Craig Davidson - Rust and Bone - Stories

He glanced at Jess’s clean-pressed OPP uniform hanging in the hall closet next to the winter coats and old Halloween decorations. “If you’re not gonna put it on, why not stuff it in the attic? Damn death shroud hanging there.”

“Coming in, Sam?”

“Since you asked.” He heeled his boots off and poked his nose into her glass. “Bit early for that, isn’t it?”

“Feels about right. Fix you one?”

“Better not. Ole liver’s bound to explode like a hand grenade, and I can’t afford the transplant.”

Sam followed her into the kitchen, where she brewed a cup of tea. Seeing her fetch a fresh teabag, the wrinkles on Sam’s forehead bunched up. “Don’t have an old bag somewhere around?”

“Nope.”

“Awful waste, seeing as I take it weak anyhow. Toss one away lately? I’ll take that, so long as it’s lying on top yesterday’s newspaper.”

“I don’t serve secondhand teabags.” She winked. “Besides, you’re worth it.”

“Quit it, will ya.”

Jess set the cup in front of him, with a plate of digestives.

“You’re not looking good,” Sam said. “Look … worn.”

“Last of the honeydrippers, aren’t you?”

Sam Mallory was Jess’s uncle, her father’s brother. As was the case with many siblings, they were polar opposites: Sam was restrained where her father was flamboyant, straightforward where her father was circumspect, solidly rootbound where her father’s sail was set to every passing wind. When his brother vanished inside a tea chest twenty-five years ago, Sam assumed wardship of the children—their mother, Jeanne, having passed giving birth to Jess’s brother. A solitary and idiosyncratic man, Sam wasn’t the ideal surrogate father. But he’d always cared for his niece and nephew in the manner of a man with much love to give and no one to lavish it upon: fiercely and devotedly, yet ever at one step removed.

What Sam knew about raising children could’ve fit comfortably on the head of a pin, with room left for a dancing angel or two. But, unlike his brother, he was willing to learn. Jess remembered rushing into the kitchen one morning to see him bent over a mixing bowl, whisking its contents into a froth. In a griddle on the stove, a sad misshapen lump sizzled fitfully.

“What’s this?” Jess had woken with a dreadful certainty the house was on fire.

Sam shielded the mixing bowl with his body, the way a mother caught wrapping Christmas presents might shield them from a nosy child. Blobs of yellowish batter clung to his wiry mesh of beard. “Can’t you see it’s breakfast?”

Jess couldn’t recall her father ever fixing breakfast.

“It’s the most important meal of the day, in case you didn’t know.” Her uncle spoke with a huffy knowledgeable air, as though this were a fact he’d recently read, quite possibly in a thick book.

Jess sat at the table, upon which Sam brusquely deposited a plate. The pancake was a charred disk; a single mouthful probably contained enough carcinogens to dispatch an iron-lunged coal miner.

“Tuck in,” he’d told her. “It’s brain food.”

Sam’s small pink tongue now hunted for digestive crumbs in the bristly forest of mustache. “Been doing some reading.”

Jess stared out at the backyard, where a raven and a squirrel quarreled over bread crusts Ted had scattered that morning. “Oh?”

“Read about something called an Act of Erasure, Jess. Happens in the military, when soldiers lose touch with reality and don’t care about anything. Fellow puts himself in harm’s way when there’s no need. Trying to ruin himself, in a roundabout way.”

“And that’s what you think I’m doing—erasing myself?”

“Maybe I do.” Sam stirred a finger through his tea. “Not ruining, but … well, shutting yourself off. Take a look, Jess—you’re half-crocked at noontime. When’s the last time you stepped outside?”

“You’re being overdramatic.”

Yet Sam wasn’t entirely off base. Jess didn’t feel herself being erased, but she did feel something growing around her, like a shell. Sometimes she thought of it this way exactly: a shell forming over her body, hard and calcified, enrobing her arms, her legs. As time went by it became more impenetrable, layer gathering upon layer the way nacre forms about a speck of grit to create a pearl. Soon everything developed a gauzy translucent aura, as though she were enclosed by panes of warped, cloudy glass. Lately things had become darker and more indistinct, the outside world—her old job and friends, Sam, her husband, the incident itself—developing a distant, hollowed-out quality, as though these were people and events she’d once dreamed, many years ago.

“What is it about you and Herbie,” Sam said. “Both of you hiding away from the world?”

Jess went to the cupboard and pulled down a bottle. That she refused to rise to his challenge, her utter lack of spirit, troubled Sam more than anything.

“Did you come for a reason,” she said, “or just to question my mental state?”

“That’s not fair, Jess. Not fair at all.”

Jess gazed out the kitchen window at the patches of lifeless brown grass crushed by the lawn furniture. It made her think of a little churchyard in some hamlet she’d passed through with her father. She remembered a tidy cemetery and her father guiding them between the gravestones. The knife-edged wind blowing across the flat endless prairie, the corroded flag holders and warmth of her father’s hand, tiny pink flowers bright amidst the browned grass.

“There was a reason I stopped by.”

“Uh-huh. And what’s that?”

“Your brother called. Wants to talk to you.”

“He’s got a phone.”

“You know Herbie.”

“I know Herbie.” As soon as she’d said it, Jess realized the lie. She hadn’t spoken to her brother in nearly two years. “What’s he want?”

Sam walked his cup to the sink and rinsed it out. He looked up and for a moment she caught something in his eyes. Then he hugged her the way Jess imagined a man trapped in a foxhole rocked by mortar fire might hug the man beside him: with a rough embarrassed ardency. She couldn’t remember the last time he’d done it—her wedding, maybe? He wiped his nose and walked to the door.

“Sam? Hey, Sam?”

She caught up with him in the front hall. “Come on. I’m sorry.”

“It’s a hard time.”

“That’s no excuse for me acting like a bear.”

“It’s alright.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Ah, quit it, will ya?”

Sam shuffled down the driveway and hoisted himself into the pickup. He looked comical behind the wheel: a tame black bear some enterprising soul had taught to drive.

“What did Herb want?”

“Didn’t say exactly,” Sam called through the open window. “Wanted you to stop by, but …”

Fakery #6: The Fraudulent Flatline . This tired ruse took root in India, where similar dime-store “miracles” are sufficient cause to bestow sainthood. The robed charlatan—for this fakery, the more aged and desiccate, the better—sits cross-legged on a busy street corner. Once a gallery of gullible rubes has assembled, someone is asked to check the charlatan’s pulse. It’s normal. Then, palms upturned and mouth closed, eyes staring like a lobotomy victim, his body trembles. Keen showmen emit white foam from the sides of their mouths, accomplished by secreting of a tab of bromoseltzer between lip and gum. The trickster’s pulse slows, slows … stops altogether! He has died before their very eyes! Yet, as if on cue, the rogue’s eyes open, and his heart beats fiercely once more. The deceit: by squeezing a small smooth stone in the crook of his armpit, applying pressure on the axillary artery to stem the blood flow, the man’s pulse “magically” disappears.