Rabbit at rest (56 page)

Out there, in the dog-days outdoors whose muggy
alternation of light and shadow flickeringly gives him back his own
ominous reflection, Harry notices that the refurbished yew hedge
- he had a lawn service replace the dead bushes and renew the
bark mulch - has collected a number of waxpaper pizza
wrappers and Styrofoam coffee cups that have blown in from Route
111. He can't have their Japanese visitor see a mess like that. He
goes outside, and the hot polluted air, bouncing off the asphalt,
takes his breath away. The left side of his ribs gives a squeeze.
He puts a Nitrostat to melt beneath his tongue before he begins to
stoop. The more wastepaper he gathers, the more it seems there is
candy wrappers, cigarette-pack cellophane, advertising fliers
and whole pages of newspaper wrinkled by rain and browned by the
sun, big soft-drink cups with the plastic lid still on and
the straw still in and the dirty water from melted ice still
sloshing around. There is no end of crud in the world. He should
have brought out a garbage bag, he has both hands full and can feel
his face getting red as he tries to hold yet one more piece of
crumpled sticky cardboard in his fanned fingers. A limousine
cracklingly pulls into the lot while Harry is still picking up the
trash, and he has to run inside to cram it all into the wastebasket
in his office. Puffing, his heart thudding, his metallic-gray
suit coat pulling at the buttons, he rushes back across the
showroom to greet Mr. Shimada at the entrance, shaking his hand
with a hand unwashed of street grit, dried sugar, and
still-sticky pizza topping.

Mr. Shimada is an impeccable compact man of about five six,
carrying an amazingly thin oxblood-red briefcase and wearing
a smoke-blue suit with an almost invisible pinstripe,
tailored to display a dapper breadth of his gold-linked
French cuffs and high white collar, on a shirt with a
pale-blue body. He looks dense, like a beanbag filled to the
corners with buckshot, and in good physical trim, though stocky,
with a burnish of California tan on his not unfriendly face. "Is
very nice meeting you," he says. "Area most nice." He speaks
English easily, but with enough of an accent to cost Harry a
second's response time answering him.

"Well, not around here exactly," he answers, instantly thinking
that this is tactless, for why would Toyota want to locate its
franchise in an ugly area? "I mean, the farm country is what we're
famous for, barns with hex signs and all that." He wonders if he
should explain "hex sign" and decides it's not worth it. "Would you
like to look around the facility? At the setup?" In case "facility"
didn't register. Talking to foreigners really makes you think about
the language.

Mr. Shimada slowly, stiffly turns his head and shoulders
together, one way and then the other, to take in the showroom. "I
see," he smiles. "Also in Torrance I study many photos and froor
pran. Oh! Rovely rady!"

Elvira has left her desk and sashays toward their visitor,
sucking in her cheeks to make herself look more glamorous. "Miss
Olshima, I mean Mr. Shimada" -Harry had been practicing the
name, telling himself it was like Ramada with shit at the
beginning, only to botch it in the crunch - "this is Miss
Ollenbach, one of our best sales reps. Representatives."

Mr. Shimada first gives her an instinctive little
hands-at-the-sides bow. When they shake hands,
it's like both of them are trying to knock each other out with
their smiles, they hold them so long. "Is good idea, to have both
sexes serring," he says to Harry. "More and more common thing."

"I don't know why it took us all so long to think of it," Harry
admits.

"Good idea take time," the other man says, curbing his smile a
little, letting an admonitory sternness tug downward his rather
full yet flat lips. Harry remembers from his boyhood in World War
II how very cruel the Japanese were to their prisoners on Bataan.
The first thing you heard about them, after Pearl Harbor, was that
they were ridiculously small, manning tiny submarines and planes
called Zeros, and then, as those early Pacific defeats rolled in,
that they were fanatic in the service of their Emperor,
robot-monkeys that had to be torched out of their caves with
flame-throwers. What a long way
we've come
since
then. Harry feels one of his surges of benevolence, of approval of
a world that isn't asking for it. Mr. Shimada seems to be asking
Elvira if she prays.

"Play tennis, you mean?" she asks back. "Yes, as a matter of
fact. Whenever I can. How did you know?"

His flat face breaks into twinkling creases and, quick as a
monkey, he taps her wrist, where a band of relative pallor shows on
her sunbrowned skin. "Sweatband," he says, proudly.

"That's clever," Elvira says. "You must play, too, in
California. Everybody does."

"All free time. Revel five, hoping revel four."

