The Rabbit Factory: A Novel (5 page)
Read The Rabbit Factory: A Novel Online
Authors: Larry Brown
M
iss Muffett bumped softly on her plastic leg down the long hall, toward the cavernous kitchen she had to use. The big house in the little town of Como, thirty minutes south of Memphis just off I-55, was loud with its silence. It was a nice old town with large oaks and stately homes and mostly quiet streets. No mullet-headed punks running up and down with monster bass speakers going. You could sit out on the porch in summer. Most of the time, her boss was never there. Not these days. Not since his tragic accident six months ago. Now he tried to stay busy. He always thought he had to tend to his business in Chicago even though he was supposed to be retired. But Chicago had been good to him. So good that he’d been able to expand his meatpacking business to Memphis a few years ago. For the last few nights he’d been working in his shop out back. She’d seen the limo pull in there a few nights ago. But she never went out there except to get some meat out of one of his coolers. She didn’t want to bother him. She guessed he tried to work out his anger with work. He was the one who’d insisted she help him dig the postholes so that he could fence in the backyard for the little dog. She’d told him three times she was scared of machinery. She didn’t blame him for being angry with her. But it wasn’t exactly the kind of thing they could talk about either. The doctors had already said there was nothing they could do for him. Just like with her leg and her daddy’s boat motor out on Sardis Lake so many years ago. Her daddy didn’t mean to cut her leg off with the prop. And it almost killed him when he did. He went to his grave still apologizing to her for it, and crying over it. But some things you couldn’t do anything for. You just had to get used to having one real leg and one made out of plastic. You had to get used to doing some kind of job that wasn’t too hard but that still brought in some money, like housecleaning, which she’d done for years all over Como and Sardis and Senatobia, or even house-sitting and dog-sitting for rich people like Mr. Hamburger. It wasn’t so bad. Miss Muffett knew that things could always be worse.
The floors were shining from her diligent mopping with Mr. Clean. She looked behind a tall potted plant. Two small and perfect dog turds lay there, one crossed over the other in an
X,
almost identical, almost hidden. He had his own little personal dog door built right into the wall there in the kitchen, so why did he keep messing in the house? Because it was cold outside sometimes and he didn’t want to go out to use the bathroom, that’s why. He was very crafty about where he left his surprises. She believed he did it on purpose and it never failed to piss her off.
“You little shit,” she said.
She wondered where he was. Sometimes he hid in closets and was small enough to crawl up under the couch in the great room and sleep there undetected for hours. He moved through the house like a ghost, silent. Sometimes he showed her his teeth. And she’d never done one thing to him, hardly, had only tried to discipline him a few times, train him. He just didn’t like her, never had from the first when he was a puppy and she was keeping him and caught him crapping on the fine white-oak floors and warped him a good one with a rolled-up
Glamour,
which in all honesty was probably a bit heavier than a rolled-up newspaper. That was her right as the housekeeper. The dog shouldn’t have held that against her, she thought, but he evidently did. She’d tried to pet him and make friends with him plenty of times since then, but he wouldn’t let her. It seemed to her that he was holding a grudge. Rather than come whining or begging to her for water whenever his pan was dry, he would make an incredible leap from the rim of the second-floor guest bedroom’s bathroom tub to the seat of the commode, like a cat, and would get on the back side of the seat and put his forepaws down inside on the sloping front of the commode and lower his head, drinking on a downhill grade. She’d seen him do it. He’d drink for a long time, until he got his fill, his long-haired back sticking up through the hole in the toilet seat like some weird wig. She’d watched him once, when she’d heard the faint click of his toenails coming, hiding in the broom closet out in the hall and peeking past the corner of the cracked door.
Getting back out was harder for him. He had to pick up one paw at a time and get them up on the seat of the commode, and he slipped that day and got his back feet wet. But she figured he had it down to a routine by now. So he wasn’t dumb, not at all. And since he wasn’t dumb, he had enough sense to know by now that he was grown and he wasn’t supposed to go to the bathroom inside the house. But did that stop him? Hell no. He was so cunning and strategic with his deposits that sometimes she didn’t find them for weeks, and by then they had turned chalky white and were hard, like peanuts. She’d cuss him while she bent down awkwardly and picked them up with toilet paper. He was hiding again somewhere, right now. Probably avoiding her. Didn’t want to be friends. Didn’t want to let bygones be bygones. Probably up under the couch again. He was kind of a spooky little dog. Once she’d wakened to a terrific thunderstorm, one so severe the power had gone off, on a night when Mr. Hamburger had gone on another trip to Chicago, and in a flash of blue lightning she’d seen the little dog lying on her chest, whining. She’d risen screaming since it had happened in tandem with a nightmare about him, one where he was eating her feet, actually some of her toes on a three-cheese pizza, and she’d thrown him to the floor so hard it had injured one of his legs, and he’d limped for four days, and she had worried, and on the fifth day he had stopped limping and Mr. Hamburger had come home and caught him up in the hall and hugged him and kissed him, acted a fool over him like he always did.
