Now Cullum spoke for the first time, his voice a high, nagging rasp, like static. “Arkson,” he said, driving nails into the first syllable, “I ain’t got all day.”
It was then that Melissa, giggling like a machine and with a pair of ice-cream cones thrust up like torches over her head, came tearing around the side of the building, her sister in pursuit. Marcia was not giggling. She was crying in frustration, wailing as if her heart had been torn out, and cutting the air with a stick. “Melissa!” Bayard shouted, but it was too late. Her skinny brown legs got tangled and she pitched forward into Cullum, who was just then swiveling his head round at the commotion. There was the scrape of sneakers on gravel, the glare of the sun poised motionless overhead, and then the wet, rich, fecal smear of chocolate-fudge ice cream — four scoops — on the seat of Cullum’s jumpsuit. Cullum’s knee buckled under the impact, and he jumped back as if he’d been struck by a snake. “Godamnit!” he roared, and Bayard could see that his hands were shaking. “Goddamnit to hell!”
Melissa lay sprawled in the dirt. Stricken face, a thin wash of red on her scraped knee. Bayard was already bending roughly for her, angry, an apology on his lips, when Cullum took a step forward and kicked her twice in the ribs. “Little shit,” he hissed, his face twisted with lunatic fury, and then Arkson had his broad arms around him, pulling him back like a handler with an attack dog.
Melissa’s mouth was working in shock, the first hurt breathless shriek caught in her throat; Marcia stood white-faced behind them; Cullum was spitting out curses and dancing in Arkson’s arms. Bayard might have lifted his daughter from the dirt and pressed her to him, he might have protested, threatened, waved his fist at this rabid dog with the red face, but he didn’t. No. Before he could think he was on Cullum, catching him in the center of that flaming face with a fist like a knob of bone. Once, twice, zeroing in on the wicked little dog eyes and the fleshy dollop of the nose, butter, margarine, wet clay, something giving with a crack, and then a glancing blow off the side of the head. He felt Cullum’s workboots flailing for his groin as he stumbled forward under his own momentum, and then Arkson was driving him up against the Mercedes and shouting something in his face. Suddenly freed, Cullum came at him, beret askew, blood bright in his nostrils, but Arkson was there, pinning Bayard to the car and shooting out an arm to catch hold of the skinny man’s shirt. “Daddy!” Melissa shrieked, the syllables broken with shock and hurt.
“You son of a bitch!” Bayard shouted.
“All right now, knock it off, will you?” Arkson held them at arm’s length like a pair of fighting cocks. “It’s just a misunderstanding, that’s all.”
Bleeding, shrunk into his jumpsuit like a withered tortoise, Cullum held Bayard’s gaze and dropped his voice to a hiss. “I’ll kill you,” he said.
Fran was aghast. “Is he dangerous?” she said, turning to peer over her spectacles at Bayard and the girls as they sat at the kitchen table. She was pouring wine vinegar from a three-gallon jug into a bowl of cucumber spears. Awkwardly. “I mean, he sounds like he escaped from a mental ward or something.”
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.