The Rabbit Factory: A Novel (8 page)

They kissed more. She rubbed him some but he was as flaccid as a dead flounder.

“You feeling anything?” she said.

“Maybe so…I think maybe…it feels…it feels like…almost…”

“You think we can do something?”

“I hope so. I sure would like to.”

“I would, too. I’m about to go crazy.”

“I know you are.”

They wound up in the bedroom, and the same thing happened, and this time she did cry. He went downstairs and had a cup of butterscotch pudding in the dark, watching somebody on the Discovery Channel digging up a woolly mammoth with the sound low so as not to wake Eric or the pit bull sleeping beside him, whose name, they’d found out, was Jada Pinkett.

He went back to the dry water pan and licked the inside of it. Then he lay down on the rug next to the desk and ran his pink tongue out.

He was still for a long time, his eyes closed almost to slits. He lay with his back legs splayed out and his head between his front paws. He turned his head at something, maybe a ghost, then sat up and with his hind foot scratched at the ribbon around his neck.

For a long time, he lay looking at the door. Once something passed, out in the hall, and his ears perked up, then lowered again. He got back down on his belly and watched the door, his chin on the floor. He had sad eyes.

But that didn’t last long. He got up and walked around the room again. The windows dripped with melting snow outside. He jumped back up on the window seat and watched it come down on the other side of the glass. He licked at it.

Finally he went back to the door and sat down in front of it and barked. Then he got up on his feet and started barking and growling at the same time, lunging at the door. From outside the room there came the faint voice of somebody yelling for him to shut the hell up. Maybe he took that for encouragement. He barked for quite a while, maybe as long as three or four minutes. But there was no other voice to either encourage or impede him. After a while he just slowed down and stopped on his own.

He went back to the water pan. Then he jumped back up on the window seat and stood on his hind legs and gnawed at one of the pieces of wood that trimmed the glass panes. There was the small sound of his tiny teeth knocking against the glass. He chewed steadily, and slivers of wood began to fall away from the window. Specks of paint began to gather on the window-seat cushion.

Maybe he got tired because sometimes he stopped and rested. Once when he stopped, he barked a single bark that sounded almost like a question. Then he went back to gnawing again.

Splinters were coming out now. He kept at it. Finally he seized a piece of wood in his teeth and tore it off at the joint. Now there was a small gap in the glass. Cool wind eased through it in a trickle and touched his nose. There were sounds and smells from the outside world leaking in.

He bumped a glass pane with his head. It didn’t move. Out past the window a car pulled away from the house, going down the driveway, out onto the street. The little dog watched it go and wagged his tail happily a few times.

He looked left, he looked right. He looked at the water pan beneath the desk and then started gnawing on another piece of wood. Tiny pieces of paint started flaking off again. Some more splinters fell. Somebody watching might even have said that he seemed to know what he was doing, such a busy little beaver he was.

She hadn’t checked on the little dog, but if he could bark he was okay. She knew she’d have to let him out of there eventually, let him go to the bathroom out in the yard. The thing about it was that he wouldn’t mess in Mr. Hamburger’s study, of all places. That was the only place in the whole house where he wouldn’t mess. She got her pistol and locked the house and got in the car and pulled out of the driveway and headed up the street, toward the interstate. He never called anyway. He wouldn’t even know she was gone.

She wanted to talk to some men and see if maybe somebody would want to have a little fun with her tonight. If she did find somebody, she could tell whoever it was that she had a very nice house up at Como they could use, and that her boss was gone to Chicago again, and that he kept a well-stocked bar in the great room, and that it would be perfectly all right for them to have drinks in there before they did it and that they could even do it in there if he wanted to. It didn’t matter, wasn’t any big deal. The house and her vagina would be open to him, whoever he was. She had plenty of cash in her purse for drinks to lubricate likely candidates.

She drove over the railroad tracks out to the overpass and it wasn’t snowing anymore. She didn’t pay any attention to the mobile home that was sitting about sixty feet in the air on some steel girders at Moore’s Mobile Homes but turned left on the other side of the bridge, got onto the ramp, and merged with the traffic flowing north on I-55. It took her about fifteen minutes to get to Senatobia, where the junior college was. She turned off at the ramp, slowing down since it was marked
30 MPH
on a yellow sign.

At the end of the ramp, she stopped and looked both ways. A pickup was coming from the east, and she had to wait for it. When it passed, she saw that there were a couple of young men with beards in it. They had on red hats and orange vests. There were guns in a rack behind the seat. Deer hunters. She wondered where they hung out to drink beer. She started to follow them but didn’t, just turned right on Highway 4 and eased her foot down on the gas pedal. She went past a few houses with redbrick siding and then over some hills of pastureland. Soggy cows were standing around waiting for somebody to feed them. There were some wet fields that had long been picked clean of cotton, and a big green tractor with a Bush Hog and a flat was sitting at the end of one of them. Then there were some woods and some patches of kudzu that had turned brown after the first frost. She turned her headlights on.

