Rabbit at rest (43 page)

Janice comes in at six on Tuesday while he is eating his last
bland supper - he is being released tomorrow. She is wearing
her new coat and a gray skirt and a low-cut magenta blouse
almost as vivid as the polka-dot dress Ruth wore in his
dream. His wife looks energized, businesslike, her
salt-and-pepper hair trimmed and given body by a
hairdresser who has eliminated the bangs, gelled them back into a
softly bristling mass, parted low on one side. Janice reminds him
of those heightened and rapid-talking women on television who
give the news. She in fact is brimming with news. Her eyes seem to
be wearing contact lenses of an unnatural glitter until he realizes
those are tears, prepared for him during the station break.

"Oh Harry," she begins, "it's worse than we thought! Thousands
and thousands!"

"Thousands of what?"

"Of dollars Nelson stole! Charlie and I and this accountant his
nephew knows - Mildred says she was too old for doing an
audit and anyway is too busy in the nursing home - went over
there today, Charlie said I
had
to be there, he and the
accountant weren't enough, and I asked to see the books, Nelson was
there for once, and he looked at me in this heartbreaking hopeless
way I'll never forget as long as I live and said, Sure, Mom, what
did I want to know? He told us everything. At first, when he needed
money so desperately for the, you know, the cocaine, he would just
write himself a check marked `Expenses' or `Operating Cash,' but
Mildred, she was still around then, questioned him about it and he
got scared. Anyway, these little amounts, a hundred or even two at
a time, weren't really enough to keep him going, so he got the idea
of offering people a discount on the used cars if they paid in cash
or with a check written directly out to him."

"I told you there weren't enough used sales on the statements,"
Harry says, in a triumph that feels rather flat. Ever since they
poked that catheter in, there's been something drained about his
emotional responses. "How many cars did he pull this stunt
with?"

"Well, he doesn't really remember, but Charlie says we can
reconstruct it from the records, the NV-is and so on, it will
just take time. Of course, Nelson didn't approach every customer
with this sort of shady deal, he had to pick and choose, the ones
that looked poor enough not to look a gift horse in the face. He
was clever about it, Nelson is much more clever than you ever gave
him credit for."

"I never said the kid wasn't clever."

"Oh, but Harry" - the shell of tears is refreshed, the
brown eyes spill, shiny trails glitter beside her blunt little knob
of a nose, a nose with no more character than a drawer pull. She
tugs a paper facial tissue from the box the hospital puts on his
night table - as she leans forward he glimpses the tops of
her tidy breasts through the loose neck of the magenta
peasant-style blouse he has never seen before, something she
has bought for the real-estate course and these meetings with
Charlie and her general stepping-out into the world, without
him. He feels a flash of unpleasant heat, as in catheterization.
His own wife's tits, surprising him like that. Janice dabbles at
her face, her muddled mutt's face, and leans even farther forward,
so he feels her breath on his face, smells some faint mint of a
Life Saver. To hide the tobacco on her breath. Her tears shine
under his eyes; her shaky voice is low so only he can hear.
"- he didn't even stop with that. He was doing crack by this
time and the amount of money he needed was incredible. He and Lyle
worked out this scheme, here it gets very technical -"

"Wait," he tells her. The culinary aide has come in to remove
his tray. She is a plump Hispanic woman with long red fingernails
and a distinct mustache.

"You no eat enough," she scolds, with her shy smile of pearlsize
teeth.

"Enough," he says. "For now. Very good.
Bueno."

She has a notebook on which she writes the percentages of the
food he has consumed. A third of the overcooked watery string
beans, half the pale oval of tasteless veal, scarcely a leaf of the
coarse green salad drowned in an orange grease, a bite of the
tapioca pudding, whose wobbly texture in his mouth made him
shudder. "For breakfast," she reads from her clipboard, "pieces
pineapple, cream of wheat, whole-wheat toast, coffee
decal"

"I can hardly wait," he tells her.

"Eat more now," she suggests.

He holds firm. "No thanks, too cold now. My wife's here."

She reads from the chart. "Says here last day tomorrow."

