Rust and Bone (14 page)

A new girl steps through the tinsel curtain to a smattering of desultory applause. Blood-red spotlights disguise the needle tracks on her arms but do nothing to hide the seam of a C-section scar curving from bellybutton to bikini line. A guy sitting up front whistles sharply, the way one seeking a dog's attention might.

A woman slides into the booth. At the tail end of her career, pencil thin lines where her eyebrows should be, a broken nose that's healed badly. A sarong wrapped around her waist, which I suppose could be either a token gesture at modesty or a means of concealing some gruesome defect.

“Drinking alone, baby?”

“Looks that way.”

“Want some company?”

My response is noncommital and she slides closer. She wears the brand of perfume strippers prefer; I wonder if there's a communal atomizer they all share.

“I'll suck your cock for fifty dollars.” She laughs crazily, as though I'd told a rakishly indelicate joke.

“I don't even know your name.”

“Sharday. What do you say, hon?”

“Let me have another drink.”

“How 'bout getting me one, too?”

Suitably fortified, we sneak out the back door. A clear autumn night and the sky spread with stars, remote and numberless. Sharday leads me across the parking lot to a row of motel rooms. Her room is small but neat and smells of carpet freshener. Framed photos of two young boys on the nightstand; she turns them face-down before easing me onto the bed. Bills change hands. She unbuttons my jeans, tugs them down.

“What's that?”

“A fake leg.” I assumed she'd noticed the replacement prosthesis in the club. For a moment I think she's going to call it off, as though amputation's contagious and she doesn't want to risk it.

“How did it happen?”

“War wound. Desert Storm. Some brown bastard cut it off with a sword. Those wiggly looking swords.”

“A kirpan?”

“Sure … one of those.”

Sharday slips a condom over me with the clinical disinterest of an ER nurse. She works with a brisk, businesslike air, humming a familiar tune I can't quite put a name to.

“Is it okay?” she says. “Feel good, hon?”

“It's … fine.”

“Something else you want? It's cool.”

I tell her to tuck her arms behind her back so that, from my perspective, it'd look …

“Like I have no arms?”

“Yes,” I say. “Like that.”

She does as I ask, but I can't look at her. Lean back on the bed, stare at a ceiling covered in a constellation of water stains. One resembles a suckling pig, another some breed of tropical bird. Stare at Sharday's bobbing skull, those dark roots growing out of her scalp. A bedspring pokes through the threadbare mattress, jabbing me in the spine. Music seeps through the wall from the other room: “Let My Love Open the Door,” by Pete Townsend. The song is followed by another and another, then “The Things I Do for Money” by the Northern Pikes is playing.

“Awful sorry, sugar. I'm dancing in a minute.”

She pulls the condom off and tucks me back inside my boxers. No refund is offered. I clip my leg on. Sharday leads me outside.

“Gonna be okay, hon?”

“Thanks for trying.”

She pecks me on the cheek then sets off across the lot, the
click-click
of her heels echoing off the graffiti-tagged walls. I walk out to the street. Cars packed with teens cruise past on Ferry, looking to pull a U-turn and head back down the Hill. A wire-mesh rack propped beside the Concorde's door, stuffed with brochures for local attractions: Castle of Frankenstein, Skylon Tower, Hollywood Wax Museum, Colonel Tilliwacker's Haunted Lemonade Stand. In the top right corner: a glossy blue brochure, killer whale leaping beneath the hub of a brilliant rainbow.
Everyone Loves Marineworld,
spelled out in inch-high bubble script.

A CAB DROPS ME OFF
outside the front gates as early morning stars bleed into the lightening sky. Ticket booths boarded up, closed for the season. Head to the trainer's entrance, kicking through drifts of crackling leaves. My key still works. In the prep area fillet knives hang on a magnetized strip above a block of frozen herring thawing in a metal basin. The odor of chlorine and gutted fish; the bark of penned sea lions. Step through another door onto the stage.

Security lamps burn on the amphitheater's perimeter, casting a silvered sheen on the water. Cross the stage, past props silent in their wrap of shadows. A paddle wheel turns with a steady trickle of water. Birds roost on a bridge spanning the show and wait pools. Peel off shirt, remove shoes and socks and pants, uncouple my leg. Late September wind buffets what's left of my body. I break out in gooseflesh.

