rippling, glazing over, re-forming. She could barely make out the clapboard shacks standing amidst a cluster of pines across the channel.

  Herbert joined her on the steps. They sat in silence for a while, listening to the constant lapping of waves against the dock pilings. The air was clean and raw and left the taste of winter at the back of their throats.

  “What do you hope to accomplish by all this?”

  “All what?”

  “Don’t be dumb,” Jess said. “What do you want to ask? What do you want him to say?”

  “I went back to the house, once. Before it sold and the furniture got carted away. Walking around, looking. This was at the time I still thought I’d, you know …”

  “Banished Dad to an alternate dimension?”

  “Right. He was everywhere in that house. He was in the bathroom cabinet, his razors and Burma Shave and that whatever it was, that pomade, to slick his hair. His clothes were lying around, smelling of him, that cologne. He was in the pictures on the walls and food in the fridge, the packet of flower seeds on the table. Hair stuck to a cake of soap. Everywhere.”

  A bullet-shaped wedge of darkness cut through the moon’s reflection, the roar of an outboard motor swelling, dissipating.

  “I made him a booklet, once. Cardboard and colored paper, tied together with yarn. I wrote down some of the tricks he’d taught me. Just this thing I’d made. It was childish; it was nothing. But I remember him saying he’d keep it close.” Herbert gazed into the sky, the seam where moonlight and darkness swam together. “It was still in his nightstand. There were a few old photos, some yellow slivers of toenail, the booklet. Why didn’t he take it with him, if it meant so much?”

  They sat in silence. Jess stared out over the bay, starlight bending upon the water’s surface. A cold wind came across the water, slightly tainted by the sulfurous smell of the pulp mills. Three or four mallards congregated beneath the boathouse, bobbing bodies illuminated by an outdoor bulb; it took a moment before Jess recognized they were decoys.

  “Why did you come?” Herbert asked. “You don’t want to see him.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So, just get out of town for a few days? Away from … all that?”

  “I guess so.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “Herbert, let’s not, huh?”

  “You should talk about it to somebody. You talked to Ted, I’m sure.” He paused, focusing on the billowy white shapes left by his words. “Listen, when I told you about the casket—it helped. I didn’t think it would.”

  She hadn’t talked about it—not to Ted, Sam, or the department psychologist. It was a wound too painful to dress, the edges raw and bleeding, and she kept thinking if she treated the pain as something untouchable and beyond her control it might heal itself eventually. But that hadn’t happened, and now everywhere, in the trees and the water and the sky, she felt a sadness weighing down on her. And though sometimes the pain receded, washed out on a tide of new possibilities and potential, it always returned, the more unbearable for that brief absence.

  “Do you want to hear about it?”

  Was it even a question?

  “Only if you want.”

  She told him this:

  The call was a routine 412: Suspicious or overt behavior in a neighboring domicile. Usually a domestic dispute: shouting, accusations, broken crockery. Jess hated 412s, the women with swollen eyes refusing to press charges, the same depressing minuet played out week after week. The call came from Grapeview Estates, a wealthy development near Port Dalhousie. She pulled into a driveway on Sarah Court shortly after nine o’clock, the night of February 27.

  The caller was a man in his mid-fifties cradling a white terrier in his arms. He pointed to a half-constructed house across the street. Saw people moving around before dark. Arsonists. Lit a fire. Liable to burn the damn block down.

  The house hovered at the lot’s back edge in a pool of darkness. Snow-covered roof beams poked at the sky like broken ribs, icicles descending from every unfinished angle. Jess walked beneath the funnel of light cast by a gooseneck streetlamp as new snow fell, flakes alighting on her hair and face. Arson was a summer crime, best when the air was hot and tinder dry; this was likely vagrants seeking shelter.

  The flashlight cast a bleached glow on the untreated wood. Electrical cables snaked through holes in the ceiling and wound around exposed beams. The floor was dusted in fresh snow, untracked by footprints.

  Officer Heinz, she called. Police.

  She shone a flashlight down the basement stairwell: smashed cinderblocks, flattened fast food cartons, gray cement glittering with frost. The ashy, electric scent of a doused fire. Jess’s footsteps echoed hollowly as she descended. The radio crackled at her hip, a medley of codes and numbers. She told herself it was a vagrant, some washed-out husk posing no threat. But she’d heard stories of encounters beneath train trestles or shadowy freeway overpasses, men with little hope or sanity lashing out viciously. Her right hand tightened on the butt of a .38 service revolver.

  A shape ran past the flashlight’s beam. Lit by the stark white cone, the eyes were glassy and feral, the hand clutching something small and silvery.

  Jess raised her pistol, the motion almost casual. Her understanding that it was a child came a split second too late to stop her muscles flexing under a presumption of danger.

  Muzzle-flash lit the boy’s face. He twisted away, as though ashamed. The force of impact threw his body back, feet leaving the ground, flying, falling. He hit the ground and skidded.

