Bunny Man's Bridge

by Ted Neill

  Bunny Man’s Bridge

  A Short Story Collection

  By Ted Neill

  Dedicated to the other founding member of Love Contusion, because, oh my God does love hurt, but I’m still grateful for all the happy memories.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  1. Vespers

  2. Tree House

  3. Quarry

  4. Michael’s Story

  5. Gunshot

  6. Verities

  7. Oral Composition

  8. When We Talk About Fights

  9. Tyra’s Story

  10. Milk Money

  11. A Favor

  12. Idolatry Soup

  13. Patches

  14. Something We Had To Do

  15. Nazis

  16. Every Time I See You

  17. Everyone Can See It

  18. The Houseguest

  19. Frontiersmen

  20. Grocery Cart

  Introduction

  According to legend, on the outskirts of the town where I grew up, there was once an asylum for the mentally deranged. The shuttered ruins, crumbling and moss covered, could still be visited in a boggy dell deep in the woods. The asylum had been closed because of inhumane treatment of the patients, but one of the patients never really left. He still lived in the woods near the property. Nobody knew his real name. He had been abandoned there when he was a child. With no family to claim him, no home to return to, he simply lingered in the forest, close to the only home he had ever known.

  The asylum had been built more like an eighteenth century prison than a hospital: all heavy, mortared stone, windows barred with iron, and bare cells—their floors strewn with straw like animal stalls. This one patient in particular kept to himself, eventually settling in an abandoned farmhouse where he managed to be self-sufficient, growing his own food. He eschewed human contact, preferring the quiet company of a few dozen wild rabbits, whom he domesticated, eventually breeding hundreds. The rabbits were his sole companions, and he knew every single one by name.

  Years passed and people in town left “the Bunny Man” alone, writing him off as an eccentric hermit. He was undisturbed until some high school students snuck onto his property one night. They were three football players and three cheerleaders: letter jackets, cardigans, knee socks, and all. The girls thought the bunnies were cute and wanted to take some as pets. The football players wanted to prank the Bunny Man, with the old ring-and-run on the doorbell.

  It was all innocent enough, at least until the girls tried to run away with some rabbits for pets. One of them tripped and fell on a stolen bunny, breaking its neck.

  That was when the Bunny Man snapped. The long dormant madness erupted as the Bunny Man chased the teens through the midnight forest, a forest he knew well from years of wandering and foraging. They did not stand a chance. Lost, separated, and frightened, the teens were easy prey. All that was ever found of them were scraps of their bloody letter jackets and cardigans. And then there were the dismembered body parts found hanging from the nearby train trellis that dated back to the Civil War.

  There was no real evidence for the Bunny Man story, of course, except the landmarks of the train trellis, an old graying farmhouse, and a crumbling stone building that many assumed had been the asylum, although some said it was instead a prison for the Union army, others for the Confederacy, maybe both. After all, the lands of Northern Virginia had changed hands numerous times throughout the war.

  But evidence isn’t as important as imagination when it comes to legends. The story of the Bunny Man was passed down from one generation of teenagers to the next as they took midnight trips down the dirt road to the sagging farmhouse or trekked through the woods with flashlights to the asylum—boys carrying six-packs and bags of weed, glancing furtively over their shoulders, hoping that the girls hanging onto their arms might let them cop a feel . . . or more.

  Later iterations of the Bunny Man legend evolved to have the Bunny Man actually wearing a pink Easter Bunny costume in order to lure children to his farmhouse, where he would do unspeakable things before slaughtering them. The traffic tunnel that led to “Bunny Land,” as the woods were called, even had a pink bunny spray-painted on its side, complete with murderous red eyes and a bloody mouth filled with overlapping fangs.

  As preteens, we would hear whispers about the Bunny Man among our older siblings or babysitters, and we were, predictably,

  deeply jealous of our elders who would actually get to visit this midnight land of terror and adventure. In that way, a trip to Bunny Land became a rite of passage and, eventually, a fitting image I landed on when thinking up a title for this little collection of stories.

