Rust and Bone (30 page)

“I don't think escape is something we can hope for,” he said. “People have it worse than us; we can't flatter ourselves otherwise. You go on. Put your head down and bull through.” He showed her his palms. “What else can you do? Find something that fills that empty space inside you. For me, it's magic. There's something peaceful about it. Calm and steadying. It gives me control. I think that's what it's about: not escaping, just regaining control.”

Regain control. It sounded so simple, a matter of mechanical application: turn wheel in the direction of the skid, pump brakes steadily. Go about your business. Jess wasn't sure she could. Her character wasn't weak or resigned, but controlling the terms of her imprisonment possessed no appeal.

“Let's get into some dry clothes,” she said. “You'll catch pneumonia. What were you thinking, trying to swim in this cold?”

“Seemed like the thing to do at the time.”

THAT NIGHT JESS CALLED HOME
. Ted picked up on the sixth ring.

“It's me.”

“It's you.” His voice logy, as though his mouth were packed with syrup-soaked wool. “Find your man?”

“No. Tomorrow.”

While they'd dated, Ted hadn't known how to dance. Jess loved dancing, the club atmosphere, the way a knowing partner would hold her. Though athletic and comfortable in his own skin, Ted was no dancer. One night she'd made an offhand remark;
I'll have to find me a boy who likes to dance,
the kind of comment a woman might make in the early stages when the threat of other options carried weight.

Unbeknownst to her, Ted started taking lessons. He met with a widowed instructor, Cora, every Tuesday and Thursday. They feather-stepped and reverse-turned across her wide living room, practicing the Paseo con Golpe and El Ocho. On New Year's Eve he'd taken her to the Blue Mermaid, where, at the stroke of midnight, he displayed his skills during a slow waltz. He was still horrible, two left feet, but that'd made no difference.

“I miss you,” he said. “I miss your smell.”

“My smell?”

“You've got a great smell. It's still here, in the sheets, but—not the same.”

“Will it be enough to tide you over?”

“I guess it'll have to. Can't hug and kiss the sheets.”

“You
could
…”

“But that would be … weird.”

“A little.”

After a beat: “You okay?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I just wanted to …”

“Hear my beautiful voice. Don't blame you: ladies call at all hours to hear my silky-smooth baritone, baby. So … what are you wearing?”

Jess laughed softly. “Ted, your dirty mind.”

“Oh, my
god,
” Herbert moaned. “Find a phone booth, why don't you?”

Fakery #44:
Rod into Serpent
. One of magic's oldest tricks, it plays on a snake's nature and instinct. First, chill the snake in an icebox for several hours to render it sluggish. Then, grasping the head between thumb and index finger, apply steady, equal pressure. This stuns the serpent, who believes an enormous beast is attacking. Unable to defend itself, it goes into shock, body rigid as a twig. Finally, set the stunned snake on the floor. Within a few minutes, it will slither away, unharmed.

[6]

The morning sky was dour, the trees to the west a dirty tone of silver. A cover of fog clung to the bay, moving low and fat across the water.

Jess navigated down the gravel track leading to the main road. Fog hung suspended between skeletal oak and maple. Rounding a blind curve, Jess glimpsed the looming shape and slammed her foot on the brake. The car's back end fishtailed over the shale.

“Holy moley,” Herbert said in a small, childlike voice.

The bull moose was easily ten feet tall. The front half of its body blocked the road, hindquarters mired in the spillway. Seen in profile, its head was a long dark wedge elegantly downswept, a smooth invert bow connecting its lips to the wet fur of its dewlap, which fanned in finlike ridges. The antlers were mostly shed of their itchy summer hide, though molting tatters hung from the odd point; rising from either side of the skull, tips stained by pine sap, they resembled the wings of an albino butterfly.

“Honk the horn.” Herbert recalled stories of cars colliding with such beasts, frames buckling and metal shearing while the animal walked away, stunned but unhurt. “Scare it.”

“It's okay,” Jess said. “There's room on your side.”

She eased the car forward, angling around the moose's projecting bulk. The animal's massive head swiveled, dark eyes focused on the vehicle. The front wheel slipped on the steep grade of the spillway. Branches raked the fender and windows.

