The Rabbit Factory: A Novel

  He finally got the cop a few hundred feet off the road. Everything was dark against the scattered snow. He pulled him behind a brush pile next to the bag. If it kept snowing, he thought it would cover them up. He stood there looking. He had to try and think of all the possibilities. The car kept rattling.

  Of course they’d come searching with their police cars once somebody missed the cop. They might find some blood, depending on how much snow fell between now and then. They could test the blood and probably find out something from it, like how long it had been there maybe, what type it was. They might even get out in the woods and kick around and discover the bodies. But they could never connect him with it if he got away now. There was always some calculated risk in moving dope. It got done all the time, but some people got caught doing it, too. None of this would have happened if he hadn’t hit the whitetail. And he’d only been in trouble with the police that one time. He knew what had happened to him. Domino had been found wrapped, crying, in a blanket in a trash can at a gas station in Tupelo by two gas station attendants, and one of them had given him to his sister, Doreen, who’d had some weird ideas. She’d had some weird ideas about Christmas, like no toys for snot-nosed kids like him, and even the early and absolute denial of the mythical sky rider, the sleighmaster Santy Claus, and weird ideas about some other things, too, chief among them that sex with preteens was okay, and she had never allowed him to attend school, partly because she thought school was evil, partly because she was afraid the authorities would find out that she had him and what she’d been doing with him. He’d sewed her drunk ass up in a quilt one night while she was passed out on Corbett Canyon and burned her all up in a Christmas Eve house fire in 1986, when he was fifteen, because she’d slapped and punched a lot between drunken bouts of sex once he got old enough to do that, but had kept him in a very cold basement sometimes when he was too little to do anything about it. And he finally just got scared she was going to kill him and did it first. The judge didn’t believe his story, and gave him life. But he’d earned his probation. It didn’t matter now. It was done. All he could do was try to get away. Then he could go to Oregon and live out there in the woods right next to the ocean. Raise the shit himself. They got a lot of rain out there, so things probably grew well. Maybe he could get a hang glider and jump off some of those cliffs.

  He walked back through the woods for the last time, hurrying now. The door was open on the cop’s shaking cruiser, and Domino got in. A Walkman was on the seat with a bunch of CDs. He picked up a few of the CDs and read the titles. He’d learned to read from Reading Rainbow when Doreen was at work. He’d picked up Townes Van Zandt’s Rear View Mirror, Hank Williams’s Rare Demos First to Last, and The Gourds’s Stadium Blitzer.

  There was a brown paper bag on the seat of the cruiser and he picked it up and looked inside it. Some kind of sandwiches. He shut the door, but it hung, and he had to shut it again. Piece of shit. The cruiser was still rattling loudly and when he pulled it down in gear it started shaking a lot worse and the muffler started going bang bang bang bang bang bang bang.

  27

  When Miss Muffett got back to Como, it was nearly nine o’clock. She knew she had to get up there quick and let the little dog out of the room, and then watch him all the way out the door to make sure he didn’t stop and pee somewhere in the house. But he probably already had. He wouldn’t have been able to hold it all this time. But whatever mess he’d made, she’d fix it to where her boss wouldn’t see it. He was very particular about his study. He didn’t like to return and find that it had been messed up in his absence. He might frown over that. She was actually a little afraid of Mr. Hamburger’s temper. It had always been bad, and now it was even worse. But again, that was certainly understandable. She just wished the whole thing had never happened.

  She herself was about to die to pee. She stopped in one of the downstairs bathrooms and yanked her panties down and her dress up and slammed her pale cloven butt down on the toilet, breathed a sigh of relief while she peed and peed. Ooh it felt good.

  Pulling her plastic leg up the stairs one step at a time, she started feeling guilty about leaving the little dog alone in the study. She suddenly realized that she hadn’t checked to see how much water had been in the pan. What if it was dry? But a dog couldn’t die of thirst overnight, could it? She suddenly had a horrible vision of the little dog stretched out dead on the floor of the study.

  But he wasn’t on the floor when she opened the door. At first she didn’t see the missing windowpane. Then she did. The little shit had gone out the window, for sure, to fall to his death. And all this time she’d thought he was so damn smart. Chewed his way out, looked like, from the splinters.

  Well, it wasn’t her fault, she told herself, and she went to the downstairs closet to put her coat back on. Mr. Hamburger couldn’t blame her for it. But he probably would. Just like with the posthole-digger deal. She was actually kind of surprised that he hadn’t fired her. She guessed he needed her.

  She looked around in the yard for the longest time for the small dead and broken body, in the melting snow, bracing herself for the shock of seeing him. The little dog wasn’t there.

  She looked all over the yard and behind the bushes and around the big shed two or three times with her nose sniffling and wiping at it with the side of her thumb and there was not a little dog to be found. Maybe he dragged himself off and died somewhere else. She stood there looking at the ground, wondering what to do next. And couldn’t think of a damn thing.