"How about that?" Harry asks her. "The big wide world. I'll miss
you. And all your healthy eats. Your
comestibles."

As she removes his plastic tray, her long red fingernails scrape
on its underside with a noise that puts his teeth on edge. He is
reminded ofthat platinum-haired bimbo who used to tickle the
computer keys at Fiscal Alternatives. Her fingernails were too long
too. Dead, Lyle said. If there is an afterlife where the dead all
gather, would he get a chance to deepen their acquaintance? But
without money around, what would they talk about?

When the woman goes, Janice resumes. The tip of her tongue
protrudes a second or two between her lips as she tries to think.
"I'm not sure I understand it entirely, but you know how we keep a
rolling inventory - so many trucks and vans and cars a month
from Mid-Atlantic Toyota in Maryland."

"Between twenty and twenty-five a month is how it's been
running," Harry tells her, to let her know he may be flat on his
back but knew his business. "We haven't been able to move three
hundred new units a year except that one year, '86, after Nelson
first took over. The strong yen's been killing us, and Honda and
Nissan taking a bigger bite. Ford Ranger put a real dent in our
one-ton pickup last year."

"Harry, try to focus. The way it was explained to me is that
there's this Toyota Motors Credit Corporation in California that
finances our inventory direct with Mid-Atlantic and gets paid
when we sell a car and adds to our credit account when we order one
for the lot. What Nelson was doing, each month he'd report one or
two sales fewer than there actually were and so Toyota would roll
over the indebtedness on these cars while he and Lyle put the
proceeds in a separate account they'd opened up in the company
name, you know how banks now are always offering you all these
different accounts, savings and checking with savings and capital
accounts with limited checks and so on. So every month we'd owe
this TMCC for one or two more cars than were actually on the lot
and our debt to them kept getting bigger and our actual inventory
was getting smaller; in two or three years if nothing had happened
we would have had no new cars in stock at all and owed
Mid-Atlantic Toyota a fortune!"

"How much do we actually owe 'em?" His mind can't quite assign
weight to these facts, these phantom Toyotas, yet. He is still
thinking hospital thoughts -the pineapple he's been promised
for breakfast, and whether or not he has taken his digitalis for
the evening.

"Nobody knows, Harry. Nelson doesn't exactly remember and Lyle
says a lot of the disks he was keeping the accounts on have been
accidentally erased."

"Accidentally on purpose, as they used to say," he says. "What a
shit. What a pair of shits."

"I know, it's horrible," Janice says, "and Lyle is horrible on
the phone. He says he's dying and doesn't care what we do to him!
He sounded kind of crazy in the head; isn't that one of the things
that happens?" The weight of the facts hits her and bears her
suddenly down into hysteria; the tears flow accompanied by sobs and
she tries to rest her wet face on his blanketed chest, but she is
too short, perched on the chair beside his high bed, and instead
presses her eyes and mouth against the hard mattress edge, burbling
her disbelief that he would do this to her.

"He" means Nelson; Harry is off the hook for once. In her grief
her whole head is hot, even the top of her skull, like a pot come
to boil. He comfortingly rubs it, through her little new hairdo,
and tries not to smile.
Serve them both right,
he thinks.
Springers. Her dark hair is so fine it sticks to his fingers like
cobwebs. For a good five minutes he massages her warm unhappy head
with his fingertips while staring at the blank television screen
and thinking that he is missing the six-o'clock news,
followed by national news at six-thirty. Somehow he can't
believe that what Janice is trying to tell him ranks with the
national news, for reality. She may be his wife but she's no Connie
Chung, let alone Diane Sawyer with her wide-apart blue eyes
and melting mouth and stunned look like some beautiful blonde ox.
"So what's going to happen?" he asks Janice at last.

She lifts her tear-smeared face and, surprisingly, has
some answers. Charlie must have been coaching her. "Well, once we
find out how much we owe TMCC we'll have to settle up. We've been
paying interest on the inventory so they shouldn't care too much,
it's like a mortgage, only Nelson has sold the house without
telling them."

"If he faked any signatures, that's forgery," Harry says, and a
black dye of despair is beginning to enter his heart, as he sees
what a lost cause his son is.
Human garbage,
like his own
father once said of him. He asks, "What's going to happen with the
kid?"

