Rabbit at rest (71 page)

Now the
News-Press
wears daily banner headlines
tracking Hurricane Hugo
-Deadly Hugo roars into islands,
Hugo rips into Puerto Rico.
Tuesday, he walks in the expensive
beachfront areas and scans the sky for hurricane signs, for clouds
God's finger might write, and reads none. In the hall that evening,
happening to be standing with him at the elevators, Mrs. Zabntski
turns those veiny protuberant eyes up at him out of her skeletal
face and pronounces, "Terrible thing."

"What is?"

"The thing coming," she says, her white hair looking already
wind-tossed, lifted out from her skull in all directions.

"Oh, it'll never get here," Harry reassures her. "It's all this
media hype. You know, hype, phony hullabaloo. They have to make
news out of something, every night."

"Yeah?" Mrs. Zabritski says, coyly. The way her neck twists into
her hunched shoulders gives her head a flirtatious tilt she may not
mean. But then again she may. Didn't he hear on some TV show that
even in the Nazi death camps there were romances? This windowless
corridor, with its peach-and-silver wallpaper, is an
eerie cryptlike space he is always anxious to get out of. The big
vase on the marble half-moon table, with green glaze running
into golden, could be holding someone's ashes. Still the elevator
refuses to arrive. His female companion clears her throat and
volunteers, "Wednesday buffet tomorrow. I like extra much the
buffet."

"Me too," he tells her. "Except I can't choose and then I wind
up taking too much and then eating it all." What is she suggesting,
that they go together? That they have a date? He's stopped telling
her that Janice is coming down.

"Do you do the kosher?"

"I don't know. Those scallops wrapped in bacon, are they
kosher?"

She stares at him as if he were the crazy one, stares so hard
her eyeballs seem in danger of snapping the bloody threads that
hold them fast in their sockets. Then she must have decided he was
joking, for a careful stiff smile slowly spreads across the lower
half of her face, crisscrossed by wrinkles like a quilt sewn of
tiny squares of skin. He thinks of that little sniffly slut in the
Polish-American Club, her silken skin below the waist, below
the sweater, and feels bitter toward Janice, for leaving him at his
age at the mercy of women. He eats at his table alone but is so
disturbed by Mrs. Zabritski's making a pass at him that he takes
two Nitrostats to quell his heart.

After dinner, in bed, on September 1, 1781, the French troops
make a dazzling impression upon the citizens of Philadelphia.
Ecstatic applause greeted the dazzling spectacle of the French
as they passed in review in their bright white uniforms and white
plumes. Wearing colored lapels and collars of pink, green, violet
or blue identifying their regiments, they were the most brilliantly
appointed soldiers in Europe.
Joseph Reed, the President of
the State of Pennsylvania, entertained the French officers at a
ceremonial dinner
of which the main feature was an immense
ninety pound turtle with soup served in its shell.
Talk about
cholesterol. Didn't seem to bother them, but, then, how old did
those poor devils get to be? Not fifty-six, most of them. The
troops are scared to march south for fear of malaria. Rochambeau
has talked Washington out of attacking New York, and at this point
seems to be the brains of the Revolution. He wants to rendezvous
with De Grasse at the head of the Chesapeake. De Grasse has evaded
Hood by sailing the back-alley route between the Bahamas and
Cuba. It will never work.

Hugo headingfor U.S.,
the
News-Press
headline says next morning. For breakfast now, Harry has switched
from Frosted Flakes to Nabisco Shredded Wheat 'n' Bran, though he
forgets exactly why, something about fiber and the bowels. He does
hope he never reaches the point where he has to think all the time
about shitting. Ma Springer, toward the end, got to talking about
her bowel movements like they were family heirlooms, each one
precious. On the evening news half the commercials are for
laxatives and the other half for hemorrhoid medicine, as if only
assholes watch the news. That walking corpse in the locker room.
After breakfast Harry walks along Pindo Palm Boulevard and brings
back a bag of groceries from Winn Dixie, passing up the Keystone
Corn Chips and going heavy on the low-cal frozen dinners. The
day's predicted showers come at noon but seem over by three and in
a kind of trance Rabbit drives into downtown Deleon, parks at a
two-hour meter, and walks the mile to the playing field he
discovered Monday. Today two sets of boys are on the dirt court,
each using one basket. One set is energetically playing a
two-on-two, but the other consists of three boys at a
desultory game of what he used to call Horse. You take a shot, and
if it goes in the next guy has to make the same shot, and if he
misses he's an H, or an H-O, and when he's a HORSE he's out.
Rabbit takes the bench within a chip shot of this group and frankly
watches - after all, is it a free country or not?