She bumped over the floor and looked behind a couch. He wasn’t there. She looked for the little dog for about twenty minutes, opening doors quietly, taking careful steps, peering around corners one eye at a time. But he was nowhere to be found. She even went looking upstairs. Then she felt something watching her in Mr. Hamburger’s study and turned around slowly. He was lying on a shelf about two feet above a desk full of shipping bills and ledgers. He looked like nothing more than an old dust rag, so still he was. She couldn’t imagine how he’d gotten up there.
She raised her hand to try and pet him but he raised his lips and showed her his teeth. Okay. Well. She turned and bumped out and closed the door and shut him in there so he wouldn’t go outside and dig in the yard and get all messy while she was gone. Her boss wasn’t coming back for about another week and she thought she might slip out for a while tonight. But she wouldn’t be gone for long. He’d be okay by himself for a while. She’d be back later.
A
njalee parked her junky Camry just around the corner from her apartment building and left it and walked up the street and peeked around the corner before she stepped out. More snow was coming down and the few people on the sidewalks were bundled up and hurrying against it. There were two police cars parked in front of her building. The lights weren’t flashing. They were just sitting there. Oh
fuck.
She’d have to go back to Gigi’s Angels and keep staying there until Frankie called for her. The couch cops might not know she was working there yet. And the regular cops would put her
under
the penitentiary if they nabbed her for Miss Barbee. She didn’t know if Miss Barbee was dead or alive. She’d looked in the paper a few times but she hadn’t seen anything about it. But if she didn’t go back to the old folks’ home for community service, she violated her probation. She’d get raped with a billy club in jail. Maybe have to muffdive somebody’s old stinky box.
She got back in her car and turned it around in a parking lot overgrown with dead weeds. In ten minutes she was back at the strip joint. She put her car behind the building. A few customers were sitting on stools in the dead midafternoon. A rock tune was blaring. One girl was dancing but not very enthusiastically. She didn’t see the neatly dressed old guy who wore a gray raincoat and who had come in there for the last few afternoons. He was not a regular and nobody knew who he was. He just sat there on the corner stool and drank gin and tonics. She’d talked to him once.
Since nobody was behind the bar, Anjalee went around to the end and raised the part that was mounted on hinges and let herself back there and got a cold mug from the little icebox and drew herself a Sam Adams and poured a shot of mezcal and picked up a salt shaker and grabbed a wedge of lime from a tray full of them and set everything across the bar and then ducked back under the thing instead of raising it again and took her stool out front.
Maybe Frankie would call soon. Maybe even today. She didn’t want to tell him she’d been turning tricks again. But she hadn’t heard from him in a few days and she couldn’t do without money, smokes, drinks, food. And where was she going to go now? Where could she go where they wouldn’t find her? They might even come looking here. The detectives might be out on the street with her mug shot, since she had one, showing it to people and asking them if they knew her. And somebody they might ask might know her. They might say, Yeah, I know her, that’s Anjalee, boy she’s hot, turns tricks over at Gigi’s Angels sometimes, there’s a room upstairs.
Which reminded her that she needed to go up there and get her good leather coat before somebody stole it.
She licked the web of her hand and poured some salt on it and grabbed the mezcal and slammed it and bit the lime hard and licked the salt off her hand and then picked up the beer and drank some of it. Another tune started up and the stripper moved into it sluggishly. Anjalee wondered if she ought to just go on home.
“Hot Juanita!” somebody yelled, and threw a dollar at the girl.
“Wore-out Juanita’s more like it,” the girl said over the music.
Moe came back in and saw Anjalee and smiled and winked. He had a bad temper sometimes, but she had him pretty well wrapped around her finger. Some other people came in, two men in suits, two men in car coats with shopping bags, towing a blind guy, and they got him up on a stool and ordered him a margarita on the rocks. The blind guy was wearing a fox stole. The two men in suits called for shots of whiskey and lit cigarettes. They were standing pretty close to where the nice old guy in the raincoat had sat those few times, and she thought about that afternoon she’d met him. Back before all this stupid bullshit happened.
“Good afternoon,” he’d said.
She had to figure out what she was going to do. Maybe she could stay at Frankie’s place for a few days, wherever that was. All he’d ever told her was that he lived in midtown.
He pulled back the stool next to hers and said: “Mind if I sit down?”
“Free country.”
The two guys in suits down the bar watched her and talked and nodded and watched her some more. One winked.
“Yes it is,” he said immediately. “It certainly is a free country and I for one am glad of it. Things would be pretty sad if it wasn’t a free country.” He took a drink of his gin and tonic and set his glass down on the napkin and said: “It’s also good to be alive. There’s a whole lot of people who can’t say that.”
She drank some more of her beer. She probably needed another shot. She looked at the guys. They were grinning like a pair of mules eating saw briars. She’d heard her daddy say that once. Jesus, she still missed him.
“Had a lot of snow lately, haven’t we?” the old guy said, although he wasn’t looking at her.
One of the guys held his drink up and nodded to her. She smiled at him and wondered how much money he had on him.
