Work Text:
April 1941
The studio sent them on the road because Porky had the mumps.
That was the official story, anyway. Porky was supposed to do the Southwest tour with the rabbit: eleven movie palaces in eleven days, Barstow to Albuquerque and back, shaking hands in lobbies and doing ten minutes on stage before the feature. Then Porky woke up on a Monday with a face like a hot-water bottle, and on Tuesday a man from the front office called Daffy in and told him to pack a bag.
“Why me?” Daffy had asked.
“You’re available,” the man had said.
That was the whole reason. It was the most insulting thing anybody had said to him in four years of pictures, and Daffy had been set on fire, dropped off a water tower, and billed underneath a house cat.
So here he was, eight o’clock on a Wednesday night, driving the studio’s car across the Mojave with the headlights full of bugs and a rabbit in the passenger seat who hadn’t said more than thirty words since Pasadena. He’d counted.
It wasn’t that the rabbit was rude. He said thanks when Daffy stopped for gas and sure when Daffy asked if he minded the radio. And when Daffy did eleven straight minutes of material on the subject of Victorville, he laughed where he was supposed to. But other than those cursory niceties, he seemed content to just sit there in the passenger seat with one elbow crooked out the window, lounging over the whole desert like he could take it or leave it.
It drove Daffy up the wall. The least the upstart could do was ask for an autograph.
He’d been acting the fool in pictures since 1937. He hollered and whooped and bounced off the heads of bumbling hunters, and he’d gotten very, very good at it. Then, last summer, the studio put out a picture with this rabbit in it. The rabbit didn’t holler or jump or do much of anything special, really. He chewed a carrot, asked a hunter what was up, and ran rings around him without breaking a sweat. The Academy even nominated his two-bit Gable impression for an Oscar, and on his very first credit, too.
Daffy kept close tabs on that race. When the rabbit lost, he felt something inside him settle.
But now there were fan letters. Not only that, the letters of Bugs’s name were getting bigger and bigger on the posters. Writers from the story department sat in on the rabbit’s rehearsals with notebooks. Even at the peak of Daffy’s drawing power, nobody had ever sat in on anything of his with a notebook. Porky made a joke to him on the sly once over the craft services table: Looks like everybody’s got the B-B-Bug for that new bunny. Daffy didn’t laugh.
And now there was this: eleven days on the road doing ten minutes before the rabbit’s ten minutes, like the fella who warms up the crowd before the real act comes on.
“You do that a lot?” asked the rabbit.
Daffy looked over. “Do what?”
“That thing with your bill where ya grind it.”
Daffy made a noise like an out of tune trumpet, wing flying to his beak. “I’m not doing that.”
“I dunno, mac. From here it sound’s like like somebody sharpenin’ a pencil.”
Daffy stopped grinding his bill. He drove in silence for a whole mile, a personal record, and then turned the radio up. It was news: something about Yugoslavia, something about Greece. He turned it back down.
They were supposed to be in Barstow by six. A series of missed exits and an unplanned detour through a ghost town off the interstate meant it was nearly nine by the time they rolled in under the neon of the Sands Motor Court, which said VACANCY with the second A burnt out. Vac Nancy, Bugs joked, reminds me of a girl I knew back home.
The woman at the desk was about sixty, in a housecoat and a hairnet, with the radio going behind her. She looked at the two of them over the tops of her glasses.
“Studio called,” she said. “Two rooms, they said.”
“That’s right,” said Daffy.
“Well, I got one.”
“One,” Daffy echoed, bill grinding.
“Had two. Then a honeymoon couple come in off Route 66 about seven o’clock. Your studio said seven and it’s past nine.” She shrugged. “I got one left. Number eight. One double bed.”
“We’ll take it,” said the rabbit.
Daffy turned around and stared at him. It was the first definitive thing he’d volunteered the entire trip.
“There’s nothin’ else in Barstow,” the rabbit said reasonably. “I asked at the gas station. It’s this or the car.”
The woman got down a key. Then she stopped, with it in her hand, and looked at them again, the duck and the rabbit, with a new sort of consideration.
“You fellas are toons,” she said.
“Guilty,” said Daffy.
“Had a toon in here in ’38. Kangaroo. Went clean through the floor of number four.” She held the key up out of reach. “You don’t do that, do you?”
“Only professionally,” said the rabbit.
She thought about that for a second. She seemed to decide it was good enough, and handed him the key.
Number eight was about the size of a closet, with a swamp cooler rattling in the window and a lamp with a fringed shade. There was one chair, a sink, a picture of a cactus, and the bed.
It was a very small bed.
They stood in the doorway with their suitcases and looked at it.
“You take it,” Daffy announced, springing into motion as if he’d only paused to be wound.
