The Easter Bunny Effect

by Richard Weems

—for Kevin McGowin (1971–2005)

I met Jake in a stink-hole dive called The Shining Tap. When I hunkered onto the stool next to him, he pulled on the bill of his cap and nodded as though he had saved my spot from undeserving strangers. Easter was a day away, and Marjorie was keeping Trudy from me for lack of child support—what better time to go on a heavy toot? The Shining Tap was dark, maybe even foggy, and Jake bent so low in his seat that he could have snorted his gin. An Orioles cap barely covered his bald spot and skin tumor. Four hours later, we were as tight as twins.

Whether I hovered over a bottle of Mad Dog under the boardwalk, pulled at some Olde English on a bus stop bench, or twiddled my fingers in a bowl of party mix in a dark bar, I sought in those days the solace of others who also drank and bemoaned their bad luck. I emptied municipal trashcans and drove a truck I smelled like at day’s end. And because I had to chip in for my ex’s apartment, I was left living in a one-roomer with a communal toilet and shower.

Jake and I weren’t alone here behind the spray-painted windows of The Shining Tap, at the ass-end of the world. Around the corner sat an underage Hispanic boy and a pretty, brown girl he bought drinks for. Across, two off-duty prostitutes who sipped Remi Martin and broke fifties with each round. One was black with a blond wig, the other Asian, maybe Filipino. They were streetwise and chisel-faced and kept their chins up so nobody could make eye contact with them. And up by the wall was a drunk who knew every Three Stooges film by heart. To get another Rolling Rock, he called out, “Hey, porcupine,” with the curt insistence of Moe, the bossy Stooge. Dennis, the bartender, wore a blond and silver mustache pulled his face down. Dennis could have put Jake and me out on our ears long ago, but we didn’t spill our drinks often, and we kept our money in an empty nachos basket. Every time Jake sipped his gin with a squirt of soda he managed to leave a little more in his beard.

I told Jake how I had been blowing off support payments so Marjorie would know she had no control over my life anymore. She threatened to keep Trudy from me altogether, so I left her long, angry messages: “Pick up, damn it, pick up for Christ’s sake, damn it, pick up the damn phone.” Trudy was four, and for almost half of her life I had been little more than an occasional babysitter who cut her pizza into thumb-thick rectangles. I kept a stuffed pink bunny, some alphabet blocks, a Hungry Hungry Hippos game and a vacuum cleaner that popped colored balls into a dome when she ran it along the floor. Trudy got bored with most of these within a few hours of being over, but a larger toy cache would have looked too much like a shrine to a missing child, so I let her watch a lot of TV.

But I was going to be a proper dad come Easter—I had a foolproof itinerary. We would see the Easter Bunny, the real thing, so she could sit on that fuzzy, pink lap. Then back to my place to a basket full of chocolate and Peeps. Ham and mashed potatoes for dinner, all the butter and salt she wanted. And hell, if she wanted to open a can of grated cheese and dump it all over her plate, I would let her do exactly that.

But if Marjorie kept Trudy from me, my little girl was going to forget that she even had a dad.

While I told Jake my story, he shook my hand every few minutes in a hug-warm grip and spat, “Everyone else don’t matter, man: you’re all right by me.”

Jake was a learned man. He had studied statistics at Tuscaloosa. He had come to Atlantic City to make his fortune, work his system, but within hours he’d lost his cash, his watch, his gold necklace, and his bus ticket home, so he moved into a water heater crate behind a skeeball arcade. He grew heroin-thin; his eyes widened into cereal bowls of fear, his cheeks into misshapen prayer stones inside leather pouches. An ambush by lifeguards left him with a bad gimp. It took him months of panhandling, selling plasma and pushing fat tourists around the boardwalk on rolling chairs to earn the money, but Jake developed his own business. He sold postcards, fake dog shit and hot pepper gum, though he didn’t have a permit and had to work out of a suitcase.

“I can pull in forty dollars on a good day,” Jake said. “And for this, I’m supposed to feel blessed.” Jake tapped his temple. “I know a thing or two about being blessed, pal, and I’m no pope.”

“Damn straight.” I threw back another Clan MacGregor for punctuation. From there, Jake and I discussed anything worth philosophical discourse: the design of martini glasses, the intricacies of Sumo wrestling, the frivolity that was the dollar coin.

Then Jake suddenly grew angry and hammered the bar with his fist.

Our glasses rattled. A moment of tense silence except for the Spanish guitar on the jukebox.

“I did that because I wanted to, man,” Jake said, “because I’m no cow. Do I look like a
cow?”

“This ain’t no dairy farm,” I said, and I looked around, daring someone to contradict Jake. For a moment I thought the Hispanic boy, trying to impress his date, was going to say something smart. Had that boy said anything like, “You do look like a cow. A skinny, ugly cow with a lump on your head,” I would have gotten in a few licks before anyone could have pulled me off.

