Rabbit Boss

by Thomas Sanchez

  “That dog of yours is going to get hisself a rabbit dinner before noon, boy. One way or the other.”

  “Joe, Paw says if your banged-up leg is a lot better to come up to the house and give the others a hand with the fencin’ over to the Johnson field. He wants all the barbwire torn out so he can run horses on that field while it’s green.”

  “Who’s he got working for him now?”

  “Ben Dora, Jandy, and I think Jimmy from Loyalton, too.”

  “Sam, you get home and tell Mister Dixel I don’t work with Ben Dora. Mister Dixel knows that but you tell him anyway so next time he don’t forget and send you over here to fetch me.” He watched as the boy moved off down the road into the heart of the valley, the dog sniffing behind until they were both out of sight, and beyond where they had disappeared, he could see the high roof of the white house, floating on the spread of the flat land like a cloud. It was spring and his leg felt good. He stamped it on the ground, the tight puffs of pain around the knee encouraged him, for weeks after he had blasted the snakes with Ralph he could feel nothing in the leg, it was like a piece of lumber somehow attached to his body that he had to drag around after him. It had been easier to crawl and let the leg pull blindly behind. He waited until the early dark of each day before he crawled from the house to the barn. It was easier going in the snow, he learned to let his body glide on the cold, the fins of his elbows striking against the white crust, guiding him into the barn where he fed the horse until her belly was fat and she settled herself into the musk of hay to sleep out the night. Sometimes he felt the feeling go out of his whole body until it was all part of the numb leg and he couldn’t move himself to the house so he slept with his back pressed against the spine of the horse. But this he tried to avoid, for the warmth of her flesh and the full sweet smell of her breath made him sleep past the time the sun came up and he had to crawl back to the house in daylight when someone passing on the road might see him. He took enough chance as it was to crawl in darkness. Once he was almost to the barn when a car pulled off the road and someone got out, the two lights slashed across the glistening snow, cutting through the deep trail his crawling body had forged. He couldn’t see who it was. He kept his face down in the snow, hoping the headlights would not penetrate the shadow his body was lumped in. Whoever it was came back out to the car and shut the bright lights, then went in the house to wait for him. He laughed softly as the time passed, his lips brushing the ice beneath his face, his bad leg was under him so if it froze he would never feel it. As winter lost its grip on the days the feeling in his leg began to come back, and by the time the snow left the ground he could stand. He used the leg carefully at first, walking about the small room of his house holding tightly to a staff he had carved out of the short days. The rabbit sensed what this new movement meant. As the feeling came back in his leg the rabbit grew and followed behind him as he hobbled about the room. The first day he trusted himself to walk outside the rabbit came with him. He thought it would run off in its first freedom. He had not wanted the day to come, for he had promised himself every time the rabbit sat hunched on his lap, as he stroked the strong gray ears, that the first day he was able to walk out of the house the rabbit could go with him and it would be free to choose its own direction. But it stayed with him, always on the side of his bad leg, as if he knew it was needed there, to support that part of him not yet healed. He knew on his first day out standing on his own two feet that the rabbit was never going to leave him and so he never thought to build a cage. “What do you call it,” the boy had said. What do you call it? What do you call something you fed by hand, letting it suck on a milk-soaked rag until it could lap up milk on its own like a cat, something that rubbed itself against that part of your body which had lost all feeling, as if it was trying to rub its own life into you. What do you call something whose dead mother you put a bullet through the head so you could collect the six-bits that was being offered. The rabbit didn’t have a name, as the fish you hook in the stream doesn’t have a name. The leg felt good and he didn’t limp as he walked down the road. By the time he passed his sister’s house the pain in his knee was almost a comfort, and a mile beyond that when he heard the wail of children coming from the stand of pines in front of Ben Dora’s place he couldn’t distinguish the bad leg from the good one, so when Ed Jesen pulled his pickup off the road and offered him a ride up front in the cab the rest of the way into Satley he felt he would have no trouble making it in and back alone. But when he finally walked into Felix’s gasstation, got an Orange Crush from the machine and gulped it down he didn’t know if the leg would hold out to take him back.

