The Rabbit Factory: A Novel

by Larry Brown

  Also by Larry Brown

  Fay: A Novel

  Father and Son: A Novel

  Facing the Music: Stories

  Big Bad Love: Stories

  Dirty Work: A Novel

  Joe: A Novel

  Billy Ray’s Farm: Essays

  On Fire: A Memoir

  FREE PRESS

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  New York, NY 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2003 by Larry Brown

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  FREE PRESS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Designed by Paul Dippolito

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Brown, Larry, 1951 July 9–

  The Rabbit Factory / Larry Brown.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PS3552.R6927R33 2003

  813’.54—dc21

  2002045591

  ISBN 0-7432-6027-9

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  This one is for Coach Brown, Shane.

  1

  The kitten was wild and skinny, and its tail looked almost broken, kind of hung down crooked. It had been around the neighborhood for several days, darting here and there, dodging traffic sometimes, and Arthur had been trying to catch it, setting the Havahart cage in the yard and baiting it with anchovies, but even though the kitten seemed desperately hungry, it would not enter the trap. It only sat and looked at the bait, and at them. But there was no big rush. Arthur had plenty of money and plenty of time to mess with stuff like that whenever he wasn’t sitting in front of the big-screen TV watching westerns. Sometimes he dozed off.

  He brought his coffee to the love seat where Helen was watching through the big bay window. Outside was late afternoon, cold and wind, a cloudy sky, no sun. A few cars passed out on South Parkway. She hadn’t switched to whiskey yet, was just having some red wine so far, holding her glass in both hands. Arthur sat carefully down with her. Snow was dusting down in the yard, tiny flakes whirling in the chilly breezes. He could see it swirling across the street. It was cozy there next to her and he thought maybe he could get it up today, if he got the chance.

  “I think it smells us,” she said.

  Arthur sipped his coffee and with her looked at the kitten. He kept thinking maybe he could find something that would occupy some of her time. He thought maybe she’d like a cat, so he was trying for one.

  “What do you mean ‘smells us’? We’re in here. It’s out there. How can it smell us?”

  “I don’t mean in here, silly. I mean maybe it smells us on the trap. Our scent.”

  Scent, Arthur mused. He guessed it was possible. Just about anything was possible, looked like. Even getting to be seventy. He’d charged the trap to his American Express card and he’d seen drinks from the Peabody bar again on last month’s statement. She seemed to be going over there a lot lately. He tried to get her to always take cabs since the trouble with the police. Sometimes she did.

  “Don’t you know anything about trapping?” she said.

  “Hm? No,” said Arthur. “But I’ll bet you do.” She knew a bit of information about a lot of things. She could converse on different subjects. She could converse fluently on penile dysfunction. She’d read a booklet about it, and he thought she might have seen a television program about it as well. She could watch the bloodiest show on TV, The Operation, and he didn’t want to be in the same room with it. He wondered where else she went to drink besides the Peabody. She never told him anything.

  “Well,” she said. “I read a book by somebody. Trappers have to cover their scent or the animals will smell them and go away. They have to boil their traps in wood ashes and things like that to remove their scent. They have to wear gloves, and if they’re trapping something really smart, like a wolf or a coyote, they can’t even touch the ground.”

  Arthur glanced at her. It was plain to anybody that she was a lot younger than him. He knew other men looked at her. He knew for a fact without having any way of proving it besides hiding in the lobby ferns and spying on her that she talked to strange men at the Peabody.

  “Come on. How can they trap if they don’t touch the ground?”

  “They have to put down something to kneel on.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Some old sacks or something.”

  “Do they have to boil the sacks?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You think we need to boil our trap?”

  “I just think it smells us. Look at the way it keeps watching us.”

  Arthur watched the kitten watching them for a while.

  “You don’t even have a pot big enough to boil it in,” he said.

  “That thing’s two feet long. How about spraying some Lysol on it?”

  Helen gave him her patient look and sipped her wine. He remembered a time when she’d clamp her lovely muscular thighs around his back like the jaws of a new bear trap. She’d be gasping, with her head thrown back and her mouth opening and closing and her fingers in his hair yanking, going, Oh my God, baby! That was a long time ago, true. Way back in Montana. Still.

  “Be serious,” she said.

  “I am serious. I already bought some cat food, didn’t I? I already spent fifty-two dollars and fifty cents for the trap, didn’t I?”

  They sat studying the kitten. It walked around the wire box, looked back at them, sniffed at the contraption. Finally it sat again in the dead grass and stared at the anchovies. Maybe its tail was just deformed.

  “Looks like if it was hungry it would go on in there,” Arthur said.

  “It’s got to be hungry. Look how skinny it is.”

  “How are you going to tame it down even if we catch it?”

