The First Annual Grand Prairie Rabbit Festival (23 page)

“Steve.” Mark pulls the blanket away from his face.

“Mark, let me finish, I know you probably can’t be bothered and you were out all night and—”

“Steve, I’ll do it. Just go, already.”

“You’ll do it? You’ll find someone? Don’t fuck this up, Mark.” Suddenly I’m acting like I’m the one with my act together, like I’ve been running a tight ship in these parts.

“Yeah, just go.”

We look at each other. I start to ask what time he got in last night, where he and Vicky had gone after the club.

“God, Steve. I’m so sorry. I know how much she meant to you,” he says.

For the briefest of moments, the demons that have taken hold of me lately are convinced he’s talking about Vicky, confessing something about last night. And just as quickly I realize what I’m thinking and am disgusted with myself. I want to cry again. I leave without saying anything more to him.

I’m five minutes down the road when I pull over to vomit. My spat with the secretary had chased off the hangover, but now it’s back in full force. I squat on the gravel shoulder, one hand against the fender for support, sweating and almost crying from the pain of what are now dry heaves. The sun is bright, impossibly warm for this time of year. The greens of the field are gaudy and the blue of the sky looks like a ridiculously large and inviting swimming pool. The chirps of the birds pierce my ears. I don’t need a mirror to know what I look like: a man in black hunched over in the dirt, pasty white with just a hint of yellow, a tinge of green, sweat beading on his forehead, tears leaking from his bloodshot eyes, a bead of snot hanging from his left nostril. After the first wave of vomiting is over, my body cycles through the hangover and I start shivering. It’s all I can do not to crawl into the backseat and sleep, or better yet, slink out into the field and stretch out, the cool grass beneath me, the warm sun above.

But I have work to do. After a few more rounds of dry heaves, I climb back into the car and drive to the nursing home. There, Timeka offers her apologies and leads me to Miss Rita’s room. I see Timeka’s nostrils flare, her eyes slip into their corners to consider me, the smell of my hangover so strong it’s cutting through the antiseptic.

The halls are mostly silent and the few people out of their rooms don’t make eye contact with me, as if embarrassed by the presence of Death, that they were so weak that no one put up a fight when he showed up to take Miss Rita off.

I’d expected the room to be stripped bare, everything boxed up. But nothing has been touched. Photos, knickknacks. Everything is still in its place. Except for Miss Rita.

“She didn’t want us to touch her stuff,” Timeka says. “Said you was the only one who could touch it.”

“Thanks,” I whisper. “Can I be alone?” I can’t get rid of her fast enough.

“Sure, Father.”

When she’s gone, I walk into the bathroom and go through another round of dry heaves. That take cares of that. It’s over. I can tell by the ache in my stomach and the exhaustion that overcomes me. I want nothing more than to curl up around the toilet, the cool tile pressed against my face. I wash my face in the sink three times. For some reason I say, “Hooo boy” to myself before walking back into the room.

It takes me a few hours to box everything up. There isn’t much, but I move slowly, partly because of the hangover, partly because I drift off whenever I come across something I’d given her. She’d kept everything, every card, every photo, every little knickknack, all in neat piles. Into one box, I put things her great-grandchildren and grandchildren and children had given to her. Into another, a smaller one, go things my family had given her.

In the nightstand by her bed I find a microrecorder and neatly stacked tapes. It’s an odd little thing, out of place here. Then again, it’s now out of place in the outside world, where tapes have gone the way of the gramophone. There’s one loaded into the recorder. I press
PLAY
. Nothing. I rewind the tape all the way and press
PLAY
again.

“Steve, why you listenin’ to my tapes boy!” she shouts, then starts cackling.

I flinch at the sound of her voice, press
STOP
. Her voice—the voice of the dead, of a ghost—frightens me on some primal level. But I press
PLAY
again.

“You can have the tapes or Teddy might like them. But they yours first if you want them. I just didn’t want to forget nothing.”

There is a long pause. I look at all the other tapes stacked in the drawer. She couldn’t possibly have filled all of them. They were probably part of that old instinct to save up for a long winter. She and Mawmaw used to make fig and pear preserves before every winter—as if Louisiana ever suffered more than a week or two of below freezing temperatures, as if they didn’t each have a refrigerator, a freezer, and access to the Piggly Wiggly produce section. “You never know,” they always said. “You just never know.”

