Rust and Bone: Stories

A MEAN UTILITY

MIDWAY THROUGH THE PITCH I pass a note to Mitch Edmonds, big kahuna of graphic design: This is going good? He grimaces and scribbles back: If by “good” you mean heart-stoppingly BAD, then yes, everything’s PEACHY. Diarrhetic adjective use aside, I suspect Edmonds is correct. In fact, the pitch is veering towards a crash of Hindenburglike proportions: feel the heat of compressed hydrogen flames and charred tatters of zeppelin silk buffeting my face, hear Herbert Morrison’s breathless voice screaming “Oh the humanity!” into a giant wind-socked microphone.

Supp-Easy-Quit is a stop-smoking aid in suppository form. The science is sound: the rectal arterial clusters, feeding directly into the larger sacral and iliac branches, are ideal nicotine-delivery channels. Yet the stone-cold fact persists: most smokers—most human beings— exhibit a distinct disinclination to propel foreign objects up their bungs. They’d rather chew Nicorette until their mouths seize with lockjaw, festoon their bodies with the Patch, Christ, insert flaming nicotine wedges under their fingernails. This hardwired predisposition renders the product a tough sell.

Don Fawkes, lead hand on the Supp-Easy-Quit account, aims a laser-pointer at a storyboard montage. “Okay,” he says, “so here’s this smoker who’s trying to quit. He’s in a smoky tavern—upscale, jazzy, bit of a speakeasy feel—tipping a few bevies, itching to fire off a lung rocket.” Don believes his timely employment of hipster lingo is key to the middling success he enjoys. “So our man slips into the men’s room and enters a stall, jazz music swells, he exits all smiles. Fade to black on the product logo.”

The Supp-Easy-Quit reps—a power-suited Eva Braun flanked by a pair of lab-coated scientist pastiches—sit with arms crossed. The trio strike me as just-the-facts-ma’am types: their ideal commercial no doubt involves clinical footage of suppositories inserted into rectums, endoscopic cameras filming the dispersal of nicotine molecules into the bloodstream.

“Tell me: do you like it?” Don Fawkes, Ignoramus extremus, asks. “Do you love it?”

Fawkes’s towering colossus of ineptitude fails to elicit any surprise or sympathy from me for two reasons: (1) last month Don singlehandedly scuttled the Juicy Jubes kosher jujubes account, enraging a group of Hasidic entrepreneurs with the utterance of his ill-conceived tagline: Juicy Jubes are Jui-y JUI-licious!; and (2) a large chunk of meat is missing from my left calf, a chunk roughly correspondent to the bite radius of a Rottweiler named Biscuits. The wound is cleaned and dressed but the calf is a fussy area, a locus of veins and connective tissues—blood seeps through the bandages, pooling in the heel of my Bruno Magli loafer.

I was mauled two nights ago, at a scratch-and-turn dogfight held in a foreclosed poultry processing plant outside Cobourg. Dottie, a three-year-old pit bull and my wife Alison’s darling bitch, was matched uphill against a hard-biting presa canario named Chinaman. Dottie was a ten fight champ with heavily muscled stifles and a bite to shatter cinderblocks; Chinaman was cherry but his lineage legendary with chest and flews capable of deflecting bullets. Betting skewed in Dottie’s favor on account of her experience and ring generalship.

After Alison gave Chinaman a thorough inspection—the breeder a jug-eared hillbilly known to soak his fighters’ fur in poison—the dogs were led into a chicken-wire pen. White worms of chicken shit dotted the floor, some with downy feathers stuck to them. The concrete was puddled with blood from the previous fight.

Dottie started out fast, butting her muzzle into Chinaman’s chest and tearing a gaping hole above his right shoulder. Chinaman looked ready to buckle—it’s the first critical injury that separates gamers from curs—but when Dottie went for his front leg he snapped at her skull, canines opening deep furrows across the bridge of her snout. Blood flowed down Dottie’s chest and sprayed in her eyes. Alison gave a little moan. Chinaman’s handler hollered, “Get at it, boy! Sic! Sic! ”

The presa rushed hard and tried to pin Dottie against the pen. Dottie back-pedaled a few paces before fastening her mouth around Chinaman’s advancing foreleg and ripping free a network of muscle and tissue. Chinaman kept pressing, chewing on Dottie’s head; it sounded as if his teeth were raking bone. The crowd pressed around the pen, slapping the chicken-wire, stomping their feet. The smell was close and hot, sweetly animal.

The bell rang. Men with blunt baling hooks reached over the wire, digging into the dense muscling of the dog’s chests, prying them apart. In the corner, I held Dottie while Alison went to work. After rubbing powdered Lidocaine into the dog’s gumline to kill the pain, she chemically cauterized the facial wounds with ferric acid. Then she saturated a Q-tip with adrenaline chloride and swabbed the rims of Dottie’s nostrils and ear holes, her anus. The dog’s eyes, previously glazed, attained a clear focus.

The bell rang. Both dogs scratched the chalk line.

