The Rabbit Factory: A Novel

  He carried his goodie over to the rug and went back to the desk to push the drawer closed with his head. Then he gnawed the cellophane off the Slim Jim he’d selected and began to munch it, wagging his tail a bit, not understanding the implications of his salty snack and the closed door, since he was just a dog.

  15

  The pit bull released the kitten on command into a steel wire-cage the young man had brought over in his car. They shut the door before it could jump out and then Arthur dozed off. Helen put the cage in the pantry to let the kitten calm down some and then put some nuggets of cat food in through the bars. The young man’s name turned out to be Eric and she talked to him in the warm kitchen while Arthur napped on the couch. She poured Eric shots of Chivas over ice and kept sipping her drink. Later, she pushed the pantry curtains aside and checked. The food was all gone. The kitten was curled in a corner, sleeping. Those were good signs. She went back to the kitchen and fixed another drink. She had a pretty good buzz going and it was making her horny. It always did. He hadn’t done anything in three months. And Ken. Why did she keep getting drunk at the Peabody and then fucking him? She didn’t even like him. And then the next day when she’d sobered up she always promised herself she’d never do it again. Hell no. Never again. Then she got drunk a couple of weeks later over there and did it again. It was what they called one of those vicious circles. And now because of those two DUIs she had to worry about the cops all the time. But it didn’t seem fair not to be able to drive the Jag over to the Peabody on a pretty fall afternoon, and get out on the cobblestones, and give the keys to a valet, and let him park it while she went on in to the bar. What was the point of even having a Jag if you couldn’t drive it where you wanted to?

  Arthur snuffled and woke up. His nap had taken about twenty minutes. He looked around for a few moments as if he didn’t know where he was. He was so eager to please her. Hoping she’d let him try again. But what for? Why didn’t he just stop spinning his wheels and go to the doctor and get a prescription for the shit and start taking it? Twenty minutes? Twenty minutes was a long time. A lot could get done in twenty minutes. Entire cities could die in flames in twenty minutes or you could have a baby. You could fuck your brains out for twenty minutes if you had somebody capable of fucking your brains out. Like that young man right over there. She looked at Eric. Then she looked back at Arthur. He knew damn well she was horny. But after all this time of trying, after taking her clothes and underwear off again and again and trying everything she knew to get him going, she was tired of messing with him. He refused to try the pills, even after the doctor told him they might help him. He’d said it wasn’t natural. She’d said: Well, is a kidney transplant? And they had no children. And never would. Not now. Nope. Couldn’t even adopt, apparently. It was too late for that. He was too old. She suspected that he had always been too old.

  It was true that if it hadn’t been for him, she might still be slinging drinks in Missoula. Or even Bozeman. But she missed Montana, too. Especially in the summertime. When you grew up in a place that beautiful, it was hard to forget it. She missed the vast brown hills that rolled away in the distance, and the mountains and clear streams and the eagles and the lakes blue as glaciers. Even after all this time, she still missed driving out Rock Creek Road on moonlit nights and drinking beer and fucking boys on the swinging bridge. What she didn’t miss was seeing her daddy’s little trailer in East Missoula with his one skinny tree in the yard. But if she went back, she’d have to go see him. And he was only two years older than Arthur.

  She thought about fingers on the inside velvet of your thighs. A sweet mouth kissing this and that. She stopped herself. She didn’t know how much longer she could take it. He refused to seek any help. He didn’t seem to realize that she had needs. And he was almost seventy years old.

  She stooped to the floor with her glass and petted the pit bull on the muzzle. He was lying beneath the kitchen table eating a few pieces of bologna that Arthur had gotten him from the icebox. She’d wiped the blood from his muzzle and scratched his back with her hairbrush. He licked her hand energetically as she petted him. Just an old chewed-up sweetie.

  Arthur’s decline had come gradually. For a long time, they’d both made excuses for him. Finally the night had come when they had to admit to each other that Arthur had a problem. But it didn’t mean she had to just live in frustration, did it?

