Rabbit at rest (65 page)

Back in his long room with its watery scent of cement from
underneath the rug, with walls painted altogether yellow, moldings
and pipes and air-conditioning vents and light-switch
plates rollered and sprayed yellow, Rabbit thinks of adding $5.50
to his bill to watch something called
Horny Housewives
but
instead watches, free, bits of
Perfect Strangers
(it makes
him uneasy, two guys living together, even if one of them is a
comical Russian) and pre-season football between the Seahawks
and 49ers. The trouble with these softcore porn movies on hotel
circuits, in case some four-year-old with lawyers for
parents happens to hit the right buttons they show tits and ass and
even some pubic hair but no real cunt and no pricks, no pricks hard
or soft at all. It's very frustrating. It turns out pricks are what
we care about, you have to see them. Maybe we're all queer, and all
his life he's been in love with Ronnie Harrison. Nice, today, the
way Pru burst out with that
Shit
again and then
Don't
tease.
That level woman-to-man voice, as if he had
his arms about her, her voice relaxing into their basic relation,
cock to cunt, doing Nelson in. In bed at last in the dark he jerks
off, picturing himself with a pair of coffee-colored hookers
from old Fayetteville, to show himself he's still alive.

The morning radio news is dull. Giamatti's death, warmed over.
Baseball mourns. Economy shows moderate growth. Bombardments in
Beirut between Christians and Muslims worse than ever. Ex-HUD
aide says files were shredded. Supreme Court ruling against
organized prayer before football games is rousing indignation all
over the Southland. In Montgomery, Mayor Emory Folmar marched to
the fifty-yard line and led a prayer there. His remarks over
the public-address system linked football and prayer as
American tradition. In Sylacauga, Alabama, local ministers rose in
the bleachers and led the crowd of three thousand in the Lord's
Prayer. In Pensacola, Florida, preachers equipped with bullhorns
led spectactors in prayer.
Fanatics,
Rabbit tells himself.
Southerners are as scary as the Amish.

From here on down to the Florida line Route 95 is like a long
green tunnel between tall pines. Little shacks peek through. A sign
offers
Pecan Rolls 3 for $ 2 .00.
Bigger signs in Hispanic
colors, orange and yellow on black, lime green, splashy and loud,
miles and miles of them, begin to advertise something called South
of the Border.
Bear Up a Leetle Longer. You Never Sausage a
Place!
With a big basketball curving right off the billboard,
Have a Ball.
When you finally get there, after all these
miles of pine tunnel, it's a junky amusement park just across the
South Carolina border: a village of souvenir shops, a kind of a
space needle wearing a sombrero. Tacos, tacky. South Carolina is a
wild state. The first to secede. The pines get taller, with a
tragic feeling. FIREWORKS are offered everywhere for sale. The land
gets hillier. Trucks loaded with great tree trunks rumble
unstoppably by on the downslope and labor to nearly a standstill on
the up. Rabbit is nervously aware now of his Pennsylvania plates
being Northern. Swerve out of line a bit and they'll throw him in
the Pee Dee River. The Lynches River. The Pocatoligo River. Animals
on this highway are hit so hard they don't squash, they explode,
impossible to know what they were. Possums. Porcupines. Some dear
old Southern lady's darling pet pussycat. Reduced to fur stains
amid the crescent fragments of exploded truck tires. Just think, he
lay down for lunch and that was it.

Janice must have got the message from Pru, she may be already at
the condo waiting, flying down from Philly and renting a car at the
airport, better enjoy his freedom while he has it. He has come upon
a black gospel station, an elastic fat voice shouting, "He'll be
there, but you got to call him names." Endlessly repeated, with
unexpected rhythmic variations. "Roll that stone away, do you know
the story?" A commercial interrupts at last and, would you believe,
it's for Toyotas. Those Japs don't miss a trick, you have to hand
it to them. Selling right in the slave quarters.
Your
pruraristic society.
Harry's neck hurts from holding his head
in one position so long. He's beginning to feel bloated on radio,
on travel. God's country. He could have made it smaller and still
made the same point.

He'll be there.
Funny, about Harry and religion. When
God hadn't a friend in the world, back there in the Sixties, he
couldn't let go of Him, and now when the preachers are all praying
through bullhorns he can't get it up for Him. He is like a friend
you've had so long you've forgotten what you liked about Him. You'd
think after that heart scare, but in a way the closer you get the
less you think about it, like you're in His hand already. Like
you're out on the court instead of on the bench swallowing down
butterflies and trying to remember the plays.

