The Rabbit Factory: A Novel

  “He works in a pet shop,” she said.

  “Oh. You want another drink?” Tyrone said.

  “I hate for you to keep buying my drinks. I’ve got money.”

  “I know you do. But I’m sticking it all on my expense account.”

  He called for Ken to give her another round and finished his own drink. Ken gave her another look. The clock on the wall crept closer to ten-thirty and still no Eric came through the door. The drink came and it was getting hard for her now to think of things to say to Tyrone. He was actually pretty boring, kind of like Arthur.

  “Are you hungry?” Tyrone said.

  “Not really.” And it was true. The drinks had removed any appetite she might have had. She knew she’d probably feel like absolute hell tomorrow, always did when she drank heavy and didn’t eat, like this morning. Then almost kissing Eric. Then yelling at Arthur. Then going to sleep. Then getting up, feeling like shit with another hangover. Then starting to drink again to get rid of it. And look where she was now. Sitting here with some boring although generous dickhead waiting for somebody to come over who might not even show up. And drunk again. Damn it. How did it happen all the time like this? She didn’t ever mean to do this. But this is how it always turned out. And by the time she realized that it had happened again, it was too late to do anything about it but sober up. And she didn’t want to do that yet.

  “Well, I could use a sandwich,” Tyrone said. “I noticed a deli down the street that stays open all night. You want to go down there with me and get some coffee to sober up on?”

  “I don’t think so,” Helen said. “But you go if you want.”

  “I think that’s what I’ll do,” Tyrone said. “I think I’ll get a sandwich to take back to my room. I’ve got an early flight in the morning.”

  Helen didn’t say anything, didn’t ask him where he was going, didn’t ask him what time he was leaving because she didn’t give a shit and didn’t care if she never saw him again. Tyrone Bradbury. Big fucking deal. He wasn’t even any kin to Ray. So he bought her a few drinks. So what? He probably had a limp dick, too. Tyrone called for his bill and Ken brought it over and eyeballed Helen with a clench in his jaw and Tyrone pulled out a credit card and paid the bill. After he got the card back, he pushed his stool back and stood up. He was a little drunk, but probably not bad enough for the bicycle cops to get him. He extended his hand.

  “Helen,” he said. “It was a pleasure to meet you.”

  She shook hands with him, not too hard.

  “It was nice to meet you, too, Tyrone. Tell Ray I said hi if you see him. And thanks for the drinks.”

  “Anytime,” he said, and laughed, and gave her a little wave. Then he turned and made his way through the people and out the door. Helen looked at the clock. It was ten-thirty on the dot. Eric had had plenty of time to get over here from the pet shop. So maybe he wasn’t coming after all. And how much longer was she willing to sit here and wait? Till closing time?

  She looked at the people around her. Some were laughing and talking and telling stories and others were sitting by themselves just looking down into their drinks. She saw a couple of men looking at her but she broke eye contact with them. She turned on her stool and looked across the back of the bar at the bins of ice and the wineglasses stacked back there and the nozzles that spewed whatever into the glasses. It was ten thirty-five.

  She lit another cigarette and crossed one leg over the other. Arthur was sitting home worrying about her. And what had he done for her to treat him this way? All he’d done was get old. And when she married him she’d always known that was going to happen one day. But it hadn’t seemed to matter so much back then, twenty years ago, when he could still do it pretty good or at least regularly, when his hair wasn’t solid gray, when he was twenty years younger than he was now. Maybe if she could have had children, it would have been different. Of course it would have been different. She would have been wrapped up in their children’s lives and that would have given her a source of happiness. It would have kept her busy and she wouldn’t have been able to brood so much. Drink so much. But that wasn’t what she had, was it? Nope. What she had was ten-fourty and her glass half empty. She stubbed the cigarette out. The easiest thing to do would be to just finish it, walk out and flag a cab, leave the car here, and go safely home. Not risk a third DUI. Fix herself a sandwich and maybe a cup of coffee. She had a new romance novel she’d bought at Burke’s bookstore that she’d been wanting to start reading. How would that be any different from what she’d been doing for a long time already? It wouldn’t be. But being so damn tired of that already was the thing. It was old.

  She decided she’d wait, have one more drink, give him a little more time. She remembered imagining what his mouth would have tasted like, like tobacco and good scotch whiskey. How strong his hands would have felt on her butt. How hard he would have been against her lower belly.

  Okay. If he wasn’t here by eleven-thirty, she’d go on home and forget about it. That was all she could do. She didn’t see anybody in here she wanted to mess with. Just Ken. And his place smelled bad. And he had roaches. And fucking Barry Manilow all night long.

