The Rabbit Factory: A Novel by Larry Brown Read Free Book Online

sealed cooler of a reefer truck that he used for deliveries. He put the prefrozen, marked weed box in first. He had to make several trips because there was so much lion meat today, as well as a package wrapped in garbage bags and already frozen, heavily taped. The work order stated that he was to dump it somewhere but not give it to the lions. It was probably guts. He put his arms around it when he picked it up.
    He was actually looking forward to going back out in the country and making his casual rounds. He was already thinking about a Pizza Den sandwich for supper.
    He went up to the empty second-floor office and smoked part of a cigar outside on the rusty fire escape, high above the river, since Mr. Hamburger didn’t like smoking inside. It was snowing again, flakes drifting down on the brown, moving water, falling far out there over in Arkansas, like a picture. He watched a tugboat come by, heading upstream with three barges, way out there. He could see a deckhand walking around. No telling where the guy was going. Lucky fucker. Going up the river like that, you’d probably see some whitetails drinking water. That would be like a picture, too.
    He went back down and ground the fresh meat up and shaped it into some mounded two-pound packages and pulled some shrink-wrap over the white foam pans. He always wrote “Hamburger Dog” on them, but today either some asshole had stolen his Magic Marker or he couldn’t find it, so he just left them blank. It was no big deal. Mr. Hamburger knew what it was. He’d written the work order. After that he went back out and stuck them in the back of the reefer truck and cranked it up. They wouldn’t freeze hard before he got to Como. It wasn’t the first time he’d fixed up a bunch of dog food for his boss. He was supposed to deliver the dog food out to Mr. Hamburger’s house on his lion-trip way out of town, as usual. He never had seen the dog on his trips out there because he’d never gone into the house. But he figured the dog had to be a big bastard, as much meat as Mr. Hamburger had sent out there. Maybe he was a Rottweiler. Or a mastiff. All he knew was that he was glad he didn’t have to pay for his dog-food bill.
    He’d wondered often why Mr. Hamburger was always in such a bad mood. He’d almost bite your head off if you said good afternoon, so naturally nobody ever did.

12
     
     
    M iss Muffett bumped softly on her plastic leg down the long hall, toward the cavernous kitchen she had to use. The big house in the little town of Como, thirty minutes south of Memphis just off I-55, was loud with its silence. It was a nice old town with large oaks and stately homes and mostly quiet streets. No mullet-headed punks running up and down with monster bass speakers going. You could sit out on the porch in summer. Most of the time, her boss was never there. Not these days. Not since his tragic accident six months ago. Now he tried to stay busy. He always thought he had to tend to his business in Chicago even though he was supposed to be retired. But Chicago had been good to him. So good that he’d been able to expand his meatpacking business to Memphis a few years ago. For the last few nights he’d been working in his shop out back. She’d seen the limo pull in there a few nights ago. But she never went out there except to get some meat out of one of his coolers. She didn’t want to bother him. She guessed he tried to work out his anger with work. He was the one who’d insisted she help him dig the postholes so that he could fence in the backyard for the little dog. She’d told him three times she was scared of machinery. She didn’t blame him for being angry with her. But it wasn’t exactly the kind of thing they could talk about either. The doctors had already said there was nothing they could do for him. Just like with her leg and her daddy’s boat motor out on Sardis Lake so many years ago. Her daddy didn’t mean to cut her leg off with the prop. And it almost