Rust and Bone

by Craig Davidson

“I’m’n a pretend I didn’t hear that, misser.”

  She jerked the door shut and fishtailed down the row of diagonally parked cars. Biscuits hurled his body at the Cutlass’s rear window, barking wrathfully, white froth slathering the glass.

  “Did that woman just …?”

  “Yes,” Alison palmed me a vitamin K tablet to promote blood clotting. “Let’s go.”

  “But you can’t—”

  “What do we tell the cops?” she said. “We were at this illegal dogfight and …”

  “But we live in a polite society!” I was raving by now. “We operate under civilized rules!”

  “Hush.”

  “I should bite her—bite that gargantuan … ASS! ”

  “Hush.”

  Halfway home Alison pulled off the highway. Dottie was emitting low wheezing sounds from the back seat, thrashing on the blood-thick blanket and tearing her stitches open.

  We wrangled the kennel crate onto the rough shale of the breakdown lane. In the dead white of an arc-sodium streetlight I broke the kennel down, there being no other way to get her out. Alison held the dog’s square head in her hands, massaging the neck and stomach, anywhere not gored. The medicinal smell of Epinephrine seeped out of Dottie’s many cuts.

  “Oh, Jesus. I can’t bury another dog, Jay.”

  Alison touched Dottie’s head, tracing her fingertips along the muzzle, kneading the expanse of slick fur between the ears. The dog looked up with sad, grateful eyes. Crickets chirped in long reeds bordering the ditch.

  Near the end Alison injected Lidocaine into Dottie’s temple, between the ring and index fingers on my left hand, which were cupped over the dog’s tight-lidded eyes. Cars moved past on the highway, bathing our bodies in headlight glow. Dottie vomited blood. Her eyelids fluttered against my palm.

  “I should’ve picked her up.”

  The dog started shaking then, the convulsions wracking her bones, radiating outwards.

  “She wouldn’t allow it,” I said. “Dottie was a deep game dog.”

  “Are you loving it?” Don Fawkes repeats for the umpteenth time. “Tell me you love it.”

  But the Supp-Easy-Quit reps are clearly not loving it, a fact Helen Keller could’ve gleaned, but of which Fawkes remains blissfully unaware. Eva Braun jots in a faux-calfskin dossier with aggressive, slashing cursive while her lab-coated bookends eye Fawkes as they might a particularly offensive strain of bacterium smeared across a specimen slide.

  Mitch Edmonds passes me a doodle: some guy with a gourd-shaped head in which a candle burns jack-o-lantern style, one eye twice outsizing the other, pumpkintoothed and drooling, squiggly stink-lines and bowtie flies and a speech bubble reading: You love it! You really, really love it!

  DR. CLIVE KETCHUM’S FERTILITY CLINIC is located in a neocolonial-style office building at the corner of Steeles and Yonge. I mount the steps leading up to a narrow hallway with hesitancy. Took a Xanax at lunch, another on the cab ride over—feeling no pain.

  Ketchum’s waiting area resembles a film noir movie set: a large, dim, oak-paneled room with high ceiling, frosted-glass valances, a white sand ashtray under a no smoking sign. The receptionist is young, petite, and blond, with prominent tits and an air of having woken this morning knowing in advance every move she’d make for the remainder of the day.

  “I have the five o’clock.”

  She consults the appointment book. “Mr. James Paris?”

  I tip her a wink, resisting—barely—the urge to flex.

  She leads me down a well-lit corridor into a spare antiseptic room. She gestures to an examination table and orders me to strip to my skivs before excusing herself.

  I hoist myself onto the examination table. Butcher paper crinkles under my thighs. A large medical illustration adorns the opposite wall: Scrotum and Contents. It’s all there: the superficial and external spermatic fascias, the tunica vaginalis, the epididymis and the testes, which, in this artist’s rendition, resemble capillary-threaded quail’s eggs. Disembodied tweezer-tips pinch and peel back to reveal strata of flesh and membrane and nerve.

  Dr. Ketchum enters. The man’s dimensions are those of a bowling pin, the majority of weight distributed to the hindquarters, and yet his body remains somehow insubstantial, as if stuffed with wadded newspapers.

  He flips open a dossier, nodding, then shaking his head. “You’ve been doing the exercises?” He performs a series of spread-legged knee bends, arms veed in front of him like a high diver. Ketchum contends this maneuver—the “gonad agitator”—will promote sperm production and, in tandem with other, uniformly unpleasant exercises—the “urethral tube widener,” the “scrotal exciter”—will have me shooting live rounds in no time.

