The Rabbit Factory: A Novel (30 page)

“It’s about three-thirty. I guess I better go.”

But Mister Arthur got up and didn’t answer him. He went after Miss Helen, and he disappeared down the hall. Eric heard him knocking on the bathroom door.

“Helen?” he yelled. He was knocking really hard.

Eric heard the muffled answer from behind the door.

“Go away. Leave me alone.”

“Open this door, Helen. I want to talk to you.”

“No,” she said dimly. And then she started yelling a bunch of stuff and Eric couldn’t make out what all she was saying. Then they were both yelling at the same time and he couldn’t make heads or tails out of what they were saying except that Mister Arthur was threatening to break the door down and she was yelling for him to go ahead and do it. Damn. Why in the hell didn’t he go on when he had the chance? He started looking around to see if he could find Jada Pinkett’s leash, and his jacket, because he was thinking about trying to sneak out while they were making all that noise and maybe then they wouldn’t notice him. But he didn’t know where the leash was, and he didn’t want to get up and start looking for it in case she came busting out of the bathroom and they brought their fight in here. He’d heard his mother and daddy fight like that before she’d left for good. Their fighting had gone on for years before she left. He guessed she just got tired of it. And he never had understood what it had all been about, except money sometimes, and his daddy’s drinking. And his daddy’s carousing. And the people he hung around with that she called worthless white trash. But he knew Mister Nub wasn’t like that. And the thing that killed Eric’s heart the worst was that she never had written him even after all this time. He knew where she was. She was in Seattle. She lived in some kind of a hippie commune, his daddy said. His daddy said she smoked dope and fucked hippies, and his constant comparing of Eric to his mother was another thing that had driven him away from home, that and the knowledge that his daddy was going to take Jada Pinkett out behind the barn and blow a hole in his brain just like all the other dogs he’d seen him do it to all his life. For different reasons. For being too old. For being too weak or too skinny or even for being just one of too many to feed that week. He wished now he could have told Mister Arthur all that. But there hadn’t been time. And now maybe there never would be. He was still screaming at her and she was still screaming at him and the next thing that happened was something he could hardly believe.

Mister Arthur broke the door down.

There was a moment of silence.

And then a long bloodcurdling scream like you’d hear somebody make in a horror movie and something that sounded like a roar from Mister Arthur.

“Come on, Jada Pinkett,” he said, but Jada Pinkett only stretched out under the coffee table again and put his head down on his paws.

“What have you been doing!?” Arthur screamed. “Whore!”

And he heard Miss Helen start crying. And then, amazingly, she ran out of the hall, holding her arms over her lovely naked breasts, which were bobbing delightfully, and she ran up the stairs. And up there the door slammed.

Gosh damn. He sipped at his drink. The credits were rolling on
Shane.
Then a commercial came on, Miss Cleo selling fortunes. Mister Arthur came walking around the corner like a zombie, shuffling his feet in his house shoes, not picking them up even an inch, and he walked slowly to the couch and sat down with his hands between his knees. He didn’t even seem to notice Eric. But he must not have forgotten that he was sitting there either. He turned his face and looked at him. It took him a long time to say anything. There were slamming noises coming from above. Eric could hear faint cussing, too.

“She’s got suck marks on her,” Mister Arthur said. “Hickies.”

Eric was struck too dumb to say anything at all. Mister Arthur turned his face back toward the TV screen, where somebody was selling Monster Hits from the Swinging Eighties. He watched the ad for a while.

“And I didn’t put them there,” Mister Arthur said to the television.

“I guess I better go,” Eric said. “Looks like y’all need some privacy.”

“Suck marks,” Mister Arthur said again. “About five or six maybe.”

“I was just lookin’ for his leash,” Eric said, getting up, wondering where in the hell he’d left it lying, wishing there was some more light in here, but not wanting to turn one on, because he could hear the old man crying now, and he didn’t want to look at him, and he truly hated himself for ever putting his arms around her and letting her do that to him.

About that time a loaded suitcase came flying down the stairs and tumbled over a few times and came to a halt. Mister Arthur turned his head and sniffled and looked at it.

“That’s her luggage,” he said, like a question.

“Yeah. I was just huntin’ his leash. Have you, uh…”

“I guess she’s leaving,” he said. “Is she leaving?”

“I don’t know,” Eric said, and stopped. “I was just—”

Then a small bag flew down.

Then a medium-size one.

And then she herself came down, hair brushed, clothes changed, wearing a long black coat with a scarf around her throat, looking in her purse. She appeared to be enraged.

Mister Arthur stood up. “Where you going?” he said. “You’re drunk.”

She stopped right in front of him. “You damn right I’m drunk! I’m getting the fuck out of here! I’m taking the Jag and I’m getting some money out of the ATM! You can do what you want to with this house! I’m going back to Montana! Where you found me!”

“Where you fucked everybody in Missoula!” Mister Arthur shouted. And she started picking up her bags. They must have been pretty heavy because she looked like she was having a hard time with them. Eric didn’t know whether to try and help her with them or what because Mister Arthur was just standing there. He looked like he was getting mad.

“Okay, Helen,” he said, and his voice had begun to shake with anger. “If that’s what you want to do. Just leave me. Then get the hell on out.”

“I
will,”
she said, and pulled the strap for the small bag over her shoulder. “Eric, will you please help me get the fuck out of here before I scream?”

He looked at Mister Arthur. Mister Arthur looked extremely pissed. But he turned his head slowly and nodded slightly at him.

“Go ahead and help her if you want to, Eric. If she wants to go, she can go right now.”

And he sat down on the couch but turned his face back toward Helen for a moment. He looked really pissed. “You can just forget about getting anything for Christmas this year,” he said.

