Rabbit at rest (4 page)

"We can either stay here and let the others find us," Harry
explains to his granddaughter, "or we can go back and look for
them. Maybe we're too tired and hot to do anything but stay here.
We could play a game seeing how many different states' license
plates we can find."

This breaks her sniffling into a wet little laugh. "Then we'd
get lost again." Her eyelids are reddened by the friction of tears
and tiny flakes of light shine in her green irises like the
microscopic facets that give metallic paint its tinselly
quality.

"Look," he tells her. "Here's Minnesota, with its little clump
of pine trees. Ten Thousand Lakes, it says. Score one for
Grandpa."

Judy merely smiles this time, not granting him a laugh, she
knows he's trying to get her to forgive his mistake in losing the
others.

"It's not us who are lost, we know where we are," he says. "It's
them."
He stops crouching beside her, the
hoity-toity little snip, and stands up, to uncreak his knees,
and also to ease the crowded feeling in his chest.

He sees them. Just this side of the zebra crossing, coming this
way, struggling with suitcases. He first sees Nelson, carrying Roy
on his shoulders like a two-headed monster, and then Pru's
head of red hair puffed out like the Sphinx, and Janice's white
tennis dress. Harry, up to his chest in car roofs, waves his arm
back and forth like a man on a desert island. Janice waves back, a
quick toss of her hand as if he's far from what they're talking
about.

But when they're all reunited Nelson is furious. His face is
pale and his upper lip stiff and bristling. "Jesus Christ, Dad,
where did you disappear to? We went all the way back upstairs to
that stupid candy store when you didn't show up in the baggage
area."

"We were there, weren't we, Judy?" Harry says, marvelling at his
son's growing baldness, exposed mercilessly by the Florida sunlight
beating down through the thinned strands, and at his mustache, a
mouse-colored stray blur like those fuzzballs that collect
under furniture. He has noticed these developments before in recent
years but they still have the power to astonish him, along with the
crow's feet and bitter cheek lines time has etched in his child's
face, sharp in the sunlight. "We didn't take more than a minute in
the candy store and came right down the escalator to the baggage
place," Rabbit says, pleased to be remembering so exactly, exactly
visualizing the two candy bars, the extra nickel he had to fish up
for the black counter woman's upturned
silver-polish-colored palm, the skin magazines with the
girls' open mouths, the interleaved teeth of the escalator steps he
was afraid Judy might catch her foot on. "We must have slipped by
each other in the crowd," he adds, trying to be helpful and
innocuous. His son frightens him.

Janice unlocks the Canny. The baking heat of its interior,
released like a ghost, brushes past their faces. They put the
suitcases in the way-back. Pru lifts the groggy boy off
Nelson's shoulders and arranges him in the shadows of the back
seat; Roy's thumb is stuck in his mouth and his dark eyes open for
an unseeing second. Nelson, his hands at last freed, slaps the top
of the Camry and cries in his agony of irritation, "God damn it,
Dad, we've been frantic, because of you! We thought you might have
lost her!" There is a look Nelson gets when he's angry or
frightened that Harry has always thought of as "white around the
gills" - a tension draining color from the child's face and
pulling his eyes back into his head. He gets the look from his
mother, and Janice got it from hers, dark plump old Bessie, who was
a hot-tempered Koerner, she liked to tell them.

"We stuck right together," Rabbit says calmly. "And don't dent
my fucking car. You've damaged enough cars in your life."

"Yeah, and you've damaged enough lives in yours. Now you're
kidnapping my goddamn daughter!"

"I can't believe this," Harry begins. A cold arrow of pain
suddenly heads down his left arm, through the armpit. He blinks.
"My own granddaughter" is all he can organize himself to say.

Janice, looking at his face, asks, "What's the matter,
Harry?"

"Nothing," he tells her sharply. "Just this crazy kid.
Something's bugging him and I can't believe it's me." A curious
gaseous weight, enveloping his head and chest, has descended in the
wake of the sudden arrow. He slumps down behind the wheel, feeling
faintly disoriented but determined to drive. When you're retired,
you get into your routines and other people, even socalled loved
ones, become a strain. This entire other family loads itself into
place behind him. Pru swings her nice wide ass in her
three-dimensional checked suit into the back seat next to
sleeping Roy, and Nelson climbs in on the other side, right behind
Harry, so he can feel the kid's breath on the back of his neck. He
turns his head as far as he can and says to Nelson, in the corner
of his eye, "I resent the word `kidnap."'

"Resent it, then. That's what it felt like. Suddenly we looked
around and you weren't there."

Like Pan Am 103 on the radar screen. "We knew where we were,
didn't we, Judy?" Harry calls backward. The girl has slithered over
her parents and brother into the way-back with the luggage.
Harry can see the silhouette of her head with its pigtail and
angular ribbon in the rearview mirror.

"I didn't know where I was but I knew you did," she answers
loyally, casting forward the thin thread of her voice.

