Matilda’s a machine. James works her through the procedure steadily. Cashew on snout, pause, “Giddyup!”
“Seven!”
“Eight!”
One end of the ninth cashew is broken off, leaving an imperfect edge. Later I’ll wonder why James chose it when the bowl was full of perfectly good ones.
“Giddyup!”
The sound it makes glancing off Matilda’s teeth is the tinny wynk of a shanked golf ball. The sound that comes out of James’s mouth is not a scream so much as a breathless hiss. Starling raises the hatchet above his head. It all happens rather quickly.
Matilda leaps onto James’s back. Uses him as a springboard. The cashew bowl’s upended, nuts spraying in a fan. Matilda’s jaws clamp fast to Starling’s shoulder.
“Yeeeeeeeeeeee!”
This is the sound that exits the broken hole of Starling’s mouth. Matilda’s jaws are nearly hyperextended, upper teeth sunk into the wrinkled flesh of his deltoid. Starling shakes at the mercy of a creature one-third his weight but every ounce of it working muscle. Momentum carries them to the floor. Matilda’s skull impacting hardwood sounds like a bowling ball dropped on a dance floor. She forfeits her grip, flips over, digs her teeth into the fresh punctures. Starling’s eye rolls back in some kind of horrible dream-state. The hatchet flails wildly and its blade hacks into Matilda’s beer-cask side.
James drags the coffee table — his hand’s still trussed up — over to her. His feet crunch on cashews. I help him tear free of the twine. He grips the top and bottom halves of Matilda’s jaw.
“Drop it. Drop.”
Matilda forfeits her grip. James kisses her nose.
We help Starling onto the sofa. Parkhurst is AWOL. Starling’s skin stinks of busted-open batteries as adrenaline dumps out every pore. His shirt’s torn open. Blood bubbles through the puncture wounds and comes off him in strings. Odd knittings of skin bracket his armpit and where his shoulder meets his neck.
I find a first aid kit in the medicine chest. Starling’s nearly stopped bleeding by the time I return. The trauma isn’t nearly so bad as it appeared. The car keys are on the floor. I slip them into my pocket.
“That was unex… pected,” Starling gasps.
“I’ll call you an ambulance.”
“No ambulance.”
“You need a doctor.”
With his good arm Starling digs a cellphone out of his pocket. Speed dials number one.
“Come now.”
He hangs up.
“I have an employee who… handles this sort of… thing.”
Matilda has crawled into the darkest part of the room. When James calls she creeps to him on her belly, grovelling the way dogs do when they believe they’ve behaved poorly. The clipped stub of her tail wags weakly. The hatchet wound is shockingly wide and it shocks me more, somehow, to see Matilda— less flesh and bone than bloodless fibres coalesced into the familiar shape of a dog — hurt this way. The shining off-pink ligaments banding her rib cage whiten as they flex.
James picks her up. “Fuck me. She’s light as a feather.”
I tell him to wait outside. The flap of skin covering Starling’s eye has folded back. Pale and membranous as the inside of an eyelid. The eye underneath has no cornea, iris, or pigment.
“Will you be alright?”
He manages a grisly smile.
“Bugs, Fletcher. A million slipper-footed space bugs. Walls of my guts. Cores of my bones. Churning, Fletcher. Softest churning you can imagine.”
“I have to go.”
“So go. But don’t take… my car. You didn’t… win.”
“Fuck off,” I tell him solemnly. “I’m taking it.”
I fishtail the Caddy down the dirt road. Moths drawn to the phosphorous glow of the headlamps smash on the windscreen. Matilda’s shovel-shaped head pokes from a mummification of towels. Her eyelids are ringed with blood.
“I can’t bury another dog, Fletcher,” James says.
Black Box: Daughter
The emergency crash slides deploy ten thousand feet above sea leveclass="underline" slick yellow tongues sucked into the engines, which explode in twin fireballs. Shrapnel punches through the fuselage. The hiss of decompression as air inside the cabin is drawn outside. Pinhole contrails stain the blue sky.
This one time, when Abigail was a kid. The playground at the school round the corner from Sarah Court. Sunday: parents airing their kids out after church. Abby on the swingset. This churchgoing man set himself in my sightline. Calling in an abrasive baritone to his own child:
“Down the slide! Down the slide!”
I couldn’t see my daughter past this man in his church suit. I wanted to kill him. An animalistic response. You don’t stand between papa bear and his cub.
Karma’s a mongrel. Its blood isn’t pure and it fails to flow in a straight and sensible line. It bites whoever it can and bites randomly. It tallies debts but makes no attempt to match them to the debt-committer. Spend your life totalling black smudges upon your soul thinking in the end they’re yours to bear.
Capillaries burst beneath my fingernails. Looks as if I’ve had them painted candy apple red. My eardrums explode. Instruments shatter at the same instant my jawbone tears free of its hinges. The air’s full of silver flecks: my fillings, added to blobs of mercury from split dials. Pressure works around the hubs of my eyes, in back, rupturing the ocular roots. I go down in blackness.
Total muscular failure. The bread-and-butter technique of powerlifting.
The theory behind total muscular failure is simple: max out your poundage until it is impossible to lift without assistance from your spotter. Easy to spot lifters who embrace the technique. They’re the ones who’ve reached familiarity with the “zonk out”: passing out during your final rep. Acolytes of total muscular failure trust their spotters implicitly.
The first medal Abby earned was silver in the clean-and-jerk at the Pan Am Games. Bronze initially, until the gold medalist’s urinalysis proved she was whacked out of her tree on Anavar.
Around this time Abby had found her first true love. Dannyfreaking-Mulligan.
He blew his MCL on an end-around sweep the final game his senior season. He enrolled in arts college, grew hippy hair, majored in modern sculpture. Particularly galling was the fact he made a point of buying not only a mattress but also underwear, all used, from the Sally Anne.
“He doesn’t care about brands,” Abby told me. “A total esthete.”
“Sounds filthy. His used bed could have mites.”
“They bleach everything before selling it.”
“I can’t believe it.”
“Isn’t he fantastic?”
“No, I mean I can’t believe there’s a place actually selling pre-worn gitch.”
Danny invited her to drive cross-country in a VW bus he’d bought at Junkyard Boyz in Welland. I forbid her. We were in up her room. She tore blue ribbons off the walls. Chucked trophies out the window into Saberhagen’s backyard. During the commotion I’d grabbed her. She pushed back so hard I went down on my ass. If she’d known how to translate that strength into violence she could have beaten the living shit out of me.
“I quit! I’m through lifting.”
Danny and my daughter reached Moose Jaw before the minibus broke down. The trip convinced Abby that Danny’s posturings were more affected than esthetic. He later dropped out of college to join the police force. I didn’t hound her. If she really wanted to quit, well, what could I say? My thinking— hideous, but I’ll say it — went along the lines of Pavlov. My daughter is a rational and complex being. Still. If you’ve imprinted it deep, sooner or later that creature will ring the bell itself.
“I want to work him out of my skin,” was how she put it.