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

networked with bluish spider veins. A slimly ironic menthol cigarette hung off her bottom lip, defying all known laws of gravity.
    â€œBad Biscuits,” she chastised the dog in a breathy baby-voice. “The manners on you. Why you want to go biting the nice man?”
    Alison arrived in a blur of shawls and indignation. I noticed she poked her fingers through Dottie’s crate before arriving at my side. Bright arterial blood pumped from my calf.
    â€œStop squirming,” she told me, breaking out the peroxide and catgut to attend to the wound.
    The woman waddled to her idling Cutlass Supreme. She opened the driver’s door—sunblistered dashboard lined with neon-haired Treasure Trolls; bingo dabbers spilling from a sprung glovebox— swatting the dog inside. A shrewish, stoop-shouldered man sat in the passenger’s seat, wearing camouflage fatigue pants and the kind of sleeveless white T-shirt favored by aged Italian gardeners.
    â€œYou can’t,” I said, reaching out to her. “Can’t just … your dog bit me! ”
    She tucked her chin to her chest, setting in motion a rippling domino-effect of subsidiary chins. “Biscuits got a touch of the ringworm, misser. Gives him the cranks.” Her look suggested I wasn’t much of a dogman if I didn’t know that . “Every one my babies is papered and rabies free. Don’t need shots, promise.”
    â€œThat dog should be destroyed!”
    â€œI’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.
    â€œDid that woman just …?”
    â€œYes,” Alison palmed me a vitamin K tablet to promote blood clotting. “Let’s go.”
    â€œBut you can’t—”
    â€œWhat do we tell the cops?” she said. “We were at this illegal dogfight and …”
    â€œBut we live in a polite society!” I was raving by now. “We operate under civilized rules!”
    â€œHush.”
    â€œI should bite her —bite that gargantuan … ASS! ”
    â€œHush.”
    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.
    â€œOh, 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.
    â€œI should’ve picked her up.”
    The dog started shaking then, the convulsions wracking her bones, radiating outwards.
    â€œShe wouldn’t allow it,” I said. “Dottie was a deep game dog.”
    â€œAre 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