  “I’ve been doing them.”

  “It’s strange.”

  “What?”

  “Strange your sperm count hasn’t increased since the start of your exercise regimen.” He gives me a look. “It is my experience that men tend to baby their testes, usually as a result of early childhood trauma. But believe me when I say they’re terrifically hardy organs. My advice is to really push yourself. Make those testicles work for you. Give them hell, as it were.”

  “I’ve been giving them … hell.”

  “Is that so?”

  “It’s been … a regular boot camp.”

  Dr. Ketchum chuckles perfunctorily. “Alright. The problem remains, James. Your scrotal sac is simply too hot. A blast furnace in there.”

  This is not new information. Five years ago, when our fledgling, lighthearted attempts at conception ended in failure, we blamed our lack of success on job stress, our recent relocation, a sheer lack of dedication to the task at hand. But as the streak lengthened, the finger of blame began to point wildly: the moon’s cycles/Alison’s low-protein diet/my pack-a-day habit/malevolent otherworldly forces. Alison visited a fertility clinic and, through a non-invasive, airy-fairy, casting-of-bones procedure I never truly understood, her womb was given a clean bill of health. Confusion and guilt propelled me to Dr. Ketchum’s office, where a violently invasive, teeth-clenchingly painful process disclosed that my scrotum’s core temperature equaled that of a steam cooker’s. The few vulcanized sperm able to withstand the heat were reduced to heaving their exhausted flagellate forms against my wife’s egg in the manner of bedraggled boat-people flinging themselves upon the impregnable walls of an asylum-denying nation.

  Ketchum prescribed pills and herbal remedies, ordered the daubing of foul-smelling ointments and the quaffing of putrid teas. He suggested immersion in cold baths or icepack application to the affected region before intercourse. None of these measures proving effective, Ketchum advocated a strenuous exercise routine and … other tactics.

  “Have you encouraged your wife to stimulate you anally? Gentle manipulation of the sphincter encourages more vigorous orgasms and promotes semen—”

  “No, we … no.”

  Ketchum emits a robust, let’s-not-be-prudish laugh. “Then by all means try. It’s a natural, healthy sexual activity. Nothing peculiar or unmanly about it.”

  A fleeting image: Ketchum’s naked, pinata-hollow body squirming delightedly under the anal ministrations of a faceless, tentacle-fingered woman.

  “It’s not that desperate.”

  “But your wife must be getting impatient.”

  “Alison’s fine,” I lie.

  Sex has become a grim struggle punctuated by bizarre and superstitious rituals. While I lounge in bed with a bag of frozen peas thawing in my boxers, Alison discreetly checks her internal temperature against the magical twenty-seven degrees Centigrade ideal for conception. She has dressed as a French maid, a succubus, a cheerleader—Ra-ra, hey-hey, fertilize that egg to-day!—a schoolgirl, a milkmaid; the local costume shop conducts a brisk trade on my singular shortcoming. No sooner have I made my contribution than she’s shoved me away, elevating her hips and bicycle-kicking her legs, body contorted into grotesque runic formations to aid my seed in “taking.” Worst is the look on Alison�
�s face as I come: a look of disquieting, anxious futility. Not this time, tiger. You didn’t bring the thunder.

  “Alison’s just fine,” I repeat. “We have other interests.”

  “Wonderful. It’s important for couples with such issues to pursue outside goals.” He flips the dossier shut. “Keep those exercises up—” a few more demonstrative deep-knee bends “—and don’t forget the urethra-widening—” his eyes trail down to my calf “—good lord, James, what happened to your leg?”

  ALISON’S FATHER OWNS a dairy farm on the outskirts of St. Catharines. When he spies a sick cow, he spraypaints an orange circle around the rear left leg. At night, when all the other chores are finished, he leads it to a brook running behind the house and shoots it in the skull. Once, when Alison and I were visiting at Christmas, he asked her to take care of a sick calf; it was cold and her father’s arthritis was acting up. Alison asked did he keep his gun in the same spot.

