The Rabbit Factory: A Novel

by Larry Brown

  Eric was supposed to get off at ten. But she thought she might pay him a visit before then. She checked her lipstick in the mirror and picked up the last of her drink and finished it. She’d slow down on her drinking for right now. She was going to the Peabody eventually, but she wasn’t going to get drunk and fuck Ken again for sure. That was over. No doubt about it. Bet on it. She wasn’t going to let the police get her again, either, because she was going to be careful. She didn’t want to have to look at those dead babies on that table again. Who would?

  44

  Rico took Domino to the Oxford hospital in a car with a wire mesh barrier between the front and back seats. His hands were cuffed behind him and he got let out in the back parking lot where cars and pickups were sitting with frost and snow on them and where steam was coming from a pipe that ran up the side of the building. Stars stood high above. Some nurses were getting off duty and talking as they went to their vehicles. It was very cold.

  Rico didn’t say anything, just got him by the arm and took him in through the emergency-room entrance. The lights were bright inside. Domino stopped when Rico stopped and stood in the middle of the waiting room. A man with a bloody head was moaning in a padded chair while a woman held a bloody towel up to the side of his face. A black child with pigtails lay crying in another woman’s lap, and Domino could see that her arm was broken, oddly bent. Deep and mournful sobs were coming out of her thick and moving lips, and gobbets of yellow snot from her nose. Some other people sat in what appeared to be trances and stared at a television playing the David Letterman show.

  “You stand right here,” Rico told him, and Domino did. Some Christmas wreaths were hung up on the walls. There was a coffeepot on a table and some foam cups were sitting next to it.

  Rico went over to a low glass partition and a lady who was behind a desk. She lifted her face as he began talking. Domino didn’t listen. All he wanted was one chance.

  A security guard came through a door. An old guy. He had a uniform on, but he didn’t have a gun, didn’t even have a nightstick, and he looked a little sick himself. Maybe on the verge of admission. He walked through the waiting room and Domino turned his head and saw him go outside and pull a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and light one and stand there smoking, walking around, flicking his ashes, his breath blowing out in the cold air.

  Rico came back.

  “Go on and sit down,” he said. “We gonna have to wait.”

  Domino looked around. There was a chair a few feet away. He eased down into it but he wasn’t able to lean back very comfortably because of the handcuffs. Having his hands behind his back like that gave him bad memories of Doreen. He looked at the TV. Dave was talking to Alec Baldwin and they were laughing. Domino liked it when they threw watermelons off the top of a building. He wished they’d do that. Instead they broke for a commercial.

  Domino sat there for a long time. Rico leaned against the wall but didn’t take his eyes off him. The guy with the bloody head got called back. The child with the broken arm got called back. The security guard kept going in and out, smoking cigarettes, letting cold air in.

  The guy he’d tried to carjack had busted his head pretty good, felt like. It kept throbbing. And the son of a bitch had fought back against a gun. He hadn’t expected that. The orderly who finally came to get him was pushing a wheelchair and Rico came off the wall.

  “He don’t need no wheelchair, man,” he said. “He can walk fine.”

  The orderly hesitated. He seemed to be looking for a place to put the chair.

  “All right,” he said, and bent over and folded the wheelchair together and slid it up against the wall.

  “Get up,” Rico said, and Domino stood up. The orderly went to a door and stood holding it open while Domino walked through it. Rico followed close behind.

  The door closed after them and they were in a wide hall where gurneys stood and where a man at the far end was mopping. Somebody was screaming loudly in a room back there somewhere. They followed the orderly up the hall and turned in with him to a small scary examining room that smelled of rubbing alcohol and had one padded metal chair and a padded table with a piece of paper stretched over it. There were shelves and a cabinet at the back. Through an open door, Domino could see the back side of the emergency-room office and the woman Rico had been talking to. She was talking on the phone now and looking at some papers in front of her and trying like everybody else to ignore the screaming.

  “Okay,” the orderly said. “Get up here and sit down and let me get a look at you.”

  Domino did like he was told. It was a little difficult to get up on the table with his hands cuffed behind his back, but he managed it. Rico leaned against the open door to the hall. Domino could see a small gun hanging on his waist. The person in the room back there kept screaming.

  The orderly took Domino’s head in his hands and tilted his face back to the overhead light. He probed with his fingers here and there.

  “That’s a nasty cut he’s got right here on his temple,” he said. “I expect the doctor’ll want to stitch that.”

  Rico didn’t say anything. Domino kept quiet, too. And he wished whoever it was back there screaming would either shut the fuck up or die. He’d heard people scream like that while they were getting raped at Parchman. Or stabbed with screwdrivers. It made it hard to sleep for wondering if you might be next.

  “I’ve got to go get a few things,” the orderly said, and went through another open door behind him.

  Domino just sat there. There was something buzzing somewhere.

