The Rabbit Factory: A Novel

by Larry Brown

  He knew he’d done exactly what he was supposed to do, even if he had been drunk. He’d had to get drunk to be able to do what he did. But he didn’t leave any evidence behind. He hadn’t left any fingerprints on anything. The gun was on the bottom of the Mississippi River, the mask in a trash can just outside the fairgrounds, the trench coat at the Salvation Army. So why did Mr. Hamburger want to talk to him this soon? Who knew? Maybe there was another job lined up for him already. Maybe even a fat bonus for a job well done.

  “You see Anjalee come in?”

  Ken nodded and picked up a wet glass to dry. He wiped it hard with a dinner napkin and the glass squeaked. He cocked his head toward the lobby and spoke to the glass.

  “I caught a glimpse of her going across the lobby. You ready for me to send it up?”

  “Right, let me get this one down.”

  Frankie picked up the second shot and drained it, then stood up, digging in his pocket for some money. He put a ten on the bar and waved as he left. Ken smiled.

  “Thanks, Mr. Falconey. See you later?”

  “Maybe so. Take care, Ken.”

  The bartender looked after his retreating back. He waited a few moments and then picked up the money and turned toward the register.

  “Yeah, right, asshole,” he muttered.

  5

  In a very nice room 420, a country girl named Anjalee was lying on the bed and on a crocheted afghan her grandmother had made for her a long time ago. She was reading in the paper about a New York–style barbershop slaying near Cooper and Young when he stepped in with the key. She had on leopard panties and pink booties. She was sipping on Mountain Dew spiked with Absolut Citron and smoking a Camel filtered. She put the cigarette in an ashtray but didn’t stub it out, and stretched out on her flat stomach and pulled her panties down to her knees and then raised her nicely rounded behind into the air and waved it around some. She knew what he’d do: step into the bathroom, take a leak, flush, wash his hands, dry them, step out, open the door for the room service guy, bring the whiskey over, fix a drink, drink the drink (or maybe two), take a condom (he was plainly terrified of catching some STD from her) from his pocket. The whole routine sucked. It wasn’t romantic anymore. He’d told her he wanted romance, even if he was paying her, and for a while they’d had it, and now they never had it. He wasn’t being considerate of her feelings anymore. Now he just showed up and mounted her. For a long time, she’d been pretty impressed by the Peabody, and had hoped it would lead to things like nice dinners at places like Automatic Slim’s, but it never had, and now she simply heard the phone ring some days and picked it up and it was him on it, saying two words: Friday, two, or Tuesday, four, or Sunday, one. And she went.

  And waited.

  Like this.

  To fuck him safely.

  For more money.

  He was quiet now, coming out of the bathroom, zipping his pants.

  On cue the bell rang and he went to the door. He didn’t open it wide enough to let the guy in, just took the bottle and passed some money out and shut the door, locked it, put the chain on, and sat down in a chair near the wall.

  She stayed on her stomach, looking at him with her ass in the air. He opened the bourbon and poured some of it into a crystal glass, dumped in a handful of ice cubes from a waiting chrome bucket. She watched his eyes when he started drinking and wasn’t looking at her. He was staring at something past her, way out past the windows, that look in his eyes he got sometimes that made her wonder what he could be thinking. She didn’t know where he got his money. He always had plenty of it. She thought he was probably a small-time hood, based on her observations of some of his thuggy friends and from overhearing a few of their stoned conversations about robberies and beatings and trips to the Shelby County Jail. But he didn’t like questions. She thought she’d ask one anyway.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “You gonna come over here and get you some of this or what?”

  He just kept sipping his drink. She guessed he was in another one of his shitty moods. He had gotten up, turned on the television, and slumped back down into the chair, and now he was watching something on ESPN. He’d watch any kind of sports. Precision swimming. Professional duck-dog retrieving trials. Those people chopping wood real fast even. Actually that stuff was pretty fun to watch. She thought she’d like to try that logrolling in water.

  “Well, horse shit,” she said, pulled her panties back up, and got off the bed to fix herself another drink and get dressed. “If you’d rather watch the damn TV than get in bed with me, I’ll just go down to the bar and watch the ducks.”

  “I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

  “Oh yeah? Like what? Must not be me.”

  He raised his head.

  “Hey. Don’t bitch at me, okay? If I want somebody to bitch at me, I’ll get married. One of your purposes is to not bitch at me.”

  She stepped into her skirt and pulled it up and fastened it around her waist. One of her purposes. Yeah, well, one of the purposes of fucking was to maybe get to come once in a while, too, but she didn’t much, did she? It was all about him all the time, wasn’t it? His needs, what he wanted. She poured some more Absolut into her glass and walked over and got a few ice cubes from his bucket. She looked down and saw a red spot on his shoe.

  “What’s that on your shoe?”

  “A pigeon shit on me.”

  “Looks like blood to me.”

  “Well it ain’t. Okay?”

  He fixed her with a look she didn’t like. She turned away from it.

  “Wow,” she said. She sat back down on the bed and got her cigarette from the ashtray and finished smoking it while she drank about half of what was in her glass. He wouldn’t even look at her. She guessed he was tired of her.

