Thumper - A Novel Excerpt

Chapter ONE: Fifty goddamn cents, a night cut short

“It’s fifty cents a pair,” said the clerk, sitting behind his computer.

“Fifty?” asked the boy.

“Yep.”

          “It was sixty yesterday.”

          “Okay.”

          “It’s fifty?”

          “It’s fifty.”

          “Got a hundred pair.”

          “That’s fifty dollars.”

          “I know that.”

          “Okay.”

          The boy pulled a trash bag from his pack, plopped it on the counter. The black plastic shone slick with wet. He cursed and held up his pack. Dark red soaked through the khaki canvas.

          “I’ll have to count ‘em,” said the clerk.

          “Alright.”

          The clerk reached under the counter and brought up a pair of purple latex gloves. He blew into the hand openings, inflating the gloves for a second, and then he put them on. He took a pair of orange handled scissors and cut the bag beneath the knot and dumped it. Rabbit ears, fur blood-crusted at their sliced bases, slid out onto the plastic-sheathed counter.

          “Gotta count em,” said the clerk again.

          “Start countin then,” said the boy.

          The clerk took the ears in pairs, marking tallies on a sheet of notebook paper with a pen. He stacked the limp, gray pieces of animal to a side. Behind him, the walls were covered from the floor to their middles by narrow slats of cherry veneer. Above the wood, the walls were nicotine-stained, a jaundiced yellow. The place smelled like old smoke and copper and bleach.

          “Slow day?” the clerk asked.

          The boy shrugged.

          “How’s your daddy?”

          “Dead,” said the boy.

          The clerk paused in his counting. “When?”

          “Couple weeks. Heart got him.”

          “Condolences.” A pause. “He was a good man.”

          The boy nodded.

          The clerk went back to counting. As he dug deeper into the bag, the ears he pulled were drenched, redder. Blood pooled under the counted stack and made the clerk’s gloves slick and shiny.

          “You’re short,” said the clerk.

          “Short?”

          “Hundred and ninety-nine ears, one short of a pair.”

          “Check the bag.”

          The clerk did. “Nope,” he said.

          “Check again.”

          “It’s not in there, son."

          “Can’t just give me the fifty cents?” the boy asked.

          “Nope.”

          The boy put his palms on the plastic covered counter and leaned in, putting his face close to the clerk’s. “It’s fifty cents,” the boy said.

          “Fifty cents you aren’t getting.” The clerk’s face was distant, impassive.

          “Twenty-five, then. For the single.”

          “Only buy in pairs. You know that. How else would we know the rabbit’s dead?”

          “I cut off one of its goddamn ears, for one.”

          “No need to shout, son.”

          “I’m not shouting.”

          “Then we don’t have a problem.”

The clerk stood from his chair. The counter stretched from wall to wall, segmented into thirds by short plexiglass dividers. The clerk’s station was the middle of the three, and the other two were deserted. He walked down the length of the counter and pushed through a swinging door. A moment later, he came back wheeling an orange trash bin stamped with a biohazard symbol.

“You want the forty-nine fifty or not?” the clerk asked.

The boy, still standing with his weight on the counter, rocked back and straightened up. “Yeah,” he said.

The clerk nodded and opened the lid of the bin. It was three-quarters full of fur and sludge and plastic. He reached over the counter, towards the boy, and pulled up the clear sheeting that draped over its edge. He folded the plastic over the pile of counted ears and then did the same with the end nearest him. After he’d parceled the ears and blood up, he dumped the plastic into the bin and pushed the bin into the back. When he returned, the clerk was absent his gloves, rubbing sanitizer into his hands. He sprayed the naked counter with a bottle of cleaner and wiped it down with a paper towel.

“I’ve got places to be,” said the boy.

“That’s a shame,” said the clerk. “Just be a minute.”

A spool of plastic sheeting hung over a cluttered desk near the rear wall. The clerk stepped around the desk and measured off a length of the plastic and cut the sheet free. He draped it over the counter and smoothed the edges. There was no trace of the blood or the ears.

“Alright, then,” the clerk said. “Just need to enter you into the computer here.”

