The O. Henry Prize Stories 100th Anniversary Edition (2019)

by The O Henry Prize Stories 2019 (retail) (epub)

  “You just don’t eat the guy,” the man said. “Rabbits are right there, you know, right on that line.”

  He made a kind of karate-chopping motion, his hand slicing down through the air.

  “You either want to be friends with them or you want to kill them and eat them for your supper. We had two other people come here already today. And I was going to take the ad down if you were the same as those bastards. I could see it in their eyes, both them guys. I could just tell. They’d have taken him home and probably thrown him in a stew, a fricot, like my grand-mère used to make, you know? Hard to look at, I tell you, when somebody’s lying to your face like that.”

  I asked him what he saw when he looked in my eyes.

  He laughed and bonked his temple with his finger.

  “I got no clue,” he said. “All we can ever do is guess, right? No way to ever be sure about what’s going on up there. But me, thinking about you right now? Me, I’m guessing that you are not the guy who is going to kill our Gunther.”

  “Gunther?” I said.

  He crouched down and said the word three times very quickly and he made a clicking noise with his tongue.

  The rabbit came flying out from beneath the sofa and went over to the man and stretched up to get his scratch between the ears.

  “He knows his name?”

  “Of course he does. Doesn’t everybody know their own name?”

  “And do we have to keep that one?”

  “You do whatever you want, my friend. After you leave here, he’s going to be your rabbit. But if you want him to know when you’re talking to him, I think you better call him what he’s always been called.”

  I stretched out my hand and Gunther sniffed at my fingers, then gave me a quick lick. His tongue seemed so strange to me then. So long and dry. The tongue of a rabbit is very long and very dry.

  The man smiled.

  “That there is a very good sign,” he said. “Doesn’t usually happen like that. Gunther, he is usually shy around new people. Normally takes him a little while to make up his mind.”

  The rabbit pushed his skull against my shin, scratching an itchy part of his head on the hard bone running down the front of my leg. I felt the change coming.

  “So we have a deal, then?” the man said.

  “I think so,” I said. And we shook hands.

  “And you’re promising me you will not kill him?” He kind of laughed that part at me.

  “Yep,” I said, and I shook my head. It was all ridiculous.

  “Maybe you can say the real words to me, right now, out loud?”

  There was no joke the second time. He looked at me hard and I stared back. He had not yet let go of my hand and as we were standing there I felt the little extra compression he put around my knuckles, the way he pushed my bones together.

  “I promise I will not kill Gunther.”

  “That is very good,” the man said, and he smiled and then he shrugged. “Or at least, I guess that is good enough for me.”

  * * *

  —

  It took maybe three weeks before Sarah and I started talking about putting him down.

  “This isn’t working,” she said. “Right? We can both see that. Whatever happens—we try to sell him or we take him back or to a shelter or whatever, I don’t care—but it cannot go on like this. It’s okay to admit we made a mistake.”

  The kids had already lost interest and the litter box was disgusting. We were using a cheaper kind of bedding and Gunther hated it. In the first couple of days he’d already shredded up two library books and chewed through half a dozen cords without ever electrocuting himself. There was an infection too, something he’d picked up in the move. Maybe we gave it to him, but it was horrible to look at. He had this thick yellow mucus matting down the fur beneath his eyes and both his tear ducts were swollen green and red. He hardly ate anything and instead of the dry, easy-to-clean pellets of poop we’d been promised, he was incontinent. For about a week, our white couch, the couch we still have, the couch where Gunther and I still sit while we watch TV, was smeared with rabbit diarrhea.

  It was getting bad for me too. Something in my breathing had started to change and a case of borderline asthma was settling deep into the membranes of my chest. I felt this strange tenderness blooming in my lungs—like a big bruise in the middle of me—and I was starting to have trouble walking up or even down the stairs in the mornings. We weren’t sure of the cause, yet, and it couldn’t be pinned directly on Gunther. The doctors said there were other possible explanations—adult-onset conditions—that could stay dormant in your body for decades before springing up fresh in your later life. I had my own wheezing theories, though, and I felt pretty certain that this rabbit and I were not meant to be together.

  We took him to a veterinarian who couldn’t help us at all.

  The guy plunked Gunther down on the stainless-steel examination table and he shone that light into his eyes and his ears and felt around, up and down Gunther’s whole body. It took less than ten minutes. Then he snapped off his purple gloves and threw them into a sterile wastebasket.

  “Look,” he said, “I’ve got to be honest here.”

  He cocked his head toward the door. On the other side, in the waiting room, there were at least ten other people, all sitting there with their leashes and their treats and their loved ones.

  “I think you can see, we’re pretty much running a cat and dog shop here. You know what I mean? That’s ninety-five percent of what we do. And I’m afraid we don’t have a lot of experience with the exotics.”

  “Exotics?” I said. “What, is a rabbit exotic now?”

  “It is for me. I’m just telling you: I’ve given you the standard examination that comes with our basic billing package. The next step is going to be X-rays and advanced diagnostics and I don’t think you really want to go there. Not for a rabbit anyway. Not for a rabbit that hasn’t even been fixed.”