Janice blinks her wet lashes. What she has to say seems to her
so momentous she withholds it a moment. Her voice has the juicy
precision Ma Springer would speak with when she had made up her
mind. "He's agreed to enter a rehab place. Immediately."

"Good, I guess. What made him agree?"

"I said it was either that or I'd fire him from the lot. And
prosecute."

"Wow. You said that? Prosecute?"

"I did, Harry. I made myself."

"To your own son?"

"I had to. He's been sinking, and he knows it. He was grateful,
really. We had it out right there on the lot, out where the weeds
are, while Charlie and the accountant stayed inside. Then we made
some phone calls, from your old office."

"Where is this rehab place?"

"In North Philadelphia. It's the one his counsellor recommends,
if he can get Nelson in. They're all overcrowded, you know. Society
can't keep up. There are some day-treatment programs in
Brewer but his counsellor says the important thing is to get away
from the entire environment the drugs are part of."

"So he really did go to a counsellor, after that blowup with
Pru. "

"Yes, to everybody's surprise. And even more surprisingly,
Nelson seems to like him. Respect him. It's a black man."

Harry feels a jealous, resentful pang. His boy is being taken
over. His fatherhood hasn't been good enough. They're calling in
the professionals. "For how long is the rehab?"

"The complete program is ninety days. The first month is detox
and intensive therapy, and then he lives in a halfway house for
sixty days and gets some kind of a job, a community-service
sort of thing probably, just something to get him back out into the
normal world."

"He'll be gone all summer. Who'll run the lot?"

Janice puts her hand over his, a gesture that feels to him
learned, coached. "You will, Harry."

"Honey, I can't. I'm a sick son of a bitch."

"Charlie says your attitude is terrible. You're giving in to
your heart. He says the best thing is a positive spirit and lots of
activity."

"Yeah, why doesn't he come back and run the lot if he's so
fucking active?"

"He has all these other fish to fry these days."

"Yeah, and you seem to be one of them. I'm hearing you
sizzle."

She giggles, along with the ugly tears drying on her face.
"Don't be so silly. He's just an old friend, who's been wonderful
in this crisis."

"While I've been useless, right?"

"You've been in the hospital, dear. You've been being brave in
your way. Anyway as we all know there are things you can't do for
me, only I can do them for myself."

He is disposed to argue this, it sounds pious in a
new-fashioned way he distrusts, but if he's ever going to get
back into the game he must let up and avoid aggravation. He asks,
"How did Nelson take your getting tough?"

"Like I said, he liked it. He's just been begging for the rest
of us to take over, he knew he was way out of control. Pru is
thrilled to think he's going to get help. Judy is thrilled."

"Is Roy thrilled?"

"He's too little to understand, but as you say yourself the
atmosphere around that house has been poisonous."

"Did I say poisonous?"

She doesn't bother to answer. She has straightened up and is
wiping her face with a licked facial tissue.

"Will I have to see the kid before he goes?"

"No, baby. He's going tomorrow morning, before we bring you
home."

"Good. I just don't know as I could face him. When you think of
what he's done, he's flushed the whole bunch of us, not just you
and me but his kids, everybody, right down the toilet. He's sold us
all out to a stupid drug."

"Well, my goodness, Harry - I've known you to act
selfishly in your life."

"Yeah, but not for a little white powder."

"They can't help it. It becomes their life. Anyway, evidently
they were buying drugs for Lyle, too. I mean drugs for his illness
- medicines for AIDS you can't buy yet in this country and
are terribly expensive, they have to be smuggled."

"It's a sad story," Rabbit says, after a pause. Inky depression
circulates in his veins. He's been in the hospital too long.
He's forgotten what life is like. He asks Janice, "Where are
you going now, in that snappy blouse?"

She rolls her eyes upward at him, from the mirror of her purse
as she fixes her face, and then her face goes wooden and stubborn,
bluffing it through. "Charlie said he'd take me out to dinner. He's
worried I'm going to crash, psychologically, after all this trauma.
I need to process."