The Rabbit Factory: A Novel

by Larry Brown

  There were Roma tomatoes and a fresh head of lettuce in the crisper, and after she got everything out, she sat down at the table and sipped her drink and sliced up half a cucumber and made a nice little tossed salad and then got back up and flipped over the burger, which was talking to her. Already the onions were going soft and brown and translucent. She microwaved a Larry’s stuffed potato, turned down the heat under the skillet, and found the ranch dressing in the fridge. There was still some tea in there from a couple of days ago, heck, it was still good probably. She turned on the oven and stuck in some rolls. She finished her drink and put the glass in the sink.

  And when she had it all ready, she put on some Perry Como and poured herself a glass of iced tea with a wedge of lemon in it and sat down and started eating, thinking to herself, with the first juicy, dripping bite, one that held a strange and delicate new flavor: Yum, and knowing again, like she had all her life, even after she lost her leg to her daddy’s boat motor, that things could always be worse. She might have lost both legs. And hey. It was almost Christmas.

  92

  When Anjalee woke in the dark of his bed, late, and turned over and touched him, Harv was on his side and cold as a fish, naked beneath the sheets. He’d made gentle and very satisfying love to her and after that they’d gone to sleep, but somehow he’d caught the big nap, eternal night or eternal light.

  She rubbed her fingers over the side of his throat and there was no pulse there. His skin was cool, like he’d just come from a shower, but it was dry. And his eyes were closed. She wished hers still were.

  She’d been having a Technicolor dream like a drive-in movie about her daddy and in the dream he had not been killed in a truck wreck in Alabama but had come back home to wreak everlasting happiness with them in Toccopola instead. They cooked out in the yard on summer evenings and drank beer with the radio on. They fished down on the riverbanks among the willows with cane poles and caught catfish and bream. They went to the fair in Tupelo and saw the rodeo and ate cotton candy. And in the dream her mother didn’t have those other men hanging around and they didn’t have cars that kept having flat tires and her mother didn’t live in a trailer that was run down and ragged and cold in the winter and they weren’t surrounded by garbage and they lived in a nice house. But she had wakened from the dream, to hold what was alive and real beside her, and now he who might have turned into the fabled sugar daddy was worse than out of town with his hair not even messed up.

  She cried for a long time, up close to his back, wetting his arm and the sheet with her tears. She kept rubbing his cold shoulder. Harv had been so nice. Such a gentleman. And nobody had ever kissed her quite the way he had. So it was very hard to see him dead, see death so close so suddenly. But it had been like that with her daddy, here one day, gone the next, so in a tiny way she was almost kind of used to it.

  She dried her cheeks with her fingers and turned her back away from him and lay on her side. She’d have to call the fucking cops.

  But she didn’t want to just yet. She could wait awhile. She had to hide his weed so they wouldn’t think it was hers. She had to make sure she didn’t get in any more trouble. She was about tired of trouble. It seemed like it had been following her around for too long. But she knew it had all started when her daddy died.

  She didn’t want to get up. She didn’t want to have to mess with the police again. They would be in here, taking pictures, asking questions, looking around. She might even have to go with them. She hadn’t thought about that, but it might be necessary. They might insist. There might be a law. Probably was. Or they might have to have an investigation. What if they revoked her probation over this shit and put her in jail anyway?

  She kept lying there, staring at the dark window, the closed blinds where light from the street seeped in around the corners. She wondered what would happen to her if she just left. What if she just got dressed, and ready to leave, and called a cab, and waited for it to get here, watched out the window until she saw it pull up on the street outside, and then called the police the last thing, going out the door, and told them his address, and that there was somebody dead in here that they needed to come get?

  That seemed the only sensible thing to do, so she got up and put her clothes on and went into the kitchen and looked around until she found some mail that had his name and address on it, and then she found the phone book and looked up a cab company and left the book open to that page.

  She hated to go off and leave him dead and alone like this after he’d been so nice to her, but she couldn’t stick around and wait for the cops to get here. The cops would want to know what had happened. They might think she had something to do with him dying. And maybe she had. Maybe she had gotten him too excited. Maybe he’d had a bad heart and hadn’t mentioned it.

  She heard a siren somewhere far off. The firemen stayed up late. She wondered if it was some of the ones she knew on that truck going somewhere in the dead of night. She still remembered those nights in Fifi’s Cabaret, and Fifi herself, with her cool black clothes and her glass of red wine and her dark and lovely Mediterranean features. Back when a girl could make a little money and have some fun at the same time. Before it got to be not fun. Not like now, when there were so many cops around looking at everything that it was hard to get away with anything. It had just gotten too risky. That’s why she’d been so glad when Frankie had come along. He’d kind of saved her from all that for a while, from doing it with strangers almost every night, back behind the closed frosted-glass doors on the darkened couches while the thump of heavy metal came through the walls, worrying about the undercover police. And now where in the hell was he? Out of town. And what was she going to do about Lenny?