  “How’s the leg holding up, Joe?” Felix appeared from the back, setting the red grease rag he wiped his hands clean with square on the top of the glossy red Coke machine, then jangled through his bunch of keys on the end of a retractable silver band tied to a belt loop. “Got so many keys here I can’t keep ’em all straight,” he counted through the five keys three or four times, stopping in between each count to hold one up to the sun and let the light play off the bright copper. He did this with each key, squinting one eye and popping the other like a jeweler or a fruit picker who is trying to decide just which one of the pears should be dropped in the bucket, which is the most perfect, the most pleasing to eye and need. “Got a key here for every damn thing, so many keys can’t keep count. Look here,” he held a skinny one with sharp bits of teeth darting along its metal spine to the sun. “This one’s for the pump, no gas goes in or out without this special little baby. And this one,” he offered up a stubby, blunt-nosed piece of metal at arm’s length and turned it swiftly in his fingers to admire it from the many angles of its two flat sides, “opens up the cash register. It’s my favorite. And this here one is to both the men’s and ladies’ comfort stations, lot more convenient that way, some service stations have two but I feel that’s one too many, it’s hard enough keeping together all that I need as it is, and of course if you only have one you cut down the possible vandalism that is likely to occur in your average comfort stations by fifty percent. I never leave my comfort stations unlocked so anyone in the general public can walk in just as easy as you please like he was in his own house. No sir, nobody walks through those doors unless he does business here, unless he’s a legitimate customer, and I’ve got the only key to make sure they don’t. Any customer has need of my comfort station all’s he got to do is ask me and I’ll open it up for him right now, if I’m pumping gas he’ll just have to wait until I’m through so’s I can open up, that way too you cut down on the overcrowding, one in and one out at a time, it’s the way your better service stations over to Reno and Truckee do it, and people ain’t coming out here thinking they can take advantage, this is the only Standard Station on Highway Eighty-Nine for forty miles or more and it’s the best one, first class, A-One-Hundred-Per-Cent.” He slipped one of the keys into the lock of the machine and his body jerked with surprise as the door flew open. He let the retractable silver band slap the keys back into their holder and pulled a bottle of Coke from the exposed slot with as much studied determination as a man pulling on his socks. “Whew,” he flicked the running foam from the neck of the bottle and took a short swig, “it shore has been a busy one today.” He leaned back on his hightopped black maintenance shoes with the doublethick guaranteed-not-to-slip-in-grease-or-water-corrugated-rubber-soles and surveyed the empty road in both directions; the only movement for miles along the straight, silent blacktop was an occasional steer scratching his bony rump against the taut barbwire, sending a subtle vibration up and down the stretch of deserted road. “You should have seen it this morning, Joe. I almost burnt the nozzles off the hoses I was pumping so quick. I could have used two, three attendants. Did they come in, one right after the other. It’s good to have a rest.” He sucked out from the foam on the bottom and set his bottle in the center of the empty rack molded onto the side of the machine. “I get a good return on this pop. I pay nothing for the machine. They install it and ser
vice it once a month right on the day. I get three cents back on every bottle sold. Three cents! Imagine. I get three cents back on every bottle sold and I do nothing. They just set the machine there, the people put their money in and I get three cents. In goes their dime, out comes my three cents. You know what I’ve been negotiating on for the past two months?” His lips pursed in a simple, secret smile as his hand brushed at the bold red cloth badge sewn on his chest that was the one island of color on the starched purity of his white shirt and pants and declared: FELIX-ITS A PLEASURE. “I knew it. I knew you wouldn’t guess it. It’s so simple to figure too. Think of it, Satley only has two buildings to its name, my service station and the Post-Office, because we have the Post-Office they have to call us a town, you’ve got to have a town to have a Post-Office, the Government can’t just up and put a Post-Office building just anywhere that doesn’t have a name. So there’s me and the Post-Office, that’s the whole town, of course there’s Odus’ place across the road there so that makes three buildings, course Odus’ place and the Post-Office ain’t much more than deserted shacks, but anyway me and the Post-Office is the only commercial buildings, if you want to get groceries or a drink you’ve got to go up the road to Sierraville or four miles over to Art’s place, there ain’t nothing of that sort here in Satley, except Mary and her daughter Laura sell eggs and bread and candy bars and a few other little things out of the Post-Office, which I think, I’m even shore of it, is breaking one or two or maybe more U.S. Federal Statutes, but that’s not what I’m thinking. I’m thinking here we are, the only commerce on this end of the valley, setting right on top of California Interstate U.S. Highway Number Eighty-Nine, the road that goes clear across the top of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and gets its even shake of tourist during the hot weather and a lot of them got to pull in here for gas because I’m the only Standard Station for forty miles or more, and when they get out and stretch they generally will have a thirst and drop a dime into this here machine so’s I’ll get my three cents, but it’s something more they want, it’s something will make their trip a pleasure, it’s a snack. How about that, Joe. It’s a snack they want. So I’ve been negotiating the past two months with a big firm over to Reno called SNACKETTE, they’ll put in free of charge to me a brand new machine on the wall right next to the cash register where I can keep my eye on it full of peanuts, life-savers, and candy bars, all behind little glass windows so they can see what they’re paying their nickel for, each and every item will be one nickel and I get back two cents on the nickel. Can you beat that. Two cents on the nickel is better than what the pop machines gives me back. Now you tell me, who’s going to walk on across the street there into that broken down, dark Post-Office and buy a candy bar from Mary and Laura when they can put their nickel in my shiny new SNACKETTE, turn the knob and out comes the same thing, fresher too.”

