I was sitting on the loading dock with Charlie, eating a rabbit sandwich. This was mid-November, now. Charlie shot the rabbit the day before, on a Sunday, in the woods behind his dad’s farm. I thought Charlie didn’t like me, you know. So I was surprised when he offered me a rabbit sandwich. We didn’t talk much. I was an out-of-towner. I was lucky to get a job anyplace.

Charlie usually sat in his truck, by himself, during the lunch break, staring out into the woods and smoking. Now I was sitting next to Charlie on the loading dock between two empty trucks, eating a rabbit sandwich. I didn’t want to eat it. I never ate rabbit before.  But I took the sandwich, said ‘thanks,’ and I ate the sandwich. It was still warm. It wasn’t bad, you know. It was a little gamey, but it wasn’t bad.

The other guys in the plant called Charlie ‘Rabbit-Man,’ but I never saw anybody call him that to his face. I rarely had contact with other people in the plant.  When I ran into them in the deep vaults of the old plant, pulling huge tractor parts and tires and pumps on rusty old pallet jacks, they looked at me like I came in off the street. When I told them I was in shipping, they said—“oh yeah? You work with Rabbit-Man?” and then we hurried off to load or unload the gear someplace else. The others were gaunt, strung-out men at the far end of the industrial waste line. They never called Charlie ‘Charlie’ but they had no problem calling him ‘Rabbit-Man,’ it appeared, when he was nowhere to be seen.

And here’s the thing—not only did Charlie eat rabbit sandwiches, but he wore a rabbit-fur coat all the time. With big red cheeks, a blonde beard and long hair, Charlie glowered over the rest of us. If he was a rabbit, he was the biggest and most menacing-looking rabbit any of us had ever seen.   

There was no time to talk. We punched in and we punched out for lunch. Then the buzzer buzzed and we had to punch back in. We had to run all the way across the empty production floor, punch little manila cards into a time clock, and run back to the trucks. Then we would spend the afternoon loading trucks with dismantled farm equipment. The equipment was from all the small family farms that were getting bought up by the banks, and the equipment was getting re-sold at auction to bigger corporate farms, but I didn’t understand that until later.

We loaded trucks with crates and fencing and apple grinders and steam-powered engines and cables and ladders and dozens and dozens of apple crates we had to break down and stack on pallets. If the parts still had any identifying markings– ‘property of Olinger Farms,’ for example– we had to run and get black paint and a brush and paint it over.  If we ran out of pallets we had to make more pallets out of apple crates.  It was harder than you think. My hands were all cut up and I was all skin-and-bones.  Charlie was a moose, a real farm boy, and he seemed smart about a lot of stuff, not school-smart or farm-smart, but smart like he was brooding on things. I was not smart like Charlie, but I was, strangely, very good at stuffing random industrial items into the back of trucks. It was hell, but we were good together. We packed a lot of trucks that fall.

*

After I ate my sandwich, and Charlie ate his sandwich, we still had a few minutes before the lunch buzzer buzzed. We sat in awkward silence.

“How do you like the Rabbit sandwich?” Charlie asked me.

“Oh, this is one fine sandwich, man, thank you.”

I tried to dislodge a bullet fragment from between two molars with my tongue. It felt like a bloody mess, so I let it be. Leaves started spiraling down onto the dock, floating in yellows and browns from the trees across from the trucks. Beyond the trees there was a tangle of orchard rising up a hill and behind that, the thick horizontal strip of South Mountain. This is a dock, I imagined. This is the sea.

“That must have been some rabbit you shot there, Charlie.”

“Yeah, well. One thing we never run out of at the old man’s farm, and that’s rabbits.”

Charlie chewed pensively on his sandwich. Then he reached into the pocket of his rabbit coat and offered me a cigarette. I took it.

“See this here coat? My Father made me this coat,” he said. “We ate lots of rabbit growing up. And squirrels. But mostly rabbits. We all got these rabbit coats. I’m proud of this coat. We lived off the land, boy. Four generations we lived up on that farm.”

You know, Charlie really did look like a rabbit—not just the coat but the whiskers, the nose, the headlight stare.  The coat was all patchy and two sizes too small but it looked warm and safe in there, and it made him look even bigger.  I pictured myself in that coat. I liked what I pictured.

“What kind of farm is it?”

“What do you mean, what kind of farm is it? It’s just a farm,” Charlie said. “Bank keeps trying to buy it but my old man ain’t selling.  I’d work up there but I’m working down here, because this pays five bucks an hour and my old man can’t pay me shit. I gotta save up some money, friend. I got big plans, friend. You even know what big plans are? I’m getting married, friend. I got a sweetheart. She had to move way down to Emmitsburg when her dad sold his farm. I’m setting to get her back. You know that pawn shop on Chambersburg Street? You see them ‘gagement rings there in that window?”

“I walk past them every day.”

