Don’t let it slam, Maggie thought to herself, as she stepped out of the front door of her mobile home and let the screen close gently behind. She paused, listening carefully behind her…no sound, Bert was still asleep. No surprise there, he’d had at least a six-pack last night, probably more like eight or nine, one right after the other. She let out her breath and stepped off the porch onto the grounds of the Lazy River RV Park and Campground.
It was still early, not even six, and the campground was quiet. This was their busy season, so the campground was almost full, all the full-service sites were occupied with diesel-pusher motorhomes or 5th-wheel trailers. Even most of the electric-and-water-only sites were taken, and there were a decent number of young couples and families over in the tent area. As she walked through the campground toward the office, she smelled smoke from a few early-riser campfires, caught a whiff of bacon mixed in with the smell of the pine trees that were scattered through the rows of trailers.
As she approached the office building, she saw two little kids, a boy and girl, she thought she remembered that they belonged to the nice couple who had checked into Site 31 (water and electric only) with the 23-foot Airstream trailer just before she closed last night. The kids were standing outside the office and staring up into the tall pine tree next to it.
Maggie looked at them curiously, fumbling with her keys.
“Morning, guys!” she said, “Are you waiting for me to open the store?”
The girl looked up at her distractedly.
“No ma’am,” she answered politely, “We’re just looking at your nice bunny.”
“My what?” Maggie asked, pausing with her keys.
“He’s cute,” said the girl, pointing and looking back up at the tree.
Maggie followed her gaze upward and felt her eyebrows rise with surprise.
Perched on a branch about twenty feet off the ground was a small cottontail rabbit, sitting calmly wedged against the vertical trunk, gazing off into the distance, apparently oblivious to the humans below, twitching its whiskers in sort of a casual, nonchalant way.
Now, it wasn’t exactly unusual to see rabbits around the Lazy River RV Park and Campground. In fact, there were a lot of them, especially since Maggie and Bert worked hard to keep stray dogs and coyotes out, and the campground was full of nice grassy patches and lots of bushes between the RV sites where the little critters could hide and do what rabbits seem to do best, which was apparently mainly to make more bunnies. Maggie viewed them as a bit of a nuisance, since they were always eating the flowers that she kept trying to grow around the office, and at least once a month one of the guests would accidentally run over one, or somebody’s pet dog would get hold of one, and then everyone in the campground would be traumatized by the high-pitched, stomach-turning scream that cute little bunnies make when they die a traumatic death.
But, as Maggie stood staring open-mouthed at the bunny in the tree far above her, she was pretty damn sure she had never seen one up in a tree. How in the world did the furry thing even get up there? The lowest branch was about ten feet off the ground and she didn’t think that cottontails could jump that high. Maybe a jackrabbit, but no, probably not even a jackrabbit could jump ten feet straight up. And she knew that rabbits had little claws, but she doubted they were sharp enough to hold onto the rough bark of a straight pine tree trunk.
Suddenly a voice behind her made her jump, “What’re y’all looking at?”
She turned and saw that it was the nice retired gentleman with the big Class A diesel-pusher who had been parked down in Site 67 (full hookups including cable) for the past several days, what was his name? Earl? Elmer? Edward! That was it, Edward. He liked to come to the office every morning for the complimentary coffee and tell Maggie and Bert stories about how he and his wife were blowing their children’s inheritance full-timing around the country.
“Morning, Edward,” Maggie said. “We were just looking at the bunny up in the tree.”
“The bunny where?” Edward asked.
Maggie pointed up at the tree and Edward looked up. A long silent pause followed.
“You know…that’s something that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before,” he said.
“I was thinking the same thing,” Maggie said. The four of them all stood looking up at the bunny for a bit longer. It continued to ignore them, still gazing off into the distance, whiskers twitching.
“Well, I guess I better open up,” Maggie said finally. It came out sounding a little empty, given the circumstances, but, well, what else could she say? She unlocked the door and went inside, turned on the lights and the computer, started the coffee pot and picked up a few registrations which had been dropped in the night slot. A few minutes later, Edward came in and made himself a cup of coffee.
“Is it still up there?” Maggie asked.
“Yup,” replied Edward, headed back out the door, “Damnedest thing I ever saw.”
Maggie processed the night registrations and checked the computer for incoming reservations. A few more guests came in for coffee, some bought supplies for breakfast. She glanced out the window of the office occasionally and saw that a small crowd had gathered underneath the pine tree. The grownups were shaking their heads incredulously, kids were running around between their legs, laughing and pointing up at the tree.
