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A Rabbit’s Cry

Jim Santore

    A fat, silver band of highway runs west from the train station seven miles before it sails south; all the while following a narrowing river overflowing with silt and clay. There are no bridges along this stretch of road, as it crosses no water, following the river like a shadow. The waterside cradles short, rocky bluffs, lined with cedars and white pines. Deer, squirrels, and birds browse the twigs, buds, and bark that hug the steel guardrail forming the fence line between primitive and refined. To the west of the road lay the polished objects of urbanity: pizza shops, dry cleaners, gas stations, convenience stores. Side streets like chubby fingers stretch from the main artery, harboring neat, angular tudor homes built upon neat, rectangular lots of leafy grass. These are the streets men and women, weary from work in the city, turn onto as dusk descends upon the country. And it is a few houses from the highway, off one of the squat driveways, that a short path of smooth gray brick shaded under an awning of dogwood, stretches to an arched front door cast in shadow.
    Nicolas Labonte walked along this path, stirring a pot-bellied robin that whistled and took flight, fracturing the stillness a warm wind had blown into the spring twilight. Labonte was dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and lemon tie. He was tall and quick, goateed, with darkened eyes, and sharpness along the shoulders. He was neither lanky nor brawny, but lean and wiry. His head was long (he was born with scaphocephaly, a congenital cranial disorder incurring damage to the nervous system, and characterized by a long, narrow head), the skin pockmarked around the cheeks, and he wore his black hair short, and parted to the left. He walked with the upright air of a sovereign, and this was his castle.
    On this final evening of his life, Labonte hung his keys gently on the deer head shaped iron hook in the foyer, his black loafers clicking lightly along the wood flooring until entering a freshly carpeted bedroom. The entire home smelled of vanilla - his favorite.
    “And what have we here?” Nicolas placed his large hands in his pockets, casually rocking back and forth.
*
    He had grown up fast - literally growing fast. By the sixth grade he was five foot ten, and learning to use every inch to intimidate and induce his influence upon his peers and staff at school. He grew from the grit of his surroundings: a father who was a hard-hitting, union plumber; and a semi-comatose mother who served breakfast at a diner five mornings a week, then spent her afternoons smoking, drinking, and playing solitaire. Inside the Labonte home, taciturnity was the first order of affairs.
    He was twenty-three when he met her at a party. Nicolas was a Fordham senior knowing what was in front of him: not graduating from a top twenty university, it would be difficult to crack the Wall Street grind. But he did, and completed an analyst program. After that, came the MBA. He returned as an associate with a top-flight firm. He had paid his dues, manifesting his worth each day, thriving in the merit-based industry of high finance. In an alpha business, he was strong, imposing, and able to flow amongst the highest-paid, most well connected executives, eventually settling in as a very lucrative prop trader. It was Nicolas’ monomaniacal drive that charmed his future wife’s dawdling soul. She latched on right away.
*
    “There’s a rabbit in the yard. It’s eating a mouse.”
    She said this distantly, without turning her head or taking her eyes off what was happening through the window. Outside was turning to gray, dusty light that comes right before darkness. The wind had picked up. Inside, a soft lemon glow shone from a lamp sitting on a white bureau. The woman, moaning softly, kneeled upright, and pressed flat her knee-length blue dress. Her eyes steadied on her husband’s.
    “You said there’s a rabbit eating a mouse?” He took a long step closer to the window - closer to her - pants swishing through the silence. “That’s strange. Rabbits don’t eat meat. One shouldn’t get near an animal when it acts out of character.”
*
    The woman’s path to this moment in time was less symmetrical. She attended a private, all girls’ high school on the Upper East Side, studying global literature - which she continued throughout college. Her parents were rich, very rich. “Well-bred,” is what Nicolas liked to say. Laid-back, bordering on apathy, she held a string of relatively low-level jobs - faxing, answering phones at her father’s firm; very part-time set designer for a small, very small theater; sporadic, random tutoring gigs - after graduation. Now she wasn’t working. The carpets often felt like quicksand; the wood floors yielding to the pressure of her footsteps – bowing inwards, drawing her down. More and more she found herself repeating a bizarre phrase, often in a whiny, childish voice:
    “But I went to Cornell.”
    When pricing grapes, or wondering whether it would be better to plant crocuses or some sort of colorful annual bordering the front path, or cooking steak tartare for Nicolas, even while negotiating his choler - she all choked-up with tears and nasally mucus, all slashed and discolored - she’d say it to herself, never aloud:
    “But I went to Cornell.”
    Huddling in the corner, her hands frozen, open wide in order to cover as much area as possible. She knew it sounded ridiculous (even within her own head), but it was there all the same. Kind of like a mantra - her inner tag line.
*
    The woman turned back to the window. Her brown hair was tied back, and now her thin, milky hands were under her chin, her arms flat along the sill. Nicolas sensed that she’d emotionally checked out. He began to grind his teeth, looking at her, at the darkening sky.
    She finally replied. “Yes, you’re right. It can kill them. Eating meat. I looked it up.”
    “Just don’t go outside. It could be rabid.”
    “You’re right. It would be foolish to be near something so dangerous.” If Nicolas didn’t know any better (but he did), he could have sworn...Absurdity.
    Outside, a rabbit continued tearing into a dead mouse. Its fuzzy front paws had pinned down the rodent; its egg-shaped body, all brown and gray and white, lay splayed on the lawn. The rabbit was next to a tall wooden fence, and was digging in like a dog with a meaty bone.
*
    “You look like you’re feeling better - physically,” Nicolas said. This was a question, and hung a moment, as Nicolas took off his suit jacket, and conscientiously hung it over the crib rail, then crossed his arms, one hand folded under, the left hand hugging his firm bicep.
    The woman lifted her chin off her hands, turning her head to the man. “My side still hurts. I think it’s my kidney.” She said this blandly, and they held eye contact for a long while.
    “It is your kidney,” said Nicholas. He dipped his head down, smiled, and said cheerfully, expectantly, “Now let’s eat some dinner.” Nicholas turned to leave the room, but his wife’s voice stopped him. She was once again looking out the window.
    “They sleep with their eyes open too.”
    “Who?”
    “I guess it’s because they’re prey animals.” Perhaps she didn’t, or couldn’t hear him. “They’re constantly on the lookout for the next crisis. It’s just around the corner, you know.”
    “You’ve spent so much time on this - you and your rabbit. I’m impressed.”
    “And the mouse.”
    “What?” Nicholas’ mouth fluttered, but he pulled it back, his grip on his right arm constricting.
    “Don’t forget the mouse.” She turned again, and soberly looked him in the eyes.
    “And the mouse.”
    “I’m tired,” the woman said, and took a deep breath, and turned her focus back toward the window.
    Imperceptibly, even to Nicolas, his other muscles began to tighten. He dropped his arms down to his sides, his large hands pressing into fists.
    “Okay,” he said. “Enough of this fun. I’m starved.” He delivered this in an upbeat tone, and with the crack of a cannon, he clapped his hands, turned on his heels militaristically, and walked out the room. A moment later, he jabbed his head in the doorway, saying kindly, “A guilty conscience needs no accuser.” He smiled, displaying a perfect row of large, white upper teeth; creases deep around his eyes; and two dimples rounded like apples - and almost as big - appearing on those pockmarked cheeks.
*
    On the other side of the window, darkness was being pulled over the sky like a hood. The woman got up, turned off the light and moved back toward the glass, her hands upon the sill, waiting for her eyes to adjust to darkness. The rabbit’s head was jerking up and down, six, seven times, until it had ripped the mouse in half. With a chunk of the mouse’s upper - or was it bottom half - in its mouth, the rabbit moved a few feet away toward an immaculate gray shed standing at the far left corner of the yard. The air was still now, and atop the other half of the mouse, the one left behind by the rabbit, flies were whirling, resting upon the carcass. A rapping of knuckles on the dining room table brought the woman’s thoughts back inside.
    “Dinner.”
    The word sent a shiver through her very being.
    She felt something. It started from the bottom of her spine and shot its way up through her throat, exploding in her brain, and causing her to smile violently. Outside, the moon was showing herself, hovering like a balloon. The woman heard herself whisper, sort of laughing as she said it. Was it even her?
    “Shhh. Quiet down, mouse.”

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