Rabbit at rest (55 page)

Ronnie is playing the grieving widower to a T; he looks like
he's been through a washer, his eyelashes poking white from his
tear-reddened lids, his kinky brass-colored hair
reduced to gray wisps above his droopy ears. Rabbit tries to
overcome his old aversion, their old rivalry, by giving the other
man's hand an expressive squeeze and saying, "Really sorry."

But the old hostile devil lights up in Harrison's face, once
meaty and now drawn and hollowed-out and stringy. With a
glance at his sons and a small over-there jab of his head, he
takes Harry's arm in a grip purposely too hard and leads him out of
earshot, a few steps away on the rutted dried mud. He says to him,
in the hurried confidential voice of men together in an athletic
huddle, "You think I don't know you were banging Thel for
years?"

"I - I've never much thought about what you know or don't
know, Ronnie."

"You son of a bitch. That night we swapped down in the islands
was just the beginning, wasn't it? You kept seeing her up
here."

"Ron, I thought you said you knew. You should have asked Thelma
if you were curious."

"I didn't want to hassle her. She was fighting to live and I
loved her. Toward the end, we talked about it."

"So you did
hassle her?"

"She wanted to clear the slate. You son of a bitch. The Old
Master. You're the coldest most selfish bastard I ever met."

"Why? What makes me so bad? Maybe she wanted me. Maybe the
favors were mutual." Over Ronnie's shoulder, Harry sees mourners
waiting to say goodbye, hesitant, conscious of the heat of this
hurried conversation. Harrison has become pink in the face and
perhaps Rabbit has too. He says, "Ronnie, people are
watching. This isn't the time."

"There won't be another time. I don't ever want to see you again
as long as I live. You disgust me."

"Yeah, and you disgust me. You always have, Ron. You got a prick
where your head ought to be. Who can blame her, if Thel gave
herself a little vacation from eating your shit now and then?"

Ronnie's face is quite pink and his eyes are watering; he has
never let go of Harry's forearm, as if this hold is his last warm
contact with his dead wife. His voice lowers into a new
intensity; Harry has to bend his head to hear. "I don't give a fuck
you banged her, what kills me is you did it without giving a shit.
She was crazy for you and you just lapped it up. You narcissistic
cocksucker. She wasted herself on you. She went against everything
she wanted to believe in and you didn't even appreciate it, you
didn't love her and she knew it, she told me herself. She told me
in the hospital asking my forgiveness." Ronnie takes breath to go
on, but tears block his throat.

Rabbit's own throat aches, thinking of Thelma and Ronnie at the
last, her betraying her lover when her body had no more love left
in it. "Ronnie," he whispers. "I
did
appreciate her. I
did. She was a fantastic lay."

"You cocksucker" is all Ronnie can get out, repetitively, and
then they both turn to face the mourners waiting to pay their
respects and climb into their cars and salvage what is left of this
hot hazy Saturday, with lawns to mow and gardens to weed all across
Diamond County. Janice and Webb are among those staring. They must
guess what the conversation has been about; in fact, most of those
here must guess, even the three sons. Though he had always been
discreet on his visits to Arrowdale, hiding his Toyota in her
garage and never getting caught in bed with her by a sick child
returning early from school or a repairman letting himself in
an unlocked door, these things have a way of getting out into the
air. Like a tire, it needs only a pinhole of a leak. People sense
it. Word has got around, or it will now. Well, fuck 'em, like
Georgie said. Fuck 'em all, including Webb's child bride, who from
the shape of her might be pregnant. That Webb, what a
character.

A nice thing happens. Ronnie and Harry, Harrison and
Angstrom, with a precision as if practiced, execute a
crisscross. They smile, despite their pink eyelids and raw throats,
at the little watching crowd and neatly cross paths as they
move toward their kin, Harry toward Janice in her navy-blue
suit with white trim and wide shoulders, and Ronnie back to his
sons and the center of his sad occasion. Once teammates, always
teammates. Rabbit, remembering how Ronnie once screwed Ruth a whole
weekend in Atlantic City and then bragged to him about it, can't
feel sorry for him at all.