“No, man, I ain’t no cow,” Jake said. The Three Stooges drunk blurted out, “Moe, Larry, cheese! Moe, Larry, cheese!” Jake’s hairy mouth hypnotized me.

“Do you wait in line to go through only one side of a set of double doors?” he said. “Or do you push open the other door your own damn self?”

I wanted to push open the other door my own damn self. The bunny I kept for Trudy’s visits was an old one, and sometimes I held it to my face to catch a whiff of her. It wasn’t right that Marjorie should keep this bunny from her. Trudy loved bunnies. She gawked at them in book store windows, kept a horde of them on her bed at home. If I asked her during our visits what bunnies did, she’d say, “Hop!” and she’d hop once or twice, and so I’d ask again and she’d hop again. We sang bunny songs while she hopped, songs that we revised to make them all about bunnies, “The Hopper in the Dell” and “The Bunnies on the Bus.”

“The bunny,” I said, meaning not just the bunny I wanted to sneak back into my daughter’s arms, but the Bunny whose lap I wanted to sit her on, and every bunny in the world that I could pile onto her little bed. Trudy deserved to have as many bunnies as she could get, and I was just the mutherfucker to get them. When I said, “The bunny,” I also meant my daughter, my little hop-a-dee-hop-hop bunny, but when I said, “The bunny,” Jake’s eyes caught fire with the napalm of a devastating plan.

He grabbed me by the shirt and said, “Let’s go get that shit-ass, that Easter Bunny, and let’s beat his pink balls into the ground.”

A keen rage fired up in his eyes. I tried to explain that I was going to make Marjorie take that damn stuffed bunny back, but Jake had his hooks deep into an idea that he wouldn’t shake.

“He’s just blocks from here, man,” he said. “I saw him yesterday and you know he’s going to be there today and it’s time. You know it’s time.”

Jake’s intent could have been tattooed on the bridge of his nose. Jake wanted us to unload our frustration on some loser pulling minimum wage in a humiliating suit. No doubt, the target deserved a good beating—that forced smile and militaristically happy pink Dacron fiber—but it was a bunny after all, an object of my daughter’s affection, so I rose up like a bull making a last stand against a shiny matador.

“No way,” I told Jake. “You drunk. You bum.” I balled up a fist and showed it to him.

Jake deflated a bit, his longtime compadre of six and a half hours now his opponent.

“Don’t you worry none,” he muttered. “They’ll kill me and they’ll stretch out my skin in the sun, and they’ll be doing me a favor.” His eyes went from hot to sloshed, and any semblance of rational thought dissipated. I shrunk into my scotch.

Jake turned and left with a war cry, something like a belch with teeth.

Dennis took away Jake’s empty glass and soggy coaster. “You sure you don’t want to be leaving with your friend?” he said.

I took the hint readily. I offered up the money Jake had left behind. I convinced Dennis to
sell me a pint of Clan MacGregor for the road.

The next day, Easter, everything turned black.

The article on the back pages of the local section was a paragraph long: “Easter Bunny Bopped.” Just hours after my whirlwind friendship with Jake, a supposedly unknown assailant worked over the Easter Bunny at the mall. A line of sticky-faced kids watched while the Bunny got kicked and slapped around, and they continued to watch as the Bunny was carried away for overnight observation. The perpetrator ran off before security could come down on him.

“It’s hard to understand what makes someone go and do something like that,” quoth the Easter Bunny’s assistant, a fuzzy chick who hadn’t lifted a wing to help.

I read the article while I swigged back some orange juice. Clan MacGregor still sloshed along the lower edge of my vision, and I laughed the story off at first. That crazy bastard Jake. Then I called Marjorie for a time to pick up Trudy, and she didn’t answer. I called again, and when I was again asked to leave my name and number, I hung up and called right back, but still nothing. I took a cab to the apartment building. The cabbie kept tabs on me through the rearview as though I were a fugitive.

In the lobby, I buzzed Marjorie’s apartment three times and got no response. The building foyer was small and smelled of boiled turnips. I buzzed Marjorie’s neighbors, but they denied me. I broke a sweat that was pure liquor, and I felt as though I were buried to the neck in wet, hot sand. With each doorbell I pushed, I felt the sphere of Trudy’s life floating away from mine. There was no credible way to think that my little girl could have known that I had had something to do with the attack on the Bunny, but rationality was the last thing on my mind.

When I snuck in behind a flower delivery and heard the sounds of television and a running sink behind Marjorie’s door, I pounded and got no answer and pounded and pounded. Neighbors threatened through their doors to call the police, but fear didn’t let me stop. Little Trudy screamed while I shouldered the door again and again. I should have walked away and straightened out the matter later with a cooler head, but I was ready to take a splinter through the neck. I was ready to bleed to death on the floor of Trudy’s bedroom rather than be shut out of her life.

