The Rabbit Factory: A Novel (28 page)
Read The Rabbit Factory: A Novel Online
Authors: Larry Brown
M
iss Muffett in her gown and robe almost broke down and cried when she saw the kitchen floor and the great-room carpet. There was mud in slick trails, and little muddy dog footprints were scattered around. She knew she didn’t have the energy to try and clean it all up tonight. She would have to get down on her hands and knee to clean it, and she just wasn’t up for it. So she went into the great room and mixed herself another drink.
She sat on the couch and wondered if maybe it was time for her to move on. She was tired of being alone with the dog but not actually
with
the dog. It might have been different if he would be just a little friendly and be some company for her. And she didn’t have any idea where her leg could be. She sat there and got sadder and sadder and sipped her drink. It didn’t seem fair for a dog to be able to do something like this to a person. He didn’t even know what he was doing. He didn’t have any idea what he was doing. He had it made and he didn’t even know it. He had a warm place to sleep and plenty of food to eat, and he didn’t appreciate any of it. All he knew how to do was shit on the floor and make a mess. Show somebody his teeth. Make more work for her.
That was when she heard what sounded like splashing in the tub upstairs. She raised her head and looked at the ceiling. It sounded like a five-pound bass flopping around up there. Then she remembered. She’d forgotten to pull the drain plug when she got out of it. Just one more thing she’d have to clean now. Didn’t he care? Couldn’t he see that she had only one leg?
H
elen was in a dark room on a water bed covered with some dirty cotton sheets and she was naked below the waist. She saw shapes, shelves, things on the walls. Her shoes were off and her head was on a pillow. He was gripping the tops of her thighs with his warm hands. Her sweater was open and one of her breasts was exposed, the bra on that side pushed down under her breast. It was too hot in the room, and he was burrowing with his mouth like a mole at the junction of her thighs. But it felt too good to do anything but just lie there and take it.
She reached out a hand and touched his hair. It was too dark to see much. She licked with her tongue around her dry lips. She thought she’d been asleep. She cleared her throat.
“That’s good,” she said. “That’s…yeah.” And she trailed off in a sigh.
There was some faint music playing somewhere, so low that she couldn’t even tell what it was. More Barry Manilow probably. Some of her hair was in her face and she pushed it away. She reached to the catch in front of her bra and undid it, and pulled the two sides away, and let them lie beneath the edges of her sweater, let her breasts lie at ease. She hated to have to wear a bra. She was beginning to remember now as she looked at the ceiling.
Oh fuck. What damn time was it?
“Ken?” she said.
He didn’t answer. He just made some pleasurable sound in his throat and kept doing what he was doing. She knew she was very drunk. She knew that much. She thought she must have gone to sleep for a while.
All those drinks. They fucked you up over the long run. It was fun at first, when everything was happy and warm and there was music and people to talk to, and then, if you kept sitting there drinking long enough, you started to feel a little sad, and a little sorry for yourself, and you started to feel lonely. And if you were talking to somebody, then you might start telling things that you might not have told if you hadn’t been drinking. You began to confide, is what you began to do. You began to tell about your unhappiness if you had some. And she remembered that happening with Ken. Again. Even after she’d told herself she wasn’t going to with him again. He had listened to her, agreeing, taking her side, touching her hand. And then he had kissed her on the mouth in a room somewhere in the hotel, behind the bar, after it was already very late. He had unzipped her sweater and pulled her breasts free of the bra and had sucked on her nipples very hard, so hard she’d been afraid he was going to cause her to have some hickies, and he might have. And then he had driven her here. Back to his place. She’d have to look later. She’d have to lock the door to the bathroom, where Arthur couldn’t see, when she got home and check herself for hickies. She couldn’t let Arthur see. He’d get mad. But wasn’t she going to divorce him anyway?
She twisted her fingers through his hair and sighed deep in her chest. She held his head and moved her legs languidly, searching for the best position. It was too late now to worry anymore about Eric. Too late to worry about what time it was. Too late to think about how embarrassing it was to be taken to jail in handcuffs. Too late to think about those dead babies they’d made her look at.
