The Rabbit Factory: A Novel (10 page)

He’d spent the rest of the night in a chair in the living room with a rug thrown over him. It was the only thing he’d been able to find. He went in there and put the rug back down on the floor and straightened it out with his foot. He could hear what sounded like a fire-truck siren going somewhere, maybe down Southern. They had a station up there. It faded away.

Upstairs he peeked through the bedroom door and saw Helen sleeping. Hungover again probably. It looked like she’d get tired of it.

Back in the kitchen, he started coffee and went out front to get the paper. He didn’t bang the door when he closed it.

The paper wasn’t on the doorstep. The asshole paper kid had thrown it out on the walk leading up to the step again, and it was lying right on top of some snow. The walk was kind of icy. And he had his house shoes on. Now he’d have to go back in and get his galoshes, or just forget about the paper. He hated to go to all that trouble. But he really wanted to read the paper. It would be something to occupy his mind and not let it dwell on what had happened again last night. It was starting to get embarrassing.

He stood there in the cold wind in front of the door and looked at the houses on each side of him and at the traffic passing down South Parkway and under the big leafless trees. He asked himself what he would do if the shoe was on the other foot. What if she had something go wrong with her, say she developed a fungus up inside her, or her vagina started making too much bad bacteria, or all the mucus in her body dried up, and it caused her to not be able to have sex, what would he do then? Assuming that he was functioning okay in the penis department, of course. There was just some piece of him that temporarily wasn’t working exactly quite right and they had to find out what that was, and if that meant going to the doctor and talking to him again, then maybe that’s what he needed to do. He couldn’t keep on like this. He had to remember that she was younger than him. Her sex drive was still strong.

So that settled that. He’d go back in and get his galoshes and get his paper and by then the coffee would be almost ready.

He turned around to go back in and the door was locked. He banged on it.

“Hey.”

He banged on it some more.

“Hey, Eric! Get up and let me in! Hey, Eric!”

It was a good thing none of the neighbors was out. This was about the third time he’d done this in a month. He always lost his keys.

“Hey, Eric!”

The door suddenly opened and Eric stood there over him, holding the doorknob, weaving.

“Locked myself out,” Arthur said, and stepped back in. “I was just getting my galoshes so I could go out for my paper.”

Eric’s hair was tousled and his eyes were red and he was scratching at his belly and yawning, but he waved a hand at Arthur and shook his head with his eyes half closed, still yawning, still sleepy.

“S’okay, Mister Arthur. I already got my boots on.”

He went out the door rubbing at the side of his face, stumbling, his arm in one sleeve of his coat. Arthur watched him and saw a few birds scatter as he moved toward them. Helen was always throwing out seeds for them, or old bread or crackers, and they hung around in the yard sometimes. Eric picked up the paper and dusted the snow from it and came back and clomped his boots at the step, knocking the snow off.

“I better take these off,” he said, handing Arthur the paper.

“Well, that’s not necessary, really, I…,” Arthur said.

He already had them off and walked sock footed back across the room and found his cigarettes and lighter on the couch where he’d slept.

Arthur closed the door and thanked Eric for getting the paper and Eric said he was welcome. Arthur could see the red light shining on the coffeepot, which meant it was ready. Jada Pinkett was sprawled like a dog who was dead.

“You a coffee man, Eric?”

“Shoot yeah. You got some ready?”

“It’s ready. How do you take it?”

And then, after a few exchanges of light chitchat, Eric began to tell him the history of Jada Pinkett, who had fought seven times in the pit, and who, though runtlike, had six times been victorious. At the end of the seventh fight, in back of a big chicken house in Paris, Mississippi, with thirty-four drunk people watching, and after suffering severe blood loss from a pumping vein on his left hind leg, he had been slowly choked down into the dry brown dirt in the second roll by a much larger and badly disturbed brindle bull named Tarzan Duran, from Athens, Georgia, and Eric thought maybe Jada Pinkett had suffered a near-death experience that changed his personality and made him stop wanting to fight and hating cats and start loving to catch little tender things like kittens and baby rabbits and play with them instead. Dog fighting had gotten a bad name, Eric told him, because of those people who wanted to put a stop to hunting once and for all and claimed fishing was cruel, too, to the fish.