“Nah,” said the rabbit, still lingering by the door. “You take it.”
“I insistht.”
“So do I.”
“You’re the star,” said Daffy. He heard exactly how it came out, and didn’t care. “The studio wants you rested. You’ve got the Fox in Phoenix on Friday. Eleven hundred seats. It’s been made very clear to me that they aren’t coming to see the duck.”
The rabbit looked at him for a second. Something went across his face too fast to read.
“You drove,” he said. “Two hundred miles. Take the bed.”
“I’m fine on the floor. I love the floor. I’ve slept on floors from here to Canada. I’m a floor enthusiast.”
“So am I.”
“You’ve never slept on a floor in your life. Look at you. You’ve got nominee written all over you.”
“I slept on plenty of floors,” said the rabbit, somehow both mild and defiant all at once. That was a tough read to get on a line, Daffy almost had to give him credit. Almost.
Bugs picked up his suitcase, set it down by the chair, and took the cushion for a pillow, very casually. It was so clearly a fella making himself at home on a floor that Daffy wanted to scream.
“Oh, no,” said Daffy. “No, you don’t.”
He crossed the room in two steps, snatched the cushion out of the rabbit’s hands, and threw it on the bed. Then he lay down with his arms crossed on the strip of floor between the foot of the bed and the door. It was the only stretch of floor in number eight long enough for a rabbit to lie down on, and Daffy spread himself across the whole length of it like a draft dodger.
The rabbit looked down at him.
“This is a little silly,” he observed.
“I’ve been called worse.”
“You’re only lyin’ there so I’s can’t lie there.”
“That’sth correct.”
The rabbit stood there for a moment and looked around the room. Then he went and folded himself into the gap between the sink and the wall, which was about the size of thick encyclopedia. He got his knees up under his chin, one ear flat against the plaster and the other tugged down over his eyes.
They lay there for a while. The swamp cooler rattled. Out on 66, a truck went by and the whole room shook. The picture of the cactus went crooked, in a way that made it seem like a common occurrence.
They may have lasted like that all night, were it not April in the desert. Whatever the day had been, the night had other ideas. The cold came up out of the linoleum and into Daffy’s tail feathers and settled there to stay.
“Ya awake?” said the rabbit, after about twenty minutes.
“No.”
“This is the dumbest thing I ever did.”
“I doubt that very much.”
The rabbit continued overtop him: “They promise you the moon when they getcha to sign their little contracts, but they leave out the bit where you’re folded up under a sink in Barstow so ya don’t lose an argument to a duck.”
Daffy sat up.
“Okay,” he said. “New plan.”
The new plan was the Walls of Jericho.
Daffy had seen It Happened One Night four times at the Egyptian in ’34, and he explained the principle while he built. You took the spare blanket from the closet, and both pillows, and the chair cushion, and you built a wall straight down the middle of the bed. Each party kept to his own side of the wall, like a civilized adult, and nobody had to sleep on the floor in Barstow.
“That’s a picture,” said the rabbit, striking an unreadable balance between amusement and doubt. “Clark Gable ends up marryin’ her.”
“That’s not the princthiple, that’s the plot.”
“It’s the whole plot.”
“Well, you’re no Claudette Colbert,” said Daffy. “Get in.”
They got in, one on each side, very carefully, with the wall between them. It was a lumpy, ramshackle wall, and it sagged in the middle. The bed was so small that even with the wall, Daffy could feel the whole mattress tip toward the rabbit every time he shifted.
There was a question of clothes. There always was, on the road with somebody new. Daffy wasn’t big on constriction — a tie for public appearances, a hat when it rained. All he had to do was take off the tie. But he heard the rabbit rustling on the other side of the wall, and turned his eye towards a gap in Jericho.
The rabbit had taken off his gloves.
He laid them on the nightstand, one on top of the other, fingers lined up. His hands lay on top of the blanket, and they were bare.
Daffy looked away fast. He looked at the ceiling. He felt his face go hot in the dark.
It wasn’t anything. Everybody took their gloves off sometime and Daffy didn’t wear them at all. But even he knew you didn’t do it in front of anybody, not if you could help it, not unless you were at home. A gloved toon’s bare hands were the plain truth under the costume, the part the animators never bothered to draw, and it was like watching a fella take out his teeth. Daffy had known the rabbit for a year and it never even occurred to him to wonder.
So he lay there and looked at the ceiling very hard and thought about Clark Gable.
In hindsight, a terrible decision.
“Can I ask ya somethin’?” said the rabbit, somewhere around eleven.
The swamp cooler had quit. The room was dead quiet except for the trucks.
“You just did.”
“Why’d ya say it like that before? You’re the star.”
