Rabbit at rest (20 page)

"Maybe that man who liked Mom will come out in his launch."

"Maybe. But wouldn't that be embarrassing, being rescued with
Roy watching?"

Judy is too worried to laugh or respond. They make their way
past the tiller, the ugly wooden thing that scraped his face. The
tern has left the sky but floating bits of brown seaweed, like
paper mops or wigs for clowns, offer proofs of other life. The
slime-stained white hull lying sideways in the water seems a
corpse he can never revive. "Back off a little," he tells the
clinging child. "I'm not sure how this will go."

As long as he is in the water, at least he doesn't weigh much;
but when, taking hold of the line threaded through the top of the
aluminum mast, he struggles to place his weight on the centerboard,
at first with his arms and then with his feet, he feels crushed by
his own limp load of slack muscle and fat and guts. The pain in his
chest gathers to such a red internal blaze that he squeezes his
eyes shut to blot it out, and blindly then he feels with a suck of
release the sail lift free of the water and the centerboard under
him plunge toward vertical. The boat knocks him backward as it
comes upright, and the loose wet sail swings its boom back and
forth in a whipping tangle of line. He has no breath left and has
an urge to give himself to the water, the water that hates him yet
wants him.

But the child with him cheers. "Yaay! You did it! Grandpa, you
O.K.?"

"I'm great. Can you get on first, honey? I'll hold the boat
steady."

After several failed leaps out of the water Judy plops her belly
on the curving deck, her blue-black bottom gleaming in two
arcs, and scrambles to a crouching position by the mast.

"Now," he announces, "here comes the whale," and, lifting his
mind clear of the striated, pulsing squeezing within his rib cage,
rises up enough out of the water to seize the tipping hull with his
abdomen. He grabs a cleat. The fake grain of the Fiberglas presses
its fine net against his cheekbone. The hungry water still sucks at
his legs and feet but he kicks it away and shakily arranges himself
in his position at the tiller again. He tells Judy, "We're getting
there, young lady."

"You O.K., Grandpa? You're talking kind of funny."

"Can't breathe too well. For some reason. I might throw up. Let
me rest a minute. And think. We don't want to. Tip this fucker over
again." The pain now is down both axis and up into his jaw. Once
Rabbit told someone, a prying clergyman,
somewhere behind all
this there's something that wants me to find it.
Whatever it
is, it now has found
him,
and is working him over.

"Do you hurt?"

"Sure. My ear where you pulled it. My leg where I scraped it."
He wants to make her smile but her starry-eyed study of him
is unremittingly solemn. How strange, Rabbit thinks, his thoughts
weirdly illumined by his agony, children are, shaped like us, torso
and legs and ears and all, yet on a scale all their own -
subcompact people made for a better but also a smaller planet. Judy
looks at him uncertain of how seriously to take him, like yesterday
when he ate the false peanuts.

"Stay just where you are," he tells her. "Don't rock the boat.
As they say."

The tiller feels oddly large in his hands, the nylon rope
unreally rough and thick. He must manage these. Untended, the boat
has drifted dead into the wind. What was Cindy's phrase for that?
In irons.
He is in irons. He waggles the tiller, hard one
way and gently the other, to get an angle on the wind, and timidly
pulls in sail, fearing the giant hand will push them over again.
Surprisingly, there are other Sunfish out in the bay, and two boys
on jet skis, brutally jumping the waves, at such a distance that
their yells and the slaps of impact arrive in his ears delayed. The
sun has moved past noon, onto the faces of the tall hotels. The
windows glint now, their comblike balconies stand out, the crowd on
the beach twinkles, another kite flyer has joined the first. The
sheet of water between here and shore is dented over and over by
downward blows of light that throw sparks. Rabbit feels chilled in
his drying skin. He feels full of a gray unrest that wants to ooze
poison out through his pores. He stretches his legs straight in
front of him and leans back on an elbow in an awkward approximation
of lying down. Sinking into sleep would be a good idea if he
weren't where he was, with this child to deliver back to the world
unharmed.

He speaks rapidly, between twinges, and clearly, not wanting to
repeat. "Judy. What we're going to do is as quietly as we can take
two big tacks and get to shore. It may not be exactly where your
mother is but we want to get to land. I feel very tired and achey
and if I fall asleep you wake me up."

