Rabbit Redux (6 page)

            "Hamburgers," Janice moans, theatrically. She's become an actress suddenly, every gesture and intonation charged to carry across an implied distance.

            Charlie's squarish intent head is bowed above the menu.

            "Let's get him some keftedes. O.K., Nelson? Meatballs."

            "Not with tomatoey goo on them."

            "No goo, just the meat. A little mint. Mint's what's in Life Savers. O.K.?"

            "O.K."

            "You'll love 'em."

            But Rabbit feels the boy has been sold a slushy car. And he feels, with Stavros's broad shoulders next to Janice's, and the man's hands each sporting a chunky gold ring, that the table has taken a turn down a road Rabbit didn't choose. He and Nelson are in the back seat.

            Janice says to Stavros, "Charlie, why don't you order for all of us? We don't know what we're doing."

            Rabbit says, "I know what I'm doing. I'll order for myself. I want the" - he picks something off the menu at random - "the paidakia."

            "Paidakia," Stavros says. "I don't think so. It's marinated lamb, you need to order it the day before, for at least six."

            Nelson says, "Dad, the movie starts in forty minutes."

            Janice explains, "We're trying to get to see this silly space movie."

            Stavros nods as ifhe knows. There is a funny echo Rabbit's ears pick up. Things said between Janice and Stavros sound dead, duplicated. Of course they work together all day. Stavros tells them, "It's lousy."

            "Why is it lousy?" Nelson asks anxiously. There is a look his face gets, bloating his lips and slightly sucking his eyes back into their sockets, that hasn't changed since his infancy, when his bottle would go dry.

            Stavros relents. "Nellie, for you it'll be great. It's all toys. For me, it just wasn't sexy. I guess I don't find technology that sexy."

            "Does everything have to be sexy?" Janice asks.

            "It doesn't have to be, it tends to be," Stavros tells her. To Rabbit he says, "Have some souvlakia. You'll love it, and it's quick." And in an admirable potent little gesture, he moves his hand, palm outward as if his fingers had been snapped, without lifting his elbow from the table, and the motherly woman comes running to them.

            "Yasou."

            "Kale spera," she answers.

            While Stavros orders in Greek, Harry studies Janice, her peculiar glow. Time has been gentle to her. As if it felt sorry for her. The something pinched and mean about her mouth, that she had even in her teens, has been relaxed by the appearance of other small wrinkles in her face, and her hair, whose sparseness once annoyed him, as another emblem of his poverty, she now brings down over her ears from a central parting in two smooth wings. She wears no lipstick and in certain lights her face possesses a gypsy severity and the dignity present in newspaper photographs of female guerrilla fighters. The gypsy look she got from her mother, the dignity from the Sixties, which freed her from the need to look fluffy. Plain is beautiful enough. And now she is all circles in happiness, squirming on her round bottom and dancing her hands through arcs of exaggeration quick white in the candelight. She tells Stavros, "If you hadn't shown up we would have starved."

            "No," he says, a reassuring factual man. "They would have taken care of you. These are nice people."

            "These two," she says, "are so American, they're helpless."

            "Yeah," Stavros says to Rabbit, "I see the decal you put on your old Falcon."

            "I told Charlie," Janice tells Rabbit, "I certainly didn't put it there."

            "What's wrong with it?" he asks them both. "It's our flag, isn't it?"

            "It's somebody's flag," Stavros says, not liking this trend and softly bouncing his fingertips together under his sheltered bad eyes.

            "But not yours, huh?"

            "Harry gets fanatical about this," Janice warns.

            "I don't get fanatical, I just get a little sad about people who come over here to make a fat buck -"

            "I was born here," Stavros quickly says. "So was my father."

            "- and then knock the fucking flag," Rabbit continues, "like it's some piece of toilet paper."

            "A flag is a flag. It's just a piece of cloth."

            "It's more than just a piece of cloth to me."

            "What is it to you?"

            "It's -"

            "The mighty Mississippi."

