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  More Praise for Rust and Bone

  “Like a gleeful bull in the china shop of staid and worthy CanLit, Davidson is defining his own literary identity by shattering conventions.”

  —National Post

  “[Rust and Bone] is a superb collection from a young writer who already feels fully formed. The stories give off an air of confidence, the kind of confidence one expects in the works of veterans like Alice Munro or William Trevor, as if Davidson is fully aware of what he can do and knows how to achieve his ends.”

  —Edmonton Journal

  “Rust and Bone gives Canadian fiction a healthy body shot.” —Calgary Herald

  “Davidson … is a fine young writer with a keen sense of the absurd and a bracing, biting wit.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Davidson matches his stellar, energetic descriptions of physical confrontation with subtle, quirky explorations of human motivation.”

  —Booklist

  “Stark oppositions often pack the punch in these gritty tales about American tough guys on the ropes.… This salty collection more than whets the appetite.”

  —The Guardian

  “Davidson’s debut collection engages the Hemingway-esque tradition of terse prose describing toughened men who suffer while hiding their scars.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Davidson’s forceful debut collection arrives like a jab to the jaw.… He is as adept at the humorous interplay of personality in a sex addicts anonymous meeting as he is in describing a vicious dogfight. There are also quiet moments of grace. Even when Davidson pushes the limits of what a reader can stomach, he never loses our attention or our empathy. Recommended as a young writer to watch.”

  —Library Journal

  “Confident.… Impressive.… Rust and Bone might be described as ‘promising’ were it not already such a finished piece of work.”

  —The Times Literary Supplement

  “Craig Davidson is a young author who already displays the surefootedness of a seasoned pro … these tightly balled, arrestingly visceral explorations of machismo’s dark recesses uncoil with concussive power.”

  —The Sunday Times

  “This collection of stories by Canadian Craig Davidson sears the senses on contact.… Davidson has whittled his prose down to bare expression, eschewing pronouns and articles for a clean, spare feel, suited to the calculated violence of the stories … he manages to deal with substantial issues such as infertility, loss, and addiction in a way that indicates a latent sensitivity underlying the sheen of brutality.”

  —The Bloomsbury Review

  PENGUIN CANADA

  RUST AND BONE

  CRAIG DAVIDSON was born in Toronto and now lives in Iowa City. His novel The Fighter is also available from Penguin Canada.

  RUST

  AND

  BONE

  *STORIES*

  CRAIG

  DAVIDSON

  PENGUIN CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

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  Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in a Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada),

  a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2005

  Published in this edition, 2006

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

  Copyright © Craig Davidson, 2005

  On page 101, lyrics from “Everytime You Go” by The Tragically Hip written by: Baker, Downey, Fay,Langlois, Sinclair; used by permission of Little Smoke Music/Southern Music Publishing Canada LTD.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Manufactured in Canada.

  * * *

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Davidson, Craig, 1976–

  Rust and bone / Craig Davidson.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-14-305125-1

  ISBN-10: 0-14-305125-3

  I. Title.

  PS8607.A79R88 2006 C813’.6 C2006-902609-2

  * * *

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, byway of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at www.penguin.ca

  Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see www.penguin.ca/corporatesales or call 1-800-399-6858, ext. 477 or 474

  To Mom and Dad

  RUST

  AND

  BONE

  Stories

  Rust and Bone

  The Rifleman

  A Mean Utility

  Rocket Ride

  On Sleepless Roads

  Friction

  Life in the Flesh

  The Apprentice’s Guide to Modern Magic

  Acknowledgments

  RUST AND BONE

  TWENTY-SEVEN BONES make up the human hand. Lunate and capitate and navicular, scaphoid and triquetrum, the tiny horn-shaped pisiforms of the outer wrist. Though differing in shape and density each is smoothly aligned and flush-fitted, lashed by a meshwork of ligatures running under the skin. All vertebrates share a similar set of bones, and all bones grow out of the same tissue: a bird’s wing, a whale’s dorsal fin, a gecko’s pad, your own hand. Some primates got more—gorilla’s got thirty-two, five in each thumb. Humans, twenty-seven.

  Bust an arm or leg and the knitting bone’s sealed in a wrap of calcium so it’s stronger than before. Bust a bone in your hand and it never heals right. Fracture a tarsus and the hairline’s there to stay— looks like a crack in granite under the x-ray. Crush a metacarpal and that’s that: bone splinters not driven into soft tissue are eaten by enzymes; powder sifts to the bloodstream. Look at a prizefighter’s hands: knucks busted flat against the heavy bag or some pug’s face and skin split on crossing diagonals, a ridge of scarred X’s.

