Rabbit at rest (26 page)

Up, up; the air thins, the barometer registers, the timer begins
to tick as the plane snugly bores through darkness and the pilot
chats on the radio while the cockpit lights burn and wink around
him and the passengers nod over their drinks in their slots of
pastel plastic. The image, like a seed at last breaking its shell
in moist soil, awakens in Harry the realization that even now as he
lies here in this antiseptic white fog tangled in tubes and ties of
blood and marriage he is just like the people he felt so sorry for,
falling from the burst-open airplane: he too is falling,
helplessly falling, toward death. The fate awaiting him behind this
veil of medical attention is as absolute as that which greeted
those bodies fallen smack upon the boggy Scottish earth like
garbage bags full of water. Smack, splat, bodies bursting across
the golf courses and heathery lanes of Lockerbie drenched in night.
What met them was no more than what awaits him. Reality broke upon
those passengers as they sat carving their airline chicken with the
unwrapped silver or dozing with tubes piping Barry Manilow into
their ears and that same icy black reality has broken upon him;
death is not a domesticated pet of life but a beast that swallowed
baby Amber and baby Becky and all those Syracuse students and
returning soldiers and will swallow him, it is truly there under
him, vast as a planet at night, gigantic and totally his. His
death. His purely own. The burning intensifies in his sore throat
and he feels all but suffocated by terror.

"Thanks," he hoarsely tells his son. "I'll read it when you go.
Those damn Arabs. I'm nervous about your missing your plane."

"Don't be. We got tons of time still. Even Mom can't get lost on
the way, can she?"

"Drive east from here to 75 and then south to Exit 21. The road
feels like it's going nowhere but after three miles the airport
shows up." Harry remembers his own drive along that weird highway,
the lack of billboards, the palm trees skinny as paint drips, the
cocoa-colored chick in the red Camaro convertible and
stewardess cap who tailgated him and then didn't give him a
sideways glance, her tipped-up nose and pushed-out
lips, and it seems unreal, coated in a fake sunshine like enamel,
like that yellow sunlight they make on TV shows from studio lights.
He didn't have a worry in the world back then. He was in paradise
and didn't know it. He feels his body sweating from fear, he smells
his own sweat,- clammy like something at the bottom of a
well, and sees Nelson standing there bathed in the artificial light
of the world that hasn't broken through into death yet, neat and
taut in the puttycolored suit he is wearing instead of the denim
jacket he wore on the flight down, but with his shirt collar still
open, so he looks like an all-night gambler who took off his
tie in a poker game, down here nearly a week and hardly ever saw
the sun. The little smudge of his mustache annoys Harry and the kid
keeps calling attention to it, sniffing and touching the underside
of his nose as if he smells his father's clammy fear.

He says, "Also, Dad, I noticed the Deion Sanders case is being
pushed back into the sports pages and somewhere in Section B
there's an article about fighting flab that'll give you a
laugh."

"Yeah, flab. I'm flabby on the inside even."

This is the cue for his son to look sincere and ask, "How're you
doing anyway?" The kid's face goes a little white around the gills,
as if he fears his father will really tell him. His haircut is
annoying, too - short on top and too long in the back, that
pathetic rat-tail. And the tiny earring.

"Pretty good, considering."

"Great. This big beefy doctor with the funny accent came out and
talked to us and said that the first one is the one a lot of people
don't survive and in your case now, for a while at least, it's just
a matter of changing your lifestyle a little."

"That guy has a thing about potato chips and hot dogs. If God
didn't want us to eat salt and fat, why did He make them taste so
good?"

Nelson's eyes get dark and swarmy, the way they do whenever his
father mentions God. The conversation keeps sticking, it doesn't
flow, Harry keeps thinking how he is falling, the kid is like a
weight on his chest.
Come on,
he says to himself, try.
You only live
once.

"Pru told me you were up all night with worry."

"Yeah, well, she exaggerates, but sort of. I don't know why I
can't sleep down here. It all feels phony to me, and there's all
this stuff back in Brewer I should be tending to."

"Like at the lot? Between holidays is a slow week usually.
Everybody's feeling broke after Christmas."

"Well, yeah, and other stuff. I keep feeling hassled."

"That's life, Nelson. Hassle."

"I suppose."

Harry says, "I been thinking about our conversation, about
Toyotas being so dull. Give 'em credit, they're trying to sex the
line up. They're coming out with this Lexus luxury sedan next fall.
V-8 engine even."

