Rabbit at rest (52 page)

"You shouldn't ride him about his religion," Harry tells
Elvira.

"I don't. I just think that damn Pope he's got ought to be put
in jail for what he does to women."

Peggy Fosnacht, Rabbit remembers, before she had a breast cut
off and then upped and died, had been wild with anger toward the
Pope. Anger is what gives you cancer, he has read somewhere. If
you've been around long enough, he reflects, you've heard it all,
the news and the commentary both, churned like the garbage in a
Disposall that doesn't drain, the media every night trying to whip
you up into a frenzy so you'll run out and buy all the depressing
stuff they advertise, laxatives and denture adhesive cream,
Fixodent and Sominex and Tylenol and hemorrhoid medicine and
mouthwash against morning mouth. Why does the evening news assume
the people who watch it are in such decrepit plugged-up
shape? It's enough to make you switch the channel. The commercials
revolt him, all that friendly jawing among these folksy
crackerbarrel types about rectal itching and burning, and the one
of the young/old beautiful woman in soft focus stretching so
luxuriously in her white bathrobe because she's just taken a shit
and all those people in the Ex-Lax ad saying "Good morning"
one after the other so you can't help picturing the world filling
up with our smiling American excrement, we'll have to pay poor
third-world countries to dump it pretty soon, like toxic
waste. "Why pick on the Pope?" Harry asks. "Bush is just as bad,
anti-choice."

"Yes, but he'll change when the women start voting Republicans
out. There's no way to vote the Pope out."

"Do you ever get the feeling," he asks her, "now that Bush is
in, that we're kind of on the sidelines, that we're sort of like a
big Canada, and what we do doesn't much matter to anybody else?
Maybe that's the way it ought to be. It's a kind of relief, I
guess, not to be the big cheese."

Elvira has decided to be amused. She fiddles with one of her
Brazil-nut earrings and looks up at him slantwise. "You
matter to everybody, Harry, if that's what you're hinting at."

This is the most daughterly thing she has ever said to him. He
feels himself blush. "I wasn't thinking of me, I was thinking of
the country. You know who I blame? The old Ayatollah, for calling
us the Great Satan. It's like he put the evil eye on us and we
shrank. Seriously. He really stuck it to us, somehow."

"Don't live in a dream world, Harry. We still need you down
here."

She goes out to the lot, where a quartet of female teenagers
have showed up, all in jackets of stone-washed denim. Who
knows, even teenagers these days have money enough for a Toyota.
Maybe it's an all-girl rock band, shopping for a van to tour
in. Harry wanders in to the office where the visiting accountants
are nesting, day after day, in piles of paper. The one in charge
has a rubbery tired face with dark rings under his eyes, and the
assistant seems to be a kind of moron, a simpleton at speaking
anyway, with not enough back to his head. As if to make up for any
deficiency he always wears a clean white shirt with a tight
necktie, pinned to his chest with a tieclip.

"Ah," the one in charge says, "just the guy we need. Does the
name Angus Barfield mean anything to you?" The rings under his eyes
are so deep and deeply bruised they go all the way around his
sockets; he looks like a raccoon. Though his face shows a lot of
wear, his hair is black as shoe polish, and lies as flat on his
head as if painted in place. These accountants have to be tidy, all
those numbers they write down, thousands and millions, and never a
five that could be confused with a three or a seven with a one. As
he cocks a ringed eye at Harry waiting for an answer, his rubbery
mouth slides around in a restless wise-guy motion.

"No," Harry says, "and yet, wait. There's a faint bell.
Barfield."

"A good guy for you to know," the accountant says, with a sly
grimace and twist of his lips. "From December to April, he was
buying a Toyota a month." He checks a paper under his shirtsleeved
forearm. He has very long black hairs on his wrists. "A Corolla
four-door, a Tercel five-speed hatchback, a Canny
wagon, a deluxe two-passenger 4-Runner, and in April he
really went fancy and took on a Supra Turbo with a sport roof, to
the tune of twenty-five seven. Totals up to just under
seventy-five K. All in the same name and the same address on
Willow Street."

"Where's Willow?"

"That's one of the side streets up above Locust, you know. The
area's gotten kind of trendy."

"Locust," Harry repeats, struggling to recall. He has heard the
odd name "Angus" before, from Nelson's lips. Going off to a party
in north Brewer.

