Rust and Bone (31 page)

“You don't believe in magic?” Herbert said. “Come outside, then. I'll show you.”

“Herbert, don't do this. Please.”

“Stop talking nonsense. I won't watch you make a bloody fool of yourself.”

Herbert's hand clutched his father's sweater. “Damn it, I'll
show
you. It's not nonsense!”

“Take your hands off me. You're making a scene.”

Jess took Herbert's wrist, trying to pry his fingers loose. Her father beat at his son's arm as he shook the sleeve. Although Jess never shared Herbert's vision of a joyful resolution, she had not imagined a tug of war in a Bowl-a-drome.

“Goddamn you, let
go!
”

“It's real! I can show you—
real!
”

“Knock it off down there!” the counterman hollered.

“Let 'em go at it,” a bowler with a limp walrus mustache called back. “About time someone gave it to the old bastard.”

Herbert gave a final furious tug, tearing the sweater, tumbling onto the floor with a swath of angora clutched in his fist. Herbert, Sr., fell back, bony backside impacting a fiberglass bowling chair with a thump. His son stood carefully. Softly but with utter conviction, he said, “I know what's real. Whether you believe or not makes no difference anymore.”

Herbert walked out of the alley. Their father sprawled in the chair, heaving. His torn sweater sleeve hung between his legs, nearly brushing the floor. The collar was stretched out of shape, baring a pale clavicle.

“I wasn't … lying,” he panted. “They were just …
fantasies
.”

Seeing him like that, a tall frail man with a torn sweater, the harsh light of the scorer's table showing just how deeply his eyes had retreated into their sockets, Jess realized this was a man who'd never really stepped out of that tea chest he'd entered many years ago. Exited physically, yes, tripped the hidden latch and vanished; but the way that body sagged, the defeated slouch of those shoulders, was the same posture she'd seen in men handcuffed in the backseat of her squad car. An imprisoned look.

THE SKY WAS A DARK BOWL
quaking and crashing with thunder. Jess scanned the parking lot, then dashed to the car. Rain pelted down in stinging wires. She peered through the window, but he wasn't inside. She called his name and wind snatched the word from her mouth.

Squinting into the driving rain, she saw him standing along the fenceline bordering the fields, fenceposts dark with creosote and the rusty stitchwork of barbed wire. Shirtless, trousers plastered to his legs, hair stuck to his skull. Eyes closed, he swayed slightly.

Jess stood in the lot, one foot mired in a pothole rapidly filling with rainwater. A vein of lightning split the sky, bathing the fields in rippling white light. Rain poured down her cheeks. Herbert swayed side to side. His face was serene. He looked so young, a boy. Jess laughed at the craziness of it all, the beautiful absurdity. “You're nuts!” she shouted, laughing harder. She saw a figure standing in silhouette behind the alley's smoked glass. Herbert swayed, his ears tuned to an unheard harmony, the rhyme of the wind and rain and sky. His hands held out, palms flat to the earth, as though seeking an elusive balance. Lightning creased the sky, whitening his body.

Her breath caught.

For the rest of her life, she will always wonder—did it happen? Perhaps it was a trick of the light, a fleeting disorientation. Later she will think her mind played a trick: she wanted so badly for it to happen that she willed her eyes into momentary belief. She will never speak of it, yet one night many years later will wake from a dream of that faraway afternoon, the wind and rain and the sense of something in the air, a quivering pressure in her eardrums, an odd taste beneath her tongue—not magic; she will never quite bring herself to so blunt an admission. Something feathery and alive that all those years later seems so unreal and yet the vision persists undimmed by time, a vision as bracing as it was during those fleeting heartbeats when it happened, and she will sit bolt upright as a cool night breeze plays through the open window and starlight curves upon the brass buttons of her police uniform hanging in the bedroom closet, and, in a voice so low and tremulous her husband does not stir, she will whisper, “He disappeared.”

The skin of Herbert's chest and arms and head turned opaque as a nearly colorless essence, smoke or mist or fog, rose off his body. For a moment Jess could see the basic structure of his skeleton, the bones of his arms and ribcage, skull gilt with flashing light, then only the arteries and veins pumping blood. When these vanished all that remained were the disembodied trousers standing on their own and the open field beyond. Jess would never forget that Rolex free-floating in the charged air, the dime-sized flash of brilliance as lightning reflected off its face.

Herbert's body suddenly coalesced, the disparate atoms flooding back and uniting. He toppled into the mud. Jess ran to him.

“Did you see it?” His eyes were alive and on fire. “Did you see?”

“I don't know what I saw.”

She helped him up, amazed at just how light he felt. A strange smell clung to him, a mixture of singed earth and ozone. She threw his arm over her shoulder and carried him across the lot. By the time she settled him into the front seat, he was fast asleep.

She cast a glance at the bowling alley window. The silhouetted figure was gone.

Recognize that what they peddle as truth is in fact fiction. Look beyond the stagecraft, deception, and sleight-of-hand, and you will always find the truth, which is simply this: there
is
no truth. It is all a lie. Elaborate and brilliantly concealed, but a lie nonetheless. Never trust your eyes. Be forever skeptical. Learn to spot the tricks I have outlined and together we shall expose these “magicians” for what they truly are: frauds, shysters, and villains!