Dottie lived up to her reputation as a wrecker in the second. She butted hard into Chinaman’s stifles, attacking that shoulder wound. Chinaman gave as good as he got, slashing at Dottie’s dewlap, shredding it. At the eight-minute mark: a fibrous snap as Chinaman’s shoulder broke. The presa was down to three legs. Dottie pressed her advantage, forcing Chinaman back, attacking the throat, a blur of snapping teeth, questing jaws, and bloody ropes of saliva as each dog angled for the killing clinch.

Chinaman managed to close his mouth around Dottie’s muzzle, gripping her entire upper palate. The brittle splintering sound was unlike anything I’d ever heard. Dottie’s spine stiffened and her claws tore at Chinaman’s belly.

The bell rang. An acne-scarred teenager mopped up blood and redrew the chalk line.

Dottie’s face was in ruins: bloody and cleaved open, shards of bone free-floating beneath the skin. Half her nose was torn off and her dewlap hung like tattered curtains. Alison debrided the worst wounds with hydrogen peroxide and Betadine before slicking them with mixed adrenaline and Vaseline.

“Pick your dogs up!” a man hollered. “That’s enough. Enough!” The crowd jeered him.

“Maybe I should,” Alison said. “Pick her up.”

I’d’ve rather cut my foot off and eaten it! “Look at that one,” I said with a nod at the presa, who was burrowing his head in the breeder’s chest like it wanted to climb inside and die. “Bet you a steak dinner it doesn’t toe the scratch.”

Chinaman’s breeder grabbed the dog by its neck and whipsawed it back and forth, growling, “Don’t flake on me, you goddamn cur. Don’t you fucking flake.”

Before the bell Alison injected 10 cc’s Epinephrine into Dottie’s haunch. I felt the dog’s fluttering heart rate normalize. Chinaman staggered from his corner, front right leg limp as a cooked noodle. The presa’s muzzle was frosted white with Lidocaine.

Round three ended it. Dottie feinted at Chinaman’s bum leg off the scratch and, in one deft move, rammed her skull into his good one. Forced to support his entire forward weight, Chinaman’s left foreleg snapped. The presa toppled face-first, front legs splayed to either side, hinds scrabbling feebly. Dottie started clawing at Chinaman’s eyes. Before long the baling hooks pulled her off.

After squaring all bets I was lugging Dottie through the parking lot—blood saturating her doggie blanket, dripping through the kennel crate’s metal honeycombs—when this raspy barking kicked up from behind. I wheeled to see a huge Rottweiler bullrushing my blind side. It wore an inch-thick studded leather collar against which the striated muscle of its throat and neck pulsed. Links of twenty-gauge chain spat gravel between its legs.

I dropped Dottie and fired an off-balance kick. The rottie passed under my leg, clamping down on my calf.

Events unfolded at the narcotic pace of a fugue. My right knee buckled and I went down, blacktopped gravel dimpling the ass of my cotton Dockers. My skull caromed off the ground and everything whited out for a moment. Then I was struggling up, fists beating a frenzied tattoo on the dog’s head as its square dark muzzle worried into the wound. Dottie pressed her busted face to the kennel’s grate, growling low in her throat, bloody bubbles forced between her black eyes and orbital bone. The Rottweiler wrenched its head sideways, teeth sunk deep into the sinews of my calf, gator-rolling me across that chill November tarmac.

Five sausage-link digits grasped the underside of the rottie’s jaw, thumb and index finger pressed to the axis where upper and lower palate met, forcing the mouth open. The woman restraining the animal was an eclipse of flesh clad in what appeared to be a pleated topsail, calves thick as an adolescent pachyderm’s networked with bluish spider veins. A slimly ironic menthol cigarette hung off her bottom lip, defying all known laws of gravity.

“Bad Biscuits,” she chastised the dog in a breathy baby-voice. “The manners on you. Why you want to go biting the nice man?”

Alison arrived in a blur of shawls and indignation. I noticed she poked her fingers through Dottie’s crate before arriving at my side. Bright arterial blood pumped from my calf.

“Stop squirming,” she told me, breaking out the peroxide and catgut to attend to the wound.

The woman waddled to her idling Cutlass Supreme. She opened the driver’s door—sunblistered dashboard lined with neon-haired Treasure Trolls; bingo dabbers spilling from a sprung glovebox— swatting the dog inside. A shrewish, stoop-shouldered man sat in the passenger’s seat, wearing camouflage fatigue pants and the kind of sleeveless white T-shirt favored by aged Italian gardeners.

“You can’t,” I said, reaching out to her. “Can’t just … your dog bit me! ”

She tucked her chin to her chest, setting in motion a rippling domino-effect of subsidiary chins. “Biscuits got a touch of the ringworm, misser. Gives him the cranks.” Her look suggested I wasn’t much of a dogman if I didn’t know that. “Every one my babies is papered and rabies free. Don’t need shots, promise.”

“That dog should be destroyed!”

“I’m’n a pretend I didn’t hear that, misser.”

She jerked the door shut and fishtailed down the row of diagonally parked cars. Biscuits hurled his body at the Cutlass’s rear window, barking wrathfully, white froth slathering the glass.

