Rabbit at rest (33 page)

"You should? Why not we?"

"According to Lyle, I'm the only one who counts."

This hurts. "You're too soft on Nelson. He can do anything he
wants with you."

"Oh, Harry, it used to be so awful, that time I ran off with
Charlie! Nelson was only twelve, he'd come over on his bicycle all
the way into Eisenhower Avenue and he'd stand there for an hour
across the street, looking up at our windows, and a couple of times
I saw him and I
hid, I
hid behind the curtain and let him
just stand there until he got exhausted and rode away." Staring
over Harry's head, seeing her little boy across the street, so
patient and puzzled and hopeful, her dark eyes fill with tears.

"Well, hell," Rabbit says, "nobody
asked
him to go over
there spying on you. 1 was taking care of him."

"With that poor crazy girl and perfectly hideous black man you
were. It's just dumb luck the house didn't bum down with Nelson in
it too."

"I would have got him out. If I'd been there I would have got
them all out."

"You don't
know,"
she says, "you don't know what you
would have done. And you don't know now what the real story is,
it's all just your suspicions, somebody's been poisoning your mind
against Nelson. I bet it was Thelma."

"Thelma? We never see her anymore, we ought to have the
Harrisons over sometime."

"Pfaa!"
She spits this refusal, he has to admire her
fury, the animal way it fluffs out her hair. "Over my dead
body."

"Just a thought." This is not a good topic. He reverts: "I don't
know what the real story is, but you do, huh? What has Nelson told
you?"

She pinches her mouth shut so she seems to have no lips at all,
like Ma Springer used to look. "Nothing really," she lies.

"Nothing
really.
Well O.K. then. You know more than I
do. Good luck. It's you he's ripping off. It's your father's
company he and his queer buddies are taking down the tube."

"Nelson wouldn't steal from the company."

"Honey, you don't understand the power of drugs. Read the
papers. Read
People,
Richard Pryor tells all. Just the
other day they pulled Yogi Berra's kid in. People who are into coke
will kill their grandmother for a fix. It used to be heroin was the
bottom of the barrel but crack makes heroin look mild."

"Nelson doesn't do crack. Much."

"Oh. Who says?"

She almost tells him, but gets frightened. "Nobody. I just know
my own son. And from what Pru lets drop."

"Pru talks, does she? What does she say?"

"She's miserable. And the children too. Little Roy acts very
odd, you must have noticed. Judy has nightmares. Ifit weren't for
the children, Pru confessed to me, she would have left Nelson long
ago."

Harry feels evaded. "Let's keep to the subject. Pru's got her
problems, you've got yours. You better get your man-child out
of Springer Motors fast."

"I'll talk to him, Harry. I don't want you to say a word."

"Why the fuck not? What's the fucking harm if I do?"

"You'll come on too strong. You'll drive him deeper into
himself. He - he takes you too seriously."

"But not you?"

"He's sure of me. He knows I love him."

"And I don't?" His eyes water at the thought. The shower outside
has already lifted, leaving a trickle in the gutters.

"You do, Harry, but there's something else too. You're another
man. Men have this territorial thing. You think of the lot as
yours. He thinks of it as his."

"It'll be his some day, if he's not in jail. I was looking at
him down in Florida and there suddenly came into my mind the word
criminal. Something about the shape ofhis head. I hate the way he's
going bald. He'll look like Ronnie Harrison."

"Will you promise to let me talk to him and you do nothing?"

"You'll just let him weasel out." But in fact he has no desire
to confront Nelson himself.

She knows this. She says, "No I won't, I promise." She stops
rubbing the back of one hand with the fingers of the other and
moves back toward him, flop flop, as he sits on the bed. She rests
her fingers above his ears and by the short hairs there pulls him
softly toward her. "I do like the way you want to defend me," she
says.

He yields to her insistent tug and rests his face on her chest
again. Her nightie has a damp spot on it where he diddled her
nipple with his tongue. Her nipples are chewed-looking, less
perfect, realer than Thelma's. Being little, Janice's tits have
kept their tilt pretty much, that perky upward thrust through those
Forties angora sweaters in the high-school halls. Through the
cotton her body gives off a smell, a stirred-up smoky smell.
"What's in it for me?" he asks, his mouth against the wet
cloth.