Around 7:30, she heard the sound of Bert’s golf cart outside the office door, then she heard his booming voice talking to the crowd of bunny watchers outside. She heard the surprise in his voice as he talked to the little crowd of bunny-watchers, then she heard everybody laugh. Bert was good at making strangers laugh.
Maggie took a deep breath.
The door to the office slammed open and Bert barged in. He had a big smile on his face, but when he saw Maggie standing behind the counter, the smile mostly faded away. He took off his cap and tossed it on the desk, grabbed a cup of coffee and came over to lean on the counter across from his wife.
“Gonna be a hot one out there today,” he said casually as he took a sip, watching her warily.
“Forecast says a high of 95,” Maggie replied.
She looked up from her paperwork and they stared at each quietly for a long moment, trying to read each other’s faces.
“So…” Bert said, “…Got anything special going today?”
He’s not going to mention it, she thought. Not a word about last night. As usual.
She managed a thin smile, “Nope. Just the usual bunnies in trees and stuff.”
Bert nodded solemnly, took another sip of coffee.
“Just the usual bunnies…” he echoed.
—–
By midday, there was a bit of a carnival atmosphere at the Lazy River RV Park and Campground. People were gathered under the pine tree, some elderly couples had brought over lawn chairs and were relaxing in the shade, getting up to move the chairs every half hour or so as the sun moved across the sky. Maggie was busy in the office. Several guests had decided to extend their stay, wanting to see how things turned out with the bunny. There was a brisk business in the store, more than usual, and Maggie was running low on ice cream bars, Gatorade and a few other things. She sent Bert into town for supplies.
Around lunchtime, Bert lugged their battered old charcoal grill out of the storage shed and fired it up next to the office, taking care that the smoke didn’t drift up toward the bunny, and started cooking hot dogs and hamburgers, something that he usually only did on big holidays like Memorial Day or the Fourth of July when the park was really full. “What the hell,” he told Maggie, “Let’s call it National Tree Bunny Day.” He priced hot dogs at four bucks and burgers at five, including a bag of chips and a soda. They sold like crazy.
The bunny, for its part, didn’t seem the least bit bothered by the commotion underneath its perch. It shifted position on the branch a couple of times, stirring a little excitement in the crowd, but otherwise it appeared to be perfectly content with its current state of affairs, twitching its whiskers constantly, accompanied by an occasional shake of an ear.
When it started getting warm, the crowd thinned out a bit. Most of the kids wandered off to the swimming pool, but the old folks in the lawn chairs maintained their vigil, though in truth they were mostly ignoring the bunny now and just chatting, especially after someone broke out the wine coolers.
Bert ran out of hot dogs and hamburgers and let his coals burn down. He came into the office and he and Maggie debated whether to get more supplies for dinner. Bert was feeling ambitious after the success of the lunch rush. He’d had a couple of beers while he was cooking and was feeling a bit celebratory about their good fortune, thanks to the bunny. Maggie was busy but she also tried to keep an eye on Bert. Even on a normal day, Bert didn’t need much reason to “celebrate” and sometimes that didn’t work out so well.
Nevertheless, after some discussion, they decided to step things up a bit. Bert left for town again, this time to buy some ribs, cole slaw and baked beans. It would be an all-you-can-eat Lazy River BBQ feast, ten dollars for adults, six for kids under 12.
In a lull after lunch, Maggie sat down at the computer and did a little internet research about rabbits. According to Wikipedia, the rabbit in the tree was a cottontail…Order Lagomorpha, Family Leporidae, Genus Sylvilagus…she couldn’t figure out which species, who knew that there were so many different kinds of cottontails? She learned a few more fun facts, like “Unlike squirrels and chipmunks that eat sitting up on their hind legs, and can hold food with their front paws while spinning it in circles to devour it quickly, a cottontail eats on all fours; and can only use its nose to move and adjust the position of the food that it places directly in front of its front paws on the ground.” Maggie decided that the most interesting fact was that someone had spent that much time actually paying attention to how squirrels, chipmunks and rabbits hold their food.
She clicked through a few more sites but not once did she encounter a single reference to a cottontail climbing a pine tree.
—–
Illustration by Albert M. Nikhla
In the late afternoon, new arrivals started pulling in with their trailers and motorhomes and tents. They were initially puzzled by the crowd around the office, then amazed by the sight of the bunny in the tree. The newcomers were treated to descriptions of the bunny’s every movement during the day, though there was a bit of bickering over the details by the veteran bunny watchers, especially the tipsy old folks in the lawn chairs. As the sun fell and the air cooled, more lawn chairs gathered under the tree, the wine coolers were replaced with “real” cocktails in clear plastic cups, or cans of cold beer.
