Craig Davidson - Rust and Bone - Stories

“Is that how you see yourself—a viper?” Joey asks. “And the others here—vipers?”

Beatrice shrugs. “I’ve been to a lot of these groups. One thing never changes: people don’t admit their flaws. Always the rough childhood, the cold wife, stress at the office, the same old piss and moan. Nobody ever stands up and says, Listen: the awful things I do come from a defect in my basic human character, deeply rooted and inseparable from who I am. Never once will you hear that. So, yeah, guess I’m a viper. Safe childhood, caring parents, but still. Don’t wish to harm anyone but your urges get the better of you sometimes, right? That’s why I’m here: searching for someone like me. Only responsible way to go.”

ME AND OWEN hunker outside the library doors, smoking. Wind whips through the courtyard, litter scuttling along the cement walls. Two empty vodka bottles wrapped in a white plastic bag perch atop an overflowing garbage can. Beatrice steps out in a leather windjammer.

“Could I bum one of those?” she asks me.

“Don’t know—do vipers share cigarettes? I mean, in the wild?”

Standing there in the courtyard’s thin yellow light I am again struck by just how beautiful this girl is: Helen of Troy, sack-the-city-torchthe-ramparts kind of beauty, the sort that leaves a wake of helpless shattered men, man- husks eaten out and hollow and left to contemplate the paths they’d taken to claim that beauty in those foolish moments when they felt themselves capable.

“You’re pretty hot, Beatrice.” Hand over my pack. “I’m saying, for a reptile and all.”

“Aw, ain’t you a peach.”

“Just got to town, huh? Where from?”

“Couple different places.”

“So, why here?”

“Weary of the same places, the same faces.” She hums the opening bars of a song which, though familiar, I cannot place. “Moving on down the line.”

“You found a job pretty quick.”

“Yeah, well, I worked for a director out West. He made a call.”

“You do good work.”

Beatrice’s long pale fingers caress the cigarette. “Nothing much to it, is there? Not talking rocket science. And how long you been in the biz?”

“Few years. Started after my divorce.”

“Like it?”

“What’s not to like?” Then: “Anyway, it’s safer. Everyone knows the stakes. Everything’s laid out in black and white.”

She fixes me with a look, the import of which I cannot fully discern. “You think?”

“Yeah I think. Sure I think.” A shrug. “Or something. Just my dime-store philosophy.”

Baney and Bette return from a coffee shop up the street. We stand in the frosty courtyard, knit shoulder-to-shoulder against the wind. The doors open and shut, mothers and children, college students, old women with satchels of paperback romances passing into and out of the library’s welcoming light. I wonder whether any of them pause to consider us huddled here—what might they think? Beatrice’s hand moves against Owen’s side, a catlike pawing gesture and Owen smiles feebly, looking away. When she laughs the plume of her cinnamoned breath wafts past my face.

Bette shivers. “Got to get out of this cold. Fat chick with thin blood—I’m an enigma.”

Baney says, “I could use an enema myself.”

The others head inside. Beatrice grinds the butt under her boot heel. “You had a wife?”

“For six years. Swell job, big house.”

“Kids?”

“A daughter.”

“Love them?”

“Don’t know I ever loved my wife. Thought I did for a while. Love my kid to death. Wish there was more room in my heart.”

“So, you’ve hurt people.”

“A lot. Haven’t you?”

She nods. “Tell them up front who you are and what you’re about but still, everyone thinks they’re the one’s gonna change you. I’m not gonna change. Sure it’s miserable sometimes, but it’s constant misery trying to be something else. This is …”

“The lesser of two evils.”

“Yeah.” A smile. “Like that.”

Down the street two faceless women scream at one another in an unknown dialect until the rumble of a watertruck drowns their voices and through a gap in the courtyard’s security fence, a lengthwise slit between decaying housing projects, the moon shivers on the hammered face of the canal.

“What are you thinking?” Beatrice says.

“Don’t know.” I shrug, suddenly despondent. “Fucking.”

“Fucking who?”

“You. Bette. The librarian. Anyone. The ‘who’ isn’t critical—that’s the problem.”

“Head back inside?”

“I’m easy.”

She grasps my jacket sleeve. “Come on.”

My name is Sam. I’m a sex addict.

Welcome, Sam.

Do I believe love is possible? Sure. I mean, of course. Certainly as an abstract concept: immaculate love, God’s love, whatever. And you see it every day: a couple passes you on the street and you get this sense that, man, those two really love one another. The way I feel about Ellie—that’s love, isn’t it? I don’t really know. It’s possible, in that anything is possible. But I’ve made a vow to be totally honest about who and what I am; how many rational women would want to involve themselves? Still, I’m an optimist. The understandings and intensities would be different, but there’s always that chance. It may not be love by anyone else’s definition, but whatever works, right? So, yeah, I think it’s possible. Absolutely I do.

STREETS AGLITTER WITH FROST. My eyes follow the yellow dash-dash-dash of the median strip running along dark tarmac. Roads forlorn and devoid of human life. A sickle moon cuts through a bank of threadbare nightclouds to grace shops and offices with a washed-out pall. Beatrice in the passenger’s seat fiddling with the radio; every so often she says, “Left here,” or “Hang a right at the doughnut shop,” leading me through the city grid to an unknown destination. A lamplit billboard towers over the shipyard, the tanned blow-dried visage of some local paragon I should recognize but do not staring down benevolently and I’m left feeling ashamed, the way you feel bumping into a person who knows your name when you cannot recall theirs— ashamed for being unable to remember what it was you’d shared together, however meaningless. Beatrice twists the radio knob and the speakers come to life: a string of garbled syllables devolving into a scream or howl, low and mournful and ongoing, the signal weak, crackling with static and I imagine a ghostly deep-space transmission, some doomed cosmonaut shrieking into an intercom, fishbowl helmet starred with cracks and the steamwhistle screech of pressure hammering his eardrums, a dead man’s voice traveling through the empty vacuum of space like a message in a bottle washed ashore on the far reaches of the AM dial.

“Weird,” Beatrice says.

“Yeah. Freaky.”

“Swing left up at the side street. Almost there.”

The building is a deteriorating five-story in the packing district. Faded scorchmarks rise, black tongues against the gouged masonry, scars of some long-ago fire. The intermittent signature of a strobelight flashes across high casement windows. Adjacent parking lot uncommonly packed: BMWs and Mercedes rowed alongside pickups and rusteaten Dodges.

“What is this place? Looks like it should be foreclosed.”

“Most likely is,” Beatrice says. “This is a one-night-only sort of deal.”

Trail her to a green-painted door set between a pair of dumpsters. Her knock is answered by a black man with the rough dimensions of a Morgan Fort gun safe. Beatrice whispers something: apparently the safeword because the man steps aside, allowing just enough room for her to squeeze past. The man is easing his planetary bulk back into position when Beatrice informs him I’m her escort; with a world-weary sigh, he steps aside once more.