There were some serious woods on up the road a ways. It was kind of like going through a tunnel in part of it, because the trees were thick on each side and the limbs hung low, and they were ragged and torn, she suspected from the tall trucks that barreled through this road all the time, taking a shortcut between Highway 7 and I-55.

She didn’t meet a whole lot of traffic. There were a few houses scattered here and there, mostly pretty run-down affairs with cars parked in muddy yards, dim yellow lights showing through the windows where plastic was tacked. Then some more woods. She passed one store. It was closed, windows knocked out, rusted shopping carts out front.

And then she saw it. It was set back in a grove of dark pines but there was a light over the front door. She slowed, put on her blinker, and turned in. About ten pickups and one van were sitting in the parking lot. It looked like every one of the pickups had a gun or two in a rack behind the seat. There were probably some dead deer lying in the backs of some of them. The sign over the door said
PINES LOUNGE
. There was advertised on another sign a catfish special with all the trimmings on Friday nights for $8.95, all you could eat, looked like a deal if their hush puppies were any good.

But since it was Wednesday, they weren’t eating any catfish when she stepped inside the dim room. Instead there was a popcorn smell like a movie theater lobby, with Johnny Horton doing “When It’s Springtime in Alaska” on the jukebox. It had great speakers, sounded like a taped-live Johnny Horton concert. There was a long bar with bottles of beer and drinks scattered up and down it, and stools scattered around as well. There was a place in the song where the girls singing backup did this thing with their voices lilting high that made a chill run up Miss Muffett’s spine. Some unshaven guy in a wheelchair and a hospital gown and black nylon socks sat near a table, his shaking fingers holding a cigarette jittering smoke while his other shaking fingers lifted a full shot glass to his lips. There were a bunch of men in muddy brown overalls and camouflage coveralls and red-checkered wool jackets and Carhartt jackets, and some of them had camouflage caps on their heads. Some of them hadn’t shaved in years. They were playing pinball machines and eating popcorn and barbecued pigskins and drinking beer and whiskey and smoking cigarettes and talking and yelling and laughing. A few of them quieted down and looked at her. Some wiseass in the back said something about strange. It looked like on first glance she was the only woman in there. Second glance, too. But she wasn’t worried. She thought she might have hit paydirt. It had taken her only about thirty-two minutes to get over here and that was pretty incredible. She had left the quiet confines of the big house where she spent so much time alone and now she was with some living breathing people, and not a dog that wouldn’t hang around her, or a boss who wouldn’t talk to her very much because of an accident he’d had that was not all her fault even if she
had
accidentally hit the throttle and caused the turning auger to wrap around the front of his pants, and she was going to have a drink or two, and she was going to talk to some of these men, and she was
going
to have a good time. She sat down on a stool.

They had Christmas lights hung up all over, which made the place seem cheery and homey and warm. She looked at some of the men. One of them was a tall handsome man with thick brown hair, in a long leather coat, and he was tethering a white hound on one of those dog reels by having the cord wrapped around one leg of his stool. He was smoking a thin cigarette and wearing dark green glasses and Miss Muffett saw suddenly that he had only one hand. He had to put his cigarette in the ashtray to take a sip of his drink. She wondered what had happened to him. Probably not a boat propeller.

There were quite a few stuffed deer heads hanging on the walls as well as some stuffed bass, some stuffed crappie, the head of an alligator, the head of a black something that looked kind of like a dog but wasn’t. It was a horrible-looking thing with long white snarly teeth. She opened her purse, wondering how she could break the ice with the nub guy. Except for the thing snarling down from the wall, it was a completely comfortable atmosphere and she wondered why she hadn’t done something like this before. The pinball machines were ringing and there was a layer of smoke up above the lights of the bar. She didn’t know for sure what she wanted to drink. She didn’t drink much. She wondered what the man with the nub was drinking. She looked but couldn’t tell.

A gray-haired but youthful-looking bartender with hefty biceps in a tight T-shirt saw her and picked up a coaster and walked over to her and put it down in front of her.

“Hey,” he said. “How you?”

Miss Muffett was startled by the blue in his eyes. It took her a moment to reply. His eyes looked like chips from a turquoise stone.

“Fine,” she said. “Just fine, thank you.”

“Good. What can I get for you this evenin’?”

He was mopping with a clean rag at the bar top, picking up a shaker or a bottle of ketchup, wiping at spilled salt. He looked up at her, his eyes a polite question. People with empty bottles and glasses were waiting for him to wait on them.