“Fine.” The boy’s jaw set, tight like his shoulders. He crossed his arms.

“Ninety-nine pairs at fifty cents a pair comes to forty-nine dollars and fifty cents,” the clerk murmured.

The boy sucked at something in his teeth.

The clerk didn’t look up from the screen. His fingers worked the keys, and then he stood again and went to the back of the room. There was a small safe built into the wall, and the clerk went to open it. The boy tried to get sight of the dial and combination, but the clerk’s back blocked his view.

“You got a couple quarters on you?” the clerk called over his shoulder.

“No,” the boy answered.

“Can’t give you the one bill, then.”

“That’s fine.”

“Alright.”

The clerk shut the safe and returned to the counter with a small stack of bills. He counted them out slow. There were a lot of singles. The boy tapped his foot and waited.

“That oughta sort it,” the clerk said when he’d finished.

The boy collected the bills and nickels and wadded them up and stuffed them into the pocket of his jeans. “Appreciate it,” he said.

“The National Bureau of Pest Control thanks you for your service,” the clerk said, sounding official. In a lower voice he said, “Sorry again. About your daddy.”

The boy left.

Outside he could see his breath in the last shreds of desaturated daylight. The Bureau building was the only structure for a mile in either direction, save a decayed barn that stood atop a hill in the far distance. There was a road, paved but barely, with weeds creeping through its asphalt skin, widening the cracks with yellow-green. Scant woods flanked the blacktop, a handful of trees that soon gave way to the endless march of empty cropfields that stretched off to the dim horizon.

The boy muttered something about fifty-goddamn-cents and spat the sour out of his mouth. Parking lot gravel crunched under his boots as he set to walking. He had no vehicle. It was cold for Fall. Soon he would be shivering, so he walked faster. His bootheels clicked on the road, the only sound aside from his breath. He looked up the road, the hills and flats, and he thought of nothing.

A rustling sound, from the roadside thicket. The trees were thin, utilitarian things: narrow from trunk to tip, branches leafbare and scraggly. The trees’ fallen color rested on the spongy earth, red and orange like firelight cast through amber. The boy stopped and squatted down on his haunches and peered into the fans of yellow wildgrass and desiccated bushes. He turned his head, ear towards the thicket, and he listened. He heard the noise again.

A flash of something, gray and quick against the colored leaves. The boy stood to his full, gangly height and waded down into the woods. Steep ground tapered into a shallow ditch. On the far slope were tree roots, exposed to the air.

The sun had mostly gone now. He shrugged out of his pack and pulled it around to his front and dug in. The pack’s innards were wet from the broken bag, but there was little of value inside. He pulled a pair of thin work gloves, fingertips the same red-black color as the bag’s bottom. When he had the gloves on, he found his flashlight.

A billyclub hung tethered to the boy’s belt, a thick length of hardwood stained coal black, shiny even in the low dusklight. Its handle was grooved by use with divots in the shapes of fingers. The boy pulled the club from his belt and held it loose in his right hand, dangling it by his side. He squinted into the brush and waited.

Nothing for a while. He kicked at the leaves pooled around his feet. The noise spooked his prey. The rabbit poked its head up from the leaves, long gray ears tall on its head. Its wet little eyes fixed on the boy. He didn’t move, barely breathed. A stillness filled the few feet between them. He gripped the handle of his club, knuckles white under the fabric of his gloves.

The boy started toward the rabbit, and the rabbit bolted. The boy dove, leaves crackling under his chest, grass scraping against his chin and neck. He missed the animal by an inch, fingers grasping at earth. He watched the rabbit go, shooting towards the root-locked slope. With his flashlight he followed it. The creature was lit and panicked in the halo of white. It dodged into the hillside, diving into a hole dug between two wrist-thick roots.

He got a fix on the hole and turned off his flashlight and pocketed it. His steps landed slow, sliding so as to not break the leaves or the quiet. He knelt in front of the warren. A root dug into his bony knee. Peering in, he saw a flash of eyes like two polished dimes. The boy jammed his arm into the hillside up to his shoulder.