            "It's people not finishing my sentences all the time."

            "Just half the time."

            "That's better than all the time like they have in China."

            "Look. The Mississippi is very broad. The Rocky Mountains really swing. I just can't get too turned-on about cops bopping hippies on the head and the Pentagon playing cowboys and Indians all over the globe. That's what your little sticker means to me. It means screw the blacks and send the CIA into Greece."

            "If we don't send somebody in the other side sure as hell will, the Greeks can't seem to manage the show by themselves."

            "Harry, don't make yourself ridiculous, they invented civilization," Janice says. To Stavros she says, "See how little and tight his mouth gets when he thinks about politics."

            "I don't think about politics," Rabbit says. "That's one of my Goddam precious American rights, not to think about politics. I just don't see why we're supposed to walk down the street with our hands tied behind our back and let ourselves be blackjacked by every thug who says he has a revolution going. And it really burns me up to listen to hotshot crap-car salesmen dripping with Vitalis sitting on their plumped-up asses bitching about a country that's been stuffing goodies into their mouth ever since they were born."

            Charlie makes to rise. "I better go. This is getting too rich."

            "Don't go," Janice begs. "He doesn't know what he's saying. He's sick on the subject."

            "Yeah, don't go, Charlie, stick around and humor the madman.

            Charlie lowers himself again and states in measured fashion, "I want to follow your reasoning. Tell me about the goodies we've been stuffing into Vietnam."

            "Christ, exactly. We'd turn it into another Japan if they'd let us. That's all we want to do, make a happy rich country full of highways and gas stations. Poor old LBJ, Jesus, with tears in his eyes on television, you must have heard him, he just about offered to make North Vietnam the fifty-fast fucking state of the damn Union if they'd just stop throwing bombs. We're begging them to rig some elections, any elections, and they'd rather throw bombs. What more can we do? We're trying to give ourselves away, that's all our foreign policy is, is trying to give ourselves away to make little yellow people happy, and guys like you sit around in restaurants moaning, Jesus, we're rotten.' "

            "I thought it was us and not them throwing the bombs."

            "We've stopped; we stopped like all you liberals were marching for and what did it get us?" He leans forward to pronounce the answer clearly. "Not shit."

            The whispering couple across the room look over in surprise; the family two booths away have hushed their noise to listen. Nelson is desperately blushing, his eyes sunk hot and hurt in his sockets. "Not shit," Harry repeats more softly. He leans over the tablecloth, beside the trembling daisies. "Now I suppose you're going to say `napalm.' That frigging magic word. They've been burying village chiefs alive and tossing mortars into hospitals for twenty years, and because of napalm they're candidates for the Albert F. Schweitzer peace prize. S, H, it." He has gotten loud again; it makes him frantic, the thoughts of the treachery and ingratitude befouling the flag, befouling him.

            "Harry, you'll get us kicked out," Janice says; but he notices she is still happy, all in circles, a cookie in the oven.

            "I'm beginning to dig him," Stavros tells her. "If I get your meaning," he says to Rabbit, "we're the big mama trying to make this unruly kid take some medicine that'll be good for him."

            "That's right. You got it. We are. And most of 'em want to take-the medicine, they're dying for it, and a few madmen in black pajamas would rather bury 'em alive. What's your theory? That we're in it for the rice? The Uncle Ben theory." Rabbit laughs and adds, "Bad old Uncle Ben."

            "No," Stavros says, squaring his hands on the checked tablecloth and staring level-browed at the base of Harry's throat gingerly with him, Harry notices: Why? - "my theory is it's a mistaken power play. It isn't that we want the rice, we don't want them to have it. Or the magnesium. Or the coastline. We've been playing chess with the Russians so long we didn't know we were off the board. White faces don't work in yellow countries anymore. Kennedy's advisers who thought they could run the world from the dean's office pushed the button and nothing happened. Then Oswald voted Johnson in who was such a bonehead he thought all it took was a bigger thumb on the button. So the machine overheated, you got inflation and a falling market at one end and college riots at the other and in the middle forty thousand sons of American mothers killed by shit-smeared bamboo. People don't like having Sonny killed in the jungle anymore. Maybe they never liked it, but they used to think it was necessary."

