Craig Davidson - Rust and Bone - Stories

“I miss you,” he said. “I miss your smell.”

“My smell?”

“You’ve got a great smell. It’s still here, in the sheets, but—not the same.”

“Will it be enough to tide you over?”

“I guess it’ll have to. Can’t hug and kiss the sheets.”

“You could …”

“But that would be … weird.”

“A little.”

After a beat: “You okay?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I just wanted to …”

“Hear my beautiful voice. Don’t blame you: ladies call at all hours to hear my silky-smooth baritone, baby. So … what are you wearing?”

Jess laughed softly. “Ted, your dirty mind.”

“Oh, my god, ” Herbert moaned. “Find a phone booth, why don’t you?”

Fakery #44: Rod into Serpent . One of magic’s oldest tricks, it plays on a snake’s nature and instinct. First, chill the snake in an icebox for several hours to render it sluggish. Then, grasping the head between thumb and index finger, apply steady, equal pressure. This stuns the serpent, who believes an enormous beast is attacking. Unable to defend itself, it goes into shock, body rigid as a twig. Finally, set the stunned snake on the floor. Within a few minutes, it will slither away, unharmed.

[6]

The morning sky was dour, the trees to the west a dirty tone of silver. A cover of fog clung to the bay, moving low and fat across the water.

Jess navigated down the gravel track leading to the main road. Fog hung suspended between skeletal oak and maple. Rounding a blind curve, Jess glimpsed the looming shape and slammed her foot on the brake. The car’s back end fishtailed over the shale.

“Holy moley,” Herbert said in a small, childlike voice.

The bull moose was easily ten feet tall. The front half of its body blocked the road, hindquarters mired in the spillway. Seen in profile, its head was a long dark wedge elegantly downswept, a smooth invert bow connecting its lips to the wet fur of its dewlap, which fanned in finlike ridges. The antlers were mostly shed of their itchy summer hide, though molting tatters hung from the odd point; rising from either side of the skull, tips stained by pine sap, they resembled the wings of an albino butterfly.

“Honk the horn.” Herbert recalled stories of cars colliding with such beasts, frames buckling and metal shearing while the animal walked away, stunned but unhurt. “Scare it.”

“It’s okay,” Jess said. “There’s room on your side.”

She eased the car forward, angling around the moose’s projecting bulk. The animal’s massive head swiveled, dark eyes focused on the vehicle. The front wheel slipped on the steep grade of the spillway. Branches raked the fender and windows.

“God, Jess. We’ll tip over.”

Jess’s heart fluttered—it felt wonderful . “We’re okay.”

She inched the front bumper ahead, tapping the gas. The moose’s head dipped, nose pressed to the driver-side window. Jess’s face was separated from the moose’s by a thin pane of glass. Beads of moisture ringed its sockets, a thickly sloped nose and teeth the hue of old bone, a corona of horseflies buzzing around its head. She felt a kinship with the animal—an illusive kinship, the kind that sometimes occurs when strangers lock eyes passing in cars headed opposite directions. The creature expelled plumes of steam through nostrils the size of teacups. Flecks of mucus sprayed the window. Its tongue, black and a foot long, licked a diagonal slash across the misted glass, as though it wished to learn of this strange shiny creature by its taste.

Jess edged the car back onto the road. They stared out the rear window as the moose flicked the huge leathery funnels of its ears at the maddening flies.

“That,” Herbert said softly, “is its own kind of magic.”

They arrived in Thessalon shortly after noon. The main drag conformed to an archaic model, with stores long since wiped from the metropolitan topography—Woolco, Stedman’s, Saan—hanging on thanks to stubborn small-town consumers. The streets and trees and shops were bleached out, town suffocating beneath a blanket of low, dark clouds.

Their father’s house stood at the end of a block shaded by the knitted branches of maple and walnut trees. The squat one-story was utterly nondescript and bordered on sterile; Jess had known bums to decorate their cardboard hovels with more flair. She thought of the exotic locales her father could’ve disappeared to: the white sand beaches of Pago Pago, the African veldt, the caldera of a dormant volcano. But no, he’d abandoned them for this shoebox less than five hundred kilometers away.

They climbed the cracked brick steps and Herbert rang the bell. Jess peeked through the slitted drapes: an ancient stereo with dual cassette player and turntable, a swayback sofa, a stack of newspapers propping up an overflowing ashtray. Dust motes hung in the air, turning over and over.

“He’s not home,” a woman’s voice called out through the shutters of the house next door.

“Do you know where he is?”

“Try the bowling alley.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure I’m sure!” The shutters snapped shut.

PARKWAY BOWL-A-DROME was a corrugated-tin building in the shape of an airplane hangar jutting from the back end of the Leonard Hotel, the two structures fused into one grisly unit. Farmland stretched for miles behind the alley.

Stepping through the front doors, Jess was assaulted by an odor peculiar to bowling alleys: an amalgam of cigarette smoke, grease, shoe deodorizer, whatever they used to polish the lanes. Herbert gazed up and down the bustling hardwood floors, the mica-flecked balls spat from return chutes and gaudy red-and-white shoes stacked in cubbyholes, the insectile hum of the ball-buffing machine, thinking his father wouldn’t set foot in this place on a dare.

The man behind the counter tried to guess Jess’s shoe size. “Size eight wide.”

“We’re not here to bowl, but yeah.” Jess unfolded the sheet of newsprint with their father’s photo. “Looking for this guy. Know him?”

“Who’s asking?”

Jess showed her badge. The counterman smiled wisely, as though unsurprised to see their father’s misdeeds had finally caught up to him. “Lane eighteen, officer.”

The man pushed a small white button in the center of the teardrop ball return and rubbed his hands together over the dryer. On the inclined scorer’s table sat a rosin stick, a talc pouch, a deck of Players, and a Styrofoam cup of coffee. The man sunk three fingers into a jet black ball, took two strides, launched the ball in a tight spiral; it flirted with the gutter before curving to strike the one pin. He marked it off on his score sheet, pulled a cigarette from the deck, lipped it, and said, “So. You found me.”

Herbert and Jess sat at the horseshoe of molded fiberglass seats ringing the lane. Their father wore tan pants and a beige sweater. His dark hair had thinned and grayed; a widow’s peak gave his face an elongated equine aspect. Though age and wear had blunted the sharpness of his features, his emerald eyes still shone.

“So,” Herbert said after a minute, “you’re bowling now.”

“Bowling’s wonderful. It makes the heart merry.” He looked his children up and down. His fingers rose to his face, tracing his lips and cheek as though searching for correspondences. “It was that newspaper article, wasn’t it? I told that damn reporter no pictures.”

Jess couldn’t believe his lack of emotion. Part of her—a very large part, it seemed—hoped he’d cower like a Nazi war criminal brought to justice. But there was no shame, no contrition. It was as though he’d stumbled across a couple of old, not especially close acquaintances, and was struggling to make polite conversation.