Rabbit at rest (15 page)

"It's not just plants, the plants are the
least
of it,
they have leopards and these crazy birds. Real leopards, Roy,
that'd claw your eyes out if you let 'em, and flamingos that fall
asleep standing on one leg - Bernie, this friend of mine,
can't get over it, the way they can sleep standing on this one
skinny leg!" He holds up a single finger to convey the wonder of
it. How ugly and strange a single finger is - its
knuckle-wrinkles, its whorly print, its pretty useless nail.
Both the children in the back seat look flushed, the way Nelson
used to when he'd be coming down with a cold - a smothery
frantic look in the eyes. "Or," Rabbit says, consulting the map,
"here's something called Braden Castle Ruins. How do you two sports
like ruins?" He knows the answer, and cinches his point with, "Or
we could all go back to the condo and take a nap." He learned this
much selling cars:
offer the
customer something he doesn't
want, to make what he half-wants look better. He peeks over
at Janice, a bit miffed by her air of detachment. Why is she making
this all his show? She's a grandparent too.

She rouses and says, "We can't go back so soon - they may
be still resting."

"Or whatever," he says. Brawling. Fucking. There is something
hot and disastrous about Nelson and Pru that scares the rest of
them. Young couples give off this heat; they're still at the heart
of the world's' business, making babies. Old couples like him and
Janice give off the musty smell of dead flower stalks, rotting in
the vase.

Judy suggests, "Let's go to a
movie."

"Yeah. Movie," Roy says, for these two words doing quite a good
accidental imitation of a grown-up voice, as if they've taken
on a hitchhiker in the back seat.

"Let's make a deal," Harry proposes. "We'll drive up and nip
into jungle Gardens, and if there's a guided tour or you think
it'll depress you we'll nip right out again, the hell with 'em.
Otherwise we'll go through and see the flamingos and then buy a
Sarasota paper and see what's at the movies. Roy, you big enough to
sit through a whole movie?" He starts the engine and gets into
gear.

Judy says, "He cried so hard during
Dumbo
Mommy had to
take him out."

"Dumbo's mommy . . ." Roy begins to explain, then starts to
cry.

"Yeah," Harry says, turning onto 41 again, casting back his
voice, rolling along. "That's a tough one, out there in that little
prison car. The business with their trunks, remember? But it all
works out. Roy, you should have stayed to the end. If you don't
stay to the end the sadness sticks with you."

"He becomes a
star,"
Judy tells her brother spitefully.
"He shoots peanuts at all the bad clowns. You missed all that."

"That Disney," Harry says, half to Janice, half for their little
audience. "He packed a punch. You had to have been raised in the
Depression to take it. Even Nelson, your daddy, couldn't stand
Snow White
when it came around in rerun."

"Daddy doesn't like anything," Judy confides. "Just his dumb
friends."

"What friends?" Rabbit asks her.

"Oh, I don't know their names. Slim and like that. Mommy hates
them and won't go out any more."

"She won't, huh?"

"She says she's scared."

"Scared! Scared of what?"

"Harry, " Janice mutters beside him. "Don't pump the
children."

"Scared of Slim," Roy says, trying it out for sound.

Judy thumps him. "No, Daddy is not scared of Slim, you dumbo,
he's scared of those other men."

"What other men?" Harry asks.

"Harry," Janice says.

"Forget I asked," he calls back, his words lost in the squall as
Roy grabs Judy's hair and won't let go. In reaching back to pull
them apart Janice rips a seam of her blouse; he can hear the
threads break even though at that moment he is being passed by an
eighteen-wheeler whose shuddering white sides say MAYFLOWER
MEANS MOVING and create an aerodynamic condition that sucks him
sideways so he has to fight the Camry's wheel. The Japanese don't
build for the full range of American conditions. Like Nelson said
about the van, the wind pushing him all over 422. Still, you got to
sell something in life. You can't just sit there and crab. We can't
all sell Lamborghinis.

