Black Rabbit and Other Stories (13 page)

“Hey man,” I say. “What's up with the elbows?”

“Are you talking to me?”

“I should kill you.”

But the conversation has already gone on too long. Let me not talk of murder here. Let me talk of brotherly and sisterly love, the kind you're not finding around town these days. Small acts of mercy. Charity. A clap on everyone's back. Everyone feel good? Good. My plate is full already. My appetite dulled by noxious traffic fumes and nauseating opinions; I mean, opinions period. My hands ache. I have a tumour in my left calf muscle. The doctor tells me it must go. Adrienne never does call me back. Let's jump ahead a bit. Adrienne marries a real-estate guy from Scarborough, Eamon. Last I heard, they bought a house in the Beaches with a tilted kitchen floor. Eamon has a very low sperm count. It took me a long time to get over Adrienne.

George finishes the play at last. The boys perform it to mixed reviews. One critic points out the lack of structure, the deliberate breaking down of a classic dramatic arc: but to what end? he wants to
know. To what end. I wouldn't dare broach the subject with George. He's grown more sensitive over time. I lost my leg after the operation, but the prosthetic leg works fine. In a year they intend to replace it with an even more efficient one. My doctor promises I'll be able to run if I want. Like I ran when I had both legs.

One day on the strip I bump into Adrienne. She's ballooned.

“You haven't changed a bit,” she says.

“Neither have you. How's life?”

“Golden right now. Golden.”

“I'm glad for you.”

And we continue our separate ways. It's nice like this. But then life can be nice if you let it. Things come into being for a reason. We're unsure what that reason is, but maybe if we just let it all play itself out without thinking about it too much—I don't know. George would have structured it once upon a time. Then he abandoned structure. And we do that. We abandon structures. And we are proud of our efforts, but no one else is.

Inside, the wife berates me from the bathroom about something I failed to do several days ago. The matter, small then, has become microscopic to me, so I bring no heat to the battle. And so it happens. Helen wins in a rout. I was wrong, I was wrong, I am evil, I am Beelzebub. But not content with mere victory, she now wants to rip my heart out and eat it; she wants to eviscerate me and fill my body cavity with hot stones; she wants to jab her toothbrush in my eye, and I'm convinced she'd do it if she could get away with it. Then again, there's no telling what I would do given impunity. This is how things stand right now. I raise my hands in surrender, tell her I need air. The bathroom door slams shut.

Outside it smells like a tire fire. I stand in the driveway with my hands on my hips and the high August sun scorching my head. As I stagger to the back, a blue jay whirs by me and I eye it to the bough of the oak tree where it harries a cardinal, of all things. Feathers fly. An orange tabby under the tree watches the tussle with sinister absorption. And not to be outdone, the squirrels square off, black versus gray, screeching and tearing at each others eyes. The world is a battlefield, make no mistake.

I glance next door. The neighbour, a stocky man with salt-and-pepper hair and a tightly trimmed moustache, stands on his deck taking in the action. He and his wife and two boys moved in a few months ago and even though we've bandied nods I don't know his name. What does that say about me, about him, about the way things are right now? I find it hard to be objective these days.

Poking his head over the privacy fence, the neighbour declares that a skunk has taken refuge under his shed. This explains everything. No wonder Larry Holmes, our lab-husky mix, wouldn't venture out. Last summer in the park down the street he ran into his first skunk. It wasn't pleasant. Wildlife abounds in this neck of the woods: coyote, fox, raccoon, and deer. Just the other day a doe and fawn clattered up the driveway, giving me a good fright. No bears have been sighted, but it wouldn't surprise me. A bear in the driveway would get the old ticker clapping, yes it would. The neighbour has more to say.

“Last guy who owned the house didn't concrete the space under the shed.”

“He didn't?”

“He did not. What kind of man doesn't concrete the space under his shed?”

When I tell Helen about the skunk, first she rebukes me for not telling her sooner, then she trumpets fears about the dog's safety.

“He's not stupid enough to mess with another skunk, honey.”

“Just keep your eyes open, Ralph. Especially at night. Skunks are nocturnal.”

