The Rabbit Factory: A Novel (3 page)

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.

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.”

The young man put Effinger down. He reached under the counter for a pack of Marlboros and a lighter, propped his feet on the counter, lit up.

“That’s a bad habit for a young person to take up,” Arthur said.

“I been smokin’ since I was six. Why don’t you get a trap?”

“I’ve already got a Havahart trap. He won’t go in it, she, whatever it is. I think it smells me. That’s what my wife said anyway. She read it in a book.”

“Is it in your yard?”

“Well, sometimes.”

“Is it scared of you?”

“I haven’t done anything to it.”

“Cats can be like that.”

“Yes they can,” Arthur said. “They can be pretty vicious, too.” He leaned up against the counter and fiddled with a small stack of chartreuse Post-its, turned and looked at some red swordtails and neon tetras, then examined a thumbnail casually. “I was attacked by one when I was a child. It stalked me when I was sitting in a car and I had to roll all the windows up to keep it from getting me. I told my parents all that beforehand.” He looked up at the young man. “And they just laughed. They weren’t laughing after that cat attacked me, I can tell you that. They were painting my little legs with a bottle of iodine.”

“Aw yeah? Your daddy kill the cat?”

“No he didn’t,” Arthur said. He hoped his disappointed tone was plain. He still didn’t know why his daddy hadn’t killed the cat. It looked like his uncle would have volunteered to kill his own cat himself, but he didn’t. He looked at a python in a cage. It had eaten some animal and there was a lump in the middle of it. He wondered what it was: gerbil, rat? It seemed his daddy had been dead almost forever now. He still thought about him often, though, and about the times he’d taken him fishing for fat bluegills at Tunica Cutoff. They used to catch piles of them. They’d pee on you when you took the hook out. He remembered how good they were to eat, fried in black iron skillets and grease in the kitchens of houses built on stilts. Old rotted boats dark and silent under shade trees. Life had been a lot simpler then. Fewer choices.

“How’d it get you?”

“Had my back turned. Making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”

“I can come over and probably catch it but it’s gonna cost you.”

“How much?”

“Fifty bucks.”

“Fifty bucks?”

“Fifty bucks.”

“That seems high. How do you propose to do it?”

“Little help from a little friend.”

“Can you come over in a couple of days?”

“Okay. Twenty up front, thirty when I hand him over.”

Arthur stood there, reaching for his billfold, feeling half angry and somewhat helpless, wondering where this could possibly lead. All this trouble and for what? One little lost animal saved from the world and hundreds of thousands of others being bred at the moment. Was it worth fifty dollars of his money? Wouldn’t it probably just tear up the drapes and the rugs and piss on the furniture? Would it change anything between him and Helen? Probably not. She was just like she’d always been. Horny.

“You’d better call first,” Arthur said. “My wife likes to sleep late in the mornings.”

There were quite a few people out and he figured a lot of them were Christmas shopping. A man walked by on the sidewalk, looking directly at him, then made a fist and lifted his thumb, and a black stretch Caddy eased to the curb next to Frankie while the back door opened. He got in and pulled the door shut. The car began moving and the dome light came on. The inside was upholstered in soft leather and the driver was hidden behind a pane of black glass. A tall and stern-looking man wearing glasses and a very good suit was sitting across from him with a slim aluminum briefcase on his lap, and it was obvious that he was not in a good mood. Beside him on the seat was a tiny long-haired dog, black and white, with a polka-dot ribbon around its neck. The little animal showed him its teeth. Frankie chuckled.

“What’s up with the guard dog, Mr. Hamburger?”

“Never mind the dog. What’s up with you?”

Frankie smiled and leaned back.

“Well, I don’t know. Lenny said you wanted to see me.”

Mr. Hamburger never took his eyes off him and watched him in a way that made Frankie think of a rattlesnake he’d seen Anjalee watching on a Discovery Channel documentary just before it hit a mouse at blinding speed. But anybody who’d gotten his dick mutilated by a gasoline-powered posthole digger would probably stay in a bad mood.

Mr. Hamburger raised the lid on the briefcase. The little dog peeked in as his master lifted an eight-by-ten photo from it. He presented it.

“Does this man look familiar to you?”

Frankie took the picture and studied it. An ordinary photo of a man with deeply tanned skin, short black hair neatly combed, with just a little gray showing. He handed the picture back. No hard question there. But why the question?

“What is this, Mr. Hamburger? We both know who that is. You gave me that picture at the Como steak house.” He glanced sideways. The glass in the car windows was very tinted.

“Who is it?”

What the fuck? He wasn’t sure now what to say. He didn’t want to say the wrong thing. Something was definitely wrong but he decided to try to make light of it.

“What’s this, some kinda joke? Okay, ha ha, it’s real funny. Where we going anyway?”

Mr. Hamburger just kept watching him, holding the photo. The car kept moving smoothly, past the big buildings that stood in their own shade, as if somebody had wired all the lights on green just for them. Frankie looked out the window, then faced Mr. Hamburger again. He was starting to get just a little bit scared.

“Had a haircut lately, Frankie?” Mr. Hamburger said.

“Nah, I ain’t had no…” He stopped. “What
is
this?” he said.