[7]

Herbert slept the entire drive home. At one point he started shivering violently and Jess wrapped him in sweaters and ran the heater until his teeth stopped chattering. The rain let up, leaving in its wake a pristine clarity.

They pulled into Herbert's driveway shortly after nine o'clock. Warm southern air was infused with the plankton smell of the canal. Jess woke Herbert, helped him wrangle his luggage onto the porch. He glanced at the stricken tree on his lawn.

“I really should do something about that poor thing, shouldn't I?”

“Burn it. End its misery.”

“Maybe I will. Plant another in its place. Water and trim it. Take good care of it.”

He reached into his pants pocket and withdrew a small booklet: soggy green construction paper tied up with fraying blue yarn, clumsy scissoring, words written in a spiky hand. For a moment it seemed as if he would crumple it, but he smoothed it out and returned it to his pocket.

“I don't think he's a bad person. I think he just … lost control. It could happen to anybody, don't you think? He's not a bad man.”

Jess envied his childlike ability to forgive. Perhaps he would never grow up, be forever a man-child lost in a world of mirrors and

brightly colored smoke. This didn't anger her, where before it had. He came forward, an awkward lunge, hugging her. Jess felt his stiff contours, bone and hard angles, a boy's body not yet fleshed into adulthood. She remembered a night when they were young, Herbert waking from a nightmare and crawling under the covers of her bed, his body all elbows and kneecaps. He really hadn't changed over the years: still bony and gangling and clinging to beliefs others had long ago surrendered.

My brother, she thought. Crown prince of Never-Never Land.

“Well.”

“Well. Sam cooks dinner for me and Ted on Sundays. You should come.”

“But, Jess … Sam's a terrible cook.”

“Come anyways. Come anytime.”

Jess walked to her Jeep. As she pulled out, she saw Herbert standing beside the gossamer-enshrouded elm, laying his hands on the trunk, stroking the black flaking bark.

SHE DROVE THROUGH STREETS
wet from a brief night rain, neighborhoods silent in the dark, the clean lawns, the houses low-slung and split-level and modern. Radio tuned to the local station, Chrissie Hynde singing about a picture of you. Moving into the country: the night coolness of low peninsula fields, vineyards and cherry groves, solitary lights of farmhouses and irrigation ditches filled with moonlit water. She thought of the summer she'd picked fruit with a group of itinerant Caribbean workers. They were paid by the basket, and a small Jamaican man with skin so dark it hurt her eyes had shown her how to twist strawberries off the vine so as not to damage the fruit. The Jamaicans shared two old ten-speeds and after the day's picking would bike to the nearest convenience store with a roll of quarters, calling their wives from payphones, talking of the money they'd made and how they'd spend it.

It was almost midnight by the time she pulled into her driveway. Sam's truck was parked at the curb. The living room light burned. She saw figures in silhouette through the drapes: one on the couch, another in a chair.

She sat on the stoop. The sterile scent of late autumn, haloes of misty yellow light making a nimbus around each streetlight. To the west, a few miles distant, a thin column of smoke rose into the sky. It came from her brother's part of town; she wondered if he'd lit that poor tree on fire. She hoped he had, and willed an errant ember to settle on the roof of his house and burn it to the ground, too. There was an inclination in her family to hide away from the world, crawl into dark places and vanish. If they weren't flushed from hiding and forced into daylight, there was a possibility they'd disappear forever.

Leaves skated across the street, pushed by a swirling wind. She stared into the sky, each star a bright pinprick, each realizing a precise clarity.
The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn
.

Jess thought of the uniform hanging in the hall closet. Tomorrow she would take it off its hook and make a decision: burn it or put it on. Either way was a beginning. She was ready for a beginning.

Booming laughter from inside. One silhouette threw its head back, the other slapped its knee. Ted and Sam, and, across town, Herbert razing his front yard.

The men in her life.

Jess scuffed her boots on the welcome mat and stepped inside.

Know this: there is such a thing as magic. It
exists
. My intent is not to teach you the art of true magic, but rather to awaken you to its presence in the world and in our lives. Magic is in the water and air and sky; it is all around us, in objects of beauty and ugliness alike. Perhaps this all sounds quite mad; perhaps you think me a fool. All I can say is, I know what is real. My convictions are unshakable. My only hope is that, even if you never accomplish real magic or see it with your own eyes, you still believe in it, or at the very least its possibility.

I am convinced the world is a much brighter place for those who believe.

—Excerpted from
The Apprentice's Guide to Modern Magic,
by Herbert T. Mallory, Jr.

Acknowledgments

MY DEEPEST THANKS
to the following people for their input, compassion, care, dedication, and support:

GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT
is also made to the following journalswhere some of these stories were first published. My thanks to theirfine editors:

“Rust and Bone” first published as “28 Bones” in
The Fiddlehead
.

“Rocket Ride” and “Life in the Flesh” in
Event
.

“On Sleepless Roads” in
Prairie Fire
.

“
Craig Davidson is a
wickedly good storyteller
who weaves worlds out of blood and magic and humanity. Our Great Northern Hope.
”—Joseph Boyden, author of
Three Day Road

“Like a gleeful bull in the china shop of staid and worthy CanLit, Davidson is defining his own literary identity by
shattering conventions
.”—
National Post