Rabbit at rest (60 page)

"So, no blood," Ronnie says, having rolled his
twelve-footer to within a gimme.

"Good match," Harry grunts, deciding against shaking hands. The
shame of his collapse clings to him. Who says the universe isn't
soaked in disgrace?

As they transfer balls and tees and sweaty gloves to the pocket
of their bags, Ronnie, now that it's his turn to feel expansive,
volunteers, "Didja see last night on Peter Jennings, the last
thing, they showed the photographs of the rings and the moon moving
away and then a composite they had made of the various shots of
Neptune projected onto a ball and twirled, so the whole planet was
there, like a toy? Incredible," Ronnie admits, "what they can do
with computer graphics."

The image faintly sickens Harry, of Voyager taking those last
shots of Neptune and then sailing off into the void, forever. How
can you believe how much void there is?

The golf bags in the rack here by the pro shop throw long shafts
of shadow. These days are drawing in. Harry is thirsty, and looks
forward to a beer on the club patio, at one ofthe outdoor tables,
under a big green-and-white umbrella, beside the
swimming pool with its cannonballing kids and budding bimbos, while
the red sun sinks behind the high horizon of Mt. Pemaquid. Before
they head up for the beets, the two men look directly at each
other, by mistake. On an unfortunate impulse, Rabbit asks, "Do you
miss her?"

Ronnie gives him an angled squint. His eyelids look sore under
his white eyelashes. "Do you?"

Ambushed, Rabbit can barely pretend he does. He used Thelma, and
then she was used up. "Sure," he says.

Ronnie clears his ropy throat and checks that the zipper on his
bag is up and then shoulders the bag to take to his car. "Sure you
do," he says. "Try to sound sincere. You never gave a fuck. No.
Excuse me. A fuck is exactly what you gave."

Harry hangs between impossible alternatives - to tell him
how much he enjoyed going to bed with Thelma (Ronnie's smiling
photo watching) or to claim that he didn't. He answers merely,
"Thelma was a lovely woman."

"For me," Ronnie tells him, dropping his pugnacious manner and
putting on his long widower's face, "it's like the bottom of the
world has dropped out. Without Thel, I'm just going through the
motions." His voice gets all froggy, disgustingly. When Harry
invites him up on the patio for the beers, he says, "No, I better
be getting back. Ron junior and his newest significant other are
having me over for dinner." When Harry tries to set a date for the
next game, he says, "Thanks, old bunny, but you're the member here.
You're the one with the rich wife. You know the Flying Eagle rules
- you can't keep having the same guest. Anyway, Labor Day's
coming. I better start getting back on the ball, or Schuylkill'll
think I'm the one who died."

He drives his slate-gray Celica home to Penn Park.
Janice's Camry is not in the driveway and he thinks the phone
ringing inside might be her. She's almost never here any more
- off at her classes, or over in Mt. Judge babysitting, or at
the lot consulting with Nelson, or in Brewer with her lawyer and
those accountants Charlie told her to hire. He works the key in the
lock - maddening, the scratchy way the key doesn't fit in the
lock instantly, it reminds him of something from way back,
something unpleasant that hollows his stomach, but what? -
and shoves the door open with his shoulder and reaches the hall
phone just as it's giving what he knows will be its dying ring.
"Hello." He can hardly get the word out.

"Dad? What's the matter?"

"Nothing. Why?"

"You sound so winded."

"I just came in. I thought you were your mother."

"Mom's
been
here. I'm still at the lot, she suggested I
call you. I've got this great idea."

"I've heard it. You want to open a drug treatment center."

"Maybe some day down the road. But for now I think we should
work on the lot as what it is. It looks great, by the way, with all
those little Toyotas in those funny colors of theirs gone. People
are still coming in to buy used, they think we must be having a
bargain sale, and a couple of companies are interested in the
location - Hyundai for instance has this big new place over
past Hayesville but the location is up behind a cloverleaf and
nobody can figure out how to get to it, there's too much
landscaping, they'd love to have a spot right on 111 - but
what I'm calling about was this idea I got last night, I ran it
past Mom, she said to talk to you."

"O.K., O.K., you're good to include me," Harry says.

"Last night I was out on the river, you know over where they
have all these little river cottages with colored lights and
porches and steps going down into the water?"

"I don't know, actually, I've never been there, but go on."

"Well, Pru and I were over there last night with Jason and Pam,
you may have heard me mention them."

"Vaguely." All these pauses for confirmation, they are wearing
Harry down. Why can't the kid just spit it out? Is his father such
an ogre?