  Wasn’t it easier to just read a book? Have a few drinks? Let him go on to sleep and then slip out? Wasn’t that better on everybody involved? If he didn’t know it, how could it hurt him?

  “Arthur, why don’t you pour Eric another shot?”

  “I don’t want to get him drunk. He’s got to drive back.”

  “Mind if I smoke?” Eric said. “And no offense, Mister Arthur, but I can handle my booze. You can ask anybody at home.”

  “Go right ahead,” Helen said, before Arthur could interrupt.

  “Arthur, get him an ashtray, too, please.”

  Arthur scratched his head. “I don’t think we’ve got any.”

  “Well, maybe we should buy some,” she said.

  “I can use just anything,” Eric said, already pulling out his pack. “A jar lid’ll do. Shoot, I can use an empty Coke can.”

  “We don’t keep much Coke around here.” Arthur was rummaging around in a drawer and she could hardly take her eyes off Eric.

  “So,” she said. “How long you been in Memphis, Eric?”

  “Couple of months,” he said.

  “And were you in the pet shop business in Mississippi?”

  Arthur was banging around in the cabinets, muttering, moving pots.

  “How about a bowl?” he said, his head behind a cabinet door.

  “Bowl’s fine,” Eric said. He already had a pretty long ash hanging off his cigarette. Arthur got the bowl under his smoke just before it tipped off. “Thanks, well, no, ma’am it wasn’t really the pet shop business. We raised dogs, bulldogs, pit bulls, weenie dogs, poodles, peek-a-poos and some beagle hounds me and Deddy and Mister Nub run rabbits with in this rabbit factory we made outa chicken wire. We had a dog trailer and we’d go over to First Monday at Ripley and set up and stay all weekend. It was pretty big time.”

  “It certainly sounds like it,” Helen said. Did he say “rabbit factory”?

  “My granddaddy had a beagle one time so scared of rabbits he had to let her ride up on the Bush Hog.”

  “My goodness.” She was going to ask about the rabbit factory but got interrupted when Arthur tilted the bottle over Eric’s glass again and Eric nodded and thanked him. He puffed contentedly on his cigarette.

  Helen sipped her drink and tried to think about what she was going to do. He didn’t want to do anything but just sit around the house and check his stocks on-line and watch those old westerns, and she was so tired of that she was about to scream. Checkers had gone the same route.

  The snow was still falling outside the window. She knew there were people somewhere sleeping out in it. In Missoula they begged for money just off the interstate. And in three or four days, depending on how hard she wanted to drive, and the weather, she could be back out there. It had been nagging at the back of her mind. Just leave him. Go back home. Get a divorce. Try to find somebody else who could make her happy. In another ten years, he’d be eighty. And she’d be fifty. And there weren’t going to be any children by anybody if she waited much longer. She knew that now. She still didn’t want to accept it, but she knew it. She had to think about her own happiness. There hadn’t been any for her here in a long time.

  “Cool,” Eric said. “This is great. Kind of cozy, like.”

  Helen smiled at him. On a small screen, like a faint movie in her head, she could see herself kissing him. Up against the counter. On the couch. On the back seat of her Jag. Several different places.

  16

  It was just dark down in Mississippi, out in the hills of woods on the black and lonesome winding roads with dirty snow melted along the sides, scatt
ered lumps of snow all over the place. Domino cruised in the freezing night air with the window cracked in the cab of the reefer truck to let his cigar smoke out. The truck didn’t have a radio in it and it was just as well. He had to play everything so loud that it was starting to drive him deaf in the other ear, too. He guessed he’d have to get a hearing aid one of these days. He’d dropped off the dog hamburger at Mr. Hamburger’s place in Como and put it into a cooler that was inside the big shed in his backyard, and had driven on down the interstate and gotten off at Batesville and turned east on Highway 6. He was going to get a room at the Ole Miss Motel in Oxford like he always did and spend the night, get a good night’s sleep, drink a little bourbon in the hotel room, try to find some nature shows on TV, take the meat on down to the lion guy the next day, and last, drop the weed box off at the empty house and pick up his money. He didn’t want to be around those big cats at night. A few of them had gotten out a few times and had to be shot by the sheriff’s deputies. One of them had killed somebody’s pet dog in a yard and had been eating it when it got shot. It had been in the paper. He wanted to be down there in the daytime so that if one of them got out again he could see it coming in time to climb a tree.