  The stories are old and young at once. Old in that they were written almost twenty years ago, so long ago that I come across passages, characters, and snippets of dialogue that I have no recollection whatsoever of writing or even sketching. And to be frank, at risk of sounding immodest, I’ve been surprised, once and a while, by a twenty-year-old’s level of craft and insight. But I ascribe this more to luck and having the great writers I was reading at the time to learn from than my own talent.

  But these stories are young as well, written as they were by a young man, himself on the cusp of adulthood at the time, and influenced by more than a little bit by Raymond Carver (isn’t everyone at some point?). I was looking back on a childhood that had come to a close, while trying to process the present and all its possible paths. As I wrote, I knew I was trying to prepare for this thing called “adulthood,” which was stretching before me, a great unknown.

  The characters are experiencing the typical things of that stage in life: coming of age, the sudden onset of insight, the stumbles of early relationships, the mystery of sex, the role of gender, and the wider question of what it meant to be a decent, successful human being. Some of the stories look back, others forward. Others are zany fantasies, tragi-comedies where I was trying to make sense of the confusion, to disarm the impending horror of growing up with humor.

  A fair warning: when I submitted some of these stories to my university literary magazine my senior year in college, they were rejected. My friend Rasheed Newson, now a successful writer in his

  own right, was an editor that year and my mole on the selection committee. Although the editors had read the stories blind, he knew mine, and later shared with me that, in the opinion of the selection committee, my stories were the best submitted that year; however, they also concluded that whoever the author was, he or she was “clearly and deeply fucked up in the head.” Despite Rasheed’s own vote of confidence, he was unsuccessful in convincing them to publish a single one.

  Certainly, there were short stories I wrote back then that don’t deserve to see the light of day. They are not included here, although I don’t know if the ones that remain in this collection will save me from the same judgment.

  I can certainly see the stories’ limitations today. The struggles and development of oblivious, sheltered, and privileged white kids in the suburbs are not exactly new territory in American literature. But on reflection, as I reexamined the settings, the characters, the plots, I saw elements that still resonate today: growing signs of diversity in traditionally white enclaves, reexaminations of views of sexual orientation, income disparity, a disappearing middle class, and a growing pathological obsession with celebrity and self-promotion. At least, I hope contemporary readers might find a few minutes of entertainment while they read this on their device, waiting in line at an airport or riding the bus or subway to work. At best, perhaps they will gain a flash of insight or a moment of identification.

  That brings me back to the image of Bunny Man’s Bridge, that train trellis traversing the dark unknown was a rite of passage, but i
t was also a sort of intersection where youthful exuberance, responsible adulthood, misplaced anxiety, and lurking insanity all met—suspended over some great abyss of loss and potential failure. Poised at that point in life, to a young man, they all felt like very real possibilities.

  They still are.

  I hope you enjoy reading.

  —Ted Neill

  1.

  Vespers

  Summer mornings, for me, were spent waking up over a bowl of cereal, followed by an hour or two of reading whatever “classic” novel my father had me reading at the time—usually one that he had been forced to read as a child, such as Oliver Twist or Great Expectations. Reading was followed by “homework” exercises, which could range from verb conjugations to algebra. All this was in some effort to keep my brain from “rotting” during the long, idle days when both my parents were away at work.

  My afternoons were spent playing Nintendo, reading comic books, or splitting my attention between the comic books and the Nintendo while my Ethiopian friend, Masterwal, took his turn as player two. It was only when my older brother got home from his job as a lifeguard at the neighborhood pool and commandeered the television, or my parents got home from work and chivvied us away from it, that Masterwal and I would head outside to play in the woods or the creek behind the house.