"Anyway this guy they know has one of these cottages, it was
neat, the colored lights and music on the radios and up and down
the river all these boats, people water skiing and all -"

"Sounds terrific. I hope. Jason and Pam don't belong to that old
Lyle-Slim crowd."

"They knew 'em, but they're straight, Dad. They're even thinking
of having a baby."

"If you're going to keep coke licked, you got to stay away from
the old coke crowd."

"Like I said, they're real straight arrow. One of their best
friends is Ron Harrison, Jr., the carpenter."

What is that supposed to mean? Does Nelson know about him and
Thelma? "O.K., O.K.," Harry says.

"So we were sitting there on the porch and this fantastic
thing

goes by - a motorcycle on the water. They have different
names

for them - wet bikes, surf jets, jet skis -"

"Yeah, I've seen 'em in Florida, out on the ocean. They look
unsafe."

"Dad, this was the best I ever saw - it went like a
rocket. Just
buzzed
along. Jason said it's called a Yamaha
Waverunner and it operates on a new principle, I don't know, it
compresses water somehow and then shoots it out the back, and he
said the only guy who sells 'em, a dinky little back-yard
shop up toward Shoemakersville, can't keep 'em in stock, and anyway
he's not that interested, he's a retired farmer who just does it as
a hobby. So I called Yamaha's sales office in New York this morning
and talked to a guy. It wouldn't be just Waverunners we'd sell, of
course, we'd carry the motorcycles, and their snowmobiles and
trailers, and they make generators a lot of small companies use and
these three- and four-wheelers, ATVs, that farmers have
now to get around their places, a lot more efficient than electric
golf carts -'

"Nelson. Wait. Don't talk so fast. What about Manny and the boys
over in Service?"

"It isn't Manny any more, Dad. It's Arnold."

"I meant to say Arnold. The guy who looks like a pig in pajamas
mincing around. I know who Arnold is. I don't care who he is, he or
she for that matter, who heads the fucking service division,
they're used to cars, big things with four wheels that run on
gasoline instead of compressed water."

"They can adjust. People can adjust, if you're under a certain
age. Anyway, Mom and I have already trimmed Service. We let go
three mechanics, and are running some ads for inspection packages.
We want to pep up the used end, for a while it'll be only used just
like Grandpa Springer started out, he used to tell me how he kept
the Toyotas out in back out of sight, people had this distrust of
Japanese products. In a way it's better already, the people without
much to spend aren't scared off by the new car showroom and the yen
exchange rate and all. So -?"

"So?"

"What do you think of the Yamaha idea?"

"O.K., now remember. You asked. And I appreciate your asking.
I'm touched by that, I realize you don't have to ask me anything,
you and your mother have the lot locked up. But in answer to your
question, I think it's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Jet skis
are a fad. Next year it'll be jet roller skates. The profit on a
toy like a motorcycle or a snowmobile is maybe a tenth that on a
solid family car - can you sell ten times as many? Don't
forget, there's a Depression coming."

"Who says?"

"I say; everybody says! Everybody says Bush is just like Hoover.
You're too young to remember Hoover."

"That was an inflated stock market. The market if anything is
undersold now. Why would we have a Depression?"

"Because we don't have any discipline! We're drowning in debt!
We don't even own our own country any more! My image of this is you
were sitting there on the porch of that shack with all these
colored lights stoned on something or other and this thing buzzes
by and you think, `Wow! Salvation!' You're almost thirtythree and
you're still into toys and fads. You came back from that detox
place stuffed full of good intentions and now you're getting rocks
in the brain again."

There is a pause. The old Nelson would have combatted him with
some childish defensive whining. But the voice on the other end of
the line at last says, with a touch of the ministerial gravity and
automated calm Rabbit had noticed at dinner the other week, "What
you don't realize about a consumer society, Dad, is it's all fads
in a way. People don't buy things because they
need 'em
.
You actually need very little. You buy something because it's
beyond what you need, it's something that will enhance your life,
not just keep it plugging along."

"It sounds to me like you did too much mystic meditation at that
detox place."

"You say detox just to bug me. It was a treatment center, and
then a halfway house for rehab. The detox part of it just takes a
couple days. It's getting the relational poison out of your system
that takes longer."

"Is that what I am to you? Relational poison?" Being snubbed by
Ronnie Harrison won't stop rankling, underneath this conversation.
Just because you boffed a man's dead wife, he shouldn't get bitter
about it. He's known Ronnie all his life.

Again, Nelson is silent. Then: "Maybe, but not only. I keep
trying to love you, but you don't really want it. You're afraid of
it, it would tie you down. You've been scared all your life of
being tied down."