"That's fabulous," she comes back, but a sideways upward glance
at Harry asks how much longer she has to be a geisha girl.

"Good fetch, no backhand," Mr. Shimada tells her,
demonstrating.

"Turn your
back
to the net, and take the racket back
low," Elvira tells him, also demonstrating. "Hit the ball out
front,
don't let it
play you."

"Talk just as pro," Mr. Shimada tells her, beaming.

No doubt about it, Elvira is impressive. You can
see
how rangy and quick she would be on the court. Harry is beginning
to relax. When the phantom tennis lesson is over, he takes their
guest on a quick tour through the office space and through the
shelved tunnel of the parts department, where Roddy, the Assistant
Parts Manager, a viciously pretty youth with long lank hair he
keeps flicking back from his face, his face and hands filmed with
gray grease, gives them a dirty white-eyed look. Harry
doesn't introduce them, for fear of besmirching Mr. Shimada with a
touch of grease. He leads him to the brass-barred door of the
rackety, cavernous garage, where Manny, the Service Manager Harry
had inherited from Fred Springer fifteen years ago, has been
replaced by Arnold, a plump young man with an advanced degree from
voke school, where he was taught to wear washable coveralls that
give him the figure of a Kewpie doll, or a snowman. Mr. Shimada
hesitates at the verge of the echoing garage -men's curses
cut through the hammering of metal on metal - and takes a
step backward, asking, "Emproyee moraru good?"

This must be "morale." Harry thinks of the mechanics, their
insatiable gripes and constant coffee breaks and demands for ever
more costly fringe benefits, and their frequent hungover absences
on Monday and suspiciously early departures on Friday, and says,
"Very good. They clear twenty-two dollars an hour, with
bonuses and benefits. The first job I ever took, when I was
fifteen, I got thirty-five cents an hour."

Mr. Shimada is not interested. "Brack emproyees, are any? I see
none."

"Yeah, well. We'd like to hire more, but it's hard to find
qualified ones. We had a man a couple years ago, had good hands and
got along with everybody, but we had to let him go finally because
he kept showing up late or not showing up at all. When we called
him on it, he said he was on Afro-American time." Harry is
ashamed to tell him what the man's nickname had been -
Blackie. At least we don't still sell Black Sambo dolls with nigger
lips like they do in Tokyo, he saw on 60
Minutes
this
summer.

"Toyota strive to be fair-practices emproyer," says Mr.
Shimada. "Wants to be good citizen of your pruraristic society. In
prant in Georgetown, Kentucky, many bracks work. Not just assembry
line, executive positions."

"We'll work on it," Rabbit promises him. "This is a kind of
conservative area, but it's coming along."

"Very pretty area."

"Right."

Back in the showroom, Harry feels obliged to explain, "My son
picked these colors for the walls and woodwork. My son Nelson. I
would have gone for something a little less, uh, choice, but he's
been the effective manager here, while I've been spending half the
year in Florida. My wife loves the sun down there. She plays
tennis, by the way. Loves the game."

Mr. Shimada beams. His lips seem flattened as if by pressing up
against glass, and his eyeglasses, their squarish gold rims, seem
set exceptionally tight against his eyes. "We know Nelson
Angstrom," he says. He has trouble with the many consonants of the
last name, making it "Ank-a-stom." "A most famous man
at Toyota company."

A constriction in Harry's chest and a watery looseness below his
belt tell him that they have arrived, after many courtesies, at the
point of the visit. "Want to come into my office and sit?"

"With preasure."

"Anything one of the girls could get you? Coffee? Tea? Not like
your tea, of course. Just a bag of Lipton's -"

"Is fine without." Rather unceremoniously, he enters Harry's
office and sits on the vinyl customer's chair, with padded chrome
arms, facing the desk. He sets his wonderfully thin briefcase on
his lap and lightly folds his hands upon it, showing two dazzling
breadths of white cuff. He waits for Harry to seat himself behind
the desk and then begins what seems to be a prepared speech.
"Arways," he says, "we in Japan admire America. As boy during
Occupation, rooked way up to big GI soldiers, their happy easygo
ways. Enemy soldiers, but not bad men. Powerful men. Our Emperor's
advisers have red him down unfortunate ways, so General MacArthur,
he seemed to us as Emperor had been, distant and first-rate.
We worked hard to do what he suggest rebuild burned cities, learn
democratic ways. Japanese very humble at first in regard to
America. You know Toyota story. At first, very modest, then bigger,
we produce a better product for the rittle man's money, yes? You
ask for it, we got it, yes?"

