Rabbit at rest (59 page)

"Lyle," Harry says with satisfaction. "How is the old computer
whiz?"

"He seems to be holding his own for the time being."

"He'll outlive me," Harry says, as a joke, but the real
possibility of it stabs him like an icicle. "So Springer Motors,"
he goes on, trying to get a handle on it, "went up in coke and
pills for a queer." How queer, he wonders, staring at his
middle-aged, fattened-up, rehabilitated son, is the
kid? Pru's answer to that had never quite satisfied him. If Nelson
wasn't queer, how come she let Harry ball her? A lot of
pent-up hunger there, her coming twice like that.

Nelson tells him, in that aggravating tranquillized
nothingcan-touch-me tone, "You get too excited, Dad,
about what really isn't, in this day and age, an awful lot of
money. You have this Depression thing about the dollar. There's
nothing holy about the dollar, it's just a unit of
measurement."

"Oh. Thanks for explaining that. What a relief."

"As to Toyota, it's no big loss. The company's been stale for
years, in my opinion. Look at their TV ads for the Lexus compared
with Nissan's for the Infiniti: there's no comparison. Infiniti's
are fantastic, there's no car in them, just birds and trees,
they're selling a concept. Toyota's selling another load of tin.
Don't be so fixated about Toyota. Springer Motors is still there,"
Nelson states. "The company still has assets. Mom and I are working
it out, how to deploy them."

"Good luck," Harry says, rolling up his napkin and reinserting
it in its ring, a child's ring of some clear substance filled with
tiny needles of varied color. "In our thirty-three years of
marriage your mother hasn't been able to deploy the ingredients of
a decent meal on the table, but maybe she'll learn. Maybe Mr.
Lister'll teach her how to deploy. Pru, that was a lovely meal.
Excuse the conversation. You really have a way with fish. Loved
those little spicy like peas on top." As he shakes out a Nitrostat
from the small bottle he carries everywhere, he sees his hands
trembling in a new way not just a tremor, but jumping, as if with
thoughts all their own, that they aren't sharing with him.

"Capers," Pru says softly.

"Harry, Nelson is coming back to the lot tomorrow," Janice
says.

"Great. That's another relief."

"I wanted to say, Dad, thanks for filling in. The summer stat
sheets look pretty good, considering."

"Considering? We pulled off a miracle over there. That Elvira is
dynamite. As I guess you know. This Jap that gave us the ax wants
to hire her for Rudy over on 422. The inventory is being shifted to
his lot." He turns to Janice and says, "I can't believe you're
putting this loser back in charge."

Janice says, in the calm tone everybody at the table is
acquiring, as if to humor a madman, "He's not a loser. He's your
son and he's a new person. We can't deny him a chance."

In a voice more wifely than Janice's, Pru adds, "He really has
changed, Harry."

"A day at a time," Nelson recites, "with the help of a higher
power. Once you accept that help, Dad, it's amazing how nothing
gets you down. All these years, I think I've been seriously
depressed; everything seemed too much. Now I just put it all in
God's hands, roll over, and go to sleep. You have to keep up the
program, of course. There're local meetings, and I drive down to
Philly once a week to see my therapist and check on some of my old
kids. I love counselling." He turns to his mother and smiles. "I
love it, and it loves me."

Harry asks him, "These druggy kids you deal with, they all
black?"

"Not all. After a while you don't even see that any more. White
or black, they have the same basic problem. Low selfesteem."

Such knowingness, such induced calm and steadiness and virtue:
it makes Rabbit feel claustrophobic. He turns to his granddaughter,
looking for an opening, a glint, a ray of undoctored light. He asks
her, "What do you make of all this, Judy?"

The child's face wears a glaze of perfection - perfect
straight teeth, perfectly spaced lashes, narrow gleams in her green
eyes and along the strands of her hair. Nature is trying to come up
with another winner. "I like having Daddy back," she says, "and not
so crazy. He's more responsible." Again, he feels that words are
being recited, learned at a rehearsal he wasn't invited to attend.
But how can he wish anything for this child but the father she
needs?

Out on the curb, he asks Janice to drive the Celica, though it
means adjusting the seat and the mirrors. Heading back around the
mountain, he asks her, "You really don't want me back at the lot?"
He looks down at his hands. Their jumping has subsided but is still
fascinating.