“God, Jess. We'll tip over.”

Jess's heart fluttered—it felt
wonderful
. “We're okay.”

She inched the front bumper ahead, tapping the gas. The moose's head dipped, nose pressed to the driver-side window. Jess's face was separated from the moose's by a thin pane of glass. Beads of moisture ringed its sockets, a thickly sloped nose and teeth the hue of old bone, a corona of horseflies buzzing around its head. She felt a kinship with the animal—an illusive kinship, the kind that sometimes occurs when strangers lock eyes passing in cars headed opposite directions. The creature expelled plumes of steam through nostrils the size of teacups. Flecks of mucus sprayed the window. Its tongue, black and a foot long, licked a diagonal slash across the misted glass, as though it wished to learn of this strange shiny creature by its taste.

Jess edged the car back onto the road. They stared out the rear window as the moose flicked the huge leathery funnels of its ears at the maddening flies.

“That,” Herbert said softly, “is its own kind of magic.”

They arrived in Thessalon shortly after noon. The main drag conformed to an archaic model, with stores long since wiped from the metropolitan topography—Woolco, Stedman's, Saan—hanging on thanks to stubborn small-town consumers. The streets and trees and shops were bleached out, town suffocating beneath a blanket of low, dark clouds.

Their father's house stood at the end of a block shaded by the knitted branches of maple and walnut trees. The squat one-story was utterly nondescript and bordered on sterile; Jess had known bums to decorate their cardboard hovels with more flair. She thought of the exotic locales her father could've disappeared to: the white sand beaches of Pago Pago, the African veldt, the caldera of a dormant volcano. But no, he'd abandoned them for this shoebox less than five hundred kilometers away.

They climbed the cracked brick steps and Herbert rang the bell. Jess peeked through the slitted drapes: an ancient stereo with dual cassette player and turntable, a swayback sofa, a stack of newspapers propping up an overflowing ashtray. Dust motes hung in the air, turning over and over.

“He's not home,” a woman's voice called out through the shutters of the house next door.

“Do you know where he is?”

“Try the bowling alley.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure I'm sure!” The shutters snapped shut.

PARKWAY BOWL-A-DROME
was a corrugated-tin building in the shape of an airplane hangar jutting from the back end of the Leonard Hotel, the two structures fused into one grisly unit. Farmland stretched for miles behind the alley.

Stepping through the front doors, Jess was assaulted by an odor peculiar to bowling alleys: an amalgam of cigarette smoke, grease, shoe deodorizer, whatever they used to polish the lanes. Herbert gazed up and down the bustling hardwood floors, the mica-flecked balls spat from return chutes and gaudy red-and-white shoes stacked in cubbyholes, the insectile hum of the ball-buffing machine, thinking his father wouldn't set foot in this place on a dare.

The man behind the counter tried to guess Jess's shoe size. “Size eight wide.”

“We're not here to bowl, but yeah.” Jess unfolded the sheet of newsprint with their father's photo. “Looking for this guy. Know him?”

“Who's asking?”

Jess showed her badge. The counterman smiled wisely, as though unsurprised to see their father's misdeeds had finally caught up to him. “Lane eighteen, officer.”

The man pushed a small white button in the center of the teardrop ball return and rubbed his hands together over the dryer. On the inclined scorer's table sat a rosin stick, a talc pouch, a deck of Players, and a Styrofoam cup of coffee. The man sunk three fingers into a jet black ball, took two strides, launched the ball in a tight spiral; it flirted with the gutter before curving to strike the one pin. He marked it off on his score sheet, pulled a cigarette from the deck, lipped it, and said, “So. You found me.”

Herbert and Jess sat at the horseshoe of molded fiberglass seats ringing the lane. Their father wore tan pants and a beige sweater. His dark hair had thinned and grayed; a widow's peak gave his face an elongated equine aspect. Though age and wear had blunted the sharpness of his features, his emerald eyes still shone.

“So,” Herbert said after a minute, “you're bowling now.”