His hand wandered, skating along the barriers of compacted earth. Stringy roots hung from the round ceiling. He stretched and stretched until he felt he might fall into the warren. A painless pressure on his fingers: the rabbit, biting him. He pulled back and scraped at the earth around the hole, dug in deeper so that he could reach. Dirt tumbled under the collar of his shirt and the inside of his coat. He could almost get hold.

The rabbit’s neck was thin and soft with thick winter fur. The creature made a high keening sound as the boy jerked it from the warren. The rabbit was fat and heavy, pregnant maybe. It squirmed as the boy freed it from the soil. Legs kicked as the creature tried to sprint across the open air. The boy shifted his grip and took the animal by its hind legs and then he laid it on the ground. He put his right boot on the rabbit’s neck. The billyclub rose high above the boy’s shoulder and then came down.

Thump, and the rabbit stopped moving.

Thump, and the boy was sure it was dead.

He rose and mopped the sweat from his brow with a sleeve. He checked the club for blood, but it was clean, so he tethered it back to his belt. From his pocket he pulled a folding knife. The blade was short and thin from lifetimes of sharpening. The boy gathered up the rabbit’s ears in a hand and sliced them clean off. He wiped the bloodied knife on the rabbit’s fur and stood. He left the carcass where it was. If he headed back now, the clerk would give him his fifty cents.

***

The Purple Toe had spent the first twenty years of its life as a sex shop. The brown-bricked goblin of a building sat squatting miles away from the nearest interstate on the high side of a steep hill. When Hero Jones bought the building some decades back, he’d added a second story that now slumped under its own weight and age. It looked old and dying, its roof missing panels and its foundations sagging. The bar had no windows, except for a single, smudged rectangle of glass high on the building’s left side.

The boy walked around to the side and looked up at the window. Orange light flickered behind a grimy film. The window didn’t open, and he wondered if it had ever been cleaned. He stooped and gathered some chalky gravel in his hand and thought about throwing a shard at the window. He tossed a rock up and caught it, tossed it and caught it. He dropped the gravel and went inside.

***

The Toe’s radiators never worked. It was warm to the point of scorching. The boy shrugged out of his coat and hung it on a steel rack just inside the door. He kept his pack with him.

One big room made up the bulk of the place, chairs and tables strewn haphazard over cheap linoleum tiles that alternated in color between dingy white and mint green. A jukebox slouched in the corner, but it had broken long before the boy had ever stepped foot in the Toe. Instead, atop the juke, there was a silver boombox with one bum speaker and a stack of seven hard-used cassettes.  

The light was all wrong for a bar. Thick strips of fluorescent white crossed the ceiling like chained rays of sun, recessed into the gray and speckled drop ceiling. The harshness of the light made corpses of the bar’s handful of patrons, bleaching their skins and magnifying every blemish that marred their faces. Tucked in the one dim corner, under a burnt-out panel, were four men hunched around a high-table, playing cards. One of them, a thickset black man, looked up from his hand and nodded to the boy. They were thumpers, same as him, same as anyone that came into the Toe.

The boy sidled up to the bar proper. The mismatched stretch of scavenged woods, forced together with nail and screw, would creak if you leaned on it. Hero, who stood behind the bar facing the wall, had built it himself. He had a clipboard cradled in his arm, making checks as he inventoried his liquors. The boy sat on a stool and laid his bag on the floor.

“What’s the count, Kit?” Hero said, without turning.

“Hundred head,” said the boy. “Hundred and one, actually.”

“Not too bad. Puts you in . . . sixth, I believe. For the week, that is.” Hero put down his clipboard and took up a piece of chalk. Mounted on the wall, next to his framed Purple Heart, hung a chalkboard Hero had scrapped from some defunct grade school. Rows and columns lined the board, a thumper’s name to the left and their count to the right. Hero wrote The Kit, and then 101 in a rough scrawl. On the far righthand side of the board were the lifetime counts, the top five of which were in the tens of thousands.

Hero turned. His face was pock-marked and reddish about the cheeks. Two cigar-thick eyebrows sat widespread on his face, ash-colored like the few wisps of hair on his head. “How long you been out working?” he asked.

