Rabbit at rest (31 page)

"I get enthusiastic. My name's Benny Leone, by the way, Mr.
Angstrom. Benny for Benedict. A pleasure to see you over here. The
way Nelson tells us, you've washed your hands of the car business
and glad of it."

"I'm semi-retired." Do they know, he wonders, that Janice
legally owns it all? He supposes they pretty much have the picture.
Most people do, in life. People know more than they let on.

Benny says, "You get all kinds of kooky calls in this business.
Nelson shouldn't let it bug him."

"Nelson takes everything too seriously," Elvira adds. "I tell
him, Don't let things get to you, but he can't help it. He's one of
those guys so uptight he squeaks."

"He was always a very caring boy," Harry tells them. "Who else
is here, besides you two? Talk about automatic pilot -"

"There's Jeremy," Benny says, "who comes in generally Wednesdays
through Saturdays."

"And Lyle's here," Elvira says, and glances sideways to where a
couple in bleached jeans are wandering in the glinting sea of
Toyotas.

"I thought Lyle was sick," Harry says.

"He says he's in remission," Benny says, his face getting a
careful look, as maybe Harry's did when he was trying not to appear
a chauvinist in Elvira's eyes. She for her part has suddenly moved,
in her spring trench coat, toward the bright outdoors, where the
pair of potential buyers browse.

"Glad to hear it," Harry says, feeling less constrained and
ceremonious talking to Benny alone. "I didn't think there was any
remission from his disease."

"Not in the long run." The man's voice has gone huskier, a touch
gangsterish, as if the woman's presence had constrained him
too.

Harry jerks his head curtly toward the outdoors. "How's she
doing really?"

Benny moves an inch even closer and confides, "She gets 'em to a
certain point, then gets rigid and lets the deal slip away. Like
she's afraid the rest of us will say she's too soft."

Harry nods. "Like women are always the stingiest tippers. Money
spooks 'em. Still," he says, loyal to the changing times and his
son's innovations, "I think it's a good idea. Like lady ministers.
They have a people touch."

"Yeah," the jowly small man cautiously allows. "Gives the place
a little zing. A little something different."

"Where is Lyle, did you say?" He wonders how much these two are
concealing from him, protecting Nelson. He was aware of eye signals
between them as they talked. A maze of secrets, this agency he
built up in his own image since 1975, when old man Springer
suddenly popped, one summer day, like an overheated thermometer. A
lot of hidden stress in the auto business. Chancy, yet you have a
ton of steady overhead.

"He was in Nelson's office ten minutes ago."

"Doesn't he use Mildred's?" Harry explains, "Mildred Kroust was
the bookkeeper for years here, when you were just a kid." In terms
of Springer Motors he has become a historian. He can remember when
that appliance-rental place up the road had a big sign saying
D I S C O remade from a Mr. Peanut in spats and top hat brandishing
his stick in neon.

But Benny seems to know all he wants to. He says, "That's a kind
of conference room now. There's a couch in there if anybody needs
all of a sudden to take a nap. Lyle used to, but now he works
mostly at home, what with his illness."

"How long has he had it?"

Benny gets that careful look again, and says, "At least a year.
That HIV virus can be inside you for five or ten before you know
it." His voice goes huskier, he comes closer still. "A couple of
the mechanics quit when Nelson brought him in as accountant in his
condition, but you got to hand it to Nelson, he told them go ahead,
quit, if they wanted to be superstitious. He spelled out how you
can't get it from casual contact and told them take it or leave
it."

"How'd Manny go for that?"

"Manny? Oh yeah, Mr. Manning in Service. As I understand it,
that was the reason he left finally. He'd been shopping, I hear, at
other agencies, but at his age it's hard to make a jump."

"You said it," Harry says. "Hey, looks like another customer out
there, you better help Elvira out."

"Let 'em look, is my motto. If they're serious, they'll come in.
Elvira tries too hard."

