The Rabbit Factory: A Novel (14 page)
Read The Rabbit Factory: A Novel Online
Authors: Larry Brown
“W
ell I don’t give a fuck what you think!” Helen yelled through the locked door. Then she threw some lipstick and gloss at it, lotions, creams, emollients.
T
hey had stopped engines and it was hard to believe until the NBC and ABC news crews’ helicopters started arriving and landing on the flight deck, along with some Coast Guard people, and then pretty soon they were on the news itself. Wayne saw it with Henderson in the TV room, which was almost deserted, since a lot of the crew who were off duty were up on deck trying to see what was going on, and Admiral Zumo was on his way out to have a personal peek they said.
Something must have gone wrong. Somebody must have said something they shouldn’t have said or maybe when they said it somebody else misunderstood what they’d just said and maybe that was how an
NBC News
cameraman wound up leaning out over the edge of the flight deck unseen behind a crowd of enlisted men who just happened to be standing there with a couple of third-class petty officers holding on to his belt while he was taking unauthorized video film of the whale that had been struck by the propeller but not killed. Wallowing out there in the rolling waves, blood staining the water around it, and Wayne standing there watching it knew that America would see the blood and the whale suffering and that a great outcry would come. Hell yes. They were mammals, not fish. They bore their young alive. They didn’t bother anybody. People had soft spots in their hearts for them and would spend two days in the hot sun trying to get them back into deep water whenever they found them run aground in a pod at Cape Cod.
There were all kinds of rumors floating around the ship. Some said the prop was broken, and that they were stranded. Some said the whale had a baby, and that the baby was out there crying and swimming around its dying mother, although nothing like that had appeared on the TV screen just yet, but being in the military, they knew how the government could suppress information, at almost any time, and for almost any reason, say, something that might be sensitive, like secretly invading another country, and if there was indeed a baby whale swimming around and crying because its dying mother had been struck by an aircraft carrier from the U.S. Navy, they’d damn well want to suppress it from the general public until they could decide what to do. Shit. There was no telling how long it took to decide what to do about them dead little green men they found crashed in Roswell back in ’47, is what Henderson said.
It was rumored that Peter Jennings was on the ship. It was rumored that Prince was on the ship. It was rumored that the captain had been on the line with the President, that the President was waiting for developments while playing a little golf and catching Billy Joe Shaver at the Continental Club in Austin, that something had gone wrong and some film had been released that shouldn’t have been. The President didn’t appear to be pissed yet.
Most everybody was confined belowdecks. They could go to the galley and eat, they could work or sleep or study, but they could not go up.
Things got pretty boring pretty quickly. Wayne and Henderson played cards, watched a movie, ate some sandwiches, played some dominoes, heard some more rumors, took a nap.
Then when they were back in the TV room to catch Steve Earle and Robert Cray on
Sessions at West 54th,
the captain gave them the straight scoop over the intercom, at 2230. Yes, it was true that the ship had hit a blue whale normally not seen in these waters, a whale that may have been sick and running a fever and whose sonar might have been subsequently impaired. Yes, the ship’s propeller had severely injured it, quite possibly critically. Yes, there was a whale calf involved, about a twenty-two-footer. The ship was stopped for an investigation, which was SOP for any collision, and since they were only three days out they would probably be going back to some port, but right now they were about to be involved with some civilians in a rescue effort for the calf. That was all. The intercom went off but then there was a long whining fuzzy buzz with enough feedback to where they thought maybe Neil Young was onboard with his electric guitar and wahwah pedal, about to come over the loudspeakers with “Mother Earth.”
“Sheeeit, Wayne,” Henderson said, turning back to the television and reaching into a big bag for some more Fritos. “We ain’t never gonna get to the Sea of Arabia messin’ with this whale shit.”
M
erlot went nuts from fear when the guy tried to light his cigar again. Sick! The guy took his eyes off him for just a few seconds to fumble around at the bottom of the dash for the lighter, and in that small window of opportunity, thinking about what the butcher guy might have done to the innocent lady cop, and what he might do to him later, he jammed both feet on the brakes, grabbed the gun, and elbowed the guy in the teeth as hard as he could. Sick! And since grabbing the gun scared the living shit out of him, and was like something he had never done before in his whole life, and since he was seized by adrenaline and given extra-normal strength from those two weird little organs coming off the top of his kidneys, he held the gun with one hand while it fired one round through the windshield post
BOOM!
and another one through the windshield, which spiderwebbed
BLAM!,
and another one right through his new Pioneer CD player with Bass Booster
BAM!
and caught the guy by the thick hair on the back of his head that was sticking out from under the knitted cap with the other hand, and slammed his face and the cigar into the windshield. It went
KaPLOW!,
and some books fell off the dash, and the guy kind of rolled his eyes, then crossed his eyes, but Merlot was still plenty revved up on the adrenaline rush, so he slammed his face again, not even noticing that the van had stopped by then, or that the cigar was getting smashed all over the place, or that books were getting scattered everywhere, and just kept on slamming his head kind of hysterically and heaving since he was still so scared.
