Rust and Bone (17 page)

“Yes, we've both got business to attend to. Suppose I'd better head to the dump and gather the makings for a shanty.”

Paris hunted a cardboard box out from under the workbench, setting the animals inside.

“What are you doing?”

“You're taking my home, remember? Their home, too.”

“But … you can't abandon them.” Graham was horrified Paris would set the box out on the curb for tomorrow's garbage pickup.

“They're your responsibility.” “Relax,” said Paris. “Come with me.”

THE BACKYARD SLOPED DOWN
to a thin stretch of sand along the lake's shore. The sky held a livid pallor, the onset of dawn. Snow piled along the banks. Waves lapped the shoreline.

Paris walked down to the water. The animals congregated inside the box, preening, scratching the cardboard. Paris set the box in the sand, heeled off his shoes, removed his socks, rolled up his pantlegs. He tucked the dozing duck under his arm and waded into the lake.

“Cold,” he hissed through his teeth. He waded out until the water touched his knees, setting the duck down. “You're free. Rejoin your mallard brethren.”

The duck swam towards Paris.

“No! Go away. You're free, don't you get it? Free!”

Paris trudged back to shore, leaving the duck to swim in aimless circles. He plucked Turtle and Scholarly Old Frog from the box.

“Boys, it's high time you became men.”

Graham sat on a boulder near the water. He didn't say anything— wasn't his place to. Paris laid the animals down on the coarse sand. The frog hopped into the water, an inky blur lost amid waving strands of eelgrass. The turtle dipped a tentative foot into the water. Satisfied, it swam out into the lake. The dark convex of its shell cut a slow path through the water, starlight bent upon the dome.

Paris stretched out on the sand. Breath puffed from his mouth, white and vaporous. Graham stirred the toe of his boot through the sand in a figure-eight pattern.

“They'll be okay, won't they?”

“I don't know,” said Graham. “Winter's coming.”

A series of shrill squeaks arose from the box as Marian Mouse's unsullied character was again challenged by a boorish Sammy Hamster.

Turtle's shell described a lazy arc through the water, looping back

towards shore.

“Cuts people's chests open. What he does for a living.”

“He who?”

“Guy sleeping with my wife. She's a nurse, he's a cardiovascular surgeon. Looks like John Travolta, and not
Saturday Night Fever
Travolta—
Look Who's Talking
Travolta. It's depressing.” Paris took a deep breath and let it out slow. “Sometimes I think about walking into the hospital, into the operating theater, punching him. Right in his swarthy face. I bet he wears gold chains under his OR scrubs—a
lot
of them. I think, y'know, like maybe it'll solve something, right? Answer something. But then I think, hey, this is the way she wants it. She's happier now, right? I know that.”

“Maybe you should be happy for her, then.”

“It's just, I thought I'd be happy, too. I wanted to be free, unfettered. All I could think about. A fresh start, hey?”

“Sure,” Graham said. “Sure, I know.”

Sleeping away the daylight hours, Graham's most persistent dream was one in which he repossesses a car, but, instead of driving to the impound lot, keeps driving. The car is a '63 Corvette Stingray convertible, cobalt blue. Sitting behind the wheel, he senses his personality shift to that of the car itself: growling and aggressive, the loudest, meanest dog on the block. All the perceived shortcomings that haunt his waking self—a lack of true intellect, a feeling he could've done better—evaporate like water dripped on a searing engine block. The city of his dream is such as he's never seen before: he drives dusty laneways strung with adobe huts where dusky-skinned children chase lean hens through open yards, past imposing Kashmiri towers bellying in the shape of onions at their peaks, greenwater canals clogged with sleek gondolas.

He arrives at a house that, despite its unfamiliar architecture, he instinctively recognizes as his own. The front door opens, Nell stepping into the clean mid-afternoon sunlight. Barefoot, wearing a short summer dress. She moves haltingly, trembling, arms outstretched in search of an elusive balance. Then a magical thing happens: hairline fissures run down her arms and legs, thin and twisting like cracks in granite. Her face shatters, the fractured portions—high arch of cheek, fluent plane of brow—flaking off, skin curled and like burnt paper. Her expression does not change, though her eyes lighten to a brilliant shade of blue. Graham thinks of a Russian doll, of a chrysalis birthing some strange new-old and beautiful thing. She skips lightly down the path—oh, the way she
moves
. Her beauty is so merciless it exists nearly in the abstract. And though he knows, deep in those chambers of heart and mind that never truly sleep, this is only a dream, he still holds an unshakable belief in its possibility.

