BAXTER BUNNY ESCAPES
1: Unsolved Histories
“He was screaming,” she said to her husband. “I heard him from the other end of the building. I couldn’t just run out.”
Paul said, “I don’t care. I’m tired of covering up for you.”
Laura frowned and said nothing. He made it sound so bad. He made everything sound worse than it was.
“What were you doing there, anyway? The move isn’t for another two weeks.”
“I was concerned about the show, which is more than what —“
“You have a funny way of showing it.”
She fought down the urge to throw coffee into his face. “I needed to see the new studio. That’s all. I needed to know just how far we’ve fallen.”
Paul took a long, thoughtful sip from his mug, and at last looked up at her with a somber expression. “And? How bad is it?”
The 37th Street Studio might have been a state-of-the-art facility in its day; but its day had been the dawn of television, nearly forty years earlier. From the moment that she stepped out of the cab, Laura, who thought she had prepared herself for the worst, realized that her notion of the worst needed to be adjusted downward.
If she had doubted that Breath of Our Days had lost its cachet in the eyes of the network, here was proof enough that the time to start worrying was well past. Crumbling brick, broken glass, smells that did not bear naming: to Laura it all had the exaggerated look of a soap opera tenement.
Inside was as bad. Laura entered unchallenged. There was a reception station of peeled formica, but no security guard was posted there. She let herself in and moved on through a narrow hall marked only by handprints on the walls and a pair of dangerously frayed cables running its length like black snakes with no head or tail.
Oh my, she thought. This is our new home.
The soundstage doors were standing open. Inside, three stagehands poked about in an atmosphere thick with the smell of cake make-up and burnt tungsten. Laura felt as if she had walked onto the set of a Frankenstein movie. The equipment looked positively Victorian, all vacuum tubes and incandescent light. An arcane set full of windows and doors, false mirrors and impossible corners, stood back in final darkness along the studio wall.
Laura approached a lean whitehaired man coiling electrical wire around his forearm. “What’s going on?” she said.
He did not even raise his eyes. “Nuh-thing,” he muttered out of the side of his mouth. “We’re through here. Eighteen years on this stage. Now its all over.”
“Eighteen years?” Laura said. She could think of some soaps that had been around as long or longer in one form or another, but none of them had been canceled recently, and none were produced out of such backward facilities. “What’s the show?”
The whitehaired man cocked his head at the polychrome set. “This show? Fun House. You don’t know it? Yeah, that’s why we’re getting th’ boot.”
“You taped your last show today?”
“Twenty minutes ago. You want to come to th’ wrap party? No? That’s good, ‘cuz there isn’t gonna be one.”
“You’re not unhappy to see it end?”
The old man sniffed the air and bent to his equipment case. “Happy,” he said. “Happy not. What’s th’ difference?”
Laura poked around the studio for another ten minutes. She saw empty offices, rehearsal rooms with paper scattered across the floor, furnishings designed for an earlier decade. There were few people about, and those she met greeted her with dejection or indifference. Perversely, her mood started to improve. She had seen the worst, she had the all-too graphic evidence that by moving Breath of Our Days into this facility, the network was putting them all on notice: now she could begin to plan ahead.
The screaming started just as she was heading out: it rose from a distant corner of the building and sent prickles down the length of her arms. Child or animal, pain or panic or both, Laura could not tell. Her first instinct was to phone security; but in this place, this forgotten, backward studio, she did not believe that any security staff remained even if she could find a telephone.
As distressing as the screams was the lack of disruption they caused. Laura ran on high heels back along the empty hallway. The whitehaired man appeared before her, offering only a blank look: screaming came down at them from ceiling panels and bounded off the walls. Laura found the stairwell, paused to take off her shoes, and noticed the old man still behind her. As she started up to the second floor, he stopped her with a word and a raised, crooked finger. “Listen,” he said, and jerked his head toward the flight of stairs leading downward. “You’re headed the wrong way.”
Laura stood on the third step looking down at the man in his green coveralls, and he stood motionless looking back. She cursed, pushed him aside and rounded the turn onto the downward flight.
By the time she found the dressing room the screaming had dissolved into muffled sobs. The door was standing half-open. From around its edge Laura saw a folding screen covered with handbills, two dressing tables and a ball of artificial fur writhing on the floor.
It was too small to be a man, but its shape was not childlike. Two legs kicked spasmodically, two arms with fingerless hands at the end wrestled each other along a narrow seam running the length of the thing’s belly. A pinched howling outraged face like a newborn baby’s was wedged through a circular gap in the furry hide, and above that, a pair of two-foot-long appendages with pink felt hollows whapped the linoleum viciously with each jerking movement of the head.