            "And it isn't?"

            Stavros blinks. "I see. You say war has to be."

            "Yeah, and better there than here. Better little wars than big ones."

            Stavros says, his hands on edge, ready to chop, "But you like it." His hands chop. "Burning up gook babies is right where you're at, friend." The "friend" is weak.

            Rabbit asks him, "How did you do your Army bit?"

            Stavros shrugs, squares his shoulders. "I was 4-F. Tricky ticker. I hear you sat out the Korean thing in Texas."

            "I went where they told me. I'd still go where they told me."

            "Bully for you. You're what made America great. A real gunslinger."

            "He's silent majority," Janice says, "but he keeps making noise," looking at Stavros hopefully, for a return on her quip. God, she is dumb, even if her ass has shaped up in middle age.

            "He's a normal product," Stavros says. "He's a typical goodhearted imperialist racist." Rabbit knows, from the careful level way this is pronounced, with that little tuck of a sold-car smile, that he is being flirted with, asked - his dim feeling is - for an alliance. But Rabbit is locked into his intuition that to describe any of America's actions as a "power play" is to miss the point. America is beyond power, it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains and darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible. He fights back, "I don't follow this racist rap. You can't turn on television now without some black face spitting at you. Everybody from Nixon down is sitting up nights trying to figure out how to make 'em all rich without putting 'em to the trouble of doing any work." His tongue is reckless; but he is defending something infinitely tender, the low flame of loyalty lit with his birth. "They talk about genocide when they're the ones planning it, they're the ones, the Negroes plus the rich kids, who want to pull it all down; not that they can't run squealing for a lawyer whenever some poor cop squints funny at 'em. The Vietnam war in my opinion - anybody want my opinion? -"

            "Harry," Janice says, "you're making Nelson miserable."

            "My opinion is, you have to fight a war now and then to show you're willing, and it doesn't much matter where it is. The trouble isn't this war, it's this country. We wouldn't fight in Korea now. Christ, we wouldn't fight Hitler now. This country is so zonked out on its own acid, sunk so deep in its own fat and babble and laziness, it would take H-bombs on every city from Detroit to Atlanta to wake us up and even then, we'd probably think we'd just been kissed."

            "Harry," Janice asks, "do you want Nelson to die in Vietnam? Go ahead, tell him you do."

            Harry turns to their child and says, "Kid, I don't want you to die anyplace. Your mother's the girl that's good at death."

            Even he knows how cruel this is; he is grateful to her for not collapsing, for blazing up instead. "Oh," she says. "Oh. Tell him why he has no brothers or sisters, Harry. Tell him who refused to have another child."

            "This is getting too rich," Stavros says.

            "I'm glad you're seeing it," Janice tells him, her eyes sunk deep; Nelson gets that from her.

            Mercifully, the food arrives. Nelson balks, discovering the meatballs drenched in gravy. He looks at Rabbit's tidily skewered lamb and says, "That's what I wanted."

            "Let's swap then. Shut up and eat," Rabbit says. He looks across to see that Janice and Stavros are having the same thing, a kind of white pie. They are sitting, to his printer's sense, too close, leaving awkward space on either side. To poke them into adjustment he says, "I think it's a swell country."

            Janice takes it up, Stavros chewing in silence. "Harry, you've never been to any other country."

            He addresses himself to Stavros. "Never had the desire to. I see these other countries on TV, they're all running like hell to be like us, and burning our Embassies because they can't make it fast enough. What other countries do you get to?"

            Stavros interrupts his eating grudgingly to utter, "Jamaica."

            "Wow," Rabbit says. "A real explorer. Three hours by jet to the lobby of some Hilton."

            "They hate us down there."

            "You mean they hate you. They never see me, I never go. Why do they hate us?"