The Rabbit Factory: A Novel (22 page)

He thought about going out to look for her but he would have to call a cab if he did. And, too, if he left, she might come in while he was gone. And then it occurred to him that maybe he should call the pet shop where Eric worked and ask him if he’d seen her. But what was the name of the pet shop? What was it? It was the name of a car. Was it Edsel? No, it wasn’t that. Was it the Pontiac Pet Shop? That didn’t sound right either. It was some kind of a car they didn’t make anymore. DeSoto maybe? Nah. Hudson? Nah. Nash Rambler? Nah.

He sat there with the phone book in his lap. He started going through the Yellow Pages, licking his fingers the way his mother used to, paging rapidly, his gray head bent.

It was a big barn.

It was a horse barn.

It belonged to a cop.

But he didn’t know that.

It had plenty of hay.

It had cat food, too.

He found some Friskies Kitten.

They had those pull rings.

It didn’t taste so bad.

And he was powerful hungry.

He actually ate two cans.

One was chicken in gravy.

One was salmon in gravy.

Both were in little chunks.

The gravy was mildly congealed.

It left him feeling unsatisfied.

The barn was pretty dark.

It was good for hiding.

He didn’t see any horses.

He pulled hay over him.

Then he slept all day.

Or might near all day.

At dusk he heard something.

Somebody came into the barn.

He pulled out Rico’s revolver.

Then another somebody came in.

He was in a corner.

It was dark there, too.

Somebody said something pretty sexy.

Then somebody else said something.

And it was even sexier.

Then he heard some sounds.

There was some hay rustling.

There was some moaning going.

Then he heard some girl say
Oh Randy fuck baby fuck my sweet my fuck my! Randy! Fuck!
and he had to lie there and listen to it for a while but finally went back to sleep to dream of falling endlessly down long dark holes with an ocean roaring far below. Good thing the cop who owned the barn didn’t hear him snoring, because he did, mouth wide open, the five or six cats that crept in later from the darkness of their baby-rabbit killing leaning over him where they sat in a circle to smell his tantalizing Friskies Kitten breath.

The phone rang again. He went to it and picked it up. He hoped to God it wasn’t Mister Arthur calling for some reason.

“Studebaker’s,” he said. And then he had to say this other thing. One of Mr. Studebaker’s ideas. “’Our puppies are precious.’”

“Eric? This is Arthur.”

Oh shit.
“Oh. Hey. Uh. How you doin’?”

“Well, I’m not too good, Eric,” he said right away. “Helen’s gone and I don’t know where she is and I’m getting worried about her. I was just wondering if by any chance you’d seen her.”

“Seen her?”

“Yes. I was wondering if she’d been by the pet shop.”

He had to either lie or not lie. A simple yes or a simple no. How could he lie to him? How could he tell him the truth without hurting him?

“Oh no, sir, I haven’t seen her, I mean, not lately.” Partly true.

“Well. I’m just worried sick about her. She hasn’t seemed herself lately. We’ve had some…problems.”

“Oh,” Eric said. He didn’t know what to say. And he hoped Mister Arthur wouldn’t get into the problems and what they were over the phone, either. He was afraid it was something like maybe he couldn’t get it up anymore because he was so old. He thought old guys had that problem sometimes. He could remember his granddaddy saying one time with a chaw in his jaw the size of a walnut that the whole head of his had done turned purple. And his grandmother laughing and accidentally farting on her front porch where she was shelling butter beans with a bunch of spotted hound dogs lying around asleep with their long tick-studded ears stretched out on the boards.

“She doesn’t usually go off like this,” Mister Arthur said over the phone. And then he said: “Well, actually, sometimes she does.” Eric could picture him, maybe standing in the kitchen in his house shoes with his hair sticking up. He could see the pans on the stove behind him. The kitten was probably still in the pantry. He almost wished now he’d never gone over there. If he hadn’t gone over there, he wouldn’t be standing here right now trying to decide whether to go over and meet her for a drink or not. And what was he going to do with Jada Pinkett while it was going on? Tie him to a tree? Put him in the trunk? The whole thing just made him feel uneasy.

“You don’t have any idea where she could be, do you?” Mister Arthur said.

Now it was down to the nitty-gritty. A big old lie or not. No way to fudge. A direct question concerning her whereabouts.

