“
Like your mother says, a bunny
comes to deliver a chocolate egg.”
“
He has a basket?”
“
No, Bad Rabbit has a special place
where he carries an egg,” his father would say, an unpleasant smile
on his face, like maybe he was smelling the dead raccoon, too. “You
see, he’s twice the size of most children, although shaped very
much like your average bunny, with the fleshy pink color of a baby
hamster.”
“
My hamster had babies.”
Dash’s father frowned while he nodded. “So you
know the color. It’s a color that looks like it might be fragile,
don’t you think? And his fur is handsome in some places, smooth to
the touch. It might even tempt you to stroke Bad Rabbit in those
spots.”
Dash shook his head that he wouldn’t, not in a
million years.
“
But the rest of him is matted with
burs and chewing gum, and other bits of garbage.”
“
Where does he keep the chocolate
egg?”
“
Oh, yes, the egg is tucked up
inside his rolls of fat, right about here.” Dash’s father would pat
his own flat stomach, where there was no place to hide an egg. “It
is all those layers of fat which cause the most unpleasant feature
of Bad Rabbit.”
“
Even worse than his
smell?”
“
Worse because when he sneaks into
your bed and curls next to you, he begins to sweat. Not the kind of
perspiration you get from lifting boxes and running around out back
on the hottest of days. It is a sweat that leaks out of every part
of him, so much that a child wakes up and begins to cry, believing
they’ve done number one.”
Dash knew he would cry, too, because he’d peed
his bed right up until the second week of pre-K. The accidents had
stopped when the new life in school became routine.
“
But Bad Rabbit’s badness is much
worse for a grownup. If a parent was to check on a child late at
night, sit on the edge of a bed where he lay hidden, Bad Rabbit
would lash out with his long rabbit teeth and bite down hard, right
through the blanket. He would not let go until the parent was also
in tears.”
“
What happens to the chocolate
egg?”
“
Oh, Bad Rabbit always leaves it.
That’s his job, after all. He tucks it under a sweaty pillow with
his filthy paws, arranges it on its side just right. Children
expect their treats and would be disappointed.”
Dash’s father had no idea of the nightmares he
caused his son. Or maybe he did. As an adult, Dash rationalized
that his father had only wanted to balance what he considered his
wife’s obsession with things made-up. His father could not tolerate
people who were gullible, who would flock to church to hear a
mortal human being justify their existence. What man could know the
thoughts of any creature able to create the universe? What
muttonhead would sit there and listen? The Bible was ink and paper
to his father, no different than any self-help book hawked on late
night infomercials. But after his father died, Dash began believing
the stories had all been for the man’s enjoyment, his desire for
control. Not every fragile antique could be put out of the
children’s reach, but his own son was easy pickings for both him
and Bad Rabbit.
“
The pain is a little better?”
Willy’s voice sounded like it came from another room.
Dash looked down at his hands and mistook the
awful mess for a melted chocolate egg.
A
thud jarred the skiff to
one side hard enough for cold water to splash over Dash. He banged
the top of his head in the dark as he came awake, confused and
shielding himself with both arms. He pushed free of the mat, used
his elbows to lift onto the bench, and then searched the cocoon of
blackness. It had to be a ship. There were no crashing waves, no
squawk of night birds. There was no smell of too-sweet flowers or
decaying jungle. But there was also no sound of men talking, no
radio static, no creak from a giant wooden stern or metallic squeal
of shifting steel. A ship would have lights, and here it was pitch
black, no moon or stars. There was nothing but a few dull plunks
from rain drops.
“
Willy?” No one answered his raspy
whisper. “Willy?”
There was only the sound of water against wood,
teasing slaps and lazy trickles. He crept over the middle bench and
reached out, needing not to be alone, but terrified of touching a
dead god. Willy’s hollow form had at least offered comfort, as much
as did an old family photograph hung too many years in the
sun.
A new jolt knocked Dash back into the narrow
bow. His head struck the flooded bottom, and when his hands with
their raw wounds found the paddle blade, white flashes crossed his
vision. The next impact turned the skiff, forcing him to grab one
side or go overboard. He balanced on all fours until the motion
settled, then he turned and lowered himself onto his crumpled
mat.
A slit opened in the clouds, was pulled wider
as if the Storm God had something for him to see. Enough light
showered down to display the weak crests of the stirred ocean, the
nearest stars returning dimension to his perilous new world. A
gleaming dorsal fin slid through the water like a prowling
submarine. The shark was longer than his meager boat, easily
measured when it streamed past on a parallel course, its wake
nearly enough to roll the skiff and begin the feeding.
He used his forearms to scramble up against the
pinched bow, adrenaline the only fuel for his spent muscles. He
faced a pale outline with a hovering green speck, what might be the
last fleeting glow of a squashed firefly.
“
Can you hear me? You believe this
shit? They sicced a shark on me, Willy. A goddamn shark of all
things.” He turned to the water, his voice giddy, nearly hysterical
as he began shouting, “I saw this fucking movie as a kid. Shark
eats man, aliens not friendly, dinosaurs chase kids. Bring on the
flesh-eating zombies, motherfuckers!”
He collapsed back, out of breath. Heart pumping
as if it wanted out, he looked up at Willy’s slumped figure. “Sorry
about the zombie thing, buddy boy. You can’t help what you look
like.”
It was a head-on strike that lifted the skiff
under Dash’s ass and sent him weightless. The keel slapped down
hard, wood splintering. At least two precious coconuts were sent
airborne and splashed into the ocean with solid kerplunks.
Something larger also went overboard, and at first he thought it
might be what remained of Willy. Pushing back up, he could see the
floating paddle forever out of reach. Not that his hands would ever
heal enough to put it back to use, having rowed himself into the
questionable mercy of gods he didn’t know.
