When Rabbit Howls

by Truddi Chase

  “My god,” he said. “You’ve got to be out of your mind with fright every day.”

  It was too much for Nails, who’d been fighting her way into this gathering, on and off.

  “You got it,” she said to him, smiling quick and sharp.

  It struck the woman as strange that not one of her friends had ever acknowledged her fear this way; they’d discounted it.

  Afterward, one of the men followed along to the front door.

  “Listen,” he said to her. “I kinda sorta admire you, somewhat.”

  Laughter roared in her throat. She gazed at him, dumbfounded. “That’s a qualifying statement if I ever heard one,” she said.

  “What I mean is, you got more than sixty of you to deal with this. We only got one each of us.”

  Stanley held the door open, he gripped his clipboard. He looked ready for anything, even if the woman’s mouth was wide and friendly.

  “Now you listen.” Tears of laughter spilled from eyes which were suddenly yellow-green. “Those two new men in there, you and the others better work their asses into the ground. Next time I talk to Stanley here, I want to know they’re sweating bullets. More than that, I want to know they understand why victims get multiple personalities in the first place.”

  After the meeting, Stanley accompanied her home to the warehouse, anxious to process what he knew had been a difficult evening. A modest dent had been made in the barrenness of the loft. Tall palms in their wicker baskets slid thin, dark fingers over the empty walls, and a smell of old wood, rich and heavy, came up from the newly polished floors. He sat drinking tea while his client drifted in and out of her own mind, bumping into so many of her people that she lost count and so did he.

  Pain ground in her head, followed by swift and raucous laughter, followed by eyes swimming with grief for a loss she could not measure. The wild, free smile of someone who was definitely feminine and sensually inclined, although the woman couldn’t dwell on it long enough to “receive” a name, even had one been offered, charged over the innocent happy smile of Twelve. And still there were the fresh sad tears of yet another newcomer to the woman’s awareness. Would these new additions to the Troop family never cease to surface? How could there be so many of them, unrevealed to her all these years? Their differences became magnified then, as if they were pressing their individualities home to her, imprinting themselves on her. Through a solid wall of rainlike tears, she could not speak to tell Stanley the emotional impact all of this had, or that the pain in her body was fierce. But no sooner had the pain begun than it shot off, only to be replaced by hilarity.

  Elvira had emerged. She laughed aloud. “Hello, Charlie,” she said, grinning at him through the individual and collective tears. “Do you like your name? We like your name.”

  Ah, Stanley thought, the lady with two identities. After all these months he knew her well enough, even without a name, to understand that she was both saluting him and making a joke, feeble as it was, to curtail the sadness surrounding the woman tonight. Her Southern drawl accented every word.

  “You’re so all-fired name-happy,” she taunted him, “so desirous of handles. Well, I’ll give you a name. You can call me Elvira. I’ve got two new forty-fives by that name. Elvira! Yeah, I do like that name!” Her fingers snapped to the silent beat of the Oak Ridge Boys.

  “Listen, Charlie. The adult core’s got to look at it through my eyes right now. I laugh a lot; it’s the only way. If she looks at it through her own eyes, she’ll go mad.”

  Someone tried to push past, and grab for the teddy bear, but Elvira’s grip on the situation was grim and tight. “You can call that dissociation or anything you want, but that’s the way it is. What do you want from us? Do you wanna make us one? That means only one thing, Charlie, our destruction. But we are the supreme and guiding force and have been for a long, long, time.”

  “I realise that,” Stanley said, trying to grasp the flow of her hell-fire and brimstone sarcasm. It was almost impossible, the way she ranted; tauntingly, mixing it like an expert old-time religion preacher, with the rock-and-roll beat of her speech.

  Stanley peered at her, accepting the name she had given him, but knowing that she was also the “Outrider.” The Southern drawl abated; the voice he heard next was cold and steady.

  “We’re trying to tell her that by fourteen, there was enough sexual experience among us to run a bordello.”

