Free Rust and Bone by Craig Davidson Page B

grotesque tumor bump-bumped against its throat. Early twilight hung suspended over the fields, patches of orange burning between the trees. Sparrows clustered on a snow-topped log lying in the middle of the brook.
    Alison settled the shotgun against the calf’s head. It flicked its ear, as though the muzzle were a fly it wished to shoo. I remember wind whistling down my neck and feeling terribly cold.
    Alison cocked the hammer and calmly pulled the trigger. The gunshot louder than I expected, a rough bark rolling out across the clean snow-topped expanse. The animal went down silently. It half-stood on its front legs. The left side of its face was just … gone . I wanted to yell “Go down, just go down, ” the way a trainer would to an overmatched boxer. It fell over on its side in the shallows. We went back inside for hot toddies.
    Half an hour after my doctor’s appointment, I step through the front door of our house. From the upstairs nursery arises the plaintive clamor of pit bull puppies seeking attention—attention I studiously deny. Pass down a hallway hung with photos of champion pits chained to spikes pounded into browned patches of grass, mouths open and teeth bared, straining against their fetters.
    Alison stands over the kitchen sink shaking water from a colander of diced zucchini. The cordless telephone is cinched between her shoulder and ear.
    â€œNo, no,” she’s saying, her tone that of a mother explaining a crucial fact to a particularly dimwitted child, “that is not the progression. Bulldog to German shepherd to Doberman pinscher to Rottweiler to pit bull. It goes no further . There is no evolution.”
    I place my hands on her hips and bring them around, fingers knitting over her bellybutton.
    â€œNo, I don’t … no … that’s in- sane .” She twists out of my grasp, pressing the mouthpiece directly to her lips, as if this forced intimacy will convey the truth of her argument. “The presa canario is nothing more than a puffed-up bully. I mean, will a hundred-twenty-pound presa beat a pit? In all probability, yes. But a heavyweight boxer would pummel a flyweight—it’s no contest. That’s why there’s weight classes … no … alright, yes … listen, I’m not going to argue.” Alison hangs her tongue out. “Fine, if that’s how you see it. All I’ll say is, pound for pound, nothing beats a pit. Pound for pound, yes … okay … fine … we agree to disagree.”
    She jams the phone in its charging cradle and blows a raspberry at it.
    â€œWho?”
    â€œNobody. Nothing. How was work?”
    â€œFawkes deep-sixed the Supp-Easy-Quit account.”
    â€œIt’s a tough product to market.”
    Alison always lets Fawkes off the hook. I took her to the office Christmas party last year and discovered the two of them in the copy room, sloppy drunk and giggling, photocopying asexual body parts: elbows, fingers, wrists, foreheads.
    â€œAnd your day?”
    â€œOh, Dr. Scalise was being Dr. Scalise.” Dr. Phillip Scalise, the cardiovascular surgeon at North York General, is thirty-five with the coarse-skinned face and dimpled chin of a Look Who’s Talking –era John Travolta. Alison is his “all-time favorite” OR nurse. “During prep he was telling these awful jokes, just plain awful, and I shouldn’t have been laughing but he’s really just so silly sometimes.”
    I recognize this should bother me but, doubtlessly due to the Xanax I popped on the homebound subway, I find myself supremely nonplussed. “He’s a silly one,” I agree. “I’ll go feed the dogs.”
    The sky’s an odd color: a deep but muted red, the color of diluted grenadine. Someone a few houses over is doing yardwork: the staccato chop-chop-chop of a lawnmower rises above the pines. The training shed is set into the far left corner in the shade of a