Shaving the Bunny
"Cool, man, it worked!" I exclaimed, admiring the fruits of our labor. "I told you, we've got all kinds of rabbits around here." Ted, one of my two best friends, tapped the cage proudly. "And you build a good trap, so we were bound to catch one." I nodded. He was right. The trap was my design and built by us both, based off of a really common trap used to catch live animals. It had a heavy wooden door propped up by a screwdriver, and a pressure plate and spring which would dislodge the screwdriver when stepped on, allowing the door to swing closed on the animal. I'd used them before to catch swamp rats, huge, three pound monsters who would sit on an ordinary rat trap and eat the bait without a care in the world. I knew my traps worked. I believed Ted when he said there were rabbits around. What I didn't believe in was our collective ability to actually catch one. I mean, our crazy plans never worked more than once or twice a month, and those were usually the plans which involved raising hell and getting in trouble. It was a hot summer day when I rode my dirt bike seven miles through the woods to Ted's house. School had been out for a month, and we were both getting desperate for things to do. Sometimes he would come over to my house and we'd spend hours messing with the junk in our yard, a yard which he liked to compare to the scene out of Terminator 2 where they open up a buried door in the middle of these people's yard and there's a large arsenal of weapons hidden below. Other times I would go to his house, and we'd sit around in his shop, listen to heavy metal music, and tinker with his junk. He didn't have as much as I did, but his was slightly more likely to actually run, and we'd build the unlikeliest four-wheelers and gocarts anyone had ever seen. If we weren't building, we were destroying, and the whole time we would be telling lies. One day we were having a shotgun war in a pasture beside his house. We cut the ends off of shotgun shells and poured out the pellets, then shot each other with the plastic wadding beneath. The effective range wasn't very far, only twenty yards or so, but a hit always produced the most painful of bruises. As usual, I called it quits first. I had a semi-automatic 20 gauge, which was a quick firing gun, but he had a big pump 12 gauge which held more shells and I swear hurt more. We were having a good time, but we were both low on ammo, so we headed back to his house. We were just crossing the pasture fence when one of us stirred up a rabbit. Quick as a wink it dashed away, and we both fired our shotguns at it as it ran. Fortunately for the rabbit, we still only had blanks, or we would have nailed it. Ted came up with some crazy idea of killing all the local rabbits and selling the fur. I thought it sounded fun, but pointed out the problem of killing them. If we shot them, we ruined the skin. He replied with the idea of the trap, and I shrugged. I knew that fur trapping was done in the winter and that summer furs are worthless, but I didn't believe we'd catch a single rabbit, so I agreed. Now I stared down at the poor, trapped, shivering rabbit that was the result of all our hard work. "Ted," I said. "Nobody wants summer fur. They've got woolfes, and fungus, and diseases and stuff." I was considered the intellectual of the two of us, and I knew all the big words. Ted, on the other hand, was from the big city before his parents moved to the boondocks, so he had been more places and done more things. We thought it was a fair trade. He taught me to hit the ground at the sound of gunfire, and I built him a pipe bomb, the latter being cool in the days before Columbine. Only the former gained widespread acceptance, in the days following, though. He shrugged. "Anh. I don't really want to skin it, anyway." He banged on the cage, but the frightened rabbit didn't move. Generous of him. He usually got me to do all the skinning. "Wanna watch MTV? I think Beavis and Butthead is on," he said. Ordinarily I would have said yes, that being one of the perks of being his friend. We didn't have satellite at my house. But we had a responsibility to our captive. "Nah, let's do something with the rabbit." A funny quirk of rabbits came to my mind. "Hey, you know that if you scare a rabbit really bad, it can't move?" "Really?" "Yeah." I nodded. "Watch, I'm gonna take him out." He laughed. "Careful." He changed his voice into a bad approximation of a British accent. "'Es got these huge..." He hooked two fingers near his mouth like fangs and mock-lunged at me. "He'll nibble yer toes off!" I laughed. "The saber-toothed rabbit is rare around here, Ted," I replied as I opened up the cage and reached in. The rabbit trembled as I grabbed the scruff of its neck, but did little else. I stood up and cuddled it for a moment, stroking its fur and bending its ears back and forth. "Y'know, the vorpal bunny this ain't." I put the rabbit on the ground and backed away. "Watch," I said. Ted frowned. "He's gonna run for it in a minute." Good, I didn't say. "Not likely," I did say. I jumped at the rabbit, stamping