"Oh, a present," she says.

"When do I get it?"

"Pretty soon."

"With the mouth?"

"We'll see." She pushes his face back from her smoky warm body
and with her fingers poking under his jaws makes him look up at
her. "But if you say another single word about Nelson, I'll stop,
and you won't get any present."

His face feels hot and his heart is racing but in a steady sweet
way, contained in his rib cage the way his hard-on is
contained in his pants, sweetly packed with blood; he is pleased
that the Vasotec may make him lightheaded but leaves him enough
blood pressure for one of these unscheduled, once in a while.
"O.K., not a word," Rabbit promises, becoming efficient. "I'll
quick go to the bathroom and brush my teeth and stuff and you turn
off the lights. And somebody ought to take the phone off the hook.
Downstairs, so we don't hear the squawking."

Strange phone calls have been coming through. Grainy voices with
that rich timbre peculiar to black males ask if Nelson Angstrom is
there. Harry or Janice responds that Nelson does not live here,
that this is the home of his parents. "Well I ain't had no luck at
the number he give me for a home number and at the place he works
this here secretary always say the man is out."

"Would you like to leave a message?"

A pause. "You just tell him Julius called." Or Luther.

` Julius?"

"That's right."

"And what's it about, Julius? You want to say?"

"He'll know what it's about. You just tell him Julius called."
Or Perry. Or Dave.

Or the caller would hang up without leaving a name. Or would
have a thin, faintly foreign, precise way of speaking, and once
wanted to speak not to Nelson but with Harry. "I am regretful to
bother you, sir, but this son you have leaves me no recourse but to
inform you in person."

"To inform me of what?"

"To inform you that your son has incurred serious debts and
gentlemen to which I am associated, against any advice which I
attempt to give them, talk of doing physical harm."

"Physical harm to Nelson?"

"Or even to certain of his near and dear. This is sorry to say
and I do apologize, but these are not perhaps such gentlemen. I
myself am merely the bearer of bad tidings. Do not rest the blame
with me." The voice seemed to be drawing closer to the telephone
mouthpiece, closer to Harry's ear, growing plaintively sincere,
attempting to strike up a conspiracy, to become Harry's friend and
ally. The familiar room, the den with its frost-faced TV and
two silvery-pink wing chairs and bookshelves holding a
smattering mostly of history books and on the upper shelves some
china knickknacks (fairies under toadstools, cherubic bald monks,
baby robins in a nest of porcelain straws) that used to be in Ma
Springer's breakfront, all this respectable furniture changes
quality, becomes murky and fluid and useless, at the insertion of
this menacing plaintive voice into his ear, a voice with a heart of
sorts, with an understandable human mission, an unpleasant duty to
do, calling out of an extensive slippery underground: just so, the
balmy blue air above the Gulf of Mexico changed for him, as if a
filter had been slipped over his eyes, when the Sunfish tipped
over.

Rabbit asks, treading water, "How did Nelson incur these
debts?"

The voice likes getting his own words back. "He incurred them,
sir, in pursuit of his satisfactions, and that is within his
privileges, but he or someone on his behalf must pay. My associates
have been assured that you are a very excellent father."

"Not so hot, actually. Whajou say your name was?"

"I did not say, señor. I did not give myself a name. It is
the name of Angstrom that is of concern. My associates are eager to
settle with anyone of that excellent name." This man, it occurred
to Harry, loves the English language, as an instrument full of
promise, of unexplored resources.

"My son," Harry tells him, "is an adult and his finances have
nothing to do with me."

"That is your word? Your very final word?"

"It is. Listen, I live half the year in Florida and come back
and -'

But the caller has hung up, leaving Harry with the sensation
that the walls of his solid little limestone house are as thin as
diet crackers, that the wall-to-wall carpet under his
feet is soaked with water, that a pipe has burst and there is no
plumber to call.