  He knew where there was a beer joint down on 315 in Panola County, so he turned off 6 onto it and cruised down that way. It wasn’t late. Not much past seven. He’d get a sixer and some pigskins and cruise around on some country roads for a while, dump those frozen guts somewhere, and still have plenty of time to get to town and hit a liquor store and grab a sandwich at Pizza Den, maybe a whole roast beef and gravy, and then check in. The lion meat would be okay overnight in the cooler on the reefer truck, since it was down to about five degrees in there right now. That shit was hard as a brickbat. After a couple of hours in there it was.

  It was a few miles down the road to the beer joint. It was farming country. Fences and cows. People had pickups. He met quite a few.

  He saw the store up ahead, the lights over the pumps. He pulled in and shut off the truck and went inside and got a cold six-pack of Schlitz tallboys and a bag of hot, barbecued skins and a few cigars, paid the guy, got back in the truck, popped a top, and went on up the road with a beer between his legs.

  After a few more miles and a few more curves, he crossed a river under a bridge with steel arches over it. He could see the river in the dark, long and straight, lined with naked winter willows. Up ahead there was a curvy cut-through road that would eventually lead him back to Oxford and he put his blinker on, slowed down, and turned off. He breathed out a contented sigh. He liked being in the country and had gotten used to it down at Parchman. He for one appreciated the fact that once you got out of Memphis you could see trees and land and farms and shit like that. Sometimes even whitetails. He turned his head for just a moment to admire a wooden fence somebody was building around a pasture and then immediately smacked a pretty nice buck. BAPLOW! Somebody would’ve liked it mounted on their mantel. It had leaped from roadside green cedars squarely into the middle of the road at the moment he’d turned his head. The whitetail rebounded from the grill and went skidding and turning across the road, white belly hair flying, a sad ballet. He felt the lick in the steering wheel beneath his hands and his beer came out from between his legs and landed on the floorboard and spilled all over the seat, all over his legs, too. Next thing he knew he was sitting on the side of the road. The whitetail was kicking in the road, illuminated by the headlights. It was a strange one-horned whitetail. And he couldn’t believe his luck. Domino was simply overjoyed. A whole entire whitetail, and it was all his! All he had to do was get it back to Memphis. Boy oh boy. Whitetail country-fried steaks with milk gravy, whitetail tenderloin in a red-wine sauce, juicy whitetail roasts cooked slowly in a Crock-Pot with onion gravy and carrots and potatoes. If he just had a woman to share it with. To cook for. How cool would that be? Well. Maybe later. Save some money. Work hard. Stay out of trouble.

  Domino put it in neutral and pulled the hand brake and got out slowly, shaking just a bit. Beer dripped out over the rocker panels. It was all over his legs. He picked up the can and pitched it across the road. His cigar had gone out and he felt a bit addled. It had happened so quickly that he hadn’t had time to do anything but hit the whitetail. He went around to the front of the truck. The hood and grill were dented in but he didn’t pay much attention to it because Mr. Hamburger had insurance. He was more interested in looking at the whitetail, which was still kicking. Just think how fresh.

  “Get you some whitetail,” he said to the whitetail.