"Wake you up?"

"Don't look so worried. This is a fun adventure. In fact, I have
a fun job for you."

"What's that?" Her voice has sharpened; she senses now that this
isn't fun.

"Sing to me." When he pulls the sail tighter, it's as if he's
tightening something within himself pain shoots up the soft inner
side of that arm to his elbow.

"Sing? I don't know any songs, Grandpa."

"Everybody knows some songs. How about `Row, Row, Row Your Boat'
to start off with?"

He closes his eyes intermittently, in obedience to the animal
instinct to crawl into a cave with your pain, and her little voice
above the slipslop of the waves and resistant creaking of the mast
picks its wavery way through the words of the round, which he used
to sing in the second grade back in the days of corduroy knickers
and Margaret Schoelkopf's pigtails and high-buttoned shoes.
-His mind joins in, but can't spare the effort to activate
his voice box,
Gently down the stream, Merrily, merrily,
merrily . . . "Life
is but a dream," Judy ends.

"Nice," he says. "How about `Mary Had a Little Lamb'? Do they
still teach you that at school? What the hell
do
they
teach you at school these days?" Being laid so low has loosened his
language, his primal need to curse and his latent political
indignation. He goes on, thinking it will make him seem less
alarming to his grandchild, and humorously alive, "I know we're
sucking hind titty in science education, the papers keep telling us
that. Thank God for the Orientals. Without these Chinese and
Vietnam refugees we'd be a nation of total idiots."

Judy does know "Mary Had a Little Lamb," and "Three Blind Mice,"
and the verses of "Farmer in the Dell" up to the wife takes a cow,
but then they both lose track. "Let's do `Three Blind Mice' again,"
he orders her.
"See
how they
run.
The
mice
ran after the farmer's
wife . . ."

She does not take up the verse and his voice dies away. Their
tack is taking them far out toward the north, toward Sarasota and
Tampa and the rich men's islands where the pirates once were, but
the people on the beach do look a little less like gray string, the
colors of their bathing suits twinkle a bit closer, and he can make
out the darting tormented flight of a volleyball. A pressure in the
center of his chest has intensified and to his nausea has been
added an urgent desire to take a crap. In trying to picture his
real life, the life of simple comforts and modest challenges that
he abandoned when his foot left the sand, he now envisions foremost
the rosecolored porcelain toilet bowl in the condo, with matching
padded seat, and the little stack of
Consumer Reports
and
Times
that waited on the bottom shelf of the
white-painted bamboo table Janice kept her cosmetics on top
of, next to the rose-tinted bathroom basin. It seems to have
been a seat in paradise.

"Grandpa, I can't think of any more songs." The child's green
eyes, greener than Pru's, have a watery touch of panic.

"Don't stop," he grunts, trying to keep everything in. "You're
making the boat go."

"No I'm not." She manages a blurred smile. "The wind makes it
go."

"In the wrong fucking direction," he says.

"Is it wrong?" she asks with the quickness of fear.

"No, I'm just kidding." It was like that sadistic squeeze he
gave her hand yesterday. Must stop that stuff. When you get
children growing under you, you try to rise to the occasion. "We're
fine," he tells her. "Let's come about. Ready? Duck your head,
honey." No more sailor talk. He yanks the tiller, the boat swings,
sail sags, sun shines down through the gap of silence, hammering
the water into sparks. The bow drifts across a certain imaginary
line, the sail hesitantly and then decisively fills, and they tug
off in another direction, south, toward the remotest glass hotel
and Naples and the other set of rich men's islands. The small
effort and anxiety of the maneuver wring such pain from his chest
that tears have sprung into his own eyes. Yet he feels good, down
deep. There is a satisfaction in his skyey enemy's having at last
found him. The sense of doom hovering over him these past days has
condensed into reality, as clouds condense into needed rain. There
is a lightness, a lightening, that comes along with misery: vast
portions of your life are shorn off, suddenly ignorable. You become
simply a piece of physical luggage to be delivered into the hands
of others. Stretched out on the Fiberglas deck he is pinned flat to
the floor of reality. The sensation of pressure, of unbearable
fullness, within him now has developed a rhythm, an eccentric
thrust as if a flywheel has come unconnected from its piston. Pain
you can lift your head above, for a little; he minds more the
breathing, the sensation that his access to the air has been
narrowed to a slot that a fleck of mucus would clog, and worse even
than the breathing, which if you can forget it seems to ease, is
the involvement of his guts, the greasy gray churning and the
desire to vomit and shit and yet not to, and the clammy sweating,
which chills him in the wind and the sun's quick drying.