They got up more than once to get more coffee and Arthur found some doughnuts that weren’t too stale in one of the cabinets and opened the box and put them on the table between them. Eric ate two and Arthur ate one. When Jada Pinkett woke up, Eric took him for a short walk and when they got back, Arthur opened a can of beef stew and let him eat it on an old newspaper. Eric, watching him eat, said his daddy had named him as a pup while holding him on his lap after seeing Jada Pinkett on MTV. Why? he said. Who knew? His daddy just liked the name, he guessed. Eric leaned closer and told Arthur that his daddy had won thousands of dollars on the dog, and he said it again,
thousands
of dollars, and Arthur asked him who from, and Eric said rich Delta ex-planters who had leased their land to the riverboat casinos, and were making ridiculous amounts of money each month not raising cotton, like three hundred thousand dollars a month, some of them, and had money to throw away, to build cool hunting cabins out in the wild river bottoms, with massive solar panels and concrete driveways that were miles long, and state-of-the-art satellite systems that pulled in over sixteen hundred channels, to install piña colada machines in the cabins where you just pushed a glass up against the machine and it spit one out. Boy, Arthur thought. He should have kept all that Tunica land his daddy had left him. But shit. How much money did a man need? He didn’t need any more. What would he do with more? Buy a big boat? Why did they need a big house with servants? He’d had that growing up and he didn’t want it. The main thing was just to be happy. But that itself was hard enough to do. If she was happy, would she drink so much? That old nagging worry of twenty years kept nagging through:
She only married you for your money, Dilbert-head.

Arthur heard a toilet flush upstairs. And he thought he heard the soft sound of the bedroom door closing, but couldn’t be absolutely sure because it happened at a moment when Eric was still talking. He couldn’t let on to Eric that he had a bunch of things troubling him. So he leaned back.

“Sounds like a whole way of life,” he murmured.

“It gets tough sometimes,” Eric said. “Y’all gotny eggs?”

Arthur found sharp cheddar cheese and half a Virginia ham in the icebox and he chopped hunks of both on a laminated block while Eric broke six eggs into a bowl and beat them with a whisk. Beside the stove Arthur found Teflon-coated pans. She’d probably sleep late. Then come down feeling bad. Then fix a Bloody Mary. Start all over again.

He looked up to see Helen standing at the foot of the stairs in her silky robe, the hem of her gown showing just below the rabbit trim, her feet in fur-lined slippers. She’d brushed her hair. Did she have lipstick on?

“Well, hey, she’s up,” he said. Jada Pinkett was browsing beside his knee for more juicy snacks. He bent over and picked up the wet messy newspaper with gobs of carrots and dog tracks in the beefstew gravy left on it and stashed it in the trash can. “Good morning,” he said, but he didn’t know what he would have said if Eric hadn’t been standing there, pouring the egg batter into the two skillets he’d preheated and coated with oil.

She seemed calm. She even smiled.

“Good morning,” she said, and walked on over, gave Arthur a light kiss on the ear. Eric turned at the stove.

“You sleep good, Miss Helen?”

“God,” she said. “I’ve got to have some aspirin.”

“Overdo it a little bit?” said Eric, with a tiny smile.

“You can say that again,” she said, and started looking in the cabinet where she kept all her pills. “I may have to fix myself a Bloody Mary.”

“Make it two if you don’t mind,” he said.