* * *

He turns to his old friend and associate Charlie Stavros,
retired from being Springer Motors' Senior Sales Representative and
moved from his old place on Eisenhower Avenue to a new condominium
development on the far north side of the city, where the railroad
had sold off an old freight yard, twenty acres of it, it's amazing
what the railroads owned in their heyday. Harry isn't sure he can
find the place and suggests they have lunch at Johnny Frye's
downtown; Johnny Frye's Chophouse was the original name for this
restaurant on Weiser Square, which became the Café Barcelona
in the Seventies and then the Crépe House later in the decade
and now has changed hands again and calls itself Salad Binge,
explaining in signs outside
Your Local Lo-Cal Eatery
and
Creative Soups and Organic Fresh-Food Health
Dishes,
to attract the health-minded yuppies who work in
the glass-skinned office building that has risen across from
Kroll's, which still stands empty, its huge display windows
whitewashed from the inside and its bare windowless side toward the
mountain exposed in rough-mortared brick above the rubbly
parking lot that extends up to the old Baghdad. ELP. SAV ME.

The downtown is mostly parking space now but the strange thing
is that the space is all full. Though there is little to shop at
downtown any more, except for some discount drugstores and a
McCrory's five and dime that still peddles parakeet food and
plastic barrettes to old people who haven't changed clothes since
1942, the number of trim youngish professionals in lightweight
suits and tight linen skirts has ballooned; they work in the banks
and insurance companies and state and federal agencies and there is
no end of them somehow. On a sunny day they fill the woodsy park
the city planners -not local, a fancy architectural firm that
came in and won the competition with their design and then flew
back to Atlanta - have made out of Weiser Square, where the
squeaking, sparking trolley cars used to line up for passengers.
They bask, these young paper-pushers, beside the abstract
cement fountains, reading
The Wall Street Journal
with
their coats off and neatly folded on the anodized,
vandal-proof benches beside them. The women of this race
especially fascinate Harry; they wear running shoes instead of high
heels but their legs are encased in sheer pantyhose and their faces
adorned by big round glasses that give them a comical sexy look, as
if their boobs are being echoed above in hard hornrims and coated
plastic. They look like Goldie Hawns conditioned by Jane Fonda. The
style these days gives them all wide mannish shoulders, and their
hips have been pared and hardened by exercise bicycles and those
ass-hugging pants that mold around every muscle like
electric-colored paint. These women seem visitors from a
slimmed-down future where sex is just another exercise and we
all live in sealed cubicles and communicate through computers.

You would have thought Charlie would be dead by now. But these
Mediterranean types don't even seem to get gray and paunchy. They
hit a plateau around fifty that doesn't change until they drop off
of it suddenly somewhere in their eighties. They use their bodies
up neatly, like mopping up a dinner plate with bread. Charlie had
rheumatic fever as a kid but, though carrying a heart murmur inside
him and subject to angina, he hasn't ever had an episode as severe
as Harry's down in the Gulf. "How the fuck do you do it, Charlie?"
Rabbit asks him.

"You learn to avoid aggravation," Charlie tells him. "If
anything looks to be aggravating, walk away from it. Things over at
the lot had got to be aggravating, so I walked away. Christ, am I
glad to be away from Toyotas! First thing I did was buy myself an
old-fashioned American boat, an Olds Toronado. Soft shocks,
single-finger steering, guzzles gas, I'm crazy about it.
Five-liter V-8, tomato red with a white padded
half-roof."

"Sounds great. You park it close by?"

"I tried and couldn't. Circled up around Spring Street twice and
finally gave up and left it in a lot up past the old Baghdad and
took a bus the three blocks down. So it costs a few pennies. Avoid
aggravation, champ."

"I still don't understand it. Downtown Brewer's supposed to be
dead and there's nowhere to park. Where are all the cars coming
from?"

"They breed," Charlie explains. "These cars get pregnant as
teenagers and go on welfare. They don't give a damn."

One of the things Harry has always enjoyed about Charlie is the
man's feel for the big picture; the two of them used to stand by
the display window over at the lot on dull mornings and rehash the
day's news. Rabbit has never gotten over the idea that the news is
going to mean something to him. As they seat themselves at one of
the tile-topped tables that remain from the days when this
was the Café Barcelona, he says, "How about Schmidt last
night?" Against the Pirates in Three Rivers Stadium, the Phillies'
veteran third baseman had doubled twice and surpassed Richie
Ashburn's team record for total hits.