The First Annual Grand Prairie Rabbit Festival (14 page)

“You and your dad use this a lot?”

“Yeah. When I was a kid. Not so much after I grew up,” she says, smiling up at me. I think it’s the first time she’s given me a straightforward smile. Not a hint of sarcasm. “But you’re sitting on my side.”

“Want to switch?”

“No. Figure I’ll sit on this side.” She points to her feet with the beer can. “Dig Daddy’s ditch a little deeper.”

We lapse into silence. I feel like I’ve been alone for weeks, like I haven’t spoken to another soul for years. It makes no sense, but there it is. I want to talk, to babble. But I’ve got no idea what to say or how to start.

“You know, long as I’ve been here, I haven’t used that path through the woods yet.” How’s that for scintillating conversation?

“Ohhh, my little path.”

“Your path?”

“Yeah. I made it. Hacked my way to the bayou with a chainsaw and machete. Took a tractor and shredded it all down to stubble. Then I plowed what was left.” She shakes her head. “That last part wasn’t such a hot idea.”

“Why?”

“It rained right after I plowed. Huge mess. Call it my little lesson in soil erosion. All that loose bare dirt. It was muck from here clear to the bayou. Daddy got a kick out of it. Hell, he’d encouraged me, helped me out a little. I think he would have liked to open it up for the parishioners.”

She pauses and looks in the direction of the woods.

“But Lord, everybody else wanted to kill me. Well, the old farts who hunt back there, anyway. Not happy at all. So I waited till it dried up some, then packed it down best I could by running the tractor back and forth, back and forth. Hell, I dreamed about driving that tractor for weeks after that. I vibrated in my sleep. Then I seeded the path with rye grass and anything else I thought might take root long enough to stop a swamp from forming. I was scared those old coots were going to shoot me off that tractor or string me from a tree.”

Now, why don’t I get stuff like that in confession?

“You should have seen my original plans. I was fourteen and plenty big in the head. I was going to pave it or something. Cobblestones. An elevated boardwalk with railing and lights. How I planned to afford that, I don’t know. Guess I figured I could pass the collection plate or hold a bake sale.”

“Bake sale?” I groan. “Don’t say that again.”

“Oh, c’mon.” She elbows me in the ribs. I’m glad she’s in good spirits considering how behind we seem to be with the festival. I’ve been having nightmares that, come April, I can’t pay Johnny Blackfoot and he comes riding after me on a very upset elephant.

“Fine,” she says, and hops out of the swing. She grabs four beers and slips them into the various pockets of her pants. She cracks two fresh ones and hands one to me. “Let’s go for a walk.”

“Sure thing,” I say.

So we walk straight for the woods without a glance back at the security light. And when the undergrowth rustles to life, I hold my breath rather than scream.

“Rabbit,” Vicky says.

“Really?” I’m impressed.

“How the hell should I know?” she answers. “What am I, Marlin Perkins?”

We move on without talking, our shoes whispering through the occasional patches of grass or crunching on leaf litter. We round a curve, and Vicky says the bayou’s not too far off. It’s a pleasant walk, the darkness and the sounds of the forest and the beer and the company are working together.

And then a scream. A high-pitched shriek.

“What the fuck?” The crimped metal edge of my now-squeezed beer can bites into the flesh between my thumb and forefinger.

“Shhh,” she says. “Quiet.”

Well, that it is. Whatever it was scared everything else in the woods silly as well. Just as the forest comes back to life, the sound comes again.

“Listen,” Vicky says.

“Shit, Vicky. It’s kind of hard not to.”

What the hell? The only logical answer, floating somewhere at the edge of my mind, a fear trying to make itself known, is that it’s a cougar, which supposedly makes a sound like a screaming woman. No one’s seen a cougar back here in a hundred years or more, but that does little to put my mind at ease.

A third scream, this time more faint.

“I think it’s moving away,” I say, unable to hide the relief in my voice.
Please, Lord, let it be moving away
.

“It’s floating down the bayou,” Vicky says.

“What?” I replace the cougar in the bushes with a baby in a basket, a bayou Moses.

Now that the thought’s occurred to me, as the fourth wail comes in, it does indeed sound like a baby in distress. People abandon babies in Dumpsters, leave them in cars in the hot sun, flush them out of the womb with saline and suction.

But here in Grand Prairie?