I Love What You Do for Me, Toyota.
That is the new
paper banner the company has sent down to hang in the big display
window. At times, standing at the window, when a cloud dense with
moisture darkens the atmosphere or an occluding truck pulls up past
the yew hedge for some business at the service doors, Harry catches
a sudden reflection of himself and is startled by how big he is, by
how much space he is taking up on the planet. Stepping out on the
empty roadway as Uncle Sam last month he had felt so eerily tall,
as if his head were a giant balloon floating above the
marching music. Though his inner sense of himself is of an
innocuous passive spirit, a steady small voice, that doesn't want
to do any harm, get trapped anywhere, or ever die, there is this
other self seen from outside, a six-foot-three
ex-athlete weighing two-thirty at the least, an
apparition wearing a sleek gray summer suit shining all over as if
waxed and a big head whose fluffy shadowy hair was trimmed at Shear
Joy Hair Styling (unisex, fifteen bucks minimum) to rest exactly on
the ears, a fearsome bulk with eyes that see and hands that
grab and teeth that bite, a body eating enough at one meal to feed
three Ethiopians for a day, a shameless consumer of gasoline,
electricity, newspapers, hydrocarbons, carbohydrates. A boss,
in a shiny suit. His recent heart troubles have become, like his
painfully and expensively crowned back teeth, part of his
respectability's full-

blown equipage.

Harry needs a good self-image today, for the lot is going
to be visited at eleven by a representative of the Toyota
Corporation, a Mr. Natsume Shimada, hitherto manifested only as a
careful signature, each letter individually formed, on creamy stiff
stationery from the American Toyota Motor Sales headquarters in
Torrance, California. Word of the financial irregularities
anatomized by the two accountants Janice hired under Charlie's
direction has filtered upward, higher and higher, as letters from
Mid-Atlantic Toyota in Glen Burnie, Maryland, were succeeded
by mail from the Toyota Motor Credit Corporation's offices in
Baltimore and then by courteous but implacable communications from
Torrance itself, signed with what seems an old-fashioned
stub-tipped fountain pen by Mr. Shimada, in sky-blue
ink.

"Nervous?" Elvira asks, sidling up beside him in a slim
seersucker suit. For the hot weather she had her hair cut short
behind, exposing sexy dark down at the back of her neck. Did Nelson
used to boff her? If Pru wasn't putting out, he had to buff
somebody. Unless coke whores were enough, or the kid was secretly
gay. Insofar as he can bear to contemplate his son's sex life,
Elvira seems a little too classy, too neuter to go along with it.
But maybe Harry is underestimating the amount of energy in the
world: he tends to do that, now that his own is sagging.

"Not too," he answers. "How do I look?"

"Very imposing. I like the new suit."

"It's kind of a gray metallic. They developed the fabric while
doing the moon shots."

Benny is doing a dance of door-opening and
hood-popping out on the lot with a couple so young they keep
looking at each other for confirmation, both talking at once and
then falling silent simultaneously, paralyzed by their wish not to
be tricked out of a single dollar. August sales are on and Toyota
is offering thousanddollar rebates. In the old days you sold only
at their list price, no haggling, take it or leave it, a quality
product. Their old purity has been corrupted by American methods.
Toyota has stooped to the scramble. "You know," he tells Elvira,
"in all the years the lot has been selling these cars I don't
recall it ever being visited by an actual Japanese. I thought they
all stayed over there in Toyota City enjoying the tea
ceremony."

"And the geisha girls," Elvira says slyly. "Like Mr. Uno."

Harry smiles at the topical allusion. This girl - woman
- keeps up. "Yeah, he wasn't Numero Uno very long, was
he?"

Her earrings today are like temple bells, little curved lids of
dull silver wired together in trembling oblongs the size of
butterfly cocoons. They shiver with a touch of indignation when she
tells him, "It's really Nelson and Lyle should be facing Mr.
Shimada."

He shrugs. "What can you do? The lawyer got Lyle on the phone
finally and the guy just laughed at him. Said he was taking oxygen
just to get out of bed and go to the toilet and could die any time.
Furthermore he said the disease had spread to his brain and he had
no idea what the lawyer was talking about. And he'd had to sell his
computer and didn't keep any of the disks. In other words he told
the lawyer to - to go jump in the lake." Suppressing "fuck
himself" like that was maybe a way of courting Elvira, he doesn't
know. Late in the game as it is, you keep trying. He likes her
being so thin -she makes Pru and even Janice look thick and
there is something cool and quiet about her he finds comforting,
like a television screen when you can't hear the words, just see
the flicker. "I had to laugh," he says, of Lyle's last
communications. "Dying has its advantages."