  In that moment, it was almost over. Gunther was nearly part of our past. The way to a different version of the future, a new opening, was right there.

  “Listen,” he said. “How about I give you the room for a little while and maybe you can have some time to think about how you’d like to say good-bye. When I come back, if you’re good with it, I can give him a little sedative that will calm everything down. Then we set up the IV and whenever you want to release the drug, that will be it; it’ll all be over in a painless, quiet, peaceful way. If he can’t eat and he isn’t drinking and he can’t see, what kind of a life is that?”

  As he left the room, I watched him shifting his facial features, moving from the serious life-and-death mode he’d been using on us to the cheerful semiannual-checkup face he used for his regular clients.

  I turned back to Sarah, but she was already packing Gunther up to bring him home.

  “Fuck that guy,” she said to me.

  I smiled and nodded my head. My wife does not like to be bossed around by anyone.

  We took Gunther home and she got to work on the computer. Online she found a woman in the country who was kind to us, but no-nonsense. She was a real farm vet—herds of cattle, giant pigs, even racehorses—and she rarely worked with pets, but she sold us the antibiotics we needed for twenty-five dollars flat and she told us exactly what to do. There were teeth problems, she said. Severely overgrown teeth, looping inside Gunther’s head, cutting him every time he tried to chew. The infection had started in his mouth. The other guy had never even looked in there.

  “It’s not pretty right now,” the vet said. “And I’m not going to touch anything, but once it’s cleared a little, after the medicine has worked, you’re going to have to cut them back.”

  * * *

  —

  All of this really happened to us, to Sarah and to me. For an entire week, we fed Gunther with a plastic syringe. In our
food processor, we blended up this disgusting kale smoothie with the medication mixed into it. Then I wrapped the rabbit’s squirming body in a towel and held him against my chest, squeezing all four of his legs into me. His hair came out, sometimes in thick clumps, sometimes in a kind of fine translucent fuzz that floated through the room and, for sure, penetrated deep into my own body. Sarah forced open his mouth and she drove tube after tube of that green sludge into him. He tried to spit it back up, but most of it went down and the rest dribbled over his chin, where it later hardened into this thick green grit in his fur.

  But the drugs worked and a week later, when he had his strength back, Sarah and I switched places and did as we’d been told. She held him in the towel and I took a brand-new pair of wire cutters—purchased and sterilized just for this task—and I peeled back Gunther’s gums.

  You could see it right away. It’s easy to tell when things are almost perfectly wrong. Each of his two front teeth was a brownish-yellow tusk, like a miniature ram’s horn, curved backward almost to a full circle with a black streak of what seemed like a blood vessel flowing inside of it. I tried to imagine how things should look if they did not look like this and I tried to summon up a picture for how a rabbit’s teeth are supposed to be, although I had never seen a rabbit’s tooth before.

  Then I just did it. I picked a spot and I aimed the scissor point of the pliers and tried to hit it. Gunther was furious, snorting hard through his nose. Sarah could barely hold him, but even in that moment of crisis he could not generate anything more than a cough.

  “Go!” she said. “Do it right now. Now. Come on.”

  I brought the cutters down on the surface of the bone and I squeezed hard and quick, but the tooth was much, much softer than I expected. There was a snap and a section an inch and a half long flew across the girls’ room. The second piece, snipped from the second tooth, was a little longer, and it nearly went down his throat before I flipped it free with the tip of my own finger. I dipped my hand in and out of Gunther’s mouth. But then it was done and Sarah let him go and he fled beneath the bed.

  We were standing there together, Sarah with the soiled towel—Gunther had let go of everything—and me with the pliers in my hand and the chunks of rabbit teeth on the floor. I turned and plucked a piece of fur out of her eyebrow and I remember that she put the towel down and wiped her palms down the front of her shirt, then mine.

  “That was not what I expected,” she said.

  “Me neither,” I said.

  Beneath the bed, Gunther remained perfectly silent. A stranger, entering the room, would not have known he was even there, and neither of us could tell if he was in agony under the mattress or if he felt any kind of relief.

  “What do we do now?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess we wait.”

  * * *

  —

  Somehow it worked the way it was supposed to. With the medicine kicking in and his teeth fixed, Gunther returned to his regular diet of raw Timothy hay. Eventually his poop hardened up and his eyes cleared. Even the kids came back to him. They played games together now, flinging his carrot across the room for fetch, and they worked up a pretty funny matador routine. If you shook a dish towel at him and shouted “Toro! Toro! Toro!,” Gunther would come charging across the room and blast under the fabric. This also worked great with a pyramid of plastic cups. As soon as you built it up, he’d come barreling through, with real strength and purpose.

  When a rabbit is truly happy, they do these insane joyful leaps where they launch their whole bodies way up into the air, so much higher than you think they can go. They twist in odd ways and kick all four of their legs at the same time. It’s like one of those ecstatic convulsions you see in born-again churches when people are so moved by the Spirit they can’t control their limbs. Gunther used to do that all the time after the bullfight game or the plastic pyramid. That kind of jumping is called a binky. That is the real, technical term for it: binky.

