Craig Davidson - Rust and Bone - Stories

SOME CHICK in the fourth row’s giving me the eye. Slim and pale with wide blue eyes, ass-length ponytail pulled through the back of her baseball cap, she sits in the shadow thrown by a woman wearing a straw hat on the verge of collapsing under a weight of plastic fruit. Her shockingly blue eyes meet mine, then skate across the show pool’s surface. She’s being coy about it, but I’ve seen The Look a thousand times.

I’m straddling the concrete wall dividing the wait pool from the show pool. Sunlight arcs over the amphitheater’s zigzagged metal roof, yellow spears quivering the afternoon air. Stands packed with sunburnt tourists in their vacation finery: tank tops and flip-flops and sansabelt slacks, wifebeaters and board shorts. I spot a sallow-chested shirtless man: the unshakable maxim seems to be those with the most revolting physiques are inevitably those most keen to bare them. Blue inflatable dolphins, red seals, black-and-white killer whales bob amidst the crowd. Tinny upbeat music lilts from recessed speakers. Seagulls wheel and spiral against the unbroken blue sky.

The show opens with the sea lions. Their flatiron-sized flippers collide wetly, broken barks rebounding off the domed cupola. Trainers steer them through a standard routine: balancing striped balls on their noses and catching bright red rings around their necks until the act segues into a Keystone Kops–style chase, animals loping across the stage with trainers in fist-shaking pursuit. The action is punctuated by boinks, tah-dahs, and wah-wah-waaas supplied by the audio booth technician.

I sit cooling my feet in the pools. Sweat rolls down my neck, wicked by the collar of my wetsuit. Off to my left, a young girl in a wheelchair sits beneath the handicapped pavilion’s wind-whipped awning. She looks maybe twelve, though could fall five years on either side: her disease makes parts of the body look worn, while others remain strangely undeveloped. The girl’s father sits beside her, rubbing her arm. I glance down, depressed in an unfocused sort of way, and catch Niska rising through the water.

The orca’s head crests the surface, sleek as a ballistic missile. Sun limns the contours of her black snout, thin golden traceries like the veins on a leaf. Her mouth yawns open, revealing teeth blunted with age and disuse. I reach down and slap her tongue—wet and bristled, like a piglet’s hide—and feed her mackerel from a stainless steel bucket. She submerges for a moment before resurfacing, a gurgle issuing from her blowhole.

“Go on, you big hog,” I say. “No more ’til showtime.”

When the sea lions are finished, Kona’s brought out from the opposite wait pool. He performs a few lackluster highbows then swims a lap around the pool, lashing his atrophied tail to the beat of “Feelin’ Hot Hot Hot,” by Buster Poindexter and the Banshees. Niska butts her snout against the metal gate separating the pools. She has a habit of rousing Kona’s ardor, which, during shows, leads to a lot of “Mommy, what’s that?” questions as Kona’s thick, pink, six-foot-long cock spools out of its sheath like a bizarre Hindu rope trick.

When Kona’s safely penned I crank a winch and raise the gate, ushering Niska into the show pool. I dive in after her. The cool water tastes of brine and chlorine. I blink the sting out of my eyes as Niska circles, body a rippled distortion beneath the waves. I feel the displacement of water as she rises, smooth and powerful, pushing me back. She surfaces in front of me, maw open. Breath like a fishmonger’s floor, rags of mackerel hanging between her teeth. I catch my reflection—curly blond hair, dimpled chin, stubbled cheeks—in the black convex of one of her golfball-sized eyes.

I slap her tongue. “Let’s do this thing, girl.”

The Rocket Ride is the triple lindy of marine mammal behaviors. Anchoring your feet on Niska’s snout, she takes you down into the water. Nearing the pool’s bottom you arch your spine and surge towards the surface. Then, with a thrust of her tail, Niska launches you from the water. That you hit twenty feet is a given—Niska’s feeling frisky, thirty’s a definite possibility. At the height of your ascent perform a snap-pike before slicing down into the water. It’s a shot of pure adrenaline: like being strapped to the nosecone of a Stinger missile.

Twenty feet underwater and the outside world disappears. Gone the crowd, the music, the birds and sun and sky. The water bitingly cold and pressure beating against my eardrums, hamstrings screaming as Niska propels me downwards. The pool basin rushes at me: flaking blue paint, thin serrate cracks, the shiny disc of a quarter some tourist must’ve prompted his kid to toss into the pool—make a wish. Brace my neck and arch my back and then I’m hurtling up through the water at phenomenal speed, lungs burning, a pearlescent helix of air bubbles corkscrewing up to the surface.

Niska’s mouth opens. My left leg slips inside. Thigh raked down a row of teeth, shredding the wetsuit. Rocketing upward, faster now. My crotch smashes the crook of her mouth and something goes snap . Jam a hand into Niska’s mouth and pry with everything I’ve got, her jaws a jammed elevator I’m trying to open. Whale gagging on the foot lodged deep in her throat, huge muscles constricting and relaxing. Bubbles swirling and ears roaring, mind panicked and lungs starved for oxygen, a bright flame of terror dancing behind my eyes and yet there remains this great liquid silence, all things distant and muted in this veil of salt water. A disconnected image races through my head: that famous black-and-white snapshot of a Buddhist monk sitting serenely in lotus position as flames consume him.

Immense pressure shatters my tibia below the hip. A wave of pain roars up my spine and through my neck, nearly tears my skull off. Open my mouth to scream and water rushes in, electric ozone taste choking my sinuses and then I’m breaking the pool’s surface, hurtling up into the warm summer air, arms stretched towards the cloudless sky, gulls screeching, the syncopated beat of salsa music and the handicapped girl sitting beside her wide-eyed father, smiling an odd inscrutable smile.

I hit the water again and then I’m paddling like a dog, kicking but not really going anywhere. I’m not afraid—have never felt calmer in my life, in fact—but my body doesn’t want to obey. It’s so silly, almost funny. Why is everyone yelling? The water’s red and the other trainers scream my name— Oh god over here, Ben, over HERE! —and I try to swim in their direction if only to shut them up but I can’t, my body’s all fucked so I end up paddling over to the wall. I try to get a grip on the wet concrete but my hands are sliced up, bloody, pinkie finger snapped at the knuckle and hanging like a half-opened penknife. Niska bumps my side, a gentle nudge and the screams intensify, earsplitting decibels and I’m thinking, Christ, will you people please shut up? Prismatic bars of color streak my vision as I stare into the stands, where the girl who’d been eyeing me slumps with her face buried in the chest of the fruit-hatted woman. I remember the blue of her eyes—as though cut from the sky—and wish she’d turn them on me once more.

A cute but clingy trainer I’d pointedly ignored since fucking her late last summer tosses me a life preserver. Hook an arm through the blue plastic doughnut, towed to the pool’s edge like a bead on a thread. Hands dig into my armpits and drag me onstage. All the color’s washed out of things, the radiant reds, blues, greens, and pinks of the stage blended into neutral grays and then I see what’s left of my leg, a shredded mess, adipose tissues encased in a yellow layer of fat, splintered bone shining in the crisp sunlight.