  * * *

  There had been differences between the abusers and the stepfather, differences that twenty-four hours later, as the women and Twelve prepared dinner in the warehouse loft, would not go away. The stepfather would have torn down walls, broken bodies and heads before admitting his guilt. When the woman saw Twelve cutting up vegetables for a salad, with angry chopping motions, she realised that Twelve was not the only source of war cries this afternoon. Just outside the kitchen loft area where the woman and Twelve worked over their preparations, Lambchop seemed to stand guard over something. Her little face was red with rage.

  “What’s Lamb Chop doing?” the woman whispered to Twelve. “What’s that she’s got?”

  “The children,” Twelve said, “are getting ready for Christmas. Didn’t Catherine tell you?”

  “We don’t have money for Christmas, we’ll celebrate next year. Didn’t we all agree on that?”

  “We’ve saved up. Myself included,” Twelve said. “The children have to have something.”

  The woman had never seen any gift that could summon up the look on Lamchop’s face at that precise moment. It wasn’t the kind of look one could describe.

  From a corner of one eye as she put Twelve’s salad on the table, she caught sight of the bright red lacquered box into which Lamb Chop peered with a grave concentration. Hesitantly, the woman approached and opened the lid. Two maggots curled up in one corner of the red box on a piece of pungently rotted meat.

  “Don’t touch that,” said a tiny, lispy voice. “It’s mine. You leave it alone.” There was a huff, then silence.

  The woman let the lid slam shut and pushed the box away.

  “And don’t slam it around like that. They’re asleep. You’ll disturb them. You’re just like the mother, always poking around in other people’s things.”

  “What do you mean, they’re asleep? What are they?” The blood had drained from the woman’s face.

  “They’re just enough to take care of those two big words.” The small lispy voice faded but not before the woman heard the voices of many children behind it.

  “If that’s a Christmas present,” the woman said, “who would it be for?”

  “The two big words are revenge and retribution,” Twelve said from her place at the kitchen table.

  “It’s a game, isn’t it?” The woman’s voice went dry.

  “Yes,” Twelve said. “A game.”

  Sleet lashed against the windows, a horn honked on the street below. In the cold air of the loft, “Hell Is for Children” played on the stereo. Twelve left it at that and the woman, much as she wanted to, couldn’t go further. She felt Twelve’s mind probing for her own, as if they were linked together tonight, almost perfectly synchronised.

  “There wasn’t anybody in that meeting quite like the stepfather,” Twelve said. “Aren’t there more like him?”

  The woman didn’t know. Stanley had mentioned treating only one brutal abuser, the hit man. Stanley had reminded her that brutal abusers lived, as a rule, within families scared to death of them. Nobody snitched on the brutal ones, so they didn’t come to light until a child died. Violently.

  “Black Katherine was waiting, you know,” said Twelve. “She’s part of the Big Three. They handle frustration, anger, and rage. If just one man had said that he handed out sex to his child because it was good for her, or to teach her how to enjoy it with a husband later, or because she was his possession, to do with as he pleased . . .”

  “I’d have reached out an
d slaughtered him,” someone said.

  Twelve smiled. “Among us, there is a proverb. ‘When Rabbit howls, can Black Katherine be far behind?’ It’s like, Mean Joe protects Miss Wonderful and Lamb Chop and the rest of the little ones but Black Katherine moves in on anyone who hurts Rabbit. Black Katherine gives ’em the pain they deserve; she’s the strongest of the Big Three. But when you got stuck in Rabbit’s pain that night in the session, Black Katherine took it away for you. Same way when the chicken got stuck in your throat in the restaurant with Norman.”

  Twelve stopped speaking aloud. She began to do something that had always been very simple for her. While this was not the first time she had tried it out, her success with the woman tonight was almost unprecedented. She honed in, with a not-quite-smug vengeance, sending thought and picture and logic, scene after scene, in colour and clarity, leaving nothing to the woman’s imagination. All was laid out in unavoidable, orderly fashion, and when Twelve was through, the woman knew Black Katherine exactly, with no room for doubt.