  Now he was in a dilemma. How was he going to keep it overnight until he could make his deliveries and clean all the boxes out of the back, and then stick the whitetail back there? He could stick it up on top of the back end of the reefer truck and maybe tie it down if he could find some rope, but he couldn’t just leave it out there in the Ole Miss Motel parking lot overnight. Somebody would come along and steal the whole damn thing while he was asleep, probably. He doubted if the Pakistani people who ran the Ole Miss Motel would let him keep the whitetail overnight in his room. And hell, it might ruin overnight if it wasn’t refrigerated or kept outside in this cold weather. He didn’t know what in the shit to do. He walked closer to the whitetail. It looked like it was trying to move. He wished it would go on and die. Maybe he should throw those frozen guts out of the back right here. Make some room.

  Domino didn’t walk too close. He’d read stories in outdoor magazines in barbershops while he was waiting for an open chair about hunters who had shot whitetails and approached them, thinking they were dead, and then suddenly the whitetail jumped up and gored the hunter, sometimes fatally. He didn’t want to get gored, even if it had only one horn. And he wondered what had happened to the other horn. Maybe some hunter had shot the other one off. Or maybe it had broken it off in a fight with another whitetail.

  He thought he’d better get his knife. Just in case it got up and tried to gore him. Or maybe he should just go on and stab it to death. There was a long-bladed boning knife in a sheath on the floorboard on the other side and he reached and got it and stuck it inside his shirt. Then he took another look at the whitetail.

  It looked like it was dying. It was still kicking some, but not very hard. He’d just wait. It might not take long. Then, on the other hand, it might take all night. And he didn’t have all night.

  He relit his cigar with his still-shaking fingers and decided to wait a while. He walked around in the road for a few minutes, looking up, smoking, and it was kind of partly cloudy. It looked like more snow. He could have whitetail steak and eggs for breakfast once he got it cleaned and cut up. He could butterfly the tenderloin and sauté it in butter.

  And just then he heard something with a loud muffler coming. He looked over his shoulder. The glow of lights was reaching up the hill behind him. He was very conscious of the weed being in the truck. But there was really nothing to worry about.

  Nothing to worry about except maybe going back to prison if something he couldn’t foresee were to happen out here. For a whole pound of weed.

  The vehicle came on. He watched a dump truck come over the hill, slow down next to his truck, and then stop. “Go on, dumb-ass,” he said. It was very cold. He thumped a few ashes in the road.

  He heard the grinding of gears. The truck moved slowly, swerved wide around the whitetail, and went on down the road, changing gears, gaining speed, the muffler rattling. He listened to the sound of it growing smaller in the distance and he listened until the sound of it was gone. He was freezing his ass off in his thin coat.

  He could dump the guts plus some of the lion meat. Throw it away right here. Hamburger would never know the difference. Hamburger didn’t know how much he had. He was back in Chicago. It would take a little work, but he could take out enough boxes to make room for the whitetail, and toss them off the side of the road, and leave the box in that had the weed, and stick the whitetail back there. He walked around to the back end and opened the latch on the cooler.
Cold air rolled out. He grabbed the first box he saw and pulled it out, got a good grip on it, and stepped off the road with it. The box was heavy, about eighty pounds, but Domino had pumped a lot of iron in prison. The ground was kind of slick with snow in spots, and he had to go slowly and step carefully. He carried it about fifty feet from the road and dropped it. He took his cigar out of his mouth and looked around. This was going to take a while. And he hoped nobody came along. He sure hoped a cop didn’t come along. A cop would want to ask questions, would want to see his license, might want to poke around in the back, and what about the whitetail? He couldn’t take it away from him, could he? Maybe he could. And how much lip could he give a cop, considering the weed in the truck? The thing to do was get the shit emptied out fast, load the whitetail in there, get the hell away from here and on up to town. He was about halfway out of the woods when he heard another vehicle coming, fast, from the other way.

  This one was a car, really hauling ass, and it barely slowed down, just enough to swerve wide around the whitetail and go on. Jesus, Domino thought, It’s cold as a well digger’s ass out here. It roared on past and went out of sight down the dark road. It kept on going until it, too, was out of hearing.