I start ticking off a list of parishioners. Who’s pregnant? Who’s capable of such a thing?

“C’mon,” Vicky says, moving quickly into the darkness. I can’t see her, but I imagine her hand waving me forward, her shoulders hunched over as she shuffles away in a creeping military posture.

Despite my instincts, the little voice in my head guaranteeing me that absolutely nothing good can come of this, I follow her. She stops and I pull up short. Two feet in front of us is the drop-off to the bayou. I can sense the barely moving water below.

“Be still,” she whispers.

Be still? I’m having to force myself to breathe. I can’t see. I’ve lost track of time. And I feel foolish, like a faithless coward.

As if in agreement, another scream goes out, directly in front of us.

To my right, a beam of light reaches out, strikes the water, and moves left until it spotlights two glowing red eyes. No sooner do I see them, no sooner do I register a paralyzing fear gripping my tailbone, than they’re gone with a loud sploosh, an almost comical sound that dissipates quickly, leaving behind silence and the taste of copper in my mouth.

“What in holy hell?”

Vicky’s laughing. “Need to change your under-roos?”

“Well, excuse the fu—excuse me for being scared shi—” I stop. Then start again from a different approach. “And you had that flashlight the whole damn time!”

“Calm down. It was just a nutria.”

“Nutria?” Say what? I’ve been scared witless by a big, dumb rodent? “I’ve seen nutria, Vicky. I’ve seen them in the park in Lafayette. Since when do they make noises like that?”

She’s laughing again. “I guess since they’ve been floating around in the dark back here.”

The only thing I can think to say is, “Well, doesn’t that just make perfect sense?”

She tosses her beer can into the bayou, grabs one from a pocket, opens it, and passes it to me. It’s warm now, but I take two large gulps anyway. I remember that there’s a crushed empty in my right hand. Not feeling particularly charitable toward Mother Nature, I wing the can into the water. I take another swallow of beer and imagine it working through me, calming me down.

And with the calm comes a feeling. High school. That’s the only phrase that comes to mind. Creeping around in the woods. Warm beer. Being scared silly. And more. Hope? Potential? Optimistic uncertainty? Those emotions that come flooding in immediately after fear is successfully vanquished, after a light is shone under your bed to reveal no monsters there, after your finals come back and you do indeed have a future. The feeling that you still have options, rather than a track you’ve set yourself upon.

“Padre?” Vicky disturbs my little reverie.

“Yeah?”

“Come here,” she says.

“Where?”

Her light clicks on, spotlights an iron bench with an S of a spine and one seat facing the bayou, the other the woods. I take the seat facing the water. She clicks the light off.

While my eyes readjust to the darkness and the black indentation of the bayou becomes more fact than imagination, I drink warm beer and listen to Vicky breathing. After what seems like several minutes, she speaks.

“So, Father Steve, why the priesthood?”

“That’s a good question,” I hear myself say. I must be drunk if I think that’s a good question.

“I’m sure it is a good question,” she says. “How about a good answer?”

I don’t think I’m that drunk. “Can I have another beer?”

“Hell yeah,” she says.

I open the beer and lean forward, away from her, looking at the bayou.

“I don’t know,” I finally say. “It just sort of happened.”

I know what she’s going to say.

“Steve, janitors sort of happen. Priests don’t just sort of happen.”

“I think your dad may have disagreed.”

“Touché,” she says. “But really.”

“No, but really,” I answer.

It’s all right here on the surface, ready for me to spill, but I go through the motions of remembering anyway. I scrunch up my brow for effect as if she can see me, as if she wouldn’t see right through that.

“Well. I planned on the job and the marriage and the kids.”

“Like everyone else,” she says, finishing my sentence. “And then what? You gay or something?”

“No.” I sigh. “That might have made more sense, been a better explanation.”

“To who? Your mom?”

“No. More to myself.”

In no hurry to go on, I take a few sips of beer.

“So what happened?”

“It just didn’t work out.”

I can feel her turn and look at the back of my head, an impatient gesture.

“Oh, was that all?” she asks.

“Sure.” I shrug.

“Steve.”

“What?”

“Steve,” Vicky says again. “You just don’t up and join the priesthood because college wasn’t working out.”

She’s not going to let this go.

“It wasn’t college—not the grades or whatever.”

I stop again. Now I can definitely sense her neck and shoulders tightening with impatience. She’s getting tired of pulling teeth, so I anticipate her next question.

