The Rabbit-People's Chritmas

 The Rabbit-People’s Christmas

The rabbit-people lived on a busy street.  Although the neighborhood was residential for ten blocks in both directions, the thoroughfare linked downtown with a sector of shopping malls and churches among large cemeteries on the outskirts of our city.  At most hours of the day and night, traffic on the street made backing out from garages adjacent to the homes challenging.  The rabbit-people were fortunate; an alley behind their two-story brick house provided access to their garage, also a square cottage-like structure brick-built and windowless with a pyramid-shaped roof, the detached outbuilding equipped with a two-car-wide aluminum door that rode up and down on a grooved track.  When the garage door was open, passers-by in the alley could scent ammonia and fetid vegetables inside, the stink of several obese rabbits confined in plywood hutches shoved against the car-port’s back wall.  

Sometimes, I walked my dog along the alley.  Evidently, the rabbit-hutches and the barrels of food pellets along with water troughs had crowded out the rabbit-people’s vehicles.  A pick-up truck, battered van, and a big white boat on the scaffold of a pale trailer were parked in the alley, narrowing the right of way to a slender track between garbage pails and wood-slat fences and the other dark, ruinous garages.  Normally, I hustled my dog past the garage after sunset or before dawn, the animal straining against the leash and lunging in the direction of the rabbit-hutches.  Often, the garage door was raised and I could see into the enclosed space.  In the dark, the rabbits were mostly invisible in the shadows, some tufts of moon-white fur behind wire-mesh where huge, wet eyes glinted.  In the adjacent patio, behind a waist-high masonry wall, there was a grill shaped like a metal cigar, some planters in which the spidery, tangled wreckage of winter-killed flowers made a fringe atop the stone-work, and a big, oval hot-tub entombed under cedar slats.  Plastic toys that were red and orange and blue (some of them with small wheels) were strewn about the patio – the rabbit people had two boys who seemed to be twins and a little girl.  The children had shrill voices and I heard them squealing sometimes as their mother loaded them into the old van to take them to school or, perhaps, day-care. 

One Spring day, while walking my dog along the busy street in front of the rabbit-people’s house, I observed a small blue wading pool situated near the concrete stoop leading to the home’s front door.  Chicken-wire had been stretched along the iron stakes of the rabbit-people’s fence around their front yard.  Among the shrubs, I saw two shelters made from canvas stretched taut between metal rods pounded into the leaf-litter between small lilac bushes planted along the home’s facade.  The rabbits were lolling in the grass, stretched out on the lawn.  It was the first time that I had seen the animals clearly.  There were two black Belgian giants, heavy-set rabbits with upright ears, shallow, tilted pockets lined with soft white fur.  The ears were like the antennae of an insect, vaguely grotesque, and the big rabbits had muscular hind-quarters with hoof-shaped paws.  Three smaller rabbits with frayed floppy ears were daintily nibbling grass, noses twitching.  Two of the floppy-eared rabbits were female and the little, squat male sometimes amused himself by mounting one or the other of them.  The females seemed indifferent to his attentions.  The lawn was bright with dandelions and the grass was green, sprouting in tufts from where the rabbits had fertilized it, and the scene was idyllic.  The lady of the house, wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat was trimming the lilac bushes heavy with purple grape-shaped blossoms.  

“I like your rabbits,” I said.

My dog trotted back and forth, pulling on the leash, along the chicken wire base strung along the base of the fence.  The rabbits weren’t concerned about the dog and ignored her.

“We decided to let them live out here,” the lady told me.  Her husband emerged from the side-door of the house, lugging tartan-colored bag of golf clubs.  “We are letting the rabbits be rabbits,” he said in a merry voice.  The little boys tagged along behind him.    

