The Rabbit Factory: A Novel

  With practice she was getting better. It didn’t take her nearly as long to get back downstairs with the crutches. She went into the great room and behind the little bar and found a glass and got some ice cubes from trays in the small icebox that was there, and then she looked at the bottles. There was vodka, whiskey, rum, scotch, tonic water, gin, Bloody Mary mix, and there were some Cokes and 7-Ups in the little refrigerator, so she mixed herself a stiff bourbon and Coke and left one crutch there, and turned carefully and headed back toward the stairs. Once in a while, she stopped and took a sip. It was pretty good even if she had made it herself.

  When she got to the foot of the stairs, she realized she was going to have to drop the other crutch as well since she had only two hands, and needed to hold on to the rail with one of them. She wished she’d thought to leave one of them upstairs. It was going to be hell to get up that way.

  What she wound up doing was turning around, dropping the crutch, then sitting down on the second step, setting her drink down, and then scooting her butt up to the next step by pushing with both hands, then reaching down for the drink. Push with both hands, reach for the drink. Push, reach. That was a lot easier, and it wasn’t too long before she was halfway up, only thing was, her drink was about half empty by then.

  She sat there on the steps, looking down, sipping. Crap. She was only halfway up. So she started scooting back down. That water was getting colder all the time. She got herself up and grabbed the crutch and went back over to the bar and got some more ice cubes and then filled her glass all the way back up with Coke and bourbon, and then she hit the stairs again. It only took her about five minutes to get to the top. And her drink was still almost full.

  She hopped her way back along the wall, thinking of how good that hot water was going to feel all over her body. She could lie there and close her eyes and just soak for a while. Then, later, she could go out to the shed in the backyard and get something for supper from one of the coolers. There was probably some fresh hamburger in there since Mr. Hamburger had just been working out there right before he left for Chicago. There was always something to eat out there.

  Finally she reached the bathroom and set the drink carefully on the edge of the tub, then put the lid down on the toilet and sat down on it to undress. She unbuttoned her dress and pulled it down off her arms, then raised up a little to slide it from beneath her, and sat there in her slip and panties and bra. She reached for the drink and took a sip. It was good. Maybe she needed to go out more. Maybe somewhere out there was a man who didn’t mind an older woman, getting slowly fat, who had a plastic leg. Maybe some widowed man who was lonely like her. She knew love was out there for everybody, if they could just find it. Some found it sooner than others. She hoped to find some herself one sweet day. It wasn’t like she hadn’t been looking her whole life already.

  76

  Merlot and Penelope slept as lovers do in the big canopied bed. She was naked next to him and when he woke briefly under the covers he could slide his nose right in the deep brown valley between her breasts and breathe in the scent of her with total contentment. She smelled to him like butter and oatmeal. His hand languidly on her broad hip, the reassuring sturdiness of it. She had a few stretch marks but he didn’t mind, loved them, too, since they were a part of her and since his legs were so skinny he couldn’t wear shorts and didn’t have any room to talk about somebody else’s body. He knew he’d inherited those skinny legs from his daddy’s side of the family. There wasn’t any doubt about it. He’d seen some pictures of his daddy and his uncle on a basketball team at Yocona High in 1949 and their legs were just skinny as hell, like his. A hereditary thing you couldn’t do anything about. Some people got handed down buck teeth or big ears.

  Hell. Close as they were going to be, they ought to go on down and see Evelyn. It wouldn’t be but a few more hours from Natchez. Well shit, it would be, too. You’d have to go down to the coast and cut across to Mobile, and he didn’t really want to be gone from Candy for an extra day. Which they’d sure have to stay if they went down there. Ruff would want to drink some beer with him and would wink and ask him if he had any left-handed cigarettes. They’d have to go out and eat oysters. And his mother would raise all kinds of hell with him if she found out that he’d been that close, in Natchez!, and hadn’t come to see her. He just wouldn’t tell her. He was going down on spring break anyway. That would be the best time to take Penelope. He looked at her.

  She didn’t snore loudly, but she snored a little. But it was a comforting sound. It let him know gently that she was alive and breathing, next to him. He nuzzled closer to her and drew in a deep breath, held her wonderful essence in his nose for a moment, and then let it out. It was very quiet. It was peaceful. Then a duck quacked.

