Rabbit at rest (53 page)

The old high school, built in the Twenties of orange brick, had
a tall windowless wall at the back, across from a
board-and-tarpaper equipment shed long since torn down,
and this black and gravelly area has profound associations for him,
a power in its mute bricks and secluding space, for it was here
after school and until twilight called you home that the more
questing and footloose of the town's children tended to gather,
girls as well as boys, hanging out, shooting baskets at the hoop
attached to the blank brickwork (flat on the wall like those in the
gym in Oriole), necking against the torn-tarpaper boards of
the equipment shed, talking (the girls held by the boys' braced
arms as in a row of soft cages), teasing, passing secrets, feeling
their way, avoiding going home, so that the gritty leftover space
here behind the school was charged with a solemn excitement, the
questing energy of adolescents. Now in this area, repaved and
cleaned up, the shed and backboards gone, Rabbit comes upon Judy's
Girl Scout troop, some of them in uniform and some posed in costume
on a flatbed truck, a float illustrating Liberty, the tallest and
prettiest girl in a white bedsheet and spiked crown holding a big
bronze book and gilded torch, and others grouped around her
cardboard pedestal with their faces painted red and brown and black
and yellow to represent the races of mankind, the faces painted
because there aren't any Indian or Negro or Asian little girls in
Mt. Judge, at least any that have joined the Girl Scouts.

Judy is one of those in badged and braided khaki uniform around
the truck, and she is so amazed to see her grandfather in his
towering costume that she takes his hand, as if to tie him to the
earth, to reality. He has difficulty bending his head to see her,
for fear that his top hat might fall off. As if addressing the
distant backstop of the baseball diamond, he asks her, "How does
the goatee look? The little beard, Judy."

"Fine, Grandpa. You scared me at first. I didn't know who you
were."

"It feels to me like it might fall off any second."

"It doesn't look that way. I love the big stripy pants. Doesn't
the vest squeeze your tummy?"

"That's the least of my problems. Judy, listen. Think you could
do me a favor? It just occurred to me, they make a Scotch tape now
that's sticky on both sides. If I gave you a couple dollars think
you could run over to the little store across Central and get me
some?" Always, under names and managements that shift with the
years, there has been a store across from the school to sell its
students bubble gum and candy and cap-guns and caps and
tablets and cigarettes and skin magazines and whatever else young
people thought they had to have. With difficulty, keeping his head
stiffly upright, he digs through the layers of his costume to his
wallet in a pouchy side pocket of the striped pants and, holding it
up to his face, digs out two one-dollar bills. Just in case,
he adds another. Things these days always cost more than he
expects.

"Suppose it's not open because of the holiday!"

"It'll be open. It was always open."

"Suppose the parade starts; I got to be on the truck!"

"No it won't, the parade can't start without me. Come on, Judy.
Think of all I've done for you. Think of how I saved you on the
boat that time. Who got me into this damn parade in the first
place? You did!"

He doesn't dare look down, lest his hat come off, but he can
hear from her voice she is near tears. Her hair makes a reddish
blur in the bottom of his vision. "O.K., I'll try, but. . ."

"Remember," he says, and as his chin stiffens in admonishment.
he feels his goatee loosen, "sticky on
both
sides. Scotch
makes it. Run, honey!" His heart is racing; he gropes through his
clothes to make sure he remembered to bring the little bottle of
nitroglycerin. He finds its life-giving nugget deep in the
pouchy pocket. When he brings his fingers to his face, to tamp down
the goatee, he sees they are trembling. If his goatee doesn't
stick, he won't be Uncle Sam, and the entire parade will flounder;
it will jam up here on the school grounds forever. He walks around
with little steps, ignoring everybody, trying to quiet his heart.
This is aggravating.

When Judy at last comes back, panting, she tells him, "They were
dumb.
They mostly sell only food now. Junky things like
Cheez Doodles. The only Scotch tape they have is sticky on one side
only. I got some anyway. Was that O.K.?"

Drum rolls sound on the parking lot, scattered at first, a few
kids impatiently clowning around, and then in unison, gathering
mass, an implacable momentum. The motors of antique cars and trucks
bearing floats are starting up, filling the holiday air with blue
exhaust. "O.K.," Harry says, unable to look down at his
granddaughter lest his hat fall off, pocketing the tape and the
change from three dollars, pressed upon him from below. Estranged
from his costumed body, he feels on stilts, his feet impossibly
small.

"I'm sorry, Grandpa. I did the best I could." Judy's little
light voice, out of sight beneath him, wobbles and crackles with
tears, like water sloshing in sun.

