Rust and Bone by Craig Davidson

fourth row’s giving me the eye. Slim and pale with wide blue eyes, ass-length ponytail pulled through the back of her baseball cap, she sits in the shadow thrown by a woman wearing a straw hat on the verge of collapsing under a weight of plastic fruit. Her shockingly blue eyes meet mine, then skate across the show pool’s surface. She’s being coy about it, but I’ve seen The Look a thousand times.
    I’m straddling the concrete wall dividing the wait pool from the show pool. Sunlight arcs over the amphitheater’s zigzagged metal roof, yellow spears quivering the afternoon air. Stands packed with sunburnt tourists in their vacation finery: tank tops and flip-flops and sansabelt slacks, wifebeaters and board shorts. I spot a sallow-chested shirtless man: the unshakable maxim seems to be those with the most revolting physiques are inevitably those most keen to bare them. Blue inflatable dolphins, red seals, black-and-white killer whales bob amidst the crowd. Tinny upbeat music lilts from recessed speakers. Seagulls wheel and spiral against the unbroken blue sky.
    The show opens with the sea lions. Their flatiron-sized flippers collide wetly, broken barks rebounding off the domed cupola. Trainers steer them through a standard routine: balancing striped balls on their noses and catching bright red rings around their necks until the act segues into a Keystone Kops–style chase, animals loping across the stage with trainers in fist-shaking pursuit. The action is punctuated by boinks, tah-dahs, and wah-wah-waaas supplied by the audio booth technician.
    I sit cooling my feet in the pools. Sweat rolls down my neck, wicked by the collar of my wetsuit. Off to my left, a young girl in a wheelchair sits beneath the handicapped pavilion’s wind-whipped awning. She looks maybe twelve, though could fall five years on either side: her disease makes parts of the body look worn, while others remain strangely undeveloped. The girl’s father sits beside her, rubbing her arm. I glance down, depressed in an unfocused sort of way, and catch Niska rising through the water.
    The orca’s head crests the surface, sleek as a ballistic missile. Sun limns the contours of her black snout, thin golden traceries like the veins on a leaf. Her mouth yawns open, revealing teeth blunted with age and disuse. I reach down and slap her tongue—wet and bristled, like a piglet’s hide—and feed her mackerel from a stainless steel bucket. She submerges for a moment before resurfacing, a gurgle issuing from her blowhole.
    â€œGo on, you big hog,” I say. “No more ’til showtime.”
    When the sea lions are finished, Kona’s brought out from the opposite wait pool. He performs a few lackluster highbows then swims a lap around the pool, lashing his atrophied tail to the beat of “Feelin’ Hot Hot Hot,” by Buster Poindexter and the Banshees. Niska butts her snout against the metal gate separating the pools. She has a habit of rousing Kona’s ardor, which, during shows, leads to a lot of “Mommy, what’s that?” questions as Kona’s thick, pink, six-foot-long cock spools out of its sheath like a bizarre Hindu rope trick.
    When Kona’s safely penned I crank a winch and raise the gate, ushering Niska into the show pool. I dive in after her. The cool water tastes of brine and chlorine. I blink the sting out of my eyes as Niska circles, body a rippled distortion beneath the waves. I feel the displacement of water as she rises, smooth and powerful, pushing me back. She surfaces in front of me, maw open. Breath like a fishmonger’s floor, rags of mackerel hanging between her teeth. I catch my reflection—curly blond hair, dimpled chin, stubbled cheeks—in the black convex of one of her golfball-sized eyes.
    I slap her tongue. “Let’s do this thing, girl.”
    The Rocket Ride is the triple lindy of marine mammal behaviors. Anchoring your feet on