Craig Davidson - Rust and Bone - Stories

The dogs square around as the crowd clusters close to the pen, leaning in for better views. Biscuits steps from left foreleg to right, then right to left, a boxer’s shuffle. Matilda stands stock-still, mouth open, haunches quivering.

The rottie rushes again, crouched low, head tucked. Flashing teeth tear his ear to shreds before he smashes into Matilda’s stifles, barreling her into the chicken-wire. Alison pokes her fingers through the wire, fingers clenched. Biscuits has Matilda pressed against the pen— Matilda pivots, lashing out with her hind legs, aiming for the gutwound. Jaws come together, two or three splintered teeth skittering across the ground. With a level of cunning I wouldn’t have guessed at, Biscuits fakes a strike at Matilda’s throat, reverses and bites down on the rear right haunch. Matilda emits a shrill yowl.

“That’s it, boy! Get at her!”

Teeth sunk deep into Matilda’s flank, Biscuits drags her away from the chicken-wire. Matilda’s body whips side to side, paws scrabbling uselessly. Alison’s grip on the wire tightens as Biscuits shakes his head, neck tendons bunching. Blood pours down Matilda’s brindled coat.

The bell rings. Men reach over the pen with blunted baling hooks to pry the dogs apart.

Matilda trots stiffly to the corner, rear right leg tucked close to her chest. I snap a muzzle on and grip her barrel chest as Alison goes to work. “Easy, Mattie baby,” Alison whispers to the squirming dog.

She cleans away the blood and debrides the cuts with a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and rubbing alcohol. Peering down through the layers of meat, she winces.

“Severed veins.”

“Do what you do.”

After swabbing the deep tissues with a thick coagulant, she sprays the topmost layers with Granulex. Then she spreads the wounds’ lips and cauterizes them with ferric acid. Matilda squeals against her muzzle. I glance at the other corner, where Lola runs a bead of Crazy Glue down Biscuits’s ear before pressing the split halves together. The rottie’s upper canines are busted to the gumline but he sports an enormous erection.

Alison swabs Matilda’s nose with adrenaline chloride 1:1000 to jack some energy into her through the mucous membranes. When I remove the muzzle she nips at my hand.

Both dogs toe the scratch. The bell rings.

Biscuits slinks forward like a cat, protecting his gut. Matilda circles right, her bloodied flank resembling a port wine stain. The rottie cocks his head and goes for Matilda’s throat. With blinding speed Matilda dodges back, the rottie’s jaws snapping closed over vacant air, and counterattacks. Biscuits howls as Matilda’s teeth open huge wounds on the right side of his face, skin folding down in a single flap, high cheek to jowl.

“Yes!” I holler. “Get him! Get at him!”

Matilda presses the retreating rottie, who is blinking to clear his blood-blind eyes; spectators at pen-side shield themselves from the flying blood. She hammers her head into Biscuits’s chest and flews.

The rottie casts his eyes around like a lost child.

“Eat him up, Mattie!”

Near the end of the round Biscuits worries his head inside Matilda’s guard, bites into her chest, lifts the smaller dog up and smashes her to the ground. Matilda’s skull snaps off the concrete and the sound of her ribs cracking is like a boot squashing a periwinkle. The bell rings.

Matilda staggers to the corner. Her left side is dented like the hull of a galleon hit by cannon fire. Blood drips in thin rills from her ears.

“She’s bleeding inside,” Alison says. “Those busted ribs are pressed up against …”

“Do what you do.”

“Pick her up. Another round could—”

“Just do what you do .”

“This is such bullshit. You are such bullshit.”

She injects procaine into Matilda’s ribs before tending to the dog’s other wounds. I feel Matilda pushing against me, eager to get at Biscuits. She is in a great deal of pain, and could die shortly. All she wants to do is fight. I remember what the dogman from whom I’d purchased my first pit bull told me: These dogs are bred for a mean utility. They are bred to fight and live only for the fight. It’s all they know . I wonder at a life so singular of purpose, a utilitarian existence no different from that of a hammer or shovel.

“Bad inter-cranial swelling,” Alison says. “Blood’s leaking out her eyes.”

I use the adrenaline to swab Matilda’s gums, her nostrils, her eyes covered with a thin film of blood and blinking uncontrollably. The dog’s body strains mindlessly.

Biscuits drags himself to the scratch. His face, which Lola has unsuccessfully attempted to glue back in place, is a gummy mess.

The bell rings. Matilda goes for the rottie’s leg but something’s wrong, she can’t see right, misses by a mile, jaw hammering off the concrete. Biscuits sidesteps, clawing at Matilda’s eyes, ripping the forehead open. Matilda’s turning a drunken circle, trying to draw a bead, unable to. She’s yowling, but whether in pain or frustration I can’t tell.

“Stomp it, boy!” Lola’s yelling. “Stomp that mutt!”

“Pick her up, Jay. She’s dying in there.”

“She’s a deep gamer. She’ll be …”

The rottie flanks Matilda’s blind spot—Christ, she’s all blind spot— and mounts her, massive jaws clamped over her neck. Matilda’s squirming, yammering, unable to move. Her bladder lets go with a stream of blood-red piss. Biscuits pins her to the concrete and lowers his body like he’s taking a shit but he’s not taking a shit, that red raw rock-hard dick—

“That’s it, boy!” Lola, apoplectic. “Throw that little bitch your dirty laig! ”

… and it comes to you in the sleepless witching hours, a question bracing in its simplicity : Do I deserve? In the clean sane light of day such notions are so easily dispelled, but with dawn’s awakening light filtering through the venetian blinds, quartering your face into corridors of day and darkness, the question takes on looming weight. What is essentially a biological question acquires critical moral import—a question of weakness so ingrained as to exert its sway on a cellular level. And you wonder if you are capable. Can you meet the world with fists raised, moving forward, fearless? All revolves within this. Advance. Retreat. Weakness. Strength. If you are capable, then so you are deserving. If not, not. At some point we all must answer to this. At some point we must stare it down. Am I capable? Do I deserve? She sleeps beside you, the woman you love, her steady exhalations raising the bedsheets by shallow increments, you thinking, Do I? Do I? and then …

I’m launching myself into the pen, slicing my hands open on snarled chicken-wire, tripping, stumbling, dragging myself up, calf stitches breaking open with a sick internal tear and the pain has me gagging but I throw myself at the rottie, shoulder-blocking it in the ribs and falling on top of Matilda, the crowd exploding in shocked disbelief, Matilda beneath me hot and tensed and shivering, whisper it’s okay, okay-okay-okay and then the rottie on me, ripping at my rubber-bandy legs, at my neck, trying to get at Matilda but I turn into him, shielding my dog and Matilda licking my fingers and I look to Alison and the way she’s staring at me, Christ, I haven’t seen that look in years, the kind of look a guy can build on then baling hooks are out and digging into the dogs, digging into me and something explodes inside my skull, a combustive fireworks display, boom, boom, boom, starbursts and fractured light pinwheeling before the red curtain of my tightly shut eyelids as one pure thought loops through my fritzing, blown-apart brainpan: so this is fatherhood .