  “I’ll cure it with kindness, I guess.”

  “What if it claws you? You ever been attacked by a cat?”

  “No, but I know you have.”

  “They can be pretty vicious if they get mad.”

  “That’s true.”

  “They can whip a grown dog if they make up their mind to.”

  “I’ve heard that.”

  “And if you get scratched, why then you’ve got that cat-scratch fever to worry about. Like in this Ted Nugent song I heard one time.”

  “Well, if I get scratched, I’ll put some peroxide on it.”

  “Or alcohol,” Arthur said, and sipped his coffee. They stayed there for a quiet period of time, just watching the kitten. Arthur looked at Helen, but Helen didn’t look at him. He sat there a little longer. Her slip was sticking out just a bit past her knee. Arthur very smoothly moved his hand over to her knee. He didn’t need any Viagra pill to schedule a hard-on for him. She just had to get him in the right mood.

  “Now, now,” she said, and flipped her skirt down and moved his hand. He returned his gaze to the kitten. It was all about blood, he thought. Pressure up, pressure down. He’d read somewhere that some guys had little rubber bivalves that had been surgically implanted and were hidden back behind their nuts. Pump it up, let it out, like an inner tube. He didn’t even want to think about doing something like that to himself.

  “I don’t think it’s going to let us catch it,” he said. Damned if he hadn’t gotten all upset again, thinking about how everything had turned out. “I think I’ll go find a coffee shop and get some fresh gr
ound.” Helen didn’t say anything. Maybe it was time for him to give it up. But it was hard to let go. So very hard to let go. Probably even when you got as old as old Mr. Stamp.

  2

  Later, near nightfall, he was in a coffee shop near Cooper and Young, sipping a cup, sitting on a stool. He was the only patron besides a drunk guy in a trench coat who was keeping quiet and minding his own business with a crossword puzzle, but he could see people passing on the sidewalk. The owner was reading The Commercial Appeal, shaking his bald noggin.

  “Dickheads,” he said, and turned the paper over.

  Arthur wondered if maybe there was some place in Memphis where a person could rent a tranquilizer gun, load it with one of those darts like they used to knock out animals in Africa they wanted to study, or a big cat in a zoo when they wanted to work on its teeth, maybe just get a small, low-dosage dart, nothing too big, something for a kitten, hell, he reasoned, you wouldn’t need anything big enough to knock down a rogue tusker.

  He could imagine himself hiding behind a tree in their yard with a tranquilizer gun, waiting for a clean shot at the kitten. But he couldn’t figure out how they’d tame it. He wondered if it would work to sedate it and hog-tie it and then force-pet it.

  He looked across the street. His eyes were old but he could see people inside a barbershop. A barber was moving around somebody’s head. It seemed late to be getting a haircut. The drunk guy in the trench coat put the crossword puzzle and a nubby pencil in his pocket and some money on the counter and weaved his way out.

  But what if only somebody like a veterinarian could get his hands on those dart guns? Maybe they were federally regulated, like machine guns. It probably wasn’t something you could just buy over the counter. There couldn’t be too much demand from the general public for an item like that. He worried over it and was glad to have it to worry over. It kept him from thinking about his repeated recent failures at getting into Helen’s exquisite bush. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d gotten a boner, and wished he’d written it down. The stripper he’d visited hadn’t done him any good. The doctor had mentioned vacuum pumps once. That sounded just a little bit dangerous. Plus, he didn’t like anybody messing with his jewels.

  He ordered a cup to go and looked across the street. A man in a trench coat stood on the sidewalk. It looked like the drunk guy again, but it was hard to tell from here. The owner set the coffee in front of Arthur and he pulled a dollar from his pocket for a tip and put it on the counter. He picked up the cup and his fresh ground, walked out, checked his watch, had to get on home quick, shit, The Wild Bunch was fixing to come on at seven.

  3

  The barbershop was not crowded. One sleepy old man in a white coat droned on a nappy couch, slumped sideways, his polishing kit beside him, brown stains on the tips of his interlaced fingers. The gray-haired barber moved on rubber soles gently around the man in the barber’s chair, his keen scissors making almost soundless snips as locks of hair drifted onto the floor and the pin-striped sheet wrapped around his customer.

  The man in the raised chair seemed at peace. The barber had just finished lathering his face with hot foam and the rich smell of it hung in an aromatic veil over customer as well as attendant. The tiles on the floor were green and white, a checkerboard of odd colors.

  The man in the chair had his eyes closed. He had a deep tan—maybe from Miami?—and his finely manicured hands where they held each other in stillness were small for such a heavy man. An ancient plastic radio in the corner on a shelf was softly playing Elgar’s “Sospiri.”

