This is the third and last instalment of the story that began a number of weeks ago. If you want to read the first two parts, click on the links here Delilah - 1 or Delilah - 2 before you continue.
Red drove him home after they finished work at four o’clock.
“Don’t stop man.”
“Don’t stop?” Jake said. “I can’t.”
“I’d like to read the whole story,” Red said.
“I’ll bring it tomorrow.”
When Red dropped him at the house, Jake was feeling pretty good. He
walked in the house. Ma was in the kitchen.
“How was work?”
“It was okay.”
“Ray’s going to be late so I thought we’d eat early.”
“Okay.”
“Pancakes?”
“Sure.”
But food wasn’t on Jake’s mind; Rabbits
was. He wanted to get back to it. Rewrite it before he showed it to Red
tomorrow. Red would read it. Red always did what he said he would. Red, who was
good for a ride to work and liked his story; how crazy was that? How contrary
to how he’d judged him?
He kept thinking this as he went to his bedroom. He scribbled down a
few thoughts and began retyping Rabbits
on his computer.
“Jake,” he heard his ma call, “pancakes are on the table.”
“Be there in a sec Ma.”
He was typing as fast as he could. Typing. Typing. Word after word.
Sentence after sentence.
He still hadn’t finished when he heard the front door open. He’d stayed
too long.
“You’re home?” he heard his ma say. “Jake and I are just about to
sit down to dinner.”
“Where’s Jake?” Ray said.
“He’s comin,” his ma replied. Her voice sounded different, not relaxed
like before. Fear, like smoke wafting into a room under a closed door, was what
he heard.
“You asked him for dinner already dinnit you?”
“He’s just doin’ his thing.”
Jake listened as he typed madly capturing words one by one as if
they were fleeing rabbits.
His bedroom door opened behind him. There was no knock.
“I bin home five minutes,” Ray snarled. “Yer mom called you for
dinner long before that. Get to the … what are you doin’?”
“Nothin’, nothing. I’m just…”
“Let me see.”
Jake didn’t move. Ray stepped in beside where he was sitting.
On his screen was what he’d rewritten of Rabbits. Beside his computer were the pages he’d edited in pencil.
“Yer still writing those stories,” Ray said. It wasn’t a question. “Damn
you!”
Ray picked up the pages beside the computer and ripped them in half.
“When are you going to get this crazy idea out of your fuckin’ head.
You can’t live on writing goddamn stories. Yer not gonna ruin your life making
up bullshit. Yer not a writer! Get to the table. Now!”
Jake stood up. Madness overtook him and at the same time seemed to
settle him. He didn’t know what to say only that he wanted to write. Ray grabbed
the edge of his desk and yanked it away from the wall.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Jake said but he wasn’t talking to
Ray.
Ray bent down beside the desk. His right hand went to the Jake’s
computer’s power cord. Jake leaped at his keyboard but Ray straight-armed him
back.
“No!” Jake hissed, cursing death on Ray.
Ray took no notice. He had Jake by fifty pounds or more; Jake didn’t
have a chance. Ray jerked the cord out of the wall socket. The computer screen blinked
and went dark.
Jake dropped to his chair and stared at his dead screen.
*
* *
“He’s writing stories again Jane.”
Jake came to the table as Ray spoke. He didn’t look up. He didn’t
need to; hate was like that. Instead he was thinking of how the Elder Rabbit explained
to those clan rabbits around him how to deal with their human captives, as
humans didn’t really care much for one another because they didn’t care enough
for themselves to make it possible.
Jake looked at his pancakes and thought how Elder Rabbit might look
at the meal he was being served as he spoke to the other rabbits, wondering
whether he was more like them than he liked to believe.
“Jake! I asked you a question.”
Jake didn’t look up and pushed his pancake to the side of his plate.
He took his knife and cut a crescent moon shape from the side of his pancake.
He reached for the plastic syrup bottle and poured syrup in the space between
the two pieces of pancake like water separating two landmasses, two peoples,
two ideals never to come together.
He stood up abruptly. He had his answer.
“Jake?” his ma said. “Don’t you like the pancakes?”
Jake shook his head. He wanted Delilah; needed Delilah.
He knew now how Rabbits would
end.
“I’m not hungry,” he said and left for his bedroom.
“Jake,” Ray said but Jake didn’t acknowledge him. It was like Ray
was one of the clan the Elder Rabbit no longer wanted to hear from.
“Let him be Ray,” his ma said.
Back in his room, Jake plugged in his computer and sat down in front
of it. Once it rebooted he began typing, trying his best to push Delilah from
his thoughts long enough to let him finish Rabbits.
He typed what he imagined the Elder Rabbit thought about his clan, they will never know the struggle.
He hit the keys to save what he’d written, then stood up.
He wanted Delilah.
He went to his closet and opened the door. He could already imagine
his fingertips gracing Delilah’s smoothness. He took off his dirty work shirt
and put on a fresh white cotton dress shirt his ma had ironed and hung in his
closet. He took off his dirty jeans and slipped into the pressed black trousers
that had hung beside his white shirt. He brought his desk chair to his open
closet and stepped up onto the chair. There were four boxes on the shelf at the
top of his closet, each identifying a different plastic airplane model kit. Two
were in front, one on top of the other, and two behind. He carefully moved the
front boxes to the right to give him access to the back two. He lifted the top
rear box and put it beside the two he’d moved. He slid the bottom box towards
him. He lifted it off the shelf, feeling its heaviness. It wasn’t plastic.
“I’m coming Delilah,” he whispered as he stepped down off the chair.
He sat down on his bed with the box on his lap. He lifted the top
off the box and set it beside him on his brown bedspread.
Inside were not the plastic parts to make the SR-71 Blackbird pictured
on the outside of the box top. Instead he lifted the loaded black 44 Magnum Red
had sold him feeling power in its weight.
“Delilah,” he whispered, “Rabbits
is finished.”
He smiled at Delilah in his hands. She seemed to smile back at him. He’d
thought of this moment many times before; before he’d finished Rabbits; before Red had said he wanted
to read Rabbits. It was going to turn
out just as Delilah wanted; she was going to win. Jake had known that from the first
time he’d laid eyes on her.
Jake put his thumb on the metal trigger as he raised Delilah’s
barrel to his mouth. It took little effort to push the trigger.
The End
If you haven't read The Actor or The Drive In, you can purchase them from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Chapters-Indigo, Kobo or wherever you get your books.