  The flashlight fell from her hands, lighting the left side of the boy’s body. He wore a puffy white parka, blue jeans, a Timex wristwatch. His right hand was mittened; the left clutched a silver Zippo. The gunshot had jolted one of his boots off. There was a hole in the heel of his sock. Jess saw all this. His face was white, green eyes dilated, left eyelid fluttering. His mouth was open and there was some blood there, thin and shiny. He drew short, hiccupping breaths. His cheeks were smooth and hairless and freckled, his hair parted to the left. There was a small hole in his parka, frosted black around its edges. The hole was placed somewhere between shoulder and heart. Tiny flecks of blood all over his clean white parka and in the swimming light they looked to move across his chest like aphids.

  Another boy stood in
the corner. The concrete at his feet scorched black. A pile of sticks, a half-burnt mitten, a soda bottle melted down to a charred lump of plastic. Two boys playing with fire in an abandoned house. The city was growing so quickly, green spaces paved into parking lots—where could boys go to do the sorts of things boys did? Two boys playing with matches, piss-scared they’d be caught. One of them had tried to run.

  “Go,” she said to the other kid who was already moving up the stairs. “Get help. Get … help.”

  She knelt beside the wounded boy, pressing her hands to his chest. Redness pushed between her fingers, warming them. How old was he? Maybe twelve, maybe younger. She called it in. Shots fired. Civilian down. The boy coughed up blood. His fingers were long and shapely; girlish. She pulled him onto her lap and tilted his head, scooping blood from his mouth with her fingers. His nose was slightly upturned—the word devilish flitted through her mind. A smear of ash on his chin. His eyes wide open, glazed, looking up into the darkness. Calm, hugely round eyes.

  “Please,” she said, “please.”

  In that moment, she saw the boy’s funeral. A small group gathered on a grassy hill, bright winter sunlight washing the snow-topped tombstones. She saw the coffin, small and narrow and polished to a high gloss. She saw a blown-up photo leaning on an easel, a picture of the boy as she’d never known, the boy’s face wide open and smiling. She saw the boy’s father sobbing in the sloppy and frightening way some men have, loud and gasping for air.

  “Why did you run?” she whispered. “It wasn’t so bad. A little fire. It’s okay. Not so bad.”

  Ambulance, fire, police: standard 911 protocol. Paramedics pulled the boy from her, injected rapid-coagulant into his neck, carried him away. Someone wrapped a blanket around Jess’s shoulders. She was led to a cruiser and taken home.

  Green luna moths pulsed on the cottage’s screen door, bathed briefly in porchlight before drifting into the darkness. Nothing had changed physically—the moon still reflected its quivering image on the bay, water still lapped the pilings—and yet things were unconditionally altered.

  “It was an accident,” said Herbert. “A terrible accident. But the boy pulled through. He’s okay—I read a story about it.”

  “His name is David Hickey. Eleven years old. The bullet passed within four centimeters of his heart.” She held her index finger and thumb an approximate distance apart. “Fractions, you know? Four … centimeters. Increments.”

  She wouldn’t tell Herbert—or anyone—about the trip to the hospital the next day. How she’d stood outside the ICU, peering through the observatory room window at the boy reclined in a hospital bed. His parents sat beside the bed watching the arrhythmic spike of the EKG monitor. She’d wanted to go to them, to apologize and hold the boy’s hand … but she was paralyzed with fear: fear of what had happened, and what could have happened. For the first time she could recall, she prayed to God, prayed for the boy to pull through. She prayed for the boy, but also—selfishly, she realized afterwards—for herself. She prayed for the boy’s health so she might go on living as she had, the fine job and caring husband and quotidian happiness she’d enjoyed. Her future depended on the boy, so she prayed for him, and for herself.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever escape,” she said. “I mean, sometimes it goes away, that feeling, but it comes back. So I’m always wondering, is it possible—escape?”

  Herbert didn’t reply. Jess felt a blankness rise inside her, flowing through her veins, nasty and slippery like heavy black oil in a drip pan. She stepped off the porch, walking down the gentle slope falling away from the cottage, towards the shore.

  “Jess? Hey, Jess?”

  She did not run; there was no urgency. She heeled off her shoes on the thin band of soil along the shoreline and went into the bay. The icy water sent a rolling tide of gooseflesh up her body. Cones of mist rose off the water’s surface and she felt the mushy bottom between her toes. The water’s flat surface was a pane of deeply tinted glass as she passed through it slowly, the chill gone now, water warm, the temperature of blood. She let herself go, not diving but merely sinking. Her mouth filled with the taste of stirred silt and algae; the weight of water forced the air from her lungs. Disconnected images fled through her mind: an improbable barn roof, the gap between each slat exactly four centimeters, sunlight pouring through in neat even bars; a World War II battlefield, mud and blood and shit, she’s charging a machinegun nest in a clean-pressed OPP uniform, screaming and laughing at once; a field on a long-ago summer day, the dry earth and smell of hay, tumbling over and over in the tall grass, holding onto someone whose face she cannot make out. Fractions, brinks, increments, hair breadths, verges, moments: she saw all this. Undercurrents buffeted her, pulling her deeper. Strands of hair swept in soft arcs across her face. Her feet lost touch with the bottom and she floated out into the uncertain gravity of the bay.