“Did that woman just …?”

“Yes,” Alison palmed me a vitamin K tablet to promote blood clotting. “Let’s go.”

“But you can’t—”

“What do we tell the cops?” she said. “We were at this illegal dogfight and …”

“But we live in a polite society!” I was raving by now. “We operate under civilized rules!”

“Hush.”

“I should bite her—bite that gargantuan … ASS! ”

“Hush.”

Halfway home Alison pulled off the highway. Dottie was emitting low wheezing sounds from the back seat, thrashing on the blood-thick blanket and tearing her stitches open.

We wrangled the kennel crate onto the rough shale of the breakdown lane. In the dead white of an arc-sodium streetlight I broke the kennel down, there being no other way to get her out. Alison held the dog’s square head in her hands, massaging the neck and stomach, anywhere not gored. The medicinal smell of Epinephrine seeped out of Dottie’s many cuts.

“Oh, Jesus. I can’t bury another dog, Jay.”

Alison touched Dottie’s head, tracing her fingertips along the muzzle, kneading the expanse of slick fur between the ears. The dog looked up with sad, grateful eyes. Crickets chirped in long reeds bordering the ditch.

Near the end Alison injected Lidocaine into Dottie’s temple, between the ring and index fingers on my left hand, which were cupped over the dog’s tight-lidded eyes. Cars moved past on the highway, bathing our bodies in headlight glow. Dottie vomited blood. Her eyelids fluttered against my palm.

“I should’ve picked her up.”

The dog started shaking then, the convulsions wracking her bones, radiating outwards.

“She wouldn’t allow it,” I said. “Dottie was a deep game dog.”

“Are you loving it?” Don Fawkes repeats for the umpteenth time. “Tell me you love it.”

But the Supp-Easy-Quit reps are clearly not loving it, a fact Helen Keller could’ve gleaned, but of which Fawkes remains blissfully unaware. Eva Braun jots in a faux-calfskin dossier with aggressive, slashing cursive while her lab-coated bookends eye Fawkes as they might a particularly offensive strain of bacterium smeared across a specimen slide.

Mitch Edmonds passes me a doodle: some guy with a gourd-shaped head in which a candle burns jack-o-lantern style, one eye twice outsizing the other, pumpkintoothed and drooling, squiggly stink-lines and bowtie flies and a speech bubble reading: You love it! You really, really love it!

DR. CLIVE KETCHUM’S FERTILITY CLINIC is located in a neocolonial-style office building at the corner of Steeles and Yonge. I mount the steps leading up to a narrow hallway with hesitancy. Took a Xanax at lunch, another on the cab ride over—feeling no pain.

Ketchum’s waiting area resembles a film noir movie set: a large, dim, oak-paneled room with high ceiling, frosted-glass valances, a white sand ashtray under a no smoking sign. The receptionist is young, petite, and blond, with prominent tits and an air of having woken this morning knowing in advance every move she’d make for the remainder of the day.

“I have the five o’clock.”

She consults the appointment book. “Mr. James Paris?”

I tip her a wink, resisting—barely—the urge to flex.

She leads me down a well-lit corridor into a spare antiseptic room. She gestures to an examination table and orders me to strip to my skivs before excusing herself.

I hoist myself onto the examination table. Butcher paper crinkles under my thighs. A large medical illustration adorns the opposite wall: Scrotum and Contents. It’s all there: the superficial and external spermatic fascias, the tunica vaginalis, the epididymis and the testes, which, in this artist’s rendition, resemble capillary-threaded quail’s eggs. Disembodied tweezer-tips pinch and peel back to reveal strata of flesh and membrane and nerve.

Dr. Ketchum enters. The man’s dimensions are those of a bowling pin, the majority of weight distributed to the hindquarters, and yet his body remains somehow insubstantial, as if stuffed with wadded newspapers.

He flips open a dossier, nodding, then shaking his head. “You’ve been doing the exercises?” He performs a series of spread-legged knee bends, arms veed in front of him like a high diver. Ketchum contends this maneuver—the “gonad agitator”—will promote sperm production and, in tandem with other, uniformly unpleasant exercises—the “urethral tube widener,” the “scrotal exciter”—will have me shooting live rounds in no time.

“I’ve been doing them.”

“It’s strange.”

“What?”

“Strange your sperm count hasn’t increased since the start of your exercise regimen.” He gives me a look. “It is my experience that men tend to baby their testes, usually as a result of early childhood trauma. But believe me when I say they’re terrifically hardy organs. My advice is to really push yourself. Make those testicles work for you. Give them hell, as it were.”

“I’ve been giving them … hell.”

“Is that so?”

“It’s been … a regular boot camp.”

Dr. Ketchum chuckles perfunctorily. “Alright. The problem remains, James. Your scrotal sac is simply too hot. A blast furnace in there.”