“Bowling's wonderful. It makes the heart merry.” He looked his children up and down. His fingers rose to his face, tracing his lips and cheek as though searching for correspondences. “It was that newspaper article, wasn't it? I told that damn reporter no pictures.”

Jess couldn't believe his lack of emotion. Part of her—a very large part, it seemed—hoped he'd cower like a Nazi war criminal brought to justice. But there was no shame, no contrition. It was as though he'd stumbled across a couple of old, not especially close acquaintances, and was struggling to make polite conversation.

“Don't you have anything to say? Don't you feel the least bit guilty?”

“Jess, please …”

“I'm too old to feel guilt, and besides, it's a wasteful emotion. If that's why you searched me out, you may as well leave. Excuse me a moment.”

He bowled a strike, then turned to his son and palmed the scorekeeper's pencil up his sleeve. “Still got it, don't I?”

Herbert dug a coin out of his pocket and sent it skipping along his knuckles, then palmed it with deft precision. He opened his mouth to show the coin glinting on his tongue.

“I saw you slip it into your mouth,” his father said. “Good, but not quite perfect.”

Herbert didn't say anything. It didn't matter his father was wrong, as Herbert had slipped the coin into his mouth earlier, anticipating the opportunity; nor did it matter he was infinitely more skilled, his movements clean where his father's were clubbish; the fame and women and wealth—none of it mattered. At that moment he was a child again, the boy forever trying to please but always falling critically short, shamed and confused before his father.

“Why'd you do it?” Jess cast her eyes in a conspicuous arc: scuffed lanes, a glass case full of cobwebbed trophies, everything overhung in a haze of bluish smoke. “Was this worth it? For all this …
splendor?
”

“You always had a smart tongue, Jessica. I knew Sam would take you, we talked about it obliquely, and that was a better fit.” A strain of subdued pride underlay this pragmatism. Jess got a sense he considered himself somehow herculean, holding on as long as he had. “Your mother wanted children. Never a goal of mine. I sent money when I could—didn't Sam tell you?”

“You abandoned us.”

“Didn't throw you to the wolves, darling.”

Jess realized that, over the years, her father had been crafting his most brilliant illusion: he'd tricked himself into believing what he'd done was justified. She'd always considered him a confused man who'd made a bad choice—and perhaps, half a lifetime ago, that had been the case. But the man she now faced was completely devoid of remorse. This wasn't an act or a smokescreen; this was self-delusion distilled to its purest essence.

“It was the other magicians, wasn't it?” Herbert said. “Fallout from the book.”

“I shouldn't have written that thing. People trusted me with their secrets and I sold them out. Foolish, but I had something to prove.”

“Was it magic, then? A search for real magic?”

Jess caught the note of desperation in Herbert's voice. For him, it all hinged on justification: the idea of their father leaving to pursue a higher goal was something he could live with.

“Real magic? No such thing. Please don't tell me any of that foolishness we talked about when you were a child lingered on. It was all …
bunk
. I was entertaining you; they were pleasant fictions, fairy tales.” He squeezed the talc pouch anxiously. “I never told you the tooth fairy didn't exist, but I never felt badly for it. I just supposed the truth would dawn on you sooner or later.”

“The truth. Right. Of course.”

Herbert's body was trembling. Had he actually believed this would end with hugs and kisses and promises of Sunday dinners? Twenty-five years dismissed and everything reverting to the way it once was, father and son driving to some dustbowl town in the summer twilight, talking of magic?

“He's everything you lacked the courage and ability to be,” Jess said. “You see that, don't you?”

Her father's gaze narrowed, then skipped across the surface of the lanes. “Anyone can become successful if their passion becomes an obsession. Set yourself to a single life task, how can you help but become a success?”

“But isn't that what you did, abandoning us to pursue—
this?
” Jess heard the desperation creeping into her voice. “Jesus, was it really so awful?”

“I was miserable.”

She would never learn why her father left. The only power he held was the magician's power of secret knowledge, and to relinquish that was to yield whatever slim command he still held over them. She wanted to tell him it didn't matter, he could take his pathetic secrets to the grave … but she did care, and for a moment saw herself as a young girl in that dirty wash of alley light, squinting into the darkness, wondering what did we do
wrong?