"I think for now, Harry. Let's give Nelson the space. He's
trying so hard."

"He's full of AA bullshit."

"It's not bullshit if you need it to live a normal life."

"He doesn't look like himself."

"He will as you get used to him."

"He reminds me of your mother. She was always laying down the
law."

"Everybody knows he looks just like you. Only not as tall, and
he has my eyes."

The park, its shadowy walks, its decrepit tennis courts, its
memorial tank that will never fire another shot. You can't see
these things so clearly when you're driving. They go by like museum
exhibits whose labels have all peeled off. He tries to climb out of
his trapped and angry mood. "Sorry if I sounded ugly at dinner, in
front of the grandchildren."

"We were prepared for much worse," she says serenely.

"I didn't mean to bring up the money or any of that stuff at
all. But somebody has to. You're in real trouble."

"I know," Janice says, letting the streetlights of upper Weiser
wash over her -her stubborn blunt-nosed profile, her
little hands tight on the steering wheel, the
diamond-and-sapphire ring she inherited from her
mother. "But you have to have faith. You've taught me that."

"I have?" He is pleasantly surprised, to think that in
thirty-three years he has taught her anything. "Faith in
what?"

"In us. In life," she says. "Another reason I think you should
stay away from the lot now, you've been looking tired. Have you
been losing weight?"

"A couple pounds. Isn't that good? Isn't that what the hell I'm
supposed to be doing?"

"It depends on how you do it," Janice says, so annoyingly full
of new information, new presumption. She reaches over and gives his
inner upper thigh, right where they inserted the catheter and he
could have bled to death, a squeeze. "We'll be fine," she lies.

Now August, muggy and oppressive in its middle weeks, is
bringing summer to a sparkling distillation, a final clarity. The
fairways at the Flying Eagle, usually burnt-out and as hard
as the cartpaths this time of year, with all the rain they've had
are still green, but for the rough of reddish-brown
buckgrass, and an occasional spindly maple sapling beginning to
show yellow. It's the young trees that turn first - more
tender, more attuned. More fearful.

Ronnie Harrison still swings like a blacksmith: short backswing,
ugly truncated follow-through, sometimes a grunt in the
middle. No longer needed at the lot, needing a partner if he was
going to take up golf again, Rabbit remembered Thelma's saying how
they had had to resign from the club because of her medical bills.
Over the phone, Ronnie had seemed surprised - Harry had
surprised himself, dialling the familiar digits trained into his
fingers by the dead affair - but had accepted, surprisingly.
They were making peace, perhaps, over Thelma's body. Or reviving a
friendship - not a friendship, an involvement - that
had existed since they were little boys in knickers and hightop
sneakers scampering through the pebbly alleys of Mt. Judge. When
Harry thinks back through all those years, to Ronnie's pugnacious
thick-upped dulleyed face as it loomed on the
elementary-school playground, to Ronnie crowingly playing
with his big pale cucumber of a prick (circumcised, and sort of
flat on its upper side) in the locker room, and then to Ronnie on
the rise and on the make in his bachelor years around Brewer, one
of the guys it turned out who had gone with Ruth before Rabbit did,
Ronnie in those years full of smartass talk and dirty stories, a
slimy operator, and then to Ronnie married to Thelma and working
for Schuylkill Mutual, a kind of a sad sack really, plugging along
doggedly, delivering his pitch, talking about "your loved ones" and
when you're "out of the picture," slowly becoming the wanly smiling
bald man in the photo on Thelma's dresser whom Harry could feel
looking up his ass, so once to Thelma's amusement he got out of bed
and put the photo flat on the bureau top, so afterwards she always
turned it away before he arrived of an afternoon, and then to
Ronnie as a widower, with the face of a bleached prune,
pulled-looking wrinkles down from his eyes, an old guy's thin
skin showing pink at the cheekbones, Harry feels that Ronnie has
always been with him, a presence he couldn't avoid, an aspect of
himself he didn't want to face but now does. That clublike cock,
those slimy jokes, the blue eyes looking up his ass, what the hell,
we're all just human, bodies with brains at one end and the rest
just plumbing.

