Craig Davidson - Rust and Bone - Stories

He arrives at a house that, despite its unfamiliar architecture, he instinctively recognizes as his own. The front door opens, Nell stepping into the clean mid-afternoon sunlight. Barefoot, wearing a short summer dress. She moves haltingly, trembling, arms outstretched in search of an elusive balance. Then a magical thing happens: hairline fissures run down her arms and legs, thin and twisting like cracks in granite. Her face shatters, the fractured portions—high arch of cheek, fluent plane of brow—flaking off, skin curled and like burnt paper. Her expression does not change, though her eyes lighten to a brilliant shade of blue. Graham thinks of a Russian doll, of a chrysalis birthing some strange new-old and beautiful thing. She skips lightly down the path—oh, the way she moves . Her beauty is so merciless it exists nearly in the abstract. And though he knows, deep in those chambers of heart and mind that never truly sleep, this is only a dream, he still holds an unshakable belief in its possibility.

Other times, driving the streets at night, his restless mind slipping in and out of focus, a different dream comes. He repossesses another car. This one never takes a concrete form: four wheels, bland and nondescript. A getaway vehicle. He drives through the city as he knows it: redbrick houses and beige apartment complexes with squares of light burning in odd windows, darkened parks, pockets of ugliness and despair overlooked by distant snow-capped hills. He pulls up to the house he and his wife have shared for twenty-five years, idling at the curb for a long empty second. He sees Nell’s trembling silhouette in the front window. Then he sets the car in gear and pulls away, turning the corner at the end of the block, the red eyes of those taillights dimming, gone. He does not know where he is going, doesn’t quite accept his own dream logic. The vision dissolves—he often snaps out of it with an audible yelp—and in its wake all that exists is a cold and resolute self-loathing.

“Nobody really holds anyone,” said Paris. “You only hold someone as well as you’re able and you’re only held as much as you’ll allow. In the beginning, you know, that’s where the excitement lies: the uncertainty, right? The … fear .” Paris turned to Graham and smiled. He had a way of smiling that made Graham sad. “Don’t you think it’d be nice if life was like the Riverside? I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Everybody works together. Everybody gets along. There’s love, sure, but not the kind that breaks people in half, wrecks things. Puppy love. Nobody gets hurt. Everyone’s just … friends. It’d be good, I think. A good life.” He laughed, the stiff barking noise of a small dog. “I’m an idiot.”

Turtle swam back to shore. It stood in the shallows, staring, with ancient pondering eyes, at the box it’d been plucked from.

“Silly thing.” Paris walked down to the water and picked the turtle up, returning it to the box. It seemed content to be back, its existence delimited by those four off-brown walls.

“Where’s the frog?”

“Think you lost him.”

“He’ll be okay. He’s resourceful.”

Paris waded out into the lake, where Dillson swam in meandering circles. “Get your feathered ass over here.” At the last possible moment the duck took flight: a splash of water, a dim flapping of wings, a plump shape fleeing across the moon’s face into the first ashes of light to the east. Paris stood in water up to his knees, shaking his head. High above, a jet left its gauzy contrail on the lightening cupola of sky.

“Maybe this is the way it happens.” Paris did not elaborate.

“Maybe so. Listen, I’m not gonna take your camper.”

“Really?”

“I came, you weren’t here. That’s my story.”

“Hey, man, thanks.”

“It’s temporary. Agency’ll send someone else.”

“I only need a week to cut the episode.”

“You should be okay. Can’t stay here, though.”

“Right. I’m a no-good deadbeat.” Paris’s quasi-criminal status appeared to energize him. “I’m on the lam. Bonnie and Clyde.”

He came out of the water. “I really hate to do this, seeing as you’ve exceeded your good Samaritan quota for this week, but I’ve got to ask you one last favor.”

BEAMS OF PREDAWN SUNLIGHT filtered over the horizon, touching the hoods of parked cars, the windows of office buildings. Moon still visible, a pale hub above the hills. The city hung suspended between darkness and day. Early morning dog walkers and paperboys went about their business with an air of reluctant obligation.

Graham drove silent suburban streets, a meandering route home. He loved this time of day, everything clean and fresh and full of possibility. A cardboard box sat on the seat beside him. Hamster, mouse, guinea pig, and turtle slept quietly inside. All four were touching, drawing heat from one another, bodies expanding and contracting as they breathed. Two cages and an aquarium stacked in the footwell, next to a sack of cedar shavings, another of barley pellets. He pulled into his driveway, hefted the box, and went inside.

The television was on, muted, tuned to another episode of The Beachcombers . Nick was hollering at Relic, presumably for stealing logs. Nell lay on the recliner. Even in sleep, her body shook fitfully.

Graham switched the TV off. Sparrows congregated on the backyard picnic table, brown bodies staggered in ranks like Confederate soldiers. He thought of the first time he’d seen Nell, at a high-school dance. A slim beautiful girl standing in the splintered light of a revolving mirror ball. She danced alone, swaying her hips and snapping her fingers to the beat. He was stunned when she asked him to dance. He wondered if it were a joke to amuse her friends, not really caring if it was in his desire to be next to her. He remembered her eyes in the malarial heat and darkness of the high-school gym, glittering blue, pupils wide and dark. The sparrows took flight en masse, a dark flurry of bodies vanishing over the rooftops.

“H-H-Honey?”

Nell was awake, rubbing her eyes.

“Just me. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“Wh-wh-what’s t-that you g-got?”

Graham set the box on the armrest. “Some new friends I made last night.”

He set the guinea pig on Nell’s lap. It burrowed into the loose folds of her sweater, warbling contentedly.

“I h-had a g-g-guinea p-pig when I w-whu-was a kid.”

Graham placed the remaining animals on different parts of his wife. They roamed the prone topography of her body: the backs of her hands, swells of her arms, crook of her neck.

“T-tuh-tickles,” she said. “W-wh-where w-wuh-will we put these g-guys?”

“We’ll find room.”

In the mellow half-light of the den, the animals made a nest of Graham’s wife. Marian Mouse nuzzled through the soft curls of Nell’s hair. Turtle sought the valley between her breasts, paused as though awaiting permission, then eased down. Nell petted BP’s head, the guinea pig happy to receive any attention.

Her hand hardly trembled. It hardly trembled at all.

A distressed squeak from somewhere below. Graham scanned his wife’s body: no hamster. It must’ve slipped between the seat and back, down into the guts of the recliner.

“Stay as still as you can,” he told Nell, kneeling beneath the leg rest and lifting the green corduroy flap, exposing the chair’s inner workings. The hamster was caught in a V of metal struts forming the recliner’s levering mechanism. Each strut was attached to a heavy spring quivering with the movement of Nell’s body. The hamster hung helplessly, stunted legs kicking the air, eyes bulging comically.

“Please,” Graham said, reaching a hand towards the shivering creature. “Please, Nell, please stay still.”