Rabbit walks across the display floor, past the performance
board and the Parts window and the crash-barred door that
leads into the garage, to the green doorway, set in old
random-grooved Masonite now painted a dusty rose, of what
used to be his office. Elvira was right; the photographic blowups
of his basketball headlines and halftone newspaper cuts haven't
been tossed out but are up on Nelson's walls, where the kid has to
look at them every day. Also on the walls are the Kiwanis and
Rotary plaques and a citation from the Greater Brewer Chamber of
Commerce and a President's Touch Award that Toyota gave the agency
a few years ago and a
Playboy
calendar, the girl for this
month dressed up as a bare-assed Easter bunny, which Harry
isn't so sure strikes quite the right note but at least says the
whole agency hasn't gone queer.

Lyle stands up at Nelson's desk before Harry is in the room. He
is very thin. He wears a thick red sweater under his gray suit. He
extends a skeletal bluish hand and an unexpectedly broad smile, his
teeth enormous in his shrunken face. "Hello, Mr. Angstrom. I bet
you don't remember me."

But he does look dimly familiar, like somebody you played
basketball against forty years ago. His skull is very narrow, the
crewcut hair so evenly blond it looks dyed; the accountant's
half-glasses on his nose are of thin gold wire. He is so
pale, light seems to be coming through his skin. Squinting, Harry
takes the offered hand in a brief shake and tries not to think of
those little HIVs, intricate as tiny spaceships, slithering off
onto his palm and up his wrist and arm into the sweat pores of his
armpit and burrowing into his bloodstream there. He wipes his palm
on the side of his jacket and hopes it looks like he's patting his
pocket.

Lyle tells him, "I used to work in Fiscal Alternatives on Weiser
Street when you and your wife would come and trade gold and
silver."

Harry laughs, remembering. "We damn near broke our backs,
lugging one load of silver dollars up the street to the fucking
bank."

"You were smart," Lyle says. "You got out in time. I was
impressed."

This last remark seems a touch impertinent, but Harry says
amiably, "Dumb luck. That place still functioning?"

"In a
very
restricted way," Lyle says, overemphasizing,
for Harry's money, the "very." It seems if you're a fag you have to
exaggerate everything, to bring it all up to normal pitch. "The
whole metals boom was a fad, really. They're
very
depressed now."

"It was a nifty little place. That beauty who used to do the
actual buying and selling. I could never figure out how she could
run the computer with those long fingernails."

"Oh, Marcia. She committed suicide."

Rabbit is stunned. She had seemed so angelic in her way. "She
did? Why?"

"Oh, the usual. Personal problems," Lyle says, flicking them
away with the back of his transparent hand. In Rabbit's eyes
globules of blurred light move around Lyle's margins, like E.T. in
the movie. "Nothing to do with the metals slump. She was just the
front, the money behind it came out of Philadelphia."

As Lyle talks airily, Harry can hear his intakes of breath, a
slight panting that goes with the bluish shadows at the temples,
the sense of him having come from space and about to go back to
space.
This guy's even worse
off
than 1 am,
Rabbit thinks, and likes him for it. He sees no signs of the
Kaposi's spots, though, just a general radiant aura of a body
resisting life, refusing sustenance, refusing to go along with its
own system. There is a sweetish-rotten smell, like when you
open the door of the unused refrigerator in a vacation place, or
maybe Rabbit imagines it. Lyle suddenly, limply, sits down, as if
standing has been too much effort.

Harry takes the chair across the desk, where the customers
usually sit, begging for easier terms. "Lyle," Harry begins. "I'd
like to inspect the books. Bank statements, receipts, payments,
loans, inventory, the works."

"Why on earth why?" Lyle's eyes, as the rest of his face wastes
away, stand out, more in the round than healthy people's eyes. He
sits erect, one fleshless forearm for support laid in its gray
sleeve parallel to the edge of Nelson's desk. Either to conserve
his energy or protect the truth, he has set himself to give minimal
answers.

"Oh, human curiosity. Frankly, there's something fishy about the
statements I've been getting in Florida." Harry hesitates, but
can't see that being specific would do any harm at this point. He
still has the hope that everything can be explained away, that he
can go back to not thinking about the lot. "There aren't enough
used-car sales, proportionally."

"There aren't?"

"You could argue it's a variable, and with the good economy
under Reagan people can afford to buy new; but in my years here
there's always been a certain proportion, things average out over
the course of a couple months, and that hasn't been happening in
the statements since November. In fact, it's been getting
weirder."

"Weirder."

