The Rabbit Factory: A Novel (18 page)
Read The Rabbit Factory: A Novel Online
Authors: Larry Brown
I
t had been a long day and it was a big surprise to Eric when Miss Helen walked in around nine. He could see right away that she’d been drinking. Her lipstick was a bit smeared, but she had a smile on her face. Some kids were looking at green-and-white parakeets. A married couple was looking at a puppy. Miss Helen walked over to the young rabbits’ cages and he saw her stick her fingers in through the bars to touch one of them. The little rabbit sniffed at her fingers. He didn’t guess he’d tell her what would be happening with some of those guys in a few more weeks, out back by the Dumpsters.
She wandered around the shop, acted like she was thinking about buying a pet. He tried to watch her without letting the people in the shop know he was watching her. But he watched her. He watched the movements of her legs in the tight jeans she was wearing and he watched her face and her breasts inside the leather coat she was wearing. The kids bought two parakeets so that maybe they could have baby parakeets and he sexed the birds quickly to be sure they were male and female and sold them a cage and gave them some feed and told them how to take care of them and they paid and left.
The guy of the couple came up to the counter and wanted to know if the bichon frise he was thinking about buying came with any kind of warranty and when Eric told him it didn’t, he left, too, and then his wife followed him out all pissed off and bitching at him.
When the door slammed, Helen looked straight at him.
“Let’s go have a drink when you get off,” she said.
“I can’t close till ten,” he said. It was true. But what about Mister Arthur?
“You know where the Peabody is?” she said.
He had to think about it for a few seconds. He thought about Jada Pinkett eating the beef stew in Miss Helen’s kitchen, about Mister Arthur opening the can for him, putting the newspaper down, petting him while he ate, talking to him. Mister Arthur had been really nice to him. So had she. It had felt good being in their house. It had made him feel not so bad about being away from home this close to Christmas.
“I never have been in there,” he said. “But I know where it’s at. What about Mister Arthur? Will he care?”
“Arthur doesn’t have to know anything about it. He doesn’t know everything I do anyway.”
He didn’t know what to say. She looked good. Better than good. But she was older. There was that. A grown woman. Not no girl. That was all he knew, girls, and not many of them. Actually only one that way, Rae Loni Kaye Nafco, a kind of large girl his age with a very pretty face who lived down close to Potlockney. She’d bought a puppy one time, a black poodle, while his daddy was gone off drinking and fishing with some of his buddies, and Eric had said some things she’d laughed at, and she kept talking to him, and stroking the puppy, and acting like she didn’t want to leave, and then he’d opened a couple of beers, and then they had taken a seat on a bale of hay, and then she had kissed him, and one thing had led to another pretty quickly, especially after she told him she was on the pill, and they had done it in the barn. Then a few very satisfying times at her trailer with fresh puppy shit on the kitchen floor. And all that had happened right before he left home. He missed her now. He missed home even more.
“What does it matter about Arthur?” she said. “You barely know him.”
She walked a little closer to him. She was wearing a zippered sweater under her coat and the zipper was down some now, almost halfway, and the cleavage of her breasts was showing. He could smell that perfume again and he felt almost weak.
“There’s no reason to be scared of me, Eric,” she said.
“Aw, I ain’t scared,” he said, which wasn’t true, since he was plenty scared, thoroughly scared, scared shitless.
“I’m going on over,” she said. “I’ll be at the bar. Just park on the street somewhere and walk on over. When you get there, we’ll get a table.”
She didn’t even wait for an answer from him. She zipped the sweater back up, stuck her hands in her pockets, then turned around and walked out. Watching her go, he couldn’t help but notice that she had a fine ass.
A
rthur was sitting on the toilet with the lid down, naked except for his socks, in the privacy of his own bathroom. He didn’t have much hair on him anymore, hadn’t in a long time. And a lot of his skin was pretty wrinkled. He was uneasy that Helen wasn’t home yet. He’d wakened during the night, a month back, and she hadn’t been in the bed, and when he’d gone downstairs, she wasn’t down there in the living room either. But she’d come back in about a half hour later with a half gallon of melting Edy’s Rocky Road ice cream, opening the front door like she was trying to be quiet, getting flustered on seeing him sitting in the living room with the lamp on and a magazine, in his housecoat and pajamas and slippers, saying that she had run over to Kroger. Had developed a sudden craving for some Rocky Road. But he’d smelled liquor on her breath when she walked by him, and figured she’d been to a bar. Probably the Peabody. And when he’d tried to question her about why she’d been drinking and driving again after all the trouble she’d already been in with the police, she’d just slammed the ice cream into the freezer and gone into the bathroom and slammed the door. But stuff like that was nothing new for her. Temper tantrums. Now she’d been gone for hours and he had no idea where. He wanted her to come on back because he was afraid of who she might be with and what she might be doing. Was something going on that he didn’t know about? Did she have somebody else? Was there another man somewhere she was seeing? Had he waited around too long to get some help? What were those stains on the back seat of the Jag and who put them there? What if she was driving around drunk again and got another DUI? The judge had already told her right there in the courtroom downtown, in front of everybody, that he’d put her in the state penitentiary for a while if she did it again, and that if she didn’t believe him, for her to just show up in his court on a DUI charge again.