"Single white male. Excellent credit ratings. Not much of a
haggler, paid list price every time. The only trouble with him as a
customer," the accountant says, "is according to city records he's
been dead for six months. Died before Christmas." He purses his
lips into a little bunch under one nostril and lifts his eyebrows
so high his nostrils dilate in sympathy.

"I got it," Harry says, with a jarring pounce of his heart.
"That's Slim. Angus Barfield was the real name of a guy everybody
called Slim. He was a, a gay I guess, about my son's age. Had a
good job in downtown Brewer - administered one of those HUD
jobtraining programs for high-school dropouts. He was a
trained psychologist, I think Nelson once told me."

The moronic assistant, who has been listening with the staring
effort of a head that can only hold one thing at a time, giggles:
the humor of insanity spills over onto psychologists. The other
twists up the lower part of his face in a new way, as if
demonstrating knots. "Bank loan officers love government
employees," he says. "They're sure and steady, see?"

Since the man seems to expect it, Harry nods, and the
accountant dramatically slaps the tidy chaos of papers spread
out on the desk. "December to April, Brewer Trust extended five car
loans to this Angus Barfield, made over to Springer Motors."

"How could they, to the same guy? Common sense -"

"Since computers, my friend, common sense has gone out the
window. It's joined your Aunt Matilda's ostrich-feather hat.
The auto-loan department of a bank is just tiddledywinks; the
computer checked his credit and liked it and the loan was
approved. The checks were cashed but never showed up in the company
credits. We think your pal Lyle opened a dummy somewhere." The man
stabs a stack of bank statements with a finger; it has black hairs
between the knuckles and bends back so far Rabbit winces and looks
away. This rubbery guy is one of those born teachers Rabbit has
instinctively avoided all his life. "Let me put it like this. A
computer is like a Frenchman. It seems real smart until you know
the language. Once you know the language, you realize it's dumb as
hell. Quick, sure. But quick ain't the same as smart."

"But," Harry gropes to say, "but for Lyle and Nelson, Lyle
especially, to use poor Slims name in a scam like this when he had
just died, when he was just about buried - would they have
actually been so hard-hearted?"

The accountant slumps a little under the weight of such
naiveté. "These were hungry boys. The dead have no feelings,
that I've heard about. The guy's credit hadn't been pulled from the
computer, and between these loans from Brewer Trust and the diddled
inventory with Mid-Atlantic Toyota, some two hundred grand
was skimmed from this operation, that we can verify so far. That's
a lot of Toll House cookies."

The assistant giggles again. Rabbit, hearing the sum, goes cold
with the premonition that this debt will swallow him. Here amid all
these papers arrayed on the desk where he himself used to work,
keeping a roll of Life Savers in the lefthand middle drawer, a
fatal hole is being hatched. He taps his jacket pocket for the
reassuring lump of the Nitrostat bottle. He'll take one as soon as
he gets away. The night he and Pru fucked, both of them weary and
half crazy with their fates, the old bed creaking beneath them had
seemed another kind of nest, an interwoven residue of family
fortunes, Ma Springer's musty old-lady scent released from
the mattress by this sudden bouncing where for years she had slept
alone, an essence of old mothballed blankets stored in attic cedar
chests among plushbound family albums and broken
cane-seated rockers and veiled hats in round hat-boxes,
an essence arising not only from the abused bed but from the old
sewing apparatus stored here and Fred's forgotten neckties in the
closet and the dust balls beneath the venerable four-poster.
All those family traces descended to this, this coupling by thunder
and lightning. It was now as if it had never been. He and Pru are
severely polite with each other, and Janice, ever more the working
girl, has ceased to create many occasions when the households
mingle. The Father's Day cookout was an exception, and the children
were tired and cranky and bug-bitten by the time the grilled
hamburgers were finally ready to be consumed.

Harry laughs, as idiotically as the assistant accountant. "Poor
Slim," he says, trying to harmonize with the head accountant's
slanginess. "Some pal Lyle turned out to be, buying him all those
wheels he didn't need."

