The Rabbit Factory: A Novel (16 page)

He swept up and fed the birds and the gerbils. He looked to see how many rabbits they had now besides the one breeding pair. Four half-grown ones in a cage, two white, one brown, one black-and-white spotted. Eric had already put the buck back in with the doe so that there’d be another fresh batch coming along in about two weeks or less. Rabbits didn’t sell very well unless they were furry babies and cute and made kids want them and throw screaming temper tantrums, wanting them to the point where they’d get down on their hands and knees and beat their heads on a concrete floor, and it was hard in the pet-shop business to keep yourself supplied with young bunnies unless you could breed them right there on the premises, but the problem with that was that some tended to get not bought and unless you disposed of them some way, then they themselves grew to breeding age rapidly and started making rabbits by the cageful, and it could turn into a pretty expensive, buying-rabbit-feed-by-the-Purina-fifty-pound-bag-and-carrying-lots-of-buckets-of-rabbit-shit-out-somewhere operation pretty soon, as Eric’s boss, Mr. Studebaker, had found out, not knowing much about the pet shop business at first, just always wanting a pet store kind of like the random kid who never got a Gibson Les Paul or a Telecaster for Christmas but instead some crummy microscope. But Eric didn’t mind. Eric gladly took care of the extra rabbits for him about once every three weeks. There was a dirty parking lot out back where the Dumpsters and the empty skids and the bundled-up and flattened cardboard boxes sat and he kept a hammer handle by the back door, and once he was outside with the rabbit hanging upside down in his hand, by both back legs, all it took was a simple really hard
WHAM!
between the ears, and then it was a dead rabbit, nothing but meat to dress. He was so practiced that he could do it back there in just a few minutes with a keen Old Timer he’d used on probably a hundred squirrels and maybe two hundred rabbits down in Mississippi. Heads feet and guts in the Dumpster. Hope no kids come along and look in. Each pet shop bunny yielded a carcass of about two pounds of clean white meat that you could cut up and dip in an egg-and-milk batter and then roll in some seasoned flour and drop into a black iron skillet with some hot oil and let it crisp up golden brown. Let it simmer a while on low with the lid over it after it was done, it was just as good as fried chicken. Maybe better. His daddy had showed him how to make some gravy in the skillet with a little flour and salt and pepper, and you could open one of those five-biscuit cans of biscuits and stick them in the oven, and when they were done, it was as good a meal as any man could want. He didn’t have a place to cook them just yet, so he was saving them in plastic bags in the freezer section of an old refrigerator in the back. And it was getting pretty full.

He gave a parakeet some water. He threw into the garbage a white, stiffened rat. He checked on Jada Pinkett, who was still snoozing and slobbering on the back seat. He’d finished Effinger’s book and he’d read all the Philip K. Dick that he had and he had a ragged hardback
Martin Eden
by Jack London that he’d found cheapat Xanadu bookstore, on Winchester. And he thought maybe reading would take his mind off Miss Helen, but he didn’t know if it really would or not. He couldn’t get it out of his mind. The way she’d looked. The way she’d smelled. And then somebody came in. He had a monkey inside his battered leather flight jacket.

Eric stood up and said, uncertainly: “Hey. What’s up.”

He was a small older man, a bit larger than a jockey, dark skin, somewhat hunched. An elfin Eskimo.

“I have a primate I wish to sell,” he murmured, his eyes roaming mildly from side to side in their sockets. “It’s a Malaysian Gibboon. His name is Bobby.”

The monkey was no bigger than a squirrel. It was gnawing its fingernails like a nervous woman and rolling its eyes fearfully.

“Looks like a squirrel monkey to me,” Eric said. “But we don’t buy nothin’ from the public. We got dealers we deal with.”

The little man wore gloves without tips at the fingers, and he stroked the monkey’s head while he looked around the shop, taking the time to turn to the individual faces of those animals and birds that weren’t asleep.

“The loneliness of the cage,” he mused. “Your cage, mine. What does it matter whose? Somebody cages us all, don’t they?”