The whale was captured in a drift net off the coast of Siberia. Sectioned from her pod, hooked to a fifty-ton winch, dragged aboard a Russian freighter. She spent three weeks cradled in a body hammock, hosed down with salt water. A crane lifted her through a moonlit sky and into a new world: 90” ×60” ×30”, glass and concrete. I was the one who fed her. Taught her. Kept her alive. I came to believe she belonged to me, the way land or a car can belong to a person. I forgot that every time I entered the water I belonged to her, and the moment I remembered was the moment it ceased to matter.

Ease myself down by the pool's lip, dangling my leg in the water. Niska swims at the far end, dorsal fin cutting the glasslike surface. Air jets from her blowhole, a shimmering spume lit by the stark white lights. Cup water and lift it to my mouth, relishing that salty sting. The pool dark and fathomless, dropping into forever. As a child I suffered this recurring nightmare in which the floor of my bedroom turned liquid, bed bobbing on the placid surface. Peering over the mattress, I saw shapes wheeling and surging in the inky water, primordial Lovecraftian horrors with scales and blunt teeth. How far down did that darkness stretch: through the Earth's core, out into space, to the edge of the known universe? The distance from the foot of my bed to the open door was perhaps five feet—I could clear it at a leap. But if I were to slip …?

Push off the concrete ledge, move out into the pool. One-legged and overweight, I cut an ungainly path through water so frigid it robs my breath. Niska's head turns, a languid sweep. Her body describes a slow half-circle, starlight rippling over the contour of her dorsal ridge. I tread water, cold pressing against my ribcage. Catch my reflection in the pool's dark mirror. No fear or indecision in my eyes and for that I'm thankful. Nothing to be done for it, now. There is only acceptance, and a hope that, in those slender moments separating what is from what may be, there might be understanding.

I once spent the night with a girl picked up at a downtown bar. I can no longer recall her name, her smell, the color of her eyes. She lived in an old building facing St. Paul Street, backing onto Twelve Mile Creek. The bedroom overlooked a wooded dell, creek running swiftly behind. Early that morning I woke to the sound of voices. I sat up and went to the window. Three figures stood in the half-light. Down along the woodline, where it was too dark to make out ages or faces: vague outlines, rough movements and angles. Two larger figures had the smaller boxed in. They shoved the person to the ground—a woman; you could tell by the pitch of her voice. One of them fell on top of her while the other stood off to one side, head sweeping side to side. Predawn sunlight streamed through the window, picking up a patina of dust on the venetian blinds. I went to the kitchen and rooted through the drawers, laying my hands on a butcher knife. When I returned the two on the ground were rocking rhythmically. The other one said something—
Give it,
or maybe
Give 'er
—and laughed. I couldn't quite grasp what I was seeing. I gripped the knife so tightly the grain of it lingered on my palm for hours afterwards. Then I slid it under the boxspring and slipped into bed, curling my body into that nameless girl who never stirred.

Maybe that's how she wants it,
I thought.
Maybe there's an arrangement
. A span of dark time went by, punctuated by a single low moan. It wasn't any of my business.
She'd scream if she needed help
. Birds chattered in the trees, and below that, the sound of endlessly rushing water.
Someone else will notice. Someone else will commit
.

And what becomes of it all? The brutalities and insincerities, the callousness and selfishness, wrongdoings real and imagined, the acts of inaction, the fear, regret, guilt? Doesn't just go away, that much I know. Gil had it right: a balancing act takes place every minute of every day, a silent tally, each act carrying its own discrete weight, its own transformative power.

And do we ever really know where we stand? At this moment, in this breath—which way the scale tips?

Square your debt. Start over fresh.

The whale surfaces. Mouth slightly open, light glinting on the points of her teeth. You're breathing heavily, held up by pure adrenaline. Run a hand over the smooth cone of her snout. She gurgles low in her throat, angling her head to expose the soft seam of her mouth. Stare into that huge black eye, search for some sign of recognition.

“I'm tired, girl.” You slap her tongue. “So let's do this thing.”

Taking your signal, Niska moves out into open water. She describes a quickening path around the pool, past the handicapped pavilion where, some million years ago, a young girl with an inscrutable smile watched you rocket into blue summer sky. Niska's dorsal fin dips below the surface. Give yourself over to the current, its power and possibilities. A locking sensation, all things in balance. Moon an unblinking eye and beyond it a million stars, around which revolve untold worlds.