I was lying. I walked past the pawn shop every day, but I never looked at the jewelry. What I looked at were the big winter coats. Warmth was hard to come by that fall—my apartment, the plant, and the long walk across the fields to the plant were taking a toll. I could never get warm. Each day it got colder.

“Yeah, well.” Charlie stared out into the woods, like he was looking for something, or like he was waiting for something.  I followed his gaze, pledging to myself that I would not try to say something funny, or stupid, or wise. Then the buzzer buzzed, echoing through the vast warehouse. We both got up and we ran like hell for the punch clock.

*

Tuesday lunch came around. Charlie went out, sat in his truck, and stared out into the woods.  I ran for Sadie’s Lunch Truck.  Sadie’s Lunch Truck was a silver-plated chuck-wagon number that was wedged up onto the back of a pick up truck. It had giant tin doors and when she pulled up in front of the plant, Sadie would flip them up like awnings, and she was ready for business. If I timed it right, as soon as the lunch horn blew, I could run across the plant and out the front door and have a choice of a pre-wrapped sandwich, or a bag of cookies, or chips, or cheese waffles, or coffee that squirted out of a strange faucet-like contraption. Sadie herself was something else. She told a couple of guys that she was almost once a stand-in extra for Daisy Duke on a Dukes of Hazard episode which is where, I figured, the outfit came in.  She tried to dress the part but everything about her was moving in the wrong direction. She wore a big yellow cowboy hat over her curly brown hair and wrap-around sunglasses.  She had a ‘Dukes of Hazard’ windbreaker with a big red car launching through a hay bale, but the decal was smudged.

I ended up at the back of the line and stood there, panting, waiting my turn. With luck I would have eight minutes left to wolf down a two dollar, stale-at-the-edges, soggy-in-the-middle tuna fish sandwich and a fifty-cent, swampy coffee. We all stood there in the parking lot, our backs to the front wall of the plant, thinking about the few items we could afford. Nobody talked. At four bucks an hour, nobody talked.

Sadie seemed happy to see us.  “Hello, my boys. Here I am. Sadie, Sadie, the Lunch Truck Lady!” The first guy up told her he was a little short on cash. “That’s alright, pal. Believe me, I been there,” she said. “Catch me next time.” She spoke with a sweet Southern drawl. After I bought my sandwich she folded down her tin awnings. ‘I used to have 20 sites, you know,’ she told us once, ‘but they all closed. Now we’re down to just you and those other guys. Jimmy Carter. I swear.’ She told us this but we all just sat there, exhausted, staring at our soggy two dollar sandwiches. I watched Sadie intently, not in a creepy way, but because somebody else was hiding under that wig.  When she thought nobody was looking, she talked to herself, like she was saying something to somebody that wasn’t there. Every once and a while something blurted out: “Yes but you never called back.” Or, “I’m tired too.” Or, “You think this is what I want to be doing right now?” The blurtings came out in a Philly accent.  Then she stopped herself, wiped the front of the sandwich display case with a paper towel, or dumped the residual coffee from the dispenser under the dripping faucet.  Then she turned, went country again, and smiled at us. “You boys need anything else? You all happy?”

“Yes, Sadie,” a couple of us mumbled.

“That’s good. I’m happy too,” she said, flashing a big show-business smile, then turning down the awnings and driving off to the other plant.

*

On Friday, Charlie didn’t show up for work. The bossman, a beefy old guy with a bushy moustache, pushed his safety glasses up the bridge of his nose and shrugged. “I guess we’ll have to get somebody to help you load the trucks today,” he said. “I guess we’ll have to hire a temp. Temp’s don’t get here until after lunch so’s you better get started. I don’t know where your partner is. I’d fire his ass but at this point, don’t really matter.”

“Why doesn’t it matter?”

The bossman stared intently at the invoices on his clipboard.

“Who’s to say,” he said, handing me a stack of orders. “You’re gonna need some new pallets. You better get working on them pallets.”

“Crap. Pallets.”

“Well, you’re gonna need them, so you best get started.”

Here’s a secret—I pretended I hated making pallets, but I loved making pallets.  I pulled out a stack of wood slats and squares from the pile of broken apple crates, plugged the pneumatic nail gun into the air hose, and loaded in a rack of nails. Fit! Fit! Fit! Driving a nail into a dried-up board without splitting it was a beautiful thing. Fit! Fit! Fit! Cutting stacks of boards with an old circular saw with a dull blade was dangerous, but rewarding. I really got into it. I had my own little world over there in the corner of the massive, half-empty warehouse. That morning, in my own little world, I got 25 pallets up before the lunch buzzer. When it buzzed I ran out to Sadie’s Lunch Truck and got in the back of the line.

The guy behind me started talking to the guy behind him about a big four-burner gas stove he’d been trying to sell for months.  “Me, I got no use for appliances,” he said.  “Just as soon drink my beer warm.”

“Must be some stove,” the other guy said.

“Anyhow,” this guy said, “I think I got a buyer.”

“A what?”

