Rabbit at rest (70 page)

"Tell me, Nelson,. I'm just curious. How does it feel to have
smoked up your parents' house in crack?"

The boy begins to sound more like himself. He whines, "I keep
telling you, I was never that much into crack. The crack just came
into it toward the end, it was so much more convenient than
freebasing. I'm sorry, Jesus. I went to rehab, I took the vows, I'm
trying to make amends like they say. Who are you to still be on my
case?"

Who indeed? "O.K.," Rabbit says. "Sorry to mention it. What else
did your mother tell you to tell me?"

"Hyundai is interested in the lot, the location is just what
they want and don't have. They'd enlarge the building out toward
the back like I always wanted to do."
Goodbye, Paraguay,
Rabbit thinks. "They'd keep the service people on, with a little
retraining, and some of the sales force, Elvira might go over to
Rudy's on 422. Hyundai's made her a counteroffer. But they don't
want me. No way. Word gets around, I guess, among these Oriental
companies."

"I guess," Harry says. Too much ninjó not enough giri. "I'm
sorry."

"Don't be sorry, Dad. It frees me up. I'm thinking of becoming a
social worker."

"A social worker!"

"Sure, why not? Help other people instead of myself for a
change. It's a two-year course at the Penn State extension, I
could still get in for this October."

"Sure, why not, come to think of it," Rabbit agrees. He is
beginning to dislike himself, for being so agreeable, for wanting
to worm back into everybody's good graces.

"Me and the lawyers all think if it goes through we should lease
to Hyundai rather than sell; if we sell the house in Penn Park we
wouldn't need any more capital and should keep the lot as an
investment, Mom says it's going to be worth millions by the year
2000."

"Wow," Harry says unenthusiastically. "You and your mom are
quite a team. Anything else to hit me with?"

"Well, this maybe isn't any of your business, but Pru thought it
was. We're trying to get pregnant."

"We?"

"We want to have a third child. All this has made us realize how
much we've been neglecting our marriage and how much really we have
invested in making it work. Not only for Judy and Roy, but for
ourselves. We love each other, Dad."

Maybe this is supposed to make him feel jealous, and there is a
pang, just under the right ventricle. But Rabbit's basic emotion is
relief, at being excused from having to keep any kind of candle
burning at Pru's shrine. Good luck to her, her and her sweet slum
hunger. "Great," he tells the boy. He can't resist adding, "Though
I'm not so sure social workers make enough to support three kids."
And, getting mad, feeling squeezed, he goes on, "And tell your
mother I'm not so sure I want to sign our house away. It's not like
the lot, we're co-owners, and she needs my signature on the
sales agreement. Ifwe split up, my signature ought to be worth
quite a bit, tell her."

"Split up?" The boy sounds frightened. "Who's saying anything
about splitting up?"

"Well," Harry says, "we seem split up now. At least I don't see
her down here, unless she's under the bed. But don't you worry
about it, Nelson. You've been through this before and I felt lousy
about it. You get on with your own life. It sounds like you're
doing fine. I'm proud of you. Or did I say that?"

"But everything kind of depends on selling the Penn Park
house."

"Tell her I'll think about it. Tell Judy and Roy I'll give 'em a
call one of these days."

"But, Dad -"

"Nelson, I got this low-cal frozen dinner in the oven and
the buzzer went off five minutes ago. Tell your mother to call me
sometime if she wants to talk about it. Must run. Terrific to talk
to you. Really." He hangs up.

He has been buying low-cal frozen meals, raw vegetables
like cabbage and carrots, and no more sodium-laden munchies.
He has lost three pounds on the bathroom scale, if he weighs
himself naked and right in the morning after taking a crap. At
night, to keep himself away from the TV and the breadbox in the
kitchen drawer and the beer in the refrigerator, he gets into bed
and reads the book Janice gave him for last Christmas. Its author
has joined Roy Orbison and Bart Giamatti in that beyond where some
celebrities like Elvis and Marilyn expand like balloons and become
gods but where most shrivel and shrink into yellowing obituaries
not much bigger than Harry's will be in the Brewer
Standard.
In the
News-Press
he doesn't
expect to get an inch. He read in her obituary that the author had
been a niece of Roosevelt's Secretary of the Treasury Henry
Morgenthau, Jr. Harry remembers Morgenthau: the pointy-nosed
guy who kept urging him and his schoolmates to buy war stamps with
their pennies. It's a small world, and a long life in a way.

