Orwell's Luck (10 page)

"OH, NO!" I shouted, "I'VE KILLED HIM AGAIN!"

But I had not.

All I had done with my carelessness that day was make a worse mess in my room and give my wounded rabbit the chance to step back into his cage, which, to my amazement, is exactly what he did.

Orwell didn't hop, as other, less-battered rabbits do. Instead, he raised himself up like an old man rising from a chair, keeping his knees bent, half-standing, half-squatting on his haunches, and in a single careful movement, he high-stepped over the hurdle beneath the open door into the familiar sanctum of his cage.

A miracle had taken place right before my eyes!

On the second day of Spring Break, the sun came out and so did Orwell.

While I practiced jump shots in the driveway with only occasional success, Orwell was rediscovering his feet. He stood in the front yard lifting his back legs one at a time in a slow unsteady march. On the mend, but not yet out of the woods, the little rabbit moved like he was wearing rented shoes several sizes too large.

A white sedan followed by a minivan pulled in across the street. The real estate man in the dark blue suit emerged from the car. Three people got out of the minivan, a slender, well-dressed woman, followed by a girl and a boy. The girl appeared to be my sister's age, perhaps a little younger. The boy I knew was my age, because it was the tousle-haired boy from school.

"Is that your rabbit?" he called to me.

"Sure is!" I called back. "His name is Orwell!"

"Funny," he laughed, carelessly combing his hair with his fingers. "Somehow I figured you for a monkey!"

As my brain scrambled to come up with a response, my basketball, a purple one from childhood days, spun from my hands and leapt into the street, where it raced down the hill in a sudden impulsive break for freedom.

I took off running to retrieve it. When I returned, out of breath, my heart in high gear, the tousle-haired boy and his companions were inside the empty house.

"Holy smokes, Orwell!" I said. "Do you suppose they're planning to buy that place?"

Orwell lifted his right foot and stared at it. Then he put it back down in the grass and lifted his left foot. He stared at it. He repeated this procedure several times. Finally, he put both feet down, raised his fragile body up into an elevated squat, and, in that comic high-step I'd witnessed once before, walked to where the grass, bleached and winter brown just days before, had started to return to green.

Orwell carefully nibbled off a slender shoot, swallowed it, then looked at me and nodded his head firmly before returning to his picnic.

"Wow!" I said. "
Quelle chance!
" What luck!

I stood and stared across the street, my eyes unblinking, mesmerized by the possibilities unleashed by this amazing coincidence. The tousle-haired boy, right across the street!

What a friend I had in Orwell!

Once again, my delinquent basketball slipped from my grasp. It bounced on the concrete driveway with a distinctive
tap-tap-tap-ta-tap!
and rolled harmlessly against the magic rabbit dining on the lawn.

Who saved Orwell?

Was Orwell saved from permanent paralysis by the new veterinarian, with his experience and his skill in putting back together the pieces chance had torn asunder? Is he the one who deserves the credit? And if he does, shouldn't he share it with the person who invented the MRI?

My grandmother with her connections played no small part in fixing the rabbit's future. Orwell himself had noticed that.

I'm the one who found Orwell crumpled in the yard, the one who brought him in and fed him and kept him from the cold. I did my part to rescue the injured rabbit. I deserve recognition.

Others in my household have earned acknowledgment for helping, each in his or her own unique way. My father because he backed me up. My mother because she let him stay. My sister because she sneaked him carrots and twice helped me clean his cage.

Minor players helped Orwell by staying minor, thereby preventing worse effects: the Irish setter who captured Orwell but didn't eat him right away. The veterinarian who gave him shots and his first murky X-rays.

Obviously, nature played a major part in Orwell's fate. So did Orwell's luck, switching from bad to neutral to good, as it seemed to have done so far.

God made all the creatures, so, of course, he contributed, but even the smartest people in the world disagree over how deeply he gets involved.

Who saved Orwell? Who is responsible for
anything
that happens? People and events are all connected.

As Orwell, in a nutshell, once explained it all to me, "What you choose to do today matters."