“Five days,” said the boy.

Hero nodded. He took up a glass and pulled a draught of the cheapest beer he had on tap and passed it to the boy. Kit thanked him.

“How’s the toe?”

“Ah, it aches,” said Hero. “The cold, you know?”

The boy nodded and drank. “Candice around?” he asked.

Hero shook his head. “It’s her night off.” He scratched at his chest. “You eating?”

“What’s on the menu?”

Hero smiled. “Stew,” he said.

“Anything else?” said the boy.

“Well, there’s more stew.”

“That’s it?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“I’ll have the stew then.”

“Excellent choice, sir,” said Hero. He refilled the boy’s glass and took the lid off a huge stockpot that sat simmering on a hotplate behind the bar. He filled a bowl and handed it to the boy, who took the cash from his pocket and counted off ten dollars and tossed it onto the bar.

The stew was hot, but not much else. Brown and viscous, it was lean on vegetables and over-filled with rabbit. The boy salted and peppered it to little improvement. He ate it all and drank his beer.

“Tell Candice I’m looking for her,” said the boy.

“Will do,” said Hero.

The cadre of thumpers in the corner grew louder as they swam deeper into their cups. The boy turned on his stool and watched the men as they slammed down their cards and shouted and laughed. He went to their table.

“Hey there, Kit,” said the black man from before. Most called him Jackie Robinson on account of him being black and using a Louisville Slugger for his killing.

“Jackie,” said the boy. “Got room?”

A tall beanpole of a man sat to Jackie’s right, Jackie’s longtime partner, Spike. He wore a rabbit fur shirt, and his head was shaved down to the scalp. “Full up,” he said.

“Sorry,” said Jackie. “Pull up a chair if you like. Keep us company”

Kit did so, taking a chair from a nearby table. It wasn’t as tall as the others, and so he felt very small next to the thumpers.

“Like I was saying,” said Spike. “The issue is reproduction.”

“Well, no shit,” said Jackie. “They’re rabbits. They fuck like rabbits.”

“Our reproduction, I mean. We can’t beat the little shits at their own game.”

“Raise ya ten,” said a third thumper the boy didn’t know.

“Call,” said Jackie.

“Just too many goddamn hoppers,” said Spike. “Too many hoppers making too many more hoppers. Kit, how many’d you kill this week alone?”

“Hundred and one,” said the boy.

“Well, that’s not enough. Jackie, how many we get?”

“Five hundred,” Jackie answered.

“Shit, that aint enough either. Never enough. Hell, you go outside to the old McReedy field right now, and you put your head down on the dirt, put your ear up against it, and you tell me if you can’t hear those bastards humpin away down there. Thumpin up against the walls, eatin all the roots. They’re everywhere.”

“True enough,” sighed the third thumper. “I fold, by the way.”

“Yeah, I fold too,” said Spike. “But the real motherfucker of it is, and this is what gets me, we’re feeding em. We keep planting crops, every Spring, Fall, Summer, whatever, and they keep eatin it all up.”

“They don’t get it all,” said Jackie.

“Near enough. Near enough. Get more than us. Saw you eatin that stew, Kit. Lotta carrots in there? Lotta onions, celery?”

“Nope.”

“Well, guess why. Fucking rabbits.” Spike stood to his full six and a half feet and rubbed his hands up and down his face. “Take my seat, kid. I’m gonna get closer to the whiskey.” He turned to Jackie. “Tomorrow, partner. Need to get back out there and do some work. Need to crack some skulls!” He adjusted the long, blood-rusted railspike attached to his beltloop and set off for the bar.

A fourth man sat at the table. He was of a slight build, narrow through the arms and legs. His hair was thin but shaped, and he wore a neat goatee. A tweed hunting jacket wrapped his sloping shoulders. His half-moon glasses caught the light and shone, making his eyes invisible. “The issue is not the breeding,” said the Professor. “The issue is the growing.”

“Sir?” said the boy.

“The rabbits breed, yes, but it’s the growing that swallows up our food. We simply cannot let the rabbits grow.” The Professor reached into his pocket and pulled a satiny pouch. He pulled open the drawstring and upended the pouch. A dozen tiny, bleached skulls fell out onto the table. Kit picked one up and examined it. The skull was intact.