He was also afraid of the pump-up thing but he went ahead and did what the instructions said and amazingly, it worked. It got big and it got hard and he slipped the rubber ring around the base of it and walked around the bathroom proudly with it sticking up at a pretty good angle for an old guy, he figured, even admired it in the mirror. Turned sideways and checked it that way, got the profile. He was surprised and almost embarrassingly pleased by how well the thing worked. And then he just let out a big sigh and started taking the band off. All pumped up with no place to go.
A
njalee moved her Camry down the street from the Peabody and took a cab over to Gigi’s Angels. She thought that would be safer. She asked the cabdriver to wait and went inside and there were only three people sitting at the bar. Nobody was dancing and there wasn’t even any music playing. The whole place looked like it was about ready to shut down. That made her feel like she was making the right move. Get off a sinking ship before it went down. And she
had
to get her good leather coat from upstairs.
“Hey, Moe!” she said. He stuck his head out from the back almost instantly. He was chewing something rapidly and he walked to the beer cooler.
“Well,” he said, swallowing, looking her up and down. “I didn’t know if you’d be back or not.”
“Just for a minute. Has Frankie called? Left a message or anything?”
“Nope. Lots of people were asking were you coming back after you left. Some more of those fire boys came back later. Jesus, can they drink some beer. You coming back tonight?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I may have gotten a better offer.”
He looked at her with a puzzled face and pulled a beer from the cooler.
“I’ve got a few things upstairs,” she said. “Some clothes and my good coat. Can I go get ’em?”
“Yeah, sure. Or leave ’em here with me, either one. What’s going on?”
“It’s nothing, it’s just…” She didn’t want to ask him if police had been around because he’d know she was in some kind of shit, and she’d just as soon he not know that about her right now in case she needed him later. So she put on her sweet face.
“I’ll come back in sometime and have a drink and we’ll talk about it. Okay? It’s just a lot of stuff going on right now.”
“Okay,” he said, and then he opened the beer and went on back through the door.
She went upstairs to the room where her things were hanging. She got her good leather coat. There were a few short dresses and a pair of shoes and a jean jacket and she got it all over one arm and hand and went back down. She went out to the waiting cab and it was gone. Her left arm was grabbed along with her right, and in just a moment there was one on either side of her, big ones in plainclothes and her stuff in a pile at her feet. People looking. Some of them just standing still, staring. The cops were actually pretty polite but they wouldn’t let her take her other clothes since she was going to jail. One of them went to the door and yelled for somebody to come outside and get her stuff. Moe came out and got the stuff but he didn’t say anything, just watched her with an awful look on his face, like he wished he could do something. They cuffed her and put her in the back seat and it didn’t have any door handles on the inside. One of the cops drove and the other cop smoked cigarettes and cussed the traffic and she was terrified because they had her ass good this time. And plus they wouldn’t talk to her.
H
elen began getting hit on by men as soon as she walked into the lobby. A couple hit on her on her way to the bar and wanted to buy her a drink but she just gave them a smile and a head shake and kept on going.
She liked the Peabody bar. It was usually filled with well-dressed working people in the late afternoons and she knew that some of them had come there straight from their jobs at banks or law firms or real estate offices downtown and within walking distance. She liked the idea of that. But she’d never brought Arthur to this place. He wouldn’t fit in, or he’d say something goofy and embarrass her. He might turn to a total stranger and start trying to talk to him about Randolph Scott. Or even Tim Holt. He was like a damn encyclopedia on those old westerns. Remembered movies he’d seen when he was a teenager in Tunica. She didn’t give a shit who Woody Strode was.
She stopped in front of the bar and smiled as she waited for some people who were leaving to get their coats and keys. And how did he get it in his head that she was so crazy about animals? She liked them okay, sure, the way you like raisin bran once in a while, but she didn’t need that wild-ass cat. It probably had rabies or something. Parasites maybe. She didn’t know where he got some of the ideas he came up with. Like looking for tranquilizer guns in a pet shop. And look now what that had led to. Eric, out of the blue. The world had gotten a lot more interesting. Then she had a sudden, exhilarating thought: What if she took him with her? To Montana? Wouldn’t that be getting a brand-new start?
The people got their stuff together and finally started getting out of the way. She pulled out a stool and took a seat. Eric seemed very innocent and she was excited by that. Ken smiled and waved while talking busily to another customer. Asshole. She found the Virginia Slim Lights she’d bought, in her purse, and lit one and looked at the row of bottles behind the bar. She didn’t know what she’d do if Eric didn’t come on over. But he’d come. She knew he would. She’d seen how he looked at her. There was no mistaking a look like that. They’d have to get a room here or go to his place. He never had said where he lived. She didn’t want to do it in the Jag in the parking lot anymore like she’d been doing with Ken. It was too risky. There were always cops walking around downtown or riding their bicycles.