  Birdsong slipped his empty Orange Crush bottle into the rack next to Felix’s, walked across the street and let the screen door of the Post-Office slam against its worn hinges behind him, loosening the conspiracy of a few idle cobwebs hung at deceptive, awkward angles from the low ceiling. “Laura.” The girl behind the counter, her body propped up on a stool and laid back into the corner like a discarded sack, flipped the page of her comic book over. “Laura, give me one of those candy bars out of the box there.”

  “Which kind,” the girl flicked the edge of the page without looking up. “We got three kinds, TOOTSIE-ROLL, LOOK, and HERSHEY WITH NUTS.”

  “Give me one of those with the red wrapper.”

  “LOOK. That’s LOOK. Cost a nickel.”

  “Just what I want. Give it to me.”

  The girl rolled the comic book up like a club and pulled her body from the corner, the bare wood of the floor creaking under the unexpected weight. “Why Mister Joe,” her face floated up before him, pale as a lemon brought up from the bottom of a bucket, her gray eyes blinking blindly like the gills of a fish, trying to adjust themselves to the dull light filtering unevenly through the rusted screen of the door. “I never knew it was you,” she spoke not to his face but to one of the buttons on his shirt, the last one before the shirt entirely disappeared beneath his belt

  “Well it was me from the beginning. Just like today is Monday, March number twenty, the first day of spring.”

  “That’s true Mister Joe,” she nodded at the button above the belt as her voice snagged on the beginning of a giggle and she turned her face to the rounded hump of bare shoulder sticking out of the sagging material of her dress, her mouth open as if she were going to bit it off or yawn. “It’s a funny thing you come in Mister Joe because there’s a letter here for you.” She slid open a drawer and watched as her fingers fumbled through a stack of mail. She felt the weight of each letter, her thumbs scraping against the grain of the clean white envelopes. “I think this should be the one,” she held it out in front of her like a pet squirrel with a nut. “Joe Birdsong, General Delivery, Satley, California. That’s all the right things to say if it’s for you,” she let the letter drop on the counter and her mouth turned up in a half smile because it didn’t break like an egg.

  “What about my LOOK,” Birdsong picked up the letter.

  “You don’t get no magazines,” the girl focused her attention again on the button.

  “I mean the candy bar.”

  “What candy bar?”

  “The candy bar I asked for when I came in.”

  “Oh … that candy bar,” she smiled in complete recognition at the button. “You know I wouldn’t forget that candy bar.”