The three are in their early teens at best, and don't know what
to make of this sudden uninvited audience. One of these old ofays
after some crack or a black boy's dick? Their languid motions
stiffen, they jostle shoulders and pass each other sliding silent
messages that make one another giggle. One of them perhaps
deliberately lets a pass flip off his hands and bounce Harry's way.
He leans off his bench end and stops it left-handed, not his
best hand but it remembers. It remembers exactly. That taut pebbled
roundness, the smooth seams between, the little circlet for taking
the air valve. A big pebbled ball that wants to fly. He flips it
back, a bit awkwardly, sitting, but still with a little zing to
show he's handled one before. Somewhat satisfied, the trio resume
Horse, trying skyhooks, under-the-basket layups,
fall-back jumpers, crazy improvised underhanded or sidearm
shots that now and then go in, by accident or miracle. One such
wild toss rockets off the rim and comes Rabbit's way. This time he
stands up with the ball and advances with it toward the boys. He
feels himself big, a big shape with the sun behind him. His shadow
falls across the face of the nearest boy, who wears an unravelling
wool cap of many colors. Another boy has the number 8 on his tank
top. "What's the game?" Harry asks them. "You call it Horse?"

"We call it Three," the wool cap answers reluctantly. "Three
misses, you out." He reaches for the ball but Rabbit lifts it out
of his reach.

"Lemme take a shot, could I?"

The boys' eyes consult, they figure this is the way to get the
ball back. "Go 'head," Wool Cap says.

Harry is out on an angle to the left maybe twenty feet and as
his knees dip and his right arm goes up he feels the heaviness of
the years, all those blankets of time, since he did this last. A
bank shot. He has the spot on the backboard in his sights, but the
ball doesn't quite have the length and, instead of glancing off and
in, jams between the wood and hoop and kicks back into the hands of
Number 8.

"Hey man," the third one, the one who looks most Hispanic and
most sullen, taunts him, "you're history!"

"I'm rusty," Rabbit admits. "The air down here is different than
I'm used to."

"You want to see somebody sink that shot?" Number 8, the
tallest, asks him. He stands where Harry stood, and opens his mouth
and lets his pink tongue dangle the way Michael Jordan does. He
gently paws the air above his forehead so the ball flies from his
long loose brown hand. But he misses also, hitting the rim on the
right. This breaks some of the ice. Rabbit holds still, waiting to
see what they will do with him.

The boy in the hat of concentric circles, a Black Muslim hat,
Harry imagines, takes the rebound and now says, "Let me sink that
mother," and indeed it does go in, though the boy kind of flings it
and, unlike Number 8, will never be a Michael Jordan.

Now or never. Harry asks, "Hey, how about letting me play one
game of, whaddeya call it, Three? One quick game and I'll go. I'm
just out walking for exercise."

The sullen Hispanic-looking boy says to the others, "Why
you lettin' this man butt in? This ain't for my blood," and goes
off and sits on the bench. But the other two, figuring perhaps that
one white man is the tip of the iceberg and the quickest way around
trouble is through it, oblige the interloper and let him play. He
goes a quick two misses down - a floating double-pump
Number 8 pulls off over the stretched hands of an imaginary crowd
of defenders, and a left-handed pop the wool hat establishes
and Number 8 matches - but then Rabbit finds a ghost of his
old touch and begins to dominate. Take a breath of oxygen, keep
your eye on the front of the rim, and it gets easy. The distance
between your hands and the hoop gets smaller and smaller. You and
it, ten feet off the ground, above it all. He even shows them a
stunt he perfected in the gravel alleys of Mt. Judge, the
two-handed backwards set, the basket sighted upside, the head
bent way back.