Leaning in the door of the office, Maggie surveyed her motley crowd of patrons. There were tanned and buff young guys in muscle shirts and baggy shorts, their skinny girlfriends in cut-off jeans, too-tight tank tops and flip-flops, all a little sunburned from a day riding ATVs in the nearby foothills, they were the ones with the big pickups and toy hauler trailers that she always tried to put in the sites over behind the restrooms, away from everyone else because they tended to get a little rambunctious in the evenings.
Then were the clusters of young, hip-looking college kids, these were the ones who filled up the tent area in the back of the campground, one of them had brought out a guitar which he was strumming gently on the fringe of the crowd. She also noted the early middle-agers, the baby boomers who favored the Class B and C motorhomes and the smaller travel trailers, the guys with their early pot-bellies and Hawaiian shirts, their wives with their sleeveless blouses and Capri pants.
And of course, the royalty of the campground, the older retired guests, the rich-folk, the ones with the big diesel buses who, on any other night, would have rolled out rugs on the dirt beside their rigs, and sat watching satellite TV under the pine trees on the big screens that swung out from exterior compartments. Drive-in theaters for the internet age…
High above it all, the bunny did not appear to have moved much all day. Nor did it seem to care about, or even be aware of, the growing party atmosphere beneath its perch.
Looking up and watching it twitch its whiskers, Maggie wondered if the poor creature was actually terrified, or just simply accepting of its surprising new place in the universe, and suddenly she felt a pang of loneliness. Reflexively, she glanced around for Bert.
He was talking to a bunch of guys in leather chaps, a group of bikers that had rumbled in on their Harleys midday and set up camp over on the edge of the tent area. They were pretty rough-looking, but had been nice enough when they checked in. Still, groups like that always made Maggie nervous. They all had beers in their hands and were passing around a flask. As Maggie watched, they handed it to Bert. He took a big swig, then laughed loudly.
As he passed it back, he must have felt Maggie watching him. He looked over at her and for a moment had an expression on his face like a kid caught doing something bad by a parent. It was quickly replaced by a look of irritation, then by defiance. He turned back to the bikers, a smile back on his lips, but now with an edge to it, more like a sneer. Maggie felt her stomach sink.
As it grew dark, Bert stoked up his grill again and soon the smoky sweet smell of BBQ ribs filled the air. Once again, business was brisk. As the campers had trickled back to the campground after their day’s activities, they gravitated back toward the office and the bunny, bringing chairs and coolers with them. The Lazy River had never seen such an accumulation of campers in one spot on the property, let alone right outside the office door.
At some point, one of the campers suggested building a campfire under the pine tree to enhance the festive atmosphere, which ignited a loud debate about the possible effects of the smoke and sparks on the bunny overhead. The conversation rapidly moved from benign discussions between strangers about where they were from and what they did for a living to something else entirely. Quickly it became clear that, far from the all-American homogeneity they had demonstrated all day, the crowd was actually divided into those who were advocates for the bunny and genuinely worried about its fate, and those who had more sinister instincts, who were maybe hoping to see it fall, who were maybe even thinking of ways to knock it off the branch. Voices grew louder. Bits of profanity cut through the air. Some of the younger parents glanced nervously around for their kids.
Maggie had been watching the alcohol flow all afternoon and didn’t like the way the mood was changing. She walked over to Bert, who was still working the grill.
“This is getting a bit rowdy,” she said in a low voice. “Don’t you think you should say something?”
Bert looked up at her. His face was sweaty, and his eye were red from the smoke of the grill and whatever those bikers had been slipping him. An irritated scowl twisted his mouth.
“They’re just having fun, Maggie,” he said. “If it bothers you so much, why don’t you say something yourself?” He looked at her as if he was daring her, then shook his head and turned back to the grill. “Jesus…”
Once again the sinking feeling in her stomach, followed by something new, a burn of anger. She almost argued with him, then thought better of it. Not in front of all these campers, not without knowing exactly how much he had been drinking. She gave herself a mental kick in the pants, she should have been paying closer attention.
“WHAT ARE YOU, SOME KIND OF FUCKING BUNNY-LOVER!?”
The male voice came from behind her. She whirled around to see that one of the bikers was standing with a beer in one hand and an armful of firewood occupying the other, directly under the bunny’s branch. In front of him, apparently the target of his loud challenge, stood the young man who had earlier been playing the guitar, which he was now gripping tightly by its neck with both hands, holding the instrument in front of him like a shield. He was a foot shorter than the biker and pretty scrawny, and Maggie wondered what in the world made him stand up to the would-be fire starter. Then she realized that the real target of the biker’s wrath was standing behind the guitarist, a thin young woman wearing a tie-dye shirt, her long brown hair in bilateral braids swinging angrily about her shoulders. She was pointing over her boyfriend’s shoulder at the biker, open defiance on her face, in contrast to the terrified look on that of her guitar-clutching defender.