“Excuse me?” Eric said. The guy looked wacko but the monkey just looked sick. Its eyes were dull and mucus was coming from its nostrils. The guy had a Kleenex in his hand, had obviously been wiping its nose.

It probably had some disease. That thing didn’t need to be in here. Old fellow looked bad, though. He hated to run him out. But he had to think about his job, too, since Mr. Studebaker also cut him a deal on ear-mite drops and heartworm pills for Jada Pinkett.

“Look, mister,” he said. “I ain’t tryin’ to be ugly or nothin’ but that thing looks sick to me and I know my boss wouldn’t want a sick animal in here with all his healthy ones. I think you need to take it to the vet or somethin’.”

Eric watched as some tears broke from the corners of the little man’s eyes. Something seemed to have cracked inside him.

“There’s nothing wrong with Bobby,” he said. “Bobby’s gonna be okay. Aren’t you, boy?”

He looked down at the animal and rubbed the top of its head and it vomited a thin dribble of foamy yellow puke down its front and over his jacket and hand. And then he just lost it and cried and cried, stood there, shaking but almost soundless, bent over slightly and holding the nasty shivering thing close to him.

“Mister. Come on.
Please?
You need to get that thing on out of here.”

He hated to have to say that. But there wasn’t anything he could do for him. Maybe he’d had him a long time. Maybe he was like his kid to him. You never knew. Some people bought sweaters for their dogs or wore them around in bags on their chests like papooses. He’d seen that once in Nashville. But you could see a lot of stuff in Nashville. Like some real pretty whores on the sidewalks, walking around in hot pants. You could just buy them. If you had the money.

“I thought maybe you could save him for me,” the elf wept. “I can’t afford the proper veterinary care.”

Eric didn’t know what to say after he saw all that. After a while the elf gave up and turned and shuffled out with his monkey. Eric stepped to the door and for a long time watched him go up the sidewalk surrounding the mall. He could see him stopping to talk to people, and people turning away from him. Some had Christmas gifts already. Others were holding hands. A lot of them seemed to be happy. Up the sidewalk the little man was still stopping people. But not very many of them stopped for long. They all had their own Christmas deals going probably.

Wayne and Henderson stood on the deck at about 1500, looking down, a sunny afternoon but cold, watching them surround in boats the whale mother below in the mostly deserted Atlantic. Even from high up there, Wayne could see the three terrible cuts across her side, and the bulge of her gray intestines spilling out into the water with some blood. A Greenpeace boat out of Norfolk had pulled next to them and the water between the enormous ship and the environmentalists’ vessel was stained red. Everybody was looking for sharks.

“That’s a lowdown dirty shame,” Henderson said. “That thing swimmin’ around free as a bird. Nursin’ that baby like a cow.”

“They ain’t gonna catch that calf, neither,” Wayne said. No shit. The Greenpeace guys had brought rope nets with floats and had made an effort with small motorboats to herd the calf into one of them, but the calf had turned over one of the motorboats and almost drowned three of the six volunteers who were on it by hitting them, in its fear and panic, with its tail a couple of times, which should have been no big surprise since it weighed a couple of thousand pounds. One of the Greenpeacers had a concussion and a few subdural hematomas and a broken nose and three broken fingers and had to be airlifted out by one of the Coast Guard choppers sitting on the deck. They had given up after that, and now they were all just kind of sitting around watching it, and watching the mother die. The calf was shy now and hung back.

All the newspeople had left on orders from the Pentagon because the Pentagon was pissed. So many people wanted to get up on the flight deck that the captain came over the intercom and said he didn’t think it was much of a thing to watch, kind of like a flood, but those who wanted to could go up in shifts if they were off duty.

“Shit,” Henderson said, looking at Wayne. “Cap’n all worried about his job now he done had a collision. All he usually worried about is gettin’ him a cold Schlitz after supper and kickin’ back to watch
Bonanza.
”

“How you know he drinks Schlitz?” Wayne said.

“Poo-Head. Works in the officers’ mess. Takes him one up.”