Perry Como comes on and sings "Because." Rabbit's scalp prickles
at the end, the skin of his eyes stings.
Because - you
- are miiiine!
Como the best, probably: Crosby had
something sly-Irish about him, clowning around with Lamour
and Hope, and Sinatra - if there's one way in which Rabbit
Angstrom has been out of step with mankind, it's Sinatra. He
doesn't like his singing. He didn't like it when bobbysoxers were
jumping out of their underpants for this skinny
hollow-cheeked guy up on the stage at the Paramount, and he
didn't like it when he mellowed into this Las Vegas fat cat making
all these moony albums you're supposed to screw to all across the
nation: oceans of jism. White with foam. His singing has always
sounded flat to Rabbit, like he's grinding it out. Now, to Mim,
Sinatra is a god, but that's more a matter of lifestyle, turning
night into day and pally with gangsters and Presidents and that
square gangster way of carrying your shoulders (Charlie Stavros has
it) and Chairman of the Board and Sammy Davis, Jr., and Dean Martin
before they dried out finally, if in fact they did, both men have
terrible health problems he read somewhere, in one of those
ridiculous scandal sheets Janice brings home from the Minit Market.
Sometimes Harry envies Mim the glamorous dangerous life he guesses
she's lived, he's glad for her, she always had that edge, wanting
speed even if it killed her, even if it flipped her off the
handlebars of his old Elgin. But the fast lane too gets to be a
rut. He doesn't regret the life he led, though Brewer isn't New
York New York or Chicago my kind of town the way Sinatra grinds it
out. What he enjoyed most, it turns out in retrospect, and he
didn't know it at the time, was standing around in the showroom,
behind the dusty big window with the banners, bouncing on the balls
of his feet to keep up his leg muscles, waiting for a customer,
shooting the bull with Charlie or whoever, earning his paycheck,
filling his slot in the big picture, doing his bit, getting a
little recognition. That's all we want from each other,
recognition. Your assigned place in the rat race. In the Army, too,
you had it: your number, your bunk, your assigned duties, your
place in line, your pass for Saturday night, four beers and fuck a
whore in a ranch house.
Honey, you didn't pay to be no
two-timer.
There's more to being a human being than
having your own way. Fact is, it has come to Rabbit this late in
life, you don't have a way apart from what other people tell you.
Your mother first, and poor Pop, then the Lutheran minister, that
tough old heinie Fritz Kruppenbach, you had to respect him though,
he said what he believed, and then all those schoolteachers, Marty
Tothero and the rest, trying to give you an angle to work from, and
now all these talk-show hosts. Your life derives, and has to
give. Maybe if your mother was in the fast lane like Annabelle's
you are naturally leery of the opposite sex. We haven't set these
kids terrific examples.

The pine trees have gaps now. Marshy stretches open the sky up,
there are cabins on stilts, trees with shaggy balls on them,
colored wash hanging on lines. Homely hand-lettered signs.
Dad's Real Southern Cookin'.
Bi-Lo. A long bridge
over Lake Marion, this enormous body ofwater in the middle of
nowhere. Highways branch off to the capital, Columbia, where he's
never been, though he and Janice did once detour over to Charleston
and back on Route 17. Another time, they diverted to Savannah and
spent the night in a made-over plantation house with high
domed ceilings and louvers on the windows. They did do some fun
things, he and Jan. The thing about a wife, though, and he supposes
a husband for that matter, is that almost anybody would do, inside
broad limits. Yet you're supposed to adore them till death do you
part. Till the end of time. Ashepoo River. Wasn't that a comic
strip, years ago?

He gets off the highway at a vast rest stop, an oasis in this
wilderness - gas pumps, a restaurant, a little department
store selling groceries, beer, fireworks, suntan lotion. At the
counter a couple of young black men, glittery black in the heat,
arms bare up to the shoulder, a mean little Malcolm X goatee on one
of them. They have a menace down here, their color shouts, they are
a race, they are everywhere. But the elderly white waitress has no
trouble with these two black boys. The three chat and smile in the
same dragged accent, making a little breeze with their mouths. Nice
to see it. For this, the Civil War.

To test if he can still use his own voice, Rabbit asks the fat
white man one empty stool away from him at the counter, a man who
has made for himself at the salad bar a mountain of lettuce and red
beets and coleslaw and cottage cheese and kidney beans and
chickpeas, "About how many more hours is it to the Florida line?"
He lets his Pennsylvania accent drag a little extra, hoping to
pass.

"Four," the man answers with a smile. "I just came from there.
Where you headin' for in Florida?"

"Way the other end. Deleon. My wife and I have a condo there,
I'm driving down alone, she'll be following later."

The man keeps smiling, smiling and chewing. "I know Deleon. Nice
old town."

Rabbit has never noticed much that is old about it. "From our
balcony we used to have a look at the sea but they built it
up."