“You will NOT harm that precious creature!” she shouted in a shrill voice.
Maggie noted in passing that everyone else gathered around the tree seemed to be frozen in place, including Bert, who was staring at the scene with a bleary-eyed and stupidly puzzled expression, his tongs poised just above the ribs on the grill. Then she realized the other bikers were starting to move slowly toward their embattled buddy. She knew she had to act fast.
She stepped forward quickly and put herself between the biker and the two hippies.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, now hold on a second!” She summoned the deepest, most authoritative voice that she could muster. The biker turned his angry gaze to her, and she almost broke and ran. Then suddenly his anger turned to confusion. His eyes were as red as Bert’s. Great, she thought, is everyone here drunk except for me?
“I’m sorry, but we have a pretty strict policy about campfires here at Lazy River,” she said, “We only allow them in the metal fire rings in the campsites. You wouldn’t know by looking now, but a few years ago we had a campfire get out of control and start to spread, and we almost lost the whole place. All the trailers almost burned down. And the motorcycles! I mean, some of the campers had motorcycles too. And they almost burned like the trailers!”
The biker looked even more confused. Maggie could tell he was trying to follow what she was saying, but he appeared to be having trouble focusing his eyes, anyway they were sort of wobbling in different directions.
“So,” she said brightly, “if you want to make a fire, that’s great! You can just take that wood back to your campsite and put that old fire ring to good use!”
She stopped. The biker stared at her. She felt the hippie kids rustle a bit behind her but everyone else was still frozen.
For an eternal moment, she was in a strange movie, one of those scenes where there was a freeze-frame, and everything was stuck in place except for one character. She had all the time in the world herself, to look around at the spectators arrayed under the pine tree. The biker’s face, a sculpture of befuddled hate in front of her, the hippie girl’s finger poised over her boyfriend’s shoulder, a fat man in a Hawaiian shirt off to the left, his can of beer halfway to his mouth and a drunken bemused smile on his lips, a thin woman in white Bermuda shorts off to the right, no smile there, only a worried, fearful frown. In the background, there was Bert, his tongs in one hand, he looked confused too, a bit angry…and more than a little afraid.
And above them all . . . the bunny. It was not frozen though, its whiskers were still twitching, its little nostrils moving in and out, its dark brown eyes taking in the human drama below it. It watched without judgment, without fear, without anger. It did not question its place in the universe. It just waited on its branch, no expectations for the future, no regrets about the past. It was on the branch, above it all, and that was all there was…
Then the biker turned and looked at his buddies. Almost simultaneously, they all shrugged and turned away.
“Ahhh, let it go, Charlie,” one of them said.
Charlie turned back to Maggie.
“Okay, lady, whatever you say,” he said, then more loudly and over Maggie’s shoulder, “It ain’t cuz of the FUCKING BUNNY, though!” He turned and walked away.
Maggie let out a sigh and turned around to the hippie kids. The girl, anger still on her face, muttered “Fascist” disgustedly then turned away herself. The boy managed a weak smile and mouthed the words “thank you” to Maggie before following the girl.
All of the other spectators relaxed and she felt the mood shift almost instantly back to one of benign comradeship. Quiet conversations started up again on all sides. She heard someone laugh.
She looked upward. In the dim light, she could see the bunny was still there, whiskers twitching.
She looked over to Bert’s grill. He was gone. The lid of the grill was closed. The BBQ was over.
—–
The party broke up shortly afterward. People drifted away and headed to their trailers and motorhomes, blinds were drawn, lights glowed from windows, some yellow, some blue from TVs taking advantage of Lazy River’s complimentary cable TV. Over in the tent area, the bikers had a big fire going and the tents around them glowed from within like big green and blue and red gumdrops.
Maggie tidied up the area outside the office, collecting beer cans and candy wrappers, then went inside. It was after ten, so she hung the “CLOSED” sign on the door, turned off most of the lights, and then sat down at the computer again. She didn’t know where Bert was, or what his mood would be, and she wasn’t in the mood herself to find out, so she Googled “rabbits in trees”. There were all kinds of results but mostly for stuff to buy…paintings of rabbits nestled against the base of trees, cute little ceramic sculptures of rabbits, dish towels embroidered with trees and rabbits, T-shirts with cartoon rabbits peeking out from behind trees, even coffee cups with rabbits and trees…but there was nothing remotely like the scene that currently existed in the tree just outside the office.