Their first round, playing as a twosome, they have a good enough
time that they schedule another, and then a third. Ronnie has his
old clients but he's no longer out there generating new business
among the young husbands, he can take an afternoon off with a
little notice. Their games are rusty and erratic, and the match
usually comes down to the last hole or two. Will Harry's fine big
free swing deliver the ball into the fairway or into the woods?
Will Ronnie look up and skull an easy chip across the green into
the sand trap, or will he keep his head down, his hands ahead, and
get the ball close, to save a par? The two men don't talk much,
lest the bad blood between them surface; the sight of the other
messing up is so hilariously welcome as to suggest affection. They
never mention Thelma.

On the seventeenth, a long par-four with a creek about one
hundred ninety yards out, Ronnie plays up short with a
four-iron. "That's a chickenshit way to play it," Harry tells
him, and goes with a driver. Concentrating on keeping his flying
right elbow close to his body, he catches the ball sweet, clearing
the creek by thirty yards. Ronnie, compensating, tries too hard on
his next shot: needing to take a three-wood, he roundhouses a
big banana ball into the pine woods on the Mt. Pemaquid side of the
fairway. Thus relieved of pressure, Rabbit thinks
Easy does
it
on his six-iron and clicks off a beauty that falls
into the heart of the green as if straight down a drainpipe. His
par leaves him one up, so he can't lose, and only has to tie to
win. Expansively he says to Ronnie as they ride the cart to the
eighteenth tee, "How about that Voyager Two? To my mind that's more
of an achievement than putting a man on the moon. In the
Standard
yesterday I was reading where some scientist says
it's like sinking a putt from New York to Los Angeles."

Ronnie grunts, sunk in a losing golfer's
self-loathing.

"Clouds on Neptune," Rabbit says, "and volcanos on Triton. What
do you think it means?"

One of his Jewish partners down in Florida might have come up
with some angle on the facts, but up here in Dutch country Ronnie
gives him a dull suspicious look. "Why would it mean anything? Your
honor."

Rabbit feels rubbed the wrong way. You try to be nice to this
guy and he snubs you. He is an ugly prick and always was. You offer
him the outer solar system to think about and he brushes it aside.
He crushes it in his coarse brain. Harry feels a fine excessiveness
in that spindly machine's feeble but true transmissions across
billions of miles, a grace of sorts that chimes with the excessive
beauty of this crystalline late-summer day. He needs to
praise. Ronnie must know some such need, or he and Thelma wouldn't
have attended that warehouse of a no-name church. "Those
three rings nobody ever saw before," Harry insists, "just like
drawn with a pencil," echoing Bernie Drechsel's awe at the thinness
of flamingo legs.

But Ronnie has moved off, over by the ball washer, pretending
not to hear. He has a bum knee from an old football injury and
begins to limp toward the end of a round. He takes a series of
vicious practice swings, anxious to begin the hole and avenge his
previous poor showing. Disappointed, distracted by thoughts of
brave Voyager, Rabbit lets his right elbow float at the top of the
backswing and cuts weakly across the ball, slicing it, on a curve
as uncanny as if plotted by computer, into the bunker in the
buckgrass to the right of the fairway. The eighteenth is a
par-five that flirts with the creek coming back but should be
an easy par; in his golfing prime he more than once birdied it. Yet
he has to come out of the bunker sideways with a wedge and then
hits his three-iron not his best club but he needs the
distance - fat, trying too hard just like Ronnie on the last
hole, and winds up in the creek, his yellow Pinnacle finally found
under a patch of watercress. The drop consumes another stroke and
he's so anxious to nail his nine-iron right to the pin he
pulls it, so he lies five on the deep fringe to the left of the
green. Ronnie has been poking along, hitting ugly low shots with
his blacksmith swing but staying out of trouble, on in four; so
Rabbit's only hope is to chip in. It's a grassy lie and he fluffs
it, like the worst kind of moronic golfing coward he forgets to hit
down and through, and the ball moves maybe two feet, onto the
froghair short of the green in six, and Ronnie has a sure two putts
for a six and a crappy, crappy win. If there's one thing Harry
hates, it's losing to a bogey. He picks up his Pinnacle and with a
sweeping heave throws the ball into the pine woods. Something in
his chest didn't like the big motion but it is bliss of sorts to
see the tormenting orb disappear in a distant swish and thud. The
match ends tied.