“I didn’t see you.”
“Yeah, no shit. Mikel. What kind of sissy name is that? Mikel Pick-ell. Mikel Pick-ell!” he yells as he walks away. I know Timothy Manning doesn’t like me but I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I’m too short or because my pants have holes or because my teeth stick out like the apes from Planet of the Apes. I wonder if this is what school will always be like.
Mom comes to the school at the end of the day and I go to the office instead of going out to play and the vice-principal tells her that the test I took says I should skip to at least third grade, maybe fourth. Has she thought about putting me in private school? She says public school is just fine thank you very much and that we couldn’t afford private school anyway and she doesn’t want to “in-doctor-nate” her kids with a bunch of religious bullcrap. She says she skipped two grades and went off to college when she was only fifteen and it wasn’t good for her because of Child Psychology so I should just stay in first grade with other kids my own age even if that means the work is easy. He says that I won’t be challenged and that could lead to behavioral problems. He’s going to put me in the Talented and Gifted Program, which means I get to go on field trips sometimes but it still won’t be the appropriate challenge. She says she’s not going to mess me up by putting me with a bunch of kids who are older than me.
The vice-principal sees that you can’t argue with her once she’s made up her mind about Her Values so I stay in the first grade.
CHAPTER 9
THE RABBITS
Paul walks back and forth with a tape measure and a pencil, marking places on the wood inside the barn in the backyard against the alley. He says it’s time that he “contribute,” and since we’re always eating hot dogs and noodles, we need healthier food so he’s going to start raising rabbits for us to eat for dinner. Mom says rabbits are the most efficient way to turn vegetables into meat.
I’ve only ever seen rabbits on TV like Bugs Bunny or the jackrabbits that used to run through the fields behind the School in Synanon. Tony says, so we’re just going to eat rabbit now? Like, bunnies? And Mom says yeah what’s wrong with that? He says because they’re pets not food. She says we won’t be treating them like pets and food is food and we can’t afford meat from the store and he can’t grow up eating only noodles and government cheese from the food bank.
“It’ll be good, you’ll see. Rabbit tastes like chicken.”
“Who’s going to kill them?”
“We are. It’s easy.”
Tony says they’re basically just big rats and Mom says no they’re a good source of lean protein. Doesn’t he want strong muscles to play baseball with?
“Why does everything we do have to be so weird?” he says. “Why can’t we just be like normal people and eat normal things?” Mom says that normal people eat rabbit and Tony says no they don’t, they eat hamburgers and chicken and ice cream after dinner.
“Why do you have to make everything so difficult?” But he says that she’s the one who makes everything difficult and he hates it here and wishes he lived in Los Angeles with Dad. Mom starts to cry because she doesn’t know how to get mad. It’s like the anger rises up in her then turns into tears the second it gets to her eyes.
She says, “I tried to have a normal life. That’s all I wanted. Just a husband and kids and a normal family that loved each other. But then they took my babies from me and everyone went crazy so what was I supposed to do? What do you want me to do, Toe?”
Tony is quiet because nobody has an answer to that question.
He goes to his room and Paul goes outside. I tell Mom that he’s always angry about something. She reaches her hand out for me to hold, her face buried in her elbow as I sit next to her in the wolf den. If I could open up my chest at that moment, there would be nothing but a blank shield inside, a barrier, rigid and sealed, from which nothing escapes, into which nothing is absorbed. It starts at the bottom of my throat and runs all the way to my knees. I hide behind it. I hold it up over me. I feel it there when I swallow, when I breathe. There are no tears because tears come from the heart and the heart is beneath the shield. There’s no anger either or sadness, just a feeling that I have to figure out the right thing to say.
“Rabbit sounds like it could be good. Progress not perfection.” I picture chasing rabbits around the yard, the fall and crack of an ax, the way it must get stuck in your teeth when you eat it.