"Funnier. Phonier. Whatever. When can I see the books? I'm no
accountant; I want Mildred Kroust to go over them with me."

Lyle makes an effort and shifts his arm off the desk and rests
both hands out of sight, on his lap. Harry is reminded by the way
he moves of the ghostly slowness of the languid dead floppy bodies
at Buchenwald being moved around in the post-war newsreels.
Naked, loose-jointed, their laps in plain view, talk about
obscene, here was something so obscene they had to show it to us so
we'd believe it. Lyle tells Harry, "I keep a lot of the data at
home, in my computer."

"We have a computer system here. Top of the line, an IBM. I
remember our installing it."

"Mine's compatible. A little Apple that does everything."

"I bet it does. You know, frankly, just because you're sick and
have to stay home a lot's no reason the Springer Motors accounts
should be scattered all over Diamond County. I want them here. I
want them here tomorrow."

This is the first acknowledgment either has made that Lyle is
sick, that Lyle is dying. The boy stiffens, and his lips puff out a
little. He smiles, that skeleton-generous grin. "I can only
show the books to authorized persons," he says.

"I'm authorized. Who could be more authorized than me? I used to
run the place. That's my picture all over the walls."

Lyle's eyelids, with lashes darker than his hair, lower over
those bulging eyes. He blinks several times, and tries to be
delicate, to keep the courtesies between them. "My understanding
from Nelson is that his mother owns the company."

"Yeah, but I'm her husband. Half of what's hers is mine."

"In some circumstances, perhaps, and perhaps in some states. But
not, I think, in Pennsylvania. If you wish to consult a lawyer -"
His breathing is becoming difficult; it is almost a mercy for Harry
to interrupt.

"I don't need to consult any lawyer. All I need is to have my
wife call you and tell you to show me the books. Me and Mildred. I
want her in on this."

"Miss Kroust, I believe, resides now in a nursing home. The
Dengler Home in Penn Park."

"Good. That's five minutes from my house. I'll pick her up and
come back here tomorrow. Let's set a time."

Lyle's lids lower again, and he awkwardly replaces his arm on
the desktop. "When and if I receive your wife's authorization, and
Nelson's go-ahead -"

"You're not going to get that. Nelson's the problem here, not
the solution."

"I say, even if, I would need some days to pull all the figures
together."

"Why is that? The books should be up-to-date. What's
going on here with you guys?"

Surprisingly, Lyle says nothing. Perhaps the struggle for breath
is too much. It is all so wearying. His hollow temples look bluer.
Harry's heart is racing and his chest twingeing but he resists the
impulse to pop another Nitrostat, he doesn't want to become an
addict. He slumps down lower in the customer's chair, as if
negotiations for now have gone as far as they can go. He tries
another topic. "Tell me about it, Lyle. How does it feel?"

"What feel?"

"Being so close to, you know, the barn. The reason I ask, I had
a touch of heart trouble down in Florida and still can't get used
to it, how close I came. I mean, most of the time it seems unreal,
I'm me, and all around me everything is piddling along as normal,
and then suddenly at night, when I wake up needing to take a leak,
or in the middle of a TV show that's sillier than hell, it hits me,
and wow. The bottom falls right out. I want to crawl back into my
parents but they're dead already."

Lyle's puffy lips tremble, or seem to, as he puzzles out this
new turn the conversation has taken. "You come to terns with it,"
he says. "Everybody dies."

"But some sooner than others, huh?"

A spasm of indignation animates Lyle. "They're developing new
drugs. All the time. The French. The Chinese. Trichosanthin. TIBO
derivatives. Eventually the FDA will have to let them in, even if
they are a bunch of Reaganite fascist homophobes who wouldn't mind
seeing us all dead. It's a question of hanging on. I have
hope."

"Well, great. More power to you. But medicine can only do so
much. That's what I'm learning, the hard way. You know, Lyle, it's
not as though I'd never thought about death, or never had people
near to me die, but I never, you could say, had the real taste of
it in my mouth. I mean, it's not kidding. It wants it all." He
wants that pill. He wonders if Nelson keeps a roll of Life Savers
in the desk the way he himself used to. Just something to put in
your mouth when you get nervous. Harry finds that every time he
thinks of his death it makes him want to eat - that's why he
hasn't lost more weight.