"Lot of building on the Gulf side now, the Atlantic side pretty
well full. Began my day in Sarasota."

"Really? That's a long way to come."

"That's why I'm makin' such a pig of myself. Hadn't eaten more
than a candy bar since five o'clock this morning. After a while you
got to stop, you begin to see things."

"What sort of things?"

"This stretch I just came over, lot of patchy ground fog, it
gets to you. just coffee gets to your stomach." This man has a
truly nice way of smiling and chewing and talking all at once. His
mouth is wide but lipless, like a Muppet's. He has set his truck
driver's cap, with a bill and a mesh panel in the back, beside his
plate; his good head of gray hair, slightly wavy like a rich man's,
is permanently dented by the edge of the cap.

"You drivin' one of those big trucks? I don't know how you guys
do it. How far you goin'?"

All the salad on the plate has vanished and the smile has
broadened. "Boston."

"Boston! All that way?" Rabbit has never been to Boston, to him
it is the end of the world, tucked up in under Maine. People living
that far north are as fantastic to him as Eskimos.

"Today, tomorrow, whatever you call it, I expect to have this
rig in Boston Sunday afternoon, twenty-four hours from
now."

"But when do you sleep?"

"Oh, you pull over and get an hour here, an hour there."

"That's amazing."

"Been doin' it for fifteen years. I had retired, but came back
to it. Couldn't stand it around the house. Nothin' on TV that was
any good. How about you?"

"Me?" On the lam. A bad LAD. He realizes what the question
means, and answers, "Retired, I guess."

"More power to ya, fella. I couldn't take it," the truck driver
says. "Retirement taxed my brain." The elderly waitress so friendly
with the two young blacks brings the hungry man an oval platter
heavy with fried steak soaking in a pink mix of oil and blood, and
three vegetables in little round side dishes, and a separate plate
of golden-brown corn pone.

Harry somewhat reluctantly - he has made a friend -
pushes away from the counter. "Well, more power to you," he
says.

And now this fat pale miracle man, who will be in Boston faster
than a speeding bullet, who like Thomas Alva Edison only needs a
catnap now and then, has his wide Muppet mouth too full to speak,
and merely smiles and nods, and loses a snaky droplet of steak
juice down the far side of his egg-shaped little chin.
Nobody's perfect. We're only human. Look at Jim Bakker. Look at
Bart Giamatti.

In his Celica Harry crosses the Tuglifinny River. The
Salkehatchie. The Little Combahee. The Coosawatchie. The Turtle.
Kickapoo, he thinks - not Ashepoo. Kickapoo joy juice in Li'1
Abner.
Between spates of black music that has that
peculiar exciting new sound of boards being slapped on the floor,
he hears commercials for the Upchurch Music Company ("an instrument
that brings musical pleasure to generations to come") and a
deodorizer called Tiny Cat. Why would a deodorizer be called Tiny
Cat? He crosses the Savannah and leaves South Carolina and its
fireworks at last. Because he is punchy from miles of miles, he
turns off at the city exit and drives into the downtown and parks
by a grand old courthouse and buys a hot pastrami sandwich at a
little sandwich joint on the main street there. He sits eating it,
trying not to have any of the juice spill out of the waxpaper and
spot his pants, like that sickening driblet from the mouth of the
guy back at the lunch place hours ago. This piece of Savannah, a
block from the river, seems a set of outdoor rooms, walled in by
row houses with high steps and curtains of dusty trees; a huge heat
still rests on the day though the shadows are deepening, thickening
on the soft old façades, sadder and rosier than those in
Brewer. A group of pigeons gathers around his bench, curious to see
if he will spare any of the bun or Bar-B-Q potato
chips. A young bum with long yellow hair like George Custer and
that brown face you get from being homeless gives him a glittering
wild eye from a bench behind a tree, in the next room as it were. A
tall obelisk rises in commemoration of something, no doubt the
glorious dead. Little chattering brown birds heave in and out of
the trees as they try to decide whether the day is over. He better
push on. He neatly packages his wastepaper and milk carton in the
bag the sandwich came in and leaves it in a public trash basket,
his gift to Savannah, the trace he will leave, like the cloud of
finger-moisture on the edge of the bureau back home. The
pigeons chuff and chortle off in indignant disappointment. The bum
has silently come up behind him and asks him in no particular
accent, the limp snarl of the drugged, if he has a cigarette.
"Nope," Rabbit tells him. "Haven't smoked in thirty years." He
remembers the moment when on a sudden resolve he canned a
half-pack of Philip Moms, the nice old tobacco-brown
pack, in somebody's open barrel in an alley in Mt. Judge. Left that
trace too.