“A buyer. But I need to deliver it. I need somebody. You got somebody?”

“What do you mean, do I got somebody.”

“Somebody, you know. Somebody with a truck.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t got somebody with a truck.”

“God-damn,” he said.

“Rabbit-Man got a truck,” a third man said, who joined the line behind the second guy. “Maybe you can get Rabbit-Man to deliver it.”

“I ain’t seen Rabbit-Man all day,” the second guy said.

“He’s all hung uo on that girl still. You know. She moved down to Emmitsburg or someplace. Say there,” he tapped me on the shoulder and I turned. All three were grinning at me. “Where’s your partner, Rabbit-Man?”

I turned and these guys were grinning at me, like I was in on a joke. 

“Rabbit-Man? Who’s that?  I don’t know any Rabbit-Man.”

“Oh, sure you do. The big fellah you work with. In the rabbit coat.”

“Don’t know him,” I said. “But if I do meet a Rabbit-Man, I’ll let him know you were asking.”

“You don’t have to do that, now,” the second said.

“Don’t get all sore, now,” the third one said.

I turned back to the lunch truck. It was cold out there, and there were still a couple of guys in front of me. I stood there freezing, my swollen and cut-up hands stuffed in my pockets, waiting my turn.

“I sure am going to miss you boys,” Sadie said.

“Wait, what? Are you leaving Sadie?”

Sadie turned red. I swear, in a second, she aged ten years.  She muttered something, sideways, to her invisible friend.  Then she smiled again.

“No, no, no! What I meant to say is, I’m gonna miss you boys this weekend!”

Nobody said anything until she drove off. In the minute before the end-of-lunch horn, we all leaned on the plant’s front wall, eating our damp sandwiches, and whispering.

“Does Sadie know something?”

“Are they closing the plant?”

“Are we gonna get fired?”

Then the buzzer blew, and we all ran, like we did every day, for the clock.

*

When I got back to the loading dock there were no trucks. The temp kid was there. It was clear, from the minute I started talking to him, that this kid was not good. He was strung out. He was sweating a lot more than he should be.  He was supposed to put the boards down in a row for me, so I didn’t have to put down the hammer, but he couldn’t do it. In five minutes he pulled over a big plastic bag of Styrofoam peanuts and lay down in it, staring up at the rafters. I had to uncoil and put the hammer down, lay out the planks, then pick up and re-coil the hammer. Fit! Fit! Fit! I didn’t care if he helped. I thought about putting a nail in his foot. Fit! Then, between planks, I heard him sniffle, like he was laughing to himself.

“So,” he said, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. “I hear you’re a friend of Rabbit-Man?”

 “Yeah. Charlie. You know him?”

“Oh, yeah. Everybody knows Rabbit-Man. He took off this morning, I heard. Just dropped everything and took off. Gonna courting. Gonna courting his sweet-heart.” The kid giggled. “Only he don’t know that his sweetheart’s already engaged. To a dentist. Can you imagine? Can you imagine the look on that dumb-ass rabbit face?”

He looked at his hands, which were soft and white, like piano-hands. I instinctively looked at mine which were laced with half-healed cuts and scrapes, a couple of old band-aids on the fingers, and smooth and shiny on the palms—just one big callous.

“So, look, buddy,” I said, trying to repeat something somebody else said to me at another job, not so long before. “I’m not the bossman, but if the bossman comes over here and sees you laying there on that peanut bag, I’m gonna take all the crap. Fit! Fit! You’ll get fired, but I’ll take all the crap. Fit! Fit! And I don’t like crap. Fit! So how about helping me out a little?”

The kid threw a couple planks over to me, then went back to looking at his hands.

“Poor old Rabbit-Man,” he said. “Everybody know’d it. Everybody know’d it but him.”

I reloaded the nail gun and started laying out a new pallet. There was a funny noise from the far side of the plant, like somebody was pulling down all the steel gates. Other than that, my nail gun, and the sniffling kid, the vast plant building filled with a terrible, hollow silence.

Fit! Fit! “You think you can help me out here?”

Still staring at the rafters, the kid grinned. Then a funny thing happened-the air pressure died in my nail gun, then the lights went out. The plant was empty.  I walked to the exit light, opened the door, and my eyes were flooded with late autumn sunlight. The kid followed me out, and started walking west, trance-like, toward the farms. I watched him fade into a field dotted with dead corn stalks. “Poor old Rabbit-Man,” he muttered.  Just as he got to the treeline, it started to rain.

Freezing, I walked back to town. Nobody told me they closed the plant. They just shut it off.  When I got to town, I started straight for that bar in the town square—you know the one—to get good and drunk, to collect my thoughts, to figure what comes next.

On the way, on Chambersburg Street, I passed the pawn shop. There was the huge rabbit-fur coat up on a hanger, in the window, selling for 20 bucks. Standing there, shivering, I stared at the coat. I thought about it a second, but as cold as I was, I just couldn’t do it.

– Frank Haberle