The big, boat, sleek and stream-lined like a space-craft was now parked along the curb on the busy street.  The van and the pickup were sheltered in the garage that the rabbits had previously occupied.   After the thaw, we had seen teenagers gathering in the alley between the garages after dark and there had been some beer bottles smashed on the asphalt.  Down the street, someone had painted the word Sur with some crooked-looking digits across the vinyl siding of one of the garages.  It seemed prudent to keep vehicles behind closed doors in the garages.  Perhaps, this accounted-for the transfer of the rabbits from the garage into the front-yard. Or, maybe, there was some sort of feud between the neighbors living next to the rabbit-people.  Transforming the front yard of the rabbit-people’s home into an open-air hare habitat seemed a bit aggressive, even an affront.  The lawns next to where the rabbits lived were very neatly maintained, sprayed with chemicals that could reputedly poison dogs and cats, and those lush green carpets were scrubbed and polished and devoid of the dandelions that grew in bright constellations all across the rabbit-people’s front yard. 

The thick green grass behind the chicken-wire in the front lawn didn’t last for very long.  Evidently, the rabbit-people didn’t know much about the actual habits of rabbits.  The creatures burrowed through the turf and reduced the grass to trampled, turd-brown dust.  After a couple months, the lawn looked an exemplary fragment of a First World War battlefield.  The rabbits had excavated narrow trenches along the fence-line, attempt to undermine the iron staves that kept them imprisoned.  In warm weather, they cooled their furry bellies in concave depressions rooted into the earth. (Fortunately, we were in the third year of a drought without respite and so the rabbit enclosure was mostly dry, but, when it did rain, the pits and craters filled up with water and the mud took on a particularly loathsome and greasy appearance.)  The rabbits chewed around the base of the lilac bushes and reduced them to bouquets of bare sticks and twigs.  Water in the toddler’s wading pool began to fester under a green-yellow scum that attracted green and black flies.  The little floppy-eared male relentlessly raped the floppy-haired females.  One of the Flemish giants lost an eye somehow and the pink socket was inflamed and oozing withe puss.  Someone saw a wild rabbit in the neighborhood and the hare had a flesh-colored growth, a stiff horny carapace above its eyes shaped a bit like a branching coral growing in the chest-deep water of some tropical sea.  People whispered that the deformed rabbit had acquired its illness from the impounded rabbits, possibly the big black and white Belgian with the missing eye.  Once, when I was walking my dog, another neighbor told me confidentially that he planned to make a complaint to the town’s animal control officer. 

“I want to be a good neighbor,” the man told me, “but...”

An old lady came twice a week and pitched raw carrots into the enclosure.  The rabbits sniffed at the carrots as if they were toxic and the vegetables, so brightly orange that they seemed to glow from within like flames on a birthday cake, were strewn all over the lawn, gradually decaying into black shriveled husks.

Then, it was Fall and the rabbit-people hung some skeletons outlined in fairy lights in their windows and set plastic pumpkins by their door illumined by small bulbs on cords plugged into an outside wall-socket.  The big white boat was retrieved from the marina on the river where it had spent the warm-weather months.  Once again, it was parked in front of the house for the season, also a violation of city ordinances.  The first snow fell and I wondered whether the white flakes would cover the ravaged lawn all pock-marked with rabbit burrows.  But the rabbits trampled and ground the snow into the dirty soil and there was never of the stuff to cover up the pellets and rotting carrots and dismal eroded bales of straw resting here and there in the mud.  

Three weeks before Christmas, the rabbits were gone.  The chicken-wire had been rolled into a bundle propped against the brick facade of the house among the shattered lilac bushes.  The droopy canvas shelters had been taken apart and the metal stakes uprooted from the lawn.  The noisome wading pool was no longer to be seen and the straw bales had been lugged off.

The rabbit-people replaced the four animals with an elaborate Christmas display. Colored lights were strung along the top of the fence just below the fleur de lis spikes crowning each iron post. Larger than life-size inflatable figures billowed up above box-shaped fans concealed at their bases.  The balloon-figures bounced slightly, pulsing as if with a pneumatic heart-beat. 

Of course, other houses along the boulevard were decorated for Christmas.  A balloon Santa was tethered to the front of one of the homes, clambering up toward the roof between second-story windows.  Some bare trees were outlined in blue bulbs and, a couple blocks away, an arc of red, flickering lights swooped upward to an illumined star hanging from the bottom bough of an old gaunt elm.  But the rabbit-people’s display far exceeded these adornments, a garish cluster of big colored balloons lit from within and wobbling precariously in the cold breeze.