The door jerked open. There was a blinding light in his eyes.
“Don’t move!”
Merlot didn’t move. The voice sounded familiar.
“Hands in the air!”
It sounded like the lady cop. But the light was so bright he couldn’t see. Son of a bitch! It was like the landing-gear light on one of those 767s! Coming straight in for you! The problem was that his left hand was still holding the gun and his right hand was holding the guy by the back of the head and he didn’t want to drop the gun and maybe risk it going off or drop the guy and maybe have him come back to life. Or her.
“I can’t put my hands up,” he said.
“Why not?” the voice said. He knew it was the lady cop now but he couldn’t see her. He felt like he was getting permanent eyeball damage.
“This guy tried to carjack me,” he said. “Are you all right?”
The light in his eyes was turned off. He had to blink a few times. He saw her then. It wasn’t a ’Fro after all. She had rounded black hair that was sheened and formed around her face and the sides of her head like a bowling ball. She had large wet doe eyes and full smoochy-looking lips and a broad but graceful nose. She was about ten pounds overweight and she was about the sexiest thing he had ever seen. And she was locked and loaded on him over the muzzle of a big revolver, both her hands steady on the grip. Then he noticed that the very tip of the muzzle, the part where the front sight was mounted, was wavering the tiniest bit. Death lay waiting in that little black hole, too.
“I can’t turn loose,” Merlot said.
She lowered the gun and stepped closer. She grabbed her flashlight again from her pocket and shone the beam on the guy.
“He carjacked me,” Merlot said again. “He pulled this gun on me when I pulled over.”
She didn’t say anything. Merlot kept looking at her and holding the gun with one hand and the guy’s hair with the other. He thought he was out.
“I think he’s out,” Merlot said. “I slammed his face a few times. You sure you’re all right?”
“Give me the gun,” she said. “Is the safety off?”
“I don’t know,” Merlot said. “Has it got a safety? I don’t know anything about guns except I’m scared of them.”
She stood there for a moment and seemed to be trying to make up her mind. Then she put the flashlight and the gun away.
“I’m not the bad guy here, ma’am. I’m just making a citizen’s arrest.”
“Who are you?”
“My name’s Merlot Jones,” Merlot said. “I teach out at Ole Miss.”
“All right. Give me the gun. Be careful with it.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Merlot turned loose of the guy’s hair and the guy’s head slumped over on him. His nose was bleeding and some of the skin was busted over one of his eyes and he had bits of smashed tobacco all over his mouth and chin and the blood was getting on his clothes.
He pulled the guy’s limp fingers out of the gun and it didn’t go off. Thank God. He was trying to be really careful with it. He was pretty scared just holding it and his hands were shaking now from thinking about what he’d just done.
“My hands are shaking,” he said. “Can’t help it.”
“I can see that,” she said. “Be careful. Here.”
He handed it to her with it pointing away from her and she took it. She expertly jacked it open and ejected the live shell, where it spun in a bright brass arc and clattered to the road and rolled and then stopped. She pulled something from the handle and stuck it in her pocket, and put the gun in her other pocket. She seemed to know a lot about guns.
“I’m coming around to the other side,” she said. “Don’t move.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
He watched her go in front of the windshield and thought she could easily be a model for one of those large-ladies’ lingerie catalogs like Erma or whatever her name was, the kind he liked to look at. He liked some meat on a woman’s bones. A big woman was extra warmth in the winter.
The other door opened. She didn’t look at him. She took hold of the guy who was bleeding, and pulled him up, and looked into his face.
“You grabbed the gun and did this, too?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You know you got a headlight out?”
Merlot nodded, looking into her eyes, which seemed to be getting bigger the more he looked, knowing he’d yearned for something all his life, and knowing now that it was her face. He suddenly had a crazy thought. He wondered if maybe she’d like to go home with him sometime and meet Candy.
T
here was a huge sycamore in Mr. Hamburger’s fenced-in backyard and in it was a nest that had been painstakingly built from leaves over a period of two months by an old white-nosed fox squirrel that lived in the neighborhood and scampered across power lines and traveled from yard to yard and raised some cute babies once in a while. The nest was about three feet out and two feet down from the edge of the roof, and Miss Muffett had seen the mama squirrel on the roof a number of times, but it had never gotten into the attic to tear up newspapers or race around up there on the insulation or gnaw the insulation off the electrical wires the way squirrels sometimes did as far as she knew, so she was cool with it, long as it didn’t bother her, she wasn’t going to bother it. But there was a little more to it than just that.
Miss Muffett actually liked the squirrel and even enjoyed feeding the squirrel and she would often put out nuts for it, sometimes Jiffy peanut butter on jar lids. It seemed to like crunchy best.
She walked out the back door in a real bad mood to feed the squirrel some pre-Christmas brazil nuts that were on sale and looked down and saw a small piece of rectangular glass lying in the yard and heard familiar yapping and looked up high in the tree and higher until she gasped and fainted dead away, toppled gently over into the deeply mulched flower beds, good thing no sharp bricks were poking up in a border like some folks have. Might have messed her
up.
