The Rabbit Factory: A Novel (25 page)

He was really tired. His head was on a tire. He needed some sleep. So he tried to ease into a better position on his side and tried to stretch out a little. His feet weren’t shackled, and he drew them up and bent his knees. It wasn’t the most comfortable way in the world to ride somewhere, but it was as good as he could do for the moment. He didn’t want to pee on himself, so he concentrated on holding it.

But that was getting harder and harder to do. There was a bad pain in his bladder that was letting him know that it couldn’t keep holding it indefinitely, that something was going to have to give. But they couldn’t keep on going forever. They’d have to stop somewhere sometime. He just didn’t know where or when that would be. So he lay quietly on his side, and listened to the tires rush against the pavement, and to the crackling of the police radio.

None of this would have happened if he hadn’t hit the whitetail. That was what messed him up. Out of the blue. Complete surprise. Something you couldn’t account for or figure into any plans. Which was actually bad timing. Which was the worst thing in the world for somebody who was doing something they weren’t supposed to be doing. It was something you couldn’t see coming and there was no way to predict it. Ten seconds, hell, five seconds, maybe, sooner or later, he probably wouldn’t have hit it. It might have jumped before then or it might have gone the other way. Domino knew that life was sometimes measured in small but critical increments. Looking down from approaching traffic for just one second to light a cigarette. Wiping your ass with the winning lottery ticket because it’s the only paper thing you have in your billfold besides money. Getting in a hurry zipping up and catching some pretty tender skin in those little brass teeth, standing there so all alone at the urinal, can’t go up or down with it, struggling silently, trying not to scream.

So he might have taken another road. That was a possibility. There were all kinds of variables. He wondered what the odds were against he himself hitting that deer on that road before Christmas at that speed at that exact time of night. Probably astronomical. Probably no way to calculate it. Doreen might have been able to. She’d been a whiz in math. She could recite long passages of poetry in Spanish. It never had made any sense. But a lot of stuff in the world didn’t make any sense. Just like this stuff right here. This cop had to be crazy if he thought he could get away with doing something like this to him, since this was, after all, America.

He really needed to pee. It was just about to go beyond bad. He didn’t want to yell anything, but it was starting to look like he might have to. He didn’t think he could take it much longer. He’d thought maybe lying quietly on his side would help it, but it hadn’t. If anything, it was worse.

He thought about trying to roll over. But he was also afraid he might pee on himself if he did that. And he sure didn’t want to pee on himself in the trunk of a police car. They’d probably beat the shit out of you some more if you did that. He sure didn’t need the shit beat out of him any more. His whole head was swollen up already from getting so much shit beat out of him.

He kept lying there, and he kept wondering why he was blindfolded. He’d seen prisoners being transported on television before and none of them had ever been blindfolded. And none of them had been in the trunk of a car. He wasn’t being kidnapped by the cops, was he? Hell. That wasn’t legal, was it? Didn’t the cops have to be legal? He was pretty sure they did since they were the ones who insisted that everybody else in the world be legal.

He sure hoped that was true. He sure hoped they weren’t trying to do something illegal with him. He certainly hoped they weren’t planning on secretly killing him and then trying to cover it up and hide it or something like that.

Damn, he needed to pee. If he didn’t get to, he was probably going to have to yell something before long. Maybe pretty soon. What if they let him out of the trunk and then shot him in the back and said he was trying to escape?

They wouldn’t try that shit, would they?

Didn’t he have some rights?

Hell. They never had given him his one phone call.

But he guessed that was probably out of the question now.

“No thanks, I’m stuffed.” Eric pulled on his cigarette and thumped his ashes into the cereal bowl in the dim light the television screen threw.

“How about another beer?”

“Yessir, I’ll take another beer.”

“I’ll pour you some scotch whenever you get ready.”

“Maybe after this one.”

“Just let me know.”

Mister Arthur got the beer out and opened it and brought it over.

“Thanks, Mister Arthur.”

