Rust and Bone (12 page)

Off in a corner of my parents' unfinished basement, hooked to a spliced cable connection, I surf for hours. The flatscreen monitor reflects its jaundiced glow on my skin: slack and sallow, quivering rolls of fat girding my abdomen and overhanging the elasticized hem of my boxers. There's a fold-out couch beside the computer desk, spread with an old sleeping bag; come early morning I switch off the computer and crawl into the bag, sleeping off the daylight hours. Jerk off five, six times a day. Friction splits the skin, makes it bleed; wrap yourself in a sock and it's bearable.

My favorite site is
Xtreme Valkyries,
where musclebound women manhandle nebbish men. This one photo always gets me: a huge she-bear, muscled beyond all reason, hefting a skinny naked man above her head. And the guy's smiling, nuts squashed in this big she-bear's fist and he's
loving
it.

Utterly helpless. Emasculated.

THE WORDS UNLIMBITED POTENTIAL
scrawled on a sheet of pink bristol board taped to the door of the Port Dalhousie Lion's Club, an arrow pointing down. Early June; first-birth mayflies buzz and circle the exposed lightbulb above the door. I park my motorcycle in the lot's rough gravel and ensure my prosthetic leg's snugly attached. The dynamic ankle squeaks: I'm supposed to lubricate it with silicone gel biweekly, but don't. Clear skies, Big Dipper tilting over Main Street.

Pause in the doorway. Rising up the short flight of stairs: voices and intemperate laughter, underlaid by the scratchy rhythm of a familiar country-and-western song. Consider leaving, but my shrink suggests I go. She also happens to write my prescription for Effexor and Elavil, two wondrous pharmaceuticals that, following the first dose, I knew I could never again live without.

So. Unlimbited Potential.

The Lion's Club is low-ceilinged with a warped parquet floor. A horseshoe of folding chairs rings a cheap plywood lectern. A folding table supports bowls of chips, a plate of macaroons, a metal coffee urn. All around are the hum of electric wheelchairs and the buzz of servo motors, the squeal of unoiled hinges, the thunk of false legs colliding with tables and chairs. I stare in stark horror at the fingerless, handless, armless, legless creatures shambling about. Those not resigned to wheelchairs have archaic prosthetics strapped to the truncated portions of their anatomy, fake limbs bent at perpetual angles. Others display their stumps with, by turns, a sense of downtrodden stoicism, strident pride, or weary indifference. Some are sunken and mottled around the eyes, the way tropical fruit goes bad and collapses. A great many strike me as hopelessly unsexed: with a few notable exceptions, I cannot distinguish men from women. This revelation fills me with a vague dread.

I sit beside a thickset middle-aged man with a peppery weekend beard. He wears chambray work pants, dark blue, a heavy sweater despite the weather. The sweater, faded greens and whites in a Christmas tree motif, is in the final stage of decomposition: I am reasonably certain that, were I to look closely, its basic molecular structure would present itself to the naked eye. He glances over as I sit down, nods. It's entirely possible that he pities me as much as I do him, perhaps because I've elected to wear a shirt that was once form-flattering but now resembles a shiny black sausage casing stretched over the planetary bulk of my gut. Particularly revolting is the buttery belt of lard projecting between the bottom of my shirt and the hem of my sweatpants.

“First time?” A lemon-yellow prosthesis projects from the guy's right sweater sleeve. Looks like he's wearing a washglove except the fingers are melted at the tips. He's got a cup of coffee clenched between his legs, stirring with his left hand. Whitener floats on the surface in pale lumps, milky scum clinging to the cup's sides.

“First time,” I say. “What's the deal?”

“Ah, a bunch of happy-crappy. Someone's gonna step behind that podium and yak for a bit, we're all gonna pretend to be interested, that person's gonna cry, we're gonna clap, drink our coffee, go home. Christ, most of us are only here on our shrinks' say-so.”

“Same here.”

“Oh, yeah?” The guy perks up. “What're you on?”

“Elavil and Effexor.”

“The good stuff. Lucky dog.”

“You?”

“Fuckin' Prozac. Might as well give me Flintstone vitamins.”

We introduce ourselves. He's Gil, a long-haul trucker from Stoney Creek. Twice-divorced, kids on the East and West Coasts. He tells me that between alimony and child support, he's barely got two pennies to rub together.

