Rabbit at rest (63 page)

Harry says, "He can't be on too high a horse after all the
stunts he's been pulling all these years. Coke whores all over
Brewer, and if you ask me that Elvira over at the lot is more than
just a token skirt. When she's around he sounds like he's been
given a shot of joy juice."

But Janice doesn't relent. "You have hurt Nelson incredibly
much," she says. "Anything he does from now on you can't blame him.
I mean, Harry, what you've done is the kind of perverted thing that
makes the newspapers. It was monstrous."

"Honey -"

"Quit it with the 'honey."'

"What's this `perverted'? We aren't at all blood-related.
It was just like a normal one-night stand. She was
hard-up and I was at death's door. It was her way of playing
nurse."

More sobbing, he never knows what will trigger it. "Harry, you
can't make jokes."

"Those weren't jokes." But he feels chastised,
dry-mouthed, spanked.

"You get right over here and help undo some of the damage you've
done for once in your life." And she hangs up, having sounded
comically like her mother in the juicy way she pronounced "for
once."

A life knows few revelations; these must be followed when they
come. Rabbit sees clearly what to do. His acts take on a decisive
haste. He goes upstairs and packs. The brown canvas suit bag. The
big yellow rigid Tourister with the dent in one corner where an
airline handler slung it. Jockey shorts, T-shirts, socks,
polo shirts in their pastel tints, dress shirts in their plastic
envelopes, golf slacks, Bermuda shorts. A few ties though he has
never liked ties. All his clothes are summer clothes these days;
the wool suits and sweaters wait in mothproof bags for fall days,
October into November, that will not come this year, for him. He
takes four lightweight sports coats and two suits, one a
putty-colored and the other the shiny gray like armor. In
case there's a wedding or a funeral. A raincoat, a couple of
sweaters. A pair of black laced shoes tucks into two pockets of his
folding suit bag and blue-and-white Nikes into the
sides of the suitcase. He should start jogging again. His
toothbrush and shaving stuff. His pills, buckets of them. What
else? Oh yes. He grabs
The First Salute
from his bedside
table and tucks it in, he'll finish it if it kills him. He leaves a
light burning in the upstairs hall to discourage burglars, and the
carriage lamp beside the front door numbered 14 1/2. He loads the
car in two trips, feeling the weight of the suitcases in his chest.
He looks around the bare hall. He goes into the den, his feet
silent on the Antron wall-to-wall carpeting, and looks
out the lozenge panes at the glowing night-time silhouette of
the weeping cherry. He plumps the pillow and straightens the arm
guards on the wing chair he fell asleep in, not long ago but on the
far side of a gulf: The he who fell asleep was somebody else, a
pathetic somebody. At the front door again, he feels a night breeze
on his face, hears the muffled rush of traffic over on Penn
Boulevard. He sets the latch and softly slams the door. Janice has
her key. He thinks of her over there in the Springers' big stucco
house that always reminded him of an abandoned enormous
ice-cream stand. Forgive me.

Rabbit gets into the Celica.
Take a Ride in the Great
Indoors:
one of the new slogans they'd been trying to push.
You can have too many slogans, they begin to cancel out. The engine
starts up; reverse gear carries him smoothly backwards.
1 Love
When You Set Me Free, Toyota.
The digital clock says 10:07.
Traffic on Penn Boulevard is starting to thin, the diners and gas
stations are beginning to darken. He turns right at the blinking
red light and then right again at the Brewer bypass along the
Running Horse River. The road lifts above the trees at a point near
the elephant-gray gas tanks and the bypassed old city shows a
certain grandeur. Its twentystory courthouse built in the beginning
of the Depression is still the tallest building, the concrete
eagles with flared wings at each corner lit by spotlights, and the
sweeping shadow of Mt. Judge, crowned by the star-spatter of
the Pinnacle Hotel, hangs behind everything like an unmoving tidal
wave. The streetlamps show Brewer's brick tint like matches cupped
in ruddy hands. Then, quite quickly, the city and all it holds are
snatched from view. Groves of weed trees half-hide the empty
factories along the river, and one might be anywhere in the United
States on a four-lane divided highway.

He and Janice have done this Southward drive so often he knows
the options: he can get off at 222 and proceed directly but pokily
toward Lancaster through a string of stoplight-ridden Brewer
suburbs, or he can stay on 422 a few miles to 176 and head directly
south and then cut west to Lancaster and York. The first time he
tried this trip, thirty years ago last spring come to think of it,
he made the mistake of heading south too soon, toward Wilmington
and a vision ofbarefoot du Pont women. But the East slants west,
and the trick is to bear west until 83, which didn't exist in those
days, and then drive south right into the maw of that
two-headed monster, Baltimore-Washington.
Monstrous,
she said. Well, in a way, you could say, being
alive is monstrous. Those crazy molecules. All by themselves?
Never.