“Mr. Leonardo Gaspucci got a haircut the other night. A quick one, they said. You know anything about Mr. Gaspucci’s haircut, Frankie?”

He knew he was in some deep shit now, but not why. He hoped to get enlightened but he doubted he would. There was probably no way to jump out. The doors were probably locked. And just then they all locked.
Click.
He swallowed hard.

“Look, Mr. Hamburger. I don’t know what you’re talking about, okay? I did what you told me to. Did I do something wrong?”

Mr. Hamburger put the photo back inside the briefcase and closed the lid. The little dog that had been peeking inside the briefcase turned its attention back on Frankie and began showing its teeth again. Mr. Hamburger petted it, stroking the long strands of black hair and white hair sensuously, slowly, careful as a lover. Frankie wondered if they were heading to the loop for I-40, and if so, where they were going. Either Arkansas or Mississippi. Why in the hell would they be going to Arkansas or Mississippi? Unless they were going to the steak house at Como again for a juicy T-bone. He couldn’t imagine why they’d be going to Arkansas.

“Would you like to know who Mr. Gaspucci is, Frankie? Would you be interested in hearing that?”

He turned his reptile eyes upon Frankie again and waited, but there were no questions showing on his face. There was only one thing to say.

“Sure, Mr. Hamburger.”

“Mr. Gaspucci was getting a nice haircut the other night, Frankie. The works. Shave, talc, nose and ear trim, the whole deal. Then somebody came in and messed up his haircut for him. I mean messed it up big time.”

“Who’s Mr. Gaspucci?” Frankie said softly.

“You wouldn’t last long in Chicago, Frankie. Mr. Gaspucci is
not
the man in the photo. That man’s still walking around selling people posthole diggers. I saw him, Frankie. And I paid you a lot of money to make sure I wouldn’t.”

Frankie laughed, snorted momentarily, then chuckled. His grin got wider and he chortled, feeling a lot better now, realizing now that Mr. Hamburger was just playing around with him and that it would be over in a few more minutes, and he would let him out somewhere, and he could find a bar, and get a drink that would calm his trembling hands. Lenny never had told him that Mr. Hamburger pulled practical jokes. Maybe this was the way they did it in Chicago. Scare the shit out of somebody and then have some belly laughs about it. He’d have to tell Lenny about this over drinks. Maybe even this afternoon. Wouldn’t that be fun? Oh how they’d howl. Call for another drink. Eat some goldfish from a bowl. He could call up Anjalee and tell her to get ready and take her somewhere nice. Maybe Huey’s, close to the Peabody. They had a very good burger and you could get a drink. Shit, maybe even try that Automatic Slim guy’s place.

“That’s a good one, Mr. Hamburger, that’s a real good funny one, reminds me of my uncle, used to tell me stuff all the time and I’d believe it, and I mean dead serious like you, too, he had this great delivery—”

“Shut the fuck up, Frankie. Mr. Gaspucci was involved in the vacuum cleaner business. He was a regional sales director for the Hoover company and he had a kid in school at Yale, pre-law. Want to know why he was getting a haircut?”

Frankie couldn’t say anything. He just had to listen. The little dog kept snarling silently, showing his nice clean white teeth.

“He was getting a haircut so he could go to Hoover’s annual motivational conference in Phoenix. He was going to meet his father there and they were going to play golf. Golf, Frankie. Mr. Gaspucci and his father got together six times a year and played golf. They played at Palm Springs, at Hilton Head, at Doe Island, at Old Waverly down in Columbus. It was their thing. It was what they did together. You know why? Because Mr. Gaspucci senior had busted his balls to get Leonardo into college and get him graduated with a business degree and you know what he did to get the money, Frankie? He sold Hoover vacuum cleaners. He sold them door to door, Frankie, and he even worked weekends and eventually, once he had his degree in business, Leonardo joined the Hoover company himself and rose through the ranks to become a regional sales director. They had a great relationship and they never had quarrels and they loved each other as much as men can, and you know what you did to Mr. Gaspucci, Frankie, you want to know why you’re in here with me and the man in the picture is out there and why we’re riding through town like this, you want to know what you did to Leo Gaspucci?”

The car was speeding up onto the ramp to cross the Mississippi at the Hernando de Soto bridge. To Arkansas. Frankie was almost weeping into his lap because he knew he wasn’t going for a big fat Como cut off a cow now. He said: “What?”

“You fucked up his haircut. You were supposed to whack this asshole who just happened to
vaguely
resemble him. Who wasn’t supposed to arrive for twenty-seven more minutes. Yet you were seen waiting outside, drunk like a dumb-ass. And if the cops grab you, it’s only a matter of time until they’ll have me. Because you’ll squeal.”

“But he came on in! Please! Mr. Hamburger,
wait
a minute…I just thought he was…kinda early!”

They were on the bridge now and going faster and Frankie could see the gray arched and riveted steel beams above them and the rails of the bridge flashing by. Far below lay the father of waters, slow and muddy, wide and ancient, home of monster catfish, alligator gar, Mark Twain, and mid-South TV’s favorite fisherman, Bill Dance. Mr. Hamburger didn’t seem to notice, only reached inside his coat. The little dog growled gently, low in his throat, but not to the hand that stroked him.

“Sorry, Frankie. We’re not responsible for what you thought.”