the ground loudly with my feet. "RARRG!" The rabbit cowered, already having given itself up for dead. I hate things that just give up, so I nudged it in the rear with my foot, none too gently. "Go," I ordered. "You're free. Go hump yourself into oblivion." The rabbit sat there. I turned to Ted. "See? If they get too scared, they can't move." "How long will he stay there?" he asked, curious. I shrugged. "I dunno, a few hours maybe, or until we go away." "Oh. That's weird." He put the rabbit back in the cage/trap we caught it in and carried the whole thing over to his shop and put it in the deep shade. He then sat down on an old tire and played with a broken ignition switch laying there. I followed and took a seat on his welding machine. I always liked being at his house because it seemed cooler there. I suppose it was because there was a small pond right beside his house. "Hey," he said suddenly. "Ain't this Thursday?" I looked at my digital watch, then nodded. "Yeah, why?" Ted jumped up, excited. "It's chicken day at BJ's house!" I rapped myself on the head. Chicken day, of course! How could I forget? Chicken day was our term for it. Actually, it was the day the Tyson trucks showed up at BJ's house and took their chickens away to the slaughter. The Tyson trucks had actually came the night before, when the chickens were asleep, and a small army of poor white boys like me and older Mexicans would sweep through the huge, stinking chicken houses, stuffing the chickens in cages. The fascinating thing was that they never took all the chickens, only the healthy ones. In any given chicken house there would be a dozen or two that didn't pass inspection. Sickly, skinny, bloody, or featherless birds weren't accepted, and would be left behind. It just happened to be BJ's job, as the young man of the house, to go out and kill those left behind. Their corpses would be put in a special freezer to be collected later and made into dog food or chicken feed. And, as BJ's friends, we were often invited to participate in the fowl slaughter. "Come on, we'll be there in a few," I said, hopping up and heading for my bike. A quick kick to the kickstarter and it roared to life. Ted's bike was in about thirty pieces at the time, so he had to ride bitch. I thought it was funny. Not only was it incredibly uncomfortable, with a narrow, hard seat and no footpegs to brace against, he had to hold on to me, which was degrading. Once situated, we rode off smoothly. I did like to ride fast, and I wasn't above scaring the hell out of my passengers, but as my dad said, it shows more skill to ride smoothly and efficiently than it does to make the engine scream and shower dirt on everything. Dirt roads were everywhere, and I usually stuck to them despite the fact that they made the trip take much longer. Log trucks were scary, and painful when they showered gravel and dust on us, but it was safer than getting a ticket for riding on the highway. It didn't take us more than fifteen minutes to make it to BJ's house. We arrived to the sounds of frightened squawks coming from one of the chicken houses. It was two in the afternoon, so he must have just been getting started. He would have been up all night helping them load the healthy chickens, then slept till past noon. I revved the engine a few times to let him know someone was there, then pulled it to the shadow of the building and parked it. Ted and I quickly hurried to the chicken house, loathe to miss any of the orgy of blood. BJ met us at the door, trails of sweat on his dust covered face. "Hey, yall. Was wondering if you were going to show up." The last was directed at me, whom he'd actually invited this time, but I knew he wouldn't mind Ted being there. We always were the most creative with more of us present. BJ was a friend, a good friend, but he wasn't one of my best friends. Quite frankly, he was too weird even for me. BJ's family was very religious, and BJ was very very religious. He was very much a part of his local Baptist church, going to all services, all revivals, all youth activities. He never dated, never went to the cool parties, and never seemed to do much beside take care of the chicken houses and pray. I thought he was a shy, if nice, guy who was perfectly happy to have the church be his sole social life. And then he invited me over to help kill chickens. He was a maniac. A bona-fide, gibbering, repressed sociopath under that cheerfully smiling exterior that didn't say much. I once watched him whip a house full of chickens to death with a garden hose, laughing the whole time. He scared the hell out of me. I kept waiting for him to show up at school one day with an assault rifle and start blowing people away. I had hunted with him, and I knew how good a shot he was. In the meantime, as a bit of preventative medicine, I was friendly to him. Invited him over, went over to his house, watched him rip chickens apart, ate fried chicken with his family. Hopefully, when he did snap, he'd be nice and deliberately miss me. "Hey, why did the chicken cross the road?" he asked. I groaned. He