Something about Fucking and Dead Rabbits

More from Edinburgh Road:

Abie lies under our green Pontiac which is propped up with two steel girders. He’s replacing the transmission with a refurbished model, his legs reminding me of the underbelly of dead fish. “I’m a good man to have around in an emergency,” he calls out and right now I believe him.

“The cats are escaping from their jackets,” Abie says. “You need to add more grommets.”
He’s doing a study on sleep deprivation and he says he’s going to be published and famous in the scientific world. I bring him our maroon book of world maps.
“Show me,” I say. “I’ve got these gaps, you know. So where is it, this scientific world?”
“Don’t be a smart ass,” he says.

But the thing is these cats are hooked up to a treadmill that keeps going and going so they can’t sleep and I’m making canvas straitjackets for them. “Are you sure you should do this?” I say. “This is top level research,” he says, showing me Russian abstracts he’s photocopied. He parades documentation, although he knows I don’t read them, which is maybe why he shows them to me. He takes me to a locked room in the basement of an old university building. The door is grey steel. Inside, lined up against walls and cluttering space between, are moveable stacks of metal shelves loaded with cages containing white mice and sepia shavings. “This one is mine,” he says and lifts off the cover. “Just keep blowing on him and he won’t jump out."
I blow and blow and then I’m screaming, running around the table, “He’s on my head, he’s on my head,” and Abie’s laughing like a wild man.


Guelph 1972

There’s a Red Barn here and a movie drive-in just outside town. We watch one step for mankind from a rumpled bed in our motel room. “This is history,” Abie says, “do you realize what this means?”
“Yes, yes I do,” I say, staring at the moon shimmering blue on TV from our disheveled double bed parked like Parkdale billboard in the centre of the room and at Abie whose name I have never felt comfortable using, opting to use a parade of nicknames that come and go with moods and seasons, sometimes waiting for his eyes to pause on me before finding their way home to the TV screen.

We play with plans ─ moving to a moshav, a commune in Southern Ontario, renting an old farm house and taking care of goats, horses, and cows for the farmer. “I was brought up on a farm until I was seven,” Abie says to the farmer’s son. Abie identifies with “Lord of the Flies” and I can see why.

I don’t know why we left the townhouse. I really liked skimming through the field of corn stalks with Abie and Pluto. Inside I was lonely, I guess. Some people grow fat to keep them company; I was hell bent on growing a baby. Maybe it was just time to move on, so I quit school two full courses before the end of my program. Abie didn’t mind; he’d stopped and started so many courses, and anyhow, he was always ready for a fuck, day or night. We ended up renting an upper duplex at the edge of highway six outside Guelph.

Behind our house there’s fenced in lot which, when I ask him and I ask about lots of things, Abie says is an acre deep and wide for three horses and two goats, and to the right, an old farm house with a verandah and curlicue wood carvings. Abie says it’s a drying-out facility for heroin addicts. We take the house anyway. I sew curtains with big sloppy stitches and make my own bagels with poppy seeds that require boiling before baking, my own challah and one-hundred-percent rye, and also strawberry preserves, and I hold my legs up when Abie fucks me so the sperm meets a wild egg and falls in love. “Maybe you should see a psychiatrist,” the school counselor said when I broke down after telling him how long I’d been trying. “Two months,” I said, “two months.” I didn’t check out another counselor. Instead I went home to Abie who fucked me while I held my legs in the air with a pillow beneath my ass.

“You gotta stay like that for fifteen minutes. So the sperm travels up instead of leaking out,” Abie says.
“Keep me company,” I say.
“Sure thing,” he says, “be right back."
“Is it is time yet?” I call out.
“So?” I call again.
“Now?”
“I thought you were going to keep me company.”
“Hey, you want a piece of challah with butter?” he says. “How about some red wine cheese on the side?

Abie takes a job at the Don Jail and comes home smelling like sweat and urine. Our downstairs neighbours have wild fights─screaming, banging, yelping, slamming doors, breaking glass. “Don’t listen,” Abie says. He doesn’t call the police because I’m alone during the day and sometimes at night. Meron’s arm is in a cast and Wayne hunts rabbits and skins them alive, which Abie says he knows because of the time he went on a truck ride with Wayne and his friends.

“I didn’t want to tell you,” he says, “I thought you’d be too upset.”
You went on a ride and watched them skin rabbits?” I say.
“Live,” he says. And then he tells me how he leaned out the window and threw up, even though his father used to bag kittens in a sack and drown them, there were just too many of them, he says by way of explanation. And Wayne and his friends were so drunk and whooping it up, they didn’t even notice.

“Why didn’t you get out and why the hell didn’t you say something?”
“We were in the woods and they had guns.”
“I know─” I say.
“So they would have thrown me out and left me there, or shot me and thrown me out and left me there.”

I’m so quiet inside I can hear the wind. "You should have heard them screeching,” he says and I think of my dead baby rabbits that first summer. I put my head on the curve of his neck just before his shoulder and he bends his head down to touch mine.

Copyright Janice Colman 2008