On her afternoon walk, my dog paused and sniffed the air, still scented, I suppose, with the now-departed rabbits.  The hiss of the blowers and the twitching inflatables, writhing as the air filled them and straining against their pillowy rounded tops alarmed her.  Had the rabbits been transmuted into these giant figures tugging to escape their tethers?  My dog barked at the bobbing figures and, then, growled with fear.

The rabbit-people’s father came around the side of his house toting a pair of short, slick Nordic skis.  He nodded at me and said that my dog was full-grown now, no longer a puppy.

“What happened to the rabbits?”  I asked.

The man grimaced and said that his wife had relatives who lived on a farm and –

I nodded my head.

“Quite a display,” I said, gesturing to the inflatables.

“Well, the kids like it,” he replied. He leaned the Nordic skis against the iron fence with its spiked staves.  

At the center of the front yard, moored in a tub-shaped pit that the rabbits had dug, a balloon nativity scene flared upward like a grotesque flower blossoming from where it was rooted in a fan.  The figures were cartoonish and the Baby Jesus in the manger was an formless pale tumor, a bit like some sort of larval grub; the baby had red tousled hair in a cowlick.  The balloons were tinted in bright, primary hues, like Crayola colors.  Beside the manger, a row of nutcrackers eight feet tall with gruesomely gaping jaws loomed over the scuffed and desolate dirt.  A lime-green reptilian grinch with a broad gloating smirk hovered over a sleigh filled with gifts.  In a corner of the yard, a snowman stood near the fence.  The figure was contrived in such a way that a moving pattern of red, white, and blue snowflakes were displayed in its round belly.  Santa Claus with a team of straining reindeer wiggled a little under the impact of vertical jets of air in their torsos.  The deer had broad goofy grins as well and one of them had an inflamed nose.  The naked tree above the inflatable, a dignified, burly oak, was all tarted up with flickering loops and spirals of lights.   Close to the front of the lawn, nestled against the iron fence, I saw six globe-shaped forms, about the size of bowling balls with fist-sized protruding eyes.

“What are those?” I asked the man.

“Sugar plum fairies,” he said.

“Oh, now, I see.”  

The dog was whimpering.  The array of tremulous, wobbling inflatables was uncanny and her ears were flat against her head as we walked away down the sidewalk.

Three days before Christmas, a blizzard swept down from Canada and the Dakotas.  The snow fell, aslant at first in the gusts of wind, and, then, horizontally as the storm strengthened.  At the intersections, maelstroms of snow ascended to swarm around the streetlights and long, fin-shaped drifts formed along the sidewalk, white surf arrested just as those white waves were about to topple forward.  The wind boomed along the streets and rattled the windows in the houses and the Christmas lights in the trees flapped in the wind as if about to take flight in the storm.  

Of course, the rabbit-people’s inflatables were torn loose from their stakes and tethers and were flung against the pointed prongs of the fence.  The vinyl tore and the balloons deflated, collapsing into the snow like sloughed-off snakeskin.  When the sky cleared and the temperatures dropped far below zero, the rabbit people’s front yard was a scene of complete devastation.  Hip-deep scoops of snow covered fallen balloons.  Brightly colored scraps and pennants of vinyl peeped out from under the drifts.  The nativity scene seemed to have melted like a tallow candle into a colored puddle veined with ice and snow and the marching ranks of nutcrackers in their scarlet military coats were all fallen, casualties of the blizzard.   

The ruin was disheartening.  This was festivity’s bitter terminus, the end of Christmas and the demise of the holiday spirit.  The crushed idols were frozen to the ground, red and green and blue scuffs in the field of snow.  

Two days after the New Years, my dog paused on the sidewalk, tilting her muzzle toward something that she scented among the shredded lilac bushes.  Beyond the flattened colored vinyl, a small wild rabbit was half-concealed under the barren shrubs.  The rabbit had something wrong with its head.  It was wearing a horny crown of thorns, pink-orange lesions around thumb-sized keratinous growths extruding from its skull.  The rabbit moved gingerly, pushing its nose under the snow, indifferent, it seemed, to its deformity.