Her voice starts up again. “Had it in mind to make a good-bye tape, but I ain’t got much to say that I ain’t said before.” Another pause.

“And I’m tired, too, I guess.”

She pauses again.

“Tell the kids I love ’em and all that. Love you, too, Steve, but you smart enough to know that, I hope. Your mawmaw woulda been proud of you. I am, too.”

One final pause.

“But I still say you need you a woman,” she says with a chuckle. Then: “I mean that.”

And that’s it. I try to hold myself together, keep it all in, but a
whumph
sound escapes me and I draw a sharp breath. I bite my bottom lip to stop it from trembling and wipe my eyes as the tears come. I want to get biblical, to sob or wail or gnash my teeth and rend my garments. I don’t. It’s not that I realize at this moment how selfish, how melodramatic I’m being. It’s just the hangover, last night’s anger, has taken all that out of me. So I’m content to let my eyes leak a little as I play snippets from each tape.

There isn’t much to them. They aren’t dated as such. Each is labeled with a number, 1–40, written in crude, trembling lines. The one empty case, presumably for the tape already in the player, hadn’t been numbered.

Number 40 starts out as a conversation with one of the attendants.

“Hi, Miss Rita.”

“Hmph.”

“Well, someone’s testy today.”

“Hmph.”

“Looks like it’s time to change them sheets.”

“No.”

“Now, Miss Rita. Why not?”

“I want a white girl to do that.”

“Miss Rita,” the girl says, a little shocked, but laughing all the same.

“You heard me, Tilly. Git one of them scrawny-ass white girls in here.”

“Girl, you crazy.”

“Maybe so. Maybe so.” They’re both laughing now.

“Well, much as I’d like to help you, none of the white girls are on shift today.”

“What about that fat girl? Tiffany?”

“That’s not nice, Miss Rita.”

“Well, girl’s fat as a tick on a dog’s butt.”

“I guess that’s one way of looking at it. But she’s on vacation. Went to Florida.”

“Hunh! Who wants to see that bloated thing on the beach? Hooo!”

They both laugh again.

I smile. I don’t know when tape 40 was made, but she seemed to be keeping it up until the end. I take 40 out and slide in the first cassette.

“Go on, say something Mawmaw.” It’s the voice of a young man, probably her grandson Teddy.

“Say what? I ain’t talking into that thing.”

“Aw, c’mon. You can talk into it. Like a diary. Every day.”

“Now, why in God’s name would I want to do that?”

“You just took God’s name in vain, Mawmaw.”
Good one, Teddy.

“Shut up, boy. Is that thing on?”

“Yeah. You want to listen?”

There’s a click and I imagine Teddy rewinding the tape, playing it back. Then more clicking and clacking, some “Testing. Testing” from Teddy, then a tentative “Hello” from Miss Rita.

I can see Teddy showing her how to use it, thinking maybe he’d hit the jackpot. Teddy had been at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, majoring in English or folklore or history or some such. He probably fancied himself the next Ernest Gaines, with Miss Rita his own personal Miss Jane Pittman. A real one.

I can more clearly see Miss Rita putting up a fuss, swearing up and down she wasn’t going to fool with such nonsense, but secretly pleased at the attention. What I can’t picture is her actually talking into the recorder every day. It just wasn’t like her. Maudlin self-analysis was the mark of younger generations. And she surely wouldn’t want it to sound to the attendants like she was talking to herself.

But a taped diary isn’t exactly what she’d kept. After that introductory course from Teddy, she’d only taped conversations. Attendants mostly. Maybe she hoped to catch one of them on tape doing something wrong. The attendants, though, are well-meaning people, southern kids with deep-rooted respect, possibly some healthy fear, of their elders. They suffered her abuses with good humor, mostly because it was her way of showing affection to the people in her daily world—and the attendants were those people, her new family.

The tapes make Miss Rita’s own family and me and my family seem like alien visitors who dropped in once a year to see how things were going. But even though the tapes were crude and the family appearances apparently few and far between, I could tell who Miss Rita’s favorite was: Kanita, her great-granddaughter. When Kanita stepped into a scene, Miss Rita’s voice sang.

“Come here, girl, come sit on my lap.”

Then the sound of running feet, the child apparently unperturbed by her surroundings.

