In steel-tipped prose, Craig Davidson conjures up a bleak world populated by hardscrabble pugilists, fighting dogs, sex addicts, and others held captive by their own bad luck and bad decisions. Visceral and with a dark urgency, Rust and Bone is a strikingly original debut.
from RUST AND BONE
TWENTY-SEVEN BONES make up the human hand. Lunate and capitate and navicular, scaphoid and triquetrum, the tiny horn-shaped pisiforms of the outer wrist. Though differing in shape and density each is smoothly aligned and flush-fitted, lashed by a meshwork of ligatures running under the skin. All vertebrates share a similar set of bones, and all bones grow out of the same tissue: a bird's wing, a whale's dorsal fin, a gecko's pad, your own hand. Some primates got more–gorilla's got thirty-two, five in each thumb. Humans, twenty-seven.
Bust an arm or leg and the knitting bone's sealed in a wrap of calcium so it's stronger than before. Bust a bone in your hand and it never heals right. Fracture a tarsus and the hairline's there to stay–looks like a crack in granite under the x-ray. Crush a metacarpal and that's that: bone splinters not driven into soft tissue are eaten by enzymes; powder sifts to the bloodstream. Look at a prizefighter's hands: knucks busted flat against the heavy bag or some pug's face and skin split on crossing diagonals, a ridge of scarred X's.
You'll see men cry breaking their hand in a fight, leather-assed Mexies and Steeltown bruisers slumped on a corner stool with tears squirting out their eyes. It's not quite the pain, though the anticipation of pain is there–mitts swelling inside red fourteen-ouncers and the electric grind of bone on bone, maybe it's the eighth and you're jabbing a busted lead right through the tenth to eke a decision. It's the frustration makes them cry. Fighting's all about minimizing weakness. Shoddy endurance? Roadwork. Sloppy footwork? Skip rope. Weak gut? A thousand stomach crunches daily. But fighters with bad hands can't do a thing about it, aside from hiring a cornerman who knows a little about wrapping brittle bones. Same goes for fighters with sharp brows and weak skin who can't help splitting wide at the slightest pawing. They're crying because it's a weakness there's not a damn thing they can do for and it'll commit them to the second tier, one step below the MGM Grand and Foxwoods, the showgirls and Bentleys.
Room's the size of a gas chamber. Wooden chair, sink, small mirror hung on the pigmented concrete wall. Forty-watt bulb hangs on a dark cord, cold yellow light touching my clean-shaven skull and breaking in spears across the floor. Cobwebs suspended like silken parachutes in corners beyond the light. Old Pony duffel between my legs packed with wintergreen liniment and Vaseline, foul protector, mouthguard with cinnamon Dentyne embedded in the teeth prints. I've got my hand wraps laid out on my lap, winding grimy herringbone around the left thumb, wrist, the meat of my palm. Time was, I had strong hands–nutcrackers, Teddy Hutch called them. By now they've been broken so many times the bones are like crockery shards in a muslin bag. You get one hard shot before they shatter.
A man with a swollen face pokes his head through the door. He rolls a gnarled toscano cigarillo to the side of his mouth and says, "You ready? Best for you these yahoos don't get any drunker."
"Got a hot water bottle?" Roll my neck low, touch chin to chest. "Can't get loose."
"Where do you think you are, Caesars Palace? When you're set, it's down the hall and up a flight of stairs."
I was born Eddie Brown, Jr., on July 19, 1966, in San Benito, a hardscrabble town ten miles north of the Tex-Mex border; "somewhere between nowhere and adiós," my mother said of her adopted hometown. My father, a Border Patrol agent, worked the international fenceline running from McAllen to Brownsville and up around the horn to the Padre Island chain off the coast. On a clear July day you'd see illegals sunning their lean bodies on the projecting headlands, soaking up heat like seals before embarking on a twilight crossing to the shores of Laguna Madre. He met his wife-to-be on a cool September evening when her raft–uneven lengths of peachwood lashed together with twine, a plastic milk jug skirt–butted the prow of his patrolling johnboat.
"It was cold, wind blowing off the Gulf," my mother once told me. "Mío Dios. The raft seem okay when I go, but then the twine is breaking and those jugs fill with water. Those waters swimming with tiger sharks plump as hens, so many entrangeros borricos to gobble up. I'm thinking I'm seeing these shapes," her index finger described the sickle of a shark's fin. "I'm thinking why I leave Cuidad Miguel–was that so terrible? But I wanted the land of opportunity." An ironic gesture: shoulders shrugged, eyes rolled heavenwards. "I almost made it, Ed, yeah?"
My father's eyes rose over a copy of the Daily Sentinel. "A few more hours and you'd've washed up somewhere, my dear."