This is not new information. Five years ago, when our fledgling, lighthearted attempts at conception ended in failure, we blamed our lack of success on job stress, our recent relocation, a sheer lack of dedication to the task at hand. But as the streak lengthened, the finger of blame began to point wildly: the moon’s cycles/Alison’s low-protein diet/my pack-a-day habit/malevolent otherworldly forces. Alison visited a fertility clinic and, through a non-invasive, airy-fairy, casting-of-bones procedure I never truly understood, her womb was given a clean bill of health. Confusion and guilt propelled me to Dr. Ketchum’s office, where a violently invasive, teeth-clenchingly painful process disclosed that my scrotum’s core temperature equaled that of a steam cooker’s. The few vulcanized sperm able to withstand the heat were reduced to heaving their exhausted flagellate forms against my wife’s egg in the manner of bedraggled boat-people flinging themselves upon the impregnable walls of an asylum-denying nation.

Ketchum prescribed pills and herbal remedies, ordered the daubing of foul-smelling ointments and the quaffing of putrid teas. He suggested immersion in cold baths or icepack application to the affected region before intercourse. None of these measures proving effective, Ketchum advocated a strenuous exercise routine and … other tactics.

“Have you encouraged your wife to stimulate you anally? Gentle manipulation of the sphincter encourages more vigorous orgasms and promotes semen—”

“No, we … no.”

Ketchum emits a robust, let’s-not-be-prudish laugh. “Then by all means try. It’s a natural, healthy sexual activity. Nothing peculiar or unmanly about it.”

A fleeting image: Ketchum’s naked, pinata-hollow body squirming delightedly under the anal ministrations of a faceless, tentacle-fingered woman.

“It’s not that desperate.”

“But your wife must be getting impatient.”

“Alison’s fine,” I lie.

Sex has become a grim struggle punctuated by bizarre and superstitious rituals. While I lounge in bed with a bag of frozen peas thawing in my boxers, Alison discreetly checks her internal temperature against the magical twenty-seven degrees Centigrade ideal for conception. She has dressed as a French maid, a succubus, a cheerleader—Ra-ra, hey-hey, fertilize that egg to-day!—a schoolgirl, a milkmaid; the local costume shop conducts a brisk trade on my singular shortcoming. No sooner have I made my contribution than she’s shoved me away, elevating her hips and bicycle-kicking her legs, body contorted into grotesque runic formations to aid my seed in “taking.” Worst is the look on Alison’s face as I come: a look of disquieting, anxious futility. Not this time, tiger. You didn’t bring the thunder.

“Alison’s just fine,” I repeat. “We have other interests.”

“Wonderful. It’s important for couples with such issues to pursue outside goals.” He flips the dossier shut. “Keep those exercises up—” a few more demonstrative deep-knee bends “—and don’t forget the urethra-widening—” his eyes trail down to my calf “—good lord, James, what happened to your leg?”

ALISON’S FATHER OWNS a dairy farm on the outskirts of St. Catharines. When he spies a sick cow, he spraypaints an orange circle around the rear left leg. At night, when all the other chores are finished, he leads it to a brook running behind the house and shoots it in the skull. Once, when Alison and I were visiting at Christmas, he asked her to take care of a sick calf; it was cold and her father’s arthritis was acting up. Alison asked did he keep his gun in the same spot.

Bundled in parkas and toques, we went out to the barn. Can’t say why I tagged along, exactly, except perhaps morbid curiosity, or out of the misplaced notion she needed the moral support. The barn was dark and earthy, claustrophobic with the stink of livestock. Cattle snorted and heaved, expelling plumes of oyster-gray steam from their nostrils. We waded between their milling flanks, guided by bars of dusky sunlight pouring through the slats. A sponge-like tumor the rough size of a softball was tethered to the calf’s jaw by a strip of skin. Alison shooed the youngster from its hiding spot beneath its mother’s belly. The cow let it go without a fight, as if knowing it was sick, what needed to be done.

She led it down to the water, guiding it gently with a switch snapped off an elm tree. The calf’s eyes wide and dark and dumb. The 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.

“No, 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.

“No, 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.

“Who?”

“Nobody. Nothing. How was work?”

“Fawkes deep-sixed the Supp-Easy-Quit account.”

“It’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.

“And your day?”

“Oh, 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 leafless maple. The maple is four feet wide at its base, thick lower limbs jutting almost parallel to the ground. I’ve often imagined nailing split two-by-twos into the trunk, a stepladder up to the boughs capable of supporting weight. I’d lay down planks and erect sturdy retaining walls, a corrugated-tin roof for rainy days, a rope-and-bucket dumbwaiter, maybe even a walkie-talkie link allowing for communication during those first nights of independence.

The shed is of solid prewar construction, dirt floor spread with Bardahl to keep the dust down. I take down a pair of ballistic-nylon gloves from a nail pounded into the doorframe and scoop Iam’s Science Diet into steel tureens.

The chicken-wire pens house three fighters but now Dottie’s gone we’re down to a pair. Rodney is a four-year-old male, forty-seven pounds of bone and sinew and teeth, winner of five consecutive, most recently the first-round butchery of Grand Chief Negrino, a vastly overrated Neapolitan mastiff bitch. I set the tureen in front of him and, while he eats, first gently but with increasing force, punch the crown of his skull until he snaps viciously at my gloved hand.