Then an “umph” from Miss Rita as the child lands. I’ve never met Kanita, had only seen posed pictures of a little girl in pigtails and pink. And that’s how I still imagine her—pigtails, pink dress, four years old—even though she’s more than likely wearing sneakers, jeans, and a dirty T-shirt.

And then there’s tape 17.

I’m startled by Daddy’s voice.

“I’d like to bring Sally and Jonathan around.” His second wife and my half brother.

“Why?”

“Why? I think they should meet you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yeah, well. I don’t want you to.”

“But, Miss Rita, why not?”

“Because I don’t want you to.”

“But I don’t understand.”

“Don’t expect you to.”

“But I thought it would be good for the boy. He’s heard so much about you.”

“Well, let him keep hearing. Besides, that kid don’t wanna be coming up in a nursing home.”

“Well.”

“Well nothing. Your new wife and kid, that ain’t part of me. Now, you and your brother and sister and that first group of kids, I know yall through your mama and I feel like I owe yall. Don’t know why, but that’s the way it is. But this new wife and kid, I got no connection there and I ain’t a museum exhibit. Show your new boy some pictures. Don’t need him up in here gawkin’ at the old colored lady. I got enough people in my life as it is. Enough white people for sure. Lord knows I got enough with your other boy moping around here half the time.”

I feel a stab of guilt and indignation.

“Well, he’s always been like that, Miss Rita.”

My own father betraying me.

“Uh-huh. I wonder where he gets it from. Just like you when you was a boy, mooning around over some girl.”

“Well, Miss Rita, boys will be boys.”

“Exactly. He ain’t a boy no more.”

“Besides, he’s a priest now.”

“Uh-huh. Yall couldn’t have talked some sense into him before he run off and do that? Rather he be in the army if you ask me.”

There’s a pause in the tape. Then Daddy again.

“Miss Rita, Steve hasn’t been moping about any girls recently?”

She pauses. “No.”

“You sure about that?”

When was this tape made?

It’s weird that Daddy even asked. He never pried, seemed to assume that once I hit sixteen, I had things pretty much figured out. I see him less than I see Mama.

“Yeah, I’m sure. Like you said. The boy’s a priest. Don’t pay no attention to me. Time slips around on me sometimes. He’s a good kid. See him more than I see my own family.”

“That where you get your whiskey?”

“Don’t know what you talking about,” she answers. I can picture the twinkle in her eyes as she dares Daddy to call her a liar to her face.

A knock on the door disturbs my reverie.

I clear my throat, find my voice. “Yes? Come in.”

Timeka pokes her head in. “Hey, Father. Some of Miss Rita’s family is here.”

“Okay,” I say, looking down at the recorder in my hands.

“Um, Father?”

I look up.

“Yes?”

“They’d like to come in.”

“Oh. Yeah, sure.”

“Okay, I’ll go get them.”

“Great.”

Then without considering propriety, morality, or roasting for all eternity in hell, I close the drawer, lock it, and put the key in my pocket.

Stupid, I know. I blame it on the hangover. Besides, what am I going to do if Teddy asks me to open the drawer? Say I lost the key or couldn’t find it? Wait until Teddy goes to the bathroom and dump the cassettes in the box marked
Steve?

Still, she said I could have them. Then again, the right thing to do would be to give the tapes to the family. I start to sweat again, the whiskey smell apparent even to me now.

Another knock and a head pokes through the door. “Father Steve?” It’s Teddy.

“Oh, hey, Teddy,” I say, walking toward him, holding out my hand. As Teddy takes it, I pull him in for a hug, a manly one, a priestly one. My first death hug, I realize.

“You holding up okay, Teddy?”

“Yeah, yeah. How about you?” He eyes me cautiously. I see his nostrils working. I wonder if he’s thinking that all Catholic priests are drunks.

“Yeah, I guess so.” I stop, wipe my forehead. Now that I’m standing again, having to talk again, the hangover seems intent on coming back. “Well, I don’t know.”

“Exactly,” Teddy says.

We stand in silence for a minute, doing what men do best—not communicating. Then the door creaks open, revealing a girl of ten or eleven. She wears slightly baggy jeans and a distressed Run DMC sweatshirt—vintage, no doubt. How can something from my teen years already be considered vintage? How fast is the world moving?