Soon came the authorities and the trip downtown and the writing of reports. I even confessed to bringing down the hit on the Easter Bunny, but without a last name, the police had no hope of catching Jake. The ordeal ended with a restraining order and an edict to attend counseling for any hope of reinstating visitation privileges, but I didn’t need experts with trained superiority telling me shit. All I needed was to set the record straight for Trudy, so I parked myself in the garbage heap in the alley across the street from her apartment building and waited for a chance to talk to her. I sealed the stuffed bunny in a Zip-loc to keep it free of stink. This mission became more important than work, than getting home to shower, than paying rent. A homeless shelter sat just a short walk away, and there were plenty of suckers in the world willing to shell out some loose change for a poor drunk. I watched Marjorie drag Trudy to the bus stop in the morning and drag her back in the afternoon. Trudy’s knit hat was always twisted as though forced onto her head, her frown crinkled and powerful. Marjorie, that Cerberus with a poodle-like perm, never left the girl alone for a minute.

I saw Jake once more. This was early June. I was outdoors by then, a dirty semblance of the broken man I once was. Jake sold tiny airplanes on a street corner. He wore a grimy shirt and a paisley clip-on. The box he sold out of looked as though it had fallen from a truck. These airplanes looped in the air and always came back to him. I avoided meeting eyes with him—he probably wouldn’t have recognized me, and I was still hopeful at the time that I would someday talk to Trudy, so I shambled by.

And then, a few weeks later, I heard through the shelter grapevine that Jake was dead. He had choked on a roast beef end on the curb in front of a convenience store. No one slapped his back or called for help. No one took note of the carcass until the owner tried to prod him awake with a giant Pixy Stick. No one at the shelter knew his name, but word had it the guy was skinny and bald, a lump of skin cancer on his forehead.

If the breeze off of a butterfly’s back can eventually stir up a hurricane, what chance does an old drunk have when he goes and kicks the Easter Bunny’s ass? It was impossible not to think that Jake’s crime against the Easter Bunny had come back at him like a divine boomerang. And if that was indeed the case, how could anything but disaster wait in the wings for the guy who unwittingly put him up to it?

Just a couple of months after Jake’s death, I got my chance at Trudy.

She snuck downstairs one Saturday morning. Marjorie was probably sleeping off her waitressing shift. Trudy had on Beatrix Potter footed jammies, a bunny slung over her shoulder as though it were a bindle. She fingered the borders of the lobby mailboxes as though she were scratching at the paint on the Mona Lisa. My little girl was tense with the thrill of escape.

Of course, I moved too quickly. I was too excited. I was too sober. I hadn’t had a liquor fix since a honk or three of some Old Crow with some hag at the shelter the night before. I emerged from my garbage pile like Godzilla from the sea, the bagged bunny dangling from my claws, and I tromped across the street towards her. I entered the foyer with a flourish, my crusty clothes crackling with various forms of energy. With only security glass between us now, the closest we’d been since I had shouldered down her front door, I must admit that I was too eager to close the distance, and I lurched at the glass.

The girl was scared shitless, and she had every right to be. Trudy scampered back into the stairwell, away from the heap on two legs that offered up a shit-brown baggie.

That night was when I started dreaming about the Easter Bunny. I’d be back in my old apartment, alone, when he’d burst in through the window by my bed, straddle my chest, and have at me with shiny, adamantine claws. After struggling briefly against his indomitable strength, I would let my arms fall from my face and ask for forgiveness and the sparing of my eyes.

“Too late, too late,” he’d scream through his mask. His voice was deafening. Enough to wake me, fortunately.

Marjorie and Trudy must have moved out one evening while I cruised the boardwalk for tourist alms and stale caramel corn. I held out against despair and kept vigil morning and night for a few days, but neither of them appeared again.

There is another woman I watch now. She may be a hairdresser, or a manicurist. She wears a pink smock under her jacket, and her perm is wide enough to hide a shih tzu. She has a girl a year or two older than Trudy but a worthy vessel just the same. The girl sometimes comes home with her shoes unbuckled, her jacket a little rumpled. Maybe she’s getting bullied at school. If she is, I hope she’s taking her lumps and learning a thing or two about life. Watching them come and go is as satisfying as a long pull on some rot gut bought with someone else’s spare change: a burn, then a lingering, acrid cloud in the nose, then a dull rush to live on for a little while longer.

Richard Weems is the author of three short fiction collections: Anything He Wants (finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize), Stark Raving Blue, and From Now On, You're Back. Recent appearances include 1922 Review, Ignatian Literary Magazine, prose.onl, and North American Review. He recently retired from teaching. Find more on Medium and his website.