He turns on the radio, searching among the jabber of rock music
and talk shows for the sweet old tunes, the tunes he grew up on. It
used to be easier to search with the old dial you twisted, instead
of these jumpy digitized scan buttons: you could feel your way. The
scan comes suddenly upon the silky voices of Dinah Shore and Buddy
Clark entwined in the duet of "Baby, It's Cold Outside." Thrilling,
it turns his spine to ice water, when, after all that melodious
banter it's hard to understand every word of, they halt, and
harmonize on the chorus line.
Coooold, out, side.
Then
this same station of oldies, fading under the underpasses,
crackling when the road curves too close to power lines, offers up
a hit he's totally forgotten, how could he have? - the
high-school dances, the dolled-up couples shuffling to
the languid waltz beat, the paper streamers drooping from the
basketball nets, the rusty heater warmth of the dash-lit
interior of Pop's Plymouth, the living warm furtive scent, like the
flavor of a food so strong you must choke it down at first, rising
from between Mary Ann's thighs.
Vaya con Dios, my darling.
The damp triangle of underpants, the garter belts girls wore then.
The dewy smooth freshness of their bodies, all of them, sweatily
wheeling beneath the crépe paper, the colored lights.
Vaya
con Dios, my love.
Oh my. It hurts. The emotion packed into
these phrases buried in some d j.'s dusty racks of 78s like the
cotton wadding in bullets, like those seeds that come to life after
a thousand years in some pyramid. Though the stars recycle
themselves and remake all the heavy atoms Creation needs, Harry
will never be that person again, that boy with that girl, his
fingertips grazing the soft insides of her thighs, a few atoms
rubbing off; a few molecules.

Then, "Mule Train," by Frankie Laine, not one of the great
Laines but great enough, and "It's Magic," by Doris Day. Those
pauses back then:
It's ma- gic.
They knew how to
hurt you, back then when there were two eight-team baseball
leagues and you could remember all the players. People then were
not exactly softer, they were harder in fact, but they were easier
to hurt, though in fewer places.

He has to leave 176 for 23 through Amish country, it's the one
really local stretch of road, but there shouldn't be any buggies
out this late to slow him down. Rabbit wants to see once more a
place in Morgantown, a hardware store with two pumps outside, where
a thickset farmer in two shirts and hairy nostrils had advised him
to know where he was going before he went there. Well, now he does.
He has learned the road and figured out the destination. But what
had been a country hardware store was now a slick little realestate
office. Where the gas pumps had been, fresh black asphalt showed
under the moonlight the stark yellow stripes of diagonal parking
spaces.

No, it isn't moonlight, he sees; it is the sulfurous
illumination that afflicts busy paved places all night. Though the
hour is near eleven, a traffic of giant trucks heaves and snorts
and groans through the sleepy stone town; the realtor's big window
is full of Polaroid snapshots of property for sale, and Route 23,
once a narrow road on the ridge between two farm valleys as dark at
night as manure, now blazes with the signs that are everywhere.
PIZZA HUT. BURGER KING. Rent a Movie. Turkey Hill MINIt MARKET.
Quilt World. Shady Maple SMORGASBORD. Village Herb Shop. Country
Knives. Real estate makes him think of Janice and his heart dips at
the picture of her waiting with Nelson and Pru for him to show up
over at the Springers' and panicking by now, probably imagining
he's had a car accident, and coming back with her key to the
deserted house, all fluttery and hotbreathed the way she gets.
Maybe he should have left a note like she did him that time.
Harry dear-1 must go
off
a few days to
think.
But she said never forgive him,
shoot you
both,
she upped the stakes, let her stew in her own juice,
thinks she's so smart suddenly, going back to school. Nelson the
same way. Damned if they're going to get him sitting in on some
family-therapy session run by his own son whose big redheaded
wife he's boffed. Only really good thing he's done all year, as he
looks back on it. Damned if he'll face the kid, give him the
satisfaction, all white in the gills from this new grievance.
Rabbit doesn't want to get counselled.