It dawned on Laura that she was looking at a little man in a rabbit costume. “It’s Carlysle,” the whitehaired man said from the doorway behind her. “But what’s got into him?”
At the sound of the voice the bunny man ceased fighting with itself and spread out into a quivery mass of fur. Blue eyes opened and peered up at them. “Oh thank God,” he said in a small, strangled voice. “Oh, help. . .”
At first, Laura thought the little man was choking. But when she knelt and tried to get her arms around him from behind he rolled away gesturing wildly with his rabbity felt paws. “No!” he shouted quite softly. “No! No! No!”
Tears broke from the corners of his eyes and ran down the sides of his face. “The suit! Can’t. . . I can’t. . .”
“Nonsense,” Laura said. “The zipper’s stuck. Let me try.”
Gently as possible, she felt along the seam beginning under his neck.
Her fingers had no more than touched the zipper — it did indeed appear to be stuck — when the little man jerked as if he had been shocked, gave out an animal shriek and pushed her away with his big bunny feet. Laura tried to pin him down and failed: the stubby costumed hands that pawed at his chest prevented her from getting anything like a firm grip.
“AAAAAAAAH!” he cried. “It’s caught! It’s caught in my skin! Oh, help!”
“Call an ambulance,” Laura said to the stagehand still hovering at her back. She didn’t know why a stuck zipper should call for a rescue team, but the screaming and the contortions had rattled her badly and it was the only thing she could think of. The whitehaired man stood there with his hand on the doorframe. Laura turned and shouted at him, “CALL AN AMBULANCE!” and glared after him as he trotted down the hall.
By the time she turned back, the man in the rabbit suit seemed to have gone into convulsions. “Calm down,” Laura said. “Please! Help is on the way.”
She realized then that she was kneeling over him with both hands outstretched, palms downward, fingers spread, as if she was a faith healer. She felt that he needed to be touched, but she could not bring herself to touch him.
“What’s happening to me?” Carlysle said at last, heaving a deep sigh that shook his entire body. The tears he had shed were puddled up along the rim of synthetic fur framing his face. “I didn’t do anything different. I tried to pull back th’ ears, like normal, an’ it felt like I was tearing my scalp off. Then . . . when I, when I tried to take off the gloves . . . oh god! It hurts so much! What’s happening to me?”
“Wait,” Laura said. “I know you.”
The little man closed his face into a knot. He sobbed out loud and raised a gloved rabbity fist into the air. “Awww, lady, you don’t know me from shit. It’s just the fuckin’ bunny suit you know. Jesus Christ. Fuckin’ thing stuck on me. Aw, Jesus Christ.”
“Shh,” Laura said. “Relax.” She looked up. A rubber bunny nose, whiskers and teeth had been neatly laid out on the farther dressing table alongside a newspaper, a tin of Clown White, a pile of crumpled tissues and an overturned bottle of scotch whiskey. That was the smell she hadn’t been able to identify. Alcohol. He reeked of it.
A lighted mirror hung on the wall above everything else. Yellowing pictures were jammed into the frame. Laura looked at them closely, and felt the years drop away like loose pages fluttering and twisting in summer air.
“You’re Baxter Bunny,” she said.
. . . and once again she was seven years old, overheated and half blind under a bank of arc lights, oblivious, happy, her fellow Brownies reduced to a dim blur on the pale bleachers around and above her. In the bag between her knees there were candy bars and a soda pop and a paper toy gun with COWBOY BOB printed along the handle in red letters shaped like rope. There was a paper cowboy hat and chewing gum and then Cowboy Bob himself came up out of the dark looking tired around the eyes and a little sweaty too but still smiling that TV smile, saying “Hey there, pardners — they got you waitin’ under these lights already? Well, that’s criminal. Still, won’t be long now. You got your badges on?”
They started to tape the show and Laura pointed the paper gun, whipped it hard in unison with the fifteen other girls from her troupe, and the paper snapped through with a loud crack. Everyone laughed. Cowboy Bob said “Yeeeeeeeeeee-HAW, and HOWWWDY there boys and girls, kids at home, we all got our ROUNDUP candy bars, why don’t you make sure you got a supply rat chair by yore teevee sets, cuz we have lots of FUN and EXCITEMENT waitin’ ahead, and YOU are goin’ to need all the ENERGY and VITAMINS you kin git!”
The bleachers were hard to sit on and the lights made it hard to see and Laura did not mind. They all sang the song and waved their guns around. . .
“Kick up your heels and let out a whoop
The Round-up is comin’ to town
Cowboy Bob and all of the group
Are turnin’ the place upside-down!
With a “Yee-Haw” yell and a lickety-split
We’ll jump and we’ll buck and rejoice!
‘Cuz Cowboy Bob is comin’ to town
And it’s time to make us some noise!”