“Good boy.”

Matilda is the most aggressive fighter I’ve ever raised. Her nose is pressed to the chicken-wire, snuffling. She has a short, clean brindle coat with a pattern of gray stripes over a base coat of jet black. I stroke her sleek head and boxy muzzle, running a fingertip across the crescentmoon scars left after her ears were amputated. She licks the glove with her large pink tongue.

I slap her as hard as I can.

The blow doesn’t budge her and then teeth flash, dense muscling of chest and flews flexes, jaws seize the glove in a bone-splintering grip and shake so violently it seems my shoulder will be jerked from socket.

“Mat—aark! Aaaagh! ”

I manage to drop the tureen inside her pen. Matilda immediately releases me and pads over to the kibble. I am struck, as I so often am, by the unstudied perfection of these animals.

Pit bulls are utterly fearless. It is a reckless, lunatic sort of fearlessness, a fearlessness suggesting the breed lacks any true conception of that emotion. Beauty exists in that fearlessness, and so the breed itself is beautiful. It is beautiful to watch your pit toe the scratch against a dog twice its size and note, in its posture and its eyes, the flat and unflinching assurance of victory. It is beautiful to hold a pit’s wine-cask body between rounds, to take in its hideous wounds—ears bitten off and eyes crushed from orbit, compound-fractured legs, flesh stripped to the bone—and see nothing but a cold resiliency, an eagerness. These dogs truly believe they are invincible. They believe they will never die. It is beautiful to watch two pits at the end of a hard roll, lying in the pen’s center or pressed up against the wire, slick with blood, blind and exhausted, licking one another with a shocking tenderness. The simple fact of their existence is its own beauty: there are creatures on this Earth upon whom the human frailties of pain, weakness, self-doubt exert no bearing.

Alison and I talk about our mutual fascination. Lately, it’s about the only topic that doesn’t lead to an argument. Sometimes she’ll ask the question: Should we be doing this? I look at it like boxing: you train your fighter to the best of your ability, bring him along slowly, don’t put him in against a murderer. “Besides,” I tell her, “these dogs want to fight. They can’t vocalize it, sure, but you can see, I can see. It’s what they do.” She’ll nod slightly, say, “The way herding is what a sheepdog does, huh?” in a small voice that doesn’t quite seem to believe. “Ex-actly, dear.”

I walk back to the kitchen. The combined pain of my leg (Biscuits) and shoulder (Matilda) compounded by the ambient soreness resulting from ten minutes of urethral widening exercises has killed the Xanax buzz. I pull two T-bone steaks from the deep-freeze and set them on the counter to thaw. Then I retrieve bottles of rum and Crème de Banane from the cupboard, eyeball shots into a pair of wide-mouthed highball glasses, top them off with heavy cream.

Alison’s in the nursery. Walls painted bright yellow, hardwood floor spread with sections of the Globe and Mail. Two mobiles: tinfoil baseball players shagging fly balls; tinfoil ballerinas pirouetting endlessly. A molded plastic chair with a dog-eared copy of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War resting upon it, from which I often quote passages to the dogs: In peace prepare for war, in war prepare for peace …

My wife on the floor, surrounded by pups. They paw her in clumsy, exploratory fashion, climbing over her hips and breasts, capturing her shirt collar between their teeth and shaking their oversize puppy heads. I sit on pissy newspapers and offer her a glass.

“How was your appointment?” she says.

“Some different exercises.”

Alison sets her glass down. A puppy commences licking the beaded condensation. “I was talking to someone at work,” she says, “about artificial insemination. Interesting option—leaf through a donor book, choose a suitable candidate.”

I imagine a houseful of miniature John Travoltas, or, worse yet, Don Fawkeses, running up and down the halls, sticky-fingered and greasyhaired, telling silly-awful jokes and asking if I love them. “I don’t think we need to explore that option.”

“I’m thirty-three, Jay,” she persists. “Conception after thirty-five is basically a no-go.”

A pup noses the toe of my loafer. I give it a boot, sending it skittering across the floor. “I’m thinking about scheduling a roll for Matilda.”

“A roll? Now?”

I set my empty glass down and pick Alison’s up.

“Mattie’s barely a yearling,” she says. “You haven’t worked her properly …”

“She’s the strongest dog I’ve ever seen. She’ll crucify anybody.”

“There’s not an even-weight dog on the circuit she could be rolled against.”

“I’d be matching her uphill.”

“By how many pounds? Against who?”

I raise her glass to my lips. Our eyes meet over the rim.

“No way,” she says with dawning awareness. “The Rottweiler that bit you is double her weight.”

“Matilda will eat that mutt up. Devour him.”

Alison cradles a puppy in her arms, kneading its baggy skin between her fingers.

“Stop coddling,” I tell her. “Make a cur out of it.”

The puppy takes her finger in its mouth, gnawing, slobbering. “Matilda’s not ready.”

“She’ll … whup him.”