She started to turn the computer off then noticed the photo that she had placed on the screen as desktop wallpaper. She had put it on the computer years ago, when they first bought the campground, it had been taken by one of their first customers, but she hadn’t really looked at it in a while. It was a photo of the big campground sign out by the main road. “Welcome to the Lazy River,” it proclaimed in big yellow letters, outlined in red. Below that, in smaller black letters, “Full-hookups. Free cable. Camping Supplies”.
But it wasn’t the sign that caught her eye, it was the young couple standing arm in arm at the lower corner of the sign, smiling at the camera. She almost didn’t recognize herself, she hadn’t realized how much she had aged in the past few years. And look how long her hair was back then!
And Bert, so much thinner, though not as tanned. She felt a pang in her heart as she looked at his smile. She hadn’t seen that smile in a long time. Back then, there wasn’t a mean bone in his body. He had been so much fun, so full of energy.
Well, she thought . . . that was then, this is now. She let out a deep sigh as she slumped back in the desk chair, still looking at the photo. Thinking back, she realized she had watched it happening, and she even knew when it started. She remembered all the visits to the doctors, all the questions, all the hard answers, all the disappointment they had both felt. She remembered how they had talked about adoption but had never seemed to have enough money, or maybe they had just never really got around to it.
She pushed away from the desk and turned off the remaining lights. She stepped outside and locked the office. She looked up at the pine tree but it was too dark, she couldn’t see the bunny. She took a deep breath, the smell of the pine trees at night never got old to her.
She walked through the campground, making a last looping circuit to check on everything. As she neared the tent area, where the bikers were still partying, she heard a familiar laugh.
Staying in the shadows of the trees, she crept silently closer. Peeking around a tree, she saw exactly what she expected. Bert was standing near the biker’s campfire, beer in hand, swaying a little as he loudly bantered with the circle of men and women around him. He was holding court, telling campground stories, ones he had practiced, ones she had heard a million times, about the crazy things that people did when they were camping, stories guaranteed to get a laugh, to make him the hit of the party. Yeah, Bert was good at making people laugh.
She watched him for a minute then slunk away into the shadows, walking slowly through the darkness toward the mobile home. Maybe if she got home before him, and got to sleep, the evening would pass quietly. She knew he would come banging in eventually, making noise on purpose to wake her up, hoping she would say something, ask him to be quiet, or if he remembered to turn off the porch light, or just say hello . . . anything that would give him an excuse to start in her, to tell her what she had done wrong that day, how he was the one who did all the work around here, how she made all the mistakes, how in the end, it was her fault that he drank so much, how she was the one responsible for their miserable life.
Thinking deeply as she walked, she almost missed the hoot of the owl in the tree above her. Then it sounded again, and she stopped dead in her tracks.
Suddenly she knew how the bunny got in the tree.
The scene played out in her head…the bunny grazing between the trees in the dark, dead hours of the night, oblivious to the silent gray shape sailing down from the sky above, only a split-second’s notice before talons grasped its body and lifted it from the ground. Up, up, into the air, the bunny twisting and turning to escape. Then, a miracle, the owl’s attack had been a few millimeters askew, its grip was not secure, the bunny sensed it and wrenched itself free and started to fall. Then, another miracle, instead of plummeting to its death, it landed on the wide branch of the pine tree and by pure luck bounced against the trunk, wedged there twenty feet high. It took a moment to collect itself, then settled against the branch. And there it waited, there was nowhere else to go, nothing else to do. The world had changed, suddenly and irrevocably, and the bunny could do nothing but accept it.
The owl hooted in the tree above her again, and Maggie closed her eyes tight. She saw the ending of the story as well. She knew that the bunny would be gone in the morning, and there would be lots of questions and speculation from the campers as to whether it had finally fallen off, or maybe it had jumped and scampered away. No one would think about the owl, who by that time would be back in its nest, quite full and satisfied with itself, happy that it had completed the meal it started the night before.
She started walking toward the mobile home. She felt her heart pounding and she thought about Bert. He had never hit her, that was true, but he had gotten close a few times, she could see it in his eyes, and she knew it was coming someday, maybe soon.
She stopped under the pines, listening to the whisper of the night breeze in the needles overheard. She thought about the bunny. She thought about standing up to that biker. She thought about Bert again. The world had changed today for the bunny, and, well . . . yeah, it had for her, too.
She started walking again. She had some work to do before she went to bed, before Bert got home. In the morning, when the sun rose through the pine trees of the Lazy River Campground, the bunny would be gone. And so would she.