  After a while she got up and put her bra on. She slipped her feet out of the booties and into her shoes and pulled her sweater over her head. Let him sit here and watch the stupid television while she got paid for it. She got her brush from her purse and went into the tiled bathroom and brushed her hair. Her makeup was still okay. She grimaced at the mirror. No lipstick on her teeth. Maybe she needed to try a new tack with him.

  Back in the room, she picked up her drink and sipped it, swirling it slowly around in her hand, studying his inert form.

  “We goin’ out to eat?” she said. “You said we could.”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “I could stand some Italian. I love that lasagna over at Papa Tutu’s. God. It’s heaven.”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “They got the best bread sticks I ever had.”

  “I ain’t made up my mind yet.”

  “When you gonna?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  She stomped her foot.

  “What the fuck, Frankie? Do you want me to leave?”

  “No,” he said to the TV, and took another sip.

  “Then why in the hell don’t you talk to me sometime?”

  “’Cause I’m watching Kyle Petty in a car race, okay?”

  And he was. They had a vibrating camera in Mr. Petty’s car. The walls and fences and grandstands were zooming by at some incredible rate of speed. Frankie didn’t look at her anymore. Fuck him. She didn’t have to stay around his mopey ass. She could go have a drink and watch the ducks come down and get in the fountain, splash around, quack.

  “Okay. Fine. Whatever. You sit right here and be Mr. Unsociable Asshole. I’ll be in the bar if you want me.”

  She drained her drink and slammed it down and headed for the door.

  “Why don’t you tell Ken to send me up a shrimp cocktail?” he said.

  6

  Anjalee had to take a bus over to the old folks’ home a few days later because she had a flat and was running late. She was still on probation from when the couch cops had nabbed her at Fifi’s Cabaret, and this was her community service. All the judges had gotten so big on that. They’d let you pick up trash or if you had a little education teach English to
some of those from Asian shores or Pakistani mountains who yearned to know it better in order to buy convenience stores they gave names like Quik-Pak or Sak.

  Her grandmother had died in one of these places down in Water Valley and she remembered how much her grandmother had suffered and so she didn’t mind it so much because everybody who kept living got old and needed help, and one day she would, too. She was a little tired so she was sitting down in the lounge taking a break. They made her wear a white uniform and creaky shoes and a white hat, and she had no medical training whatsoever. Most of the days she worked were spent rolling old folks over or rolling them over the other way or feeding them or emptying their bedpans or listening to them complain about their feet or their backs or their digestive processes or their old tickers that didn’t tick so good anymore or their miserable arthritis or the cold spots inside their bodies or just innumerable things that in their combining sometimes made her afraid of getting old. On the other hand, she’d seen a few of the old folks having sex, withered and wrinkled bodies singing joyously in the throes of hot lust, liver-spotted hands gripping each other, and whenever that happened she stood guard outside the door. If anybody came along, she said the patient was using the bedpan and the other old folks’ home workers just went on down the hall because they didn’t need any more work, saved them from wiping another ass. Who wanted to wipe an extra ass?

  She put her feet up in a chair. She drank her diet Coke and smoked her cigarette clandestinely, what with it being prohibited in there and all, it being a place that was kind of like a hospital but not exactly, but some of the die-hard smoker old folks had smokes smuggled in by relatives and raised their windows and lit up and exhaled out them just like Anjalee was doing right now.

  A few of the old folks had died, too. It seemed to her that sometimes they’d just take a notion to up and croak overnight because one day they’d be laughing at Opie and Andy and eating their apple-sauce and the next day stretched out cold as a mackerel. Mr. Pasternak, Miss Doobis, Mr. Munchie, Mrs. Haddow-Green, each now dead with a new stranger in their bed. Sometimes she wished she was back in Toccopola fixing hair.

  She heard Miss Barbee’s swishing footsteps and chunked her Camel out the window and fanned the air with her hand and then with her white hat and stuck it back on her head. Miss Barbee came in and sniffed the air like a bird dog and Anjalee told her a patient had burned some tissue just now, not over two minutes ago, and Miss Barbee, who was a beautiful Swiss chocolate brown and large with gigantic tits and feet and ass and a melon head, too, put her hands on her hips, said, “Oh yeah, I bet,” and then, “Well, come on here, we got to go wipe Mister Boudreaux’s ass, old fool done shit all over the place again.”

  Anjalee got up and followed Miss Barbee down the hall, squeaking along in her shoes, trying to keep up. They turned in at the end of the hall and there sprawled on a bed like a skinned squirrel was Mr. T. J. Boudreaux, formerly of New Iberia, shit smeared on him from head to toe. Anjalee had always felt tender toward him because he mumbled what sounded like sweet Cajun nothings to her while she was feeding him his lukewarm gruel.

  “Got damn!” Miss Barbee said. “We gone need a fire hose to clean his ass up this time!” She closed the door.

  She went over to the side of the bed and put her hands on her hips.

  Mr. T.J. was trying to say something, but nothing intelligible came out of his mouth. Anjalee thought he was probably trying to apologize for the mess. She knew Mr. T.J. couldn’t help it. He peed in the bed all the time.