“You’re very welcome.”

He went back over to the refrigerator and looked inside it again.

Jada Pinkett was still standing there, wagging his nub of a tail.

“I think I’ll give him the rest of this spaghetti,” he said. “It’s been in here a couple of days and I probably won’t eat it.”

“Okay,” Eric said. “But you better get back over here pretty quick. It’s just about to the part where they gonna have this badass stampede.”

“I’m coming,” Mister Arthur said. He took the lid off the Tupperware container and put the bottom part down on the floor and closed the icebox door. Jada Pinkett moved in on the spaghetti. Eric watched them. Damn, he was glad he didn’t go over there to that Peabody. He’d decided, after much thought, that this would be the best thing to do, to just come on over here after all and sit around a while with Mister Arthur and keep him company and get something to eat and have a few drinks and see if she came in. But she hadn’t. He’d been here for over an hour and she still wasn’t in. And Mister Arthur wasn’t saying much about it. He’d said a little about it when he’d first gotten there, but now he seemed pretty happy to just pet Jada Pinkett and feed him and watch the television and talk about John Wayne and Ben Johnson and Marlon Brando and John Ford and Alan Ladd. It was pretty amazing how much Mister Arthur knew about westerns, especially the old ones, the ones Eric was most interested in. He knew who Noah Beery was, and Wallace, too.

“You want some pudding, Eric?” Mister Arthur was standing at the kitchen table with one of those plastic four-packs of butterscotch.

“No thanks,” he said, and raised his beer. “I’m cool.”

He heard him get a spoon from a drawer and heard the dog eating. Mister Arthur settled on the other end of the couch and pulled the lid off his pudding and put the foil top upside down on the coffee table. He had his house shoes on and he picked his feet up and put them on the coffee table, too. Mister Arthur had one of those really big monster TVs. Cost no telling how much. Digital black-and-white cows were lying on the open prairie, hundreds of them. Mister Arthur dipped his spoon into his pudding. A cowboy on a horse bumped against something on a wagon while stealing some sugar and set the cows off. They all jumped up and took off running. Then it was a stampede. Eric took a cold drink of his beer and watched the rest of the stampede, watched them sadly bury the cowpoke who’d gotten killed in the stampede, watched John Wayne angrily shoot the guy with the sweet tooth for causing the stampede, and then they cut for a commercial.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Mister Arthur checking his watch. He hated to think about having to sleep in the car again tonight. It had been so nice to be able to sleep on the couch in here last night. It beat the hell out of his back seat. He couldn’t run the motor all night for the heater because cops would stop then, if they saw a car idling for a long time, if they noticed the smoke coming from the tailpipe, because they thought it was maybe somebody getting a quickie from a hooker, because it had happened before, several times. They shined their powerful flashlights in. But they never had done anything to him, just woke him up and told him he’d have to move on. He guessed it wasn’t any crime to be homeless in Memphis. But it sure was a pain in the ass. He always woke up cold and cramped in the mornings. He knew he would be a lot colder if he didn’t have Jada Pinkett to sleep with him under the blanket. He wasn’t that big, but he had some serious body heat. Eric kept his dog food in the trunk with his folded clean clothes and took showers at the Y and ate a lot of meals at McDonald’s so that he could use their bathrooms.

“Well,” Mister Arthur said. “It’s getting close to midnight.”

“Is it?” he said. He knew it was. He guessed it was time to leave.

“I figured she’d be in by now,” Mister Arthur said.

“Maybe she went to a movie,” Eric said, even though he knew where she was. Crap. What he should have done was go on over there and talk her into coming home. But he’d been afraid of that, too. He’d been afraid that if he got close to her again and so much as smelled her perfume or touched her on the arm, or the hand, or the shoulder, he would lose all his resolve and then wouldn’t be able to stop himself from going on and doing whatever would have happened.

“I don’t think the movies run this late,” Mister Arthur said.