Water surges beneath you, a thrilling push. Tiny bubbles trail to the surface, bursting with a fizzy club-soda pop. You hear yourself say, “I'm so sorry,” though to whom or for what reasons you will remain forever unsure.

ON SLEEPLESS ROADS

GRAHAM LOVED THE WAY
his wife moved. While out walking he used to fall a half-step behind, just to watch. Her hips—but more than that. Legs, arms, the faint bob of her head. The way it all came together, the way it
meshed
. She loved to dance with her long black hair tied up on top of her head. She wore a moonstone on a leather thong that glimmered in the soft swell of her throat when the light from a mirror ball caught it. Seeing her like that, a snatch of song always came to him:
My girl don't just walk, she unfurls
. The photos Graham kept in his dresser gave a sense—weightless, beyond gravity—but didn't do justice to the way she once moved.

She didn't move that way anymore. Her limbs jerked erratically or not at all. Her body shook, an abiding shiver.
Bradykinesia,
the doctors called it, caused by a lack of dopamine in the brain. She'd lost all sense of equilibrium: when she fell she did so heedlessly, the way a chest of drawers pushed from a second-story balcony falls. Pills with names like Sinemet and Comtan and Requip. Sometimes she didn't take them. At first it was an act of defiance: she'd sit in a kitchen chair facing the wall, fingers white around the armrests, teeth clenched and muscles bunched along her jaw. Now it was an act of exploration: she wanted to see how strong the disease was, sense its power, her own powerlessness against it.

“Like slowly going blind,” she once said. “Better to be born that way, don't you think?”

When things got really bad Graham held her down. Her wrists escaped the gentle manacles of his fingers, fists striking his chest with a resonant thump. Her body held a mindless strength: as though he were grappling with a possessed bundle of sticks, those brooms in
The Sorcerer's Apprentice
. Only her steady gaze, those blue eyes darkened indigo by the drugs, expressed understanding. He'd jam a leg between hers, thigh pressing her hips. At these times he'd recall those days when she'd visited his bachelor apartment—TV on a milk crate, cinderblock bookshelves—making out on his sagging futon, his leg between hers and the friction of denim on denim, eyes half-closed and her voice whispering,
Yes, like that. Just … like … that
. He'd look down at her body, her
now
-body, the flailing limbs and skeletal rattle of her teeth and yet always those eyes, that calm indigo gaze.

“I'm heading out, Nell.”

She was sitting in a recliner beside the television tuned to an old episode of
The Beachcombers
. A book lay open on her lap. She tried to turn the page. Soon Graham turned it for her.

“You're not watching this?”

“S-suh-seen it a-ah-already,” Nell said. “Relic steals Nick's l-l-logs in t-thuh-this one.”

“Relic's always stealing Nick's logs. Turn it off?”

“It's uh-o-okay. Something to luh-luh-listen to.”

A sheen of sweat on her face, glittering her skin like frost in moonlight. She was always sweating: the drugs, mainly, and her body never truly at rest. Still gorgeous. She'd never lose that. When Graham first saw her, the words
Nordic beauty
came to mind: those blue eyes and high cheekbones. He'd pictured her face framed by a white fur hood, a range of snow-topped mountains rising in the distance.

Graham set The Plunger on the hassock beside her recliner. He'd bought it—a saucer-sized disk connected to a phone line running to a jack in the wall—at a medical supply store. When pushed, it automatically dialed 911 to dispatch paramedics. They didn't have the savings to hire a private nurse while he worked. So … The Plunger.

Graham kissed his wife. The warmth of her lips, that faint tremble. He checked his watch: 11:00. Night pressed to the living room window and beyond that a few stars, very faint, very beautiful.

“See you in the morning.”

“B-buh-be c-caref-ful.”

The clean raw air of the late October night left a taste of winter at the back of Graham's throat. Snow fell through the arc-sodium glow of a nearby streetlamp, flakes touching his hair and melting in streams down his neck. He opened the door of a '95 Freightliner tow truck— the words
Repo Depot
stenciled in blue above the fender—keyed the ignition, and pulled out onto the street.