  She got her cigarettes and walked into the den. The lamp was still on and she sat down in the chair that was in front of the TV. She lit a cigarette and crossed her ankles on the footstool.

  What if it had happened when he’d been on top of her? When he’d been inside her? What if he’d been coming and then died? Oh God. That would have been awful. And she didn’t know anything about him or who he really was or what he’d been doing all his life or if he had children or even grandchildren maybe. If he had children, they were probably older than her. Who was going to go to the morgue and get him? She wouldn’t even know.

  She sat there and smoked her cigarette, wondering if this was the right thing to do. She couldn’t think of anything else. And she needed a drink. So she got up and went into the kitchen and found a bottle of mezcal in the refrigerator and a lime in the crisper. She found some sea salt in a little round box up in the cabinet and she got it down.

  This shit was just like all the other shit. She got a knife from the drawer and sliced the lime into quarters and then eighths. Drawing. What good was it? What could you do with it that would make any money to live off of and not have to do what she’d been doing for the last three years? The cops knew her now. She needed to get out of this fucking town. Maybe even find something else to do for a living. Find, hell. She had a perfectly good license from the state of Mississippi to fix hair. She’d gone down to Jackson and taken her state board exams, had passed, still had the certificate framed somewhere. She thought it was in her mother’s trailer. But fixing hair was a lot of work, too. Fixing hair you had to stand on your feet all day listening to women bitch. But getting humped by strangers all the time wasn’t exactly the world’s best scenario either, no matter what she’d told Ronnie the cop about liking the way it felt. It looked like there would be a happy medium somewhere in there. Why couldn’t she find a nice guy? Somebody like that sailor boy?

  There was a clean shot glass in the drain board and she opened the mezcal and poured it full. She did the shot and bit the lime and shook some sea salt onto her hand and licked it off. Wiped her mouth. And Ronnie Boy got a freebie. Big deal. And in another way it was the same thing as raping her. She wished she could kill the little son of a bitch. He didn’t need to be a cop. Cops were supposed to be good.

 
; “Brrrrrrrrrr,” she said, when the rush from the mezcal hit her, and kind of shivered her shoulders. Maybe the thing to do was just get fucked up before she called the cab and the cops.

  And maybe she needed to go on home like she’d been thinking about. It had been a while. Her mother never called her because she didn’t want to run up her phone bill because her beer bill was already so high. It had been about a twelve-pack a day for a while. And when you had a bunch of deadbeats hanging around eating your food and all your microwave popcorn and helping you drink the beer, you needed even more than that for one day and night. Mostly night. Watch movies and jewelry channel shows all night long. Wait for some guy or guys to come over at two A.M. Let dirty clothes pile up. Leave dirty skillets and plates with bad food all over the place and garbage overflowing in the trash can until a person didn’t even want to sit in there. Anjalee had cleaned up that trailer more times than she could remember, and her mother would always let it slide back into something pretty bad for people to try and live in. That was another reason she’d left.

  There was some cold beer in Harv’s fridge. Five tallboys of Stroh’s. She got one out and popped the top, and picked up her cigarette from the ashtray, and took a drink, and pulled on the cigarette, and then decided that she could probably use a toke or two off his stash and his pipe. Or just take it with her, hell, Harv wasn’t going to need it. It would be a shame to let good dope go to waste. And a good pipe, too. All the cops would do if they found it was just confiscate it. Some asshole like Ronnie would probably keep it for himself. Harv’d probably want her to have it instead of them. He’d seemed to be a pretty unselfish man. The bill for the two steak dinners and salads and appetizers and drinks had been $127.60 and she knew that because she’d picked up the bill and looked at it while he was gone to the bathroom in the restaurant, just because she’d wondered how much it was.

  She went back in and looked at Harv again just to make sure he was still dead. He was. He wasn’t moving at all. But it was the damnedest thing. Except for his chest not rising and falling with his breathing he just looked like he was asleep.

  “Old fart,” she said, in a sad but loving way, and she was kind of mad at him for just up and dying on her. She stood there and looked at him for a bit, then she went back to the kitchen and did another shot.

  “Son of a bitch,” she said, standing in the kitchen, doing that little shiver again. All those firefighters got her to doing that stuff, that mezcal. Claimed if you ate the worm, you’d have a vision. And she had eaten the worm one night. It tasted pretty bad, was tough and chewy, and she didn’t think she had a vision, just got drunk as hell.

  She put her cigarette out and loaded up the pipe, then wrapped the rest of the weed tightly in its little bag and stuck it in her purse.