Orwell's cage by the windows was now merely Orwell's bed. With its door remaining open, he was free to come and go as he pleased, using it only at night or when he felt like resting. Most often during the day, Orwell walked around the house with me, or went off on his own exploring, sometimes watching my father or my sister work, sometimes visiting the dog or cat.

Orwell's high-step way of walking really cracked me up. Have you ever rolled your jeans up as high as they would go and gone wading in a pond? You know how you lift your legs up very high before you set them down again, just a short step away? That's how Orwell walked from room to room, less like a rabbit than a living cartoon.

"Why does he do that?" my sister asked, emptying her laundry basket on the bed that I'd just made.

"Do what?" I said.

"Why does he walk like that? Why doesn't he hop like other rabbits?"

"I guess he can't," I answered. "Or maybe he's forgotten how. Anyway, what he's doing seems to work."

"I think it's weird," my sister said.

"'Weird' may be Orwell's middle name," I replied.

In an effort to hone my detective skills, I began keeping Orwell's written communications posted on my wall. Each day the list grew by seven words.

Orwell seemed very fond of words. In the afternoon, our chores completed and my father busy with his tools, my sister and I played Scrabble until my mother got home from work. Orwell never missed a game.

The curious rabbit would look at my letters, then stride over to see what my sister had drawn. He'd stand behind her in that peculiar, stoop-kneed way of his, scratching his chin, then he'd step back over to my side and wait until I played my hand.

Scrabble is a game that's played with seven letters at a time. The letters you can use depend on luck.
The words you choose to play rely on skill. Orwell's value to the game was mostly in the former. With him standing near, I drew lucky combinations every time:
CAPSIZE. MAXIMAL. GIRAFFE.

"Your rabbit is cheating," my sister complained, when the score stood at 217 to 45.

"He can't help it," I explained. "It's in his nature. He likes to change the outcome."

"Well, tell him to go sit down," my sister said. "This isn't any fun for me." By way of illustration, she played the single letter O, creating the common two-point word
ON
. With Orwell's intervention, I promptly turned it into
QUOTATION.

"That's it, I quit!" my sister said.

"Would you rather play cards?" I asked. "We could play seven-card rummy."

"No way," my sister said. "Not with that rabbit hanging around."

With occasional help from me, my mother, and my sister, and some emergency assistance from a plumber with a big white truck, my father had nearly finished the rooms that other workers had started on the back of our house so many months before.

I had finished my chores and was looking for Orwell. I wanted to discuss an idea for a science fair project that had come to me while gazing out our windows into the backyard, where at this moment the sun was shining brightly, robins were hopping in the grass, and pint-size black-and-white woodpeckers were walking up and down the trunks of trees.

Perhaps my rabbit would be interested in helping me demonstrate unique methods of animal locomotion.

I found my father standing on a ladder with a paint roller duct-taped to a broom handle, trying to reach the uppermost parts of a vaulted ceiling. To ventilate the fumes, he'd opened all the windows and the sliding double door that led to the deck.

"Have you seen Orwell?" I asked.

"He was just here," my father replied. "He's been watching me all morning. I figured he left to find you."

I checked with my sister. She hadn't seen him either. Nor was Orwell with the dog, whom I found on the floor in the family room sleeping, as usual. Orwell wasn't off conspiring with his new friend the cat, because the cat, like the dog, was taking an afternoon snooze, curled up in a shaft of sunlight in the dining room.

Worried now, I checked every room in the house, including closets and storage rooms. Orwell was nowhere to be found. It occurred to me that he must have gone outside.

I hurried back to the master bedroom to speak to my father. He was teetering dangerously on the top of the ladder, leaning over backward with his roller apparatus, his face to the ceiling, his glasses covered with white spatters.

"When was the last time you saw Orwell?" I asked.

"Not sure," he grunted. A blob of paint, liberated from his roller by Earth's gravity, plopped onto my father's glasses like a gift from a low-flying goose.

