The First Annual Grand Prairie Rabbit Festival (15 page)

Fudge Round was steady—steady and loyal. He might not have been the brightest guy in the world, but he was always eager to help a friend in need. And spending large amounts of time alone in various states of intoxication gave him a unique approach to problem solving.

I happened to have a problem and Fudge Round was working on a solution. We’d already given lip service to being adult, taking the high road. He even told me, “Cuz, it’s like I heard dis one time. If you love somethin’—really, really love it—you gotta let it go. And if it come back, you know it’s meant to be.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“Well, it’s time to go fishin’ for somethin’ else, my friend. There’s plenty of fish out in the sea.”

“Fuck a fish,” I said. At that point, the sea looked like little more than a stagnant pond and I was too angry to consider any more mixed love metaphors.

Though a peaceful guy by default, Fudge Round brooked no treachery. So he sat in silence for a while.

“I think I got it,” he said finally. “She scared of the devil?”

I laughed for a good five minutes. We’d been smoking as well as drinking and it just struck me as funny. “The devil?”

“Yeah, cuz.” He called everyone cuz. “You know, the devil.”

“I know who he is.”

“Well, she’s probably scared of him, right?”

“I don’t know. I guess.”

“Me? I’m scared to death of that devil.” He shook his head and interjected a “Kee-yahhhh” to show how serious he was. “Scared, scared. Think about it. Eternity. Forever. Pass your mind on that for a little while. For. Ever. That devil poking you in the ass with that pitchfork. I tell you what, that keeps me up at night sometimes. You don’t worry about that, do you?”

“I guess,” I lied.

“Everybody must at some point,” he said. “So that devil’s probably the scariest thing in the whole world.”

“Okay,” I said. “So?”

“So, c’mon,” he said, and led me to a storage shed, from which he pulled out a roller, a paintbrush, a paint pan, and a can of firehouse-red latex exterior paint.

“Take your clothes off,” he said.

“Say what?”

“You heard me. Take your clothes off. We gone put the fear of the devil in that girl.”

It made no sense. It made perfect sense. I stripped. He handed me the paintbrush. “You do your privates. I’ll roll the rest.”

If I wasn’t already high enough to be considered clinically retarded, the paint fumes quickly finished the job. The paint was cool, thick, and went on sticky. In awed silence, I watched Fudge Round work. His tongue poked out of the corner of his mouth as he concentrated. After he was done, he took his own clothes off.

“Fudge Round, what are you doing?”

“Mais, if there’s something scarier than one devil, it’s two devils!” he explained as if I was the stupidest man alive.

“But you never leave your yard,” I protested.

“Shoo,” he said. “You don’t know all there is to know about Fudge Round. Besides, you’re my friend. And this is what friends do.”

If my ducts hadn’t been clogged solid with paint, I would have cried. Instead, I painted Fudge Round. After we were done, we smoked another bowl. By the time we left his place, it was near three in the morning.

We rode our bikes, somehow making it three miles without being seen. Upon dismount, a layer of red paint stayed with the seat, leaving our blinding white asses exposed to the night air.

Other than painting each other and scaring Rachel, Fudge Round’s plan was short on details. But when I saw her house and her car in the drive, things sorted out on their own. I dropped my bike and ran across the lawn, dew tickling my ankles. I ran as fast and as hard as a drunk and stoned boy covered in red paint could run and then spread my arms and threw myself against the front door with a startling
thwap
.

I backed away from the door and considered my work—a big red splot resembling a crow or perhaps a crucified midget who’d been detached from his head. I turned to Fudge Round and smiled.

“Cuz, you crazy or something? Get your ass back here before her daddy wakes up.”

As if on cue, a light turned on in the master bedroom.

“Shit,” I said. “Run around the back.”

We crouched on the side of the house, laughing into our arms. After five or ten minutes, the lights went off.

“Where her window at?” Fudge Round asked.

I led the way. It was a single-level ranch, with windows that practically stretched from window to ground. I raised my hand to knock.

“Wait,” Fudge Round said. “Let me think a bit.” Finally he snapped his fingers and broke off a handful of branches from a shrub. “Now roll in the grass.”

“What?”

