Craig Davidson - Rust and Bone - Stories

“What’s the story?” Follow Beatrice up a narrow staircase. Walls graffiti tagged, holes punched through plaster to reveal corroded wires and sodden pink insulation. “Are you leading me into ruin? A snuff film crew? Black-market organ farmers?”

“It’s a traveling showcase.” She stops, glancing back at me. “Different cities, different participants. I’ve done it a few times.” A wink. “Surprised you don’t know about it.”

At the top of the stairs a girl with a pierced bellybutton stands beneath a sign reading Coat Check . Doff my jacket and hand it over. She taps the sign with a hot-pink fingernail and I notice it in fact reads Clothes Check . Beatrice and I strip, turning our shirts and jeans over to the girl. She hands me a claim chit but I’ve no idea where to stow it. Beatrice slips hers under her tongue. I do the same.

The girl positions herself before a sliding metal door. Spraypainted on the door in pink letters matching her fingernails is the word GOMORRAH.

“Pitter-patter,” says Beatrice, hopping lightly from one foot to the other, “let’s get at ’er.”

The first thing to hit you is heat: this warmth closing around your body. The second is smell: sweet and bitter at once, the scent of bodies in close contact. The way Bette said: like sweat, but deeper. As my eyes adjust I see we’re in a warehouse. Steel girders row the vaulted ceiling; small creatures, birds or mice, scuttle across rusted A-beams. Strobelights set on telescopic tripods throw kinetic pinwheels on the walls and floor. A DJ spins trance music on a pair of portable turntables.

“Welcome to the viper’s nest.” Beatrice’s lips next to my ear. “Or is it viper’s pit?”

She leads me to the clutch of naked bodies. Thirty or forty people sprawled on swaths of thick velvet. Arms and elbows, calves and knees; occasionally a head will crest, person taking a deep breath as though they’ve been trapped under water. No one speaks; no voices at all save the sporadic sigh or shuddering exhale. Beatrice is gone, her body twined with a dozen others, amalgamate now, indistinguishable.

Wade in slowly, as a swimmer immerses himself in cold surf. A hand reaches out, grabbing my calf, pulling me down; I’ll go willingly enough. Bodies press against mine, limbs hairy and smooth; breasts pushed into my face, a perfumed arm wrapped round my head urging me on; someone’s hand, cold and brittle as a talon, clamps onto my leg and delivers a nasty pinch; my lips on thighs and asses, in vaginas and mouths, the crooks of elbows, the undersides of knees; a hard cock crosses the underside of my throat, across lips, gone. A faceless stranger with a dextrous tongue, woman or man I cannot tell, performs fellatio with such wanton bravado I’m left on the verge of weeping. Men and women congregate in well-dressed groups in the warehouse shadows, silent observers. A man stands amidst the teeming surge and emits a high gibbering shriek like some jungle creature and in the plated moonlight falling through the casement windows he appears skinless and I’m thinking about my daughter standing in a green summer field, Ellie’s smiling face lit by the July sun. Peace and serenity I’m thinking. Wayne’s mangled cock I’m thinking. Pussy tits ass I’m thinking. Admit the existence of a higher power I’m thinking. Flesh I’m thinking. Flesh flesh flesh flesh …

At some point I am standing. Beatrice faces me: hands on hips, head cocked to one side, appraising me with a slight smile. She’s kicking off this unearthly glow as though her veins rush with phosphorus. Her beauty is crushing and I feel minuscule. Bodies seethe at our feet but in this moment nothing else exists. She brushes at a lock of hair fallen over her eyes and it’s ludicrous but I’m envisioning the country cottage and white picket fence, the words SAMUEL + BEATRICE encircled by a heart carved into the wood of an oak tree, all these childish insupportable fantasies. And sure, I’ve run through this script enough times to know how it turns out but before the guilt and recrimination there exists a state of grace—right … now —a fleeting span of limitless possibility and hope.

“Think it always has to be this way?”

“The viper bites,” Beatrice says. “Can’t help itself.”

She reaches for me and I pull away. Can’t bear to touch her. My body’s electric; tongues of blue static lick and pop off the ends of my fingertips. You’re gonna exit this world with regrets; it’s an absolute given. And okay, I’ve been burned before—haven’t we all? All I’m saying is, there’s that chance, right? A longshot, fine, a million to one. Still—it’s there.

Maybe. That’s as far as I’ll go. Just maybe .

TWO MONTHS SHY of my twenty-eighth birthday I beat Johnny “The Kid” Starkley to death in Tupelo, Mississippi. A stiff right to the solar plexus sent him to the ropes, gulping for breath. I clubbed him a pair of overhand rights and a left just below the ear, where the jawbone connects. Brutal punches fired straight from the hip, subtle as a train wreck. The Kid—an apt nickname: sandalwood-smooth skin and clear green eyes, so light on his feet he seemed to float above the canvas— held his left arm out, that arm trembling, red glove bobbing like a buoy on a riotous sea. The Kid’s mouthpiece stuck to his teeth, the insides of his lips filmed with white lather, holding his left arm out as if to say, Please, I’ve had enough, but his body too stubborn, too disciplined, to buckle to the will of his mind. I hit him until his eyes glazed over like a dying animal’s, until that arm fell away, until the ref signaled for the bell. Starkley’s death hit me hard, but at the time I wouldn’t cop to it. The fight was sanctioned. Marquis of Queensbury rules—I’d done nothing wrong!

Started juicing on Ten High bourbon and Schlitz. Went from training five hours a day at Top Rank gym to closing out the Cyclone, the gin joint next door. I shed a sickening amount of weight, skin green and jaundiced, booze destroying the mitochondria in my guts. For a few months I didn’t know sobriety: sixpack for breakfast and a flask of mescal on the nightstand, brushing my teeth with apricot brandy. I saw Starkley trapped in the ropes, mouthpiece dangling out, blood filling his eyes. And, in this persistent vision, I knew he was dying, knew I was killing him, but I didn’t stop. The worst part was watching Starkley grow younger with each blow—now thirty, now twenty-five, now eighteen, finally my fists slamming into this kid, this skinny-legged, sparrow-chested child hung up between the red and blue ropes.

My manager, Moe Kundler, tried to salvage me. Stumbling back from the Cyclone I’d find AA schedules taped to the door, twelve-step brochures in the mailbox. Then Moe dropped by to find me zonked on the kitchen floor, shards of shattered bottle punched into my palms, pants filled with piss and shit. He filled a pot with water and dumped it on me. I came to sputtering, fists balled and ready to rumble. He slapped me hard and said, “Clean yourself up. I’m making the phone call.”

No way could I hack detox or the nuthatch, glimpsing Starkley in those Rorschach inkblots. I gathered up the money I’d ratholed and hightailed it. Thailand was my choice on account of an uninhibited sexual politic and stern non-extradition policy. I arrived in Bangkok twenty-five years ago, and have never left.

Yesterday Moe wired he’s sending a hardass. Time and distance have patched our old beefs. The kid arrives on the 9:40 Air Canada out of Vancouver. Late twenties, baggy board-shorts and a garish Hawaiian shirt, eyes dark behind oversize wraparounds. Workably broad across the shoulders and chest, bull necked, narrow waisted, and small hipped. Underslung jaw and a nose busted eastward. His acute-angled brow would give any cutman the screaming meemies: heavy layers of scar tissue rim the curves beneath each eyebrow, and I know if he tastes the long knuckle the sharp ridges of bone will tear those scars to shit.