"Splish, splash, I was takin' a bath," Judy's faint voice sings,
little feathers of music that fly away, "along about Saturday night
. . ." She has moved from nursery rhymes to television commercials,
the first few lines of them until she forgets. "The good times,
great taste, of McDonald's..." "I wish I were an Oscar Mayer
wiener. That is what I'd truly like to be. 'Cause if I were an
Oscar Mayer wiener, everyone would be in love with me." And the one
the toilet paper sings, and the "Stand by Me" imitation by those
California raisins, and the "Mack the Knife" by Ray Charles as the
man in the moon, and the reassurance that if you want it, we've got
it, "Toy-o-to . . . Who could ask for anything more?"
It is like switching channels back and forth, her little voice
lifting and blowing back into his face, his eyes closed while his
mind pays furtive visits in the dark to the grinding, galloping,
lopsided maladjustment in his chest and then open again, to check
their bearings and the tension in the sail, to test the illusion of
blue sky and his fixed belief that her voice is powering the
Sunfish toward the shore. "Coke is it,"Judy sings, "the most
refreshing taste around, Coke is it, the one that never lets you
down, Coke is it, the biggest taste you ever found!"

He has to tack twice more, and by then his granddaughter has
discovered within herself the treasure of songs from videos she has
watched many times, of children's classics Rabbit saw when they
were new, the first time in those old movie theaters with Arabian
decors and plush curtains that pulled back and giant mirrors in the
lobby, songs of departure, "We're off to see the Wizard, the
wonderful Wizard of Oz" and "Hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to
work we go," and sad songs of something in the sky to distract us
from the Depression, "Somewhere over the Rainbow," and "When You
Wish upon a Star," little Jiminy Cricket out there with his top hat
and furled umbrella on that moon-bathed windowsill.
That
Disney, he really packed a punch.

"Nice, Judy," Rabbit grunts. "Terrific. You were really getting
into it."

"It was fun, like you said. Look, there's Mommy!"

Harry lets the sheet and tiller go. The Sunfish bobs in the
breaking waves of shallow water, and Judy pulls up the centerboard
and jumps off into water up to her shiny hips and pulls the boat
like a barge through the last yards before the bow scrapes sand.
"We tipped over and Grandpa got sick!" she shouts.

Not just Pru and Roy but Gregg Silvers have come to meet them,
about a good six-iron shot up the beach from where they set
out. Gregg's too-tan face gives a twitch, seeing the way
Harry keeps stretched out beside the useless tiller, and seeing
something Harry can't, perhaps the color of his face. How bad is
he? He looks at his palms; they are mottled with yellow and blue.
Swiftly Gregg takes the painter from Judy and asks Harry, "Want to
stay where you are?"

Harry waits until a push of pain passes and says, "I'm getting
off this fucking tub if it kills me."

But the action of standing and easing off the tipping Sunfish
and wading a few feet does bad things to his slipped insides. He
feels himself wade even through air, on the packed sand, against
pronounced resistance. He lies down on the sand at Pru's feet, her
long bare feet with chipped scarlet nails and their pink toe joints
like his mother's knuckles from doing the dishes too many times. He
lies face up, looking up at her white spandex crotch. Little Roy,
thinking Harry's posture playful, toddles over and stands above his
grandfather's head, shedding grains of sand down into Rabbit's
ears, his clenched mouth, his open eyes; his eyes squeeze shut.

The sky is a blank redness out of which Pru's factual Ohio voice
falls with a concerned intonation. "We saw you go over but Gregg
says it happens all the time. Then it seemed to take so long he was
just about to come out in the launch."