The details of that boat ride were never revealed, so I'll never know whether love blossomed or a sober deal was struck. I can picture my mother wrapped in an emergency blanket, sitting beside my father as he worked the hand-throttle on an old Evinrude, the glow of a harvest moon touching the soft curve of her cheek. Maybe something stirred. But I can also picture a hushed negotiation as they lay anchored at the government dock, maiden's hair slapping the pilings and jaundiced light spilling between the bars of the holding cell beyond. She was a classic Latin beauty: raven hair and polished umber skin, a birthmark on her left cheek resembling a bird in distant flight. Many border guards took Mexican wives; the paperwork wasn't difficult to push through. My sister was born that year. Three years later, me.
I finish wrapping my hands and stand, bobbing on the tips of my toes. Tug the sweatshirt hood up, cinch the drawstring. Half-circle to the left, feint low and fire a right cross, arm cocked at a ninety-degree L to generate maximum force. Torque the hips, still bobbing slightly, three stiff jabs, turning the elbow out at the end. A lot of people don't like a jabby fighter, a pitty-patter, but a smart boxer knows everything flows off the jab: keeps your opponent at a distance and muffles his offense, plus you're always in a position to counterpunch. And hey, if the guy's glass-jawed or thin-skulled, a jab might just knock him onto queer street.
My father once took me on his evening rounds. August, so hot even the adders and geckos sought shade. We drove across the dry wash in his patrol Bronco, past clumps of sun-browned chickweed and pokeberry bushes so withered their fruit rattled like hollow plastic beads. He stopped to show me the vents cut through the border fence, chainlink pried back in silvery flaps.
"Tin snips stashed in a plastic bag tied to an ankle. Swim across the Rio Grande, creep up the bank and cut through." A defeated shrug. "Easy as pie."
The sky was darkening by the time we reached the dock. Walking down the berm to the shoreline, we passed a patch of agaves so sickly even the moonshiners couldn't be bothered. Our boots stirred up clouds of rust-hued dust. Stars hovered at the eastern horizon, casting slivers of metallic light on the water.
My father cycled the motor, pulling into the bay. Suspended between day and night, the sky was a tight-sheened purple, shiny as eggplant skin. The oily stink of exhaust mingled with the scent of creosote and Cherokee rose. To one side, the fawn-colored foothills of west Texas rolled in knuckled swells beneath a bank of violet-edged clouds. To the other, the Sierra Madres were a finned ridge, wedges of terra cotta light burning though the gaps. A brush fire burned distantly to the north, wavering funnels of flame holding the darkness at bay. Stars stood on their reflections at the Rio Grande's delta, a seam of perfectly smooth water where river met ocean.
My father fired a flare into the sky. As the comet of red light arced, he squinted at the water's surface lit by the spreading contrail.
"They don't understand how dangerous it is," he said. "The pulls and undertows. Fighting a stiff current all the way." He pulled a Black Cat cigar from his shirt pocket and lit it with a wooden match. "Shouldn't feel any responsibility, truly. Not like I make them take the plunge. Everyone thinks it's sunnier on the other side of the street."
I snap off a few more jabs as my heart falls into pre-fight rhythm. Sweat's coming now, clear odorless beads collecting on my brow and clinging to the short hairs of my wrists. Twist the sink's spigot and splash cold, sulfurous water on my face. A milky crack bisects the mirror, running up the left side of my neck to the jaw before turning sharply, cleaving my lips and continuing north through cheek and temple. Stare at my face split into unequal portions: forehead marbled with knots of sub-dermal scar tissue and nose broken in the center, the angle of cartilage obtuse. Weak fingers of light crawl around the base of my skull, shadowing the deep pits of my sockets.
Thirty-seven years old. Not so old. Too old for this.
"These big, riveting stories about tough guys in trouble are the best I've read in a long time from a young writer."
—Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho
"Davidson ... smudges the line between comedy and horror, cruelty and mercy. His remarkable stories are challenging and upsetting."
—Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club
"When it comes to raw power, Davidson is truly a force to be reckoned with."
—Thom Jones, author of The Pugilist at Rest
"This is in every way an extraordinary book."
—Clive Barker, author of Books of Blood
"A writer of immense power and surprising, accurate insights."
—Peter Straub, author of Ghost Story
"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
"Sometimes so tough as to be volcanically sentimental, unreal, sometimes acutely accurate and tender ... a powerful debut."
—The Globe and Mail
"Davidson writes with a precision and power that's hard to ignore ... It's an excellent collection."
—The Independent
"...a solid collection of stories etched in wonderful prose..."
—Books in Canada
"...a writer of great promise..."
—Books in Canada