I don't know much about skunks, except for the obvious. I mean what's there to know? It wouldn't be hard to find out more about them, but the idea of it bores me. Lately everything bores me. I've stopped watching television and movies. I can't read anything, not even magazines. I don't sleep well at night.

Helen hates her job at the hotel. She claims the other girls gang up on her, whisper behind her back, sabotage her work. Just the other day she heard them laughing it up in the washroom—they never laugh when she's around, this is the thing. Every workplace has its problems,
I tell her. Stand up for yourself, do a good job and no one can touch you. She tells me I'm full of hot air then starts crying.

My efforts to comfort her produce a shoulder shift. I understand. She begrudges my position—I'm a youth counsellor, well paid with full benefits. But it's heartbreaking work and takes its toll on you. I've lost my sense of humour, my spark. But this is not about me. Despite having many marketable talents and a supple intellect, Helen has resigned herself. Get another job, I encourage her, but she can't bring herself to do it, to search, to go through the rigmarole of the interviews and so on. I've stopped listening to her complaints about work, though I let her vent. I do that with the kids I counsel—let them vent, without getting too involved.

One morning I'm taking out the garbage. Viola, the blue-haired widow from across the street with hips like a chesterfield, waves to me and shouts something I don't catch. I gesture.

“There's a skunk loose, Ralph.”

“Yes, there is. He's under my next-door neighbour's shed.”

“It's a female.”

She finds this amusing. She has no children, no grandchildren, no pets. I often get the feeling she's making sport of me. Helen says I remind Viola of her dead husband, something disconcerting on many levels.

“They're hard to kill,” she cackles.

“It's not funny, Viola.”

“But it is, Ralph. It is.”

Back inside I describe the above encounter to Helen. She's getting ready for work, darting back and forth between the bedroom and the bathroom, whipping clothes and shoes about, spilling powders and creams, convulsing with hysterical energy. She abruptly stops what she's doing and glares at me, her chest heaving. Then she whips a hairbrush down the hall, bouncing it off the pantry door.

“Viola's fucking batty, now out of my way, I'm late.”

“But I resent people mocking me.”

“Tell it to the marines.”

I see the neighbour poking around his tomatoes with a long wooden pole. They look ill, the tomatoes, pale, mealy. I wouldn't eat one if you paid me. The sky is a pretty blue today, angelic clouds frame the jet streaks chalking it. And birds flit from branch to branch, finches spiked among the sparrows and the grackles, but are they finches? And where is yesterday's blue jay? So nervy, so bold. A chirp like a bark. A dog of a bird, dogging the others. I know little about nature, only what I've seen on the television and most of that I have forgotten. The neighbour detects my presence and approaches the fence, breathing heavily. I can see him through the slats, in a canary yellow shirt, the armpits soaked.

“Thought I had the bugger.”

“Don't you fear being sprayed?”

“That's why I've got the pole.”

But surely a skunk has more range than that, I surmise, though I'm not in the mood to debate it.

Helen and I sip nightcaps on the front porch. She makes a beautiful martini. I suck the pimento out of the second olive, take a tasty gulp. That's what I'm talking about. Larry Holmes snores at our feet. A candle Helen lit flickers on the little table between us; Orion glitters above us. Except for the clicking of bats, a hushed tranquility envelopes the street. Helen sighs.

“It's lovely out.”

“It is,” I say with feeling.

“What's that?” She points to the dim corner.

For a moment I see nothing; then, through a pale shaft of street-light, a white stripe slashes into view.

“Oh my God,” Helen says.

I lean forward in my chair. The skunk. She has stopped at a mailbox. I wonder for what reason. She probes with fascination, fearless, omnipotent, an enigma. But this won't last. She will cross the street and come right for us, I conjecture, because things often happen that way. So when she crosses the street and comes right for us I am not surprised.

Larry Holmes jumps up but freezes in mid-frame like a bronze relief. Helen looks at me, eyes moist with fear, hands bunched to her chin. I don't know what to do. Screaming seems wrong; running wronger still. The skunk bears down on us, primeval, cartoonish, horrific, but at the last moment makes a sudden turn and shuffles to the neighbour's driveway where she dives into the shadows.

