Craig Davidson - Rust and Bone - Stories

Let’s finish this last swallow and get right on the blower. It’s a long road ahead.

Like the shoe commercial says, right? Just Do It. Hey!

MIDWAY THROUGH THE PITCH I pass a note to Mitch Edmonds, big kahuna of graphic design: This is going good? He grimaces and scribbles back: If by “good” you mean heart-stoppingly BAD, then yes, everything’s PEACHY . Diarrhetic adjective use aside, I suspect Edmonds is correct. In fact, the pitch is veering towards a crash of Hindenburglike proportions: feel the heat of compressed hydrogen flames and charred tatters of zeppelin silk buffeting my face, hear Herbert Morrison’s breathless voice screaming “Oh the humanity! ” into a giant wind-socked microphone.

Supp-Easy-Quit is a stop-smoking aid in suppository form. The science is sound: the rectal arterial clusters, feeding directly into the larger sacral and iliac branches, are ideal nicotine-delivery channels. Yet the stone-cold fact persists: most smokers—most human beings — exhibit a distinct disinclination to propel foreign objects up their bungs. They’d rather chew Nicorette until their mouths seize with lockjaw, festoon their bodies with the Patch, Christ, insert flaming nicotine wedges under their fingernails. This hardwired predisposition renders the product a tough sell.

Don Fawkes, lead hand on the Supp-Easy-Quit account, aims a laser-pointer at a storyboard montage. “Okay,” he says, “so here’s this smoker who’s trying to quit. He’s in a smoky tavern—upscale, jazzy, bit of a speakeasy feel—tipping a few bevies, itching to fire off a lung rocket.” Don believes his timely employment of hipster lingo is key to the middling success he enjoys. “So our man slips into the men’s room and enters a stall, jazz music swells, he exits all smiles. Fade to black on the product logo.”

The Supp-Easy-Quit reps—a power-suited Eva Braun flanked by a pair of lab-coated scientist pastiches—sit with arms crossed. The trio strike me as just-the-facts-ma’am types: their ideal commercial no doubt involves clinical footage of suppositories inserted into rectums, endoscopic cameras filming the dispersal of nicotine molecules into the bloodstream.

“Tell me: do you like it?” Don Fawkes, Ignoramus extremus, asks. “Do you love it?”

Fawkes’s towering colossus of ineptitude fails to elicit any surprise or sympathy from me for two reasons: (1) last month Don singlehandedly scuttled the Juicy Jubes kosher jujubes account, enraging a group of Hasidic entrepreneurs with the utterance of his ill-conceived tagline: Juicy Jubes are Jui-y JUI-licious!; and (2) a large chunk of meat is missing from my left calf, a chunk roughly correspondent to the bite radius of a Rottweiler named Biscuits. The wound is cleaned and dressed but the calf is a fussy area, a locus of veins and connective tissues—blood seeps through the bandages, pooling in the heel of my Bruno Magli loafer.

I was mauled two nights ago, at a scratch-and-turn dogfight held in a foreclosed poultry processing plant outside Cobourg. Dottie, a three-year-old pit bull and my wife Alison’s darling bitch, was matched uphill against a hard-biting presa canario named Chinaman. Dottie was a ten fight champ with heavily muscled stifles and a bite to shatter cinderblocks; Chinaman was cherry but his lineage legendary with chest and flews capable of deflecting bullets. Betting skewed in Dottie’s favor on account of her experience and ring generalship.

After Alison gave Chinaman a thorough inspection—the breeder a jug-eared hillbilly known to soak his fighters’ fur in poison—the dogs were led into a chicken-wire pen. White worms of chicken shit dotted the floor, some with downy feathers stuck to them. The concrete was puddled with blood from the previous fight.