“Roll with Rodney, at least.”

“Matilda’s ready.”

She stands and walks to the window. With the night pressed against the window glass, the darkness reflects her face set in rigid lines. Alison doesn’t have the sort of features that become more attractive with anger, the high Latin cheekbones or bee-stung lips that, when flushed, evoke a certain male stirring. She is much prettier when calm and accommodating.

“Matilda didn’t bite you. It’s not her fault.”

“That’s not what this is about!” I sway unsteadily to my feet, chest puffed with righteous indignation. The glass slips from my grasp and shatters on the floorboards. Puppies rush at the yellow mess. I kick at them, “Watch the broken glass, you little shits!”

Alison gathers double handfuls of newspaper and sops the spill. She’s ditched the OR scrubs for a paint-flecked crop-topped shirt and a pair of cutoffs—her “bumming around gear,” which she knows I find sexy in a slovenly, hausfrau-ish way. Her hair is combed out in feathered waves that I’d like to plunge my hands and face into. Her face seems suddenly pretty again, the face of the woman I married.

“Honey. Listen.” I lick my lips and try to straighten my tie before realizing I’m no longer wearing one. “You know what? Hey, what— hey, what the hell was I thinking?” I’m in the boardroom, wheeling and dealing, soothing bruised egos, smoothing things over. “Matilda’s not ready. You’re absolutely right.” Sell it, baby. Sell it! “We’ll wait, okay? We’ll just wait.”

Her features soften into something approaching belief. “I think it’s for the best …”

“Sure. Sure, I think so.” I kneel beside her, picking up shards of glass. This triggers the discomforting memory of a fight we had months ago, a fight over … what? Finances, booze, assumed infidelities. The usual suspects. As the fight crested towards its predictable apex, I’d stormed into the den, plucked a blown-glass globe from the mantel—a gift from that honeydripping bastard Dr. Scalise, bartered from a legless peddler in Malta—and hurled it into the fireplace, where it exploded with a brittle tinkling sound.

“It’s a good decision,” she says.

“Sure.”

“You think?”

“Sure I think.”

SOMETIME THAT NIGHT, after a bout of energetic but futile congress, I have a dream. In this dream, I stand stark naked in the middle of a cavernous auditorium. The tiered stands are packed. Not with people—birds. Bluebills and meadowlarks, flamingoes and penguins, turkey vultures, toucans, sandpipers, pelicans, even a dodo. The sounds they make are disquieting: feathers rustling, talons scrabbling, beaks digging ticks from molting plumage. The aviary smell of them—dust and millet and caked shit—clogs my nostrils. I clear my throat, unsure of how to address this throng, yet convinced it is expected of me. Beady dark eyes, thousands of them, stare down.

“I’m sure you’re wondering why I’ve called this meeting …”

Then my penis falls off. Not just my cock: balls, ball sack, pubes. The whole apparatus. My tackle doesn’t drop so much as float to the ground in a series of oscillating parabolas, light as tissue paper, settling gently on the concrete. Touch my plucked groin with a trembling hand. The skin is pebbled, like the rind of an orange.

Every bird in the auditorium takes flight; the sound of their wings fills my ears like a stiff, storm-bearing wind. They swoop down, the flurry of their beating wings messing my meticulously styled hairdo. White gobs of guano pelt my face and chest. An army of birds descend upon my penis. I squawk, a birdlike sound, pushing through the feathery mob to recover it. A thousand beaks pecking, two thousand clawed feet raking, air thick with feathers. “That’s mine!” I scream. A yellow goose with Xanax eyes hisses and bites at my fingers. A hummingbird with Tippi Hedren’s face flies up my nose, flitting about behind my eyes. “No!” I scream pitifully. “I need that!”

The birds take flight en masse, flying up through a hole in the auditorium ceiling, vanishing into the vast pewter sky. Apart from the downy drifts of tail feathers, the floor is bare.

A BLACK SMUDGE marks the cement approaching the processing plant’s loading bay doors. Years ago, after his Doberman bitch dropped a brutal roll to a wrecking-ball presa canario, some owner doused his dog with kerosene and set it on fire. The Doberman, leg-broke and missing skin from its face and haunches, ran in herky-jerk circles, biting at the flames climbing down her throat and igniting her lungs. She lay down, then lay still as a stone and burned to blackness on the concrete.

I step over the smudge and into the warehouse. Matilda’s crate hangs at the end of my left arm, the dog dozing inside. Alison trails behind, lugging a diaper bag packed with narcotics, needles, catgut, gauze. She’s here solely for Mattie’s sake.

The morning after my bird dream, I told Alison in no uncertain terms that Matilda would be fighting Biscuits as soon as it could be arranged. She stared at me, toothbrush jutting from her mouth, lips frothy with paste. She shook her head, “I should have known.” I said, “Hey, Mattie will kill that rottie!” and pinched the pudge girding her waistline. She slapped my hand away with a closed fist, called me a name. Bastard? Fucker? Her mouth was full of toothpaste.