  The battles Masterwal and I fought together, whether through our comic books, video games, or just in our imagination while we passed hours in the woods, always teetered on the edge of the apocalypse. We were always cast as the heroes. We knew none of it was real, but it was all based on some assumption that when we came of age, those life and death struggles would, indeed, be our own. After all, that was what one story after another told us, whether in the plot of a book, movie, comic, or video game: young preteens were often called to an adventure that required saving the world.

  At fifteen, my brother Rick seemed to be on the cusp of such adventures. He already had a driver’s permit. And he would routinely get up early on Saturday mornings and disappear all day with my Uncle Gary in a quest for fish. They would come back in the evening, sunburned, smelly, and mosquito bitten, but usually with enough fish for dinner. At the table, we would hear of their exploits—about the one that got away, the one that pulled the boat at least twenty yards before they could reel it in, or the one Uncle Gary had to club to stun long enough so that it didn’t flip the boat altogether.

  What incredible adventures, and surely the sort of dress rehearsal one would need for the greater ones that lay in store.

  I had seen the lake they fished at on a school field trip. Rick explained the size of the lake to me in terms of thousands of acres. There were islands in the lake on which no one was allowed to set foot because they were wildfowl refuges. But the real reason, Rick explained, was because the islands were burial grounds for First Nation peoples. Ghosts would follow any trespasser and haunt them forever. The most well-known island was Vesper Island. A few years before, a girl’s body had been found there. I wondered if the murderer who had left her there was still haunted by the spirits of the Native American dead whom he had disturbed.

  I never saw Vesper Island from the shore. Nevertheless, it loomed large in my imagination. I could picture the trees, with their cobwebbed branches disturbed by the occasional breeze, which carried the stench of carrion and the whispers of voices from beyond the veil. First Nation peoples did not actually bury their dead on Vesper. Instead they made high lofts in the trees where they would lay the bodies to rest. I imagined the canopy of Vesper Island was cluttered with such lofts, holding the decaying remains of noble chiefs and braves, while sentinels of ravens stood watch from the branches or rotated in slow circles in an overcast sky above.

  So when it came, Rick’s invitation for me to join them on my first fishing trip felt like a leap into manhood. The night before, I couldn’t sleep. I woke every few hours, checked the clock, groaned when I realized it was too early, then rolled over. Finally, at 4 a.m. I couldn’t go back to sleep, so I went down for breakfast and started to gather my tackle. Rick was slower and came down a bit later. The night sky was lightening, and the outside was noisy as birds sang out their morning calls. I practiced my cast on the driveway, letting the bobber click against the asphalt. I was still outside when my uncle’s pickup truck rolled down the street and stopped in front of the house.

  “Hey there, Daniel.” He stepped out the driver’s seat holding a 7-11 Styrofoam coffee cup. “You ready to catch some fish?”

  I nodded. Behind the truck was a trailer with a sixteen-foot aluminum rowboat. I laid my rod in the bed of the truck and climbed onto the trailer. The boat boomed with artificial thunder when I stepped inside. I rocked the sides as if huge waves were threatening to tip us over.

  “Can I ride back here?”

  “Not until we get in the water. You can ride up front with us.”

  I sat in the middle seat. Gary and Rick talked about the weather, its consequence on the fish, and the best spot to start fishing.

  “Looks like there’s a front coming in. That will have them all screwed up,” Rick said, looking out at the clouds on the horizon. I wondered what he read in their shapes and textures.

  “Hard to get them to bite,” Uncle Gary said, his fingers drawing down the turn indicator.

  “Yeah.”

  “We’ll still catch some, won’t we?” I asked.

  “Of course, we will,” Gary said.

  The lake was an hour away. Rick helped me into the boat before he climbed aboard himself. He baited the lines and explained to me the different riggings—Texas rigging, Carolina rigging. Meanwhile, Gary dipped the motor into the water and pointed us across the lake.

