T. Boyle - Greasy Lake and Other Stories

Bayard shrugged. He could still taste the tinny aftershock the incident had left in the back of his throat. A fight. He’d been involved in a fight. Though he hadn’t struck anyone in anger since elementary school, hadn’t even come close, he’d reacted instinctively in defense of his children. He sipped his gimlet and felt a glow of satisfaction.

“This is the man we’re going to have next door to us?” Fran set the bowl on the table beside a platter of reconstituted stir-fried vegetables and defrosted tofu. The girls were subdued, staring down their straws into glasses of chocolate milk. “Well?” Fran’s eyes searched him as she sat down across the table. “Do you think I can have any peace of mind with this sort of. . of violence and lawlessness on my doorstep? Is this what we left the city for?”

Bayard speared a square of tofu and fed it into his mouth. “It’s hardly on our doorstep, Fran,” he said, gesturing with his fork. “Besides, I can handle him, no problem.”

A week passed. Then two. Bayard saw no more of Arkson, or of Cullum, and the incident began to fade from his mind. Perhaps Cullum had soured on the deal and gone off somewhere else — or back to the hole he’d crawled out of. And what if he did move in? Arkson was right: there was so much land between them they might never lay eyes on one another, let alone compete for resources. At any rate, Bayard was too busy to worry about it. Mornings, it was second-grade geography and fourth-grade history, which meant relearning his state capitals and trying to keep his de Sotos, Coronados, and Cabeza de Vacas straight. Afternoons, he kept busy with various home-improvement projects — constructing a lopsided playhouse for the girls, fencing his vegetable garden against the mysterious agent that masticated everything he planted right down to the root, splitting and stacking wood, fumbling over the instructions for the prefab aluminum toolshed he’d mail-ordered from the Arkson Outfitters catalogue. Every third day he drove into Bounceback for groceries (he and Fran had decided to go easy on the self-subsistence business until such time as society collapsed and made it imperative) and on weekends the family would make the long trek down to Missoula for a restaurant meal and a movie. It was on one of these occasions that they bought the rabbits.

Bayard was coming out of the hardware store with a box of two-penny nails, a set of socket wrenches, and a hacksaw when he spotted Fran and the girls across the street, huddled over a man who seemed to be part of the sidewalk. The man, Bayard saw as he crossed the street to join them, was long-haired, bearded, and dirty. He had a burlap sack beside him, and the sack was moving. “Here, here,” said the man, grinning up at them, and then he plunged his hand into the bag and drew out a rabbit by the ears. The animal’s paws were bound with rubber bands, its fur was rat-colored. “This one here’s named Duke,” the man said, grinning. “He’s trained.

Long-whiskered, long-eared, and long-legged, it looked more like a newborn mule than a rabbit. As the man dangled it before the girls, its paws futilely kicking and eyes big with terror, Bayard almost expected it to bray. “Good eatin’, friend,” the man said, giving Bayard a shrewd look.

“Daddy,” Melissa gasped, “can we buy him? Can we?”

The man was down on his knees, fumbling in the sack. A moment later he extracted a second rabbit, as lanky, brown, and sickly-looking as the first. “This one’s Lennie. He’s trained too.”

“Can we, Daddy?” Marcia chimed in, tugging at his pant leg.

Bayard looked at Fran. The girls held their breath. “Five bucks,” the man said.

Down the street sat the Olfputt, gleaming like a gigantic toaster oven. Two women, a man in a cowboy hat, and a boy Melissa’s age stood staring at it in awe and bewilderment. Bayard jingled the change in his pocket, hesitating. “For both,” the man said.

Initially, the rabbits had seemed a good idea. Bayard was no psychologist, but he could see that these gangling flat-footed rodents, with their multiplicity of needs, with their twitching noses and grateful mouths, might help draw the girls out of themselves. He was right. From the moment they’d hustled the rabbits into the car, cut their bonds, and pressed them to their scrawny chests while Fran fretted over ticks, tularemia, and relapsing fever, the girls were absorbed with them. They fed them grass, lettuce, and the neat little pellets of rabbit food that so much resembled the neat little pellets the animals excreted. They cuddled, dressed, and brushed them. They helped Bayard construct a pair of interlocking chicken-wire cages and selected the tree from which they would hang, their thin serious faces compressed with concern over weasels, foxes, coons, coyotes. Melissa devoted less time to tormenting her sister and bemoaning the absence of her school friends; Marcia seemed less withdrawn.

For his part, Bayard too found the new pets compelling. They thumped their feet joyously when he approached their cages with lettuce or parsley, and as they nuzzled his fingers he gazed out over his cleared acre to the trees beyond and thought how this was only the beginning. He would have goats, chickens, pigs, maybe even a cow or a horse. The way he saw it, a pet today was meat on the hoof tomorrow. Hadn’t they eaten horses during the First World War? Mules, oxen, dogs? Not to mention rabbits. Of course, these particular rabbits were an exception. Though in theory they were to be skinned, stewed, and eaten in time of distress, though they represented a hedge against hard times and a life-sustaining stock of protein, Bayard looked into their quiet, moist eyes and knew he would eat lentils first.

The following week Bayard took the family into Missoula for a double sci-fi/horror feature (which only helped confirm him in his conviction that the world was disintegrating) and dinner at the local Chinese restaurant. It was after dark when they got home and the Olfputt’s headlights swung into the yard to illuminate two tiny figures hanging like wash from the simulated beam that ran the length of the front porch. Melissa spotted them first. “What’s that?” she said.

“Where?”

“There, up on the porch.”

By the time Bayard saw them it was too late. Fran had seen them too — disheveled ears and limp paws, the puny little carcasses twisting slowly round their monofilament nooses — and worse, the seven-year-old, rousing herself from sleep, had caught a nightmarish glimpse of them before he could flick off the lights. “My God,” Fran whispered. They sat there a moment, the dark suffocating, no gleam of light for miles. Then Marcia began to whimper and Melissa called out his name sharply, as if in accusation, as if he alone were responsible for all the hurts and pertersions of the world.

Bayard felt he was sinking. Pork fried rice and duck sauce tore at the pit of his stomach with a hellish insistence, Fran was hyper-ventilating, and the girls’ lamentations rose in intensity from piteous bewildered bleats to the caterwauling of demons. Frightened, angry, uncomprehending, he sat there in utter blackness, his hands trembling on the wheel. When finally he turned on the parking lights and pushed open the door, Fran clutched his arm with the grip of a madwoman. “Don’t go out there,” she hissed.

“Don’t be silly,” Bayard said.

“No,” she sobbed, clawing at him as if she were drowning. Her eyes raged at him in the dim light, the girls were weeping and moaning, and then she was pressing something into his hand, heavy, cold, instrument of death. “Take this.”

Six or seven pickups were parked outside the T&T Cocktail Bar when Bayard rolled into downtown Bounceback. It was half past eleven, still hot, the town’s solitary street light glowing like a myopic eye. As he crossed the street to the telephone outside Chuck’s Wagon, Bayard could make out a number of shadowy figures in broad-brimmed hats milling around in front of the bar. There was a murmur of disembodied voices, the nagging whine of a country fiddle, stars overhead, the glow of cigarettes below. Drunks, he thought, hurrying past them. Their lives wouldn’t be worth a carton of crushed eggs when the ax fell.