"When was the last time you saw
anything?
" I wisecracked, dashing through the open door.

There were no rabbits on the deck, but I did find painted footprints leading out the door and down the steps. They were a funny kind of footprints, not like rabbits usually make. They were two-footed footprints, the kind a child might have made, if the child had walked through spattered paint and if its feet were like a rabbit's.

Any detective worth his salt would have known that they were Orwell's!

Orwell wasn't in the grass. He wasn't by the pond. He wasn't in or on the woodpile. He wasn't hiding in the bushes or behind the trees. He must have squeezed through the fence and gone into the park. But why? Why would Orwell run away, or walk away, as the case may be?

I opened the gate, ran down the steppingstones to the children's playground and on to the jogging trail, anxiously searching for my wayward rabbit.

Orwell was in no condition to be on his own. He couldn't run. He couldn't hop. He could only walk that crazy, high-stepping walk, which would hardly be enough to keep him out of danger.

If he was in the park, he wasn't where I could find him. I kept moving. Down the sidewalk, into other people's yards, down the street, my heart beating faster with each passing, bunnyless minute.

Where in the Sam Hill universe was Orwell?

Eventually, red-faced, frantic, and out of breath, I came to the boulevard where the traffic runs in a perpetual race to the expressway past the neon-lit windows of the Saturn-Mart, and there, out in the road beside the grassy median, I spied a flattened, furry lump.

My heart sank into my shoes. My mouth went completely dry.

Orwell?

I stood on the sidewalk and trembled, straining to see beyond the blurry stream of cars. It wasn't trash that someone had discarded from an open window. It wasn't a plastic bag the wind had carried from the Saturn-Mart. It wasn't carpeting, or a blown-out tire, or a single athletic shoe.

It was an animal, a small furry animal. And it was dead.

And it smelled bad. Really bad. Even worse than the exhaust fumes from the cars. As I stood there with my overloaded brain shooting sparks inside my skull, trying to make out the shape of the deceased, a whiff of it hit me full in the face.

I knew that stink. Everybody knows that stink.

Skunk!

The creature in the road, who was no more, was a skunk. Solemnly, I said a prayer for the poor, unlucky white-striped stiff. I said another one for Orwell. Wherever he had gone, thank God, it wasn't here.

The newspaper subscription, prepaid by the lottery winners who had lived across the street, ran out the very day that Orwell walked away.

Coincidence? Perhaps. In any event, its effect was that I had no contact with my rabbit. Not a sighting. Not a single word.

I was worried.

Worry had gotten into me like a fever. It sat in my stomach and it occupied my brain. It wouldn't go away no matter what I told myself, no matter how I tried to console myself by saying, "He's OK, he'll be back, he's just off exploring for a while."

Worry was waiting for me the moment I woke up. It followed me like a noise throughout the day, constant, grating, distracting.

At night, when my head sank into the puffy pillow that my grandmother had bought for me, I tried to make the worry go away by praying, but the persistent thought that somewhere out there my rabbit was walking upright to his doom, his knees bent, his body straight like a Cossack dancer, strolling blindly into death, denied me the comfort that prayer sometimes provides.

On the second night, there was a thunderstorm, a violent one, with lightning illuminating the sky. One especially impressive bolt shook the house when it crashed into a tree in the park. The winds blew hard. In the far distance, where sometimes I hear the sounds of trains, a tornado siren cried.

It was not the kind of night to be outside.

When Lewis and Clark pushed up the Missouri, across the Continental Divide and down the Columbia through the great forests of the Pacific Northwest, they endured every kind of weather I've ever seen. Surely a rabbit, born and raised outdoors, could make it through a night or two. Surely. That's what I told my brain to think about.

Where was Orwell? What was he doing? And how was I to go about finding him? Losing a wild rabbit is not like losing a dog or a cat. You can't post signs around the neighborhood or run an ad in the newspaper and expect to get results.

If ever a private detective were needed, I told myself, it was now.

I got out of bed and turned on the light. I sat down at my desk with pen and paper and began to make a list.