Craig Davidson - Sarah Court

And he says no more.

Starling leads us into a cool scentless night as they often are this far north. James and Matilda, myself, Starling in a camelhair coat. Moonlight falls across a flat-roofed shack enclosed by chicken wire. A huge white dog exits. Matilda squats on her haunches. Licks her hindquarters.

“This is a joke,” James says. “Right?”

“That’s an Akita,” Starling tells him. “Japanese fighting dog.”

“I know what it is. A puffed-up husky. We can’t roll them.”

“The man I bought it from called it a quarrelsome breed. I feed it chicken blood.”

“And I’m a dogman, not a butcher.” James is fuming. “We met in an online pitbull forum. You’ve got a fucking sledder here. Akita versus any pitbull, let alone a dead gamer like Matty… it’s Mike Tyson fighting a five-year-old. Matilda will crunch that poor thing’s skull like a crouton.”

“Oh, I very much doubt that. Shall we see?”

“Are you psycho? Look, I’ll show you.”

James approaches the chicken wire with Matilda. The Akita yowls: a sexually aggressive sound. Rips at the fence with its teeth. Ropes of drool dangle from the wire. The dogs’ noses touch through the fence. Matilda’s lips curl: a black-gummed riptide displaying the pegs of her canines. She doesn’t growl. Barely moves. The Akita twists upon its flanks. Gnaws its own ass. Turns and crawls inside its doghouse. Flat on its belly. Whimpering.

“What am I supposed to do with a cur?” says Starling, heartbroken.

“Akitas are good hunt dogs.”

“My life’s too complex for a dog.”

Back inside we have a drink. James and Starling are bummed. The dogfight was to be wagered upon. I’m glad they’re gutted. The booze beelines to my bladder.

The cabin’s toilet is brushed steel and tiny. An airplane latrine. On the toilet tank sits an old issue of Dog Fancier bookmarked with a memorandum from one Donald Kerr, solicitor. That little thing we discussed … reads the subject heading.

I shake off. Zip up. A darkened room stands opposite the bathroom. Empty but for a box. Glasswalled, eight feet tall: a magician’s box, the kind you fill with water for shackled escapes. Inside rests what looks like an enormous kidney bean. Except it quivers and in this way is more of a Mexican jumping bean. I’d once given such a bean to Abby. I told her the Cydia moth lays an egg inside the bean. The larvae eats away the inside. When the bean warms in your palm the pupal-stage moth quivers to make the bean hop.

Starling’s smiling when I return.

“You’ve got a bloody nose, Fletcher.”

My thumb comes away from my nostrils with a bead of blood on it.

“Show me again,” says Starling, who couldn’t care less about my nose.

James sets a cashew on the tip of Matilda’s snout. “Giddyup!” Matilda pops the nut into the air. Swallows it.

Starling claps. “Bloody marvellous. Could she do it ten times in a row?”

“All night.”

“Ten times. Without missing.” Starling studies James. “Why don’t we make a bet on it?”

“Bet sounds fine. Big bet, fine.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll make you a very good bet. I’m a rich man. A sporting man. The Cadillac that picked you up. Like it?”

“It’s nice.” James leans back and he laughs. “I don’t have anything like that.”

“Get that fine bitch of yours to do her trick ten times in a row and it’s yours. You’d like a Caddy, wouldn’t you?”

“I’d like it, sure. A Caddy. Who wouldn’t?”

“We make this bet, then. I put up my car.”

“And I put up?”

“I wouldn’t ask you to bet what you cannot afford.”

“You can’t have my dog.”

“Some insignificant thing whose parting would not leave you too bereft.”

“What, then?”

“How about, say… your thumb.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I chop it off.”

“That’s insane,” I say.

“James tells me he needs money,” says Starling. “He can sell the car.”

James considers it. He passes from consid-eration to acceptance far too swiftly for my liking.

“Otherwise I’m here for nothing. Matilda can’t fight a sledder.” James drinks his drink and says: “Matty does her trick ten times running and I get the car. If she misses even once I lose my thumb. She’s never missed. Which hand?”

“Your right. Which one’s dominant?” Starling waves it off. “Left, right.”

“So, left thumb?”

“That’s the deal. Left thumb.”

“I can get it reattached. How about my pinkie?”

“No, thumb.”

“Index finger.”

“Thumb.”

“What year is the car?”

“Last year’s model. Parkhurst! Keys.”

Parkhurst materializes and hands over the keys. Starling sets them beside the cashews.

“Middle finger.”

“Fine. But I keep it. No re-attachments.”

“I don’t recall ever having much use for the middle finger of my left hand.” James massages the folds of Matilda’s mouth. “It’s a super bet.”

“Let’s strap your hand down,” says Starling. “Parkhurst. Fetch nails, string, and a chopping knife.”

Starling’s biographer returns with hammer, nails, butcher twine and a campfire hatchet. Starling hammers nails into the edge of the coffee table four inches apart. Cheap ten-penny nails with metal burrs clung to the nailheads. He tests them for firmness with his fingers.

“Put your hand in here. Middle finger out.”

Starling winds twine over James’s wrist, across his knuckles and around the nails. James’s fingernail whitens. Starling hefts the hatchet: new, shiny, with a foam-grip handle. James seems unperturbed with the blade hovering above his outstretched finger.

“Begin,” says Starling.

James sets a cashew on Matilda’s nose. The curve of the nut shapes itself to the dog’s snout. Matilda goes cross-eyed focusing upon it.

“Giddyup!”

The nut disappears down her gullet.

“Good girl.”

James sets another nut on Matilda’s snout. Starling holds the hatchet level to his ear.

“Giddyup! Two. Good girl.”

“Three.”

“Four.”

“Five.”

“Six.”

Matilda’s a machine. James works her through the procedure steadily. Cashew on snout, pause, “Giddyup!”

“Seven!”

“Eight!”

One end of the ninth cashew is broken off, leaving an imperfect edge. Later I’ll wonder why James chose it when the bowl was full of perfectly good ones.

“Giddyup!”

The sound it makes glancing off Matilda’s teeth is the tinny wynk of a shanked golf ball. The sound that comes out of James’s mouth is not a scream so much as a breathless hiss. Starling raises the hatchet above his head. It all happens rather quickly.

Matilda leaps onto James’s back. Uses him as a springboard. The cashew bowl’s upended, nuts spraying in a fan. Matilda’s jaws clamp fast to Starling’s shoulder.

“Yeeeeeeeeeeee!”

This is the sound that exits the broken hole of Starling’s mouth. Matilda’s jaws are nearly hyperextended, upper teeth sunk into the wrinkled flesh of his deltoid. Starling shakes at the mercy of a creature one-third his weight but every ounce of it working muscle. Momentum carries them to the floor. Matilda’s skull impacting hardwood sounds like a bowling ball dropped on a dance floor. She forfeits her grip, flips over, digs her teeth into the fresh punctures. Starling’s eye rolls back in some kind of horrible dream-state. The hatchet flails wildly and its blade hacks into Matilda’s beer-cask side.

James drags the coffee table — his hand’s still trussed up — over to her. His feet crunch on cashews. I help him tear free of the twine. He grips the top and bottom halves of Matilda’s jaw.