31 Days of Short Stories, Day 21. “Rust and Bone,” by Craig Davidson

Posted 21 August, 2008 in Short Stories, 31 Days of Short Stories |

From Rust and Bone

Craig Davidson’s fiction is brutal and bruising; he writes about men living on the edges of society, struggling to find some kind of meaning and redemption, often through violence. His boxing stories — the title story in his debut collection, and his follow-up novel, The Fighter — put one in the mind of Thom Jones or F.X. Toole, with a soupçon of Chuck Palahniuk thrown in for good measure.

“Rust and Bone” is the story of Eddie, a thirty-seven-year-old boxer long past his prime, who continues to fight in underground bare-knuckle bouts as a means of atoning for an act of negligence in his past that almost cost the life of his nephew, Jake. The story is told in prose that is tough and sinewy, and extremely violent: readers with delicate sensibilities beware.

Davidson’s approach is so aggressive, however, that it’s easy to miss just how subtly he has structured his story. “Rust and Bone” opens on an almost clinical note, with a careful and precise description of the bones in a human hand:

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.

Twenty-seven bones in a human hand, fifty-four in total. Before the story is over, Eddie will have shattered forty-five out of fifty-four trying to break through the ice on a lake, beneath which his five-year-old nephew, Jake, has fallen.

“Bust an arm or leg and the knitting bone’s sealed in a wrap of calcium so it’s stronger than before,” Davidson writes. “Bust a bone in your hand and it never heals right.” Bust forty-five bones in your hands, and it would seem like your boxing days are well and truly over. But Eddie, wracked with guilt over allowing his nephew to fall through the ice, continues to seek out matches in an attempt to make reparation; all his earnings are given over to his sister and brother-in-law for his nephew’s care.

To this end, Eddie steps into the ring to fight Nicodemus, a bare-knuckle boxer with a massive frame but few scruples:

Bare-chested, his arms are swelled, monstrous. Tribal tattoos crisscrossed the ribbed musculature of his stomach; ornate curlicues encircle his extruded bellybutton, giving it the look of a sightless eye. He turns to the cutman and says, “Who this, the shoeshine boy? Mus’ be my birthday.”

The prose here sings: “the ribbed musculature of his stomach,” the tattooed bellybutton that has “the look of a sightless eye.” Davidson’s peculiar talent is in taking frankly macho material and dressing it up in a language that approaches musicality in its movement.

Structurally, Davidson has bravely chosen to shuttle his story back and forth in time, interspersing scenes from Eddie’s past into the progress of his fight with Nicodemus. These various sections are not set off with editorial spaces, which is what a less confident writer would do to cue the reader. Instead, Davidson trusts in his rigid control over his material, and the result is a story that bobs and weaves, thrusts and jabs with something resembling the rhythms of a boxing match.

After his first fight in Texas, against a Mexican who had crossed the Rio Grande illegally to take part and to earn his share of the purse money, Eddie comes to his greatest realization about boxing:

Reach a certain experience level, you don’t fight without a reason. You’ve seen too many boxers hurt, killed even, to treat matches as dick-swinging contests. Fighting becomes a job, stepping into the ring punching a clock. It’s a pragmatic pursuit, opponents equations to be solved using the chimerical physics of reach, height, spacing, leverage, heart. You’d no more fight outside the ropes than a factory lineman would work a shift for no pay. I entered my first fight for no other reason than to see if I could, testing what I thought I’d known against the unknown reality. I lost because I was green, yes, but also because nothing was really at stake: my life wouldn’t've been substantially better or worse, win or lose. The Mexican stepped between the ropes with the subdued air of a man entering an office cubicle. When he realized it was going to be an easy day he leaned back in his chair, kicked off his shoes. He didn’t give the crowd what it wanted, didn’t hurt me without cause. His job was to defeat his opponent, and he did. But he wouldn’t be there without reason.

Eddie’s own reason for fighting takes shape out of his experience trying to rescue Jake from dying beneath the ice of a Pennsylvania river. That scene, which is neatly counterpointed with an earlier scene in which Eddie’s father, a border guard, talks about the dangers of the undercurrent to illegals crossing into Texas, provides him with the redemptive rationale to climb into the ring well past the point at which he should have quit. In so doing, it also recalls a comment that Eddie’s trainer makes after the wretched loss to the Mexican: “You fight, you lose. You fight, you win. You fight.” Kind of like life.

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