“And just the other day some bastard stole my new prosthesis. I'm back to the old one.” He lifts his fake arm, which looks pretty trailworn. “Had a nice new unit—articulate digits, ribbed sili-skin, even little fake hairs. Guess I fell behind on the payments because a repo man crawled through my bedroom window and swiped it off the nightstand. Can you imagine—repo'ing an amputee's
arm?
We're talking ten shades of
low,
man. So,” he nods at my prosthesis, “how'd that happen?”

I suppose it's standard protocol to discuss such matters, the same way AA members swap tales of epic benders. “That was you?” Gil says when I tell him. “I read about it in the papers. They ran that photo. Man, it was …
gruesome
.”

Taken by an opportunistic shutterbug, the photo graced the pages of the
Toronto Star,
the
Standard,
the
Globe and Mail,
a few syndicated dailies. An unfocused middle-distance snapshot, it conveys a sense of great activity—of
frenzy
. I'm laid out on the wet stage, sunlight reflecting off the show pool's surface. Though parts of my body are obscured by the milling trainers, the stump is clearly visible. In the far left-hand corner, Niska's shadow curves beneath the water.

I cut out every copy of the article I could find and taped them to my bedroom wall. While I was out at a doctor's appointment, my mother tore them down.

“Same kind of thing happened to me.” Gil raises his yellow melted hand. “Shark, thirty yards off Indian Rocks Beach in Clearwater, Florida. I'm out past the break where the water's calm, just paddling along. Then something's rubbing up under my legs, thick and rough: felt like I'd been run by a power sander. I caught a brown flash a few feet down and knew I was in
mucho
trouble. Tiger shark, most likely. Vicious fuckers. Stripped flesh from the elbow down;
gloved
me, that being the technical term.”

A young woman sits beside him. Blond and strikingly beautiful, firm well-formed breasts straining against a white linen blouse. Looks about twenty, though she could be younger. The ghost of a harelip scar is visible when she smiles. She appears to have no arms.

“Gil,” she says, “introduce me to your friend?”

“Friend?” says Gil. “Just met him.”

She says, “Heidi Giroux.”

“Ben Jones. Nice to meet you.”

Heidi smiles again, making me think of a girl I'd treated shabbily.
You rotten-ass bastard
were her last words to me. We broke up over the phone, two thousand kilometers between us and the insult didn't register, didn't sting. In fact, I liked the sound of it, the way it tripped off her tongue.
You rotten-ass bastard
.

An utter shipwreck of a human being shambles to the podium. He appears to be composed entirely of diverse plastics and latexes, wood, possibly carpenter's putty. A pincer-like mechanism constitutes his left hand. His right leg is a tapered peg. I'm unsure whether his state is the result of a single catastrophic accident or a series of unrelated minor misadventures. A horrendous farming mishap? A fraternity prank gone horridly awry? The mind reels. He speaks in gulps and gasps, sentence fragments clearing his lips in a metronomic, hypnotic cadence.

“There were times … I thought … why not just … end it? But with the love … and support … of my wife … my kids … the grace … of God … I go on. What else … can anyone … do?”

The man cries. We applaud. Mingle. Disperse.

Afterwards Heidi and I sit on the gate of Gil's Chevy Sierra while he hunts the glovebox for rolling papers. To the south, down a soft slope, night waves lap the shores of Martindale Pond, slapping the hulls of tethered rowing skulls. By the domelight's glow, I see Heidi is not entirely armless: a pair of stubs project from her smoothly sloped shoulders. She smells of vanilla perfume, a brand favored by high-school girls.

Gil materializes bearing a joint of herculean proportions. He sparks the tip and sets it in the crook of Heidi's mouth. She takes a decidedly unladylike toke, expelling bluish smoke through her nose.

“Himalayan Gold,” Gil says. “Buy it from a guy in Texarkana and smuggle it over the border in a box of clementines. Drug dogs can't sniff it.”

Gil plucks the joint from Heidi's mouth, takes a hit, passes it. Potent stuff: a shiny metallic bubble expands inside my skull, dense and bright with colors. Cars pass on Main Street, the growl of motors swelling, receding. From Old Port Dalhousie comes the intermittent screech of teenagers scarring the tarmac in juiced-up musclecars. A mosquito hums against Heidi's neck. I slap it. “One here, too,” she says, eyes falling to her chest, where another mosquito rests on the comfortable swell of her breast. What the hell—slap that fucker, too.