She slid an ashtray closer. Ken kept screwing around but that was temporarily okay because she hadn’t made up her mind what she wanted yet. She’d already had three draft beers and two shots of Rumpel Minze in another bar, but all that had been over the course of a good while. She could switch to whiskey, and she still wouldn’t be drunk when he came in a little after ten. If he came in. She was afraid he was scared of her.
My God, honey,
she said to herself.
Don’t be scared of me. I just want to take a few minutes of your time to show you a few things your mother never did.
“Hello,” a smooth, husky voice said close to her. She turned her head to see a man in his early forties, curly coal-black hair, dressed in trim tan slacks and a charcoal coat over a white shirt.
“Hi,” she said, after a moment. After that moment Ken came over.
“Helen,” he said. “Sorry to make you wait. Everybody wants to talk football. Only game in town.” He winked.
“Don’t they, though,” she said. Winking at her like he owned her.
“What can I get you?”
“I wanted to see if I could maybe buy you a drink,” the guy butted in and said.
Ken looked at him. Helen looked at him. He was a fairly decent-looking dude but he had a pocket-pen protector. She didn’t want him to be around when Eric got here. Some guys would buy you a drink and never leave. Some guys thought buying you a drink entitled them to some privileges, like sitting in a bar beside you all night boring you almost to tears over their old girlfriends and how much money they made and what kind of car they had and how they went to Cancun three times a year and blah blah blah and rah rah rah. He could buy her a drink. But she wasn’t going to let him tongue-kiss her or anything. She didn’t think. But who knew? Who would have thought she’d wind up fucking this loser behind the bar who had holes in his socks and his underwear, too? And all he had to listen to was Barry Manilow. Every time she went over there, it was the same thing. Fucking Barry Manilow. Over and over. Endlessly.
“I don’t believe I know you,” she said.
“That’s true,” he said, and he stepped forward with his hand out. Ken stood there watching, looked around at the other customers, and waited. “My name’s Tyrone Bradbury.”
“Oh,” she said, and smiled. “Well. Are you any relation to Ray?”
He laughed and shook his head. She liked the way he put his hands in his pockets.
“No, but I get asked that sometimes.” He was clearly nervous. But he looked up. “I just saw you and wanted to introduce myself. I didn’t see a wedding ring on your finger.”
Which was true. It was in her pocket and she’d put on a silver-filigree-mounted topaz to cover the white ring of skin.
“I didn’t mean to bother you,” he said. “May I ask your name?”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, and put out her hand. “I’m Helen.”
He took it and he had a warm and firm clasp.
“It’s nice to meet you, Helen. So, can I buy you a drink?”
“Well. I may be meeting somebody after a while,” she said.
“Around ten or a little after.”
She looked at Ken after she said that. She thought his eyes were going to cross.
“That’s okay,” he said. “You don’t have to talk to me all night just because I buy you a drink.”
“Oh. Well, okay.” She turned back to Tyrone. “Pull up a chair.” He did. Ken was waiting, and watching her. She leaned forward with her breasts up on top of the bar. He was sure watching then. “Ken, Ken. What do I want tonight? You’ve got all that stuff back there and I don’t know what I want.”
Tyrone had gone back to his table for his drink and brought it over with a wet napkin because he’d sloshed some of it, looked like a scotch and water. She remembered that Eric liked scotch. She was aware of Tyrone sitting down next to her but she was looking at the bottles. They were rowed up back there and in a small pyramid at the bottom under blue neon glass. She could have one drink or two and get this guy to get a room and get it taken care of easy probably. Or she could wait for Eric and maybe get nothing. He was having a thing about Arthur. She could tell that already.
“What do you want, Helen?” Tyrone said.
“I don’t know. I don’t…freaking…know.”
“It’s about quit snowing,” Tyrone offered. Nobody responded. He sipped at his drink and some ran off on his hand and he looked for another napkin and then reached way over for one and then almost toppled his chair and spilled about half his drink and righted the chair and muttered something. Some drunk in the back laughed pretty loud but Tyrone acted like he was deaf. Ken got some napkins and started mopping the bar with them.
“I want a Crown and Coke,” she said, and Ken wadded the wet napkins and said: “Crown it is,” and, “I’ll get you another one, sir.”
She swiveled around slightly toward Tyrone and he smiled.
“Thanks,” he said to Ken. He’d spilled some on his coat, too.
“I don’t think I’ve seen you in here before,” she said, as he dabbed with a handkerchief and muttered.
“No,” he said, looking up. “I’m just here on business.”
“What business are you in, Tyrone?”
He scooted his seat closer, a smile on his face. Ken was making her drink back there and looking over his shoulder at her. Cars were passing on the street outside. She felt warm inside knowing that she was waiting here for Eric to come see her. She felt a way she hadn’t felt in a long time. It was something to look forward to, and she couldn’t think of many things she
could
look forward to. Going home sometime tonight sure wasn’t one of them. She was going to be nice to Tyrone. But she was going to hold out for Eric.
