Craig Davidson - Rust and Bone - Stories

“Don’t you have anything to say? Don’t you feel the least bit guilty?”

“Jess, please …”

“I’m too old to feel guilt, and besides, it’s a wasteful emotion. If that’s why you searched me out, you may as well leave. Excuse me a moment.”

He bowled a strike, then turned to his son and palmed the scorekeeper’s pencil up his sleeve. “Still got it, don’t I?”

Herbert dug a coin out of his pocket and sent it skipping along his knuckles, then palmed it with deft precision. He opened his mouth to show the coin glinting on his tongue.

“I saw you slip it into your mouth,” his father said. “Good, but not quite perfect.”

Herbert didn’t say anything. It didn’t matter his father was wrong, as Herbert had slipped the coin into his mouth earlier, anticipating the opportunity; nor did it matter he was infinitely more skilled, his movements clean where his father’s were clubbish; the fame and women and wealth—none of it mattered. At that moment he was a child again, the boy forever trying to please but always falling critically short, shamed and confused before his father.

“Why’d you do it?” Jess cast her eyes in a conspicuous arc: scuffed lanes, a glass case full of cobwebbed trophies, everything overhung in a haze of bluish smoke. “Was this worth it? For all this … splendor? ”

“You always had a smart tongue, Jessica. I knew Sam would take you, we talked about it obliquely, and that was a better fit.” A strain of subdued pride underlay this pragmatism. Jess got a sense he considered himself somehow herculean, holding on as long as he had. “Your mother wanted children. Never a goal of mine. I sent money when I could—didn’t Sam tell you?”

“You abandoned us.”

“Didn’t throw you to the wolves, darling.”

Jess realized that, over the years, her father had been crafting his most brilliant illusion: he’d tricked himself into believing what he’d done was justified. She’d always considered him a confused man who’d made a bad choice—and perhaps, half a lifetime ago, that had been the case. But the man she now faced was completely devoid of remorse. This wasn’t an act or a smokescreen; this was self-delusion distilled to its purest essence.

“It was the other magicians, wasn’t it?” Herbert said. “Fallout from the book.”

“I shouldn’t have written that thing. People trusted me with their secrets and I sold them out. Foolish, but I had something to prove.”

“Was it magic, then? A search for real magic?”

Jess caught the note of desperation in Herbert’s voice. For him, it all hinged on justification: the idea of their father leaving to pursue a higher goal was something he could live with.

“Real magic? No such thing. Please don’t tell me any of that foolishness we talked about when you were a child lingered on. It was all … bunk . I was entertaining you; they were pleasant fictions, fairy tales.” He squeezed the talc pouch anxiously. “I never told you the tooth fairy didn’t exist, but I never felt badly for it. I just supposed the truth would dawn on you sooner or later.”

“The truth. Right. Of course.”

Herbert’s body was trembling. Had he actually believed this would end with hugs and kisses and promises of Sunday dinners? Twenty-five years dismissed and everything reverting to the way it once was, father and son driving to some dustbowl town in the summer twilight, talking of magic?

“He’s everything you lacked the courage and ability to be,” Jess said. “You see that, don’t you?”

Her father’s gaze narrowed, then skipped across the surface of the lanes. “Anyone can become successful if their passion becomes an obsession. Set yourself to a single life task, how can you help but become a success?”

“But isn’t that what you did, abandoning us to pursue— this? ” Jess heard the desperation creeping into her voice. “Jesus, was it really so awful?”

“I was miserable.”

She would never learn why her father left. The only power he held was the magician’s power of secret knowledge, and to relinquish that was to yield whatever slim command he still held over them. She wanted to tell him it didn’t matter, he could take his pathetic secrets to the grave … but she did care, and for a moment saw herself as a young girl in that dirty wash of alley light, squinting into the darkness, wondering what did we do wrong?

“You don’t believe in magic?” Herbert said. “Come outside, then. I’ll show you.”

“Herbert, don’t do this. Please.”

“Stop talking nonsense. I won’t watch you make a bloody fool of yourself.”

Herbert’s hand clutched his father’s sweater. “Damn it, I’ll show you. It’s not nonsense!”

“Take your hands off me. You’re making a scene.”

Jess took Herbert’s wrist, trying to pry his fingers loose. Her father beat at his son’s arm as he shook the sleeve. Although Jess never shared Herbert’s vision of a joyful resolution, she had not imagined a tug of war in a Bowl-a-drome.

“Goddamn you, let go! ”

“It’s real! I can show you— real! ”

“Knock it off down there!” the counterman hollered.

“Let ’em go at it,” a bowler with a limp walrus mustache called back. “About time someone gave it to the old bastard.”

Herbert gave a final furious tug, tearing the sweater, tumbling onto the floor with a swath of angora clutched in his fist. Herbert, Sr., fell back, bony backside impacting a fiberglass bowling chair with a thump. His son stood carefully. Softly but with utter conviction, he said, “I know what’s real. Whether you believe or not makes no difference anymore.”

Herbert walked out of the alley. Their father sprawled in the chair, heaving. His torn sweater sleeve hung between his legs, nearly brushing the floor. The collar was stretched out of shape, baring a pale clavicle.

“I wasn’t … lying,” he panted. “They were just … fantasies .”

Seeing him like that, a tall frail man with a torn sweater, the harsh light of the scorer’s table showing just how deeply his eyes had retreated into their sockets, Jess realized this was a man who’d never really stepped out of that tea chest he’d entered many years ago. Exited physically, yes, tripped the hidden latch and vanished; but the way that body sagged, the defeated slouch of those shoulders, was the same posture she’d seen in men handcuffed in the backseat of her squad car. An imprisoned look.

THE SKY WAS A DARK BOWL quaking and crashing with thunder. Jess scanned the parking lot, then dashed to the car. Rain pelted down in stinging wires. She peered through the window, but he wasn’t inside. She called his name and wind snatched the word from her mouth.

Squinting into the driving rain, she saw him standing along the fenceline bordering the fields, fenceposts dark with creosote and the rusty stitchwork of barbed wire. Shirtless, trousers plastered to his legs, hair stuck to his skull. Eyes closed, he swayed slightly.

Jess stood in the lot, one foot mired in a pothole rapidly filling with rainwater. A vein of lightning split the sky, bathing the fields in rippling white light. Rain poured down her cheeks. Herbert swayed side to side. His face was serene. He looked so young, a boy. Jess laughed at the craziness of it all, the beautiful absurdity. “You’re nuts!” she shouted, laughing harder. She saw a figure standing in silhouette behind the alley’s smoked glass. Herbert swayed, his ears tuned to an unheard harmony, the rhyme of the wind and rain and sky. His hands held out, palms flat to the earth, as though seeking an elusive balance. Lightning creased the sky, whitening his body.

Her breath caught.