Craig Davidson - Rust and Bone - Stories

I dropped Dottie and fired an off-balance kick. The rottie passed under my leg, clamping down on my calf.

Events unfolded at the narcotic pace of a fugue. My right knee buckled and I went down, blacktopped gravel dimpling the ass of my cotton Dockers. My skull caromed off the ground and everything whited out for a moment. Then I was struggling up, fists beating a frenzied tattoo on the dog’s head as its square dark muzzle worried into the wound. Dottie pressed her busted face to the kennel’s grate, growling low in her throat, bloody bubbles forced between her black eyes and orbital bone. The Rottweiler wrenched its head sideways, teeth sunk deep into the sinews of my calf, gator-rolling me across that chill November tarmac.

Five sausage-link digits grasped the underside of the rottie’s jaw, thumb and index finger pressed to the axis where upper and lower palate met, forcing the mouth open. The woman restraining the animal was an eclipse of flesh clad in what appeared to be a pleated topsail, calves thick as an adolescent pachyderm’s networked with bluish spider veins. A slimly ironic menthol cigarette hung off her bottom lip, defying all known laws of gravity.

“Bad Biscuits,” she chastised the dog in a breathy baby-voice. “The manners on you. Why you want to go biting the nice man?”

Alison arrived in a blur of shawls and indignation. I noticed she poked her fingers through Dottie’s crate before arriving at my side. Bright arterial blood pumped from my calf.

“Stop squirming,” she told me, breaking out the peroxide and catgut to attend to the wound.

The woman waddled to her idling Cutlass Supreme. She opened the driver’s door—sunblistered dashboard lined with neon-haired Treasure Trolls; bingo dabbers spilling from a sprung glovebox— swatting the dog inside. A shrewish, stoop-shouldered man sat in the passenger’s seat, wearing camouflage fatigue pants and the kind of sleeveless white T-shirt favored by aged Italian gardeners.

“You can’t,” I said, reaching out to her. “Can’t just … your dog bit me! ”

She tucked her chin to her chest, setting in motion a rippling domino-effect of subsidiary chins. “Biscuits got a touch of the ringworm, misser. Gives him the cranks.” Her look suggested I wasn’t much of a dogman if I didn’t know that . “Every one my babies is papered and rabies free. Don’t need shots, promise.”

“That dog should be destroyed!”

“I’m’n a pretend I didn’t hear that, misser.”

She jerked the door shut and fishtailed down the row of diagonally parked cars. Biscuits hurled his body at the Cutlass’s rear window, barking wrathfully, white froth slathering the glass.

“Did that woman just …?”

“Yes,” Alison palmed me a vitamin K tablet to promote blood clotting. “Let’s go.”

“But you can’t—”

“What do we tell the cops?” she said. “We were at this illegal dogfight and …”

“But we live in a polite society!” I was raving by now. “We operate under civilized rules!”

“Hush.”

“I should bite her —bite that gargantuan … ASS! ”

“Hush.”

Halfway home Alison pulled off the highway. Dottie was emitting low wheezing sounds from the back seat, thrashing on the blood-thick blanket and tearing her stitches open.

We wrangled the kennel crate onto the rough shale of the breakdown lane. In the dead white of an arc-sodium streetlight I broke the kennel down, there being no other way to get her out. Alison held the dog’s square head in her hands, massaging the neck and stomach, anywhere not gored. The medicinal smell of Epinephrine seeped out of Dottie’s many cuts.

“Oh, Jesus. I can’t bury another dog, Jay.”

Alison touched Dottie’s head, tracing her fingertips along the muzzle, kneading the expanse of slick fur between the ears. The dog looked up with sad, grateful eyes. Crickets chirped in long reeds bordering the ditch.

Near the end Alison injected Lidocaine into Dottie’s temple, between the ring and index fingers on my left hand, which were cupped over the dog’s tight-lidded eyes. Cars moved past on the highway, bathing our bodies in headlight glow. Dottie vomited blood. Her eyelids fluttered against my palm.

“I should’ve picked her up.”

The dog started shaking then, the convulsions wracking her bones, radiating outwards.

“She wouldn’t allow it,” I said. “Dottie was a deep game dog.”

“Are you loving it?” Don Fawkes repeats for the umpteenth time. “Tell me you love it.”

But the Supp-Easy-Quit reps are clearly not loving it, a fact Helen Keller could’ve gleaned, but of which Fawkes remains blissfully unaware. Eva Braun jots in a faux-calfskin dossier with aggressive, slashing cursive while her lab-coated bookends eye Fawkes as they might a particularly offensive strain of bacterium smeared across a specimen slide.

Mitch Edmonds passes me a doodle: some guy with a gourd-shaped head in which a candle burns jack-o-lantern style, one eye twice outsizing the other, pumpkintoothed and drooling, squiggly stink-lines and bowtie flies and a speech bubble reading: You love it! You really, really love it!

DR. CLIVE KETCHUM’S FERTILITY CLINIC is located in a neocolonial-style office building at the corner of Steeles and Yonge. I mount the steps leading up to a narrow hallway with hesitancy. Took a Xanax at lunch, another on the cab ride over—feeling no pain.

Ketchum’s waiting area resembles a film noir movie set: a large, dim, oak-paneled room with high ceiling, frosted-glass valances, a white sand ashtray under a no smoking sign. The receptionist is young, petite, and blond, with prominent tits and an air of having woken this morning knowing in advance every move she’d make for the remainder of the day.

“I have the five o’clock.”

She consults the appointment book. “Mr. James Paris?”

I tip her a wink, resisting—barely—the urge to flex.

She leads me down a well-lit corridor into a spare antiseptic room. She gestures to an examination table and orders me to strip to my skivs before excusing herself.

I hoist myself onto the examination table. Butcher paper crinkles under my thighs. A large medical illustration adorns the opposite wall: Scrotum and Contents . It’s all there: the superficial and external spermatic fascias, the tunica vaginalis, the epididymis and the testes, which, in this artist’s rendition, resemble capillary-threaded quail’s eggs. Disembodied tweezer-tips pinch and peel back to reveal strata of flesh and membrane and nerve.

Dr. Ketchum enters. The man’s dimensions are those of a bowling pin, the majority of weight distributed to the hindquarters, and yet his body remains somehow insubstantial, as if stuffed with wadded newspapers.

He flips open a dossier, nodding, then shaking his head. “You’ve been doing the exercises?” He performs a series of spread-legged knee bends, arms veed in front of him like a high diver. Ketchum contends this maneuver—the “gonad agitator”—will promote sperm production and, in tandem with other, uniformly unpleasant exercises—the “urethral tube widener,” the “scrotal exciter”—will have me shooting live rounds in no time.

“I’ve been doing them.”

“It’s strange.”

“What?”

“Strange your sperm count hasn’t increased since the start of your exercise regimen.” He gives me a look. “It is my experience that men tend to baby their testes, usually as a result of early childhood trauma. But believe me when I say they’re terrifically hardy organs. My advice is to really push yourself. Make those testicles work for you. Give them hell, as it were.”

“I’ve been giving them … hell.”