Craig Davidson - Rust and Bone - Stories

For the rest of her life, she will always wonder—did it happen? Perhaps it was a trick of the light, a fleeting disorientation. Later she will think her mind played a trick: she wanted so badly for it to happen that she willed her eyes into momentary belief. She will never speak of it, yet one night many years later will wake from a dream of that faraway afternoon, the wind and rain and the sense of something in the air, a quivering pressure in her eardrums, an odd taste beneath her tongue—not magic; she will never quite bring herself to so blunt an admission. Something feathery and alive that all those years later seems so unreal and yet the vision persists undimmed by time, a vision as bracing as it was during those fleeting heartbeats when it happened, and she will sit bolt upright as a cool night breeze plays through the open window and starlight curves upon the brass buttons of her police uniform hanging in the bedroom closet, and, in a voice so low and tremulous her husband does not stir, she will whisper, “He disappeared.”

The skin of Herbert’s chest and arms and head turned opaque as a nearly colorless essence, smoke or mist or fog, rose off his body. For a moment Jess could see the basic structure of his skeleton, the bones of his arms and ribcage, skull gilt with flashing light, then only the arteries and veins pumping blood. When these vanished all that remained were the disembodied trousers standing on their own and the open field beyond. Jess would never forget that Rolex free-floating in the charged air, the dime-sized flash of brilliance as lightning reflected off its face.

Herbert’s body suddenly coalesced, the disparate atoms flooding back and uniting. He toppled into the mud. Jess ran to him.

“Did you see it?” His eyes were alive and on fire. “Did you see?”

“I don’t know what I saw.”

She helped him up, amazed at just how light he felt. A strange smell clung to him, a mixture of singed earth and ozone. She threw his arm over her shoulder and carried him across the lot. By the time she settled him into the front seat, he was fast asleep.

She cast a glance at the bowling alley window. The silhouetted figure was gone.

Recognize that what they peddle as truth is in fact fiction. Look beyond the stagecraft, deception, and sleight-of-hand, and you will always find the truth, which is simply this: there is no truth. It is all a lie. Elaborate and brilliantly concealed, but a lie nonetheless. Never trust your eyes. Be forever skeptical. Learn to spot the tricks I have outlined and together we shall expose these “magicians” for what they truly are: frauds, shysters, and villains!

[7]

Herbert slept the entire drive home. At one point he started shivering violently and Jess wrapped him in sweaters and ran the heater until his teeth stopped chattering. The rain let up, leaving in its wake a pristine clarity.

They pulled into Herbert’s driveway shortly after nine o’clock. Warm southern air was infused with the plankton smell of the canal. Jess woke Herbert, helped him wrangle his luggage onto the porch. He glanced at the stricken tree on his lawn.

“I really should do something about that poor thing, shouldn’t I?”

“Burn it. End its misery.”

“Maybe I will. Plant another in its place. Water and trim it. Take good care of it.”

He reached into his pants pocket and withdrew a small booklet: soggy green construction paper tied up with fraying blue yarn, clumsy scissoring, words written in a spiky hand. For a moment it seemed as if he would crumple it, but he smoothed it out and returned it to his pocket.

“I don’t think he’s a bad person. I think he just … lost control. It could happen to anybody, don’t you think? He’s not a bad man.”

Jess envied his childlike ability to forgive. Perhaps he would never grow up, be forever a man-child lost in a world of mirrors and

brightly colored smoke. This didn’t anger her, where before it had. He came forward, an awkward lunge, hugging her. Jess felt his stiff contours, bone and hard angles, a boy’s body not yet fleshed into adulthood. She remembered a night when they were young, Herbert waking from a nightmare and crawling under the covers of her bed, his body all elbows and kneecaps. He really hadn’t changed over the years: still bony and gangling and clinging to beliefs others had long ago surrendered.

My brother, she thought. Crown prince of Never-Never Land.

“Well.”

“Well. Sam cooks dinner for me and Ted on Sundays. You should come.”

“But, Jess … Sam’s a terrible cook.”

“Come anyways. Come anytime.”

Jess walked to her Jeep. As she pulled out, she saw Herbert standing beside the gossamer-enshrouded elm, laying his hands on the trunk, stroking the black flaking bark.

SHE DROVE THROUGH STREETS wet from a brief night rain, neighborhoods silent in the dark, the clean lawns, the houses low-slung and split-level and modern. Radio tuned to the local station, Chrissie Hynde singing about a picture of you. Moving into the country: the night coolness of low peninsula fields, vineyards and cherry groves, solitary lights of farmhouses and irrigation ditches filled with moonlit water. She thought of the summer she’d picked fruit with a group of itinerant Caribbean workers. They were paid by the basket, and a small Jamaican man with skin so dark it hurt her eyes had shown her how to twist strawberries off the vine so as not to damage the fruit. The Jamaicans shared two old ten-speeds and after the day’s picking would bike to the nearest convenience store with a roll of quarters, calling their wives from payphones, talking of the money they’d made and how they’d spend it.

It was almost midnight by the time she pulled into her driveway. Sam’s truck was parked at the curb. The living room light burned. She saw figures in silhouette through the drapes: one on the couch, another in a chair.

She sat on the stoop. The sterile scent of late autumn, haloes of misty yellow light making a nimbus around each streetlight. To the west, a few miles distant, a thin column of smoke rose into the sky. It came from her brother’s part of town; she wondered if he’d lit that poor tree on fire. She hoped he had, and willed an errant ember to settle on the roof of his house and burn it to the ground, too. There was an inclination in her family to hide away from the world, crawl into dark places and vanish. If they weren’t flushed from hiding and forced into daylight, there was a possibility they’d disappear forever.

Leaves skated across the street, pushed by a swirling wind. She stared into the sky, each star a bright pinprick, each realizing a precise clarity. The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn .

Jess thought of the uniform hanging in the hall closet. Tomorrow she would take it off its hook and make a decision: burn it or put it on. Either way was a beginning. She was ready for a beginning.

Booming laughter from inside. One silhouette threw its head back, the other slapped its knee. Ted and Sam, and, across town, Herbert razing his front yard.

The men in her life.

Jess scuffed her boots on the welcome mat and stepped inside.

Know this: there is such a thing as magic. It exists . My intent is not to teach you the art of true magic, but rather to awaken you to its presence in the world and in our lives. Magic is in the water and air and sky; it is all around us, in objects of beauty and ugliness alike. Perhaps this all sounds quite mad; perhaps you think me a fool. All I can say is, I know what is real. My convictions are unshakable. My only hope is that, even if you never accomplish real magic or see it with your own eyes, you still believe in it, or at the very least its possibility.