“WAY-ull that was maht’ PERTY you gals! Kids at home, Ah have Brownie Troupe 156 here with me at the Ranch t’day, an’ WHAIR did all yo’ gals say y’all come from?”
In unison, they all shouted “WESTCHESTER!” and Cowboy Bob showed his smile and said, “Way-ull, YEEEE-haw, it shore must be a nice place to raise up such a crop of — PERTY gals lack yew!”
The camera, a huge boxy thing, loomed over them. They squinted in the arc light and tried to see the things happening in shadow.
“Way-ull kiddies, we got ourseffes some GOOD cartoons today, plus a episode of Mr. Gene Autry in The Phantom Empire, not to mention a whole PASSEL of fun with the Roundup Gang! Now, gals, it’s time fer some rope tricks an’ lessee here, wha’s YORE name li’l’ missy?”
Laura was alarmed to suddenly find a microphone in her face. “Lorrie,” she said softly. It didn’t come out well because she had half of a Roundup candy bar stuck in her right cheek.
“WAY-ulll, that’s a mat perty li’l name there, Miss Lorrie. Now, how bout chew stand rat chair, an’ I will show the kids at home how we rope a steer here at the ranch. . .”
The rest of her troupe convulsed with laughter. Laura was far from the smallest and now she knew that she would have to suffer cow jokes for the next several weeks.
She stood on a chalk X under the hottest lights and suddenly Cowboy Bob’s lariat was whirling around her like a hurricane. It tapped on the studio floor a time or two, but it never touched her, and she had seen the show enough times not to be nervous.
Cowboy Bob was in the middle of his rope tricks when a half-naked man painted bright red appeared just in front of Laura, throwing her into shadow. The rope miraculously retracted itself into Cowboy Bob’s hands. The red-painted man had on fringed leather leggings and a headress that looked like a turkey sitting on him.
“UGH!” he said.
And Cowboy Bob said, as he did every week, “Why, yeeeeee-HAW, iffn it ain’t Chief KOOK-amonga. What in blazes are you up to today, Kooky?”
“UGH!” the chief said. He hopped about brandishing his tomahawk. “OY-yoy-yoy-yoy! Me wantum RABBIT STEW right now. Where that low-down no-good varmint BAXTER BUNNY?”
“Baxter Bunny!” The little man shouted. “I’m Baxter Bunny! This can’t be happening to me! My name is Carlysle!” He gripped the rabbit costume in his padded hands, tore at it viciously and screamed in pain all over again. “I’m not a bunny! I’m not! I’m not! AAAAAA-HA-HAAAAA!”
“In here,” said a voice from the doorway. The whitehaired stagehand stood aside for two blue-uniformed attendants carrying a stretcher between them.
“He thinks the costume is stuck to him,” Laura said. “I can’t get ahold of the zipper. The way he’s thrashing around, I was afraid there might be something else wrong. But then I looked on the dressing table . . .” She nodded at the overturned bottle.
“We’ll handle it,” the leader said. “Thanks for staying with him.”
They maneuvered her out into the hall. Suddenly the building was so quiet that she could hear the rustle of the paramedic’s uniform as he knelt down at Baxter Bunny’s — no, at Carlysle’s side. Laura could not decide whether to stay or leave. She took a step back and then a step forward and then another step back.
The sound of ripping cloth came out of the room and then everything exploded. The stagehand and one of the attendants fell backwards into the hall, found their balance and dove into the room again. Above the deranged animal cries Laura heard the bigger men cursing and yelling out instructions to each other. Shadows flailed and beat against the yellow walls. The stretcher clattered and was drawn into the room. The yowling of the little man was muffled, but did not stop.
When they wheeled him out of the room he was tied into the stretcher. A bloodstained white gag had been knotted tightly into the corners of his mouth. His pinched little face had turned purple and was wrenched into a grimace of agony. The floppy rabbit ears seemed to be trembling.
“He’ll be all right,” the senior attendant said with some irritation.
The stagehand loped along behind them, flustered and red in the face. “He ain’t got any next of kin,” he said. “Not that I know of. None that I know of.”
Laura watched them wheel the stretcher down the length of the hall. The undercarriage folded away naturally as they hit the stairs. They carried him up and out of sight and Laura stood alone in the doorway of the little dressing room. The folding screen had been knocked over. Laura reached into the room and turned out the light.
“Did it never occur to you that he might be a pervert?” Paul said later. “That he might be trying something?”
Laura wrinkled her nose at that. Paul’s expressions of concern always managed to sound demeaning.
“No. It occurred to me that he was a drunk old actor who’d spent a big chunk of his life playing a character that had just become worthless.” She turned a part of her dinner over on the plate in front of her and frowned, and felt sad without any obvious reason.