Unaware of her opponent’s trainer, the fat hillbilly—Lola Snape, the matchmaker told me—agreed to match Biscuits against Matilda. I wade through a crowd of dogmen, gawkers, and fight bums to the weigh-in. One guy wears a Russian fur hat and an electric-blue seersucker suit with hand-sewn bolts of red-and-purple lightning down each sleeve. He heels, on a shoestring leash, a peanut-sized pomeranian with a streak of red-dyed fur running skull to tail-tip.

Lola and her husband wait at the scale. She appraises me for a good twenty seconds before a flicker of recognition crosses her cow eyes.

“How’s that leg, misser?” She pronounces leg as laig.

The weighmaster sets Matilda’s crate on the scale. After subtracting fifteen pounds for the kennel, Matilda’s official weight is fifty-three pounds.

I clip a lead onto Matilda’s collar and draw her from the crate. Her body is a canine anatomy chart, every tendon group and connective ligature clearly visible beneath a thin sheath of skin. Her legs are roped with thickly dilated veins. She squats on her haunches and scratches behind her left ear, gaze never leaving the hulking rottie.

Biscuits tips the scale at a buttery ninety-three pounds. I am heartened to see his pendulous gut and bony forelegs, deficiencies I failed to note on our first encounter. His back and flanks are deeply scarred where he’s been bitten, or more likely beaten. He growls at Matilda, upper lip rippling to expose canines the size and color of large cashews.

Their weights are chalked on a tote board, next to their records— Biscuits a surprising 11-1. The line is established at 3-1 against Matilda on account of her weight, greenhorn status, and murky lineage. The line excites a good deal of betting.

As we lead our dogs to the pen, Lola leans over and says, “Fat chance your little yapper’s gonna beat my Biscuits.” Days later, lying bandaged and in a hospital bed, a late-blossoming riposte of Churchillian wit will come to me—You, madam, are the fattest chance I’ve ever laid eyes on—but at the moment I simply entreat her to fuck off. She looks to her haystack-haired hubby in hopes he’ll defend her honor, but the weevil-legged woodhick is engrossed by his gumboots.

“It’ll be alright,” I tell Alison, assuming she’s noticed Biscuits’s shortcomings.

“Whatever.”

“Matilda will demolish him.”

“Whatever.”

We usher our dogs into the pen. I’ve got hold of Matilda’s scruff over the chicken-wire; her body thrums like a high-tension powerline. A dwarfish man with phony hair rings the bell for round one.

The rottie comes out strong, thinking Matilda will be easy to stop in the first round, only Matilda isn’t there. She feints left on Biscuits’s lead-off charge, ducks under his advancing left foreleg, fastens onto the hanging meat of his abdomen. The bigger dog back-pedals madly, yelping, biting down at Matilda’s thrashing head.

Lola hollering, “Get that little shit! Bite her! Get off, get off ! ”

The rottie twists his body sideways and Matilda tumbles across the pen with a chunk of Biscuits in her mouth. A rude bloody hole in the rottie’s gut but he’s still very much game.

The dogs square around as the crowd clusters close to the pen, leaning in for better views. Biscuits steps from left foreleg to right, then right to left, a boxer’s shuffle. Matilda stands stock-still, mouth open, haunches quivering.

The rottie rushes again, crouched low, head tucked. Flashing teeth tear his ear to shreds before he smashes into Matilda’s stifles, barreling her into the chicken-wire. Alison pokes her fingers through the wire, fingers clenched. Biscuits has Matilda pressed against the pen— Matilda pivots, lashing out with her hind legs, aiming for the gutwound. Jaws come together, two or three splintered teeth skittering across the ground. With a level of cunning I wouldn’t have guessed at, Biscuits fakes a strike at Matilda’s throat, reverses and bites down on the rear right haunch. Matilda emits a shrill yowl.

“That’s it, boy! Get at her!”

Teeth sunk deep into Matilda’s flank, Biscuits drags her away from the chicken-wire. Matilda’s body whips side to side, paws scrabbling uselessly. Alison’s grip on the wire tightens as Biscuits shakes his head, neck tendons bunching. Blood pours down Matilda’s brindled coat.

The bell rings. Men reach over the pen with blunted baling hooks to pry the dogs apart.

Matilda trots stiffly to the corner, rear right leg tucked close to her chest. I snap a muzzle on and grip her barrel chest as Alison goes to work. “Easy, Mattie baby,” Alison whispers to the squirming dog.

She cleans away the blood and debrides the cuts with a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and rubbing alcohol. Peering down through the layers of meat, she winces.

“Severed veins.”

“Do what you do.”

After swabbing the deep tissues with a thick coagulant, she sprays the topmost layers with Granulex. Then she spreads the wounds’ lips and cauterizes them with ferric acid. Matilda squeals against her muzzle. I glance at the other corner, where Lola runs a bead of Crazy Glue down Biscuits’s ear before pressing the split halves together. The rottie’s upper canines are busted to the gumline but he sports an enormous erection.

Alison swabs Matilda’s nose with adrenaline chloride 1:1000 to jack some energy into her through the mucous membranes. When I remove the muzzle she nips at my hand.