also knew an amazing number of lame chicken jokes. "Because it was running from you?" Ted asked. I snickered. Clever Ted. "To show the possum it could be done!" he exclaimed, grinning widely. I laughed easily. "Not bad. Hey, did you hear the one about the guy who's wife got into a really bad wreck?" "Yeah, actually. You told it to me last week." "Oh. Damn." I shut up, disappointed. I liked that one. "Killed 'em all yet?" Ted asked. He shrugged. "Most. I've got the rest of this house and one more to do." "Hogged 'em all to yourself, didn't you?" I shook my finger at him. "Here, here's a stick," he said, reaching in the door and handing us each a tomato stake. "I've been using a garden rake," he said proudly, showing us his weapon of war. The rake had a stout wooden handle and thick, short iron prongs set far apart for ripping through roots, not for gathering leaves. The tines were covered in dark, congealed blood with white feathers stuck here and there. One tine in particular had been driven through a chicken's head, which had then been pulled from the body. BJ hadn't bothered to remove it. I nodded, dutifully impressed. Nobody did slaughter like BJ. Ted snapped his oak stake in half, making two with pointed ends. He brandished them in a fake martial art stance, then ran screaming at the chickens huddled in the far end of the house, swinging the sticks wildly. I smiled and stepped in, letting BJ close the door. I coughed at first, nearly overwhelmed by the ammonia stench of chicken droppings and the dust that filled the air. "Ted, there," I said in my best, wise guru voice, "is like a puppy allowed out to chase the birds. He makes a lot of noise, but they just run away." Actually, he had managed to nail one, but the rest were running away, back towards our end. "I, on the other hand, am like the hunting tiger. I wait patiently for my prey to come to me, then I pounce." I waited until about six chickens flapped and squawked their way near me, then swung my own staff over my head and broke it over the backs of about three of them. I was left with a couple of flopping birds and a short, jagged stick, which I stared at stupidly. My attack botched, I drove the stake through the most lively one's body, while BJ jumped up and down on the other. BJ laughed. "If you're the tiger, I'm the tornado. I slice! I dice! I make julienne fries!" Swinging his garden rake, he proceeded to massacre most of the remaining chickens. Between the three of us, we killed the rest of the chickens. Hot and sweaty, we took a break on his porch and sipped on drinks thoughtfully provided by his mom. Ted told us the recent news that one of the seniors had had sex with a horse at a party in full view of everyone. We all agreed that it was things like that that gave good southerners like us a bad name. BJ asked if we wanted to go cow tipping later that night, which we both thought was a good idea. We wanted to look for psylicybin mushrooms while we were out there, so BJ would bring a flashlight, although he refused to try one. After a number of lies, most of which I told, the conversation swung around to the rabbit, and what we were going to do with it. BJ suggested we take a syringe from a rabies shot, which he had a box of, and inject ice water into the rabbit. Supposedly, the rabbit would be fine for a few moments, then would keel over dead when the water hit its heart. I dismissed that idea. Ted came up with the idea of shaving it and setting it free. As he reasoned, it would be a kindness, because it was so hot and rabbits stay out of the sun anyway. We thought that would be a fun thing to do. I brought up the idea of dying it pink and setting it go, which was agreed to be funny, too. Hair dye, I said, would be perfect. All we have to do is mix it up in a bucket and drop the rabbit in for a few minutes. "No," BJ said. "Why don't you shave half of it, like one side, and dye the other side pink?" Ted and I thought about it for a few moments, then shrugged. "Sure, why not," I replied. "I wish I could be there whenever someone sees it. Can you imagine the look on a hunter's face? I mean, you're sitting there in a deer stand, looking around, and then this pink, shaved rabbit hops by?" Ted laughed most. "I don't know about y'all, but I don't sit on a deer stand when I'm looking for some shaved pink." I thought it was funny, but it had to be explained to BJ. "Well, we going to do this?" Ted wanted to know. "Alright, let's go. You coming, BJ?" I asked. I actually expected him to, because he seemed so keyed up by the chicken killing. He shook his head. "Nah, my mom won't let me. I'm going to stay here and rake out the chickens." I noticed that he never asked his mom, but then again he never went anywhere but school and church, so I didn't press the issue. We said our goodbyes and Ted and I rode back to his house. Ted said he guessed that BJ was just going to hide behind the chicken house and beat his meat as we left. I didn't laugh, because I was worried that that was exactly what BJ was planning on doing. That boy wasn't right. It was Ted's house, so he