Rabbit at rest (6 page)

"It stinks, in my humble. There's nothing new about it. Oh, it's
bigger, a bit, and the engine is up from two point eight to three
point oh, and twenty-four valves instead of twelve, so you
get more oomph, but for a basic twenty-one K you expect a
little oomph - my God. The dashboard is a disaster. The
climatecontrol panel slides out like a drawer and won't budge
unless the ignition's on, which is ridiculous, number one, and two,
they kept from last year's model their crazy idea of two sets of
audio controls so you have all these extra buttons when already
there's enough for an airplane cockpit. It costs luxury, Dad, and
it drives luxury you could say, but it looks cheap inside and
pseudo-Audi outside. Toyota, let's face it, has about the
styling imagination of a gerbil. Their cars don't express anything.
Good cars, classic cars - the Thirties Packards, the little
Jags with the long hood and spoked wheels, the Fifties finned
jobbies, even the VW bug
expressed something,
made a
statement. Toyotas don't express anything but playing it safe and
stealing other people's ideas. Look at their pickup. The pickup
used to be hot, but now they've let Ford and GM right back into the
market. Look at the MR-2. It doesn't sell for shit now."

Harry argues, "High insurance is hurting everybody's twoseaters.
Toyota puts out a good solid machine. They handle well and they
last, and people know that and respect it."

Nelson cuts him short. "And they're so damn dictatorial -
they tell you exactly what to charge, what to put in the windows,
what your salespeople should wear, how many square feet of this and
that you have to have to be good enough to lick their bazoo. When I
took over I was surprised at all the crap you and Charlie had been
swallowing all those years. They expect you to be their robot."

Now Rabbit is fully offended. "Welcome to the real world, kid.
You're going to be part of some organization or other in this life.
Toyota's been good to us and good to your grandfather and don't you
forget it. I can remember Fred Springer when he first got the
Toyota franchise saying he felt like a kid at Christmas all year
round." The women in the family are always saying Nelson is a
throwback to his grandfather and Harry hopes by mentioning dead
Fred to bring the boy back into line. All this blaspheming Toyota
makes Harry uneasy.

But Nelson goes on, "Grandpa was a
dealer, Dad
. He
loved to make deals. He used to tell about it: you came up short on
some and made out like a bandit on others and it was fun. There was
some play in the situation, some space for creativity. Unloading
the trade-ins is about the only spontaneous creative thing
left in the business now, and Toyota tells you they don't want a
bunch of ugly American junk up front on the lot, you almost have to
sell the used cars on the sly. At least you can cut an extra grand
or so if you get a dummy; selling new is just running the cash
register. I don't call that selling, just standing at the checkout
counter."

"Not bad for forty-five thou plus benefits." What Nelson
makes a year now. Harry and Janice quarrel about it; he says it's
too much, she says he has a family to support. "When I was your
age," he tells the boy, perhaps not for the first time, "I was
pulling down- thirteen five a year as a Linotyper and came
home dirty every night. The job gave me headaches and ruined my
eyes. I used to have perfect eyes."

"That was then, Dad, this is now. You were still in the
industrial era. You were a blue-collar slave. People
don't make money an hour at a time any more; you just get yourself
in the right position and it comes. I know guys, lawyers,
guys in real estate, no older than me and not as smart who pull in
two, three hundred K on a single transaction. You must know a lot
of retired money down here. It's easy to be rich, that's what this
country is all about."

"These must be the guys doing all that selling-off of
Nevada to the Japanese you're so upset about. What're you so hungry
for money for anyway? You live mortgage-free in that house
your mother gives you, you must be saving a bundle. Speaking of
used cars - '

"Dad, I hate to break the news to you, but forty thousand just
isn't a fuck of a lot if you want to live with any style."

"Jesus, how much style do you and Pru need? Your house is free,
all you do is cover heat and taxes -"

"The taxes on that barn have crept up to over four grand. Mt.
Judge real estate is way up since the new baby boom, even a
semidetached over toward that slummy end of Jackson Road
where you used to live goes for six figures. Also the federal tax
reform didn't do a thing for my bracket, you got to be rich to get
the benefits. Lyle was showing me on a spread sheet - "

"That's something else I wanted to ask you about. Whose idea was
it to replace Mildred Kroust with this guy?"

"Dad, she'd been with Springer Motors forever - "

"I know, that was the point. She could do it all in her
sleep."