Seen upside down, how blue and stony-gray the cloudy sky
appears - an abyss, a swallowing, upheaving kind of earth! He
sinks the backwards set shot and all three of them laugh. These
kids never take two-handed set shots, it's not black style,
and by doing nothing else from five steps out Rabbit might have
cleaned up. But, since they were good sports to let him in, he lets
himself get sloppysilly on a few one-handers, and Number 8
gains back control.

"Here you see a Kareem sky-hook," the boy says, and does
sink a hook from about six feet out, on the right.

"When I was a kid," Rabbit tells them, "a guy called Bob Pettit,
played for St. Louis, used to specialize in those." Almost on
purpose, he misses. "That gives me three. I'm out. Thanks for the
game, gentlemen."

They murmur wordlessly, like bees, at this farewell. To the boy
sitting on the bench out of protest, he says, "All yours, amigo."
Bending down to pick up the furled golf umbrella he brought along
in case it rained again, Harry smiles to see that his walking Nikes
are coated with a pink-tan dust just like these black boys'
sneakers.

He walks back to his car at the meter feeling lightened, purged
like those people on the Milk of Magnesia commercials who drift
around in fuzzy focus in their bathrobes ecstatic at having become
"regular." His bit of basketball has left him feeling cocky. He
stops at a joy Food Store on the way back to Valhalla Village and
buys a big bag of onion-flavored potato chips and a frozen
lasagna to heat up in the oven instead of going down to the buffet
and risking running into Mrs. Zabritski. He's beginning to think he
owes her something, for keeping him company on the floor, for being
another lonely refugee.

In the condo, the phone is silent. The evening news is all Hugo
and looting in St. Croix and St. Thomas in the wake of the
devastation and a catastrophic health-plan repeal in
Washington that gets big play down here because of all the elderly
and a report on that French airliner that disappeared on the way
from Chad to Paris. The wreckage has been found, scattered over a
large area of the Sahara desert. From the wide distribution of the
debris it would appear to have been a bomb.
Just like that
plane over Lockerbie,
Rabbit thinks. His cockiness ebbs. Every
plane had a bomb ticking away in its belly. We can explode any
second.

The rooms and furniture of the condo in these days he's been
living here alone have taken on the tension and menace of a living
person who is choosing to remain motionless. At night he can feel
the rooms breathe and think. They are thinking about him. The blank
TV, the blond sofa, the birds made of small white shells, the taut
bedspread in the room where Nelson and Pru stayed last New Year's,
the aqua kitchen cabinets that seemed too intense once they were
painted and still do, the phone that refuses to ring all have a
certain power, the ability to outlast him. He is flesh, they are
inanimate things. The well-sealed hollow space that greeted
his arrival seventeen days ago now does brim with fear, with a
nervous expectancy that the babble of the TV, the headlines in the
paper, the ticking warmth of the oven and the minutes ticking down
on the timer panel, even the soft scuffle and rustle of his body's
own movements hold at bay for their duration; but when these small
commotions are over the silence comes back, the presence of
absence, the unanswerable question that surrounds his rustling
upright stalk of warm blood. The lasagna is gluey and like napalm
on the tongue but he eats it all, a portion for two, while flipping
channels between Jennings and Brokaw looking for the best clips of
hurricane damage and wind, wild wet wind screaming through rooms
just like this one, knocking out entire glass sliding doors and
ski
mmin
g them around like pie plates. Everything flies
loose, the world is crashing, nothing in life can be nailed down.
Terrific.

He suddenly needs, as suddenly as the need to urinate comes upon
a man taking diuretics, to talk to his grandchildren. He is a
grandfather, they can't deny him that. He has to look up Nelson's
number in the address book on the fake-bamboo desk, it was
changed last winter, he's forgotten it already, your mind at
Harry's age lets all sorts of things slip. He finds the book, kept
in Janice's half-formed schoolgirl hand, in a variety of
slants. He dials, having to hang up once when he thinks he
might have dialled an 8 for a 9. Pru answers. Her voice is casual,
light, tough. He almost hangs up again.

"Hi," he says. "It's me."

"Harry, you really shouldn't be -"

"I'm not. I don't want to talk to you. I want to talk to my
grandchildren. Isn't it about time for Roy's birthday?"

"Next month."