“I wish it would snow the whole city over and stop everything from moving,” she said, and looked at him. He was studying a dusty deer head mounted above the bar, in the back. UT Volunteers and Tennessee Titans and Memphis Tigers caps hung on the horns.
“You a sports fan?” he said.
“Naw. Not really. I been to a few fights at Tunica.”
Maybe if she took them on together she’d make more.
“Me either.” He shook his head. “I don’t even get excited over the World Series. Everybody else does. I guess there must be something wrong with me.”
“My boyfriend’s nuts about baseball,” she said. “Football. Hockey. Basketball. Car racing. Horse racing. Drag racing. Dog racing.”
“I like westerns,” he said. “Old stuff mostly. John Wayne. Alan Ladd. Randolph Scott.”
Moe came down the bar to get a beer from the cooler back there. He opened it and turned around.
“I thought you went home already,” he said to her.
“I decided to come back.”
“You gonna be around tonight?” Meaning did she want him to put out the word that she was available for rolls in the upstairs hay.
“Maybe so. I don’t know yet.”
“Well let me know when you do. Couple guys down here askin’ can they buy you a drink.”
She ducked her head a couple of times and after watching her for a few seconds he moved away. She didn’t know what she was going to do.
The old guy left her alone, raised his face, and watched the stripper dance for a bit. After a while he called for another drink. When the bartender started making it, he turned to her.
“Would you like something else, miss? Looks like you’re getting depleted there.”
She looked up at him. He had on a pale blue paisley tie and his shoes were shined and he kind of resembled Richard Harris only shorter and plumper. She’d seen
A Man Called Horse
at the drive-in outside Pontotoc once, when she was very small and pale, while somebody was on top of her mother in the back seat, grunting. She had concentrated on the movie even when the sounds behind her got too loud to ignore, when the grunts began to climb toward breathless short screams. She had sat there with no popcorn and watched Richard Harris being hung on horsehair ropes by the meat of his chest to the beat of rawhide drums and stayed as quiet as a hiding rabbit since her daddy was dead and all appeared to be lost.
“Okay. Sure. Mezcal and a Sam Adams. Thanks.”
Some more people were coming in now and before long it would start to get dark. Voices rose in laughter and talk. The two guys who had been watching her finished their drinks and left. Maybe she needed to think about cutting some action before long. Maybe if she made a long night of it she wouldn’t even need to worry about Frankie’s money. But no matter how much she made, she wouldn’t be able to go back to her apartment and get her drawings and stuff. She hated that. She’d drawn one from memory of her grandmother sitting on a paddleboat in Charleston Harbor, going out to look at Fort Sumter. Maybe she did need to go home. But that would be hard to do without some money. Her mother didn’t have any. And there’d probably be some grubby asshole with a pot gut hanging around. There always was.
After the fresh drinks came, the old guy turned to her again.
“I’m not trying to be nosy or anything,” he said. “I’m just wondering if you work here. I’ve seen you behind the bar.”
She picked up her beer and sipped it. He seemed like a nice old guy. He looked pretty harmless. Like somebody’s uncle. Like Mr. Pasternak.
“Well,” she said. “I guess you could say that.”
“Are you a dancer?”
It was odd to her that he said “dancer” instead of stripper. It was like he was showing her a little respect. She decided she liked him.
“Sometimes.”
“Are you going to dance today?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I usually do my dancing late at night.”
He looked at one of his thumbnails and seemed uncomfortable.
“I was just wondering,” he said. “Do you have a costume with you?”
“A costume?”
“Or whatever you dance in.”
“I’ve got something I can go put on if that’s what you mean.”
Now he seemed shy. His face turned just a little red and he cleared his throat. That was something you didn’t see much in here.
“I was just wondering,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“How much would it cost me for you to go put your costume on and dance a little?”
“You mean just for you?”
“Yes,” he said, and looked into her eyes. There was something in his that was soft and vulnerable, as if it pained him to say what he was saying.
“I don’t know. How much would you like to give me?”
“How about fifty dollars?” he said.
She was already sliding off her stool.
“Hell, mister, for fifty dollars you can go upstairs.”
“What’s upstairs?” he said.
“Come on and I’ll show you,” she said, and reached for his hand.
But when she got him up there, and took off everything except her panties, and did a little sexy dancing for him, he couldn’t get it up, not that she saw it, because he didn’t take any of his clothes off, only admitted that he was having a problem with his wife, and she felt bad for him, because she thought maybe he was going to start crying, and she thought it was pretty sad, but he gave her the fifty dollars anyway, and she was ashamed of herself for taking it, but she did, since she needed it.
The door opened, and a group of guys came in, some Memphis firefighters she knew from Fifi’s Cabaret when she used to work the couches, and she saw them looking at her. They were regulars in here now and good tippers and loved to drink the hell out of some cold beer when they got off duty.
“I’m in for the night, Moe,” she said, and he said okay. What she needed was a sugar daddy. Somebody who could take care of her the way she wanted to get taken care of. Stay on South Beach in Miami during the winter maybe. Or fly to some island. First class. All expenses paid.