  28

  Deep inside the ship, cruising through the black water of the Atlantic Ocean, Wayne couldn’t get to sleep for a long time because of thinking about Anjalee, but he finally did, and then sometime during the night a tremendous shock went through the vessel and woke him up and there was an awful immense groaning noise that came from somewhere down below. A bell was ringing. He could hear an alarm going off, BaBaWOP, BaBaWOP, BaBaWOP. Then some other bells started going off. Something else was screeching like a smoke detector.

  Henderson turned on his light and rolled over.

  “What the shit, bro?” Wayne said.

  “We done hit somethin’.”

  “Hit something? What the hell could we hit out here in the middle of the ocean?”

  “I don’t know,” Henderson said. He sat up suddenly. He’d been sleeping in his clothes. He rubbed excitedly with his fingers at some sleep in the corner of one eye. “They ain’t no tellin’ what all’s swimmin’ around out here, Wayne. Might be one a them gigantic squids.”

  Something very wrong had happened. A collision of some kind. And everybody knew that collisions were not allowed in the United States Navy. Wayne sat up and started putting his clothes on. Henderson grabbed his flip-flops and stuck them on his feet. They hurried out to the passageway together.

  29

  Eric sat there in the kitchen while Mister Arthur shoveled the walk outside and got comfortably tight again, on the cold and spicy Bloody Marys she’d fixed for him and then on some beer from the icebox, and then on screwdrivers that Miss Helen made while giggling and jiggling her perky boobs around. She’d gotten a tad towheaded and had put Dean Martin on her compact Bose CD player and Eric had decided that back in the day, Dude could damn sure wail. The front of her robe had come open and her gown was slit up the side and sometimes he caught a glimpse of her long and shapely thigh, the curve of her slick, muscled calf. She’d taken her house shoes off and including her feet she was as nice a woman as Eric had seen. The nice was coming off her like heat off his granddaddy’s stovepipe.

  He didn’t know what the hell to do about her. She didn’t have a bra on and it was hard not to stare. He liked Mister Arthur, and didn’t want to have the kind of thoughts he was having about her, but they just kept coming, and he’d already imagined himself doing some things with her. It was hard not to. And all the time she was looking at him with a slight smile on her face that was hard to read. Was it an invitation?

  If it was, invitati
on to what?

  What about Mister Arthur?

  How long would he shovel the walk?

  Was he misreading the whole situation?

  Was she drunk as shit?

  Was she as drunk as she got last night?

  Did she do this very often?

  Did she drink too much?

  If so, why?

  Would she want to drink with him, maybe, some more sometime?

  Would that lead to something?

  How would he feel if it did?

  How old was Mister Arthur?

  How old was she?

  Were they having some kind of problem besides the cat?

  He smoked another couple of cigarettes with her. Finally he raised his wrist and looked at his watch. He didn’t really want to go. Just felt like he had to, Mister Arthur out there shoveling the walk by himself in the snow and all. He was intruding on their time together probably.

  “Boy, look at the time,” he said. “I guess I ought to think about gettin’ outa here. I got to sober up and get to work sometime.”

  Miss Helen had her legs crossed. She reached a hand out to him, and squeezed his briefly.

  “I don’t want you to go,” she said. “You’re fun.” She looked down for a second before sipping from her glass. “Arthur’s not fun sometimes, if you must know the truth.”

  He didn’t know what to say to that. He didn’t know what kind of perfume she was wearing but whatever kind it was would give you a hard-on. Jada Pinkett was sprawled on the floor, sleeping again. Snoring. Almost worse than his daddy. He wondered if he could call in sick. Naw, shit, not today, Jada Pinkett needed some dog food.

  “Well, I got to get to work sometime,” he said. “I ain’t even sure what time. I always have to work till ten.”

  She raised her eyes.

  “Why don’t you call and see? The phone’s right there.”

  “You don’t care?”

  “No, go right ahead. Maybe you don’t have to go just yet.”

  She got up and moved clumsily over to the window when he stood up to go to the phone, her drink in her hand. She stood there looking out while he poked the numbers. It rang a few times and then Antwerp answered it. He hated to have to talk to Antwerp simply because Antwerp always managed to make him feel dumb and hickified and he just never had punched his stupid ass out yet, the job and all, big discount on the Purina.

  “Uh, Antwerp, hey. This is Eric.”

  “I know who it is!” Antwerp shot back. “It’s the guy who didn’t clean the iguanas’ cages and left ’em for me. Let me tell you, man, it’s caked pretty hard. You’re gonna have to shape up and start pulling your weight around here.”

  Eric said: “Look, asshole. All I need from you is what time I need to be in today.”

  “Sounds to me like you’d better sober up,” Antwerp whined.

  Eric could hear some parrots in the background and the sound of serious electric guitars booming through some bass-heavy speakers. Antwerp always turned his music up extremely loud if there were no customers in the store, which might have explained why so few came in when he was there, which was probably why he did it.

  “Can you just look on the schedule for me?” Eric said.

  “Hold on.”

  The phone was laid down on the other end and there was a bumping noise in his ear. He listened to the music. It wasn’t heavy metal. It sounded like Slobberbone. He thought it was “I Can Tell Your Love Is Waning” and he started humming it standing there. He sipped on his screwdriver. Miss Helen turned from the window. Her robe was fully open now and her gown was made of some thin material and he could see her nipples pushing against the fabric and the shape and size of her breasts. There was nothing left to the imagination. There was just a piece of cloth between them. He heard the phone being picked back up.