  “Me and you gonna take a little ride after they get through with you,” Rico said. “We gonna ride out in the country and see what we can see.”

  Domino just kept quiet. He didn’t like the look on this cop’s face. He looked like he might kill you just for the fun of it.

  The lady from the desk up front hung up the telephone and as soon as she did it rang again. She answered it and talked for a few seconds and then swiveled around in her chair.

  “Officer Perkins?” she said. “There’s a call for you.”

  Rico walked halfway across the room but he kept his eyes on Domino.

  “I can’t come in there right now, ma’am, I’ve got nobody to watch my prisoner.”

  “Well, let me see if I can stretch the cord that far,” she said, and came on in the room with it. It just barely reached. Rico had to turn his back to her after he took it so that he could keep watching Domino.

  Rico talked for a few moments, and Domino saw a sudden rage come over the cop’s face.

  “All right,” he said, finally, and handed the phone back over his shoulder without looking at the lady. “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said, and looked frightened, and disappeared behind Rico.

  Rico’s face had turned a little white and he walked slowly over to Domino. He was clenching and unclenching his fists.

  “They found my brother’s car,” he said in a low voice. “You better hope to God he’s okay.”

  Just then the orderly came back in with a plastic tray of bandages and some medical tools. Domino didn’t see any scissors in there.

  “Okay,” the orderly said. He looked at Rico and waited for him to move out of the way.

  “You mind, Officer?” he said.

  Rico moved out of the way but not very far. He was staring a hole in Domino. And Domino didn’t even want to know what he was thinking.

  The orderly had been working on him for only a few minutes when the doctor came in. He was a small black man with a short-clipped beard and he was wearing a blue uniform and some puffy paper covers over his tennis shoes. He did not look or sound like he was from around there. He looked and sounded like he was from someplace like Sudan or maybe Nigeria.

  “I will take it from here,” he said to the orderly. “How about checking on the lady in four?”

  “Yes, sir,” the orderly said, and left.

  The doctor rooted around in the tray and
pulled a few things out, then set them back in. He muttered something and left. Domino kept sitting on the table and trying not to look at Rico. The screaming went on and on.

  “You better not have done nothin’ wrong to my brother,” Rico said.

  “Fuck you and your asshole brother both,” Domino told him, since he didn’t like threats, especially with his hands cuffed or tied behind his back.

  Rico had started over to him when the doctor walked back in with a pair of scissors. He stopped.

  “What is this? This is a hospital.”

  “I know what the fuck it is,” Rico said.

  “Okay, swell,” the doctor said. He came on over to Domino and set the scissors in the tray and looked at his head. Domino could feel his fingers touching him. They felt warm and reassuring.

  “He has a pretty nasty cut here,” the doctor said, to nobody in particular. Rico didn’t answer. He was back leaning on the wall with his arms crossed.

  “Can you lie down?” the doctor said to Domino.

  “Not too good,” he said. “Not with these handcuffs on.”

  The doctor turned to Rico.

  “Can you take these handcuffs off this man while I stitch him?”

  Rico thought it over for a few seconds. He frowned and shook his head.

  “I’d rather not, Doctor,” he said. “Can’t you just do it with him sittin’ there?”

  “Well, yes I could,” the doctor said, in a really smart-ass Sudanese or maybe Nigerian tone. “I could stick this needle in his eye if he jerks his head around, too.”

  Domino could see it happening before it happened. He saw the chair there by the wall. He saw how many steps he needed. The person in the back kept on screaming. It looked like it was getting on everybody’s nerves.

  “I really hate to, Doctor,” Rico said over the screaming. “This man’s dangerous.”

  “Do you want him treated?”

  “Well, yes, I’m required by law to get him treated.”

  “Well. I can’t do what I need to with him sitting up. I need to look at this eye. And he needs to be flat on his back for that.”

  Rico just stood there. The screaming went on and on, only high and weak now, like some strange new song. Maybe the drugs were kicking in.

  “What, Officer, are you afraid he will run off?”

  “I don’t know what he may do. Or what all he has done yet. That’s what I’m tryin’ to find out. But I need him patched up tonight.”

  The little doctor let out a deep sigh. He turned his eyes for a moment toward the screaming in the back. Then he looked at Rico and spoke in a surprisingly gentle voice, full of logic and reason.

  “Officer, we have got a lot of hurt people in here tonight. And we have got some more coming in just a few minutes from an auto accident on Highway 7. If I don’t do this now, I may not get to do it for another two hours. Or maybe four. Do you want to wait that long?”

  “I can’t,” Rico said. “I’ve got to go somewhere.”

  “Well, how about cooperating with me then?”