"You did great," he tells her.

A frantic stocky woman in a green committee T-shirt and
truck-driver hat comes and hustles him away, to the head of
the parade, past floats and drum-and-bugle corps, Model
A Fords and civic leaders in neckties and a white limousine. A Mt.
Judge patrol car with its blue light twirling and its siren silent
will be the spearhead, then Harry at a distance. As if he doesn't
know the route: as a child he used to participate in parades, in
the crowd of town kids riding bicycles with red, white, and blue
crépe paper threaded through the spokes. Down Central to
Market a block short of 422, through the heart of the little
slanting diagonal downtown, then left and uphill along Potter
Avenue, through blocks of brick semidetached houses up on their
terraced lawns behind the retaining walls, then downhill past
Kegerise Alley as they used to call it, Kegerise Street it is now,
with its small former hosiery factories and machine shops renamed
Lynnex and Data Development and Business Logistical Systems, up to
Jackson, the high end, a block from his old house, and on down to
Joseph and past the big Baptist church, and sharp right on Myrtle
past the post office and the gaunt old Oddfellows' Hall to end at
the reviewing stand set up in front of the Borough Hall, in the
little park that was full in the Sixties of kids smoking pot and
playing guitars but now on a normal day holds just a few old
retired persons and homeless drifters with million-dollar
tans. The green-chested woman, along with a marshal with a
big cardboard badge, a squinty stooped jeweller called Himmelreich
- Rabbit was in school a few grades behind his father, whom
everybody said was Jewish - makes sure he delays enough to
let a distance build between him and the lead car, so Uncle Sam
doesn't look too associated with the police. Immediately next in
the parade is the white limousine carrying the Mt. Judge burgess
and what borough councilmen aren't off in the Poconos or at the
Jersey Shore. From further behind come the sounds of the
drum-and-bugle corps and some bagpipers hired from
Chester County and the scratchy pop tunes playing on the floats to
help illustrate Liberty and the Spirit of 1776 and ONE WORLD/UN
MUNDO and Head, Heart, Hands, and Health, and at the tail end a
local rock singer doing ecstatic imitations of Presley and Orbison
and Lennon while a megawatt electric fan loudly blows on all the
amplifying equipment stacked on his flatbed truck. But up front, at
the head of the parade, it is oddly silent, hushed. What a
precarious weird feeling it is for Harry at last to put his
suede-booted feet on the yellow double line of the town's
main street and start walking! He feels giddy, ridiculous,
enormous. Behind him there is the white limousine purring along in
low gear, so he cannot stop walking, and far ahead, so far ahead it
twinkles out of sight around corners and bends in the route, the
police car; but immediately ahead there is nothing but the eerie
emptiness of normally busy Central Street under a dazed July sky
blue above the telephone wires. He is the traffic, his solitary
upright body. The stilled street has its lunar details, its
pockmarks, its scars, its ancient metal lids. The tremor in his
heart and hands becomes an exalted sacrificial feeling as he takes
those few steps into the asphalt void, rimmed at this end of the
route with only a few spectators, a few bare bodies in shorts and
sneakers and tinted shirts along the curb.

They call to him. They wave ironically, calling "Yaaaay" at the
idea of Uncle Sam, this walking flag, this incorrigible taxer and
frisky international mischief-maker. He has nothing to do but
wave back, carefully nodding so as not to spill his hat or shake
loose his goatee. The crowd as it thickens calls out more and more
his name, "Harry," or "Rabbit" - "Hey, Rabbit! Hey, hotshot!"
They remember him. He hasn't heard his old nickname so often in
many years; nobody in Florida uses it, and his grandchildren would
be puzzled to hear it. But suddenly from these curbstones there it
is again, alive, affectionate. This crowd seems a strung-out
recycled version of the crowd that used to jam the old
auditorium-gym Tuesday and Friday nights, basketball nights,
in the dead of the winter, making their own summer heat with their
bodies, so that out on the floor sweat kept burning your eyes and
trickling down from under your hair, behind your ears, down your
neck to the hollow between your collar bones. Now the sweat builds
under his wool swallowtail coat, on his back and his belly, which
indeed is squeezed as Judy said, and under his hat even without the
wig; thank God Janice got him out of that, she isn't always a dumb
mutt.