He has reached the exciting part of the book, where, after years
of frustration and starvation and lousy support from his fellow
would-be Americans, Washington has hopes of joining up with a
French fleet sailing from the Caribbean to trap Cornwallis and his
army at York in the Chesapeake Bay. It seems impossible that it
will work. The logistics of it need perfect timing, and the
communications take weeks, ships to land and back. Anyway,
what's in it for France?
Instead of an aggressive ally, they
were tied to a depen dent client, unable to establish a
strong government and requiring transfusions of
men-at-arms and money to keep its war effort alive. The
war, like all wars, was proving more expensive for the Bourbons
than planned.
What was in it for the soldiers?
The
American troops, for too long orphans of the battle, unkempt,
underfed and unpaid while Congress rode in carriages and dined at
well-laid tables, would not march without pay.
What was
in it for Washington? He couldn't even have known he'd get his face
on the dollar bill. But he hangs in there, patching, begging,
scrambling, his only assets the fatheadedness of the British
commanders, all gouty noblemen wishing they were home in their
castles, and the fact that, just like in Vietnam, the natives
weren't basically friendly. Washington gets his troops across the
Hudson while Clinton cowers defensively in New York. DeGrasse gets
his fleet heading north because Admiral Rodney cautiously
chooses the defense of Barbados over pursuit. But, still, the odds
of the troops and the ships arriving at the Chesapeake at the same
time and Cornwallis remaining a sitting duck in Yorktown are
preposterous. All that transport, all those men trudging and horses
galloping along the New World's sandy, woodsy roads, winding
through forests, past lonely clearings, among bears and wolves and
chipmunks and Indians and passenger pigeons, it makes Harry sleepy
to think about. The tangle of it all, the trouble. He reads ten
pages a night; his is a slow march.

He does not always gravitate in his health walks to the black
section of Deleon; he discovers and explores posh streets he never
dreamed were there, long roads parallel to the beach, giving the
passerby glimpses of backs of houses that front on the ocean,
wooden back stairs and sundecks, three-car garages at the end
of driveways surfaced in crushed seashells, plantings of hibiscus
and jacaranda, splashing sounds coming from a fenced-in
swimming pool, the purr of air-conditioners lost amid the
retreating and advancing shush of the surf.
Posh, shoosh.
Some people have it made; not for them a condo where they steal
your view of the Gulf from the balcony. No matter how hard you
climb, there are always the rich above you, who got there without
effort. Lucky stiffs, holding you down, making you discontent so
you buy more of the crap advertised on television.

Occasional breaks in the developed oceanfront property permit a
look at the Gulf, its striped sails and scooting jet skis, its
parachutes being pulled by powerboats, its far gray stationary
freighters. Bicyclers in bathing suits pass him with a
whirr;
a beefy young mailman in blue-gray shorts and
socks to match pushes along one of these pouches on rubber wheels
they have now, like baby strollers. We're getting soft. A nation of
couch potatoes. The man who brought the mail to Jackson Road, he
forgets his name, an iron-haired man with a handsome unhappy
face, Mom said his wife had left him, used to carry this scuffed
leather pouch, leaning to one side against its pull especially on
Fridays when the magazines came to the houses,
Life
and the
Post.
Mr. Abendroth. That was his name. Left by
his wife: Harry as a boy used to try to imagine what could
have been so terribly wrong with him, to earn such a disgrace in
life.

His Nikes with the bubbles of air in the heels take him along
crushed-shell sidewalks, so white they hurt his eyes when the
sun is high. And he walks through an area of marinas cut into coral
shell, neat straight streets of water sliced out, full of
powerboats tied up obedient and empty, their rub rails tapping the
sliced coral, their curved sides seeming to tremble and twitch in
the sunlight reflected in bobbling stripes off the calm water as it
lightly kicks and laps. Tap.
Lap. No
Trespassing signs
abound, but not so much for him, a respectable-looking white
man past middle age. Each boat ties up as much money as a house
used to cost and a number of them no doubt are involved in cocaine
smuggling, put-putting out in the dead of the night when the
moon is down, crime and the sea have always mixed, pirates ever
since there have been ships, law ends with the land, man is nothing
out there, a few bubbles as he goes down under the mindless waves:
that must be why Harry has always been afraid of it, the water. He
loves freedom but a grassy field is his idea of enough. People down
here are crazy about boats but not him. Give him terra firma. Away
from the water he walks miles of plain neighborhoods, glorified
cabins put up after the war for people without much capital who yet
wanted a piece of the sun Washington won for them or else were born
here, this strange thin vacation-land their natural home,
their houses shedding paint like a sunbather's clothes, surrounded
not by barberry and yew bushes but spiky cactuses fattening in the
baking heat, America too hot and dry really for European
civilization to take deep root.

