Read Online Rust and Bone by Craig Davidson - Free Book Online

he says, “so here’s this smoker who’s trying to quit. He’s in a smoky tavern—upscale, jazzy, bit of a speakeasy feel—tipping a few bevies, itching to fire off a lung rocket.” Don believes his timely employment of hipster lingo is key to the middling success he enjoys. “So our man slips into the men’s room and enters a stall, jazz music swells, he exits all smiles. Fade to black on the product logo.”
    The Supp-Easy-Quit reps—a power-suited Eva Braun flanked by a pair of lab-coated scientist pastiches—sit with arms crossed. The trio strike me as just-the-facts-ma’am types: their ideal commercial no doubt involves clinical footage of suppositories inserted into rectums, endoscopic cameras filming the dispersal of nicotine molecules into the bloodstream.
    â€œTell me: do you like it?” Don Fawkes, Ignoramus extremus, asks. “Do you love it?”
    Fawkes’s towering colossus of ineptitude fails to elicit any surprise or sympathy from me for two reasons: (1) last month Don singlehandedly scuttled the Juicy Jubes kosher jujubes account, enraging a group of Hasidic entrepreneurs with the utterance of his ill-conceived tagline: Juicy Jubes are Jui-y JUI-licious!; and (2) a large chunk of meat is missing from my left calf, a chunk roughly correspondent to the bite radius of a Rottweiler named Biscuits. The wound is cleaned and dressed but the calf is a fussy area, a locus of veins and connective tissues—blood seeps through the bandages, pooling in the heel of my Bruno Magli loafer.
    I was mauled two nights ago, at a scratch-and-turn dogfight held in a foreclosed poultry processing plant outside Cobourg. Dottie, a three-year-old pit bull and my wife Alison’s darling bitch, was matched uphill against a hard-biting presa canario named Chinaman. Dottie was a ten fight champ with heavily muscled stifles and a bite to shatter cinderblocks; Chinaman was cherry but his lineage legendary with chest and flews capable of deflecting bullets. Betting skewed in Dottie’s favor on account of her experience and ring generalship.
    After Alison gave Chinaman a thorough inspection—the breeder a jug-eared hillbilly known to soak his fighters’ fur in poison—the dogs were led into a chicken-wire pen. White worms of chicken shit dotted the floor, some with downy feathers stuck to them. The concrete was puddled with blood from the previous fight.
    Dottie started out fast, butting her muzzle into Chinaman’s chest and tearing a gaping hole above his right shoulder. Chinaman looked ready to buckle—it’s the first critical injury that separates gamers from curs—but when Dottie went for his front leg he snapped at her skull, canines opening deep furrows across the bridge of her snout. Blood flowed down Dottie’s chest and sprayed in her eyes. Alison gave a little moan. Chinaman’s handler hollered, “Get at it, boy! Sic! Sic! ”
    The presa rushed hard and tried to pin Dottie against the pen. Dottie back-pedaled a few paces before fastening her mouth around Chinaman’s advancing foreleg and ripping free a network of muscle and tissue. Chinaman kept pressing, chewing on Dottie’s head; it sounded as if his teeth were raking bone. The crowd pressed around the pen, slapping the chicken-wire, stomping their feet. The smell was close and hot, sweetly animal.
    The bell rang. Men with blunt baling hooks reached over the wire, digging into the dense muscling of the dog’s chests, prying them apart. In the corner, I held Dottie while Alison went to work. After rubbing powdered Lidocaine into the dog’s gumline to kill the pain, she chemically cauterized the facial wounds with ferric acid. Then she saturated a Q-tip with adrenaline chloride and swabbed the rims of Dottie’s nostrils and ear holes, her anus. The dog’s eyes, previously glazed, attained a clear focus.
    The bell rang. Both dogs scratched the chalk