A
rthur dozed off in the waiting room and had to be roused by a nurse, who took him back to an examining room. There was a long wait, but he finally got seen.
“Looks like a blood-flow problem to me,” the doctor said in his office after the examination, leaning back in his rich leather chair, pouring a double shot of Stolichnaya over big square ice blocks in a crystal glass on his desk. He went ahead and lit up a Doral Light, too. The walls were paneled with good dark wood and there were pictures of his smiling grandchildren on them. One was riding a spotted pony while the doctor held the halter.
“What are you saying?” Arthur said.
“Jesus,” the doctor said. “All I’m saying is all last week I was getting up at two
A
.
M
. to take a whiz after a couple of pops.”
Arthur waited politely. He wondered what Helen was doing now.
“Because I’m old, too, you know?” the doctor said. He sipped his drink. An intercom on his desk said something garbled. He turned a knob and it quieted. He raised his tired old eyes over the glass and looked morosely across the desk.
“How much do you expect at your age without some help? You’re not some young bull full of piss and vinegar, you know. You ever heard the term ‘slowing down’? Or ‘getting old’?”
“I still have desire,” Arthur said. “So does Helen.”
The doctor took such a large drink that he almost choked. He made a few
KAFF, KAFF
sounds, then cleared his throat, sucked in a lungful of smoke, blew it out.
“Whew. Don’t we all,” he said. “Don’t we all. A hard penis is nothing but one that’s full of blood, Arthur. And we have a blood-flow problem here. That’s about as simply as I can explain it, being a doctor. Now, you don’t want to go on Viagra because you say it makes you feel unmanly. You don’t want to schedule your sex because you’re uncomfortable with that. I can go with that, even if I don’t accept it as valid. But my God. Patients, without the benefit of attending eight years of medical school, always know so much about themselves and their conditions that it continues to astound me daily.”
“But…?”
The doctor held up the cigarette hand, which trailed smoke.
“Will you let me finish? Please?”
Arthur sat quietly. Like a lamb before the slaughter.
“Now. I can fix you up with a good pump.”
“A good pump.”
“Yes.”
“A good dick pump, you mean,” Arthur said bitterly.
The doctor sighed. He set his glass down and picked up the phone and punched a number and waited for it to ring while he took quick furtive puffs off his smoke. He spoke into it. He lowered his head. He asked a question. He muttered some things into it that sounded like model numbers. He said Fine, fine, then Thank you, and hung up. Then he stood up.
“It’s your lucky day, Arthur, we’ve got some in stock. You can pick it up and pay the girl out front. I take all major credit cards.”
“How do I know that’s what I want?” Arthur said.
“It’s either this or Viagra or reconsider some type of surgery.”
“No!” Arthur said.
“No need to get all hot about it,” the doctor said.
“I’m not hot,” Arthur said. “I’m just…” He stopped. “I don’t know what I am anymore.”
“You’re a normal human male, Arthur. Who’s getting up there a little in years. Who has a wife who’s a good bit younger than him. You have to have some help. Why do you think they make these things? Because it’s a common problem. That’s your key word right there, ‘common.’”
Arthur was afraid he was in for a lecture now. Once the doctor got on a roll, he could just keep on going. You didn’t want him to get started on arteriosclerosis or the black plague.
“Okay. So it’s common. But knowing that doesn’t make me feel any better.”
“Don’t be bitter, Arthur. Now, I’ve got some company brochures here if you’d like to take one with you. Of course there’ll be one in the packet explaining how to use the pump. It’s pretty self-explanatory actually. You just stick it in and…”
Arthur thought about it for a few seconds.
“How much is this thing going to cost me anyway? I just paid fifty bucks to a kid to get a cat caught.” He didn’t mention the fifty bucks to the beautiful young stripper.
“To do a what what?” the doctor said.
“It’s a long story. I’m just trying to do something to make Helen happy.”
The doctor smirked then and took another drink and puffed on his cigarette some more.
“Arthur, you take this thing home and you’ll make Helen happy, believe me. It’s three or four hundred, plus tax.”
The doctor waited. He seemed about to make a shooing gesture.
“I’ve got other patients today, Arthur. Do you want the brochure or not?”
“I guess so,” Arthur said, and got out of his chair. The doctor reached into a pile of pamphlets that were scattered on the corner of his desk and handed one to him. There was a picture on the front of a white-haired couple riding horses on a beach. The picture was in color. Shallow waves were rolling in behind them. They looked slightly happy. The man seemed stoic and looked virile for his age. The woman looked like she might not be the most amazing fuck on the whole beach. They were wearing sweaters and jeans and they were barefoot, riding the horses, which were wearing saddles. To Arthur there was an unspoken yet grim message in the picture of some older people in trouble who were hiding it from the world but gamely trying to do something about it. He realized that they were like him. But not like Helen. She didn’t fit into that picture. It seemed so awfully scary to him that he put the pamphlet in his pocket quickly.
“Let me know how it goes,” the doctor said. He turned up his glass and winked at him, and Arthur booked for a fat man’s ass on out of there.