"Yeah, but they won't let us regular dealerships handle it.
They're establishing a whole new retail network. Let 'em, it's
going to flop anyway. The Japanese aren't Italians. Luxury isn't
their bag."

"I forgot about that separate Lexus network. I tell ya, Nelson,
I'm not quite with it. I'm in a fog."

"Join the crowd," Nelson says.

"And oh yeah - the stat sheets. I've been thinking about
that. Are you having trouble moving the used? Don't get greedy. Ten
per cent markup is all you should expect, it's worth shaving the
profit just to keep the inventory flowing."

"O.K., Dad. If you say so. I'll check it out."

The conversation sticks again. Roy squirms in his father's grip.
Harry is falling, the light is just a skin of the dark, thinner
than an airplane's skin, thinner than an aluminum beer can. Grab
something, anything. "She's turned out to be quite a fine woman,
Pru," he volunteers to his son.

The boy looks surprised. "Yeah, she's not bad." And he
volunteers, "I should try to be nicer to her."

"How?"

"Oh - you know. Clean up my act. Try to be more
mature."

"You always seemed pretty mature to me. Maybe too, early on.
Maybe I didn't set such a good example of maturity."

"All the more reason, then. For me, I mean."

Does Harry imagine it, or is there a stirring, a tiny dry
coughing, behind the curtain next to him, in the bed he cannot see?
His phantom roommate lives. He says, "I'm really getting anxious
about you making your plane."

"Sorry about that, by the way. I feel crummy leaving. Pru and I
were talking last night, if we ought to stay a few more days, but,
I don't know, you make plans, you get socked in."

"Don't I know it. What could you do, staying? Your old man's
fine. He's in great hands. I just have to learn to live with a not
so great heart. A bum ticker. Charlie's done it for twenty years, I
can do it." But then Rabbit adds, threatening to pass into the
maudlin, the clingy, the elegiac, "But, then, he's a wiry little
Greek and I'm a big fat Swede."

Nelson has become quite tense. He radiates a nervous desire to
be elsewhere. "O.K., Dad. You're right, we'd better get moving.
Give Grandpa a kiss," he tells Roy.

He leans the boy in, like shovelling off a wriggling football,
to kiss his grandfather's cheek. But Roy, instead of delivering a
kiss, grabs the double-barrelled baby-blue oxygen tube
feeding into Harry's nose and yanks it out.

`Jesus!" Nelson says, showing emotion at last. "You all right?
Did that hurt?" He whacks his son on the bottom, and sets him down
on the floor.

It did hurt slightly, the sudden smarting violence of it, but
Harry has to laugh. "No problem," he says. "It just sits in there,
like upside-down glasses. Oxygen, I don't really need it,
it's just one more perk."

Roy has gone rubber-legged with rage and collapses on the
shiny floor beside the bed. He writhes and makes a scrawking
breathless noise and Nelson bends down and hits him again.

"Don't hit the kid," Harry tells him, not emphatically. "He just
wanted to do me a favor." As best he can with his free hand, he
resettles the two pale-blue tubes one over each ear as they
come from the oxygen box hung on the wall behind him and resettles
the clip, with its gentle enriching whisper, on his septum. "He
maybe thought it was like blowing my nose for me."

"You little shit, you could have killed your own grandfather,"
Nelson explains down at the writhing child, who has to be hauled,
kicking, out from under the bed.

"Now who's exaggerating," Harry says, "I'm tougher to kill than
that," and begins to believe it. Roy, white in the gills just like
his dad, finds his voice and lets loose a yell and tries to throw
himself out of Nelson's grasp. The rubber heels of nurses are
hurrying toward them down the hall. The unseen roommate suddenly
groans behind his white curtain, with a burbly,
deep-pulmonary-trouble kind of groan. Roy is kicking
like a landed fish and must be catching Nelson in the stomach;
Harry has to chuckle, to think of the child doing that. On one
grab: deft. Maybe in his four-yearold mind he thought the
tubes were snakes eating at his grandfather's face; maybe he just
thought they were too ugly to look at.

Full though his arms are, Nelson manages to lean in past the
tangle of life-supporting connections and give Harry's cheek
the quick kiss he meant Roy to bestow. A warm touch of mustache. A
sea-urchin's sting. The watery monster stirring behind the
bed curtain releases another burbling, wracking groan from the
deeps. Alarmed nurses enter the room; their cheeks are flushed. The
head nurse looms, with her waxy woven tresses, like oodles of black
noodles or packets of small firecrackers.