  Bundled in parkas and toques, we went out to the barn. Can’t say why I tagged along, exactly, except perhaps morbid curiosity, or out of the misplaced notion she needed the moral support. The barn was dark and earthy, claustrophobic with the stink of livestock. Cattle snorted and heaved, expelling plumes of oyster-gray steam from their nostrils. We waded between their milling flanks, guided by bars of dusky sunlight pouring through the slats. A sponge-like tumor the rough size of a softball was tethered to the calf’s jaw by a strip of skin. Alison shooed the youngster from its hiding spot beneath its mother’s belly. The cow let it go without a fight, as if knowing it was sick, what needed to be done.

  She led it down to the water, guiding it gently with a switch snapped off an elm tree. The calf’s eyes wide and dark and dumb. The grotesque tumor bump-bumped against its throat. Early twilight hung suspended over the fields, patches of orange burning between the trees. Sparrows clustered on a snow-topped log lying in the middle of the brook.

  Alison settled the shotgun against the calf’s head. It flicked its ear, as though the muzzle were a fly it wished to shoo. I remember wind whistling down my neck and feeling terribly cold.

  Alison cocked the hammer and calmly pulled the trigger. The gunshot louder than I expected, a rough bark rolling out across the clean snow-topped expanse. The animal went down silently. It half-stood on its front legs. The left side of its face was just … gone. I wanted to yell “Go down, just go down,” the way a trainer would to an overmatched boxer. It fell over on its side in the shallows. We went back inside for hot toddies.

  Half an hour after my doctor’s appointment, I step through the front door of our house. From the upstairs nursery arises the plaintive clamor of pit bull puppies seeking attention—attention I studiously deny. Pass down a hallway hung with photos of champion pits chained to spikes pounded into browned patches of grass, mouths open and teeth bared, straining against their fetters.

  Alison stands over the kitchen sink shaking water from a colander of diced zucchini. The cordless telephone is cinched between her shoulder and ear.

  “No, no,” she’s saying, her tone that of a mother explaining a crucial fact to a particularly dimwitted child, “that is not the progression. Bulldog to German shepherd to Doberman pinscher to Rottweiler to pit bull. It goes no further. There is no evolution.”

  I place my hands on her hips and bring them around, fingers knitting over her bellybutton.

  “No, I don’t … no … that’s in-sane.” She twists out of my grasp, pressing the mouthpiece directly to her lips, as if this forced intimacy will convey the truth of her argument. “The presa canario is nothing more than a puffed-up bully. I mean, will a hundred-twenty-pound presa beat a pit? In all probability, yes. But a heavyweight boxer would pummel a flyweight—it’s no contest. That’s why there’s weight classes … no … alright, yes … listen, I’m not going to argue.” Alison hangs her tongue out. “Fine, if that’s how you see it. All I’ll say is, pound for pound, nothing beats a pit. Pound for pound, yes … okay … fine … we agree to disagree.”

  She jams the phone in its charging cradle and blows a raspberry at it.

  “Who?”

  “Nobody. Nothing. How was work?”

  “Fawkes deep-sixed the Supp-Easy-Quit account.”

  “It’s a tough product to market.”

  Alison always lets Fawkes off the hook. I took her to the office Christmas party last year and discovered the two of them in the copy room, sloppy drunk and giggling, photocopying asexual body parts: elbows, fingers, wrists, foreheads.

  “And your day?”

  “Oh, Dr. Scalise was being Dr. Scalise.” Dr. Phillip Scalise, the cardiovascular surgeon at North York General, is thirty-five with the coarse-skinned face and dimpled chin of a Look Who’s Talking–era John Travolta. Alison is his “all-time favorite” OR nurse. “During prep he was telling these awful jokes, just plain awful, and I shouldn’t have been laughing but he’s really just so silly sometimes.”

  I recognize this should bother me but, doubtlessly due to the Xanax I popped on the homebound subway, I find myself supremely nonplussed. “He’s a silly one,” I agree. “I’ll go feed the dogs.”

  The sky’s an odd color: a deep but muted red, the color of diluted grenadine. Someone a few houses over is doing yardwork: the staccato chop-chop-chop of a lawnmower rises above the pines. The training shed is set into the far left corner in the shade of a leafless maple. The maple is four feet wide at its base, thick lower limbs jutting almost parallel to the ground. I’ve often imagined nailing split two-by-twos into the trunk, a stepladder up to the boughs capable of supporting weight. I’d lay down planks and erect sturdy retaining walls, a corrugated-tin roof for rainy days, a rope-and-bucket dumbwaiter, maybe even a walkie-talkie link allowing for communication during those first nights of independence.