"She couldn't, actually, though she was asleep a lot of the
time. She never could handle computers, for one thing. Oh sure, she
tried, but one little scramble or error message'd show up on the
screen she'd blame the machine and call up the company to send a
repairman over at a hundred twenty an hour when all that was wrong
was she couldn't read the manual and had hit the wrong key. She was
ancient. You should have let her go when she reached retirement
age."

The apartment door furtively clicks open. "Just me," Janice's
voice calls. "Pru and the babies wanted to stay at the pool a
little longer and I thought I'd come back and start dinner. I
thought we'd just have odds and ends tonight; I'll see if there's
any soup to warm up. Keep talking, boys." She doesn't intrude upon
them; her footsteps head into the kitchen. She must imagine they
are having a healing talk, father to son. In fact Harry is looking
at Nelson as if the boy is a computer. There is a glitch, a secret.
He talks too much, too rapidly. Nellie used to be taciturn and
sullen and now he keeps spilling out words, giving more answer than
there was question. Something is revving him up, something is
wrong. Harry says, of Mildred Kroust, "She wasn't that old,
actually, was she? Sixty-eight? Sixty-nine?"

"Dad, she was in her seventies and counting. Lyle does all she
ever used to do and comes in only two or three days a week."

"He's doing it all different, I can see on the stat sheets. That
was the thing I wanted to ask you about, the figures on the used in
the November set."

For some reason, the kid has gone white around the gills again.
He pokes his cigarette through the hole at the beer pull-tab
and then crushes the can in one hand, no big trick now that they're
made of paper-thin aluminum. He rises from his chair and
seems to be heading toward his mother, who has been knocking things
around in the kitchen.

'Janice! " Harry shouts, turning his head with difficulty, his
neck stiff with fat.

She stands in the kitchen entryway in a wet black bathing suit
and a purple wraparound skirt, to make herself decent for the
elevator. She looks a touch foozled: she cracked open the Campari
bottle before leading the others down to the pool and must have
hurried back to give herself another slug. Her skimpy hair is wet
and stringy. "What?" she says, responding guiltily to the urgent
sound of Harry's voice.

"Where did that latest batch of sheets from the lot go? Weren't
they sitting over on the desk?"

This desk is one they bought cheap down here, in a hurry to
furnish their place, in the same style as the end tables flanking
the blond fold-out sofa and their bedroom bureaus -
white-painted wood with the legs slashed at intervals with
gold paint to imitate bamboo joints. It has only three shallow
drawers that stick in the humidity and some cubby holes up top
where bills and invitations get lost. The desktop, of some glazed
marmoreal stuff like petrified honey-vanilla ice cream, is
generally covered by a drift of unanswered letters and bank
statements and statements from their stockbrokers and money
management fund and golf scorecards and Xeroxed announcements from
the Village Activities Committee, called VAC since life down here
is supposedly a perpetual vacation. Also Janice has a way of
tearing out clippings from health magazines and
The National
Enquirer
and the Fort Myers
News-Press
and then
forgetting who she meant to send them to. She looks frightened.

"Were they?" she asks. "Maybe I threw them out. Your idea,
Harry, is just pile everything on it and it'll still be there next
year when you want it."

"These just came in last week. They were November's financial
summaries."

Her mouth pinches in and her face seems to click shut on a
decision she will stick to blindly no matter what happens, the way
women will. "I don't know where they went to. What I especially
hate are your old golf cards drifting around. Why do you keep
them?"

"I write tips to myself on them, what I learned on that round.
Don't change the subject, Janice. I want those Goddamn stat
sheets."

Nelson stands beside his mother at the mouth of the kitchen, the
crushed can in his hand. Without the denim jacket his shirt looks
even more sissified, with its delicate pink stripes and white
French cuffs and round-pointed white collar. The boy and
Janice are near the same height, with tense small cloudy faces.
Both look furtive. "No big deal, Dad," Nelson says in a
dry-mouthed voice. "You'll be getting the December summaries
in a couple of weeks." When he turns toward the refrigerator, to
get himself another beer, he gives Rabbit a heartbreaking view of
the back of his head - the careful rat's tail, the curved
sliver of earring, the growing bald spot.

And when Pru comes back from the pool with the children, all of
them in rubber flipflops and hugging towels around their shoulders
and their hair pasted flat against their skulls, the two small
children shivering gleefully, their lips bluish, their miniature
fingers white and wrinkled from the water, Harry sees Pru in a new
way, as the weakest link in a conspiracy against him. That cushiony
frontal kiss she gave him at the airport. The pelvis that in her
high-cut but otherwise demure white bathing suit looks so
gently pried wider by the passing years.