On July Fourth, for Judy's sake, he marches in a Mt. Judge
parade. Her Girl Scout troop is in it and the troop leader's
husband, Clarence Eifert, is on the organizing committee. They
needed a man tall enough to be Uncle Sam and Judy told Mrs. Eifert
that her grandfather was wonderfully tall. Actually, six three
isn't tall by today's standards, you'd be a dwarf in the NBA at
that height, but several members of the committee, a generation
older than Mr. Eifert, remembered Rabbit Angstrom from his
highschool glory days and became enthusiastic, even though Harry
lives now in Penn Park on the other side of Brewer. He was a Mt.
Judge boy and something of a hero once. He has become more
corpulent than our national symbol should be but he has the right
fair skin and pale blue eyes and a good soldierly bearing. He
served during Korea. He did his bit.

The bell-bottom trousers with their broad red stripes have
to be left unbuttoned at the stomach, but since they are held up by
tricolor suspenders, and a pale-blue vest patterned in stars
comes down over the belt area, it doesn't much matter. Harry and
Janice fuss a good deal at the costume in the week before the
Fourth. They actually go buy a formal shirt with French cuffs and a
wing collar to go with the floppy red cravat, and decide that
somehow his suede Hush Puppies go better with the red-striped
trousers, look more like boots, than the formal black shoes he
keeps for weddings and funerals. The swallowtail coat, of a wool
darker blue than the vest, with three unbuttonable brass buttons on
both sides, fits well enough, but the fuzzy flared top hat with its
hatband of big silver stars perches on his high head unsteadily, a
touch tight with the white nylon wig, so it feels like it might
totter and fall off.

Janice bites the tip of her tongue thoughtfully. "Do you need
the wig? Your hair's so pale anyway."

"But it's cut too short for Uncle Sam. I would have let it grow
out if I'd known."

"Well," she says, "why wouldn't Uncle Sam have a modern haircut?
He's not dead, is he?"

He tests the hat without the wig and says, "It does feel better,
actually."

"And frankly, Harry, the wig on you is somehow alarming. It
makes you look like a very big red-faced woman."

"Look, I'm doing this for our granddaughter, there's no need to
get insulting."

"It's not insulting, it's interesting. I never saw your female
side before. I bet you would have made a nicer woman than either
your mother or Mim. They should have been men, both of them."

Mom was mean to Janice from the moment he first brought her home
from Kroll's, and Mim once stole Charlie Stavros from her, or so
Janice interpreted it. "I'm getting hot and itchy in this outfit,"
Harry says. "Let's try the goatee."

The goatee in place, Janice says, "Oh, yes. It slims your face
right down. I wonder why you never grew a beard." There is this
subtle past tense that keeps creeping into her remarks about him.
"Mr. Lister is growing a beard now, and it makes him look a lot
less doleful. He has these sagging jowls."

"I don't want to hear about that creep." He adds, "When I talk,
the stickum doesn't feel like enough."

"It must be, it's gone through a lot of other parades."

"That's its problem, you dope. Is there any way to renew the
stickum?"

"Just don't move your chin too much. I could call up Doris
Eberhardt; when she was married to Kaufmann they were big into
amateur theatricals."

"Don't get that pushy bitch on my case. Maybe somebody at the
parade will have some spare stickum."

But the mustering of the parade is a confused and scattered
business, held on the grounds of the old Mt. Judge High School, now
the junior high school and slated to be torn down because of the
asbestos in it everywhere and the insurance rates on the wooden
floors. When Harry went there, they all just breathed the asbestos
and took their chances on the floors catching fire. There are
marching bands and antique cars and 4-H floats and veterans
in their old uniforms all milling around on the asphalt of the
parking lot and the brown grass of the baseball outfield, with the
only organizing principle provided by men and women in green
T-shirts stencilled MT. JUDGE INDEPENDENCE DAY COMMITTEE and
those plastic truck-driver caps with a bill in front and a
panel of mesh at the back. Looking to be told where to go, Rabbit
wanders in this area where long ago he had roamed with
wet-combed duck-tailed hair and a corduroy shirt tight
across his back, the sleeves folded back and, out of basketball
season, a cigarette pack squaring the shirt pocket. He expects to
come across his old girlfriend, Mary Ann, as she had been then, in
saddle shoes and white socks and a short pleated cheerleader's
skirt, her calves straight and smooth and round-muscled
between the skirt and the socks, and her face, with the dimple in
one cheek and the touch of acne on her forehead, springing into
joyful recognition at the sight of him. Instead, strange people
with puzzled Eighties faces keep asking directions, because he is
dressed as Uncle Sam and should know. He has to keep telling them
he doesn't know anything.