“Do you ever think about it?” Gil's weaving side to side. “Karma?”

“Gil,” Heidi says, “please.”

“No, I'm serious. Not saying I deserved this, exactly—who
deserves
to get their arm tore off, right? Then again, maybe I did. Sit and think on it awhile and you realize, yeah, of course you deserve it—
conceivably
. Some unkindness or cruelty or selfishness, doing the wrong thing when the right thing was too hard or didn't suit your purposes, hurting someone just for the rip of it, 'cause it made you feel like a big man. Great Wheel of Karma, man. All comes around.”

“I call it bullshit, Gil. Pure bullshit.”

Gil shrugs, unfazed at my skepticism. “When something awful happens to you, can you chalk it up to bad luck, crossed stars, wrong place, wrong time? Not me. As a human being, you've got to believe there's a
reason
. Catted around on my wives, wasn't always there for my kids. A tiger shark took my arm thirty yards off the white sand beaches of Indian Rocks. A bit harsh, sure, but all things seek balance. Tit for tat. Did I deserve it? Could be I did.”

“You can't possibly believe that.”

“Why not? Comforting, in a way. Square your debt and start again, fresh.”

“It's ridiculous. What about all the people who suffer horribly for no reason? What about …” Cock a thumb at Heidi. “… her?”

“You don't know what I deserve,” she says. “You don't know me at all.”

“Okay, okay, then what about … starving children? What about kids born with warped spines, or … or
retards
. Explain them.”

“Not claiming it's an easy theory to defend. Just my belief.”

“Yeah, well, it's the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard.”

Gil raises his artificial hand to his lips. The roach glows between those yellow fingertips, blistering the plastic. “A few years ago, this elephant, Tyke, was killed by the Toronto police. A performing elephant, right, with a traveling circus? Got loose after a show. Cops boxed it in with their patrol cars and opened fire. It hadn't hurt anyone, but I guess it could've. Took two hundred rounds to put the thing down. They shot it in the trunk and belly, its ears and face, trying to put a slug in its brain but its skull was so thick the bullets were driven flat. I remember blood on that gray skin—so
much
blood. It went down on its front knees, head bowed like it was surrendering. The cops reloaded and kept shooting.”

“So what?” An intense rage gathers, only slightly offset by the mellowing effect of the dope. “What the
fuck
does that have to do with anything?”

“So who's to blame?” Gil says. “The cops? They were doing their job. Tyke? Scared, mistreated animal. What I'm saying is, when I saw the photo of you in the paper I thought of that elephant shot to death on the street. Karma, man. Universal and everlasting.”

“What are you
talking
about? I had nothing to do with that. You don't know the first thing about
me
.”

“Don't know nothing about nothing, man. Speculation, is all. I gotta go.”

He climbs into the truck, keys the engine. The final bars of Warren Zevon's “Werewolves of London” rattle from the truck's stereo. Rolling down the window, he waves goodbye with his fake hand, pulling away.

“Go …
fuck!
”

Taillights brightening, the truck slows. I ball my hands into fists, loosening them only when Gil gooses the gas pedal and turns onto the street.

“What an
ass
hole.”

“He gets that way when he's high,” says Heidi.

“Are you two close?”

“We smoke up after the meetings. I guess we're friends.”

“Whatever. I'm leaving.”

“Give me a lift?”

“I drove my bike, and I'm pretty high. Might kill us both.”

“Who cares?”

“The depth of your nihilism shocks me.”

HEIDI LIVES
outside Welland, a township near the Merritville Speedway. When I was a kid my father took me to the Speedway to watch Baja buggies tear around a dirt oval, nitrous oxide funnycars, demolition derbies. I remember the cool autumn air thickened with stirred dust, Dad buying beer for himself, Orange Crush for me. I drive slow down back roads, taking it easy on the curves. Heidi leans against the backrest, powerful legs wrapped around my waist. Midges and moths splatter the helmet's faceshield. The soft heat of Heidi's body, her breath on the hairs of my neck.

The house sits at the base of a wooded valley. Pickup trucks in the blacktopped drive. Smells: woodsmoke and pinesap. Sly noises in the fringing trees: raccoons, maybe spring turkeys.