Rabbit cannot speak; he is letting a Nitrostat dissolve under
his tongue. It burns like a little pellet of red candy, and induces
a floating dilated feeling that adds inches to his sensation of
height. The kid will make him cry if he thinks about it. He says,
"Let's cut the psychology and get down to earth. What the hell do
you and your mother intend to do about that hundred fifty thousand
dollars Toyota has to have by the end of the month or else it will
prosecute?"

"Oh," the boy says airily, "didn't Mom tell you? That's been
settled. They've been paid. We took out a loan."

"A loan? Who would trust you?"

"Brewer Trust. A second mortgage on the lot property, it's worth
at least half a million. A hundred forty-five, and they
consolidated it with the seventy-five for Slims five cars,
which will be coming back to us pretty much as a credit on the
rolling inventory we were maintaining with Mid-Atlantic
Motors. As soon as they took our inventory over to Rudy's lot,
don't forget, they started owing us."

"And you're somehow going to pay back Brewer Trust selling water
scooters?"

"You don't have to pay a loan back, they don't want you to pay
it back; they just want you to keep up the installments. Meanwhile,
the value of the dollar goes down and you get to taxdeduct all the
interest. We were underfinanced, in fact, before."

"Thank God you're back in the saddle. How does your mother like
the Yamaha connection?"

"She likes it. She's not like you; she's open, and willing to be
creative. Dad, there's something I think we should try to process
sometime. Why do you resent it so, me and Mom getting out into the
world and trying to learn new things?"

"I don't resent it. I respect it."

"You hate it. You act jealous and envious. I say this in love,
Dad. You feel stuck, and you want everybody to be stuck with
you."

He tries giving back the kid a little of his own medicine, some
therapeutic silence. His Nitrostat rings that little bell in the
seat of his pants, and his dilated blood vessels lift weight from
the world around him, making it seem delicate and distant, like
Neptune's rings. "It wasn't me," he says at last, "who ran Springer
Motors into the ground. But do what you want. You're the Springer,
not me."

He can hear a voice in the background, a female voice, and then
that seashell sound of a telephone mouthpiece with a hand placed
over it. When Nelson's voice returns, it has changed tint, as if
dipped in something, by what has passed between him and Elvira.
Love juices have flowed. Maybe the kid is normal after all. "Elvira
has something she wants to ask you. What do you think of the Pete
Rose settlement?"

"Tell her I think it was the best both sides could do. And I
think he should get into the Hall of Fame anyway, on the strength
of his numbers. But tell her Schmidt is my idea of a classy
ballplayer. Tell her I miss her."

Hanging up, Harry pictures the showroom, the
late-afternoon light on the dust on the display windows, tall
to the sky now with all the banners down, and the fun going on,
amazingly, without him.

The thready lawn behind their little limestone house at 14Vz
Franklin Drive has the dry kiss of autumn on it: brown patches and
the first few fallen leaves, cast off by the weeping cherry, his
neighbor's black walnut, the sweet cherry that leans close to the
house so he can watch the squirrels scrabble along its branches,
and the willow above the empty cement fish pond with the
bluepainted bottom and rim of real seashells. These trees still
seem green and growing but their brown leaves are accumulating in
the grass. Even the hemlock toward the neighboring house of thin
yellow bricks, and the rhododendrons along the palisade fence
separating the Angstroms' yard from the property of the big
mockTudor house of clinker bricks, and the shaggy Austrian pines
whose cast-off needles clutter the cement pond, though all
evergreen, are tinged by summer's end, dusty and sweetly
dried-out like the smell that used to come from the old cedar
hope chest where Mom kept spare blankets and their good embroidered
linen tablecloth for Thanksgiving and Christmas and the two old
crazy quilts she had inherited from the Renningers. It was family
legend that these quilts were fabulously valuable but when, in some
family crunch when Harry was in his early teens, they tried to sell
them, the best offer they could get was sixty dollars apiece. After
much talk around the porcelain kitchen table, they took the offer,
and now authentic old quilts like that bring thousands if in good
condition. When he thinks about those old days and the amounts of
money they considered important it's as if they were being cheated,
getting by on slave wages, eating bread that cost eleven cents a
loaf. They were living in a financial dungeon, back there on
Jackson Road, and the fact that everybody else was in it too only
makes it sadder. Just thinking about those old days lately
depresses him; it makes him face life's constant depreciation.
Lying awake at night, afraid he will never fall asleep or will fall
asleep forever, he feels a stifling uselessness in things, a kind
of atomic decay whereby the precious glowing present turns, with
each tick of the clock, into the leaden slag of history.