  You’ll see men cry breaking their hand in a fight, leather-assed Mexies and Steeltown bruisers slumped on a corner stool with tears squirting out their eyes. It’s not quite the pain, though the anticipation of pain is there—mitts swelling inside red fourteen-ouncers and the electric grind of bone on
bone, maybe it’s the eighth and you’re jabbing a busted lead right through the tenth to eke a decision. It’s the frustration makes them cry. Fighting’s all about minimizing weakness. Shoddy endurance? Roadwork. Sloppy footwork? Skip rope. Weak gut? A thousand stomach crunches daily. But fighters with bad hands can’t do a thing about it, aside from hiring a cornerman who knows a little about wrapping brittle bones. Same goes for fighters with sharp brows and weak skin who can’t help splitting wide at the slightest pawing. They’re crying because it’s a weakness there’s not a damn thing they can do for and it’ll commit them to the second tier, one step below the MGM Grand and Foxwoods, the showgirls and Bentleys.

  Room’s the size of a gas chamber. Wooden chair, sink, small mirror hung on the pigmented concrete wall. Forty-watt bulb hangs on a dark cord, cold yellow light touching my clean-shaven skull and breaking in spears across the floor. Cobwebs suspended like silken parachutes in corners beyond the light. Old Pony duffel between my legs packed with wintergreen liniment and Vaseline, foul protector, mouthguard with cinnamon Dentyne embedded in the teeth prints. I’ve got my hand wraps laid out on my lap, winding grimy herringbone around the left thumb, wrist, the meat of my palm. Time was, I had strong hands—nutcrackers, Teddy Hutch called them. By now they’ve been broken so many times the bones are like crockery shards in a muslin bag. You get one hard shot before they shatter.

  A man with a swollen face pokes his head through the door. He rolls a gnarled toscano cigarillo to the side of his mouth and says, “You ready? Best for you these yahoos don’t get any drunker.”

  “Got a hot water bottle?” Roll my neck low, touch chin to chest. “Can’t get loose.”

  “Where do you think you are, Caesars Palace? When you’re set, it’s down the hall and up a flight of stairs.”

  I was born Eddie Brown, Jr., on July 19, 1966, in San Benito, a hardscrabble town ten miles north of the Tex-Mex border; “somewhere between nowhere and adiós,” my mother said of her adopted hometown. My father, a Border Patrol agent, worked the international fenceline running from McAllen to Brownsville and up around the horn to the Padre Island chain off the coast. On a clear July day you’d see illegals sunning their lean bodies on the projecting headlands, soaking up heat like seals before embarking on a twilight crossing to the shores of Laguna Madre. He met his wife-to-be on a cool September evening when her raft—uneven lengths of peachwood lashed together with twine, a plastic milk jug skirt—butted the prow of his patrolling johnboat.

  “It was cold, wind blowing off the Gulf,” my mother once told me. “Mío Dios. The raft seem okay when I go, but then the twine is breaking and those jugs fill with water. Those waters swimming with tiger sharks plump as hens, so many entrangeros borricos to gobble up. I’m thinking I’m seeing these shapes,” her index finger described the sickle of a shark’s fin. “I’m thinking why I leave Cuidad Miguel—was that so terrible? But I wanted the land of opportunity.” An ironic gesture: shoulders shrugged, eyes rolled heavenwards. “I almost made it, Ed, yeah?”

  My father’s eyes rose over a copy of the Daily Sentinel. “A few more hours and you’d’ve washed up somewhere, my dear.”

  The details of that boat ride were never revealed, so I’ll never know whether love blossomed or a sober deal was struck. I can picture my mother wrapped in an emergency blanket, sitting beside my father as he worked the hand-throttle on an old Evinrude, the glow of a harvest moon touching the soft curve of her cheek. Maybe something stirred. But I can also picture a hushed negotiation as they lay anchored at the government dock, maiden’s hair slapping the pilings and jaundiced light spilling between the bars of the holding cell beyond. She was a classic Latin beauty: raven hair and polished umber skin, a birthmark on her left cheek resembling a bird in distant flight. Many border guards took Mexican wives; the paperwork wasn’t difficult to push through. My sister was born that year. Three years later, me.

  I finish wrapping my hands and stand, bobbing on the tips of my toes. Tug the sweatshirt hood up, cinch the drawstring. Half-circle to the left, feint low and fire a right cross, arm cocked at a ninety-degree L to generate maximum force. Torque the hips, still bobbing slightly, three stiff jabs, turning the elbow out at the end. A lot of people don’t like a jabby fighter, a pitty-patter, but a smart boxer knows everything flows off the jab: keeps your opponent at a distance and muffles his offense, plus you’re always in a position to counterpunch. And hey, if the guy’s glass-jawed or thin-skulled, a jab might just knock him onto queer street.

  My father once took me on his evening rounds. August, so hot even the adders and geckos sought shade. We drove across the dry wash in his patrol Bronco, past clumps of sun-browned chickweed and pokeberry bushes so withered their fruit rattled like hollow plastic beads. He stopped to show me the vents cut through the border fence, chain-link pried back in silvery flaps.