“Ken,” she said. “Make me come again ’cause I’ve got to go.”
A
njalee was sitting on a sleek leather couch in Harv’s den and he had his stereo going at a nice listening level, not too loud. He had a really nice place and he hadn’t been wrong about the steaks. She’d never known that a T-bone could be that tender. She was full, comfortable, and a little bit sleepy. But she wasn’t quite ready to go to sleep. Not yet.
He wanted to go over to her place sometime and see her drawings and she was nervous about it. Frankie had been to her place only a time or two and never had said anything about any of them, had only turned on the television and plopped down on the couch and called for a drink. She thought of Christmas with another tinge of regret. But there wasn’t anything she could do about that. Not unless she wanted to go all the way home and have Christmas there. But she already knew what that would be like. Her mother would have some man over at her trailer. He’d be divorced or maybe even still married. Maybe he’d have a stubble of beard or bad breath or a pot gut or a human bite mark on his nose, and she again wouldn’t be able to understand why her mother had spent almost her whole life fucking a bunch of losers. She wished she could have known her daddy better, longer. He was such a dim memory. She knew he’d been a real good man. Her mother had said it enough times: Honey, your daddy was a real good man.
She was still worried about not getting in touch with Lenny before she left the hotel. She hoped he wasn’t mad, because she didn’t want to blow a possible good thing with him. What was she doing with Harv anyway? Lately could she not stick with one man for more than a few days at a time?
She heard him coming out of the bathroom. He walked into the den and took his coat off and dropped it onto a chair. Who was it he looked like? Was it Cesar Romero? Errol Flynn?
“I love your place,” she said. “Who’s that you got on the stereo?”
“Patty Griffin,” he said. “It’s her new record. Isn’t she great?”
“She’s mighty good. I can’t believe I’ve never heard of her,” she said. “But I guess you can’t keep up with everything.”
“I guess not. I can make some coffee if you want some after a while. There’s some brandy here. Or I could make you a drink.”
He ducked his head for a second to start loosening his tie and she could see that he had no bald spot. His hair looked as strong as a twenty-year-old’s, only flowing silver. She wondered what kind of shape the rest of him was in.
“I might have a drink,” she said.
“It’s right here,” he said, going over to a little cart where there were some bottles and a small tub of ice he’d brought from the kitchen earlier. He took the knot out of his tie and pulled on one end of it and slid it from his collar. “I know you like bourbon. I’ve got Maker’s, Crown, Wild Turkey. What would you like?”
“Maker’s on the rocks is fine.”
He folded the tie and put it on top of the stereo and started fixing her drink. It wasn’t that late, only a little after ten. She watched him pour the bourbon over the ice and then he walked over with it.
“I’m sorry I don’t have any cocktail napkins,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said. “This is fine.”
Suddenly she didn’t know what to say. He was just so fucking
distinguished.
He looked like he could be president of a university or something like that. Maybe a bank.
“You want to get stoned?” he said. “I’ve got some good grass.”
She took a sip and smiled at him.
“I’d love to. Mine’s back at my place.”
“Okay. I’ll be right back.”
He went past her and touched her briefly on the shoulder and walked into the kitchen. She heard him opening a drawer.
She hadn’t told him anything about her recent troubles. For some reason she’d felt it wouldn’t be the right thing to do. He still seemed a little mysterious and when she’d asked him about what he did for a living, he had said only that he dabbled in this and that. Which could mean almost anything. There were some nice paintings on his walls and pictures of him holding big fish that had come from some ocean.