Arthur wasn’t surprised. He went over to the stove and gauged the progress of the omelets. The slowly crisping edges had slid away from the sloping walls of the pan and in the center of the quaking yellow mass there was cheese melting and cooking together with thick bits of ham, a genie wisp of fragrant steam rising that reminded Arthur of things his mother used to make for him at their big house in the Delta, out there in the old pecan grove. He could still smell in his head the pies she used to make, maybe blackberry the most since it was always their job to pick the berries, together, and he could remember the purple stains on his fingers, and the summertime heat, and the clean dirty jokes she told wearing her long dress and bonnet and laughing, and he could remember the view from the kitchen window, all those cotton wagons, filling up the whole back field in the summertime, twenty or thirty of them, grass growing up around them, all the tires his daddy had to get his men to fix in the fall. Took that many wagons to get it all in. But he never had wanted to farm, like his daddy. All that heat and dust. All that mud. If you didn’t get rain, you were screwed for that year. And he’d done all right with his daddy’s money, first in oil, then in the stock market. All you had to do was just leave it in there and you’d be okay. Better than okay. He had a lot more now than what his daddy had left him. Eric had the pans by the handles, sliding them back and forth a bit, making sure they weren’t sticking. Helen had gone into the liquor cabinet and was reaching for a bottle. Arthur didn’t say anything. He watched her get one of those six-packs of tomato juice from the pantry and listened to her coo to the kitty for a bit and the hissing was louder than the cooing. When she came back to the sink, she got a glass of water and opened a plastic bottle and took two pills, leaning her head back to get them down with the water.

“Crap,” she said. “I don’t know how we’re going to tame that kitten down.” She went to the icebox and got a lime and some Worcestershire sauce and some hot sauce and some pickled okra, and then she got some glasses and ice and started mixing and slicing. He made some more coffee and got three plates down. He’d halve his with Helen. But she saw him do it and said: “If you’re getting a plate for me you can put one back.” So he did. Then he got to thinking about those adoption people. Those adoption people had always thought he was too old. They never would come right out and say it, but he knew that was what they’d thought, in all their tidy little offices:
Too old. Almost a geeze-ball. Didn’t get married until he was almost fifty? And what the fuck does
she
know about raising a kid? Stamp them “Rejected.”

He should have tried to get one in Russia. Russia had plenty of them. But she hadn’t said anything about trying to get a baby in a long time now. She just carried the grieving of it around inside her like a stomachache. He still felt guilty over his lazy sperm. They were probably all dead by now.

“They’re ready,” Eric said, and pretty soon he had them on the plates. Arthur found the silverware and got napkins while Helen sat on the high stool and sipped her drink. Eric had already downed half of his by the time he put their breakfast on the table. Helen bummed a cigarette off him and found the bowl he’d used the night before and actually lit up and then coughed a delicate cough. Arthur didn’t say anything. He just sat there and ate and watched her. She was beginning to seem like somebody he didn’t exactly know. Like something had changed about her during a night’s sleep. Her hair looked longer somehow. She looked younger. And he didn’t believe he had ever seen her look more beautiful. It was all he could do to keep eating. He kept thinking about her crying, how the sobbing had sounded, how he’d been almost able to feel the anguish that was in her heart.

By the time breakfast was over, Eric had gone ahead and gotten a beer from the icebox and Helen had mixed herself another drink.

“You guys are starting a little early, aren’t you?” Arthur said. He’d kept quiet for a long time. He just couldn’t stand it anymore.

“Hair of the dog that bit me on the ass,” Eric said.

“Works for me,” Helen said.

“But don’t you think you should eat something?” Arthur asked her.

She just waved a casual hand. “I’ll boil some eggs. Something.”

“Well,” he said, looking at both of them, hoping that maybe Eric would decide to get going now if he gave him the gentle hint that they were ready to get on with their normal day of being with each other without him around. “I need to get my galoshes on and shovel some of that snow off the walk. Start my day.”

“Good,” Helen said. “That sure needs doing. It gets so slick sometimes I’m afraid I’m going to fall. Eric, honey, I hate to keep bumming.”