“He just cut the lawn. Get some grass all over you. It’ll make you scarier.”

So I did.

He handed me a branch. “Now take this and scratch on the window. Not too much. Not too hard. Just enough she’ll hear.”

While I started on that, Fudge Round rolled himself in the grass. He looked ridiculous.

It was only thirty seconds before the nails-across-chalkboard sound of branches on glass woke Rachel, who turned on a light, probably her bedside lamp. I stopped and held my breath.

“Do it again,” Fudge Round whispered as he slid up right next to me. I did it again, once slowly, then a frenzied brushing motion. From the other side of the window came a muffled “Eeep” then a “Shhh” and what sounded like a male voice.

“Cuz, is somebody in there with her?”

“Brad,” I hissed. My gut clenched and my heart hopped into my throat. My hands started to shake, so I occupied them by brushing the branch across the window again.

“You sure it’s not her daddy?” he asked.

“I’m fucking sure.”

I heard more muffled whispering, then the vertical blinds snapped open, revealing two pairs of eyes. Rachel, in an oversized T-shirt and a pair of old boxers—my old boxers. And some guy, Brad, shirtless and sporting his own pair of boxers, bulging slightly in the middle.

I snapped.

“Rawr! Motherfuckers!”
I screamed, and started pounding on the window. Brad stumbled back and Rachel let out her own scream, the likes of which I hope never to hear again. It went on and on. But I wasn’t done.
“Rawwwwrrrr! Rawwwrrr! Motherfuckers! Rawwrrrrr!”

Fudge Round chimed in as well.
“Wooooooooooooo! Booga-booga-woooooo!”
he shouted.

We were all still screaming when her bedroom door flew open and her dad burst in. He wore white briefs and a pair of untied work boots and carried a very large handgun that zeroed in on Brad’s face. Brad fell down into a crouch and threw his hands over his head. “No, no, no, no,” he yelped, pointing out the window. To this day, I shudder to think how close we came to getting Brad shot in the face.

But I didn’t have time to process anything that night. It took all of half a second for the old man’s pistol to swing toward the window.

“Run!” Fudge Round shouted.

He didn’t have to tell me twice. We dived from the window just as the glass exploded from the first shot. Just to be safe, the old man fired twice more. By that point we were stumbling madly over our bikes, trying to force our fear-stricken limbs to quit imitating Jell-O and start doing the serious work of getting us the hell off that lawn.

Rachel still hadn’t stopped screaming.

I heard the old man say, “Whoever the hell you are, call 911. And put some damn clothes on before I shoot you, too.”

Finally perched on my bike, I took one last look over my shoulder. Rachel’s dad was walking through the remains of the broken window like some unstoppable movie monster, his fish-white belly glowing in the dark.

We made it five blocks and were safely out of the old man’s reach when I stopped to throw up. Pizza, fear, tequila, beer, and rage came pouring out of me. The bitterness, though, that was going to stick around for quite some time.

“You okay, cuz?”

“Yeah, I feel better, I think,” I said. “Look, man, this meant a lot to me, Fudge Round.”

“Awwww, shit,” he said.

“No. Really,” I started.

“No,” he said, pointing at the police cruiser making its way down the street, its spotlight sweeping the neighborhood like some devouring eye searching for prey.

I imagined the 911 call.

“Two devils were outside our window.”

“Two devils, you say?”

“Yes, devils.”

“Can you describe these…devils?”

“You know, red and, um, covered in grass.”

“Really?”

“And they’re riding bikes.”

Then the same thing had to be repeated as the dispatcher radioed the cruiser. And there it was, seeking out two devils riding their bikes through the night.

Fudge Round shook his head, wrung his handlebars in his hands. His eyes had gone big, as if he were the one seeing Satan. “Cuz, I can’t get picked up. I can’t. It’d be the end of old Fudge Round. I just can’t.”

I’d never seen him worried about anything.

“Just ditch your bike and go hide behind that house,” I said.

“What you gonna do?”

“Don’t worry about me.”

I saddled up and rode. I rode right by the cruiser and waved when I sped by. “Evening, gentlemen,” I called out in a British accent, then pedaled like hell.

Of course they caught me.