He came back in and sat down beside her and handed her a tiny green glass pipe and some brown weed that smelled pretty good when she opened the top of the bag. She set her drink down on the coffee table and loaded it and got her lighter from beside her cigarettes and fired the bowl up and took a hit. She handed him the lighter and the pipe and held the smoke in for a few seconds, then blew it out. He fired the bowl up and took a hit that made the little pile of marijuana glow red. He blew a plume of smoke toward the ceiling. He handed the pipe and the lighter back but she smiled at him to let him know she was fine and set them back on the coffee table. He patted her on the hand. He let it rest there and she was glad to feel it. Then for a few minutes they just listened to the singing in the darkened living room. Anjalee leaned back. She didn’t want to be alone tonight. She could tell Lenny just about anything she wanted to once she saw him again. If she did. Who knew if she would, even though he’d given her money and said in the note that he’d hook back up? Who’d have thought that Frankie would just up and disappear?
But maybe he’d decided to dump her and this was just his way, to stop coming around, to stop calling, to stop coming by Gigi’s Angels.
Harv was listening to the music. And then her cell phone rang. Just once because she reached into her purse and cut it off. She didn’t know who could be calling unless it was Moe, and she didn’t want to talk to him right now.
“I’m not gonna answer that,” she said. He just nodded.
It was driving her nuts who he looked like, but she couldn’t think who it was. Hopalong Cassidy? One of our cowboy heroes. She couldn’t help herself. She leaned to him and kissed him full on the mouth. His hand went naturally to her breast and cupped it, and her hair swung down beside her face and she put her other hand on his chest. She kissed him some more without taking her mouth away from his and reached lower and found something about the size of a Jimmy Dean smoked sausage in his pants.
“Hot damn,” she said. “Where’s the bedroom?”
I
t was cloudy and overcast outside and looking like more snow but warm inside the Four-Runner, which they were both almost ready to buy since it was so nice. Merlot had already mentioned maybe trying to trade in the minivan on it once they got all the bullet holes fixed. They’d loaded up on pancakes and sausage and eggs at a Waffle House just outside Mathiston and had gotten back on the Trace there. He said they’d have to get off the Trace for a short while near Jackson since it disappeared for a stretch there, but that he’d catch it again at Ridgeland, and then it would be a straight shot on down to Natchez. They’d already passed through Kosciusko and he thought it was about an hour to Jackson from there, and then probably about two more hours or a little more to Natchez. Which would put them in there early. They’d have plenty of time to stop for a good lunch somewhere, and could take their time eating. They listened to music as they drove.
The land beside the road was sometimes filled with woods, sometimes fields where hay had been cut and baled in large round bales and covered with rolls of either black or white plastic, and set in straight rows. Or she saw farms with red barns and neat brick houses where the fields were filled with the dead stalks of the fall’s crop. Corn. Cows. Once in a while some horses. There was not much traffic. Sometimes they saw creeks and there were deer feeding openly beside the road in places and she even saw a small one that had spots. She was still a little apprehensive, and didn’t really know why, only that she was. She was already getting a bit hungry but hadn’t said anything about it because she didn’t want him to think she ate too much. She wasn’t starving or anything. She just wanted maybe a Coke and a candy bar to tide her over until lunch. Or some Nabs. She decided she’d wait a while longer before she said anything. He didn’t eat as much as she did. Or as often. She couldn’t help it, she liked food. But he didn’t seem to mind her size. It was just the reverse. He’d told her she was his dream come true, big hipped and big breasted. He’d said that the women in all those old paintings you saw in museums were built like her, that the old masters knew what a good woman was supposed to look like naked.
Merlot pointed.
“Look at those turkeys.”
She looked but didn’t see them. They rode in silence for a while. The highway was clean now with only scraps of white that lay in the shady places along the sides of the road. She remembered snow from when she was growing up and having snowball fights with her grandmother, who would go out every evening in the summer into the little garden she kept and pick some peppers for her supper, tiny curled and wrinkled green things that would bring tears to Penelope’s eyes, but which her grandmother would munch calmly along with her corn bread and buttermilk and fatback.
If she hadn’t given her baby away, she wouldn’t have wound up here today, with this man, going to spend the night in the oldest house in Mississippi. If DeWayne had been willing to marry her, it might have turned out different. She might not even be a police officer.