“I…uh…maybe she’s in a bar somewhere.”
You big old liar.

“I’m sure that’s probably true. She’s probably at the Peabody. She goes there quite a bit.” There was a long silence. A really long silence. It seemed filled with sadness even though it was so silent.

“Are you okay?” Eric said.

“I’m just worried,” Mister Arthur said to him over the phone. “I don’t know what she might do. I don’t know when she might come in. We kind of had a fight. She didn’t leave a note or anything and she hasn’t called to let me know where she is. You know there was a murder at the barbershop just across from the coffee shop I go to sometimes.”

“Oh yeah. I saw that in
The Commercial,”
Eric said.

“You just never know,” Mister Arthur said over the phone. “It’s a big city. Lots of people. Lots of things go on. Probably some things we don’t even want to know about.”

“I know that’s right,” Eric said.

“What are you doing?”

“Me? Aw, nothin’. I’m about ready to close.”

“What time do you close?”

“Ten.”

“What time is it now?”

“It’s about five till.”

“What are you going to do when you get off work?”

“Aw. I don’t know.” Just one damn lie after another.

“Have you got old Jada Pinkett in there with you?”

“Yessir, well, he’s out in the car. They won’t let me bring him in here. He’s asleep last time I looked.”

“Is he doing okay?”

“Jada Pinkett? Aw yeah, he’s fine. He’s old, but he’s all right.”

“Can he still breed?” Arthur asked.

Eric hated to tell him. He remembered it out by the barn. In the shade under the big mimosa tree. Some of his daddy’s buddies standing around drinking beer. Telling dirty jokes. His daddy talking about the whore that had left him and how glad he was she was gone. Eric’s mother.

“Well, nosir, he cain’t get a puppy no more I don’t reckon. He don’t seem to be able to get it up. Last time Deddy had to take his hand and kind of guide it up in there and…I don’t reckon it did no good…she never did have no puppies. Not from him.”

Puppies. There was no telling how many his daddy had drowned. Maybe hundreds. Sometimes the pit-bull boys dug or tore out of their pens and into another and got ahold of the weenie-dog girls, and made a strange, kind of reddish dog, one that was long and low and brindle striped with a big square head and a deep chest that would dig up armadillos from their dens and kill them, but you couldn’t really sell them to anybody unless they specifically wanted armadillo dogs, which, of course, a few folks here and there did. But it took dog food to raise them after six weeks on the teat. And dog food cost money. Eric knew his daddy figured correctly that it was a lot cheaper to put the ones nobody wanted in a tow sack early and throw them in a deep hole in the river. He never had done it himself, and his daddy had always said he was too soft, and sometimes, when he thought about stuff like that, he didn’t want to go back home so much. But it was his daddy. What was he supposed to do?

“Oh. I see,” Mister Arthur said, and then he brightened. “It was really something the way he caught that kitten. I was really impressed by that. Helen was, too, after she got over her scare. Helen’s…Helen’s really a good woman, Eric.”

He had to swallow hard. The shot of the open zipper had burned itself into his brain. But he couldn’t say
No she’s not.

“Yessir. She’s been real nice to me.”

“Me, too,” Mister Arthur said. “We’ve been married for almost twenty years. I’m sure you can tell that she’s a good bit younger than me.”

“Well. Yessir. I noticed that. I think she’s around the age of my mama.”

“I know she married me for my money,” Mister Arthur said. “But I like to think that she does care about me.”

“Yessir. I’m sure she does.”

There was some more silence. Eric didn’t have any idea what to say and now all he wanted was to just get off the phone. Then he heard Mister Arthur clear his throat.

“Well. I was just wondering if you wanted to come by here and have a drink. I’ve got plenty of scotch, there’s some food here, too, I’m just sitting here by myself, well, not totally by myself, I mean I’ve got the cat here with me, but of course it’s not much company, being in the cage and everything, but I thought maybe you might want to come by here and have a drink and maybe a sandwich. TBS is showing
Red River
at eleven. John Wayne? I thought I’d sit up and watch it and see if she comes on in. I thought maybe you might want to come over and watch it with me. You could bring Jada Pinkett and I could feed him something. I’ve got some frozen hamburger I could thaw out. It’s really a good movie. Have you ever seen it?”