Nelson tries to apologize. "I didn't mean to get so pissed," he
says, "but if you knew what a hassle it is to have two children,
the hassle of travelling all day, and then to have your own father
steal one of them -"

"I didn't
steal
her, for Chnssake," Harry says. "I
bought her a
Sky
Bar." He can feel his heart racing, a
kind of gallop with an extra kick in one of the legs. He starts up
the Camry and puts it in drive and then brakes when the car jerks
forward and puts it into reverse, trying not to make contact, as he
eases out, with the side of the Minnesota Bivouac, its protruding
side mirror and its racing stripe in three tones of brown.

"Harry, would you like me to drive?" Janice asks.

"No," he says. "Why would I?"

She hesitates; without looking, he can see, in the hesitation,
her little pointed tongue poke out of her mouth and touch her upper
lip in that way she has when she tries to think, he knows her so
well. He knows her so well that making conversation with her is
like having a struggle with himself. "You just had a look on your
face a minute ago," she says. "You looked -"

"White around the gills," he supplies.

"Something like that."

The old guy who thinks he's directing the show directs them down
the arrows painted on the asphalt toward the tollbooth. The car
ahead of theirs in line, a tan Honda Accord with New Jersey plates,
GARDEN STATE, has backs of the head in it that look familiar: it's
that jumpy little guy who hopped through the chairs back in the
waiting room, good old Grace up beside him, and in the back seat
the frizzy-headed daughter and another passenger, a head even
taller and the frizz even tighter - the black guy in the
Waspy business suit Harry had assumed had nothing to do with them.
The old guy is gabbing and gesturing and the black guy is nodding
just like Harry used to do with Fred Springer. It's bad enough even
when your father-in-law is the same color. Harry is so
interested he nearly coasts into the back of the Honda. "Honey,
brake,"
Janice says, and out of the blur of her white
tennis dress in the corner of his eye she holds out to him fifty
cents for the parking-lot charge. An Oriental kid
stone-deaf inside his Walkman earmuffs takes the two quarters
with a hand jumping along with some beat only he can hear, and the
striped bar goes up, and they are free, free to go home.

"Well," Harry says, back on the weird brief highway, "it's a
helluva thing, to have your own son accuse you of kidnapping. And
as to the big deal ofhaving two children, it can't be that much
worse than having one. Either way, your freedom's gone."

Actually Nelson has, unwittingly or not, touched a sore point,
for Harry and Janice did have two children. Their dead child lives
on with them as a silent glue of guilt and shame, an inexpungeable
sourness at the bottom of things. And Rabbit suspects himself of
having an illegitimate daughter, three years younger than Nelson,
by a woman called Ruth, who wouldn't admit it the last time Harry
saw her.

Nelson goes on, helpless in the grip of his hardened
resentments, "You go run off with Judy all palsy-walsy and
haven't said boo to little Roy."

"Say boo? - I'd wake him up, saying boo, he's been asleep
all the time, it's like he's drugged. And how much longer you gonna
let him suck his thumb? Shouldn't he be outgrowing it by now?"

"What does it matter to you if he sucks his thumb? How is it
hurting you?"

"He'll get buck teeth."

"Dad, that's an old wives' tale. Pru asked our pediatrician and
he said you don't suck your thumb with your teeth."

Pru says quietly, "He did say he should outgrow it soon."

"What makes you so
down
on everything, Dad?" Nelson
whines, unable it seems to find another pitch. The kid is itching
and his voice can't stop scratching. "You used to be a pretty
laidback hombre; now everything you say is kind of negative."

Rabbit wants to lead the boy on, to see how bad he can make him
look in front of the women. "Rigid," he smilingly agrees. "The
older you get, the more you get set in your ways. Nobody at
Valhalla Village sucks their thumb. There may even be a rule
against it, like swimming in the pool without a bathing cap. Like
swimming with an earring on. Tell me something. What's the
significance of an earring when you're married with two
children?"

Nelson ignores the question in dignified silence, making his
father look bad.

They are breezing along, between shoulders of unreal grass, the
palms clicking by like telephone poles. Pru says from the back
seat, to change the subject, "I can never get over how flat Florida
is."

"It gets a little rolling," Harry tells her, "away from the
coasts. Ranch and orange-grove country. Rednecks and a lot of
Mexicans. We could all go for a drive inland some day. See the real
Florida."

"Judy and Roy are dying to see Disney World," Nelson says,
trying to become reasonable.

"Too far," his father swiftly tells him. "It'd be like driving
to Pittsburgh from Brewer. This is a big state. You need
reservations to stay overnight and this time of year there aren't
any. Absolutely impossible."

This flat statement renders them all wordless. Through the
rushing noise of the air-conditioning fan and the humming of
the tires Harry hears from the way-back that for a second
time in this first half-hour he has made his granddaughter
cry. Pru turns and murmurs to her. Harry shouts back, "There's lots
else to do. We can go to that circus museum in Sarasota again."