gathered up the supplies. We didn't find any pink hair dye, but his sister, whom I had never actually met or saw and considered a myth, had some magenta dye. She worked at a record store/headshop, and needed to look the part. He also produced a can of shaving cream and an electric razor, as well as a pair of scissors. I asked him why we needed both. "You can't just shave hair, you know," he replied. "It's too long, it gums up the blades. You've got to trim the hair down as far as it will go, then shave." "Oh." He was older than I was, and knew more about shaving. I had never shaved before, had never needed to, in fact. I kept hoping, though. "Hey, let's dye it first," I said quickly. He shook his head. "Nah, it's too hard to cut wet hair." I sniggered. "Wet hare. Too hard to cut wet a wet hare." He shrugged and turned away, dismissing it as just another one of my odd moments. Ted proceeded to beat and bang on the cage, even going so far as to pick it up and drop it again. "Ted, Ted, hey yo! What the hell are you doing, man?" He gave me a look that clearly said I was stupid for even asking. "Scaring the rabbit, what else? If he don't move when he's scared, he won't try to get away when we start shaving him." I blinked. "Hey, that actually makes sense." "Of course. Now hold the rabbit." I held the rabbit while he operated the scissors, and soon we were both covered in a blanket of tan rabbit fur. I had the unfortunate tendency to sneeze in the presence of rabbit fur, and my eyes quickly swole shut and I started sneezing explosively. Each time I sneezed, the rabbit would jerk and freeze. Finally, I could take no more. "Stob, Teb! By boze id kibbing be." Tears streamed down my face, and I was firmly of the opinion that this whole mess had been a bad idea. "Alright, alright, I'll take the rabbit, you go take an allergy pill or something. Sudafed's in the medicine cabinet." Ted took the bunny, which was little more than a soft brown fuzzy thing to my teary eyes, and I ran for the bathroom to splash water on my face and scrub thoroughly. When I could see and breathe again, I returned to find Ted giggling as he watched the rabbit hop around its cage. The rabbit was soaking wet, and the ground and cage were splashed as well. A water hose lay nearby, obviously the tool of the water torture. The rabbit had a distinctly reddish tinge, too. He had already worked the magenta hair dye into its fur through the cage door, and now he was watching as it changed the hair color. "The box says it has to stay on for fifteen minutes," he said by way of greeting. "Then we drop it in a bucket of water and rub it for a bit. Should be nice and pink." I grunted and sat down to watch. Ted had done a pretty fair job of cutting the rabbit's fur. The left side was a patchwork of very short stubble and slightly longer hairs. An uneven line ran down the rabbit's back, marking the boundary between unshaved and what would later be shaved. "The hair needs to be wet when I put the shaving cream on," he explained. "I figured we might as well dye it now." I grunted again. "That's already one funny looking rabbit." He nodded, grinning. "Yeah, it's like some crazy old lady forgot what she was doing and dyed the Easter Bunny instead of an egg." I snickered and felt better about the whole thing. "Time," he said. Rather than fill up a bucket, he simply picked up the water hose and started spraying again, creating a froth of pink which poured off onto the ground and ran away in a stream. The poor rabbit ran to and fro, turning and hopping and jumping in the air to escape the water, but Ted was relentless. He even picked one end of the cage up so he could get the rabbit's belly. It really didn't like that. Finally satisfied, he turned the water off and returned to stare at the violently magenta bunny, which shivered and wheezed in one corner of the cage. "Damn," I said reverently. "Yeah, that's her color all right." Suddenly I was glad I'd never met his sister. He picked up the cordless electric shaver and a can of electric shaving gel, which he tossed to me. "You ready for this?" I laughed and shook my head. "Ted, I don't think I could ever be ready to do something as crazy as shaving a rabbit." We pulled the much maligned but still unresisting rabbit from the cage. I held it in my arms, my allergies no longer reacting to wet rabbit fur. Ted worked the gel into the stubble left by the scissors. We whooped and laughed, and most of it seemed to get on my chest and his arms. Finally, he pulled out the electric shaver and turned it on. I felt the rabbit twitch in my arms, but paid it little mind. I instantly regretted it, though, because as soon as he touched that humming, buzzing device to the rabbit's coat, it sucked up a tangle of hair, bound up and started a much deeper, grinding hum, and tore out a tuft. The rabbit shrieked like a tea kettle and tore out of my arms like a pink guided missile, leaving dozens of deep scratches in my hands, arms, and chest. It streaked across the yard and disappeared into the tall dry grass, and both Ted and I fell over laughing.