His sweat, as with increasing ease and eagerness he waves at the
crowd that clusters at the corners and in the shade of the Norway
maples and on the sandstone retaining walls and terraced lawns up
into the cool shadow of the porches, loosens his goatee, undermines
the adhesive. He feels one side of it softly separate from his chin
and without breaking stride - Uncle Sam has a
bent-kneed, cranky stride not quite Harry's loping own
- he digs out the Scotch tape from the pouchy pocket and
tears off an inch, with the tab of red plaid paper. It wants to
stick to his fingers; after several increasingly angry flicks it
flutters away onto the street. Then he pulls off another piece,
which he presses onto his own face and the detaching edge of
synthetic white beard; the tape holds, though it must make a
rectangular gleam on his face. The spectators who see him improvise
this repair cheer. He takes to doffing his tall heavy hat, with a
cautious bow to either side, and this stirs more applause and
friendly salutation.

The crowd he sees from behind his wave, his smile, his adhesive
gleam amazes him. The people of Mt. Judge are dressed for summer,
with a bareness that since Harry's childhood has crept up from
children into the old. White-haired women sit in their
aluminum lawn chairs down by the curb dressed like fat babies in
checks and frills, their shapeless veined legs cheerfully
protruding. Middle-aged men have squeezed their keglike
thighs into bicycle shorts meant for boys. Young mothers have come
from their back-yard aboveground swimming pools in bikinis
and high-sided slips of spandex that leave half their asses
and boobs exposed. On their cocked hips they hold
heat-flushed babies in nothing but diapers and rubber pants.
There seem so many young - babies, tots, a bubbling up of
generation on generation since the town brought him forth. Then it
was full of the old: as he walked to school of a morning, severe
and scolding women would come out of their houses shaking brooms
and wearing thick dark stockings and housedresses with buttons all
down the front. Now a cheerful innocent froth of flesh lines
Jackson Road. Bare knees are bunched like grapes, and barrels of
naked brown shoulders hulk in the dappled curbside shade. There are
American flags on gilded sticks, and balloons, balloons in all
colors, even metallic balloons shaped like hearts and pillows, held
in hands and tied to bushes, to the handles of strollers containing
yet more babies. A spirit of indulgence, a conspiring to be amused,
surrounds and upholds his parade as he leads it down the stunning
emptiness at the center of the familiar slanting streets.

Harry puts some Scotch tape on the other side of his goatee and
out of the same pocket fishes his pill vial and pops a Nitrostat.
The uphill section of the route tested him, and now turning
downhill jars his heels and knees. When he draws too close to the
cop car up ahead, carbon monoxide washes into his lungs. Mingled
music from behind pushes him on: the gaps of "American Patrol" are
filled with strains of "Yesterday." He concentrates on the painted
yellow line, besmirched here and there by skid marks, dotted for
stretches where passing is permitted but mostly double like the
inflexible old trolley tracks, long buried or torn up for scrap.
Cameras click at him. Voices call his several names. They know him,
but he sees no face he knows, not one, not even Pru's wry
red-haired heart-shape or Roy's black-eyed stare
or Janice's brown little stubborn nut of a face. They said they
would be at the corner of Joseph and Myrtle, but here near the
Borough Hall the crowd is thickest, the summer-cooked bodies
four and five deep, and his loved ones have been swallowed up.

The whole town he knew has been swallowed up, by the decades,
but another has taken its place, younger, more naked, less fearful,
better. And it still loves him, as it did when he would score
forty-two points for them in a single home game. He is a
legend, a walking cloud. Inside him a droplet of explosive has
opened his veins like flower petals uncurling in the sun. His eyes
are burning with sweat or something allergic, his head aches under
the pressure cooker of the tall top hat. The greenhouse effect, he
thinks. The hole in the ozone. When the ice in Antarctica goes,
we'll all be drowned. Scanning the human melt for the glint of a
familiar face, Harry sees instead a beer can being brazenly passed
back and forth, the flash of a myopic child's earnest spectacles, a
silver hoop earring in the lobe of a Hispanic-looking girl.
Along the march he noticed a few black faces in the crowd, as
cheerful and upholding as the rest, and some Orientals - an
adopted Vietnamese orphan, a chunky Filipino wife. From far back in
the still-unwinding parade the bagpipers keen a Highland
killing song and the rock impersonator whimpers ". . . imagine all
the people" and, closer to the front, on a scratchy tape through
crackling speakers, Kate Smith belts out, dead as she is, dragged
into the grave by sheer gangrenous weight, "God Bless America"
- . . . to the oceans, white with foam." Harry's eyes burn
and the impression giddily - as if he has been lifted up to
survey all human history - grows upon him, making his heart
thump worse and worse, that all in all this is the happiest fucking
country the world has ever seen.