He braced for the final assault, with the
regret of not having fashioned a spear for his escape into shark
territory. He imagined the satisfaction of returning some of the
pain with a mighty jab, a sudden epiphany over what went on in the
heads of killers who stabbed their victims a hundred times. Once
you’d started, why stop? He might have been Custer of the Sea,
making a glorious last stand in this primitive craft, weapon at the
ready to track the canny man-eater. He’d sound a battle cry before
putting out one of his assailant’s eyes with a bulls-eye throw
before being swallowed whole. The idea of bravery made him laugh,
and then made him weep. He was a raging coward who ran from trouble
in the real world—left innocent, motherless girls to suffer
murderous devils alone.
Minutes passed, and then an hour or more. The
clouds broke farther apart and the stars changed positions. The
shark did not come again. Maybe it had grown bored, or maybe
frustrated enough to move on. Perhaps it would return later for
another go.
Dash reached for the leaning bucket with his
fingertips and righted it. He touched the moist interior and
brought the dampness to his lips. He sat with his legs folded,
elbows on the seat behind. The amber disk Tiki had given him sat on
its edge, leaning against his right foot. As he took it between his
fingers and rubbed the smooth surface, the guilt for leaving her
was almost too much to bear. He tucked her gift into his
underwear.
The stern seemed empty, but not quite. Not when
he looked real hard. He could discern Willy’s beefy torso that
reflected some of the light from the heavens. “Talk to me, Willy.
Are you pissed that I blamed you for the girl getting hurt? So what
if she didn’t believe in you? I needed you to help her.”
There was no response, no flicker from his
bulb.
“
She was just a kid. Becoming a god
after the fact, after rotten things happen, is bullshit. It’s all
backwards. That girl and her people would have good reason to hate
you if they knew you existed. Christ, the only thing more useless
than talking to a god is listening to one.”
Dash’s head rolled with the waves, a loose
coconut bumping his knee in the sloshing water. He was tired and
alone, and needed this to end. It wasn’t possible to live another
day by himself.
“
You lied,” he said, wanting to
provoke a response. “My plane wasn’t knocked out of the sky by some
crazy Volcano bitch. I felt what happened. We ran out of fucking
gas, or some tube fell out of the carburetor. It wasn’t any more
magic than you are. It was one of those shit happens
things.”
Dash tilted his head toward the egg-shaped
opening in the clouds. Stars twinkled from a fast moving low scud,
perhaps the same stars he’d taken for granted back in Vermont.
Stars were meant for real sailors and for people in love. They were
for children to make wishes that sometimes came true. Watching the
flickering light, he made his own wish that he would die easily,
without much pain. He also wished there to be no afterlife with
judgmental gods hanging around to keep score, only an instantaneous
transition from all this loneliness to perfect
nothingness.
The skiff rocked him into a sleep where he
dreamed about birds that flew at night.
* * *
He woke with the sun warm on his face, a wood
box floating at his feet, probably dislodged from the old netting
stuffed under the middle bench. It was about a foot across and
three fingers tall. He lifted it with his knuckles and balanced it
on his thigh. The surface was polished, with tiny intricate hinges
engraved in fine designs. It was constructed some place far away.
He pushed open the metal latch and lifted the lid to expose a dozen
crude bone hooks, a small square mirror, and a Western-style
serrated knife with a brown stain running the blade’s length. He
set the box next to him, flexed his right hand to stretch the skin
being pulled tight by fledgling scabs. The wounds itched and
burned, but were bearable. He gripped the knife’s wood handle. The
brown stuff was rust, or maybe fish blood.
“
Look.” He held his find up to
Willy, whose eyes appeared to move, face muscles to twitch. Hard to
be certain, since the sky behind him was nearly the same brightness
as his translucent head.
Dash sniffed the blade, stuck his tongue out
over cracked lips to taste the steel.
“
Don’t.”
Dash jerked, nearly sliced his tongue, heart
thumping.
“
What the hell, Willy?” It hurt his
throat to speak above a whisper. “I was seeing if it was
blood.”
The outline of Willy’s slumped body filled in
and became a little more real. Dash could see his light
pulsing.
“
How old were you?” Willy
asked.
Dash ignored the question. Maybe he also had
the power to read minds, because he knew what Willy had returned to
ask.
“
It’s just an old fishing
knife.”
“
Were you alone when you found him?”
Willy’s voice came from one of those tin can phone set-ups you put
together as a kid, running a string from one can to the other,
smelling chicken soup the whole time. It was as if Willy was in a
nearby boat, rather than sucking breath through a grotesque fish
mouth two seats away and hurling accusing questions.
“
You want to know about my
father.”
“
Yes, that’s what I’m asking,” said
Willy, who’d come fully back. “We’re on a sea cruise, could use a
little entertainment, but I’m all talked out. Time for a story from
my last friend in the world.”
Dash remembered seeing his breath in the house,
and his mother worrying that the oil truck hadn’t delivered even
though she’d called and left dire messages. The entire winter he’d
turned fifteen was miserable, felt like it would never end. Spring
came on the calendar, but the snow pack remained a solid five feet.
There hadn’t been a whole lot of big nor’easters, but there hadn’t
been the usual thaws. Snow built up in layers, reflecting back the
good warm sun. The cold had gotten inside their home, had invaded
their family.
“
I was fifteen, a sophomore in high
school.” Dash pinched the blade between his fingers, then drew it
along slowly. It came clean in spots, flashing bright when it
caught the sun. He wiped the brown stuff on his thigh.
“
Not a whole lot of
friends?”
“
No,” said Dash. “I worked in my
folk’s store when I wasn’t at school. Helped in the summers, too.
Not a lot of kids wanted to hang around a dusty old antique shop. I
sure as hell didn’t.”