But it is the widespread black section that draws him back, he
doesn't quite know why, whether because he is exerting his national
right to go where he pleases or because this ignored part of Deleon
is in some way familiar, he's been there before, before his life
got too soft. On the Monday after a pretty good weekend for blacks
- a black Miss America got elected, and Randall Cunningham
brought the Eagles back from being down to the Redskins twenty to
nothing - Rabbit ventures several blocks farther than he has
dared walk before and comes upon, beyond an abandoned high school
built about when Brewer High was, an ochre-brick edifice with
tall gridded windows and a piece of Latin in cement over the main
entrance, a recreation field - a wide tan emptiness under the
sun, with a baseball diamond and backstop at the far end, a pair of
soccer goals set up in the outfield, and, nearer the street, two
pitted clay tennis courts with wire nets slack and bent from
repeated assaults and, also of pale tamped earth, a basketball
court. A backboard and netless hoop lifted up on pipe legs preside
at either end. A small pack of black boys are scrimmaging around
one basket. Legs, shouts. Puffs of dust rise from their striving,
stop-and-starting feet. Some benches have been placed
in an unmowed strip of seedy blanched weeds next to the cement
sidewalk. The benches are backless so you can sit facing the street
or facing the field. Rabbit seats himself on the end of one, facing
neither way, so he can watch the basketball while seeming to be
doing something else, just resting a second on his way through, not
looking at anything, minding his own business.

The kids, six of them, in shorts and tank tops, vary in heights
and degrees of looseness, but all have that unhurried look he likes
to see, missing shots or making them, passing back out and then
crossing over in a screen, dribbling as if to drive in and then
stopping dead to pass off in a droll behind-the-back
toss, imitating the fancy stuff they see on television, all
together making a weave, nobody trying too hard, it's a long life,
a long afternoon. Their busy legs are up to their knees in a steady
haze of pink dust lifting from the clay, their calves dulled but
for where sweat makes dark rivulets, their sneakers solidly coated
a rosy earth color. There is a breeze here, stirred up by the empty
space stretching to the baseball backstop. Rabbit's watch says four
o'clock, school is over, but the brick high school has been
abandoned, the real action is elsewhere, at some modern low glassy
high school you take a bus to, out on the bulldozed edges of the
city. Rabbit is happy to think that the world isn't yet too crowded
to have a few of these underused pockets left. Grass, he observes,
has crept onto the dirt court, in the middle, where the pounding,
pivoting feet rarely come. Shallow semicircular troughs have been
worn around the baskets at either end.

Though he is sitting some distance away - a good firm chip
shot, or a feathered wedge - the players eye him. They're
doing this for themselves, not as a show for some fat old honky
walking around where he shouldn't be. Where's his car? Feeling heat
from their sidelong glances, not wanting so delicate a relation to
turn awkward, Harry sighs ostentatiously and heaves himself up from
the bench and walks away the way he came, taking note of the street
signs so he can find this peaceful place again. If he comes every
day he'll blend in. Blacks don't have this racist thing whites do,
about keeping their neighborhoods pure. They can't be too angry
these days, with their third Miss America just elected. The funny
thing about the final judges' panel, it held two celebrities he
feels he knows, has taken into himself, loves, actually: Phylicia
Rashad, who for his money is the real star of
The Cosby
Show,
with those legs and that nice loose smile, and Mike
Schmidt, who had the grace to pack it in when he could no longer
produce. So there is life after death of a sort. Schmidt judges.
Skeeter lives. And the weekend before last, a young black girl beat
Chrissie Evert in the last U.S. Open match she'll ever play. She
packed it in too. There comes a time.