Craig Davidson - Rust and Bone - Stories

I recognize this should bother me but, doubtlessly due to the Xanax I popped on the homebound subway, I find myself supremely nonplussed. “He’s a silly one,” I agree. “I’ll go feed the dogs.”

The sky’s an odd color: a deep but muted red, the color of diluted grenadine. Someone a few houses over is doing yardwork: the staccato chop-chop-chop of a lawnmower rises above the pines. The training shed is set into the far left corner in the shade of a leafless maple. The maple is four feet wide at its base, thick lower limbs jutting almost parallel to the ground. I’ve often imagined nailing split two-by-twos into the trunk, a stepladder up to the boughs capable of supporting weight. I’d lay down planks and erect sturdy retaining walls, a corrugated-tin roof for rainy days, a rope-and-bucket dumbwaiter, maybe even a walkie-talkie link allowing for communication during those first nights of independence.

The shed is of solid prewar construction, dirt floor spread with Bardahl to keep the dust down. I take down a pair of ballistic-nylon gloves from a nail pounded into the doorframe and scoop Iam’s Science Diet into steel tureens.

The chicken-wire pens house three fighters but now Dottie’s gone we’re down to a pair. Rodney is a four-year-old male, forty-seven pounds of bone and sinew and teeth, winner of five consecutive, most recently the first-round butchery of Grand Chief Negrino, a vastly overrated Neapolitan mastiff bitch. I set the tureen in front of him and, while he eats, first gently but with increasing force, punch the crown of his skull until he snaps viciously at my gloved hand.

“Good boy.”

Matilda is the most aggressive fighter I’ve ever raised. Her nose is pressed to the chicken-wire, snuffling. She has a short, clean brindle coat with a pattern of gray stripes over a base coat of jet black. I stroke her sleek head and boxy muzzle, running a fingertip across the crescentmoon scars left after her ears were amputated. She licks the glove with her large pink tongue.

I slap her as hard as I can.

The blow doesn’t budge her and then teeth flash, dense muscling of chest and flews flexes, jaws seize the glove in a bone-splintering grip and shake so violently it seems my shoulder will be jerked from socket.

“Mat—aark! Aaaagh! ”

I manage to drop the tureen inside her pen. Matilda immediately releases me and pads over to the kibble. I am struck, as I so often am, by the unstudied perfection of these animals.

Pit bulls are utterly fearless. It is a reckless, lunatic sort of fearlessness, a fearlessness suggesting the breed lacks any true conception of that emotion. Beauty exists in that fearlessness, and so the breed itself is beautiful. It is beautiful to watch your pit toe the scratch against a dog twice its size and note, in its posture and its eyes, the flat and unflinching assurance of victory. It is beautiful to hold a pit’s wine-cask body between rounds, to take in its hideous wounds—ears bitten off and eyes crushed from orbit, compound-fractured legs, flesh stripped to the bone—and see nothing but a cold resiliency, an eagerness . These dogs truly believe they are invincible. They believe they will never die. It is beautiful to watch two pits at the end of a hard roll, lying in the pen’s center or pressed up against the wire, slick with blood, blind and exhausted, licking one another with a shocking tenderness. The simple fact of their existence is its own beauty: there are creatures on this Earth upon whom the human frailties of pain, weakness, self-doubt exert no bearing.

Alison and I talk about our mutual fascination. Lately, it’s about the only topic that doesn’t lead to an argument. Sometimes she’ll ask the question: Should we be doing this? I look at it like boxing: you train your fighter to the best of your ability, bring him along slowly, don’t put him in against a murderer. “Besides,” I tell her, “these dogs want to fight. They can’t vocalize it, sure, but you can see, I can see. It’s what they do .” She’ll nod slightly, say, “The way herding is what a sheepdog does, huh?” in a small voice that doesn’t quite seem to believe. “Ex- actly, dear.”

I walk back to the kitchen. The combined pain of my leg (Biscuits) and shoulder (Matilda) compounded by the ambient soreness resulting from ten minutes of urethral widening exercises has killed the Xanax buzz. I pull two T-bone steaks from the deep-freeze and set them on the counter to thaw. Then I retrieve bottles of rum and Crème de Banane from the cupboard, eyeball shots into a pair of wide-mouthed highball glasses, top them off with heavy cream.

Alison’s in the nursery. Walls painted bright yellow, hardwood floor spread with sections of the Globe and Mail . Two mobiles: tinfoil baseball players shagging fly balls; tinfoil ballerinas pirouetting endlessly. A molded plastic chair with a dog-eared copy of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War resting upon it, from which I often quote passages to the dogs: In peace prepare for war, in war prepare for peace …

My wife on the floor, surrounded by pups. They paw her in clumsy, exploratory fashion, climbing over her hips and breasts, capturing her shirt collar between their teeth and shaking their oversize puppy heads. I sit on pissy newspapers and offer her a glass.

“How was your appointment?” she says.

“Some different exercises.”

Alison sets her glass down. A puppy commences licking the beaded condensation. “I was talking to someone at work,” she says, “about artificial insemination. Interesting option—leaf through a donor book, choose a suitable candidate.”

I imagine a houseful of miniature John Travoltas, or, worse yet, Don Fawkeses, running up and down the halls, sticky-fingered and greasyhaired, telling silly-awful jokes and asking if I love them. “I don’t think we need to explore that option.”

“I’m thirty-three, Jay,” she persists. “Conception after thirty-five is basically a no-go.”

A pup noses the toe of my loafer. I give it a boot, sending it skittering across the floor. “I’m thinking about scheduling a roll for Matilda.”

“A roll? Now?”

I set my empty glass down and pick Alison’s up.

“Mattie’s barely a yearling,” she says. “You haven’t worked her properly …”

“She’s the strongest dog I’ve ever seen. She’ll crucify anybody.”

“There’s not an even-weight dog on the circuit she could be rolled against.”

“I’d be matching her uphill.”

“By how many pounds? Against who ?”

I raise her glass to my lips. Our eyes meet over the rim.

“No way,” she says with dawning awareness. “The Rottweiler that bit you is double her weight.”

“Matilda will eat that mutt up. Devour him.”

Alison cradles a puppy in her arms, kneading its baggy skin between her fingers.

“Stop coddling,” I tell her. “Make a cur out of it.”

The puppy takes her finger in its mouth, gnawing, slobbering. “Matilda’s not ready.”

“She’ll … whup him.”

“Roll with Rodney, at least.”

“Matilda’s ready.”

She stands and walks to the window. With the night pressed against the window glass, the darkness reflects her face set in rigid lines. Alison doesn’t have the sort of features that become more attractive with anger, the high Latin cheekbones or bee-stung lips that, when flushed, evoke a certain male stirring. She is much prettier when calm and accommodating.

“Matilda didn’t bite you. It’s not her fault.”

“That’s not what this is about!” I sway unsteadily to my feet, chest puffed with righteous indignation. The glass slips from my grasp and shatters on the floorboards. Puppies rush at the yellow mess. I kick at them, “Watch the broken glass, you little shits!”