  “Well, let me have it then.”

  She placed her hand in the box, “One or two?”

  “One. All I need is one.”

  “That’s a nickel,” she set it on the counter. “Same price as a fancy stamp, and airmail is eight cents, two less than Coca-Cola, that’s how I remember which is which.”

  “Airmail is seven cents, Coca-Cola is ten, you’re one cent off.”

  “I knew I made a mistake somewhere between the two. Some people said I was a mistake.”

  “Got any new WANTED FBI posters in?”

  “One I just put up this morning, or yesterday,” the girl put his nickel in a tin box and climbed back up on her stool, unfurling the rolled comic book like a new flag. He studied the WANTED posters tacked firmly on the wall, the ones turning yellow he knew by heart. Some were without pictures and he read the descriptions over slowly, letting the words fit together the picture of the man wanted for Federal crimes in his mind until it became clear and stamped itself deep in his memory and for the moment was more vivid and close than the image of his own face. He noticed the man from Wyoming who kidnapped the two girls and left them to suffocate in the trunk of an old ’36 Ford had a different poster out with more recent pictures, he had gone down from number three MOST WANTED to number seven, it probably meant they wouldn’t catch him. Whenever a man dropped down in position he never seemed to go back up, finally they even stop sending out posters on him and it was as if he never existed but for the year or two he was tacked up on the wall of every Post-Office in the United States. He always wondered where they all went when they no longer had a position on the wall. That bothered him, because even though their faces were gone from the wall he still carried them around in his head. There wasn’t anything special about the new man except that under “Scars and Marks” he had almost the longest list Birdsong had ever seen, “scars left and right side of cheek, right side of chest, left little and index fingers, right shin. Tattoos: nude woman, both upper arms; anchor, ‘USN’, rope, ship, four gulls, cross between right thumb and index finger; heart, ‘Evelyn’ right calf, bee on left foot.” There was nothing unusual about his “occupations,” in that category he wasn’t much different from thousands of other men; “hod carrier, insurance salesman, roofer.” The Federal warrant had been issued “on December 9, 1955 at Tampa, Florida, charging Edgar Horhimer with unlawful interstate flight to avoid prosecution for murder (Title 18, U.S. Code, Section 107
3).” He was “reportedly carrying a pistol and has access to other types of weapons, including handgrenades, considered extremely dangerous.” But the thing that was funny about the man was his criminal record, there was something about it left incomplete, throwing the whole poster off balance, “has been convicted of trespassing, petty larceny and murder.” From trespassing to murder with only petty larceny in between was one long step, and it was this detail that Birdsong’s imagination tripped over, how could a man go from trespassing to handgrenades? He walked outside, trying to find the proper weight in his head to balance trespassing and murder, surely petty larceny wasn’t it. He leaned against the building, cocking his bad leg up on the wall releasing it from its share of the burden. His fingers peeled the wrapper carefully down the slab of chocolate as he looked across the road to see if Felix had a clear view of him, but all that could be seen was the back of the white uniform and the fury of a leather cloth rubbing the blood shine of the Coke machine, and then that was gone, obscured as Frank Madson’s tractor rolled in front of him with all the steel and clang and roar of a tank blitzing through a long ago conquered hamlet, with Frank himself sitting high in the metal seat, his stiff straw allweather cowboy hat tucked down at a forward angle, a raised hand held in sudden greeting to the loyal peasants who turned out to wave him onward on top of his Japanese tractor that he picked up for fifteen hundred dollars in the summer auction at Grass Valley when the auctioneer announced the Japanese had been making tractors a hundred years before transistor radios and Frank bought it on the spot. Birdsong saluted the bouncing back with his melting bar as the machine bore its Captain down the road toward its long field for the day, leaving in its wake Felix standing supported between his two pillars across the road, his white starched body hung suspended directly between the Regular 20¢ pump and the High Test 240 pump with his eyes nailed into the chocolate bar disappearing suddenly into his brother-in-law’s mouth and being chewed with great motions of the jaw.