Craig Davidson - Rust and Bone - Stories

CONSTANTCRAVINGS: Say a prayer for yourself, killjoy! Have a drink and lighten up!

[CONSTANTCRAVINGS, you have been banned from this forum]

I’M SITTING IN A CORNER BOOTH at the Concorde, a strip club near Clifton Hill. I used to come here with my high-school buddies, all of us toting fake IDs. We’d sit along pervert’s row, laughing and hooting, superior in our youth and wide-open future and potential to do great things.

On the raised parquet stage, a topless chick spins disinterestedly round a polished brass pole. A woman in her mid-forties stands in the red glare of a HOT NUTS vending machine, naked save a pair of pink heels. She’s eating barbecued peanuts from a plastic cup, pinching them between fingernails that must be two inches long. It’s the most oddly revolting sight I’ve ever laid eyes on.

I’m drinking Sauza tequila: empty shot glasses on the table, ashtray filled with wrung lemon wedges. The darkness and smoke favor the strippers, whose faces are made for mood lighting. In their younger years, many of them worked the pole at Mints or Private Eyes but, bumped by the influx of new meat, they’ve carted their sagging anatomies and failing looks here, a final stand before the street corner.

A new girl steps through the tinsel curtain to a smattering of desultory applause. Blood-red spotlights disguise the needle tracks on her arms but do nothing to hide the seam of a C-section scar curving from bellybutton to bikini line. A guy sitting up front whistles sharply, the way one seeking a dog’s attention might.

A woman slides into the booth. At the tail end of her career, pencil thin lines where her eyebrows should be, a broken nose that’s healed badly. A sarong wrapped around her waist, which I suppose could be either a token gesture at modesty or a means of concealing some gruesome defect.

“Drinking alone, baby?”

“Looks that way.”

“Want some company?”

My response is noncommital and she slides closer. She wears the brand of perfume strippers prefer; I wonder if there’s a communal atomizer they all share.

“I’ll suck your cock for fifty dollars.” She laughs crazily, as though I’d told a rakishly indelicate joke.

“I don’t even know your name.”

“Sharday. What do you say, hon?”

“Let me have another drink.”

“How ’bout getting me one, too?”

Suitably fortified, we sneak out the back door. A clear autumn night and the sky spread with stars, remote and numberless. Sharday leads me across the parking lot to a row of motel rooms. Her room is small but neat and smells of carpet freshener. Framed photos of two young boys on the nightstand; she turns them face-down before easing me onto the bed. Bills change hands. She unbuttons my jeans, tugs them down.

“What’s that?”

“A fake leg.” I assumed she’d noticed the replacement prosthesis in the club. For a moment I think she’s going to call it off, as though amputation’s contagious and she doesn’t want to risk it.

“How did it happen?”

“War wound. Desert Storm. Some brown bastard cut it off with a sword. Those wiggly looking swords.”

“A kirpan?”

“Sure … one of those.”

Sharday slips a condom over me with the clinical disinterest of an ER nurse. She works with a brisk, businesslike air, humming a familiar tune I can’t quite put a name to.

“Is it okay?” she says. “Feel good, hon?”

“It’s … fine.”

“Something else you want? It’s cool.”

I tell her to tuck her arms behind her back so that, from my perspective, it’d look …

“Like I have no arms?”

“Yes,” I say. “Like that.”

She does as I ask, but I can’t look at her. Lean back on the bed, stare at a ceiling covered in a constellation of water stains. One resembles a suckling pig, another some breed of tropical bird. Stare at Sharday’s bobbing skull, those dark roots growing out of her scalp. A bedspring pokes through the threadbare mattress, jabbing me in the spine. Music seeps through the wall from the other room: “Let My Love Open the Door,” by Pete Townsend. The song is followed by another and another, then “The Things I Do for Money” by the Northern Pikes is playing.

“Awful sorry, sugar. I’m dancing in a minute.”

She pulls the condom off and tucks me back inside my boxers. No refund is offered. I clip my leg on. Sharday leads me outside.

“Gonna be okay, hon?”

“Thanks for trying.”

She pecks me on the cheek then sets off across the lot, the click-click of her heels echoing off the graffiti-tagged walls. I walk out to the street. Cars packed with teens cruise past on Ferry, looking to pull a U-turn and head back down the Hill. A wire-mesh rack propped beside the Concorde’s door, stuffed with brochures for local attractions: Castle of Frankenstein, Skylon Tower, Hollywood Wax Museum, Colonel Tilliwacker’s Haunted Lemonade Stand. In the top right corner: a glossy blue brochure, killer whale leaping beneath the hub of a brilliant rainbow. Everyone Loves Marineworld, spelled out in inch-high bubble script.

A CAB DROPS ME OFF outside the front gates as early morning stars bleed into the lightening sky. Ticket booths boarded up, closed for the season. Head to the trainer’s entrance, kicking through drifts of crackling leaves. My key still works. In the prep area fillet knives hang on a magnetized strip above a block of frozen herring thawing in a metal basin. The odor of chlorine and gutted fish; the bark of penned sea lions. Step through another door onto the stage.

Security lamps burn on the amphitheater’s perimeter, casting a silvered sheen on the water. Cross the stage, past props silent in their wrap of shadows. A paddle wheel turns with a steady trickle of water. Birds roost on a bridge spanning the show and wait pools. Peel off shirt, remove shoes and socks and pants, uncouple my leg. Late September wind buffets what’s left of my body. I break out in gooseflesh.

The whale was captured in a drift net off the coast of Siberia. Sectioned from her pod, hooked to a fifty-ton winch, dragged aboard a Russian freighter. She spent three weeks cradled in a body hammock, hosed down with salt water. A crane lifted her through a moonlit sky and into a new world: 90” ×60” ×30”, glass and concrete. I was the one who fed her. Taught her. Kept her alive. I came to believe she belonged to me, the way land or a car can belong to a person. I forgot that every time I entered the water I belonged to her, and the moment I remembered was the moment it ceased to matter.

Ease myself down by the pool’s lip, dangling my leg in the water. Niska swims at the far end, dorsal fin cutting the glasslike surface. Air jets from her blowhole, a shimmering spume lit by the stark white lights. Cup water and lift it to my mouth, relishing that salty sting. The pool dark and fathomless, dropping into forever. As a child I suffered this recurring nightmare in which the floor of my bedroom turned liquid, bed bobbing on the placid surface. Peering over the mattress, I saw shapes wheeling and surging in the inky water, primordial Lovecraftian horrors with scales and blunt teeth. How far down did that darkness stretch: through the Earth’s core, out into space, to the edge of the known universe? The distance from the foot of my bed to the open door was perhaps five feet—I could clear it at a leap. But if I were to slip …?

Push off the concrete ledge, move out into the pool. One-legged and overweight, I cut an ungainly path through water so frigid it robs my breath. Niska’s head turns, a languid sweep. Her body describes a slow half-circle, starlight rippling over the contour of her dorsal ridge. I tread water, cold pressing against my ribcage. Catch my reflection in the pool’s dark mirror. No fear or indecision in my eyes and for that I’m thankful. Nothing to be done for it, now. There is only acceptance, and a hope that, in those slender moments separating what is from what may be, there might be understanding.