"Oh yeah," Harry thinks to add as Nelson hurries his yelling,
writhing burden away, down the hall, toward Pennsylvania. "Happy
1989!"

II. PA

SUN AND MOON, rise and fall: the well-worn wheels of
nature that in Florida impinge where beach meets sea are in
Pennsylvania mufed, softened, sedimented over, clothed in the
profoundly accustomed. In the Penn Park quarter-acre that
Janice and Harry acquired a decade ago, there is, over toward the
neighboring house built of clinker bricks, a weeping cherry tree,
and he likes to be back when it blossoms, around April tenth. By
then, too, baseball has come north - Schmidt this year
hitting two home runs in the first two games, squelching all talk
that he was through and lawns are sending up tufts of garlic. The
magnolias and quince are in bloom, and the forsythia is out, its
glad cool yellow calling from every yard like a sudden declaration
of the secret sap that runs through everybody's lives. A red haze
of budding fills the maples along the curbs and runs through the
woods that still exist, here and there, ever more thinly, on the
edge of developments old and new.

His first days back, Rabbit likes to drive around, freshening
his memory and hurting himself with the pieces of his old self that
cling to almost every corner ofthe Brewer area. The streets where
he was a kid are still there, though the trolley cars no longer
run. The iron bridges, the railroad yards rust inside the noose of
bypasses that now encircles the city. The license plates still have
an orange keystone in the middle, but now say
You've Got a
Friend in Pennsylvania,
which he always found sappy, and
sappier still those imitation plates that can be bolted on the
front bumper and say
You've Got a Friend in
JESUS. The
covers of telephone directories boast
The UnCommonwealth of
Pennsylvania. Behind
the wheel of his car, he gravitates to
Mt. Judge, the town where he was born and raised, on the opposite
side of Brewer from Penn Park. In this fortresslike sandstone
church with its mismatching new wing, the Mt. Judge Evangelical
Lutheran, he was baptized and confirmed, in a shirt that chafed his
neck like it had been starched in lye, and here, further along
Central, in front of a candy store now a photocopying shop, he
first felt himself in love, with Margaret Schoelkopf in her
pigtails and hightop shoes. His heart had felt numb and swollen
above the sidewalk squares like one of those zeppelins you used to
see in the sky, the squares of cement like city blocks far beneath
his floating childish heart. Every other house in this homely
borough holds the ghost of someone he once knew who now is gone.
Empty to him as seashells in a collector's cabinet, these plain
domiciles with their brick-pillared porches and dim front
parlors don't change much; even the slummier row houses such as he
and Janice lived in on Wilbur Avenue when they were first married
are just the same in shape, climbing the hill like a staircase,
though those dismal old asphalt sidings the tints of bruise and
dung have given way to more festive substances imitating
rough-hewn stone or wooden clapboards, thicker on some
facades than others, so there is a little step up and down at the
edges as your eye moves along the row. Harry always forgets, what
is so hard to picture in flat Florida, the speckled busyness, the
antic jammed architecture, the distant blue hilliness forcing in
the foreground the gabled houses to climb and cling on the high
sides of streets, the spiky retaining walls and sharp slopes
crowned by a barberry hedge or tulip bed, slopes planted more and
more no longer in lawn but ground cover like ivy or juniper that
you don't have to mow once a week with those old-fashioned
reel mowers. Some people would rig their mowers with a rope on the
handle so they could let it slither clattering down and then pull
it back up. Rabbit smiles in his car, remembering those
wooden-handled old mowers and that longdead Methodist
neighbor of theirs on Jackson Road Mom used to feud with about
mowing the two-foot strip of grass between the cement walks
that ran along the foundation walls of their houses. The old
Methodist couple had bought the house from the Zims when they moved
to Cleveland. Carolyn Zim had been so pretty - like Shirley
Temple only without the dimple, more of a Deanna Durbin sultriness,
on this little girl's body - that Mr. and Mrs. fought all the
time, Mom said, Mrs. being jealous. He used to wait by his window
for a glimpse in the soft evening of Carolyn undressing for bed,
across the little air space. His room: he can almost remember the
wallpaper, its extra-yellowed look above the radiator, the
varnished shelf where his teddy bears sat, the bushel basket his
Tinker Toy spokes and hubs and his rubber soldiers and lead
airplanes lived in. There was a taste, oilclothy, or like hot
windowsill paint, or the vanilla and nutmeg when Mom baked a cake,
to that room he can almost taste again, but not quite, it moves
into the shadows, it slips behind the silver-painted radiator
with its spines imprinted with scrolling designs in blurred low
relief.