They looked down. The wind was blowing in Wayne’s face and the bottoms of his bell-bottoms were wet. The whale lay on her side, trying to maintain her position so that she could still blow her exhaled air out of the water. She rose and fell slightly with the motion of the ocean. The Seals and the Greenpeace guys had surrounded her with their little flotilla of boats and nets. Some of them were touching her. Still others at her head were saying things to her. She was almost too weak to move now and the Seals were not scared of anything anyway. Nobody knew when they were going back. That decision hadn’t been made just yet. That decision was up to somebody bigger than the captain. All Wayne knew was that they were going back. And he felt bad for the whales. He decided he would stay on the deck as long as he could.

He and Henderson stayed out there until dark. Wayne worked for a while in the armory and let a couple of marines check out their M-14s so they could clean them for an inspection. He read a woodworking magazine and cut his fingernails. He thought about Anjalee and wondered what she was doing right now. She might even be sitting in that same bar.

After a few more hours, his relief came in and he went for a roast beef sandwich with hot mustard but didn’t see Henderson in the galley. He talked to some boys he knew who were flight deckhands and they’d been watching the whale event unfold, too. One of them said it looked to him like the whale would die pretty soon and another one said he thought it might take days.

After he finished eating, he still wasn’t sleepy, so he went back up to see if he could get back on deck and he could. The lights were up on the bridge as if for flight operations. He walked to the edge of the sailors, who all had their pea coats on now with the chill night air, and he was surprised to look down and see that the Seals and some of the Greenpeace guys were still in the water dumping shark repellant and using lamps they had rigged on their boats as well as some spotlights from the carrier. It was still about the same story. Lurking nearby was the calf. Wayne could see it, a vague shape under the water waiting around at the edge of the men and boats that were gathered around its mother.

It kept spouting, and now it had started a weird crying that Wayne could hear even high up on the deck. A thin keening, and dark all around, except for the pools of light down there in and on the water, and the swells rocking the whalesavers’ boat, and even when Wayne stood there another hour, she wasn’t dead. He was almost frozen by then. The group on deck got smaller and smaller. Finally he had to go, too.

Wayne set his alarm and thought about Anjalee for a long time. He built houses in Ohio for the two of them in his mind. He heard Henderson come in just before he fell asleep.

The clock went off at 0600 and Wayne hit it with his hand and then lay there. It was dark except for a tiny light over LeBonte’s bed, and he wasn’t in the bed. He lay on his back, warm under his wool blanket. He couldn’t hear anything but Henderson doing a slight droning number.

He dressed quietly and put on his pea coat and went back up on the deck. It was very cold. Only a few sailors were out there. Dawn was just breaking and the ship was making a long slow turn under a weak orange light against the horizon, smeared gray clouds over it. The rocking swells were wide and there was nothing on the horizon but more of them. He looked down. The mother whale was gone, along with the calf. All the navy divers were out of the water. The Greenpeace boat was only a memory now.

“She drowned,” a guy next to Wayne said.

He thought about that. To be born in water and die in it.

“What about the calf?”

“I don’t know, man. I guess it figured we wasn’t cool after we killed its mama.”

The sailor had his hands in his jacket pockets and he motioned toward the water with his elbow.

“One of the Seals, he said he thought it was asking us for help.”

“I heard it,” Wayne said, and he suddenly wanted hot sausage and three over easy and knew he could have them. Toast and jelly. Hash browns. And he was going back to Memphis somehow. When he found her this time, he wasn’t going to let her go.

He kept standing there. He hated to think about it out there in the wide open, a baby, swimming along all by itself, looking for a new pod where it could hang. How would it find others of its own kind? Was it calling to them, even now? He knew they sang to each other, from Iceland to Jamaica. Were the songs bouncing off underwater cliffs that went deep into the water? How did anybody know how far those songs could go?

He just hoped it would live, after all the shit it had gone through. He hoped for that as hard as he’d ever hoped for anything in his life. Not counting kissing Anjalee naked in a bed.