She was going to have to call sometime and see what they’d found out about Perk. She was going to have to know. If he was dead, it was going to be hard to deal with. She couldn’t believe that guy had gotten away from Rico. Everybody knew Rico was a bad son of a bitch. The only soft spot he had in him was for Perk.
“What else you got to listen to?” Merlot said.
“I’ve got some more back here,” she said, and reached back between the seats and into her bag for her CD case without unfastening her seat belt. It was a little black zippered box that held ten discs. She put it in her lap and opened it up.
“What about Al Green? You got any Al?” Merlot said.
“I did have but he got to skipping. Let me see what else I’ve got.”
She looked.
“I’ve got Lightnin’ Hopkins,” she said.
“Stop right there,” Merlot said.
They’d been listening to mixed Motown and she pushed the button to eject it. She got Lightnin’ out and pushed him into the player. Guitar strokes like bolts of velvet lightning started throbbing up in the Four-Runner.
They rode with the music for a while and she watched the land go by. She watched the curves go by and sometimes she saw roadside stands where pumpkins or vegetables had been sold, but now they were empty and deserted, lightless and abandoned until next year. There were small windmills for sale in yards, draft horses in pens beside the highway. Once she saw a
DEER CROSSING
sign, a black deer in silhouette outlined against bright yellow. But in a way she didn’t really see any of it. Things passed that she didn’t notice.
She wanted to see Gabriel again, that was what she wanted, to hold him, or if that wasn’t possible, to maybe just stand somewhere at a distance and be able to watch him for a while. Like at his high school graduation, wherever he was. He could be anywhere. He could be in Louisiana. Or Texas. Or Wisconsin. Or Florida. Anywhere. Maybe even overseas. She’d checked already, lots of times, but hadn’t been able to find out anything. The records had been sealed, they’d told her. She’d signed a bunch of papers, but she didn’t remember now what-all they said. There were so many of them, and she’d been crying so much she had wet all the pages. Smeared the ink with her signature. Maybe she wouldn’t ever see him again. How was she going to know? What if he was sick? What if whoever had him was mean to him? How would she ever find that out? What did she ever give him up for? Other girls raised their babies by themselves. Or with the help of their mothers. If they had mothers who were around. Or sisters. Or aunts. Or grandmothers. And her mamaw had begged her not to do it, had come to the hospital and told her she’d take it and raise it until Penelope was out of school and had a job and was able to take care of it herself. But she’d been so confused. And so embarrassed. And so scared. And so young. You could make a mistake when you were young and then it would follow you around for the rest of your life. She wanted to tell Merlot. She was going to tell Merlot. But she wanted to wait until the time was right. If he really loved her, maybe he’d help her find out what had happened to her baby. He was smart. He’d been to college. Hell, he taught at a college. Maybe together they could find him. Was that too much to hope for?
“How much longer you think it’ll take?” she said.
Merlot reached up and turned Lightnin’ down some.
“We’ll be there in a couple more hours. We’ll stop and eat some lunch somewhere. You getting hungry?”
“I could use a snack.”
“We’ll get you one next place we see.”
She reached out and put her hand on his arm.
“I like going places with you.”
Merlot smiled and she watched his eyes.
“I can stop at the next town and find a gas station and get you a snack to tide you over if you want,” he said. “A hot dog or something till we can get to a place for lunch.”
“That’d be great,” she said.
That made her happy and she settled back in her seat. The nameless worries she’d had earlier had about gone away now. She was looking forward to seeing where he lived when they got back, what he had in his house, what his yard looked like. He’d tried to describe it. He’d said it was lovely in the summer when the leaves were on the trees.
After a while she got sleepy and closed her eyes, reached for the knob on the side of the seat, and leaned it back. She kept listening to the music and Merlot kept driving. It was absolutely wonderful being off with him. Once in a while the sun broke through and she could feel it through her eyelids.