She asks at his side, "Won't Nelson be home in a week or
so?"

"That's the schedule," Harry says. "Summer flies by, doesn't it?
You notice it in the evening now. It's still warm but gets dark
earlier and earlier. It's a thing you forget from year to year,
that latesummer darkness. The cicadas. That smell of
baked-out lawns. Except this summer's been so damn rainy
- in my little garden, God, the weeds won't stop growing, and
the lettuce and broccoli are so leggy they're falling over. And the
pea vines have spread like Virginia creeper, up over the fence and
into the neighbor's yard."

"At least it hasn't been so terribly hot like it was the summer
before," Elvira says, "when everybody kept talking about the
greenhouse effect. Maybe there is no greenhouse effect."

"Oh, there is," Rabbit tells her, with a conviction he didn't
know he had. Across Route 111, above the red hat-shaped roof
of the Pizza Hut, a flock of starlings, already migrating south,
speckle the telephone wires like a bar of musical notation. "I
won't live to see it," he says, "but you will, and my
grandchildren. New York, Philly, their docks will be underwater,
once Antarctica starts melting. All of the Jersey Shore." Ronnie
Harrison and Ruth: what a shit, that guy.

"How is he doing, have you heard much? Nelson."

"He's dropped us a couple of cards of the Liberty Bell. He
sounded cheerful. In a way, the kid's been always looking for more
structure than we could ever give him, and I guess a rehab program
is big on structure. He talks to Pru on the phone, but they don't
encourage too much outside contact at this point."

"What does Pru think about everything?" Does Harry imagine it,
an edge of heightened interest here, as if the sound on the TV set
clicked back in?

"Hard to know what Pru thinks," he says. "I have the impression
she was about ready to pack it in, the marriage, before he sent
himself off. She and Janice and the kids have been up at the
Poconos."

"That makes it lonely for you," Elvira Ollenbach says.

Could this be a feeler? Is he supposed to have her come on over?
Have a couple daiquiris in the den, stroke the dark nape of her
neck, see if her pussy matches up, up in that slanty spare bedroom
where all the old
Playboys
were stashed in the closet when
they moved in - the thought of that wiry young female body
seeking to slake its appetites on his affects him like the thought
of an avalanche. It would make a wreck of his routine. "At my age I
don't mind it," he says. "I can watch the TV shows I want.
National Geographic, Disney, World of Nature.
When Janice
is there she makes us watch all these family situation shows with
everybody clowning around in the living room. This
Roseanne,
I
asked her what the hell she sees in it, she told me, `I like
her. She's fat and messy and mean, like most of the women in
America.' I watch less and less. I try to have just one beer and go
to bed early."

The young woman silently offers to move away, back to her
cubicle in the direction of Paraguay. But he likes her near him,
and abruptly asks, "You know who I'm sick of hearing about?"

"Who?"

"Pete Rose. 'Djou read in the
Standard
the other day
how he's been in hot water before, in 1980 when he and a lot of the
other Phils were caught taking amphetamines and the club traded
away Randy Leach, the only player who admitted to it, and the rest
of 'em just brazened it through?"

"I glanced at it. It was a Brewer doctor supplying the
prescriptions."

"That's right, our own little burg. So that's why he thinks he
can bluff it through now. Nobody else has to pay for what they do,
everybody else gets away with everything. Ollie North, drug
dealers, what with the jails being full and everybody such a
bleeding heart anyway. Break the law, burn the flag, who the fuck
cares?"

"Don't get yourself upset, Harry," she says, in her maternal,
retreating mode. "The world is full of cheaters."

"Yeah, we should know."

She makes no response at all, having turned her back. Maybe she
had been balling Nelson after all.

"I always thought he was an ugly ballplayer, anyway," he feels
compelled to say, concerning Rose. "If you have to do it all with
hustle and grit, you shouldn't be out there."