  When he woke again, she was gone from the bed. He raised his head and stretched his arms and yawned hugely. He rolled over and wondered where she was and closed his eyes. He’d just had a dream about going out in some country with snow on the far mountains and on horseback in a golden meadow getting morel mushrooms, some really big fat ones you could ride the horse right up to that grew out of these giant fossilized cow turds from these giant cows that used to roam the earth thousands of years before and that kept a new crop of the mushrooms coming up every year like perennial grass. Then the dream changed as dreams will to him and Penelope in France, drinking Beaujolais wine in a shady garden bower, and then she started having a baby during her birthday party at the new museum and he had to catch it in his hands and it was bloody and slick and already wearing glasses like him and then the baby got sick when it got older and they were in the hospital with it for a while and Penelope had another baby in the waiting room while they were waiting for the first one to get well but everything got okay and then they were all in a car at the Memphis airport and the back seat was full of babies and dogs and Candy was back there playing with them and she was young and beautiful again, and she still had all her hair. And her teeth.

  He opened his eyes and threw back the covers. He couldn’t hear her in the bathroom, couldn’t hear the water running. He got up and went into the bathroom and took a leak for a long time, his head fuzzy from the wine and brandy the night before. They could make it in to Natchez by this afternoon if they went ahead and got some breakfast and packed and got on out of here.

  He took a quick shower and washed his hair with the shampoo that was in there, some essence of herbs, maybe, something that smelled like apples. He wondered where she was. He zipped open her bag to see if her gun was in there and it was, small, black, deadly. He didn’t like it. Why did she feel like she had to carry it around all the time? Just because she was a cop? He zipped it shut.

  He shaved and got dressed and combed his hair and put all his things in his pockets and picked up his jacket in case she was outside.

  He went downstairs to find a big kitchen with coffee ready in two pots and some doughnuts and stuff. He fixed himself a cup and saw her through the French doors, on the corner of a deck, sitting at a round table with a hole in it for the umbrella it held in summer. She was drinking coffee and looking out over the yard and the trees. She looked up and smiled when he opened the door.

  “Hey, baby,” he said. He set his coffee on the table and pulled his jacket on.

  “Hey.”

  He leaned over and kissed her and she kissed him back, but not with much enthusiasm, he thought. Probably still thinking about that Perk guy.

  He hoped the guy was all right. He really didn’t know how he was supposed to feel about somebody who might be dead who might have been her lover, who might have kissed her the way he did, did to her the things he so loved to do. He pulled out a chair and sat down. She was drinking from a cup of coffee but he couldn’t see any steam coming from it.

  “How long you been out here?” he said.

  She pulled her coat closer around her. She had one of the many mufflers Evelyn had made for him wrapped around her throat.

  “Not long. I came down to th
e kitchen and got some coffee. I thought I’d come out here and look at the goldfish.”

  “Oh yeah? What are they doing?”

  “Nothing. Swimming around.”

  He hugged his shoulders with his arms. There were a few leaves left hanging in the trees, but not many. Winter had robbed them of their clothes and the trunks of the trees stood in spots of snow. Patches of snow dotted the woods that ran up the hill behind the house.

  “You sleep good?” he said.

  “I did. I started having the best dreams.”

  “Oh yeah? What did you dream?”

  She picked up her cup and took another sip from it. She looked out over the woods. She had a look on her face he hadn’t seen before.

  “I dreamed about being with my mamaw,” she said. “We were picking blackberries like we used to when I was a kid.”

  Merlot leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers across his stomach.

  “Is your grandmother still alive?”

  She set the cup down and rubbed her hands together. It was very cold.

  “Yeah. She’s ninety-three but she’s still going. Goes to church every Sunday. I need to go see her.”

  “How long’s it been?”

  “Aw, just a couple of weeks. But I’m always so busy. You know.”

  “Yeah. I know.” Thinking about his mother. But hell, she was all right. Ruff, her second husband, was taking good care of her. She got to walk on the beach every day. He waited a second. “Well, what do you say we pack our stuff and take off? We can make it in plenty of time if we go ahead and get on the road.”

  “That suits me,” she said. But she didn’t look happy when she said it.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. I’m fine.” She paused for a moment. “I was just wondering.”

  “Yes?”

  He knew the coffee had to be cold but she took another sip from it anyway. Stalling?

  “Are you going to take me over to your place when we get back?”

  He thought of Candy instantly and looked down at the table, then back up at her. Now was as good a time to tell her as any. And she had leveled with him about the cop. She’d been honest, and he knew he hadn’t. But she was old, damn it, she was old, and she’d lived a long time, and yeah, she was in bad shape, but he didn’t see some days how he could have her killed. Mainly because he knew she wouldn’t do it to him if the shoe was on the other foot. Like always, he waffled from day to day, back and forth on it. Some days it seemed like the sensible thing to do. Some days no way, Renee.

  “Yeah.”

