“The killer rabbit,” I interrupted.
“Pardon me?”
“It’s about the killer swamp rabbit,” I said. “Isn’t it. Why you’re here.”
Carter shook his head bemusedly, the vaguest hint of a smile playing about his lips. “Robert, I came to talk about you. And the wrong we boys did in letting you take the fall for us. In letting you alone be punished.”
A diversion. It’s hard for any guy to admit to his impotence.
Well, I kept at him. For a while, rather than face up to the lop-eared specter, Carter continued to claim interest in the incident that had led to my parents’ leaving Plains. He showed a single-minded determination to divert the conversation from its true purpose. I could see how, in your high-level talks, he could have been a tiger. Still, I cycled back to the rabbit. And finally my subtle handling opened the floodgates.
“Oh, all right. Trivial episode, relatively, but I’ll give you the story if you really want it.”
It wasn’t till after the Reagan inauguration, he said, when he went back to South Georgia, that he really thought about the rabbit incident. He had time, in Reagan’s early months, to read the jeering accounts; he had time to reflect that there had been nothing out of the ordinary in his behavior in the fishing boat. He had merely caught sight of an animal in the water and, surprised, jerked an oar in its direction. He’d done it the same way you might swat a fly. His train of thought—moving from the Ayatollah Khomeini to Warren Christopher and standards of cancer care at Sloan-Kettering—had been rudely broken. He realized what the animal was a split second later and lost interest. He had seen swamp rabbits before, mostly in marshes; they took to water readily, to escape from predators.
Two of the four rabbit species in Georgia, he said, swam well; only the cottontails couldn’t swim.
For a while, he said, he’d toyed with conspiracy theories. The Reagan strategists, after all, were lean and mean, unlike his own friendly posse of good ol’ boys with their antiquated notions of honor and straight shooting. He imagined far-fetched scenarios: James Baker creeping through the foliage with a phalanx of hungry coon dogs, scaring rabbits out of their hollows and chasing them toward the pond; Ed Meese, wearing oversize waders and a filthy baseball cap, pulling up to the waterline in a rickety truck with traps full of long-ears foaming at the mouth.
The thing was, said Carter with lazy good humor, he, unlike the Republicans, had long been a friend to the meek and the undefended. Heck, he had signed the Alaska Lands Act. And yet the rabbit had swum against him!
He laughed awkwardly. Clearly he was masking a wound that still ached. I had no doubt the rabbit had affected his conjugal performance.
I’d already put back a good part of the bottle; Carter had barely sipped. I needed a release valve, since my then-wife was attending twelve-step meetings that seemed to consist of a gaggle of hausfraus who had fastened like limpets to the notion that every man jack was a substance abuser. To hear them tell it, a lone Miller Lite in the hand of a spousal equivalent—I use the term advisedly, as there were several lesbians in the group—was the equivalent of a Scud missile. Though only dimly aware of the words’ definitions, Debbie had armed herself to the teeth with jargon culled from these get-togethers. Terms like codependent and enabling were thickening the air like poison-tipped arrows.
“You wish you’d got it, don’t you,” I said.
“I’m sorry?”
“The rabbit. Hit your mark, man. Instead of missing.”
Carter stared at me with his mouth agape. In that moment, the ex-free-world leader looked like a village idiot.
“Would have read better,” I went on. “In the history books. You’re afraid your name will bear the stigma of that moment of weakness. Of your symbolic impotence.”
“Gosh, I . . .” He trailed off.
The inability to speak at all is, in my line of work, highly significant. I had to press home my advantage.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I said. In a session I would never say this, of course, but we were old familiars, after all, and I felt myself homing in. “Maybe Reagan wouldn’t have won at all. Maybe you’d still be president now. If you’d hit it. Who knows? Maybe the hostages woulda come home in time. Maybe you’d be more successful in other areas, too. If you know what I mean.”
The pause lasted a while.
Then:
“Well, Bob,” drawled Carter. “Now, you may just be right. But the thing is, I didn’t miss. I wasn’t trying to hit that poor critter at all.”
And just like that, the rabbit faded. Slowly but surely I knew the dark form of the old Mullins cat, strung up and skinned. Only had two and a half legs to begin with, limped around everywhere; that was why we hated it. Pitiful. Thing made you want to weep.
We trapped it in a corner, Al Jr., Travis, me, and J. C. Whose idea had it been to club it to death in the first place?
Not his.
“Listen. It was all of us that did it, Robert,” came Carter’s voice faintly. The wine made my head heavy; it wanted to loll. “Sure, you did the . . . you know, first hit—but the guys were egging you on. I hope you understand you don’t have to bear the burden alone. There was a mob mentality. I mean, the hardness of those times took a toll on us kids. I don’t believe it was your fault alone. I really don’t. I know we were just children. But I want you to know that I am deeply sorry we did not all step forward to take responsibility. I think how you were punished, and I feel for you. I will always be profoundly repentant for what we boys did.”
Carter was playing hard at deflection. He’d brought out the big guns.
“What you may