Dottie started out fast, butting her muzzle into Chinaman’s chest and tearing a gaping hole above his right shoulder. Chinaman looked ready to buckle—it’s the first critical injury that separates gamers from curs—but when Dottie went for his front leg he snapped at her skull, canines opening deep furrows across the bridge of her snout. Blood flowed down Dottie’s chest and sprayed in her eyes. Alison gave a little moan. Chinaman’s handler hollered, “Get at it, boy! Sic! Sic! ”

The presa rushed hard and tried to pin Dottie against the pen. Dottie back-pedaled a few paces before fastening her mouth around Chinaman’s advancing foreleg and ripping free a network of muscle and tissue. Chinaman kept pressing, chewing on Dottie’s head; it sounded as if his teeth were raking bone. The crowd pressed around the pen, slapping the chicken-wire, stomping their feet. The smell was close and hot, sweetly animal.

The bell rang. Men with blunt baling hooks reached over the wire, digging into the dense muscling of the dog’s chests, prying them apart. In the corner, I held Dottie while Alison went to work. After rubbing powdered Lidocaine into the dog’s gumline to kill the pain, she chemically cauterized the facial wounds with ferric acid. Then she saturated a Q-tip with adrenaline chloride and swabbed the rims of Dottie’s nostrils and ear holes, her anus. The dog’s eyes, previously glazed, attained a clear focus.

The bell rang. Both dogs scratched the chalk line.

Dottie lived up to her reputation as a wrecker in the second. She butted hard into Chinaman’s stifles, attacking that shoulder wound. Chinaman gave as good as he got, slashing at Dottie’s dewlap, shredding it. At the eight-minute mark: a fibrous snap as Chinaman’s shoulder broke. The presa was down to three legs. Dottie pressed her advantage, forcing Chinaman back, attacking the throat, a blur of snapping teeth, questing jaws, and bloody ropes of saliva as each dog angled for the killing clinch.

Chinaman managed to close his mouth around Dottie’s muzzle, gripping her entire upper palate. The brittle splintering sound was unlike anything I’d ever heard. Dottie’s spine stiffened and her claws tore at Chinaman’s belly.

The bell rang. An acne-scarred teenager mopped up blood and redrew the chalk line.

Dottie’s face was in ruins: bloody and cleaved open, shards of bone free-floating beneath the skin. Half her nose was torn off and her dewlap hung like tattered curtains. Alison debrided the worst wounds with hydrogen peroxide and Betadine before slicking them with mixed adrenaline and Vaseline.

“Pick your dogs up!” a man hollered. “That’s enough. Enough!” The crowd jeered him.

“Maybe I should,” Alison said. “Pick her up.”

I’d’ve rather cut my foot off and eaten it! “Look at that one,” I said with a nod at the presa, who was burrowing his head in the breeder’s chest like it wanted to climb inside and die. “Bet you a steak dinner it doesn’t toe the scratch.”

Chinaman’s breeder grabbed the dog by its neck and whipsawed it back and forth, growling, “Don’t flake on me, you goddamn cur. Don’t you fucking flake .”

Before the bell Alison injected 10 cc’s Epinephrine into Dottie’s haunch. I felt the dog’s fluttering heart rate normalize. Chinaman staggered from his corner, front right leg limp as a cooked noodle. The presa’s muzzle was frosted white with Lidocaine.

Round three ended it. Dottie feinted at Chinaman’s bum leg off the scratch and, in one deft move, rammed her skull into his good one. Forced to support his entire forward weight, Chinaman’s left foreleg snapped. The presa toppled face-first, front legs splayed to either side, hinds scrabbling feebly. Dottie started clawing at Chinaman’s eyes. Before long the baling hooks pulled her off.

After squaring all bets I was lugging Dottie through the parking lot—blood saturating her doggie blanket, dripping through the kennel crate’s metal honeycombs—when this raspy barking kicked up from behind. I wheeled to see a huge Rottweiler bullrushing my blind side. It wore an inch-thick studded leather collar against which the striated muscle of its throat and neck pulsed. Links of twenty-gauge chain spat gravel between its legs.