  She’d started over to the closet for some clean sheets when she heard a WHOP! Her head turned toward the bed and she saw Mr. Boudreaux’s top half hanging out off the other side and Miss Barbee drawn back to let him have it again.

  “You nasty mess!” she yelled. “I’m sick a wipin’ yo ass!” She reached over and slapped him the other way, WHAP!, and all Anjalee did was look for what to hit her with and that turned out to be a nice heavy steel pitcher on a table. Miss Barbee didn’t see it coming because she was so busy. Anjalee swung it with both hands by the handle and KAPOW! knocked Miss Barbee’s crisp white hat clean off her head. Miss Barbee as she was falling and farting turned and made a feeble grab for Anjalee’s arm, but Anjalee had been to a few four-rounders at Sam’s Town in Tunica with Frankie, back before things started turning sour, and she feinted quick and waited until Miss Barbee was almost on the floor and then BEEONG! popped her again right over her left eye with it and watched her go down like a steer in the killing pen, so hard her ugly-ass head bounced on the floor. Mr. T.J. was still talking Cajun gibberish in the bed and he was crying a little, too, but Anjalee knelt down next to Miss Barbee with her white-stockinged knee on the floor and looked at her. The skin was split deeply above her eye with some fatty bloody flesh showing and she was bleeding from the ears and nose and as Anjalee knelt there watching, a stain began to spread out from her panty-hosed crotch where her uniform dress had risen up on her fatpuckered thighs. The pitcher had two dents in it.

  “Well fuck a mule,” Anjalee said. She got up and then backed away.

  She went to work on the old oysterman rapidly, washing him, putting his dirty pajamas in a plastic bag, shifting him back and forth while she replaced the sheets and put clean pajamas on him. Then she closed the door behind her when she went out and down the hall and got her sweater from the coatroom and left, trying not to walk too rapidly, out the side entrance, a voice raising a question behind her, down the steps and over the wet sidewalks and once she hit the street, running, until her mind caught up with her and told her to slow down and not attract attention on the way to the bus stop, get home and change the flat, move the car, try to be a little bit cool.

  7

  Arthur got all upset over TV news at lunch about a hit man conducting his business right across the street from the coffee shop he’d been in. To calm down he got in the Jag and drove over to the Mall of Memphis, and then after getting across the parking lot without being run over, he browsed along a pet shop’s sidewalk windows, checking out the items there, collars and dog dishes, parakeets and cockatoos in wire cages, hamsters on their rolling treadmills busily trying to get the hell out of Dodge. A few listless puppies in sawdust soaked with puppy pee. Sad and puzzled little things with their heads cocked to one side, and the sight of them probably capable of breaking Helen’s heart. She slept like a frog in cold mud beside him after drinking until late most nights, then dozed and flopped around and groaned late in the mornings while he got up quietly and dressed and drank coffee and made his breakfast and watched the big TV while he waited for her to come down with her hangover and start mixing her cure. But he knew she slipped out sometimes, too. For Rocky Road, my ass. He’d written Dear Abby about all his problems and that evidently hadn’t done any good. Dear Abby hadn’t even run it in her column. Dear Abby wasn’t even writing her own column anymore according to a little note at the bottom of her column. Maybe she’d gotten too old, too. He gave out an enormous inward sigh. What was he to do if he didn’t go back to the doctor? Helen still had needs. And so did he, at least sometimes anyway. Not a whole lot. Just once in a while. But he could hardly stand to admit defeat and accept that he’d gotten too old to cut the mustard by himself. Maybe he did need a pump. A dick pump. Good God. More money. The DUIs had already cost him a bundle.

  He didn’t see a tranquilizer gun in the window, guessed he’d have to go in and ask. He hoped they weren’t smart-asses. A bell over the door rang when he went in, accompanied by the peace-inducing music of aquariums bubbling, the irritating squawks of tropical birds. A stocky young man was behind the counter, wheat hair, shirt too big, tie too loose, propped back on a stool reading a tattered paperback, spacecraft on its cover, by a guy named Effinger. Arthur read the title: The Wolves of Memory. The young man didn’t look up. The shop reeked of Pine Sol trying to cover up dog shit.

  Arthur cleared his throat. That usually worked, but the young man still didn’t look up. He seemed intent upon his book.

>   “Excuse me,” Arthur said. “Would you happen to have any tranquilizer guns?”

  “Nawsir,” said the young man, who turned a page.

  “I have a wild animal I want to catch,” Arthur said, feeling slightly foolish over saying “wild animal.”

  “If it’s a possum, you can call the dogcatcher folks.”

  “It’s a cat, actually. A rather small one. A kitten, really.”

  “Cats are weird,” said the young man, still not looking up, and Arthur didn’t know why this cat problem had to come about now alongside these other problems with Helen’s drinking and his dick. It seemed to him that one problem at a time ought to be enough. What Helen needed was some help. But she didn’t want to hear that.

  “I really need some help,” he said, trying not to sound like he was pleading. “It’s my wife I’m trying to catch it for.”