  “I mean, you don’t have some woman you haven’t told me about or something, do you?”

  He laughed then, even though he was uneasy with his secret. But he had lost his courage, too. What if he told her and she didn’t understand how things were?

  “I do have a woman,” he said, and got up and reached for her hand. “But it’s not like you think. She’s about eighty years old and she’s got her own boyfriends. Now don’t worry about it. Let’s just have a good time. We’re on vacation.”

  She smiled then, and was her old self again. She took his hand and got up. She leaned over and kissed him good on the mouth.

  “Okay. I was just wondering.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said.

  77

  When Penelope woke, Merlot had his nose deep between her breasts. She hadn’t slept good for dreaming about Gabriel again. She pulled back gently from him and his face slid down onto the pillow. For more than a few moments she lay there beside him, touching the side of his face with the back of her hand. There were a few gray hairs on the sides of his head. Stubble on his chin. On top his hair was thinning a little. He’d told her he was forty-two and tenured. She wanted to know more. She wanted to know everything about him. But there were still so many questions. He was a teacher, she was a cop. He had tenure there, she had twelve years toward a twenty-year retirement. So they had steady salaries, insurance, growing pension funds. There were a lot of things she didn’t know about him and there were a lot of things he didn’t know about her. Plenty of things he didn’t know about her. He didn’t know that one of her uncles was in prison doing his tenth year of life for murder or that she had given a baby up for adoption fifteen years ago, when she was eighteen. A fine healthy boy. She didn’t know when she’d be able to tell him about that. Not yet. She didn’t know him well enough yet. She didn’t know his heart yet. But she thought it was good. She wanted more than anything a kind man and a loving man and she thought he was that.

  He snored lightly and she got up without waking him. She pulled the covers over him a little better and patted him fondly on the ass.

  Naked, she stood at the French doors, admiring the yard. She could see a nice deck down there. Some old Chinese guy raking leaves looked up casually and kind of coughed out his amazement and almost lost his grip on his rake until she jumped behind the curtains with her big titties jiggling and peeked back out. Then he went on, dragging his rake, shaking his head. She thought about stepping out there and flashing him just for the fun of it.

  It was very cloudy and the sun was hidden. She thought she’d get dressed and find the kitchen and get some coffee and sit out on that deck for a while.

  She peed first, the door almost closed, her elbows on her thighs and her chin in her fingers, thinking. They’d probably be there this afternoon. She hadn’t let on to him how scared she’d been the other night, when all that had happened, because she wanted him to think she was strong, that she was fearless, because that was how a police officer was supposed to be, even if the officer was a woman.

  She brushed her teeth and flossed and found some long underwear in the bag she’d left on a chair in the bedroom and dressed in the bathroom, the marble floor cold on her bare feet. She put on thick socks. She had half a mind to call the station to see if they’d found out anything, see if they’d found Elwood. They hadn’t turned the TV on last night so there hadn’t been any news to hear. She guessed she could always buy a paper today at a gas station somewhere if she really wanted to know. If she really did. If he was dead, and she didn’t know it yet, wouldn’t that be kind of like a blessed ignorance, just for today?

  She had some heavy wool pants and pulled them on and put on a sweater and her big coat. Merlot was still sleeping. One of his mufflers was hanging in the closet and she wrapped it around her neck, got her boots, unlocked the hall door, and went down to the kitchen. There was nobody down there, but some coffee was ready and there were some doughnuts and pastries. Some cereal. Bananas. Milk in an iced tub. She pulled out a chair from the table and sat down and laced the boots on. She was afraid she was falling in love with him. He was absolutely nutty and incredibly smart. He was very loving. He was able to make her go dreamy inside her head and make goose pimples jump out all over her. And he wanted children. Lord she did need to go see her mamaw. Tell her she’d found the man she wanted.

  Two small stainless-steel urns were sitting on the table beside plastic baskets with the sugar and stuff and Penelope got a big foam cup and drew it full of smoking decaf. She dumped in about five spoonfuls of sugar and stirred it. There were some doughnuts and chocolate eclairs and fruit-filled pastries under glass. She blew on her coffee and sipped it, trying to decide what she wanted. Just a little something to tide her over until Merlot woke up and they could have a real breakfast, maybe ham and eggs if they could find a Shoney’s or an IHOP or a Waffle House or a Huddle House nearby. Then hit the road. She set her coffee down and picked up a napkin and lifted the glass top from the eclairs and reached with the napkin for one of them.

  She got back out the door by holding the coffee carefully against her breast with her arm and using her free hand for the doorknob. She was glad they’d stopped here. She’d remember this one day when she was old.