Eric didn’t say anything. He wondered how he’d feel if he was in Mister Arthur’s place. He still didn’t know for sure what the problem was between them, but if it was what he thought it was, then there probably wasn’t any tactful way to bring it up. Hell, it probably wasn’t something he wanted to talk about. Something like that was private as hell. And would probably be pretty scary. But it was pretty obvious that Miss Helen was wanting something she wasn’t getting and it wasn’t a cat.

A happy guy in a fishing cap came on the TV screen selling cars. It was well-known fisherman Bill Dance again, this time for some car dealership out on Getwell.

“Where’d you and Miss Helen meet at?” Eric said. He was just making conversation, but he wanted to know, too.

“Montana,” Mister Arthur said, and spooned some pudding into his mouth. Jada Pinkett was pushing the Tupperware pan around on the kitchen floor with his head, slurping and snuffling and snorting and slobbering.

“I’d say he likes spaghetti,” Mister Arthur went on. “Oh yes, we met in Missoula about twenty years ago. I used to have some oil wells and was in partnership with some people in Texas who used to take me with them when they went hunting. They had a camp and a private plane and we’d fly in to the airport out there and then get some pickups and horses and trailers and all that.”

“Aw, wow,” Eric said. “Montana? What’d you hunt?”

“Well, I didn’t really hunt. I just went for the trip. Like a vacation. I usually stayed in camp and played checkers with the cook. He was an old crippled cowboy named Lark Linkhorn. He could cook the best baked beans I ever had, with smoked bacon. And his enchiladas were something else, too. But the people I went with hunted deer mostly. Mulies. What I enjoyed was going to camp and seeing all that beautiful country and eating deer steaks and rabbit stew and playing checkers with Lark and taking naps in my tent.”

“I like rabbits myself,” Eric said. He started to tell him he had about eleven frozen over at the pet shop that he needed to cook sometime.

Another man came on the TV screen and he was selling paint jobs for cars. Mister Arthur spooned up some more pudding. Then the movie came back on. They watched it without talking and Eric finished his beer just as the next commercial came on. When Mister Arthur saw him set the can down, he went into the kitchen and got a glass from the cabinet and put some ice into it and poured a couple of shots of Chivas over it and brought it back. Eric took it and looked up at him. He guessed it wasn’t time to leave after all. That made him feel pretty good. It made him feel wanted. And he hadn’t felt that way in a while. Except for those few times with Rae Loni Kaye Nafco and her poodle puppy.

“Thanks, Mister Arthur. A guy could get spoiled hangin’ around you for long.”

“You’re welcome,” Mister Arthur said. He had another cup of pudding now and he peeled the lid from it slowly and picked up his spoon. “It’s nice to have somebody to watch TV with. Helen usually stays in the bedroom and reads at night. A long time ago she used to play checkers with me, but I think we played so much she finally got burned out on it.”

Eric sipped at the scotch and slouched his socked feet out on the floor and rested on his spine. Damn. Was she so hot he just couldn’t handle her? Was that what was going on? No wonder he didn’t want to talk about it. Hell. How could you talk about a thing like that?

He looked over at Jada Pinkett. He was curled up under the kitchen table, his head on his paws, his eyes looking over at them, and then they closed. He was glad to have him in out of the cold for a while. He was afraid he got cold in the car sometimes when he had to keep him out there during his work hours. On days when the weather was decent, he got him out and walked him. Sometimes he tied him up outside a bookstore but made sure he could see him from the window while he browsed. People didn’t try to pet him, though, he’d noticed that. He guessed they were afraid of him because of all the scars he had. And he had a lot. Ears about chewed off. But no wonder. He’d killed six dogs. A dog got a lot of scars killing six dogs.

“She was working in a bar,” Mister Arthur said.

“Miss Helen?”

“Yes. We’d go into town sometimes. It was a bar downtown. The Union. They had a long bar and a lot of pool tables and the kids from the university had readings there on Sunday nights. And Helen worked there, but she’d stop working and go in and sit down and listen to the readings until they took a break. Then she’d go back out front and start waiting tables again. She was very popular there. I think just about every man in there knew her name.”

