The Rabbit Factory: A Novel (23 page)

She waited at the corners when
DON’T WALK
was lit on the pole and waited with other people who did not look at her, all except the men. She walked by furniture shops and delicatessens and shoe shops and electronics shops and bars and windows full of lamps and scarves and things carved from wood and ivory in countries far north of there. She didn’t see anything she wanted. When she got tired of walking, she flagged a cab the few blocks back to the Peabody. She’d have to go back and see Moe and get her clothes and her coat sometime.

She went to the women’s room and made herself up and decided she was okay to be seen. It wasn’t very crowded in the lobby since the ducks had already done their thing. At the elegant bar, she took a tall padded chair and waited for a slightly sullen and plainly disinterested woman in pants and white shirt and a bow tie and a short black jacket to come over and take her order for a shot of Herradura and a Bud draft. There was a folded menu and she picked it up and read it. Good thing she was on the pill. But who knew if he had genital herpes? Cops could catch things, too. She’d been tested for HIV four times. She thought she’d have some chicken wings. She looked up at the lady in the black jacket who was pouring the shot.

“Are these wings hot?” she said.

The bartender got a cold glass mug and gave her a shrug and pulled the handle on the tap.

“So-so,” she said. “I’ve got Tabasco.”

“Good. Let me have some wings, please,” Anjalee said.

The bartender brought the shot and the beer and set them down on some coasters and pushed them in front of Anjalee. She picked up a phone and said the order into it and hung it back up. She went over to the cash register and turned to look back and said: “You want to start a tab?”

“You can just put it on my room.”

“What’s your room number?”

Anjalee looked at her dumbly and shook her head.

“Why hell, lady, I done forgot. Let me see.”

Shit. The key card was in her purse somewhere, in a little paper thing. And the cops had gone through everything in there but had put it all back in. All the money was in there. Good thing she didn’t have any grass on her, they’d have busted her ass for that. She pawed through it, pushing aside lipsticks, quarters and pennies, pieces of Juicy Fruit and Big Red.

“It’s in here somewhere,” she said without raising her head. She wondered if Lenny had ever come in. She could use a house phone and call up to the room after a while. Then she found the key card and pulled it out.

“Four oh seven,” she read aloud, and put it back in her purse.

The bartender did something at the register and it spit out a curling white piece of paper that she tore off and brought over with a pen for Anjalee to sign. Anjalee added a good tip and signed it and gave the pen and the paper back to her and picked up the beer and drank some of it. She was almost out of cigarettes, but she’d seen a machine in the entrance to the lobby.

“Can I get a piece of lemon, please?” she said. “And a salt shaker?”

The bartender didn’t say anything, just brought them over. Anjalee picked up the shot glass and sipped from it, then put some salt on the lemon wedge and sucked on it. She turned a little on her stool and looked at the fountain. She knew it was almost dark. She’d eat something and have a few drinks and see what happened. She’d get some cigarettes and call up to the room. She wondered again what in the hell had happened to Frankie. What did he mean going out of town and not letting her know? It was starting to look like she might never hear from him again. And would that be a bad thing if it happened? Probably not. As long as she could hang with Lenny until she could get back on her feet. Go back to her apartment. Try to get back to her drawing. Maybe write her mother a letter and try to send her some money. God knows she probably needed it, all those drunks hanging around.

She found her cigarettes and lit one and thought about Ronnie on top of her. Worthless little son of a bitch. It seemed like she was meeting a lot of them. And you could find plenty of them in Mississippi, you didn’t need to come all the way to Memphis to find some more. More than anything she was giddy with relief to be away from the police without getting locked up. She didn’t want to think about what it would be like if she were doing that now, sitting in a concrete cell with a stainless-steel toilet and some bars on the door, wearing a jumpsuit, instead of being in here, in this nice place, having a leisurely smoke and a cold beer and a shot, waiting for some wings that might need just a little Tabasco.

Two older guys in suits came in and sat four or five stools down from her. Their suits looked expensive and their black shoes were shiny and they had heads of graceful silvering hair. Rings on their fingers and they were tanned. The bartender immediately smiled at them and went over and one of them said something she laughed at. She seemed to have a great personality almost instantly now, kind of a Dr. Jekyll thing. Then he said something to the other guy and they all three laughed. They had to be regular customers, but Anjalee could tell that they also had money. And that caused people to be nice to you. She’d seen plenty of that and not just here.

She turned her face away from them and looked at the mirror behind the bar. She was trying to tell if she looked like she’d just gotten fucked, but she couldn’t tell. What were you supposed to look like after you’d just gotten fucked? She guessed if it had been good you would look contented, but she didn’t look contented, not even to herself.

That fucking Frankie. She looked around to see if there was a house phone in the bar but she didn’t see one. She could ask the waitress. Bartender. Whatever she was. If she ever got through flirting with the two old rich guys.

Anjalee watched her. She was making their drinks now. The two men were talking in low voices, maybe business, she figured. Anjalee looked to see what they were getting just because she liked to know what was going on around her. The bartender filled two crystal glasses with large ice cubes from a scoop and picked up a bottle of Beefeater and made a gin and tonic and added a twist of lime. She poured two shots of Johnny Walker into the other glass and put the drinks on napkins and served them. Then she leaned her arms on the back of the bar and pushed some of the hair away from her face and kept talking to the two old guys.

Anjalee looked around. She sipped at her beer and sipped at the Herradura. She didn’t like sitting by herself right now. It would be nice if Lenny would walk in. She could give him a kiss in front of these people and let them see that she had somebody. But would it do to tell him the cops had picked her up? She hadn’t been able to have any deep conversation with him just yet, just some really satisfying, energetic sex. No telling where he was now. Resting maybe.