“Like us,” she said, thinking that the 37th Street studio, with all of its atmosphere of age and despair, was about to become their daily workplace. “He was frightened.”
“I’m frightened,” Paul said. He sawed another chunk off of his steak and popped it into his mouth. “How long do you think before the network pulls the plug on us entirely?”
Over the divider between the dining area and the living room, Laura watched the four televisions playing scenes from four different news broadcasts. There were scenes of riots and scenes of shouting men and scenes of homeless people with their feet sticking out of boxes. There were people in suits with grave faces yammering silently into the camera. There were well-polished announcers and advertisements for soap and air sanitizer and tampons. She said, absent-mindedly, “Never, we hope. We can still save it. They haven’t actually canceled us.”
“No, they haven’t,” Paul said. “They’ll replace you and I with a new producing team before that happens. Which is why I can’t have you disappearing for half a day, when a meeting is scheduled, and then turning up late looking like a Raggedy Ann doll that’s been rescued from a rummage sale.”
Laura flushed with anger and started to say “How dare you!” but Paul went on obliviously to describe the meeting that she had missed. It had been decided to resolve the triangle between Eleanor and Phillip and Diana. Mark Payton, who played Phillip, had been fishing for more money; now his contract was up, and Paul suggested killing him off. After some discussion Eleanor had been given the honors: in a fit of jealous rage she’d go after Diana with a gun, and Phillip would get into the middle. . .
Laura was about to suggest that maybe all three of them should be killed off, in an avalanche or something, during a menage a trois at some remote mountain cabin, when a smug announcer’s face was replaced on one of the television screens by a scene of three men in hospital uniforms murdering a rug.
That was what it looked like. It took a moment to realize that it wasn’t a rug at all, but a little man in a rabbit costume.
“Paul!” Laura shouted. “It’s him!”
She grabbed one of the remotes from the center of the table and pressed the MUTE button, but it was the wrong remote and the sound came up on a different TV, where a stodgy man in stodgy gray was reading a stock market report. Paul looked up at her with a blank expression on his face. “I was talking about firing Mark,” he said.
Laura had not taken her eyes from the screen. The little man bit the wrist of one of the orderlies and followed it up with a good strong kick. She tossed the remote aside and grabbed another just as the small man hit the ground and ran blindly out into heavy traffic. A gray sedan swerved to avoid him and lurched up onto the curb. Laura hit the MUTE button. “No one was seriously hurt,” the announcer was saying, “but the fifty-six year old actor is still missing at this hour and authorities are concerned that he may pose some danger to himself and others.”
As though to emphasize this, the man in the rabbit costume was shown running diagonally across the street. The announcer said, “Sources suggest that he was upset at the recent cancellation...” and as Laura watched the cameraman zoomed into a choking closeup on Carlysle, who reached the opposite sidewalk and half-turned to look back. He didn’t look frightened. He didn’t look angry. Laura wasn’t sure exactly what she saw in his face.
“I can’t believe you,” Paul said. “Have you been listening to me at all?”
Laura scowled back at him from over her left shoulder. “Have you been listening to me at all?”
Paul turned to look at the television for the first time. An emaciated model was licking her teeth in what was supposed to be a seductive manner.
“Are you done?” Paul said.
*
Sitting in the bed with her knees drawn up close to her chin and her hands clasped around her calves, a notepad lying untouched on the blankets nearby, Laura flicked her eyes from muted set to muted set. The distant sound of water in the shower reassured her that she was safe for the moment. She kept hoping for more news of the little man, but none came; only the steady stream of infotainment, silent, lips moving ceaselessly, squibs flashing across the screen.
At last Paul came out of the bathroom and moved between her and the televisions. She felt the blanket raised on the opposite side of the bed and she felt the weight of his body settling down beside her.
“Any ideas?” Paul said.
Silence. Paul sighed.
“You know that you’re the imagination on this team,” he said. “You know that without your spark I have nothing. If I’m hard on you, it’s because we would have nothing if you were to tune out.”
“I’m running on vapor,” Laura said. “I’m stuck and I don’t know how to get unstuck. Something happened today and I —“
“I understand,” Paul said. He seemed about to add a qualifier, but for once he remained silent. The lights in their bedroom dimmed, leaving only the glow of the four TV sets banked on their dressing table, and the harsher light from the lamp on Paul’s side of the bed.
Laura slid down into the sheets. She had never felt so alone. In desperation, she turned onto her left side and slid her arms around Paul’s waist.
Paul shook her off and concentrated on marking up the script in his lap. He said, “Don’t let’s pretend that we still like each other.”
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© 2015 Doug Thornsjo and Duck Soup Productions, all rights reserved.