  The shed is of solid prewar construction, dirt floor spread with Bardahl to keep the dust down. I take down a pair of ballistic-nylon gloves from a nail pounded into the doorframe and scoop Iam’s Science Diet into steel tureens.

  The chicken-wire pens house three fighters but now Dottie’s gone we’re down to a pair. Rodney is a four-year-old male, forty-seven pounds of bone and sinew and teeth, winner of five consecutive, most recently the first-round butchery of Grand Chief Negrino, a vastly overrated Neapolitan mastiff bitch. I set the tureen in front of him and, while he eats, first gently but with increasing force, punch the crown of his skull until he snaps viciously at my gloved hand.

  “Good boy.”

  Matilda is the most aggressive fighter I’ve ever raised. Her nose is pressed to the chicken-wire, snuffling. She has a short, clean brindle coat with a pattern of gray stripes over a base coat of jet black. I stroke her sleek head and boxy muzzle, running a fingertip across the crescentmoon scars left after her ears were amputated. She licks the glove with her large pink tongue.

  I slap her as hard as I can.

  The blow doesn’t budge her and then teeth flash, dense muscling of chest and flews flexes, jaws seize the glove in a bone-splintering grip and shake so violently it seems my shoulder will be jerked from socket.

  “Mat—aark! Aaaagh! ”

  I manage to drop the tureen inside her pen. Matilda immediately releases me and pads over to the kibble. I am struck, as I so often am, by the unstudied perfection of these animals.

  Pit bulls are utterly fearless. It is a reckless, lunatic sort of fearlessness, a fearlessness suggesting the breed lacks any true conception of that emotion. Beauty exists in that fearlessness, and so the breed itself is beautiful. It is beautiful to watch your pit toe the scratch against a dog twice its size and note, in its posture and its eyes, the flat and unflinching assurance of victory. It is beautiful to hold a pit’s wine-cask body between rounds, to take in its hideous wounds—ears bitten off and eyes crushed from orbit, compound-fractured legs, flesh stripped to the bone—and see nothing but a cold resiliency, an eagerness. These dogs truly believe they are invincible. They believe they will never die. It is beautiful to watch two pits at the
end of a hard roll, lying in the pen’s center or pressed up against the wire, slick with blood, blind and exhausted, licking one another with a shocking tenderness. The simple fact of their existence is its own beauty: there are creatures on this Earth upon whom the human frailties of pain, weakness, self-doubt exert no bearing.

  Alison and I talk about our mutual fascination. Lately, it’s about the only topic that doesn’t lead to an argument. Sometimes she’ll ask the question: Should we be doing this? I look at it like boxing: you train your fighter to the best of your ability, bring him along slowly, don’t put him in against a murderer. “Besides,” I tell her, “these dogs want to fight. They can’t vocalize it, sure, but you can see, I can see. It’s what they do.” She’ll nod slightly, say, “The way herding is what a sheepdog does, huh?” in a small voice that doesn’t quite seem to believe. “Ex-actly, dear.”

  I walk back to the kitchen. The combined pain of my leg (Biscuits) and shoulder (Matilda) compounded by the ambient soreness resulting from ten minutes of urethral widening exercises has killed the Xanax buzz. I pull two T-bone steaks from the deep-freeze and set them on the counter to thaw. Then I retrieve bottles of rum and Crème de Banane from the cupboard, eyeball shots into a pair of wide-mouthed highball glasses, top them off with heavy cream.

  Alison’s in the nursery. Walls painted bright yellow, hardwood floor spread with sections of the Globe and Mail. Two mobiles: tinfoil baseball players shagging fly balls; tinfoil ballerinas pirouetting endlessly. A molded plastic chair with a dog-eared copy of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War resting upon it, from which I often quote passages to the dogs: In peace prepare for war, in war prepare for peace …

  My wife on the floor, surrounded by pups. They paw her in clumsy, exploratory fashion, climbing over her hips and breasts, capturing her shirt collar between their teeth and shaking their oversize puppy heads. I sit on pissy newspapers and offer her a glass.

  “How was your appointment?” she says.

  “Some different exercises.”

  Alison sets her glass down. A puppy commences licking the beaded condensation. “I was talking to someone at work,” she says, “about artificial insemination. Interesting option—leaf through a donor book, choose a suitable candidate.”