  The only sound not drowned out by the wind was that of the waves smacking like hand claps on the bottom of the boat. We stopped along a point and cast our spinner baits. I liked using the spinner bait. It made my rod feel like there was a fish on the end whenever I wound it.

  After an hour or so without a bite, Gary finally said, “I can’t believe we haven’t caught anything yet.”

  He moved the boat along the shore and into the shallows, where a creek fed into the lake. Grassy banks closed in on either side of us. Gary told me to aim my line towards them. A faint odor lingered in the air. I had smelled it before in creeks but had never thought much on it.

  “It smells fishy in there, but no one’s biting,” Rick said. If the fish close enough for us to smell were not biting I decided that I would have to make bolder casts for fish farther from the boat. I made a strong cast from the boat. My line traced a perfect arc from my rod towards the bank, a textbook effort . . . until it snagged in a tree. I shook it, but it was stuck fast.

  “I’m sorry, Uncle Gary,” I said, as he reeled his own line in then pointed the boat towards the trees.

  “It’s all right, that’s fishing. It happens to everyone.”

  We floated under the branches, but neither Gary nor Rick could reach the feathery bait. Batting it with oars was not effective, and neither was shaking the line. Gary gave it a final fierce tug. The hook broke free and shot between Rick and me, then landed in the water.

  “Now why couldn’t that land in the boat?” Gary wondered aloud while reversing the motor and bringing the bow to where the ripples were spreading in a circle. Rick reached into the water but, after a few seconds, shook his head and rolled his sleeve back down.

  “Can’t find it.”

  The spinner bait was lost.

  “I’m sorry, guys.”

  “No problem, that happens.” Rick said. “I’m going to rig his line with a rubber lizard, since we’re not catching anything with the spinners. The fish may have moved out into deeper water.” Rick replaced the lost hook on my line then skewered a purple rubber lizard with it. He showed me how to cast it and how to pull it in slowly so that I could feel it bumping along the bottom.

  “If he actually catches anything with that kiddie rod, it’s going to give him fits trying to pull it in,” Gary lau
ghed and sent out a cast.

  “The more bumps, the better!” Rick said to me while tying my line. “Bass like to hang out under things, and when they see this guy bumping along, they’ll grab him.”

  I did as Rick told me. It was more exciting than the spinner bait, because every tug and snag I felt through the line could be a fish. A few times, when my hook got caught, I would wind hard. The reel would make a squealing noise. Gary and Rick would look at my bent rod, but once they saw the end was stationary, they would know it was simply a snag. Rick would back the boat over the place where the line disappeared into the water, and it would come loose.

  The morning wore on. I took off my flannel shirt and tied it around my waist. The air was warm and thick with humidity. Haze hung over the lake, and the day promised to be a hot one. I imagined Rick and Gary must be disappointed that we had not caught anything. Maybe I was bad luck. I was about to say so when I felt an unmistakable tug on my line.

  “He’s got a fish,” Rick cried out, sliding across the thwart towards me.

  I knew it too. The line danced back and forth in the water as I tried to reel. The rod was bent like a candy cane as I spun the handle of the spinner.

  “What do I do?”

  “Keep reeling,” Uncle Gary said, his eyes bright. The fish flashed on the surface of the water. I could see its white underbelly, and then all I could see was the line slicing though the water and going under the boat. I heard the fish’s tail slap the underside, and then it was alongside again. I went to grab the line.

  “No, don’t grab the line. I’ll get it.” Gary reached over the side and lifted out the two-pound bass by the lower lip. He dislodged the hook and held the fish out to me.

  “You caught a fish, son!”

  Rick slapped me a high five. My hands were shaking. Gary held the fish out to me. I knew he wanted to let me hold it, but I pretended not to realize it and kept both hands on my rod. I didn’t want to touch it, much less stick my fingers in its mouth. I was disgusted by its gaping red gills and pungent odor. I felt a strong wave of sympathy for the fish, hanging there, its body trembling, its jaw stretched open.