  She’d wait a little longer anyway. Maybe he’d come on in. It still wasn’t too late for him to show up. He might have had car trouble with that old thing he drove. But she didn’t need to wait too long or get too drunk because she still had to get home someway. If she left the Jag and called a cab, she’d have to call another cab to come back and get it. That would be a pain in the ass tomorrow afternoon sometime. And she wasn’t just crazy about leaving it in the parking lot overnight anyway. Arthur had traded in the Seville on it after she’d finished her last alcohol-safety education program and gotten her license back and promised him she wouldn’t get in any more trouble with the cops. And she didn’t want any more trouble with the cops. It was the last thing she wanted. The classes had been hard for her to take, being thrown in with all those people in the class whose only connection with her was that they all had been caught driving drunk. Some of them looked slimy. Some of them had tried to hit on her while the classes were going on, once a week, for eight weeks straight. But it wasn’t just that. It was also the films they made them watch, which were of gruesome car wrecks, and bodies under sheets lying in the middle of highways, and some dead babies on a table who had been killed in drunk-driving wrecks. She couldn’t shake those last images from her mind, the cut and torn little bodies, but she couldn’t seem to handle her problem either, because here she sat again. Maybe she did need some help.

  She kept sitting there and watching the people. There was one couple in one of the booths she couldn’t help watching. The young man looked to be about Eric’s age, and the girl maybe a bit younger. They were sitting side by side in the booth and he kept holding on to her hand while he talked to her. She had only one hand on the table, so she had to have the other one on him somewhere. And the look on her face was pure love. They were just kids. They didn’t know anything. They didn’t know shit about the way life could turn around on you and leave you with nothing and no remedy for it except something drastic. Either that or just suffering in silence.

  At eleven o’clock she ordered another drink and when Ken brought it, he leaned over the bar toward her and smiled uncertainly.

  “You’re out late tonight,” he said. “What’s the occasion?”

  She held the straw with her fingers and swirled it around in the glass.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I just didn’t feel like sitting around the house tonight I guess.”

  “Everything okay at home?”

  She looked up at him. He had this terrible-sounding laugh, too, high and in the back of his throat, like a gargling rooster.

  “Things could be better,” she said. “As usual.”

  “I can make them better. Always do, don’t I?”

  “I always have to go home, too, Ken.”

  “I guess so. Since you’re married. Unless you get unmarried.”
>
  Ken picked up a cherry from a garnish tray of sliced limes and oranges and lemons and pulled the cherry from the stem and chewed it. She watched his mouth chew it, watched it stop chewing. Then he put the stem in his mouth and his tongue did some things she couldn’t see and when he pulled the stem back out of his mouth, he had tied it in a knot.

  “How you like that?” he said.

  “That’s pretty interesting,” she said. It wasn’t very subtle, but it was pretty interesting. His tongue was the most interesting thing about him.

  “It took me a lot of practice to learn how to do that.”

  “You been getting to practice much lately?”

  Somebody yelled for him and he turned away and went to another customer. She picked up her drink and sipped it. She hated herself for doing it, but she kept watching the clock, and the minute hand kept creeping its slow inexorable way around the clock’s face. It was about eleven-fifteen. Before long it would be eleven-thirty. Then it’d be time to make a decision. Keep sitting here or go on home. Or…?

  “You need another one, Helen?”

  She looked up and this time Ken winked at her.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I think I’ll have one more for the road.”

  But she didn’t. She had three, and sat there while people started to go out, by ones and twos, while the level of noise dropped inside the bar, while her mind clouded and hashed and rehashed her problems, while the traffic in the street out front diminished, while the night grew longer, and the hours left before morning ticked off slowly one by one on the clock, and again, one more time, Ken got to gradually looking better and better, at least in her messed-up head.

  72

  Domino didn’t know where in the hell Rico could be taking him. He had to get everything straight in his head. The warden had propped his nicely tooled black cowboy boots on his desk after a big breakfast of whitetail tenderloin and two over easy with wheat toast and told him to go straight and now he was blindfolded and handcuffed and lying in the trunk of a police car with a thawing-out box of meat. He could hear a police radio going faintly sometimes and he could hear the tires rushing on the pavement. His hands were cuffed behind him and he was needing to go to somebody’s bathroom pretty bad, pretty soon. He figured they’d get to wherever they were going before long and then they’d get out somewhere and he could use the bathroom there. The only thing was that he’d been thinking that for what felt like close to an hour and they hadn’t shown any signs of stopping anywhere yet. He’d felt it slow, had felt it make some turns, maybe go off some ramps, had felt it come to a rolling slowdown a few times, but it hadn’t actually stopped. He didn’t assume that he was getting transported somewhere to either get charged with his crimes or to get some medical attention since he was blindfolded and handcuffed and lying in the trunk of a police car. He had one hell of a headache and his stomach was going crazy for wanting something in it. That bologna sandwich was the last thing he’d had. Pigskins before that, he remembered. Why did he have to take that road? Weren’t there plenty of other roads around just as good? He took that road because he wanted some beer. He took that road because he wanted to ride around and drink some beer and see if he could see a white-tail. Well. He saw one.

  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.

  73

  “You want another sandwich, Eric?” Mister Arthur said. “I’ve got a whole turkey breast in here.” He was standing with his head inside the refrigerator and Jada Pinkett was checking out the stuff on the lower shelves, inside the door, sniffing Philadelphia cream cheese, nosing eggs and garlic cloves, sorting the scent of steak sauce from tartar like a visiting wine connoisseur cork-sniffing in a Lebanese vintner’s dusty rows of tanks.

  “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.