  Hands encircled her waist. Her head broke the surface and she saw the hot white stars aligned in orbit. Her brother’s arms were hooked tightly beneath her armpits, feet kicking between her legs. Herbert paddled into the shallows and rolled over on his side.

  “Jesus,” he gasped, “are you crazy?”

  “I don’t know.” Shivering, she struggled to frame an appropriate response. “I can’t see my way clear of it anymore. Like, the things you thought possible aren’t truly possible anymore, and they’ll never be again. I’m sorry, but, you know, sorry’s not enough. It’s just … not … enough.”

  Herbert peeled his shirt over his head and heaved it onto the grass. His chest was wan and sunken, an arrowhead of dark hair pointing at his chin. Plumes of steam rose off his shoulders and braided from the crown of his skull.

  “I don’t think escape is something we can hope for,” he said. “People have it worse than us; we can’t flatter ourselves otherwise. You go on. Put your head down and bull through.” He showed her his palms. “What else can you do? Find something that fills that empty space inside you. For me, it’s magic. There’s something peaceful about it. Calm and steadying. It gives me control. I think that’s what it’s about: not escaping, just regaining control.”

  Regain control. It sounded so simple, a matter of mechanical application: turn wheel in the direction of the skid, pump brakes steadily. Go about your business. Jess wasn’t sure she could. Her character wasn’t weak or resigned, but controlling the terms of her imprisonment possessed no appeal.

  “Let’s get into some dry clothes,” she said. “You’ll catch pneumonia. What were you thinking, trying to swim in this cold?”

  “Seemed like the thing to do at the time.”

  THAT NIGHT JESS CALLED HOME. Ted picked up on the sixth ring.

  “It’s me.”

  “It’s you.” His voice logy, as though his mouth were packed with syrup-soaked wool. “Find your man?”

  “No. Tomorrow.”

  While they’d dated, Ted hadn’t known how to dance. Jess loved dancing, the club atmosphere, the way a knowing partner would hold her. Though athletic and comfortable in his own skin, Ted was no dancer. One night she’d made an offhand remark; I’ll have to find me a boy who likes to dance, the kind of comment a woman might make in the early stages when the threat of other options carried weight.

  Unbeknownst to her, Ted started taking lessons. He met with a widowed instructor, Cora, every Tuesday and Thursday. They feather-stepped and reverse-turned across her wide living room, practicing the Paseo con Golpe and El Ocho. On New Year’s Eve he’d taken her to the Blue Mermaid, where, at the stroke of midnight, he displayed his skills during a slow waltz. He was still horrible, two left feet, but that’d made no difference.

  “I miss you,” he said. “I miss your smell.”

  “My smell?”

  “You’ve got a great smell. It’s still here, in the sheets, but—not the same.”

  “Will it be enough to tide you over?”

  “I guess it’ll have to. Can’t hug and kiss the sheets.”

  “You could…”r />
  “But that would be … weird.”

  “A little.”

  After a beat: “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I just wanted to …”

  “Hear my beautiful voice. Don’t blame you: ladies call at all hours to hear my silky-smooth baritone, baby. So … what are you wearing?”

  Jess laughed softly. “Ted, your dirty mind.”

  “Oh, my god,” Herbert moaned. “Find a phone booth, why don’t you?”

  Fakery #44: Rod into Serpent. One of magic’s oldest tricks, it plays on a snake’s nature and instinct. First, chill the snake in an icebox for several hours to render it sluggish. Then, grasping the head between thumb and index finger, apply steady, equal pressure. This stuns the serpent, who believes an enormous beast is attacking. Unable to defend itself, it goes into shock, body rigid as a twig. Finally, set the stunned snake on the floor. Within a few minutes, it will slither away, unharmed.

  [6]

  The morning sky was dour, the trees to the west a dirty tone of silver. A cover of fog clung to the bay, moving low and fat across the water.

  Jess navigated down the gravel track leading to the main road. Fog hung suspended between skeletal oak and maple. Rounding a blind curve, Jess glimpsed the looming shape and slammed her foot on the brake. The car’s back end fishtailed over the shale.

  “Holy moley,” Herbert said in a small, childlike voice.

  The bull moose was easily ten feet tall. The front half of its body blocked the road, hindquarters mired in the spillway. Seen in profile, its head was a long dark wedge elegantly downswept, a smooth invert bow connecting its lips to the wet fur of its dewlap, which fanned in finlike ridges. The antlers were mostly shed of their itchy summer hide, though molting tatters hung from the odd point; rising from either side of the skull, tips stained by pine sap, they resembled the wings of an albino butterfly.

  “Honk the horn.” Herbert recalled stories of cars colliding with such beasts, frames buckling and metal shearing while the animal walked away, stunned but unhurt. “Scare it.”