  “Tin snips stashed in a plastic bag tied to an ankle. Swim across the Rio Grande, creep up the bank and cut through.” A defeated shrug. “Easy as pie.”

  The sky was darkening by the time we reached the dock. Walking down the berm to the shoreline, we passed a patch of agaves so sickly even the moonshiners couldn’t be bothered. Our boots stirred up clouds of rust-hued dust. Stars hovered at the eastern horizon, casting slivers of metallic light on the water.

  My father cycled the motor, pulling into the bay. Suspended between day and night, the sky was a tight-sheened purple, shiny as eggplant skin. The oily stink of exhaust mingled with the scent of creosote and Cherokee rose. To one side, the fawn-colored foothills of west Texas rolled in knuckled swells beneath a bank of violet-edged clouds. To the other, the Sierra Madres were a finned ridge, wedges of terra cotta light burning though the gaps. A brush fire burned distantly to the north, wavering funnels of flame holding the darkness at bay. Stars stood on their reflections at the Rio Grande’s delta, a seam of perfectly smooth water where river met ocean.

  My father fired a flare into the sky. As the comet of red light arced, he squinted at the water’s surface lit by the spreading contrail.

  “They don’t understand how dangerous it is,” he said. “The pulls and undertows. Fighting a stiff current all the way.” He pulled a Black Cat cigar from his shirt pocket and lit it with a wooden match. “Shouldn’t feel any responsibility, truly. Not like I make them take the plunge. Everyone thinks it’s sunnier on the other side of the street.”

  I snap off a few more jabs as my heart falls into pre-fight rhythm. Sweat’s coming now, clear odorless beads collecting on my brow and clinging to the short hairs of my wrists. Twist the sink’s spigot and splash cold, sulfurous water on my face. A milky crack bisects the mirror, running up the left side of my neck to the jaw before turning sharply, cleaving my lips and continuing north through cheek and temple. Stare at my face split into unequal portions: forehead marbled with knots of sub-dermal scar tissue and nose broken in the center, the angle of cartilage obtuse. Weak fingers of light crawl around the base of my skull, shadowing the deep pits of my sockets.

  Thirty-seven years old. Not so old. Too old for this.

  On my fourteenth birthday my father drove me to Top Rank, a boxing gym owned by ex-welterweight contender Exum Speight. I’d been tussling at school and I guess he figured the sport might channel that aggression. We walked through a black door set in a flat tin-roofed building, inhaling air cooler but somehow denser than the air from the street. The gym was as spacious as a dance hall and dim, vapor lamps set in the ceiling. The ring erected in the center with a row of folding chairs in front. A punching bag platform stood between two dusty tinted windows on the left. An old movie poster hung on the water-stained wall: The Joe Louis Story. America’s Greatness was in his FISTS, the tagline read, The Screen’s Big Story in his HEART! A squat black man worked the speed bag in a ponderous rhythm while a Philco radio played “Boogie Oogie Oogie,” by A Taste of Honey.

  A short thin man in his early forties exited the office. He wore a checkered blazer with leatherette elbow patches and a
brown fedora with faded salt stains peaking the hatband. “How you doing, fellas?”

  “You Speight?”

  “Exum’s up in Chicago with a fighter,” the man told my father. “Jack Cantrales. I mind the shop while he’s gone.”

  Jack made me skip rope for a few minutes, then quoted a monthly training fee. My father shook his hand again and said, “Be back in a few hours, Eddie.”

  For the next two years I spent every free minute at Top Rank. As Exum Speight busied himself with the heavyweights, my training fell to Cantrales. Jack was an amiable bullshitter, always joking and free with advice, but later I came to realize he was one of the milling coves known to haunt boxing clubs, the “gym bums.” Gym bums were pugilistic has-beens or never-wases—Cantrales’s pro record stood at 3-18-2, his sole attribute an ability to consume mass quantities of red leather—who hovered, wraithlike, around promising fighters. Gym bums were also known to squeeze a penny ’til it screamed, and Contrales was typical of the breed: he once slid his foot over a coin a kid had dropped, shrugged, and told the kid it must’ve rolled into the sewer.

  It was a dime.

  Near the end of high school Cantrales booked my first fight at Rosalita’s, a honkeytonk border bar. My parents would’ve never allowed it had they known, so I squeezed through my bedroom window after lights out and met Cantrales at the end of the block. He drove a Chevelle 454 SS—car had get-up like a scalded cat.

  “You loose?” he asked as we fled down the I-38 to Norias. June bugs hammered the windshield, exoskeletons shattering with a high tensile sound, bodies bursting in pale yellow riots.

  “Yeah,” I said, though I couldn’t stop shaking. “Loose.”

  “That’s good.” Cantrales had recently switched his fedora in favor of a captain’s hat of a style worn by Captain Merrill Stubing on Love Boat. Dashboard light reflected off the black plastic visor, according his features a malign aspect. “You’ll eat this frito bandito up.”