Daffy frowned.
He could have made a joke. He had about forty of them, and he’d been polishing some since Pasadena. But it was dark, and late, and there was a wall of pillows between them, and he couldn’t see the rabbit’s face. For some reason that made it easier.
“Because you are,” he said. “You walked on that lot last summer and you were. Like that.” He snapped his fingers in the dark. “And everybody could see it. And now the whole story department’s walking around with their notebooks, and you know what they’re writing down? Not hoo-hoo, I’ll tell ya that for free. Not bouncing off the walls. They’re writing down a hundred and one ways to chomp a carrot.” He stared at the ceiling. “Screwballs are going out. I can feel it. Everybody wants a smart guy now, a guy who stays cool. Four years I’ve been hollering my head off, and all of a sudden I can hear what it sounds like. It sounds like last year.”
The rabbit was quiet for a long time.
“They didn’t send ya ’cause you was available,” he said.
“Well, that’sth what the man—“
“The man said what I told him to say.”
Daffy shut up.
“Porky goes down Monday,” said the rabbit, to the ceiling. “Tuesday mornin’ they bring me a list. Six names. Fellas who could fill in. Yours was fourth.”
“Fourth?”
“I picked you.”
Daffy lay there with his bill working like he was chewing millet.
“Why?” he finally managed.
“’Cause everybody else on that list,” said the rabbit, “I say somethin’ smart, they laugh, and that’s the end of it. They fold.” He shifted, and the mattress tipped. “You I say somethin’ smart, and ya come back swingin’. Every time, it’s the craziest thing I ever seen. Three wrong turns and still you fought me over the directions for forty miles. I haven’t had that much fun since I got to this town.”
“So you want somebody to fight you, is that it?”
“I want somebody to make me earn it.”
“That,” said Daffy, “is the most egotistical thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”
“Yeah, well,” said the rabbit. “Takes one to know one.”
Daffy opened his mouth. He shut it again.
“And ya ain’t last year,” said the rabbit. “Anybody tellin’ ya that don’t know what they’re lookin’ at.”
“Oh? And what are they looking at?”
“You ain’t figured out what you’re for yet, is all. You’re still doin’ the thing that got ya in the door.” A pause. “You’ll figure it out.”
“And you have?”
“Sure,” said the rabbit easily. “I’m the fella who wins.”
It was the most infuriating thing Daffy had ever heard, and the worst part was that it was obviously true. The rabbit said it the way you’d say it was going to be hot tomorrow.
“And what am I?” he said, before he could stop himself.
The rabbit was quiet for a moment.
“I’ll tell ya when I figure it out,” he said.
Daffy lay there in the dark and felt something happen in his chest that he didn’t have a name for.
He wanted to say I’ve seen your picture seven times. He wanted to say I sat in the back with a hat pulled down and watched you eat that carrot, and I wanted to throw my beak at the screen, and I didn’t know why, and I went back the next Saturday and the one after that. It pressed up against the back of his bill so hard he could feel it.
“Fourth,” he said instead, with deep bitterness.
The rabbit laughed. It was a real laugh, low and surprised, the first one Daffy had gotten out of him all day that wasn’t for an audience, and it went right through the pillows and the blanket and the chair cushion and landed somewhere under Daffy’s ribs.
“G’night, duck,” said the rabbit.
“Good night.”
Neither of them slept for a long time.
Daffy woke up at a quarter past six, when the light started coming in gray around the edges of the blind. He knew right away that something had happened to the Walls of Jericho.
The first clue was that he couldn’t see them. The second was that there was an arm across his chest. The third, which took him longer, was that his head was not on a pillow but on something warm that rose and fell slowly under his cheek. He lay there with his eyes open, looking at a bare gray hand lying palm up on the blanket six inches from his bill, and he put the rest together one piece at a time, like a man doing arithmetic with a hangover.
At some point in the night, the wall had come down.
He could see what was left of it from the corner of his eye. One pillow was on the floor. The chair cushion had gone to the foot of the bed. The spare blanket had been kicked into a heap against the wall. And somewhere in the dark, with nothing between them, in a bed about the size of a card table, they had simply rolled toward the middle. He was lying mostly on the rabbit’s chest, under the rabbit’s arm, and one long ear had fallen across the pillow and over Daffy’s shoulder like a scarf.
The rabbit was asleep. Daffy could tell from the breathing, slow and deep.
Daffy lay perfectly still.
The right thing to do was obvious. Slide out from under the arm. Get back to your own side. Put up at least part of the wall, and close your eyes. When the rabbit woke, it would be as if none of it had happened, because as far as the rabbit knew, it wouldn’t have.
He didn’t do it. He lay there instead and listened to the rabbit breathe, and looked at the bare hand on the blanket.