  She couldn’t believe this shit. But it wouldn’t do any good to cry. Crying never had gotten a damn thing done. That was the other thing her mother did, cry. All the time. From unhappiness. From missing her father. From being drunk. From being depressed from being almost constantly drunk. From living the way she did. But she wouldn’t try to change any of it. That was the thing. She just wanted to lay around on her ass all the time and feel sorry for herself and draw a check off the government. And drink. She was going to drink herself to death if she didn’t slow down.

  She fired the pipe up and took a long hit and held it, then blew the stream of smoke out. Would she have ended up like this if her daddy had lived? She liked to think that she wouldn’t have, but she didn’t have any way of knowing for sure. She guessed she’d always been a little man crazy, but she sure enough got it from her mother. After watching her long enough, she knew she had.

  She did another shot of mezcal and already a warm dizziness was spreading through her. She could feel it wrapping around her as surely as a cloak or a coat. It wasn’t the worst thing in the world. It wasn’t the end of the world. Here is how it was. She had fucked up Miss Barbee and violated her probation. Frankie was gone. Harv was dead. She had some money. It was close to Christmas. She still had time to go home, pack a few things and get them in the car, and gas it up and head out. Just go back home. Just see what things were like. Maybe they were better. There was always a chance. And her mama would be surprised.

  She hoped she’d be glad to see her. Maybe she could give her some of the money Lenny had given her. She needed to get his number somehow before she left. And was she coming back? The rent was going to come due in about three more weeks. If she stayed here, she’d have to pay it. And it looked like Frankie’s money was out of the picture. And how was she going to get ahold of Lenny again, without going back to Gigi’s Angels to wait on him, or sitting around the Peabody bar, hoping he’d walk in?

  There was too much going on at once. She stood in the kitchen and sipped her beer and then lit another cigarette. She was going to have to call the cab and the cops before long. She couldn’t just put it off all night.

  She was stoned now on top of the booze. And maybe she needed another toke off her pipe, too. Maybe she hadn’t smoked enough yet because she wasn’t to the place where she wanted to be yet. She didn’t want to feel anything or have any worries. And she wanted to be somewhere with some people she knew before this night was over. And she wanted her good black leather coat. Something to remember Frankie by.

  So she smoked some more weed and stuck the pipe in her purse and went back to the kitchen for a fresh beer. She braced herself. She got her cell phone out of her purse and walked over to the phone book she’d left open and called the cab company. Some sleepy-headed-sounding woman answered and Anjalee gave her the address and the woman told her the cab would be there in ten minutes. Then she pulled up the blinds in the den so that she could see the front of the building, sat down with her fresh beer, and settled down to wait. But then she got up, went into the room where Harv lay, and bending over, kissed him good-bye on top of his graceful silver head.

  93

  The fight was over, now, but the lions were still growling. It hadn’t been much of a fight anyway, with his hands cuffed behind his back, but he’d fought all he could, once he saw what was going to happen, had tried to butt with his head, had tried to kick, had even tried to bite, but it hadn’t worked, since Rico had simply knocked him out cold again. And that was getting old. Domino’s brain felt fuzzy and damaged. He thought maybe electrons were ebbing, going weak like old bad batteries. Some blood was probably loose in there, too, and maybe some of his brain cells were getting drunk on it. And Domino felt more than a little light-headed, but considering the blood he was losing that wasn’t any big surprise. Rico had cut his balls off and was holding them in his hand. Then he threw them over the top of the cage and one of the lions started eating them.

  And that made Domino throw up. He panted hard afterward and threw up again. Really just gagged, nothing came up, just that choking gasping dry retching, eyes streaming, going into shock.

  The lions in the cages behind him were snarling and lashing their half tails. There was one with a missing back leg that stumped back and forth, coughing with its hunger or just its rage at being in the cage. He could hear Rico going through the keys looking for the right one.

  He was too weak now to resist anything much. He heard the enclosure door open and felt the blood leaking into the crack of his ass. He thought maybe he would have had a chance if they hadn’t put him in a fucking garbage can. Maybe if he’d been given a chance, instead of being given to some inbred person full of fear and hate. Then some pimply prison employee punk shoots a shotgun in your ear. But the warden likes whitetail, too, and says go straight. Another guy says give him a cigarette or else. Then you’re fighting somebody. Which way to turn? And who do you call on if there’s nobody you know?

  His arms and hands were really hurting. There was some blood in his eyes. Why didn’t he just go straight? Why didn’t he just listen to the warden? The warden had made it plain as day.

  The lions would probably be quick. He knew from watching the nature
shows that they could pierce the brain with their long teeth and he probably wouldn’t feel a thing. He knew they’d eat him, but he also knew that was their nature, and besides that, he’d eaten a lot of animals himself in his life. Cut them up for a living. Untold tons of them. What was so crazy about one of them eating him? He wouldn’t need his body after he was gone. He was sorry for killing the cop and wished he hadn’t done it. And all those people in those wrecks. He wished he’d gone straight. As it turned out, like the flip of a coin, he hadn’t, but easily might’ve.