  Rico moved very slowly. Reluctantly. He reached slowly for the handcuff keys that were in a pouch on his belt. He came over. He walked behind Domino and Domino could feel him holding on to the cuffs, could hear the tiny click of the key as it opened one cuff, then the other. When Rico walked back in front of him, he was holding the cuffs in one hand. He looked down for just a moment to put the cuffs in the leather holder on his waist and Domino grabbed the scissors from the plastic tray and stabbed the little doctor in the throat at the same time he came off the table and went for the chair. Rico almost stopped him. He was plenty big enough. He was strong enough. And he was almost fast enough. But not quite. The chair caught him across the face and blood flew and Domino tugged the gun loose from Rico’s belt as he fell and then he was running hard for the door.

  45

  Eric got to work on time and left Jada Pinkett sleeping on the back seat of his car, and thought about slapping Antwerp upside his head if he said anything, but Antwerp didn’t say anything after he took a look at Eric’s face. He just punched out and left, took his jambox with him. Eric had asked a few times for Antwerp to leave it so that he could listen to Robert Earl Keen and the Robert Earl Keen band while he was working, but Antwerp never would because he was a stingy son of a bitch, Eric supposed.

  He swept up and fed the birds and the gerbils. He looked to see how many rabbits they had now besides the one breeding pair. Four half-grown ones in a cage, two white, one brown, one black-and-white spotted. Eric had already put the buck back in with the doe so that there’d be another fresh batch coming along in about two weeks or less. Rabbits didn’t sell very well unless they were furry babies and cute and made kids want them and throw screaming temper tantrums, wanting them to the point where they’d get down on their hands and knees and beat their heads on a concrete floor, and it was hard in the pet-shop business to keep yourself supplied with young bunnies unless you could breed them right there on the premises, but the problem with that was that some tended to get not bought and unless you disposed of them some way, then they themselves grew to breeding age rapidly and started making rabbits by the cageful, and it could turn into a pretty expensive, buying-rabbit-feed-by-the-Purina-fifty-pound-bag-and-carrying-lots-of-buckets-of-rabbit-shit-out-somewhere operation pretty soon, as Eric’s boss, Mr. Studebaker, had found out, not knowing much about the pet shop business at first, just always wanting a pet store kind of like the random kid who never got a Gibson Les Paul or a Telecaster for Christmas but instead some crummy microscope. But Eric didn’t mind. Eric gladly took care of the extra rabbits for him about once every three weeks. There was a dirty parking lot out back where the Dumpsters and the empty skids and the bundled-up and flattened cardboard boxes sat and he kept a hammer handle by the back door, and once he was outside with the rabbit hanging upside down in his hand, by both back legs, all it took was a simple really hard WHAM! between the ears, and then it was a dead rabbit, nothing but meat to dress. He was so practiced that he could do it back there in just a few minutes with a keen Old Timer he’d used on probably a hundred squirrels and maybe two hundred rabbits down in Mississippi. Heads feet and guts in the Dumpster. Hope no kids come along and look in. Each pet shop bunny yielded a carcass of about two pounds of clean white meat that you could cut up and dip in an egg-and-milk batter and then roll in some seasoned flour and drop into a black iron skillet with some hot oil and let it crisp up golden brown. Let it simmer a while on low with the lid over it after it was done, it was just as good as fried chicken. Maybe better. His daddy had showed him how to make some gravy in the skillet with a little flour and salt and pepper, and you could open one of those five-biscuit cans of biscuits and stick them in the oven, and when they were done, it was as good a meal as any man could want. He didn’t have a place to cook them just yet, so he was saving them in plastic bags in the freezer section of an old refrigerator in the back. And it was getting pretty full.

  He gave a parakeet some water. He threw into the garbage a white, stiffened rat. He checked on Jada Pinkett, who was still snoozing and slobbering on the back seat. He’d finished Effinger’s book and he’d read all the Philip K. Dick that he had and he had a ragged hardback Martin Eden by Jack London that he’d found cheapat Xanadu bookstore, on Winchester. And he thought maybe reading would take his mind off Miss Helen, but he didn’t know if it really would or not. He couldn’t get it out of his mind. The way she’d looked. The way she’d smelled. And then somebody came in. He had a monkey inside his battered leather flight jacket.

  Eric stood up and said, uncertainly: “Hey. What’s up.”

  He was a small older man, a bit larger than a jockey, dark skin, somewhat hunched. An elfin Eskimo.

  “I have a primate I wish to sell,” he murmured, his eyes roaming mildly from side to side in their sockets. “It’s a Malaysian Gibboon. His name is Bobby.”

  The monkey was no bigger than a squirrel. It was gnawing its fingernails like a nervous w
oman and rolling its eyes fearfully.

  “Looks like a squirrel monkey to me,” Eric said. “But we don’t buy nothin’ from the public. We got dealers we deal with.”

  The little man wore gloves without tips at the fingers, and he stroked the monkey’s head while he looked around the shop, taking the time to turn to the individual faces of those animals and birds that weren’t asleep.