“When they’re this small, one need not waste energy with tools. A twist of the hands, and the problem is solved.”

The Professor smiled, something satisfied leaking through his grin.

“You’re a lunatic, Professor,” said Jackie.

***

The boy climbed the rickety stairs to the second floor of the Toe. They creaked with each step, moaned and groaned like the beaten bits of orphan wood they were. No two steps were quite the same width or length. It was late, and he was drunk, so it was hard going.

The stairs landed in a narrow hallway carpeted with a cheap, surplus burgundy shag, crusted in places with mud. The walls were naked drywall painted with a few test swatches of random color: a green, a blue, a canary yellow, but Hero had never followed through on the painting. The unfinished ceiling showed uneven rafters and pink insulation backed with brown paper. Exposed wiring ran from the strange lamps fixed to the roof, snaking up and across the rafters, and splitting like tributaries into the rooms that lined the hall.

Five rooms, all with different colored doors, and no permanent tenants but one. The boy stumbled down the skinny stretch of carpet, leaning heavy on one wall with his shoulder. His footfalls shook the mismatched floorboards. There was a queasiness in him that rocked his stomach and sent bile creeping up his throat. But there was the door, the red door at the end of the hall.

He knocked, and the door rattled on its hinges. No answer, so he knocked again. The boy pressed his ear to the thin wood and heard the whine of bedsprings. A cough bubbled up out of his chest. He leaned on the doorframe with one hand and hacked into the other. The door’s deadbolt cycled, and the door swung open.

Through drink-blurred eyes, Candice looked like an angel. Redheaded and dressed in an imitation-silk robe, she stood to a head with the slouching boy. She’d opened the door only halfway, so that most of her was hiding behind it. He smiled at her, a lopsided grin she answered with a frown.

“It’s late,” she said. Her voice was scratchy and dull from sleep.

“I know,” said the boy.

“I was sleeping.”

“I’m sorry. Was waiting for you to come down.” His words were slurred.

“I was busy.”

“Who with?” asked the boy, his voice acid.

“Don’t start that,” said Candice.

The boy rocked on his feet and said nothing. He was very pale and sweat crept down his forehead.

“How much did you drink?” she asked.

“Was playin’ cards. With Jackie and Spike,” he said.

“A lot then. . .” Candice looked him over and sighed. She opened the door the rest of the way. “Come in, before you pass out in my doorway.”

He fell into Candice’s dark room. Light came from the scant window, moonlight filtered through spots of dirt on the glass. The air smelled like vanilla. Cheap plastic candles flickered in every corner of the room. Heat from the bar below never made it up the stairs, and so it was cold.

As Candice closed the door behind him, the boy spun her and pressed her against the wall. He kissed her, half missing her mouth, and she drew a sharp breath. Candice put a hand on his chest but didn’t push him off. He yanked at the knotted cord of her robe, and it opened. His hands grabbed at her sides. She pushed off the wall and pulled him by his shirt towards the bed. Their breathing was hurried and loud in the quiet of the room.

The boy fell into the bed back first. The mattress caught him and bounced and groaned. Candice climbed on, straddling him at the waist. His fingers slid up and down her bare thighs, soft and cool. But the pillow under his head was softer. Warmth spilled off her, but the bed beneath him was warmer. The boy’s heart slowed, and the fire in him dimmed, and he passed out.

Candice stopped and reached over to the bedside lamp and turned it on. Soft snores sounded from the boy as his chest rose and fell. She wrapped her robe around her and tied the cord. He looked very young when he slept, with his forehead unlined and his dark brows unfurrowed. There was a smudge of dirt on his forehead. Candice wet her finger with spit and rubbed it away.

She climbed off him and undid his boots and sat them by the door. She took off his socks too, and his belt. She pushed a curl of hair off his forehead and traced the slim bridge of his nose with a finger. She touched his lips, which were chapped and broken by cold and liquor. Candice turned the boy onto his side and switched off the light and slept beside him.

***