Both dogs toe the scratch. The bell rings.

Biscuits slinks forward like a cat, protecting his gut. Matilda circles right, her bloodied flank resembling a port wine stain. The rottie cocks his head and goes for Matilda’s throat. With blinding speed Matilda dodges back, the rottie’s jaws snapping closed over vacant air, and counterattacks. Biscuits howls as Matilda’s teeth open huge wounds on the right side of his face, skin folding down in a single flap, high cheek to jowl.

“Yes!” I holler. “Get him! Get at him!”

Matilda presses the retreating rottie, who is blinking to clear his blood-blind eyes; spectators at pen-side shield themselves from the flying blood. She hammers her head into Biscuits’s chest and flews.

The rottie casts his eyes around like a lost child.

“Eat him up, Mattie!”

Near the end of the round Biscuits worries his head inside Matilda’s guard, bites into her chest, lifts the smaller dog up and smashes her to the ground. Matilda’s skull snaps off the concrete and the sound of her ribs cracking is like a boot squashing a periwinkle. The bell rings.

Matilda staggers to the corner. Her left side is dented like the hull of a galleon hit by cannon fire. Blood drips in thin rills from her ears.

“She’s bleeding inside,” Alison says. “Those busted ribs are pressed up against …”

“Do what you do.”

“Pick her up. Another round could—”

“Just do what you do.”

“This is such bullshit. You are such bullshit.”

She injects procaine into Matilda’s ribs before tending to the dog’s other wounds. I feel Matilda pushing against me, eager to get at Biscuits. She is in a great deal of pain, and could die shortly. All she wants to do is fight. I remember what the dogman from whom I’d purchased my first pit bull told me: These dogs are bred for a mean utility. They are bred to fight and live only for the fight. It’s all they know. I wonder at a life so singular of purpose, a utilitarian existence no different from that of a hammer or shovel.

“Bad inter-cranial swelling,” Alison says. “Blood’s leaking out her eyes.”

I use the adrenaline to swab Matilda’s gums, her nostrils, her eyes covered with a thin film of blood and blinking uncontrollably. The dog’s body strains mindlessly.

Biscuits drags himself to the scratch. His face, which Lola has unsuccessfully attempted to glue back in place, is a gummy mess.

The bell rings. Matilda goes for the rottie’s leg but something’s wrong, she can’t see right, misses by a mile, jaw hammering off the concrete. Biscuits sidesteps, clawing at Matilda’s eyes, ripping the forehead open. Matilda’s turning a drunken circle, trying to draw a bead, unable to. She’s yowling, but whether in pain or frustration I can’t tell.

“Stomp it, boy!” Lola’s yelling. “Stomp that mutt!”

“Pick her up, Jay. She’s dying in there.”

“She’s a deep gamer. She’ll be …”

The rottie flanks Matilda’s blind spot—Christ, she’s all blind spot— and mounts her, massive jaws clamped over her neck. Matilda’s squirming, yammering, unable to move. Her bladder lets go with a stream of blood-red piss. Biscuits pins her to the concrete and lowers his body like he’s taking a shit but he’s not taking a shit, that red raw rock-hard dick—

“That’s it, boy!” Lola, apoplectic. “Throw that little bitch your dirty laig! ”

… and it comes to you in the sleepless witching hours, a question bracing in its simplicity: Do I deserve? In the clean sane light of day such notions are so easily dispelled, but with dawn’s awakening light filtering through the venetian blinds, quartering your face into corridors of day and darkness, the question takes on looming weight. What is essentially a biological question acquires critical moral import—a question of weakness so ingrained as to exert its sway on a cellular level. And you wonder if you are capable. Can you meet the world with fists raised, moving forward, fearless? All revolves within this. Advance. Retreat. Weakness. Strength. If you are capable, then so you are deserving. If not, not. At some point we all must answer to this. At some point we must stare it down. Am I capable? Do I deserve? She sleeps beside you, the woman you love, her steady exhalations raising the bedsheets by shallow increments, you thinking, Do I? Do I? and then …

I’m launching myself into the pen, slicing my hands open on snarled chicken-wire, tripping, stumbling, dragging myself up, calf stitches breaking open with a sick internal tear and the pain has me gagging but I throw myself at the rottie, shoulder-blocking it in the ribs and falling on top of Matilda, the crowd exploding in shocked disbelief, Matilda beneath me hot and tensed and shivering, whisper it’s okay, okay-okay-okay and then the rottie on me, ripping at my rubber-bandy legs, at my neck, trying to get at Matilda but I turn into him, shielding my dog and Matilda licking my fingers and I look to Alison and the way she’s staring at me, Christ, I haven’t seen that look in years, the kind of look a guy can build on then baling hooks are out and digging into the dogs, digging into me and something explodes inside my skull, a combustive fireworks display, boom, boom, boom, starbursts and fractured light pinwheeling before the red curtain of my tightly shut eyelids as one pure thought loops through my fritzing, blown-apart brainpan: so this is fatherhood.