Jungle Gardens works out better than anyone dared hope. A big
shop full of shells and corny artifacts like that stuff of Janice's
back on the condo shelves opens into a miniature outdoors. You can
go one way to the Reptile Show and the Gardens of Christ and the
other to the Bird Show. They all turn toward the Bird Show, and
watch tattered, disgruntled-looking parrots ride bicycles and
see saws and hop through hoops. Then a curving cement path,
jungle Trail, leads them along: you shuffle obediently past mossy
roots and trickling rocks and at each turn confront some fresh mild
wonder - a trio of spider monkeys with long hairy arms and
little worried faces, then a cageful of finches whirring up and
down, roost to roost, like the tireless works of a complicated
clock, then a bo-tree such as Buddha was illuminated under.
Rabbit wonders how the Dalai Lama is doing, after all that exile.
Do you still believe in God, if people keep telling you you are
God?

The four Angstroms come to Mirror Lake, where mute swans float,
and Flamingo Lagoon, where, as Bernie Drechsel promised, flocks of
flamingos, colored that unreal orange-pink color, sleep while
standing up, like big feathery lollypops, each body a ball, the
idle leg and the neck and head somehow knitted in, balanced on one
pencil-thin leg and wide weird leathern foot. Others, almost
as marvellous, are awake and stirring, tenderly treading. "Look how
they drink," Harry tells his grandchildren, lowering his voice as
if in the presence of something sacred. "Upside down. Their bills
are scoops that work upside down." And they stand marvelling, the
four human beings, as ifthe space between farflung planets has been
abolished, so different do these living things loom from
themselves. The Earth is many planets, that intersect only at
moments. Even among themselves, slices of difference interpose,
speaking the same language though they do, and lacking feathers,
and all drinking right side up.

After the flamingos, the path takes them to a snack bar in a
pavilion, and a shell-and-butterfly exhibit, and a
goldfish pond, and a cage of black leopards just as Harry had
promised Roy. The black-eyed child stares at the animals'
noiseless pacing as if into the heart of a whirlpool that might
suck him down. A small machine such as those that in Harry's youth
supplied a handful of peanuts or pistachio nuts in almost every gas
station and grocery store is fixed to a pavilion post near an area
where peacocks restlessly drag their extravagant feathers across
the dust. Here he makes his historic blunder. As his three kin move
ahead he fishes in his pocket for a dime, inserts it, receives a
handful of brown dry objects, and begins to eat them. They are not
exactly peanuts, but perhaps some Florida delicacy, and taste so
dry and stale as to be bitter; but who knows how long these
machines wait for customers? When he offers some to Judy, though,
she looks at them, smells them, and stares up into his face with
pure wonderment. "Grandpa!" she cries. "That's to feed the birds!
Grandma! He's been eating birdfood! Little brown things like rabbit
turds!"

Janice and Roy gather around to see, and Harry holds open his
hand to display the shaming evidence. "I didn't know," he weakly
says. "There's no sign or anything." He is suffused with a curious
sensation; he feels faintly numb and sick but beyond that, beyond
the warm volume enclosed by his skin, the air is swept by a
universal devaluation; for one flash he sees his life as a silly
thing it will be a relief to discard.

Only Judy actually laughs, a laughter that turns forced, out of
her fine-featured little face with its perfect teeth; Janice
and Roy just look sad, and a bit puzzled.

Judy says, "Grandpa, that's the
dumbest thing
I ever
saw anybody do!"

He smiles and nods at his inflated height above her; he feels
short of breath and tight bands of pain pulse across his chest. In
his mouth an acid taste intensifies. He turns his hand, his puffy
keratotic hand, long-fingered enough to hold a basketball
from above, and scatters the pellets where the peacocks can eat
them. A dirty white one dragging its filmy tail through the dust
eyes the turdlike food but doesn't peck. Maybe it was human food
after all. Still, his day has taken a blow, and as they move along
the path only Judy is gleeful; her prattle eclipses a sudden
anguished crying, the noise peacocks make, behind them.

Wearying of Jungle Gardens, they move along a path that
pas-ses yet another piece of this same all-purpose
lake, and a cage where a lonely ocelot dozes, and cactus gardens,
and a black pool advertising a water monitor but where they see
nothing, perhaps because they don't know what a water monitor is,
and cages of parrots and macaws whose brilliant plumage and ornate
bills seem to weigh them down. It's hell, to be a creature. You are
trapped in yourself, the genetic instructions, more strictly than
in a cage. At the last cage a scraggly tall emu and a rhea are
snapping at the wires of the fencing with a doleful soft leathery
clack of their bills. Their long-lashed great eyes stare
through the diagonal wire squares. Clip. Tap. Clip, say their sad
persistent bills, to no avail. Are they catching insects human
beings cannot see? Are they delirious, like old rummies?