The lady put them in an elegant upstairs room whose back doors opened onto a fine wood gallery that overlooked a brick courtyard like those you’d find in New Orleans. The furniture looked so old that Merlot was almost scared to sit on it. It was still plenty early enough to go out, not even close to dark yet, so they locked their room with the key the lady had given them and took off down the sidewalk and it was only about thirty minutes before they were in the casino, which was basically a big floating boat that was moored in the Mississippi River by two very thick ropes that were hooked to the bank. It had a wide gangway, a huge parking lot, and buses gladly ferried suckers back and forth twenty-four/seven, even on Christmas, even on Christmas Eve, Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, Rosh Hashanah.

Inside it was lit brightly and there was music playing and people talking and bells were going off and all manner of folks were walking around, old ladies with bad legs on walkers and slick young pomaded dudes with girls on their arms, people in muddy overalls who looked like they’d just stepped from a cotton field, and probably had, security people in good suits, semiprofessional gamblers out of Vegas with flashy diamond/gold rings and gold chains around their necks, retirees up from Florida in print shirts and berets, a wide mixture of humanity, all come to be happy in risking their money in the hope that they might not lose what they already had but instead hit the big jackpot and get some more.

Merlot couldn’t get over how loud it was. There were no windows or clocks. Penelope bought twenty dollars’ worth of quarters right away and got a free beer and started playing the progressive slot machines with an intensity Merlot found a little bit scary. She got to where she would hardly even talk to him. Once in a while she’d hit for twenty or thirty dollars and the quarters would come rolling out and she’d put them in a large plastic cup that she pulled from the stacks of them that sat on each side of each machine. And there were a lot of machines. Bells were ringing everywhere, lights flashing, skimpily dressed girls with short dresses and net stockings and push-up bras carrying around trays of free drinks.

Pretty soon she had a couple of cups half full of quarters and when she started betting fifty cents at a time, he told her he was going to walk around for a while and see what was happening. She just nodded and kept playing.

He stopped a cashier and gave her a twenty and got some dollar tokens and went over to the bar where a country & western band was doing covers of Merle and Waylon. He hated like hell that Waylon died. He got the bartender to give him a beer and tipped him one of the tokens and started playing the poker machines in a row in front of him. He kept looking around. He hadn’t said a word to her yet about Candy. And they’d probably be back at his house before tomorrow night. She was getting really insistent about seeing where he lived and he knew there was no good reason why he shouldn’t be able to take her over there. No reason that she’d be able to understand anyway.

There was some older lady a few machines down and she was playing the same kind of machine he was on. She wasn’t winning anything and he wasn’t either. Not for a while. Then he got to playing five-card stud and won a little. He punched the Pay button and when the quarters rolled out, the old lady turned to him and leaned over. She had glasses thicker than his and she had several black and decayed teeth. A nearly toothless hag.

“You like it. Don’t ye?” she said, and he nodded.

“Oh yeah.”

He went back by and checked on Penelope one time and she was still playing, but she was losing now and pissed off and was feeding the machine very slowly and had gone back to betting a quarter at a time.

“How much were you up?” he said.

“Shit, baby. Almost two hundred one time.” She stopped one of the cashier carts and gave the lady another twenty-dollar bill for a roll of quarters.

“I think I need to move to another machine.”

Merlot stood there and watched her for a while. He clinked together some of the dollar tokens he had left in his hand. Idly, without half looking, he shoved a token into one of the dollar slot machines just across from her and pulled the handle.

“You still want to go back to the place for dinner?” he said.

She said something but he couldn’t hear it because it was lost in the sudden scream of sirens. He looked at his machine. All the lights were going off on it and three cherries were lined up in the glass and the machine started going
BONGBONGBONGBONGBONGBONGBONGBONGBONG!
and spewing dollar tokens into the tray with a steady clicking noise and while he stood there stunned they filled up the tray and started spilling over onto the floor. All around him people were looking at him and pointing and shouting and smiling. Some casino officials were coming toward them. They were smiling, too.

The machine finally ran out of its coins and stopped spewing them out but by then they were scattered all over the flowery carpet and the machine kept binging and somebody came over with a street broom and started pushing them into a pile for him.

“I still can’t believe you won twenty-seven hundred,” she said.

It
was
pretty hard to believe. But the cashier’s check from the casino was lying right over there on the dresser next to his car keys and wallet and change. They’d already taken out the state and federal income taxes. She yawned.

“What you gonna do with all that money?” she said.

“I was thinking about getting me a dog,” he said, just kidding.

“Oh,” she said, drowsy, almost asleep. “My mamaw had one when I was little. The meanest thing. I was scared to death of that dog the whole time I was growing up. I used to have nightmares about it.”

That worried Merlot, to hear that she’d had nightmares about a dog, of all things. He’d never had a nightmare about a dog.

“Oh yeah?”

The flames flickered in the grate. Little shadows were moving around on the walls. A car passed, down the street. He held on to her, listening to their breathing. Nearly silent. So drowsy in the soft pillowy bed with its thick white sheets and mattress. So good. So warm. So sleepy.

“Aw yeah. It got old and got to where it couldn’t walk and just drug itself around and my mamaw wouldn’t have nobody shoot it.” She snuggled closer to him and he touched the side of her face with his cheek.

That worried him even more, to hear her talk so casually about somebody
shooting
a
dog.
He wondered again if that gun of hers was loaded and why she thought she needed to bring it along with them. He hated to say anything about it. She was a cop, yeah, but why did she need it with him?

“So what do you think about dogs now?” he said, listening carefully in the dark.

But she never did give him an answer because she was already asleep and beginning to snore very lightly, a gentle hmm…hmm…hmm…