Other times, driving the streets at night, his restless mind slipping in and out of focus, a different dream comes. He repossesses another car. This one never takes a concrete form: four wheels, bland and nondescript. A getaway vehicle. He drives through the city as he knows it: redbrick houses and beige apartment complexes with squares of light burning in odd windows, darkened parks, pockets of ugliness and despair overlooked by distant snow-capped hills. He pulls up to the house he and his wife have shared for twenty-five years, idling at the curb for a long empty second. He sees Nell's trembling silhouette in the front window. Then he sets the car in gear and pulls away, turning the corner at the end of the block, the red eyes of those taillights dimming, gone. He does not know where he is going, doesn't quite accept his own dream logic. The vision dissolves—he often snaps out of it with an audible yelp—and in its wake all that exists is a cold and resolute self-loathing.

“Nobody really holds anyone,” said Paris. “You only hold someone as well as you're able and you're only held as much as you'll allow. In the beginning, you know, that's where the excitement lies: the uncertainty, right? The …
fear
.” Paris turned to Graham and smiled. He had a way of smiling that made Graham sad. “Don't you think it'd be nice if life was like the Riverside? I've been thinking about it a lot. Everybody works together. Everybody gets along. There's love, sure, but not the kind that breaks people in half, wrecks things. Puppy love. Nobody gets hurt. Everyone's just … friends. It'd be good, I think. A good life.” He laughed, the stiff barking noise of a small dog. “I'm an idiot.”

Turtle swam back to shore. It stood in the shallows, staring, with ancient pondering eyes, at the box it'd been plucked from.

“Silly thing.” Paris walked down to the water and picked the turtle up, returning it to the box. It seemed content to be back, its existence delimited by those four off-brown walls.

“Where's the frog?”

“Think you lost him.”

“He'll be okay. He's resourceful.”

Paris waded out into the lake, where Dillson swam in meandering circles. “Get your feathered ass over here.” At the last possible moment the duck took flight: a splash of water, a dim flapping of wings, a plump shape fleeing across the moon's face into the first ashes of light to the east. Paris stood in water up to his knees, shaking his head. High above, a jet left its gauzy contrail on the lightening cupola of sky.

“Maybe this is the way it happens.” Paris did not elaborate.

“Maybe so. Listen, I'm not gonna take your camper.”

“Really?”

“I came, you weren't here. That's my story.”

“Hey, man, thanks.”

“It's temporary. Agency'll send someone else.”

“I only need a week to cut the episode.”

“You should be okay. Can't stay here, though.”

“Right. I'm a no-good deadbeat.” Paris's quasi-criminal status appeared to energize him. “I'm on the lam. Bonnie and Clyde.”

He came out of the water. “I really hate to do this, seeing as you've exceeded your good Samaritan quota for this week, but I've got to ask you one last favor.”

BEAMS OF PREDAWN SUNLIGHT
filtered over the horizon, touching the hoods of parked cars, the windows of office buildings. Moon still visible, a pale hub above the hills. The city hung suspended between darkness and day. Early morning dog walkers and paperboys went about their business with an air of reluctant obligation.

Graham drove silent suburban streets, a meandering route home. He loved this time of day, everything clean and fresh and full of possibility. A cardboard box sat on the seat beside him. Hamster, mouse, guinea pig, and turtle slept quietly inside. All four were touching, drawing heat from one another, bodies expanding and contracting as they breathed. Two cages and an aquarium stacked in the footwell, next to a sack of cedar shavings, another of barley pellets. He pulled into his driveway, hefted the box, and went inside.

The television was on, muted, tuned to another episode of
The Beachcombers
. Nick was hollering at Relic, presumably for stealing logs. Nell lay on the recliner. Even in sleep, her body shook fitfully.