  You can never be sure, but I think that somewhere in the blur between our decision at the vet’s office and the thing with the teeth and the end of everything else, Gunther’s life fit into ours and we all almost made sense. He receded into the deep background of our existence, and took up his place in the daily sequence. Taking care of him became a set of regular tasks. Each week it was a different person’s job to change the bedding and blast the room with the Dustbuster and make sure his water and food were topped up. Allowances were paid for this labor and Gunther became a formal responsibility of the household, like emptying the dishwasher or taking out the garbage. When other things, new emergencies, claimed us—the year Sarah’s father got sick and eventually died, or the time I was laid off for eight months, or the spring when we had to take out another loan to fix the roof and repoint the chimney and replace all the gutters—I could almost forget that Gunther lived with us. Though we shared the same space, and his presence eventually put me on regular inhalers, puffers that became automatic, I still might go an entire week without actually seeing him. We were all just barely touching and it seemed like the minivan was always running in our driveway, its rolling side door gaping for the quickest possible turnaround, like an army helicopter. Sarah or I would take one step across the threshold of the front door, before we’d be clapping our hands and yelling: “Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go!”

  Back and forth through the van door, into and out of traffic. Every day and every night of the week there was some other activity. Making lunches for picky, ungrateful people: whenever I cut the crusts off a sandwich or allowed someone to return a perfectly untouched, but perfectly prepared, Tupperware container of sliced cucumbers and ranch dip, I wondered if I was loving a child or wrecking her for the future. Every morning we just barely made it to the corner for the first school bus at seven thirty and the second at seven forty-five. Then showering and getting your hair okay and putting on real clothes and going to work and dealing with all the stupid people at work. The stupid things that every stupid person said and did.

  Piano and swimming and soccer and music and school assemblies. In an effort to spend quality time with the kids, Sarah signed up to be a Girl Guide leader. She learned all the promises and she got the uniform and we sold cases and cases of cookies. I coached a boys’ soccer team for five years, though I knew nothing about soccer in the beginning. Every morning, the morning arrived just five or six hours after we’d gone down. And every morning, when Sarah and I opened our eyes again, we were already late, already behind.

  “What is today?” I’d ask, and she’d look at me and blink and stare at me like a stranger. Then she’d turn away or look up to the ceiling as if she were reading a screen, like this was the dentist’s office and they had a news crawl running up there.

  “Wednesday,” she’d say. “Wednesday is Pizza Day. No lunches. But then violin, and the after-school thing—some meeting we’re supposed to go to about cleaning up the playground—somebody has to be seen to be there. Then, if there’s time after that, please, God, haircuts. Please. Everybody in this whole house needs a goddamn haircut.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m serious,” she said. “You need a haircut. You look like a homeless person.”

  * * *

  —

  I remember once, maybe five years ago—it was at a retirement party for a lady from Sarah’s work—we snuck out during the speeches and fucked in the minivan, right there, doggie-style, on the third-row Stow ’n’ Go bench. It was ridiculous but also, absolutely, the right thing to do. There were stained Popsicle sticks and food wrappers back there, headphones and Legos, even a long-lost running shoe that we were so glad to find. Sarah held it up triumphantly with one hand, even as she was unbuttoning her pants with the other. “At last!” she said. “Remind me not to forget about this when we get home.”

  The other cars just sat there by the curb under the streetlights and no
pedestrians ever walked by to peer through our slightly tinted windows. Inside the van, we were rushed and awkward, but we got what we came for and still made it back in time for the cake, all rezipped and smoothed out.

  I don’t know what happened to us after that. There was no single event. No dramatic explosion, no other character that wandered into our lives. I think we just wore down gradually, inevitably, and eventually, we both decided we’d had enough and it was time to move on. There must have been something else—a pull from the inside or a signal from the outside—that compelled us in some way, but I’m not sure. Maybe we really did just outlive the possibilities of each other’s bodies.

  But Sarah and I: we had a good, solid run and I think we came through pretty well. Three kids is not nothing and we carried those people—we carried them from their delivery rooms to their day cares to their schools and through all their summer vacations, all the way down to the fancy dinners we hosted on the nights of their high school graduations. Then, one by one, they left our house for good and, all of us, we never lived together again. Two went to universities in different cities and one moved in with her boyfriend across town and started working at a call center.

  After they left, we were by ourselves again. Together, but by ourselves now, and only Gunther stayed. The change was harder than we expected. There was too much space now and we filled it up with everything that had always been missing. Though there was no one else around, we kept getting in each other’s way. I felt like the air inside the house was thickening again, but worse now, like a clear sludge was being slowly poured into every gap in our lives. We had to slog through it every day and every exchange was more difficult than it needed to be. Neither of us would ever watch the other person’s shows and there were arguments, real arguments, about who should have the power to decide if an overhead light should be turned off or turned on. I did not like how she chewed her food, the way she incessantly talked about other people behind their backs, her selfishness. And she did not like the way I clicked my pens, the way I was always intruding on her plans, the way I started things, but never finished them. No single can of soup could serve us both.