Harry retastes the acid pellets and the
yellow-and-red glop McDonald's puts on hamburgers, with
the little limp green pickle, and wishes to God he could stop
eating. Janice comes to his side and touches the back of his
hanging hand with the back of hers. "It was a natural mistake," she
says.

"That's the kind I make," he says. "Natural ones."

"Harry, don't be so down."

"Am I? "

"You keep thinking about Nelson," she tells him. So that's what
has been preoccupying her. Her, not him.

"I was thinking about emus," he confesses.

Janice says, "Let's go see if the kids want anything in the
souvenir shop and then go buy a paper. I'm dying to be somewhere
air-conditioned." In the souvenir shop they buy Judy a lovely
glossy top shell and Roy a strikingly black-and-white
murex, with rough prongs that he instantly begins to scrape along
smooth surfaces - the painted rail leading back to the
parking lot, and the Camry itself if Harry hadn't reached down and
grabbed the little slob by his boneless little arm. Harry hates
shells. Whenever he sees them he can't help thinking of the blobby
hungry sluggy creatures who inhabit them, with hearts and mouths
and anuses and feelers and feeble eyes, underneath the sea, a murky
cold world halfway to death. He really can't stand the thought of
underwater, the things haunting it, eating each other, drilling
through shells, sucking each other's stringy guts out.

The interior of the car has grown broiling hot in their absence.
The Florida sun has burned away those thin clouds like aging jet
trails and left only a waste of pure blue above the palms and the
Spanish tiles. The heat and the pressure of family life have
stupefied the kids; they hardly beg for a treat when he stops at a
joy Food and Gas and buys a Sarasota
Sentinel.
The movie
they all decide upon is
Working Girl
at
two-forty-five at some "park" that turns out to be
miles away, shimmering flat Florida miles full of big white soupy
power-steered American cars being driven by old people so
shrunken they can hardly see over the hood. Any time you get
somewhere down here without a head-on collision is a tribute
to the geriatric medicine in this part of the world, the pep pills
and vitamin injections and blood thinners.

Though Judy swears Roy has been to the movies before, he doesn't
seem to understand you can't just talk up as in your own living
room. He keeps asking why, with a plaintive inflection:
"Why
she take off her clothes?"
"Why
she so mad
at that man?" Harry likes it, in the movie, when you see that
Melanie Griffith in her whorehouse underwear has a bit of honest
fat to her, not like most of these Hollywood anorectics, and when
she bursts in upon her boyfriend with the totally naked girl, like
herself supposed to be Italian but not like her aspiring to be a
Wall Street wheeler-dealer, riding the guy in the astride
position, her long bare side sleek as the skin of a top shell and
her dark-nippled boobs right on screen for a good five
seconds. But the plot, and the farce of the hero and heroine
worming their way into the upper-crust wedding, he feels he
saw some forty years ago with Cary Grant or Gary Cooper and Irene
Dunne or jean Arthur. When Roy loudly asks,
"Why
don't we
go now?" he is willing to go out into the lobby with him, so Janice
and Judy can see the picture to the end in peace.

He and Roy split a box of popcorn and try a video game called
Annihilation. Though he always thought of himself as pretty good on
eye-hand coordination, Harry can't hit a single space monster
as it twitches and wiggles past in computer graphics. Roy, so small
he has to be held up to the control panel until his twitching,
wiggling weight gives Harry a pain across his shoulders, isn't any
better. "Well, Roy," he sums up, when he gets his breath back, "if
it was all up to us, the world would be taken over by space
monsters." The boy, more accustomed to his grandfather now, stands
close, and his breath smells buttery from the popcorn, making Harry
slightly queasy: this thin unconscious stream of childish breath
reminds him of the overhead vent in an airplane.

When the crowd comes out of Cinema 3, Janice announces, "I think
I need a job. Wouldn't you like me better, Harry, if I was a
working girl?"