  All that could be seen of the man were his lathered face, his hands, the cuffs of his black pants, and his shiny shoes resting on the pedestal.

  When the door opened, no head turned except the barber’s. He stepped back out of the way when he saw what was happening and then crossed his hands over his chest, comb and scissors raised, eyes wide behind his thick glasses.

  The muzzle of the gun came within six inches of its target. Perhaps the man in the chair had gone to sleep or at least drifted woozily in the barber’s fragrant ablutions. The gun fired, bright blood sprinkling on the silent barber, a jarring explosion that momentarily silenced the music.

  It fired again, an enormous sound in that closed space, the air filling with the sweet smell of glucose and the sharp odor of smokeless powder and the soaring of stringed instruments.

  It fired again and then the barber stood with hot blood dripping from his glasses, his hands still crossed at his chest. The shoe shiner clutched his belly but did not open his eyes. The killer, who wore a trench coat and a mask kind of like the Lone Ranger’s, turned and weaved out the door while taking off the mask, stepped between two parked cars, and was gone. Elapsed time inside the barbershop: nine or maybe nineteen seconds. The barber would tell the police later that it happened so quickly it was hard to say. The guy had been standing under the streetlamp out front drunk, earlier, though, he added. Looked like he was working a crossword puzzle.

  4

  Next afternoon a cab stopped on the brick parking lot in front of the south entrance to the Peabody hotel, downtown. Frankie Falconey stepped out and looked at his shoes. Claude the doorman was smiling at him and holding the cab door open with a white-gloved hand. Frankie paid the cabbie and the doorman closed the door and the cab pulled away. There was still some snow lying here and there. He had a whopper of a hangover.

  “What’s up, Claude,” he said, and kept looking at his shoes. The shit wouldn’t ever come off after it dried. And damn his head felt bad.

  “Everything’s cool, Mr. Falconey. The birds are out again.”

  Frankie looked up.

  “What birds? I don’t see no fucking birds. You mean these flying rats the city won’t shoot? All they’re good for’s crapping on your car. Or in your hair.”

  The doorman just smiled. Taxis and private cars were letting people off and taking riders in. There were women sporting fur coats. A few well-dressed dudes in black hats going in had acoustic guitars in cases. Horns were blowing on Second and the pigeons flapped and rose in whirling flocks, blue, green, gray, dull colors with pink beaks, over the parking lot and above the old hotel. Frankie could remember when the place had been just about shut down, back in the early seventies when he was just a kid, the dark hallways, the moldy carpet. But they’d fixed it up really nice now.

  There was one spot, just a speck of dried blood, right there on the toe of his right shoe, just about over the toe next to the little one. Frankie raised his foot and wiped the toe against the back of his pants leg, rubbed it hard against his calf. He checked it again and saw that it was not gone. He turned toward the door anyway, shooting his cuffs and patting his hair briefly with his hands.

  “She in?” he said.

  “She’s in,” Claude said, and held the door open. Frankie pressed a folded five into his hand. He liked to keep everybody greased, made him feel like Bobby DeNiro in Goodfellas. He went on up the hall past some shops.

  He went up the steps past the two big bronze dogs and into the lobby with its polished floors and its brightly lit chandelier and its square marble columns where music was playing from a black baby grand that was tinkling itself in a corner. A monstrous bouquet of colorful flowers sat in front of the elevators atop the circular fountain where the mallards took their twice-daily baths. As usual the lobby was full of people with cameras waiting on the ducks or having drinks or chatting in richly upholstered chairs pulled up beside the round tables. Lots of voices were talking. He walked over to the bar and found an empty tall chair and waved at Ken, who was busy making three Bloody Marys. Frankie looked around to see if anybody famous was sitting in the lobby today. He’d seen Billy Joel in there one afternoon having a drink, but hadn’t asked him for an autograph. You couldn’t ever tell who might pop in. Clapton maybe if he was doing another show at the Pyramid. B.B. might walk in with Lucille in her case. There were people in tourist T-shirts, some laughing Japanese people in horn-rimmed glasses and big coat
s, a few guys in suits drinking draft beers, some college-age kids maybe up from Ole Miss for a night on the town. Ken rang up a tab and placed the bill in front of a customer with a pen and then came over and put a small duck-embossed napkin in front of Frankie on the bar’s black slab.

  “How’s it going, Ken? You win any money on the football?”

  Ken was already pouring a shot of Himmel. He set it on the napkin.

  “Ah, the Titans…if they’d get their shit together…. I don’t know what they’re thinking.”

  Frankie lifted the shot glass and sipped half of it. It instantly made him feel better, calmed his nerves and furnished a comfortable afterglow. He looked at the glass he was holding. His fingers were still shaking the tiniest bit. He sipped again and set it down empty. Ken refilled it.