  “You’re supposed to relieve me at two and keep it open until ten. Plus you’re supposed to sweep up and feed all the birds. And the gerbils. I’ve already fed the puppies and the lizards.”

  Then Miss Helen moved closer to him. She said almost soundlessly: “I don’t want you to go.”

  “Okay,” Eric mumbled into the phone, and heard Antwerp start with a question, but he put the phone back on the hook. She was standing right in front of him and he could see into her eyes and there was something scary deep in there and he could smell that maddening perfume. He was wondering if maybe she wanted him to kiss her. But what if he tried to kiss her and she didn’t really want him to? What if he didn’t kiss her and she wanted him to?

  Eric in the midst of his fear/lust/confusion heard Mister Arthur scuffing the snow off his galoshes out front, and drew back from her, and there was sudden sadness on her face. Then it turned to anger, he supposed toward Mister Arthur. She pulled her robe around herself and grabbed her drink and hurried out and went back up the stairs. He was breathing hard, and standing there in the kitchen alone he wondered if Mister Arthur would be able to smell her perfume on him when he came in because it smelled to him like he was standing in a dizzying cloud of it, where she had been, like an animal that had left its track.

  30

  Domino, cruising in the dark, listened to “White Freight Liner Blues” while he was wearing the earphones and thought it was pretty kickass, and he ate one of the dead cop’s fresh-fried bologna on whites with mayonnaise. It felt strange to be eating a dead man’s supper, but he was hungry and upset and trying to calm down. This was all Hamburger’s fault. Domino had moved the cruiser and hidden it about a half mile down the road and then jogged back to the reefer truck and loaded the whitetail. He was trying to reassure himself that everything was going to be all right. That nothing had changed. There was no reason to change his plans. He couldn’t change his plans. He had to drop off the weed and get the money whether he dropped off the lion meat or not. He was going to go on with his routine, drive on up to Oxford, hit C&M Package across from the hospital, get a pint of bourbon, hit Pizza Den on University Avenue for maybe a whole muffaletta instead of a roast beef with gravy and a big bag of chips and go right on down the street to the Ole Miss Motel and check in. The whitetail was in the back and would stay good and cold in there overnight. He knew he needed to gut it sometime. Pretty soon. He had the knife. He could always do that after he dropped the weed off. Tomorrow. Tomorrow would be a better day. Tonight he could talk to the Pakistani man when he checked in and then lie in the slightly seedy Ole Miss Motel and eat his sandwich and drink his bourbon and watch some nature shows on the television with the volume turned up and try not to think about what he had done. It had taken him a long time to stop thinking about what he had done to Doreen, not that he ever actually had stopped, but it had taken him a long time to get to the place where he didn’t just think about it constantly while he was chopping cotton or picking it down at Parchman. He knew this thing was going to be the same way. But at least tonight he’d be in the motel, and he’d have the bourbon, and he could drink it until he was drunk, and then he could sleep. Tomorrow would be a better day. And each day after that it would get dimmer in his mind. Or at least he hoped it would. He didn’t want to let himself think about whether the guy had a family or not. He hadn’t been wearing a wedding ring. But that didn’t mean he didn’t have a family. He must have had somebody. Out there in the world somewhere there was probably somebody who would miss him. Maybe even cry over him. He’d wished a million times that he’d had somebody who would have cried over him, instead of leaving him in a fucking garbage can in Tupelo. And who was that in the bag? Why was somebody in a bag?

  He finished the sandwich and balled up the zip-lock thing it had been in and threw it out the window. When he rolled the window up, the red temperature light was on in the dash.

  Oh shit.

  He took the earphones off his ears and his foot off the gas and slowed down. The red light didn’t go off. It stayed on. He didn’t understand it. He’d driven this same truck down this same road plenty of times, all up and down I-55, out to Como a million times de
livering steaks, all over Memphis delivering meat, and it had never once gotten hot on him. It wasn’t even that old. It couldn’t be over two or three years old. The reefer box and the refrigeration unit were used, but the truck chassis and engine were pretty new. So why was it hot?

  He was going to have to shut it off. That was all there was to it. If he didn’t stop and shut it off, it would ruin the engine. Lock it up. If it ruined the engine, he wouldn’t be able to drive it anywhere. He’d be stuck.

  How far had he come? Five miles? Ten? He’d started eating the sandwich as soon as he’d left. And how long had that taken? Five minutes? How far could you travel in five minutes? Not far enough. Not nearly far enough away from what he’d left behind him.

  Shit. Was he around any houses? He didn’t see any right at the moment. He was going very slow now. There were just some fields where it looked like cotton had been picked. There was what looked like a junked school bus on the side of the road. There was a broken-down house with brown wilted kudzu all over it that the frost had killed. There was a cotton gin down here somewhere but he didn’t think he was close to it yet. He thought there might be some houses around it. Somebody might have a phone. But who was he going to call?