“I don’t know what I want,” she said. “How about a beer?”

“Sure. What kind?”

She didn’t know one beer from another. She never had paid any attention to beer. It was just beer. It said so right on the label, just like cooking oil.

“Hey, Scotty, bourbon and Coke down here?” some guy said.

“I’ll take another Miller when you get a chance,” another one said.

“Okay,” he said. “What kind of beer you want, lady?”

“Just any kind.”

“Just any kind?”

She nodded.

He didn’t act like he thought that was weird but merely got a mug from the back side of the bar and pulled down on a chrome lever and started filling it. Maybe she should have asked for a bourbon and Coke. She could always try that if she didn’t like the beer. Or what about a martini? They were supposed to knock you on your ass, weren’t they? She figured it might be easier to get picked up if she was sloppy drunk, so she wanted whatever would do the job. She eyed the one-handed man clandestinely. He was
so
handsome. The bartender was turning back to her. He brought the beer and set it down on the coaster.

“Dollar-fifty,” he said, and stood lingering impatiently. She paid him and tipped him a dollar and he thanked her and turned away. Then he started waiting on the other people.

Miss Muffett turned dreamily on her stool and listened to the music and started looking around. There were a bunch of guys in the back at a table, shooting pool. One of them had a ponytail that hung out the back of his cap where the little adjustable headband was. One fat guy in starched Duck Head overalls was Pavarotti with a larger beard.

She looked at the beer. She guessed she’d have to drink some of it. It was as dark as Coca-Cola and it had a thick and foamy brown head. She picked it up and took a sip from it. It was hard to keep from making a face because it tasted so incredibly bitter to her. Yuck City! When she looked up, the bartender was watching her. She smiled at him and took another drink. The second one made her gag. The bartender saw her and walked back over with a worried look on his face.

“You don’t like it, huh.”

“Hey, man. How about a Fighting Cock on the rocks over here?”

“Well…actually…no,” she said. “I think maybe I should just get a bourbon, maybe a bourbon and Coke…”

“A bourbon?”

“Yes.”

“Mind if I ask you a polite question?” He was smiling now.

“Why no.”

“You know any more about bourbon than you do about beer?”

It seemed that several people were listening to this conversation. They seemed to be waiting for what she was going to say next.

“Not really,” she said. “I don’t drink much.”

“You don’t?”

“No.”

He leaned in. “Is that beer bitter to you?”

“Well, yes, it is. A little. Actually, quite a lot. To me, anyway.”

“Some people have to develop a taste for beer.”

Somebody hollered: “Hey, Scotty, Schlitz and a Blatz and a Schmidt’s and a Schaeffer and a Rollin’ Rock?”

“Well, how do you ever develop a taste for it if it tastes so awful the first time you try it?” she said. “I mean, why would you want to keep trying it? That’s like getting beat up and enjoying it.”

The bartender laughed and put both hands on the bar.

“You want me to make you a drink that tastes real good?”

“That would be wonderful,” Miss Muffett said.

He cocked his head for her to tell him the truth.

“You aim to get drunk?”

“That’s what I came in here for,” Miss Muffett said.

“Fix her a lemon drop, Scotty,” one guy said.

“Naw, man, make her a sloe gin fizz,” another one said.

“I don’t know much about drinking,” she said to those around her in a general way. And then she saw the handsome one-handed dog man with the thick hair leaning against a wall and talking on the telephone, but the dog was still tied to the stool. She was able to watch him since he had his back turned to her. He looked somewhat mysterious in his long leather coat.

The people standing around her started leaning in toward her and giving her their names. There was Ricky and Ben and Joel and Matt and Michael and Mark and Traver and Keith and Horatio Potter who lived just down the road and trapped part-time. She asked Horatio what the snarling thing up on the wall was and he said it was a coy-dog he’d killed, a cross between a coyote and a dog, nasty sumbitch, wasn’t it?

Scotty brought a drink in a narrow glass with different colors: pink, yellow, white. It had two straws but no parasol. Perhaps a pink poo-poo?

“Here go. Lock them lips around this,” he said. “Scotty’s tsunami, on the house.”

“Why thank you,” Miss Muffett said, and slid her mouth over one of the straws and sucked. Mmm, mmm, she inwardly went. She’d never had one this good, like some special new candy.

“Wow, Scotty,” she said. “I could drink about ten of these babies.”

“Yeah, but you’d be on your ass,” Scotty said. “Shit’s dynamite.”

“I feel like a little dynamite tonight,” she said, and bent to slurp at her straw. He watched her for a moment. Then he grinned.

“Well hell,” he told her. “Rip it up, girl. If you want to party, you come to the right place.”

“Don’t get too far away,” she said. And she turned her eyes back toward the man with the nub. Who was looking at her.