“Who made you such an old soul?” she says. I shift my weight. She likes to say this but all I ever do is repeat the things I hear the adults say. I think I know what “progress not perfection” means. I’ve read it on the little pamphlets for Al-Anon Mom leaves around the house. But I also know that to her it means something different, something more. I like the power this gives me, to be thought of as an adult or a wise man, someone to be relied upon in a crisis, someone who’s stronger than all of them and can’t be shaken. And I believe it. After all, I can do anything.
But then sometimes I forget and I get mad. I want to run away. I’m scared and I’m sad. I have nowhere to put it. I don’t know the words so I just repeat the ones I read in the AA pamphlets.
“It’ll be okay, Mom. Remember to let go and let God.”
“One day at a time.”
“Progress not perfection.”
* * *
THE FIRST TIME Paul slaughters the rabbits, we are at school. When we come home, there is a white plastic bucket full of guts in the backyard next to the tree covered in powdery lye. The smell of blood and fur is thick in the air. The rabbit carcasses are stacked on top of each other on a table, bound for the freezer downstairs. The gray-brown pelts are piled neatly on the gravel path leading to the barn. The ground beneath the tree is red with blood. He’s placed the heads in a plastic bag in the alley behind the barn. You can follow the smell of it, to open the bag and see tiny white maggots crawling over their eyes.
Tony picks up Paul’s hunting knife with its carved bone handle and thick six-inch blade and cleans it off with the hose. We both like the knife. Paul lets us hold it sometimes. It’s bigger than my forearm, heavy, like a sword, the curved blade rounding to a point at the tip. We hold it sideways in front of our faces and imagine we are David Carradine in Kung Fu walking alone through the Chinese desert.
Paul hands each of us a shovel to work on the piles of rabbit droppings under the empty cages in the barn. “Rabbit shit is the cleanest of all shits,” he says. “It makes for great fertilizer. You could practically eat it.” The small, round black pellets of manure have an earthy smell. We shovel it into a wheelbarrow then carry the bucket to a pile next to the shed where Paul keeps his tools. “We’re going to start composting. From now on anything plant or animal doesn’t go in the trash. It goes here.”
The compost heap grows in the weeks afterward as we add eggshells and rabbit bones, apple cores and lemon peels. Paul rents a tiller and tears up the ground next to the house so that the grass and weeds turn to mulch. He boxes in four large gardens with wooden boards and Mom plants tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, carrots, cabbage, lettuce and even strawberries. Saturdays are for pulling weeds and once the vegetables begin to grow, she avoids store-bought produce if she can.
After the first slaughter, we eat rabbit most nights. Tony considers this a kind of torture and is in constant protest just like Mom was in Berkeley under Reagan. He squirms in his chair. He crosses his arms. He stares at his plate. He says, “This piece looks bad. What if I just eat the potatoes?” Or he says, “I think rabbit can make you sick. We studied it in school today.”
Mom makes baked rabbit and lemon rabbit. She makes stir-fry rabbit with peppers and onions and “rabbit surprise,” which is leftover baked rabbit that has been cut up and put into a casserole dish. Sometimes Mom fries up a rabbit kidney in a pan or a veiny rabbit heart the size of a plum. The organs struggle and spit, dancing around the hot frying pan like they’re still alive, filling the house with the gamy smell of hot blood. Mom will lift the kidney whole with a fork
and plop it in her mouth without even salting it. It’s amazing to watch her eat something so disgusting. It seems to us like a kind of sorcery.
When Mom dares to serve rabbit liver as an entrée, Tony refuses to eat at all. He just stares at his plate and shakes his head.
Mom says, “There’s good nutrition in that liver.”
“I’m not eating this. It’s disgusting.”
Mom crosses her arms and says, “You can’t get up until you eat your liver.” There’s a silence in the kitchen as the words ring out. I look down at the slab of tough, unseasoned meat on my plate and poke it with a fork. Eventually I take a bite. It tastes exactly the way rabbit manure smells.