Then she saw the two old guys looking at her. She took a drag off her smoke and thumped her ashes into an ashtray and gave them a look of cool appraisal. Then she glanced away. She could hear murmuring. The murmuring sounded to her kind of like maybe one of the old guys was asking the bartender who she was. The bartender murmured something back, sounded kind of like: “I don’t know, she just came in.”

The old guy said something else. Anjalee sipped at her beer. She wondered what Christmas was going to be like up here if she stayed. Not worth a shit probably. Now that the cops had turned her loose, she didn’t have to leave. And she didn’t know if her probation officer would let her leave the state or not. She’d still have to see him sometime, unless she just took off and didn’t look back. And would they send somebody to look for her if she did? Did the Memphis Police Department really care if they had one less ho who worked the strip clubs in the city? Back at her place she had a small fake tree that she hadn’t decorated yet, hadn’t even taken it out of the box. It was only two feet tall. She’d been planning on getting Frankie a few things with the money he’d paid her, and inviting him over to open presents, hoping that maybe he’d have a few little things for her. They didn’t have to be anything big. She would have been satisfied with something little. She’d thought about baking a ham and maybe trying her hand at making some potato salad. She could have gotten a can of cranberry sauce. All you had to do was stick that son of a bitch in the refrigerator for a while and then open both ends and push it out on a plate and slice it up. She could have stuffed some eggs and used red-hot sauce the way her daddy used to do, another dim memory now recalled. That would have been almost like a real Christmas dinner. Now the lousy fuck wasn’t even around to fuck.

She’d managed to ask Ronnie if she could go back to her apartment after he got through with her and he’d asked her why was she asking him. This was while he was wiping himself off with a moist towelette, which he then wadded up and threw out the window, possibly for some other city employee to have to pick up with a nail on a stick.

She wanted to get to her place. Her probation officer seemed to be a pretty decent guy and she thought she could explain to him how it happened with Miss Barbee and Mr. T.J., but she didn’t know if they’d send her back to the old folks’ home now or not. She didn’t really want to go back there if she could get out of it. If there was some other place where she could go and do her community service, even if it was cleaning a building or something, she thought she’d rather have that. She didn’t want to think about the possibility that Miss Barbee had killed Miss Doobis or maybe Mr. Pasternak because what kind of a monster would want to hurt a sweet old person like that who in all likelihood was somebody’s daddy or mama? And as soon as she thought that, she remembered the slap and what it had sounded like and knew what kind of a monster it took. Miss Barbee looked like she was about half man.

“Hi there.”

She turned her head. She had her legs crossed. One of the old guys was standing next to her, holding his drink. He had one hand in his pocket and his suit was black with thin lines of silver in it.

“Hey,” she said.

He extended a tanned hand. Super-clean nails. A deep old scar, perhaps a burn, perhaps shrapnel from a war, which one?

“Harv Pressman,” he said, deep voice, just distinguished as hell.

“Hi. I’m Anjalee,” she said, and shook his big warm safe-feeling hand. She was trying to figure his age. He was older but well preserved. But what was old? Sixty? Seventy? She didn’t know but she figured that to a ninety-eight-year-old facing ninety-nine, sixty-three looked pretty damn good. She didn’t think he was seventy yet.

“I don’t think you’re from here, Anjalee,” he said, and he smiled with nice white teeth that looked to be his. “Is that a little north Mississippi hill country I hear in your voice?”

“I reckon so,” she said, and stubbed out her smoke.

He set his drink on the bar and lifted one foot and put it on the rail that ran in front of their feet. He clasped one hand in the other like a casual lawyer about to interrogate somebody on the witness stand. She saw a fancy watch. He dressed like he had money.

“I’d guess Tupelo,” he said.

“Wrong.”

“But not far.”

“Not even the same county.”

“But not far.”

“Far enough.”

“New Albany.”

“Nope. Pontotoc. Actually Toccopola.”

“Did you go to school there?”

She picked up her beer and held it. She could tell that in his youth he’d been one hell of a handsome man. Even now he resembled an aging movie star. She looked at his hand and there was no wedding band on it. The rings he had were really nice. She wondered what he wanted. But that wasn’t hard to figure out. Same thing they all wanted.

“Nosir. We ain’t got a school there no more. A long time ago we had one, and Elvis played out there one time before anybody ever heard of him. I went to Miss LeAnne’s Academy of Curl in Tupelo for a while.”

“I think I’ve heard of it,” Harv Pressman said, and picked up his drink for a small sip. As he did so, she looked away for just a moment. His friend was talking to the bartender down there and he was massaging the back of her hand with one of his fingers. The conversation they were having was decidedly private.

“What else do you like to do?” Harv Pressman asked.

“Well.” Should she tell him? Why not? “I like drawin’,” Anjalee said.

“Oh. You’re into art.”

“Yeah. I really am.”

He seemed to be pretty interested, seemed to be waiting for her to go on, but Ronnie’s laughter in the dirty cop room was still a mocking echo in her ears. What did that asshole know about Elvis? What did he know about being sick of being poorer than anybody you knew and trying to get your ass out of it any way you could even if it meant selling it?

“And how does it go these days?”

She set the beer glass down and picked up the shot glass and drank the rest of the Herradura, picked up her lemon chunk, sucked it briefly. She didn’t care what it looked like. She’d never claimed to have a lot of class anyway.

“It don’t go too good sometimes,” she said. “I don’t seem to get around to it enough. I want to. But it seems like early in the mornins is the only time I can work. And I don’t see enough of those. I’m always up late.”