“And it wasn’t a woman.” I add, as an afterthought, “Or a man.”

“Well?”

I sigh and run my fingers though my hair, and for some strange reason say a little prayer of thanks for still having all of it.
Thank you, God, for letting me keep my hair
. The way my mind works sometimes, trying desperately to run itself out of tight situations, fight or flight, daze and confuse, shuck and jive.

“Okay. It wasn’t
one
woman. It was all of them. Remember the other night how Tommy told everyone that story about that girl dumping me and me riding around half naked on my bike?”

“You mean Ruh-ruh-ruh-Rachel? How could I forget?”

“Well, the story didn’t end there.”

After being so unceremoniously dumped by Rachel, I had to face her every day of the week at school. Seeing her made me want to cry and vomit and cut myself all at the same time. There was simply no escape. She and I were both in advanced placement, meaning we were in the same eight classes, sitting right next to each other.

Worse, perhaps because she felt guilty or felt she had the upper hand, she was trying to be nice. Worse still, either because she was forgetful or because she was the evil, manipulative sow I suspected her to be, she’d put her hand on my shoulder or rub her fingers through my hair while walking by, then say, “Oh. Oh my God. I’m sorry, Steve. I’m so sorry.”

Other than an under-the-breath “fuck off” here and there, I kept it together for a week. And when the weekend came, I was relieved that she didn’t show, allowing me to get drunk with my friends and accept their condolences. That is, until Cicily Gautreaux—who’d always hated Rachel and had a bit of a crush on me—let the cat out of the bag. Rachel wasn’t hanging out on the back roads of Opelousas because she was at a frat party.

“God, she’s so stuck up. All she’s talking about is Brad and his stupid frat house. Two weeks of that. I can’t take it anymore.”

Two weeks? That meant she was seeing this Brad before she dumped me? And a frat house?

I had a sudden very vivid image of Rachel naked on her back in some squalid room, a blond jock type with a backward-facing ball cap, pulling up his pants as he walked out of the room, high-fiving one of his buddies and saying, “Your turn, bro!” In this vision, Rachel smiled and said, “You know, I can do more than one at a time, yall.”

I was so angry I shook. But I did nothing. I went home that Saturday night and stared at the ceiling. Every time I shut my eyes, visions of my ex-girlfriend fellating half a football team pranced across my head.

Sunday was the same.

Monday, when I went to school I wanted to punch Rachel right in the nose. But there are rules about such things. Then she dropped her pen. It fell right under my desk, but I sat there staring straight ahead.

“Steve,” Rachel said finally, in a tone indicating that I was being a jerk. “Can you get my pen, please?”

“Why don’t you call Brad and ask him to get your fucking pen, you whore?”

Dr. Crane stopped writing on the board and looked over her shoulder. Rachel burst into tears and ran out of the room.

“Yeah, go ahead and cry. I should be the one crying!” I shouted.

In religion class, I raised my hand.

“Yes, Steven?” Mr. Hitchens asked.

“I have a question about the story of Rachel, Leah, and Jacob.”

“Steven, I can’t see for the life of me what that has to do with Saul on the road to Damascus, but okay.”

“I guess I’m just confused. I mean, Rachel is pretty much a liar and backstabber of the worst sort. Shouldn’t God have smote her or something?”

As it turned out, I was wrong. Leah was the liar. But it was still enough to get Rachel to run out of the class crying.

She didn’t come back for trigonometry.

But I wasn’t done with Rachel yet. Revenge didn’t satisfy me for long, and it didn’t do much for the visions of her sucking off the entire Kappa Alpha house. I spent another entire week without sleep and Friday night found me strung out, exhausted, and sitting with “Fudge Round” Arcenaux under his carport, doing tequila shots and watching him work through a box of Little Debbie Fudge Rounds snack cakes.

I didn’t hang out much with Fudge Round. He was a neighborhood kid who went to public school and didn’t seem to have much use for socializing beyond the extent of his yard. His parents were never around—his mom worked nights, his dad worked offshore when he wasn’t in jail—so Fudge Round was content with sitting in the drive watching the world go by, smoking pot, drinking, and, when the urge struck him, huffing gas. If people showed up, he was happy to entertain. If no one showed up, he was equally happy to enjoy his substance abuse and Fudge Rounds in peace.