Tony doesn’t budge. He sits all through dinner, then after dinner when I take a bath, all through The Greatest American Hero and teeth brushing. I walk into the kitchen to check on him, “Maybe just eat a little.” But he shakes his head and lays it into the crook of his elbow at the table.
Just before bedtime, when the lights are off and I am in bed wondering who is going to win the standoff, whether Tony is simply going to start a new life there in the kitchen next to his uneaten plate of liver, maybe pitch a tent beneath the table or set up his sleeping bag next to his chair, I hear Mom walk in and say, “Okay, you can get up. I don’t know what to do with you. But you’re going to bed without supper.” Tony runs downstairs and jumps into the bed next to me, pulling the covers over his head.
“Why didn’t you just eat some of it? Just to make her happy?”
“That’s not my job.”
On a Saturday morning Mom announces that she is going to make a pot of rabbit stew using only vegetables from our garden. She has a kind of hypnotized look in her eyes, a dreaminess as she slices the zucchini and tomatoes and tosses them into the big metal pot that we see on Christmas when she makes warm apple cider with cinnamon sticks. She adds onions and celery and potatoes and bits of rabbit. The pot boils all afternoon, filling the house with an earthy aroma that gets in our clothes and hair. When dinner comes, she stands at the pot proudly and says, “See, we can be self-sufficient if we want to. No money from the government or a corporation, just people living off their own labor.”
I offer her my bowl because I’m certain we’re about to hear a lecture about Nixon. He was impeached just after I was born. The events are always connected in my head since they’ve been described to me that way so many times. “Well, you were born right when they got Thatbastard Nixon so I knew we were on to something.” It’s not clear exactly where the stew fits into the story but I know “living off our own labor” is a way to “stick it to the man” who is always “stepping on the little guy” and that eating rabbit stew is my patriotic duty.
After dinner, the big pot goes into the fridge where it sits overnight and, as Mom puts it, “steeps.” Like the special cheese in the drawer that we’re not allowed to eat, the philosophy is that rabbit stew gets better “as it ages.” So, on night two of rabbit stew, we sit down to eat a thicker version of the soup we ate the night before. The carrots have begun to lose their shape and bits of rabbit meat have separated into long strings. The celery is still mostly intact and there is still the occasional potato.
By night three, there is a palpable resentment in the air. Mom spoons the thick stew into our bowls. Paul wants to support Mom’s project to “live off the grid” and as a rule does not complain when she cooks. But after two reheatings and three days in the fridge, the stew has become something more like a slop. It is still possible to distinguish solids from liquids but it is no longer possible to distinguish solids from each other. Potatoes and carrots and celery and rabbit clump together in a mushy gel the consistency of thickened snot. We lift the stew into the air with spoons and let it drip slowly back into our bowls.
By day four of rabbit stew, it is not entirely clear if what is left in the big pot is technically food. A grayish brown mass sits in the center. Chewy bits of caked stew, blackened from four nights of reheating on the stove, have fallen off the sides and are only distinguishable from the clumps of vegetable by their shape, which is flat, like little squares of tomatoey skin. Mom serves the stew in silence. Tony and I stare at our bowls, trying to remember brighter days. Even Paul taps the goop with his spoon, testing it cautiously, like it might jump. He looks up at Mom, who says, “What? It’s better now. It’s absorbed the spices.”
Tony takes a bite, twisting his mouth in disgust as his face loses color. “I don’t feel good. Can I have something else?”
“No you cannot. Eat your dinner. This is good nourishment.”
I watch him lift his spoon slowly to his mouth with an unsteady hand. He sniffs at it, throws his head back like he’s been punched, and throws up right into his stew bowl.
We freeze. I think maybe he’s faking it and I’m mad that I didn’t think of it first. But as he pulls his mouth away, covered in red and orange spit, chunks of vegetable on his chin, it’s clear he waged the most effective nonviolent protest yet. If this isn’t passive resistance, I don’t know what is.
I expect Mom to scoop the puke out of his mouth and put it back into the pot because at this point what would be the difference?