Damn, man. How fucking pathetic was it going to get? And how pathetic was
he,
lying like this to a nice old man who had only befriended him?

“Yessir, I’ve seen it. It’s a good one, sure is. Old Montgomery Clift’s in that one.”

“Yes he is. And there’s probably some other stuff on. The History Channel usually has some good stuff on. Sometimes. Well, they have reruns, but of course some stuff’s fun to watch over and over, like those treasure-hunter guys. You ever watch those guys who go out to Arizona with metal detectors and look for buried treasure? I’d like to do that sometime.”

Boy, he just kind of rambled sometimes, didn’t he? Just jumped around from one thing to another. Maybe Miss Helen thought he was loony. Maybe he
was
loony. Naw, hell, he was probably just lonesome and old. Like his granddaddy after his grandmother died and left him sitting alone in his rocking chair with only the hounds that slept on the porch of the big weathered house to keep him company in his last days.

“Nosir. Well. I’ll probably just get on home. I mean, unless I stop for a drink somewhere.”
Shit! What the fuck’d you say
that
for?

“Well, I just thought I’d see,” Mister Arthur said over the phone.

“I just thought you might want to.” He paused. “But you’re a young man. You’ve got your own things you want to do. I’m sure you’ve got your own friends your own age you like to do things with.”

No. Hell no. That wasn’t right. It wasn’t like that at all. Eric wanted to tell him that he didn’t have any friends up here, that it was hard to meet people, he thought because of his hick accent, and that he’d actually stolen Jada Pinkett from his daddy and run away from Mississippi because his daddy had been going to shoot Jada Pinkett for refusing to fight anymore, and because he couldn’t fuck anymore, and that he was lonely except for the old dog, and homeless, and scared sometimes, and that he really wanted to come over and have a drink with him, and a sandwich maybe, too, and tell him some more stories about home, maybe even tell him about how they’d built the rabbit factory, he and his daddy and Mister Nub, putting up the steel posts and six feet of chicken wire around seven acres of grass and brush over two summers, and running boards all along the bottom and tacking the wire to the boards to keep the rabbits in so that they could take the beagles over and run them for practice in the summer, and sit on the benches they’d built, and sip cold beer, and listen to the races. But then, if he did that, he wouldn’t be able to go have a drink with Miss Helen, and find out what was going to happen with her, so he just stayed quiet, knowing what he was doing, but not being able to really help himself because he was so badly wanting her, wanting her even worse than he wanted the complete boxed set of
The Civil War
by Shelby Foote, and he wanted it pretty bad.

“Well,” Mister Arthur said. “I just thought I’d call and see if you’d seen her. I didn’t know but what she came by there to get some catnip for the cat maybe. But you might not even sell catnip. I didn’t notice any when I was in there. Of course I wasn’t really looking for any. It was a long shot, I guess. I guess she’ll eventually come in sometime tonight. I just hope she’s not drinking and driving.”

“You gonna be okay?” Eric said. He guessed this meant if he went over to the bar and had a drink or two with her at the Peabody and then got her in his car and drove her somewhere he probably wouldn’t get to see Mister Arthur anymore. That’d be a shame. Shit. It would be worse than a shame.

“Oh, sure,” Mister Arthur said over the phone. “I’ll just sit here and watch some TV until she gets in. I’ve got the cat. I can feed it maybe. I think I may have another can of anchovies in the cabinet somewhere. Maybe I can make friends with it.”

“Maybe you can,” Eric said.

There was another long pause. It went on for a pretty good while but Eric just waited. He tried, but he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“Well. Come by and see me sometime, Eric.”

“Okay. I will.”
No you won’t. Not if you do that shit.

“And bring Jada Pinkett, too. Maybe he can play around with the cat some. Maybe it’ll be tamed down by then.”

“I’ll bet he can,” Eric said.

“I’ll bet he can, too. Well. Take it easy, Eric.”

“You too, Mister Arthur.”

He hung the phone up, and for a while he just stood there, looking down at the floor. He was thinking about Miss Helen and what she’d said. And how she’d looked. He thought about Mister Arthur at home alone. Then he felt something. He didn’t know what it was at first. Then he looked at the animals in the cages around him. They were all watching him, almost like they could tell what he was thinking.