Read The Rabbit Factory: A Novel Online
Authors: Larry Brown
D
omino, cruising in the dark, listened to “White Freight Liner Blues” while he was wearing the earphones and thought it was pretty kickass, and he ate one of the dead cop’s fresh-fried bologna on whites with mayonnaise. It felt strange to be eating a dead man’s supper, but he was hungry and upset and trying to calm down. This was all Hamburger’s fault. Domino had moved the cruiser and hidden it about a half mile down the road and then jogged back to the reefer truck and loaded the whitetail. He was trying to reassure himself that everything was going to be all right. That nothing had changed. There was no reason to change his plans. He
couldn’t
change his plans. He had to drop off the weed and get the money whether he dropped off the lion meat or not. He was going to go on with his routine, drive on up to Oxford, hit C&M Package across from the hospital, get a pint of bourbon, hit Pizza Den on University Avenue for maybe a whole muffaletta instead of a roast beef with gravy and a big bag of chips and go right on down the street to the Ole Miss Motel and check in. The whitetail was in the back and would stay good and cold in there overnight. He knew he needed to gut it sometime. Pretty soon. He had the knife. He could always do that after he dropped the weed off. Tomorrow. Tomorrow would be a better day. Tonight he could talk to the Pakistani man when he checked in and then lie in the slightly seedy Ole Miss Motel and eat his sandwich and drink his bourbon and watch some nature shows on the television with the volume turned up and try not to think about what he had done. It had taken him a long time to stop thinking about what he had done to Doreen, not that he ever actually had stopped, but it had taken him a long time to get to the place where he didn’t just think about it constantly while he was chopping cotton or picking it down at Parchman. He knew this thing was going to be the same way. But at least tonight he’d be in the motel, and he’d have the bourbon, and he could drink it until he was drunk, and then he could sleep. Tomorrow would be a better day. And each day after that it would get dimmer in his mind. Or at least he hoped it would. He didn’t want to let himself think about whether the guy had a family or not. He hadn’t been wearing a wedding ring. But that didn’t mean he didn’t have a family. He must have had somebody. Out there in the world somewhere there was probably somebody who would miss him. Maybe even cry over him. He’d wished a million times that he’d had somebody who would have cried over him, instead of leaving him in a fucking garbage can in Tupelo. And who was that in the
bag
? Why was somebody
in
a bag?
He finished the sandwich and balled up the zip-lock thing it had been in and threw it out the window. When he rolled the window up, the red temperature light was on in the dash.
Oh shit.
He took the earphones off his ears and his foot off the gas and slowed down. The red light didn’t go off. It stayed on. He didn’t understand it. He’d driven this same truck down this same road plenty of times, all up and down I-55, out to Como a million times delivering steaks, all over Memphis delivering meat, and it had never once gotten hot on him. It wasn’t even that old. It couldn’t be over two or three years old. The reefer box and the refrigeration unit were used, but the truck chassis and engine were pretty new. So why was it hot?
He was going to have to shut it off. That was all there was to it. If he didn’t stop and shut it off, it would ruin the engine. Lock it up. If it ruined the engine, he wouldn’t be able to drive it anywhere. He’d be stuck.
How far had he come? Five miles? Ten? He’d started eating the sandwich as soon as he’d left. And how long had that taken? Five minutes? How far could you travel in five minutes? Not far enough. Not nearly far enough away from what he’d left behind him.
Shit. Was he around any houses? He didn’t see any right at the moment. He was going very slow now. There were just some fields where it looked like cotton had been picked. There was what looked like a junked school bus on the side of the road. There was a broken-down house with brown wilted kudzu all over it that the frost had killed. There was a cotton gin down here somewhere but he didn’t think he was close to it yet. He thought there might be some houses around it. Somebody might have a phone. But who was he going to call?
Whatever he did he couldn’t keep going. He was going to have to shut the truck off. Pretty soon. Before it cracked a head or something. If he cracked the head, he’d have to call a wrecker. And the wrecker would have to tow it to a shop. And the truck wouldn’t be running. And all that stuff in the back would start to thaw out after ten or twelve hours. And if it thawed out and stayed thawed out long enough, it would start stinking. And that pound of weed was back there. And it would be a big stinking melted mess of meat. And the whitetail was back there. And all that might look kind of funny to somebody in town. It might look funny to some shop mechanic. Who might call the game warden. Who might poke around in there and decide it was too much for him and call the city police.
He stopped. He didn’t have any choice. The light was burning bright:
HOT
. And now steam was coming up from the hood.
Son of a bitch. He was right on the highway. He started up again, looking for someplace to at least get it off the road. There was a green sign up there. Maybe there was a side road there. He knew it was getting hotter and hotter. It hit him then. They were going to find out he’d killed that cop, was what was going to happen. Either that or catch him with the weed. Then they were going to send him back to the penitentiary. He was going to be back in prison. Maybe even on death row this time.
No he wasn’t. He was going to get out of this shit someway. He wasn’t going back to that place. He sped up a little. The green sign got closer. The green sign said
PAPA JOHNNY ROAD
. He didn’t have any choice. He swung onto the dirt road, went around a curve behind some trees, and pulled to the edge of it, off on the left, and killed the motor. Then the lights.
The motor was making a horrible noise. Even with his bad ear, he could hear it just fine. It was rattling and he could dimly hear steam hissing and now it was just boiling out all over the hood.
Now he was really scared. The motor was knocking like hell and something sounded like it was frying. He opened the door. The interior light came on and he reached down for the black rubber-coated flashlight, one of those six-cell things that would sit flat on the floor without rolling around. He reached under the steering wheel on the left and pulled the hood latch.