But it was worth it. Brad was scarred for life. Rachel was grounded for the rest of the school year. And I was forced to go to Confession. From behind the screen, I heard the priest gasp in laughter no fewer than five times.

Vicky was laughing. Hard. I can see where others would find it funny. I get that. But even now, I’m still frightened by just how unable I was to control the feelings raging through me, my complete inability to handle rejection.

“And then there was Stephanie. In college,” I said.

“There’s more?”

“Oh yeah.”

The short version was Stephanie and I were nineteen and, being nineteen, stupid. We thought we were in love. We moved in, played house, bought a dog. JuJu, a yellow Lab. Then she dumped me. Thinking it was the mature thing to do, I let her keep both the dog and my heart. Of course that kind of thinking is folly. After working my way through a bottle one stormy night, I drove to our old place to visit my dog. I parked on the street and stepped out into the rain. She, at least, was happy to see me. And because it really had nothing at all to do about the love between a boy and his dog, I called JuJu out into the front yard, where we played in the rain. I stumbled around drunk, calling her name manically. She barked in the pure unadulterated delight of finding a playmate in the middle of the night.

“Lightning flashed, thunder rolled, and I yelled, ‘JuJu’ at the top of my lungs.”

“Oh. My. God,” says Vicky, clutching her knees, hardly able to breathe. “That is so not funny.”

“Even less hilarious was that Stephanie and her new boyfriend called the campus alcoholic hotline instead of the cops.” And what followed was three weeks’ worth of mini interventions and counseling that totally missed the point. I wasn’t an alcoholic. Alcoholism—as twelve-steppers are fond of saying—is a disease. My drinking wasn’t a disease, it was a symptom of a worse malady—inability to deal with women in a rational manner.

“Wow,” says Vicky, “it’s all starting to fall into place.”

I finish my beer, throw the can into the bayou.

“Here, have the last one,” she says.

I take it without protest and drink half of it in one swallow.

“But, Steve, just because it’s not working out with the ladies, you gave up and joined the priesthood?”

“Well, don’t go looking for sense where there is none to be found. And that’s only the half of it. After that, the mere thought of going on a date was enough to give me panic attacks. The minute a girl said yes to a date, she stopped being this pretty object and became someone who was one hundred percent bound to crush me. I actually got so nervous, I threw up on one girl. Therapy didn’t work. Drugs didn’t work. And not to sound young and stupid—which I was at the time—but the ladies were the whole point. I mean, why bother with college and finding the job and earning the money if not for that one lady and to provide for the family and all?”

“Wow, that’s romantic.”

I can’t tell if she’s being sarcastic or not.

“Then one day, I was going to a wedding in Opelousas—a high school friend of mine—and there was a mix-up or I was spaced out or something and I went to St. Landry instead of Queen of Angels. I realized my mistake in the parking lot, but went in anyway and just sat for a while. I hadn’t been to church in years and I felt, well, I guess at peace. No voices. No calling. Not much of anything. Just this blissful emptiness. A lack of commotion more than anything else. Silence. And, I don’t know, I think at that point I started to realize I couldn’t be in love—or anywhere near it—in a balanced or quiet way.”

“So, what?” she asks. “The Voice of God is actually an absence of noise?”

“Something like that.”

I finish off the beer, look into the middle distance where I imagine the bayou’s opposite bank to be. There’s more to it than that, I’m sure. There has to be, right? I’ve been doing a bang-up job of not giving it much thought since making the decision, and I don’t necessarily feel an overwhelming need to change that right now.

“You know, Steve, I have to say I’m a little disappointed.”

“About?”

“I can’t believe you never told me you were the Painted Devil of Opelousas!”

I laugh. “You knew about that?”

“I wasn’t the only rumor floating around these parts, bub.”

After a moment or two of chuckling, I turn it around to her. “So what about you?”

“Me and God are square.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about.”

“Well, Steve, you’re the one changing the subject, so why don’t you be a little more clear?”

I can’t tell if she’s teasing or not. She doesn’t sound upset.

“What are you doing out here, in Grand Prairie…” I let it trail off. I don’t say “in the woods with a priest.”

Now there’s a little edge in her voice. “You mean all alone without a man?”