  “She won’t hurt you,” Twelve said. “Black Katherine isn’t here to hurt you or us. But she is the source of the rage, and it won’t ever go away. Some of it will always be here.”

  “Norman wouldn’t agree with you,” the woman hissed. “Psychologists say that no victim is healthy, harbouring vicious thoughts, ideas of revenge.”

  “Stanley says no victim is healthy without the anger,” Twelve replied casually. “The victims themselves say it never goes away.” As if to prove her point, she moved aside and let the woman feel Black Katherine, full force.

  An invisible knife twisted, something broke inside, and rage flooded the woman with something as old as time itself. It felt wonderful, for it was a brutal, a fine, killing rage.

  Instantly, the woman knew where it should be directed.

  Cheers went up all over the loft.

  In battles of yore, intoned a voice with a suspicion of brogue, we enjoyed such a passion, without remourse.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  BY nine o’clock on the first Monday in December, a group of forty people, Stanley’s students, friends, and colleagues, were gathered in his candle-lit town house. Their voices blended with the Christmas carols being played on the stereo.

  Down by the makeshift bar, Captain Albert Johnson poured drinks from almost as many bottles as there were people. Jeannie, determined that this big, gruff man should have a good time, repeated jokes she’d collected at the university and waited for his reaction. There was none. With a nod of her head, she signaled across the room to Stanley, who began working his way through the crowd.

  Albert had been scooping ice from a big tin tub under the bar. When he looked up at Stanley, his eyes were a flat, cold grey.

  “I like your booze, Stanley. I don’t like what’s happening with that Troop Formation. Throwing away inappropriate guilt, as you call it, and recognising inner rage is one thing. Acting it out is another.”

  “Doesn’t it depend on how they decide to act it out?” Stanley helped himself to eggnog, frothy in a clear plastic cup.

  “My wife,” Albert said, “was Irish. The Irish know one way: war.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting a lot of other things the Irish are famous for?”

  “When my wife got angry, there was only one thing she cared about. The Irishman in that damned Tunnel is up to no good and you should put a stop to it. Christmas is only a few weeks off.”

  Jeannie knew what Albert meant. In Stanley’s classes, she often sat with Albert, listening and watching the videos. Troop anger had reached a point she knew too well. Her own therapy was not that far behind her. She’d come awfully close while in that therapy to doing exactly what the Troops were planning—and still, on occasion, wished that she had.

  * * *

  The documents today were only a formality, a clearing away of prior settlement details. Ten-Four was, for all intents and purposes, no longer in the real estate business. The purchaser reached over and lit her cigarette and the flame exposed every crevice in his mature face. Would she ever be able to look at a man without first searching for some sign of the stepfather?

  The stepfather had created a legacy of emptiness, bounded on all sides by fear and daily apprehension. Legacies are handed down, someone said in the woman’s mind, but one does not have to accept them.

  I’m scared, the woman cried.

  Unfinished business, the voice replied. We can’t go further until it’s finished.

  During the business meeting, boredom set in for the little ones. Afterward, they hit the street, running. Twelve demanded a movie; Nails said no, there was too much work to do, but Elvira insisted. They fought the entire way to the carry-out store, where Lambchop stamped her foot on the pavement.

  “Someday,” Lamb Chop warned them, holding Rabbit’s hand in hers, “I’ll be all grown up. Then you’ll be sorry.”

  “Do you have to be all grown up to win?” Rabbit’s voice carried on the frosty winter air.

  * * *

  The Troops brought a bottle of wine to the next session.

  “Drink up, Stanley,” Nails said. “If it weren’t for you, there wouldn’t be any good news. We’ve almost finished the manuscript. We cooperated long enough, all of us, to bring the whole thing together without killing each other. Can you imagine that? The only thing is, if Rabbit is ever published, how do you verify our reality? Some of us may never be able to look at the manuscript as a whole picture, but for those of us who can—we realise how strange we sound.”

