David Gates - Jernigan

“We all of us tried to talk him out of that stupid name,” she said.

“What’s wrong with Tim?”

“So funny,” she said, reaching over and pinching my cheek. “Suburban Survivalist.”

“I’m lost,” I said.

“Peter,” she said. “I told you. It’s Tim’s magazine.”

“Somebody you know puts out that thing?”

“I did tell you, Peter. You must not have been paying attention.”

“Listen, I’m sure you did,” I said. I’m sure she did.

“Tell me something,” she said. “Has Danny given you any idea of what goes on around here?”

“Why?” I said. “What, do you sit around—” I was going to say levitating , but I needed something more improbable. Nothing came to mind that was too weird to imagine her maybe actually doing; that’s how much I trusted this Martha Peretsky. So what was I doing in her house all the time? Right, but I mean besides that.

“You look so stricken,” she said. “It’s not anything deep and dark. It’s just that this is a sort of a two-woman survivor community here. Who, disguised”—trying to deepen her voice to a Don Pardo baritone—“as an everyday broken home, fights a never-ending battle.” Back to normal voice. “Though I sometimes wonder why we bother. You’ve never even asked me what I do for money.”

Huh. Yeah. Well. Certainly had me nailed on that one. I really should’ve shown some minimal curiosity, especially when she was seeing me off in the morning and showing no signs herself of getting ready to go to work. Fuck, I really should’ve felt some minimal curiosity. I must have assumed she was on vacation or something, assuming I was assuming anything. I mean, a vacation that goes from July into September? What did I think she was, a college professor? Maybe I just assumed she was my mother, seeing me off to school and not existing until I came home again. (After third grade, of course, it was a sequence of nannies and shit that I forgot about every day. Whole other story, though.) But I was certainly wrong not to have asked what she did for money. Well, I hadn’t. Though on the other hand I wasn’t about to eat shit for it, either.

“Well?” I said. “Do tell.”

“I can see you’re fascinated.”

“I’m curious, yes. What do you do for money?”

“Nothing,” she said, pretty clearly expecting me to smite my brow like a Three Stooge. “I might temp once in a while if I’m really strapped, and over Christmas I usually work at Alexander’s if they need extra help. But basically …” She waved her hand around in air as if twirling a lariat, to suggest her freedom from the everyday. “The house is paid for — it actually was Rusty’s parents’ house. But it was sort of part of the agreement when he left that Clarissa and I would just keep staying here. Anyhow, so with a good big garden and this and that, Clarissa and I can just sort of …” She lariated her hand again. Old Martha here seemed to be pretty popped on that moonshine. “I call her my little cash cow,” she said, “because Rusty sometimes kicks in some money. When he’s feeling guilty enough, basically. You know, maybe she’ll be the next Madonna, support me in my old age. She has the look down, if she just knew how to do anything. But you know, we do fine. And we do it pretty much outside the money economy. I can’t believe Danny didn’t tell you any of this. Did he tell you about Bunny Hell?”

“Is that like Benny Hill?” I said. I just really didn’t feel like getting into all this.

“I think it blew his mind a little at first. You know the way he never lets on, but you could sort of see it. I mean, I guess it blows my mind a little if I think about it the wrong way. But he doesn’t seem to mind eating the bunnyburgers.”

I got serious. “You mean you really raise rabbits? Where the hell are the rabbits?”

“Bunny Hell,” she said. “You want to see?”

She stood up and kitchy-kooed. She opened the door next to the refrigerator and I followed her down the cellar stairs. Fluorescent lights were already on down there, as if it were a business office; black plastic was stapled over the chin-level windows. “I thought we better cover the windows over,” she said, “so people wouldn’t see the lights on all night and think we were growing sinsemilla. Anyhow, voilà . Bunny Hell.”

I counted five cages, made of two-by-fours and chicken wire: three on the built-in workbench, two on a ping-pong table, one on each side of the net. Each cage had three or four rabbits. White, black, piebald; bright, trusting eyes. Martha stuck two fingers through the chicken wire and smoothed between the ears of a chocolate-brown rabbit the size of a roasting chicken. “You want to hold one?”

“I’ll pass,” I said.

“Look,” she said, “I know. But they really do have a good life. You know, for a bunny. Lots of other bunnies to hang out with and fuck — we definitely encourage fucking — and good big cages that get cleaned all the time, good stuff to eat, sunshine all day every day”—she pointed up at the fluorescent lights—“and when their time comes they never know what hit ’em.”

“What does hit ’em?” I said.

“Twenty-two,” she said. “Look it’s absolutely no more immoral than going to the supermarket and buying a chicken that somebody has killed for you. You want to see?”

“Christ no,” I said.

“I don’t mean a demonstration,” she said. “Here.” The basement was divided by a partition; she opened a door into a room that smelled of … some smell from my childhood. She pulled a string, and a bare bulb lit up. One corner was stacked with haybales. “Used to be the coal bin in here,” she said. Coal: that was the smell. Grandpa Jernigan’s basement. “Before Rusty and I put the oil burner in, his parents had this big-ass old coal furnace sitting in the middle of the basement. With all the ducts going all over the place? When Clarissa was a little girl, I used to tell her it was a tin tree for the Tin Woodman to cut down.”

She squatted down and lifted the top of an old metal tool chest. Inside was a little automatic pistol and a box of.22 shorts. “In case you’re here alone,” she said, “and the Revolution starts or something.”

“This is the death chamber?” I said. “What do you do, shoot ’em against the haybales?”

She looked surprised. “Huh,” she said. “Yeah, Tim told me to make sure and use a haybales. Otherwise probably the first one I would have done, the bullet would have ricocheted off the floor and killed somebody. See, what I do is just sort of get a good grip on the bunny, and then I just put the thing right against the back of the, the thing’s head, so I’m shooting into there like. We use the hay for the little guys’ bedding, too.”

“Waste not, want not,” I said.

“Believe me, I know how all this sounds,” she said. “But it’s actually more moral than going out and buying chicken or something. Do you know how those chickens live that you get at the store? You know how they die?”

I didn’t, exactly, but I nodded yes so I wouldn’t have to hear about it. Of course she was right, although you had to wonder if all those millions of miserable chicken lives outweighed a single ruined human life, ending in a drunken human death by automobile. Apples and oranges, probably.

Walking past the cages again, I gave the deathbound bunnies a crisp salute, thinking of the old morituri te salutamus , although in fact I had it all fucked up, since I was doing the saluting and they were doing the moriturying, at least right now. Good and popped on that moonshine myself.