"Good slogan," Harry tells him. "I like it better than some of
the recent ones've been coming down."

But Mr. Shimada does not expect to be even slightly interrupted.
His burnished, manicured hands firmly flatten on the thin oxblood
briefcase and he inclines his upper body forward to make his voice
clear. "Nevertheress, these years of postwar, Japanese, man and
woman, have great respect for United States. Rike big brother. But
in recent times big brother act rike rittle brother, always cry and
comprain. Want many favors in trade, saying Japanese unfair
competition. Why unfair? Make something, cheaper even with duty and
transportation costs, people rike, people buy. American way in old
times. But in new times America make nothing, just do mergers, do
acquisitions, rower taxes, raise national debt. Nothing comes out,
all goes in - foreign goods, foreign capital. America take
everything, give nothing. Rike big brack hole."

Mr. Shimada is proud of this up-to-date analogy and
of his unanswerable command of English. He smiles to himself and
opens, with a double snap as startling as a gunshot, his briefcase.
From it he takes a single sheet of stiff creamy paper, sparsely
decorated with typed figures. "According to figures here, between
November '88 and May '89 Springer Motors fail to report sale of
nine Toyota vehicles totarring one hundred thirty-seven
thousand four hundred at factory price. This sum accumurating
interest come to as of this date one hundred forty-five
thousand eight hundred." With one of his reflexive,
half-suppressed bows, he hands the paper across the desk.

Harry covers it with his big hand and says, "Yeah, well, but
it's accountants we hired reported all this to you. It's not as if
Springer Motors as a company is trying to cheat anybody. It's a
screwy - an unusual - situation that developed and
that's being corrected. My son had a drug problem and hired a bad
egg as chief accountant and together they ripped us all off. The
Brewer Trust, too, in another scam - they had a dead mutual
friend buying cars, would you believe it? But listen: my wife and I
- technically she's the owner here - we have every
intention of paying Mid-Atlantic Toyota back every penny we
owe. And I'd like to see, sometime, how you're computing that
interest."

Mr. Shimada leans back a bit and makes his briefest speech. "How
soon?"

Harry takes a plunge. "End of August." Three weeks away. They
might have to take out a bank loan, and Brewer Trust is already on
their case. Well, let Janice's accountants work it out if they're
so smart.

Mr. Shimada blinks, behind those lenses embedded in his flat
face, and seems to nod in concord. "End of August. Interest
computed at twelve per cent monthly compounded as in standard TMCC
loan." He snaps shut his briefcase and balances it on its edge
beside his chair. He gazes obliquely at the framed photographs on
Harry's desk: Janice, when she still had bangs, in a spangly long
dress three or four years ago, about to go off to the Valhalla
Village New Year's Eve party, a flashlit color print Fern Drechsel
took with a Nikkomat Bernie had just given her for a Hanukkah
present and that came out surprisingly well, Janice's face in
anticipation of the party looking younger than her years, a bit
overexposed and out of focus and starry-eyed; Nelson's
highschool graduation picture, in a blazer and necktie but his hair
down to his shoulders, long as a girl's; and, left over from
Nelson's tenure at this desk, a framed black-and-white
posed school photo of Harry in his basketball uniform, holding the
ball above his shining right shoulder as if to get off a shot, his
hair crewcut, his eyes sleepy, his tank top stencilled MJ.

Mr. Shimada's less upright posture in the chair indicates a new,
less formal level of discourse. "Young people now most
interesting," he decides to say. "Not scared of starving as through
most human history. Not scared of atom bomb as until recently. But
scared of something - not happy. In Japan, too. Brue jeans,
rock music not make happiness enough. In former times, in Japan,
very simple things make men happy. Moonright on fish pond at
certain moment. Cricket singing in bamboo grove. Very small things
bring very great feering. Japan a rittle ireand country, must make
do with very near nothing. Not rike endless China, not rike U.S. No
oiru wells, no great spaces. We have only our people, their
disciprine. Riving now five years in Carifornia, it disappoints me,
the rack of disciprine in people of America. Many good qualities,
of course. Good tennis, good hearts. Roads of fun. I have many most
dear American friends. Always they aporogize to me for Japanese
internment camps in Frankrin Roosevelt days. Always I say to them,
surprised, `Was war!' In war, people need disciprine. Not just in
war. Peace a kind of war also. We fight now not Americans and
British but Nissan, Honda, Ford. Toyota agency must be a prace of
disciprine, a prace of order."