  “There’s nothing to verify,” Stanley said. “What’s in the pages is reality for you. Someday, through books like yours, the public will understand that reality.”

  Behind the woman’s eyes, as she surfaced, happiness threatened to explode. Her head sunk to her chest.

  “Oh, god.” Her voice was a whispered wail. Someone else, with a rounder, more relaxed face, had to experience what she could not.

  “Oh, Stanley,” Miss Wonderful said. “Isn’t it truly a miracle?”

  Right then, Stanley considered going into primal scream therapy. Hellish therapy and recall and thousands of draft pages . . . a miracle, Miss Wonderful had called it.

  And then he laughed out loud.

  Maybe Miss Wonderful was right.

  “You’d better keep venting that anger,” Stanley said.

  “I’m trying,” the woman sounded tired. “But around the children, I need control or I’d swat them. I’m finding evidence, traces of the way their minds work. I don’t like it!”

  “What frightens you?”

  “Spying on them makes me feel like the mother, and I hate that. But the things they bring to the loft are bizarre.”

  “They didn’t grow up on the Muppets and Star Wars. They grew up,” Stanley said, “playing a very real game. By adult rules.”

  “You keep telling me that I need more recall and you’re right. I can’t face that bastard without a mountain of proof at my back. It seems as if the most recall comes to me when I’m dead tired. How can I get more tired than I already am?”

  “Look. You’ve just finished conducting real estate transactions in a rotten economy; you’re finishing the manuscript, illustrating and doing the camera copy for a five-hundred-page booklet, seeing your daughter, and having six hours of therapy a week. It’s all a strain and ninety percent of it involves a very draining creativity.”

  “You’re saying normal people don’t go at this pace.”

  “I’m saying you’re speeding. And you’re too hard on yourself. Tell me, is it possible that the reality of the book will satisfy those who desire revenge?”

  The cold expression just then belonged to Black Katherine’s mirror-image.

  “We’re all rational. It’s enough, I suppose, that through the book and the training films, others will have choices we never had. Just don’t ask us to recant and extend him compassion, or a kind word. Ever.” />
  His death would not be enough, anyway. As the thought entered her mind, the woman received an instant flick of memory: the stepfather’s face, his eyes with the angry yellow lights, glinting as he watched her. He was amused, holding down a child, her small legs kicking, her mouth open and screaming obscenities at him.

  “Try it,” he was saying. “Go ahead, try it. I’ll grind your face into that cement wall. Then you won’t be so smart.”

  Flick. He was staring at her while she ate, his sloppy grin turning into a laugh, then a leer as the mother left the table to get something. “Go ahead, tell your mother. You’re so smart, tell her. You do, and I’ll break your ass, whore.”

  She recognised a larger message as well: I’m bigger than you, I can humiliate, torment, torture, and dehumanise you, and there isn’t a thing you can do about it, or anyone who’d dare believe you, if you told. I’m the winner, you lose!

  In the woman’s mind, the children were crying. They began to stamp their feet in anger, and their voices grew fainter as they drew close around one another.

  Stanley couldn’t peer into the woman’s mind; he didn’t know what was going on. All he saw was her empty expression and the huddled way she sat on the floor cushions.

  * * *

  At five the next morning, she got up and worked steadily on the manuscript, with breaks only for tea or to stretch cramped leg muscles. At midnight, she was still at it, still wide awake. So she jogged around the loft, to the tune of “Elvira,” and “Tube Snake Boogie,” with energy to spare. The fury of the children had not gone away.

  “When do we get our turn?” Lamb Chop cried.

  “The book will do a lot of good.” The woman poured hot chocolate and kept her tones even.

  “Baloney,” Twelve said. “The book is for adults. We’ve got to have something for us.”

  “What are you saying?” the woman demanded, because she truly did not understand.

  “I’m saying that adults look at things one way, children look at them another.”