Graham switched the TV off. Sparrows congregated on the backyard picnic table, brown bodies staggered in ranks like Confederate soldiers. He thought of the first time he'd seen Nell, at a high-school dance. A slim beautiful girl standing in the splintered light of a revolving mirror ball. She danced alone, swaying her hips and snapping her fingers to the beat. He was stunned when she asked him to dance. He wondered if it were a joke to amuse her friends, not really caring if it was in his desire to be next to her. He remembered her eyes in the malarial heat and darkness of the high-school gym, glittering blue, pupils wide and dark. The sparrows took flight
en masse,
a dark flurry of bodies vanishing over the rooftops.

“H-H-Honey?”

Nell was awake, rubbing her eyes.

“Just me. I didn't mean to wake you.”

“Wh-wh-what's t-that you g-got?”

Graham set the box on the armrest. “Some new friends I made last night.”

He set the guinea pig on Nell's lap. It burrowed into the loose folds of her sweater, warbling contentedly.

“I h-had a g-g-guinea p-pig when I w-whu-was a kid.”

Graham placed the remaining animals on different parts of his wife. They roamed the prone topography of her body: the backs of her hands, swells of her arms, crook of her neck.

“T-tuh-tickles,” she said. “W-wh-where w-wuh-will we put these g-guys?”

“We'll find room.”

In the mellow half-light of the den, the animals made a nest of Graham's wife. Marian Mouse nuzzled through the soft curls of Nell's hair. Turtle sought the valley between her breasts, paused as though awaiting permission, then eased down. Nell petted BP's head, the guinea pig happy to receive any attention.

Her hand hardly trembled. It hardly trembled at all.

A distressed squeak from somewhere below. Graham scanned his wife's body: no hamster. It must've slipped between the seat and back, down into the guts of the recliner.

“Stay as still as you can,” he told Nell, kneeling beneath the leg rest and lifting the green corduroy flap, exposing the chair's inner workings. The hamster was caught in a V of metal struts forming the recliner's levering mechanism. Each strut was attached to a heavy spring quivering with the movement of Nell's body. The hamster hung helplessly, stunted legs kicking the air, eyes bulging comically.

“Please,” Graham said, reaching a hand towards the shivering creature. “Please, Nell, please stay still.”

FRICTION

My name is Sam. I'm a sex addict.

Welcome, Sam.

Thanks, all of you. So, when did I first realize I had a problem—that's the question, is it? Guess it'd be in my teens; fifteen, maybe sixteen. Standing in a bodega in the city where I grew up, only place you could find Black Bart licorice gum— remember that stuff? This woman came in for cigarettes. She wasn't remarkable in any tangible way. I recall her elbow. The, um, inside of it—crook of her arm, really. When she reached over the counter to pay you saw these downy hairs, a raised blue vein and I wanted to touch that spot, smell and taste it. Crazy, but I wanted to shrink myself, atomize like those scientists in
Fantastic Voyage,
view things on a cellular level. I wanted to know everything about it—not her, you understand, I didn't care about her history or goals or fears, any of that. Just be intimate with that unthinking portion of her. That was the first time I felt that way—my whole world collapsing in a single gesture or stimulus. Same way Hank Aaron must've felt swinging a bat for the first time, Ray Charles tickling those ivories. So this is it, huh? My life's purpose. Crush homeruns. Write great music. Obsess about a woman's elbow. Oh. To some the wheat, others the chaff. But you make do, right?

I'VE GOT THE GIRL
bent over a glasstop desk with her ass in the air, my hands on her hips, thrusting diligently. Her name's Caitlin—no, Kitten. Glass fogged under Kitten's armpits and her nipple rings produce a glasscutter clink on the tabletop. She's blowing Wayne and every so often pauses to exhort me to Fuck her, Fuck her hard, Fill her up, Harder, Faster, Make her cum, et cetera. Klieg lights hot on my skin and a cameraman between my spread legs, zoomed in for an insertion shot. Give it a little swizzlestick action and Kitten moans at this pedestrian maneuver. Wayne's leaning forward, red flushmarks across his thighs caused by pressure from the table. An eagle spread-winged across Kitten's lower back, red rose clutched in each talon.

“Give it to me,” she says. “Give it to your little
whore
.”

“Cut!” The director barks. “Take twenty, people.”