"I hate the circus museum," he hears Judy's small voice say.

"We've never been to the Edison house in Fort Myers," he
announces, speaking now as patriarch, to the entire carful. "The
people at the condo say it's fascinating, he even invented
television it turns out."

"And the beach, baby," Pru softly adds. "You know how you love
the beach at the Shore." In a less maternal voice she tells Janice
and Harry, "She's a lovely swimmer now."

"Driving to the Jersey Shore used to be absolutely the most
boring thing we did," Nelson tells his parents, trying to get down
out of his dark cloud into a family mode, willing now in
recollection to be a child again.

"Driving is boring," Rabbit pontificates, "but it's what we do.
Most of American life is driving somewhere and then driving back
wondering why the hell you went."

"Harry," Janice says. "You're going too fast again. Do you want
to take 75, or push on to Route 41?"

* * *

Of all the roads Harry has seen in his life, Route 41, the old
Tamiami Trail, is the most steadily depressing. It is wider than
commercial-use, unlimited-access highways tend to be up
north, and somehow the competitive roadside enterprise looks worse
in constant sunlight, as if like plastic garbage bags it will never
rot away. WINN DIXIE. PUBLIX. Eckerd Drugs. K Mart. Wal-Mart.
TACO BELL. ARK PLAZA. Joy Food Store. Starvin' Marvin Discount Food
Wine and Beer. Among the repeating franchises selling gasoline and
groceries and liquor and drugs all mixed together in that peculiar
lawless way they have down here, low -pale buildings cater
especially to illness and age. Arthritic Rehabilitation Center.
Nursefinder, Inc. Cardiac Rehabilitation Center. Chiropractix.
Legal Offices - Medicare and Malpractice Cases a Speciality.
Hearing Aids and Contact Lenses. West Coast Knee Center. Universal
Prosthetics. National Cremation Society. On the telephone wires,
instead of the sparrows and starlings you see in Pennsylvania, lone
hawks and buzzards sit. Banks, stylish big structures in smoked
glass, rise higher than the wires with their glossy
self-advertisements. First Federal. Southeast. Barnett Bank
with its Superteller. C & S proclaiming All Services, servicing
the millions and billions in money people bring down here along
with their decrepit bodies, the loot of all those lifetimes
flooding the sandy low land, floating these big smoked-glass
superliners.

Alongside 41, between the banks and stores and pet suppliers and
sprinkler installers, miles of low homes are roofed with fat white
cooling tile. A block or two back from the highway in the
carbon-monoxide haze tall pink condos like Spanish castles or
Chinese pagodas spread sideways like banyan trees. Banyan trees
fascinate Harry down here, the way they spread by dropping down
vines that take root; they look to him like enormous chewing gum on
your shoe. Easy Drugs. Nu-VIEW. Ameri-Life and Health.
Starlite Motel. JESUS CHRIST Is LORD. His carful of family grows
silent and dazed as he drives the miles, stopping now and then at
the overhead lights that signal an intersecting road, a secondary
road heading west to beaches and what mangrove swamps survive and
east to the scruffy prairie being skinned in great square tracts
for yet more development. Development! We're being developed to
death. Each turning off of Route 41 takes some people home, to
their little niche in the maze, their own parking spot and
hard-bought place in the sun. The sun is low enough over the
Gulf now to tinge everything pink, the red of the stoplights almost
invisible. At the Angstroms' own turnoff, two more miles of streets
unfold, some straight and some curving, through blocks of
single-family houses with half-dead little front yards
ornamented by plumes of pampas grass and flowering bushes on
vacation from flowering in this dry butt-end of the year.
Janice and Harry at first thought they might purchase one of these
pale one-story houses lurking behind their tropical bushes
and orange trees, caves of coolness and dark, with their secret
pools out back behind the garages with their automatic doors, but
such houses reminded them unhappily of the house they had in Penn
Villas that saw so much marital misery and strangeness before it
burned down, half of it, so they settled for a two-bedroom
condominium up high in the air, on the fourth floor, overlooking a
golf course from a narrow balcony screened by the top branches of
Norfolk pines. Of all the addresses where Harry has lived in his
life - 303 Jackson Road; Btry A, 66th FA Bn, Fort Larson,
Texas; 447 Wilbur Street, Apt. #5; whatever the number on Summer
Street was where he parked himself with Ruth Leonard that spring
long ago; 26 Vista Crescent; 89 Joseph Street for ten years,
courtesy of Ma Springer; 14%2 Franklin Drive - this is the
highest number by far: 59600 Pindo Palm Boulevard, Building B,
#413. He hadn't been crazy about the thirteen, in fact he thought
builders didn't put that number in things, but maybe people are
less superstitious than they used to be. When he was a kid there
was all sorts of worry, not altogether playful, about black cats
and spilled salt and opening umbrellas in the house and kicking
buckets and walking under ladders. The air was thought then to have
eyes and ears and to need placating.