Rust and Bone by Craig Davidson Page B

yellow layer of fat, splintered bone shining in the crisp sunlight.
    Niska swims slowly past. My leg hangs from her jaws, loosely flexed at the knee. Flashbulbs pop in the stands and I think, That’s not what they came to see, but then maybe it is. My wetsuit’s torn to the breastbone, peeled back in flaps to reveal tanned flesh, gym-sculpted abs, clean-shaven groin, my painfully erect cock. Brachial veins running like river systems under the elastic flesh, its size—6 3 ⁄4 inches: I’d measured, digging the ruler into my crotch for an added quarter-inch— grossly amplified, monstrous and hemorrhaging blood.
    The cute trainer’s lips move but no sound comes out. “I’m okay,” I tell her, and smile. “It’s o-o-kay, I’m … fine.” She’s crying, she’s shaking her head. Overhead, a big pale sun burns without heat. I wish everyone would go away and leave me alone, wish I were somewhere dark and quiet and cool. My gaze drawn to a gap between the topmost seats and the amphitheater roof: calm ongoing sky reaching off to the horizon, remotely beautiful, all things in alignment.
    Jesus, do something, do something…Paramedics, move, move …
    The leg, where’s the fucking leg …
    Quit pumping the plasma expander, his blood’s thin as Kool-Aid …
    These voices, even in the haze.
    FIVE MONTHS LATER I’m in a VW Beetle driving down the QEW. Snow piled along the highway-side and Lake Ontario a frozen white stretch off to the north. I can just make out the slender spike of the CN Tower rising beyond the Toronto harbor. Over the guardrails and down the snow-covered shoreline, two muffled figures sit round a hole drilled through the ice.
    I sit in the passenger seat, cheek pressed to the window glass. My right leg rests against the padded doorframe. My left leg is mostly gone: a rude stump two inches below my crotch. The surgeons did a fine job, considering: high-gauge stitches left a ring of baby-pink dimples, a balloon knot of puckered flesh at the stub. I nearly died, or so I’m told. The sacral, varicose, basilic, and femoral arteries merge in the upper thigh, pumping a pint of blood a minute. I lost over a gallon before the medics transfused me. From Niagara Falls, I was airlifted to the Hotel Dieu in St. Catharines, where a team of surgeons operated for two hours. Battleground surgery: a hundred years ago, some meatball medic would’ve jammed a rum-soaked leather thong between my teeth and slathered the stump with boiling tar. Thanks to today’s wonder drugs, I don’t recall a damn thing.
    I awoke two days later. The hospital room’s every ledge festooned with flowers in frosted glass vases, plush white teddy bears, balloon bouquets bump-bumping in the AC flow. Condolences: family and friends and co-workers, old high-school acquaintances, ex-girlfriends softened by my pathetic state, a War Amps rep, the morbidly curious. A summer intern conducted a brief interview for the Standard .
    â€œTell me what happened, in your own words.”
    â€œIn my own words? A whale bit my leg off.”
    â€œI see.” Scribbles on a notepad. “Did you see this coming?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œWas there, well, any … hostility … between the two of you?”
    â€œYes. I was envious of the whale’s career.”
    â€œIs that so?”
    â€œInsanely jealous, yes.”
    â€œWill you be suing?”
    â€œWho—the whale?”
    â€œIs that possible?”
    â€œGet out of here.”
    Animal rights protesters held a rally on the hospital’s front lawn. They toted placards bearing slogans: FREE NISKA and CAPTIVITY + MISTREATMENT = MURDER. They had a boombox playing “Freedom Calling” and a huge inflatable whale with shackles over its pectoral fins. My father got into a fistfight with the ringleader, a dreadlocked grad student from the local university. They rolled across the grass