Later, in bed, when I rest my hand on Helen's hip, she pretends to sleep, even feigning a delicate snore. The hip feels cold, all bone. I listen to her snoring. I know the difference. I keep my hand on her hip for a long time. It doesn't warm up. At one point she pretends to dream, mutters something, and shifts away from me on the bed, clinging to the airy precipice of her side.

Next morning in the kitchen, Helen smashes an orange majolica rooster into smithereens. Shards fly across the floor tiles. Larry Holmes cowers under the table. I let her vent. It is nothing I have done, or so I believe.

“What's the matter now?”

“I'm not happy.”

“Tell me something I don't know.” I think she's going to take a swing at me, but she goes quiet, stills her body. Then I think she's going to cry but she doesn't; she walks out of the kitchen and locks herself in the bathroom.

At twilight Larry Holmes steps out. After his evening piss he likes to do a perimeter check around the backyard. It's all bullshit if you ask me, but it makes him feel powerful I suppose, master of his domain. I expect him to come scratching at the side door any second. Then I hear the yelp. My knees buckle. I know what that yelp means. I know. It's one of those moments again. Any second I expect Helen to come running out of the bathroom, and she does, though plastered with a luminous green face cream. We stare at each other, then bolt for the door.

It takes five or six hosings and the application of special shampoo to clean the dog's fur, and even then his face exudes the smell, poor bastard. You've never beheld a more miserable animal. Helen vetoed the use of tomato juice, citing several studies questioning its efficacy to neutralize skunk excretions. Who would argue with that?

What a scene. The skunk got Larry Holmes square in the chops, blinding him and causing him to vomit and convulse in a seizure of revulsion and wretchedness. The dog can be dramatic yes, but an objective evaluation would grant him good cause for the show on this occasion. His pain is real; I feel for him. The only one more miserable than Larry Holmes is Helen.

“We should have been more vigilant,” she intones.

“The dog needs his space.”

“He's shattered.”

“He'll get over it.”

Helen dips her head and bursts into tears. Jesus Christ. “Helen,” I say, touching her shoulder, expecting another rebuff. But rather than retreating she lets me embrace her and then wraps her arms around my neck, burying her face in my chest, shaking with sobs, clinging to me long after the weeping stops.

The neighbour told me that bright lights keep skunks away, so I retrieve the stepladder, intent on replacing the burnt-out bulb above the side door. I'm the first to admit I'm useless as a handyman. I have no feel for it. The slightest task makes me cringe with anxiety. I look at a hammer or a wrench and I want to run for the hills. Perhaps if I took the time to learn a few basics I would save myself a lot of trouble, but I can't see that happening in this lifetime.

I'm not up on the ladder for more than a minute when I detect movement at the end of the driveway. Nothing. Maybe just a cat or the wind, though there's no wind. I continue with my task. The fucking thing is jammed or something, the bulb, and I'm afraid to break the fragile glass by forcing it. That happened to me when we first moved into the house. While unscrewing a dead light bulb above the stove it broke in my hand. I sustained a wound on my palm and when I tried to get out the rest of the light bulb I received a nasty shock. Helen laughed her head off, though I failed to see the humour in it. My arm ached for days. She chided me for whining. Maybe I milked it some, taking the week off work and loafing around the house.

I unscrew the present dead light bulb without issue and I'm about to replace it when I see a white stripe moving toward me like a banner. I hear myself scream. That I could make such a sound is scary. Larry Holmes starts freaking out inside. I freeze like a sloth on the ladder as the skunk moves in. I hear Helen calling me. Not now, I say in my head, not now. I'm afraid to look, but I must look. I take a deep breath. I look.

The skunk is not alone. Three little ones surround her, chirping, tails raised.

“Skunks are nearly blind,” the neighbour explains, working on a wedge of rich red watermelon. “But they're fearless, for obvious reasons. They shoot the offensive pungence from anal glands. They say even skunks can't stand their own smell. Cats keep their distance and only dogs that haven't been sprayed bother them.”