Their fifth winter down here, this is, and Harry still wakes
amazed to find himself actually in Florida, beside the Gulf of
Mexico. If not exactly beside it, within sight of it, at least he
was until that new row of six-story condos with ornamental
turrets and Spanish-tile roofs shut out the last distant wink
of watery horizon. When he and Janice bought the place in 1984 you
could still see from their balcony snatches of the Gulf, a
dead-level edge to the world over the rooftops and broken
between the raw new towers like the dots and dashes of Morse code,
and in their excitement they bought a telescope and tripod at a
nautical shop at the mall a mile down Pindo Palm Boulevard. In its
trembling little circle of vision, that first winter, they would
catch a sailboat with its striped spinnaker bellying out or a
luxury yacht with tall white sides peeling back the waves silently
or a fishing charter with its winglike gaffing platforms or,
farthest out, a world unto itself, a rusty gray oil freighter
headed motionlessly toward Mobile or New Orleans or back toward
Panama or Venezuela. In the years since, their view of the water
has been built shut, skyscraper hotels arising along the shore,
constructions the color of oatmeal or raspberry whip or else sheer
glass like vertical distillations, cold and pure, of the Gulf's
blue-green.

Where these towers arise had once been nothing but sand and
mangrove swamp and snaky tidal inlets slipping among the nets of
roots and dimpling where an alligator or a water moccasin glided;
and then a scattering of white-painted houses and unpainted
shacks in feeble imitation of the South to the north, scratching
out some cotton and grazing some cattle on the sandy soil, sending
north shuffling herds of beef on the hoof to the starving rebel
troops in the Civil War; and then houses closer together, some of
brick and wrought iron and of limestone and granite barged in from
Alabama quarries. Then, in the era after Reconstruction, to this
appendage of the South came the railroads and the rich and the sick
and the hopeful misfits, this being frontier in an unexpected
direction. Busts followed booms; optimism kept washing in. Now,
with the jets and Social Security and the national sunworship, they
can't build onto it fast enough, this city called Deleon, named
after some Spanish explorer killed for all his shining black
breastplate by the poisoned arrow of a Seminole in 1521 near here
or a place like it, and pronounced
Deelyun by
the locals,
as if they are offering to deal you in. The past glimmers like a
dream at the back of Harry's mind as he awakes; in his
semiretirement he has taken to reading history. It has always
vaguely interested him, that sinister mulch of facts our little
lives grow out of before joining the mulch themselves, the fragile
brown rotting layers of previous deaths, layers that if deep enough
and squeezed hard enough make coal as in Pennsylvania. On quiet
evenings, while Janice sits on the sofa sipping herself into
stupidity with some lamebrain TV show, he lies on the bed leaning
back against its padded satiny headboard with a book, staring
dizzily down into the past as if high in a jade-green
treehouse.

The sound that breaks into his dreams and dispels them is the
rasp of golf greens being mowed, and then the scarcely less
mechanical weeping noise of the seagulls gathering on the freshly
watered fairways, where the earthworms are surfacing to drink. The
head of their bed is by the big glass sliding doors, left open a
crack to take in the winter-morning cool, in these few months
when the air-conditioner is non-essential; so the cool
salt air, sweetened with the scent of fresh fairways, reminds his
face of where he is, this mass-produced paradise where
Janice's money has taken him. She is not in the bed, though her
warmth still greets his knee as he spreadeagles into her space. In
deference to his height of six three, they have at last bought a
king-size bed, so for the first time in his life his feet do
not hang over the bottom and force him to sleep on his belly like a
dead man floating. It took him a long time to get used to it, his
feet not hooking onto the mattress this way but instead being
forced to bend at the ankle or else point sideways. He gets foot
cramps. He tries to sleep on his side, slightly curled up; it gives
his mouth space to breathe and his belly room to slop into, and it
frightens his frail heart less than hanging face down over the
thickness of the mattress. But his arms don't know where to go. A
hand crooked under his head loses circulation at the wrist and its
numbness awakes him, tingling as if with an electric shock. If he
lies on his back, Janice says, he snores. She snores herself now,
now that they are approaching elderly, but he tries not to blame
her for it: poor mutt, she can't help what she does when asleep,
snoring and sometimes farting so bad he has to bury his nose in the
pillow and remind himself she's only human. Poor women: they have a
lot of leaks down there, their bodies are too complicated. He hears
her now in the kitchen, talking in an unreal high needling sort of
voice, the way we talk to children.