Paul says, “Jesus, Tony,” as he wipes his face with a hand towel. They go into the bathroom to clean up. Mom stands silently next to her pot of homegrown rabbit stew, defeated and alone with her thoughts.
I wonder if this is how Nixon felt.
When they walk back in, Paul says, “Maybe we should go out to eat tonight.”
I don’t say a word.
Mom says, “But what’ll we do with all this stew?”
* * *
WHEN SLAUGHTERING TIME comes around again, Mom decides it’s time we learn about the “cycle of life” so that we can understand our food comes from somewhere besides the grocery store. Paul sits us down in the backyard early on a Saturday morning and tells us, “This isn’t a game, so I need you guys to take it seriously. I can teach you but only if you respect it. Don’t go fartin’ around with the knife or the lye or the club.”
He gets the black metal rod down from the loft in the barn where he keeps his rifle and ties a string around a branch from the tree in front of the shed. “This is where we hang the rabbits, to drain the blood.” He takes a scooper from a bucket of white powder and shakes it down the trunk of the big tree next to the toolshed. “This is lye. Don’t touch this stuff. It’s there to make sure none of the blood or guts turn to rot on the tree.”
We go into the barn where the litters of three-month-old bunnies are waiting in their cages. They aren’t quite as big as the breeders, the mama bunnies and papa bunnies we’ve named Peter and Princess, the huge brown floppy-eared bunny we’ve named Fred who sits around his cage all day. But they aren’t small either. We’ve been careful not to name the young ones since Mom says you can’t be friends with your food.
Paul opens a cage and picks up one of the adolescent gray bunnies by the loose skin around its neck. It kicks and flails. He’s careful to keep the sharp claws away from his face, holding it out with a stiff arm as we follow him outside.
He kneels down and pins the rabbit to the gravel with his left hand, picking up the black iron club with his right. “The important thing is to hit him hard on his head. You want to knock him out so he doesn’t suffer. Not two hits. Not three. One hard smack across the back of the skull.” He lifts the pipe and brings it down hard. There’s a crushing sound as metal hits bone. Bunny eyes shoot back in their sockets, bunny legs kick straight out. Paul holds it up and carries it to the tree while it squirms. “He’s knocked out. That’s just nerves leaving the body.”
I can’t help but think of Phil in the driveway and the bad men from Synanon.
We grab another from the barn. He holds it down by its neck on the gravel path and says, “Remember you’ve got to hit him hard. That’s the humane thing to do. Hitting him softly only means he suffers more.” He hands me the iron rod. “Go ahead.”
I feel the weight of it. The cl
ub is heavier than I expected it to be, not quite as heavy as a baseball bat, but smaller, denser, so that as I take practice swings, the end falls much faster than I expect and I have trouble with my aim. I squeeze tight and hit the bunny on the head. It kicks and squirms. “No!” Paul yells in my ear. “You got to hit it hard. Now you just hurt him. Swing again!”
There’s a trickle of blood coming from the rabbit’s nose as it struggles under his hand. “Now! Hit him! Hard!” I swing the club again, feeling it ricochet back when it hits the skull. The bunny lets out an awful wheezing sound as its left eye bugs out and falls halfway from its socket. It’s still kicking and trembling, a small bright red pool forms under its head. Little spots of blood dot the gravel. “Goddamn it! Give me the goddamn club!” He takes it from my hand and smashes it over the rabbit’s skull with a loud crack that seems to echo off the barn and the house, down the alley and up into the sky. The bunny falls limp.
“That’s why you gotta hit ’em hard.”
“I tried. I was just afraid to hurt it.”
“You’ve got to kill it on the first hit. That’s the whole point.”
He ties the rabbit’s foot to the string on the tree as it flops and twitches against the trunk. He walks over to the table he’s set up and picks up the big hunting knife, carrying it low, blade down, below his waist. He grabs the ears and cuts off the head, sawing through the neck. Thick dark red blood flows out in streams over the powdery white lye.
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