Eric sipped his scotch. Boy it was comfortable here. It would be nice to live here, and be able to go to bed anytime you wanted to, in a nice soft bed, some thick covers. He wished he could go back home, but he didn’t think he could just yet because he didn’t know what his daddy would say, whether he’d let him come back or not. He didn’t think his mama would ever come back. There’d been a bunch of yelling and screaming between him and his daddy, and his daddy had been drunk as hell again. He wished his daddy hadn’t told him to leave. He figured his daddy probably regretted it now, only thing was, there wasn’t any way for his daddy to get ahold of him since he didn’t know where he was. He missed everything now, his daddy, taking care of the dogs, riding the four-wheelers through the lanes they’d Bush Hogged in the patches of briars and tall grass within the rabbit factory, fishing, riding around in pickups and drinking beer. Swimming in Yocona River with his friends and diving off the river bridge below Taylor. Sitting underneath a tree at daylight with his shotgun, waiting for squirrels.

“How’d you ever get to talkin’ to her?”

“I spilled my drink,” Mister Arthur said. “I spilled it on her hand taking it off my tray. But the reason I spilled it was because I was looking at her.”

“She’s a pretty lady,” Eric said. He felt guilty saying even that, knowing that he still wanted to kiss her. What was he doing sitting here? It wasn’t right for him to be sitting here thinking the things he was thinking. But it wasn’t like he’d made the first move either. He never would have made a move. He would have been too scared to. She looked too good. And she was so much older than him, too. Older was intimidating. Compared to her he was nothing but a kid. But maybe older women knew what they wanted and weren’t shy about asking for it.

“That’s why I’m so worried,” Mister Arthur said. “I know she goes out to bars sometimes. I don’t know who she talks to. I guess she thinks I’m kind of boring. It doesn’t seem like she talks to me nearly as much as she used to.”

Eric swiveled around a little.

“Well, I don’t think you’re borin’. Why don’t you try talkin’ to her about Ben Johnson?”

“I have. She’s not interested in old movies the way I am. And there’s such a big difference in our ages,” Mister Arthur said. “I’ve always secretly worried about that. I’ve always been afraid it would catch up with us one day.” He said this last in a long sigh: “And I guess it has.”

The movie came back on then. Jada Pinkett, under the table, began a light snoring. Eric kept sitting there drinking as the ice slowly melted in his glass. Mister Arthur had finished his pudding and sat with his hands in his lap, his head tilted up a little. It wasn’t until another light sawing started up that Eric realized Mister Arthur had gone to sleep. He sat up and took a look at him. Yep. Asleep. Eyes closed, glasses down on his nose, mouth partly open.

Well shit. What should he do, wake him up and tell him to go to bed? He thought maybe he ought to just get another drink, so that’s what he did. He got up quietly and walked over to the icebox. Jada Pinkett didn’t stir. He seemed to be pretty happy here, and why not? Mister Arthur fed him all the time and played with him and scratched his belly and behind his ears and it was warm. Eric thought he liked being around the kitten, too. Earlier in the evening, the old dog had gone into the pantry a time or two to look at the kitten, but it had only bowed up and hissed with its teeth bared. But he knew it would probably tame down if they kept it. Cats were just weird.

He opened the top of the icebox quietly and scooped a few cubes from the bin in there. Jada Pinkett didn’t move. He looked over at Mister Arthur, who had rolled his head over onto his shoulder. He closed the top of the icebox and it was dark except for the light from the television screen and a small light that was on over the stove. It held the remains of Mister Arthur’s supper: a few small potatoes left in a pan, some green beans in a Corningware dish, half a breaded-and-fried pork chop. He pinched off a piece and chewed it. He turned the light off. The bottle was there on the counter and he poured enough scotch in the glass to cover up the cubes.