It was a nice hand. That was a stupid thing to think, and he thought it anyway. It was longer than he’d have guessed, and thinner, with a little callus on the side of the first finger from something, a pencil maybe, or a bat. The underside of the paw was a shade paler than the rest, with a set of well-kept claws poking out from the fluff. He wondered if anybody at the studio had seen Bugs like this before, coming again and again to the answer that no, definitely not. And yet there it was lying there six inches away, open, as if it had forgotten itself.
The breathing under his cheek changed.
It was only a small change, a little catch, the way breathing goes when somebody wakes all at once and decides very quickly to go on pretending not to. Daffy felt it happen. He felt the rabbit’s whole body go still under him, perfectly, carefully still.
The rabbit was awake.
The rabbit was awake, with his arm across Daffy’s chest, and he was not moving it. He was not moving at all.
Daffy closed his eyes. He made his breathing slow and even. He had played asleep on camera a hundred times and he was good at it. He lay on the rabbit’s chest and faked sleep as hard as he had ever faked anything in his life, and felt the rabbit underneath him faking it right back.
Neither of them moved. It went on for a very long time. The light came up. A truck went by on 66. Daffy could hear the rabbit’s heart under his ear, and it was going much too fast for a fella who was supposed to be resting. He was fairly sure his own was doing the same, and that the rabbit could feel it. He kept his eyes shut anyway.
Then something moved. It was so slow that at first he thought he’d imagined it. The rabbit’s bare hand came up off the blanket, and hovered, and came down very lightly on the back of Daffy’s head, and stayed there.
Daffy did not breathe.
The hand didn’t do anything. It didn’t stroke or pat or pull. It just rested there on the back of his head, bare and warm and very slightly unsteady, the way you’d lay your hand on something to find out if it was real.
Somebody knocked on the door.
“Coffee!” called the woman from the desk. “Seven o’clock! Checkout’s ten!”
They came apart like a cartoon.
Daffy was on his feet on his side of the bed before the second knock and the rabbit was on his feet on the other. They stood there staring at each other across the ruins of the Walls of Jericho, with a pillow on the floor between them, the rabbit’s hands bare at his sides and every one of Daffy’s feathers standing straight up from bill to tail.
“Mornin’,” said the rabbit.
“Morning,” said Daffy.
The rabbit picked up his gloves from the nightstand and put them on, one and then the other, without looking at Daffy at all. His ears had gone bright pink from the roots to the tips.
“Must’ve kicked the wall down,” he said.
“Must have,” said Daffy.
“In my sleep.”
“In your sleep.”
“I kick,” said the rabbit.
“I noticed,” said Daffy, who hadn’t noticed any such thing, and went to get the coffee.
They did the Barstow Theater at noon. Daffy did his ten minutes and got a good hand. Then the rabbit came out and leaned on the proscenium and ate a carrot and asked the organist what was up, and the house came apart. Daffy stood in the wings and watched him and couldn’t, for the life of him, work out whether he wanted to strangle him or something else entirely.
They were on the road by two. The rabbit leaned out the window with his ears over his eyes all the way to Needles, and Daffy drove, and neither of them turned on the radio. Neither of them said a single word about the Sands Motor Court.
In Kingman, there was a place called the Arrowhead Lodge, with a big neon sign out front in the shape of one. It was nearly dark when they pulled in. The office had a bell on the counter and a boy of about seventeen behind it, reading a pulp magazine with a rocket ship on the cover.
He put the magazine down when he saw who they were.
“Studio reservation,” he said, before either of them could speak, and looked at his ledger. “Two rooms. You’re in six and seven.”
Daffy opened his mouth.
He didn’t know what he was going to say. He had no idea. He only knew that the boy was taking two keys down off the board, and the rabbit was standing next to him at the counter with his hands at his hips, saying nothing, looking very hard at a postcard rack full of pictures of the Grand Canyon.
“One,” said Daffy.
The boy looked up. So did the rabbit.
“One room,” said Daffy. His voice was doing something strange, and he pushed straight through it. “Sthtudio’s paying. No sense throwing their money around. Economics.”
The boy shrugged and hung one key back on the board.
The rabbit hadn’t moved. He was looking at Daffy now instead of the postcards, and his face had nothing on it at all, as if somebody had wiped it clean of its usual smugness. Then, very slowly, one corner of his mouth went up.
“Economics,” he agreed.
He picked up both suitcases, his and Daffy’s, before Daffy could stop him, and walked out the office door toward number six without looking back. Daffy stood at the counter and watched him go.
“Double bed okay?” said the boy.
“Fine,” said Daffy. “Terrific.” He took the key. “Got any extra pillows?”