He got out and went around to the front. He turned the flashlight on. That’s when he saw the broken piece of whitetail horn that was sticking into the radiator. If his hearing hadn’t been so bad and Perk’s car hadn’t been so loud, he probably would have heard the radiator hissing a lot sooner. But. The pimply prison guard had taken care of that for him a long time before. Kind of like a preordained thing or a snowball effect when you considered all the elements over the years.
I
t was cold where Perk and what was left of Frankie lay in the dark and the snowy woods. No cars passed on the road and it was late now. Snow drifted down from the black limbs above in silent dropping and piled up and became deeper and began to cover up Perk’s face, which was on its side and surprised with one open blue staring eye, and settled in his hair, even melted a little on the neck of his cooling body, but not much longer. The temperature was steadily falling and falling, dropping toward zero, rare cold for this country of snakes and cows and flathead catfish.
Except for the wind, it was very quiet.
In the silent dark, the trunks of the trees stood somehow unclear against the growing white carpet, which itself had no light and showed itself only because it was white. Something moved out there at a distance, out beyond the dead trees slanted among their living brothers, out behind an old rusted fence. The first coy-dog drifted out of the woods and lifted its nose high. A mongrel mix born in a culvert. Like a shark it would eat anything. Its muzzle threaded the air and moved until it found the fresh scent of blood and locked on it and then it began to walk forward. Behind it others slinked, quiet shapes threading their way among the silent trunks and fallen logs, the dark vines, over the dead grass beneath everything that lay waiting for the promise of spring.
T
he road was cold and deserted, winter locked in. Domino had been walking and walking and nobody at all had come along. He’d stayed next to the truck for a long time, thinking that somebody might come along, that maybe somebody who lived down Papa Johnny Road would turn in going home and stop to see if he needed any help, and the only thing he’d known to try if that happened was to maybe ask if he could get a ride up to their house with them and see if they had a phone book and try to find a shop somewhere that had twenty-four-hour towing service and repair service and maybe get the truck towed into town and try to get the radiator fixed tonight. Other than that he didn’t know what to do. He didn’t feel like he could just leave the truck with the weed in it. He didn’t want to take a chance on taking out all the boxes just to get to the one that had the weed in it with the truck still so close to where he’d killed the cop and left the bag. He was nervous about his out-of-state tag because he knew how cops were about out-of-state tags. He was torn between staying with the truck and getting away from it.
But nobody had ever come along. So he’d started walking. He’d walked and walked and walked and now his feet were hurting and his hips were hurting and the boots he had weren’t the best ones for walking. They were made more for keeping your toes warm. They were doing okay with that.
He should have gone straight. That’s what he should have done. That’s exactly what they’d told him to do when they’d let him out. The warden had actually been a pretty nice guy, and had developed somewhat of a fondness for Domino, and he’d had a short talk with him on the day he’d been released.
“Go straight, kid,” he’d said, even though Domino wasn’t a kid, the warden sitting kicked back in his chair with his ostrich-skin cowboy boots up on his desk. And Domino had assured him that he would. Now look where he was.
He had the gun hidden inside his pants and the knife was still inside his shirt. He’d thrown the Walkman and the CDs into a bunch of privet bushes. The road curved a lot and he’d already gone by the gin. It was deserted, no pickups parked out there, no lights that would indicate somebody working late inside.
He thought he’d been walking for at least an hour. Maybe over an hour. He’d taken one of the Schlitz tallboys with him, but it had been gone a long time. He wished now that he’d stuck another one in his pocket.
The more he walked, the more he thought it might be a bad idea to try to find a towing service or a repair service. What if he succeeded in getting it towed to town, but then couldn’t find a place that did overnight repairs? The stuff would thaw out if the truck sat there long enough without getting cranked up. He’d still have the same problem. What he needed was another vehicle. It didn’t even have to be a refrigerated one. If he could just get his hands on a vehicle, he could drive it back to the truck, turn the headlights on the reefer box, and pull out enough boxes to find the one that had the weed in it. Then what he could do was just drive the weed box on over to the empty house tomorrow and drop it off. Since he’d already made the phone call, they were expecting it, and the money would be there. The lion meat would all be ruined, but Mr. Hamburger would just have to understand that accidents sometimes happened. And what the hell was Hamburger going to say crossways to him now anyway? The whitetail would ruin, too, sure, but fuck that now. At least he wouldn’t get caught with the weed, close to a dead cop. And somebody dismembered in a garbage bag.
But where was he going to get a vehicle? Even if somebody came along, what was he going to do, hijack somebody? If he did hijack somebody, what was he going to do with the person after he got through with the vehicle? Kill him? Kill her? What if there were children? Where exactly was he going to stop?
But he didn’t have time to think about that for long, because by the time his good ear picked up the sound of something coming up behind him, he was already beginning to see the road getting lit up in front of him.
What if it was another cop? He had a dead cop’s gun on him and a bloody knife inside his shirt. He was down here all alone. If it was a cop, he might not have any choice but to shoot him. And then where would he be? Not in a different boat.
But it wasn’t a cop car that slowed behind him and pulled alongside him. It was a blue Dodge minivan with one headlight out, and Domino raised his hand and waved as it stopped. He couldn’t see inside it. He couldn’t tell who was driving it. He didn’t know if it was a man or a woman, or an older person or a teenager. He wasn’t going to know who it was until he opened the door, and he wasn’t going to know what to do until he opened the door, whether to come on out with the gun or not.
But he had to do something. His hand reached out for the door handle. His fingers closed around it. He pushed the button. He pulled the gun out of his pants and raised it. When he opened the door, the guy already had his hands raised. He was wearing a coat and a sweater and glasses and what looked like a homemade muffler. He had wide eyes. He also had long pale fingers and wild curly hair.
“Shit! Don’t shoot!” he said. He looked like he might be an intellectual from all the books piled up on the dash and the seat.