The eleven-o'clock news comes on the radio. Jim Bakker, on
trial in Charlotte, North Carolina, on twenty-four counts of
fraud in connection with his scandal-ridden PTL television
ministry, collapsed today in court and is being held for up to
sixty days for psychiatric evaluation at the Federal Correctional
Institute. Dr. Basil Jackson, a psychiatrist who has been treating
Bakker for nine months, said that the once-charismatic
evangelist has been hallucinating: leaving the courtroom Wednesday
after former PTL executive Steve Nelson collapsed on the witness
stand, Bakker saw the people outside as animals intent upon
attacking and injuring him. Bakker's wife, Tammy, said from her
luxurious home in Orlando, Florida, that Bakker over the phone had
seemed to be experiencing a terrible emotional trauma and that she
prayed with him and they agreed that they would trust in the Lord.
In Los Angeles, Jessica Hahn, the former PTL secretary whose sexual
encounter with Bakker in 1980 led to his downfall, told reporters,
quote, I'm not a doctor but I do know about Jim Bakker. I believe
Jim Bakker is a master manipulator. I think this is a sympathy
stunt just like it is every time Tammy gets on TV and starts crying
and saying how abused they are, end quote. In Washington, the
Energy Department is searching for mysteriously missing amounts of
tritium, the heavy-hydrogen isotope necessary to the making
of hydrogen bombs. Also in Washington,
Science
magazine
reports that the new bomb detector, called a TNA for thermal
neutron analysis, installed today at JFK Airport in New York City,
is set to detect two point five pounds of plastic explosives and
would not have detected the bomb, thought to contain only one pound
of Semtex explosive, which brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over
Lockerbie, Scotland. In Toronto, movie superstar Marlon Brando told
reporters that he has made his last movie. "It's horrible," he said
of the motion picture, entitled
The Freshman.
"It's going
to be a flop, but after this, I'm retiring. You can't imagine how
happy I am." In Bonn, West Germany, Chancellor Helmut Kohl
telephoned the new Polish Prime Minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, in a
plea for better relations between their two countries. It was fifty
years ago tomorrow, indeed almost right to this minute when
allowances are made for time zones, that Germany under Adolf Hitler
invaded Poland, precipitating World War II, in which an estimated
fifty million persons were to perish. Like, wow! In sports, the
Phillies are losing in San Diego and Pittsburgh is idle. As to the
weather, it could be better, and it could be worse.
Mezzo,
mezzo. I
didn't say messy, but look out for thundershowers,
you Lancaster County night owls. Oh yes, Brando also called his new
and terminal movie a "stinker." No sweat, for a fellow who began
his career in a torn undershirt.

Rabbit smiles in the whispering, onrushing cave of the car; this
guy must think nobody is listening, gagging it up like this. Lonely
in those radio studios, surrounded by paper coffee cups and
perforated acoustic tiles. Hard to know the effect you're making.
Hard to believe God is always listening, never gets bored. The
dashboard lights of the Celica glow beneath his line of vision like
the lights of a city about to be bombed.

The superhighway crosses the Susquehanna and at York catches 83.
As Harry drives south, the station fades behind him, toward the end
of Louis Prima's "Just a Gigolo," that fantastic chorus where the
chorus keeps chanting "Just a gigolo" in a kind of affectionate
mockery of that wheezy wonderful voice: it makes your scalp prickle
with joy. Rabbit fumbles with the scan button but can't find
another oldies station, just talk shows, drunks calling in, the
host sounding punchy himself, his mouth running on automatic pilot,
abortion, nuclear waste, unemployment among young black males, CIA
complicity in the AIDS epidemic, Boesky, Milken, Bush and North,
Nonega, you
can't tell me that
Rabbit switches the radio
off, hating the sound of the human voice. Vermin. We are noisy
vermin, crowding even the air. Better the murmur of the tires, the
green road signs looming in the lights and parabolically enlarging
and then whisked out of sight like magicians' handkerchieves. It's
getting close to midnight, but before he stops he wants to be out
of the state. Even that botched time ages ago he got as far as West
Virginia. To get out of Pennsylvania you have to climb a nameless
mountain, beyond Hungerford. Signs and lights diminish. The lonely
highway climbs. High lakes gleam under what is, now, in a gap
between clouds, true moonlight. He descends into Maryland. There is
a different feeling: groomed center strips, advertisements for Park
and Ride for commuters. Civilization. Out of the sticks. His
eyelids feel sandy, his heart fluttery and sated. He pulls off 83
into a Best Western well north of Baltimore, pleased to think that
nobody in the world, nobody but the stocky indifferent
Asian-American desk clerk, knows his location. Where oh where
is the missing tritium?