Rabbit is rich (29 page)

"Uh-huh." As an afterthought: "Want me to sit on you first?"

"Uh-huh." As an afterthought: "Don't make me come."

Harry's skin is bitten as by ice when he lies on his back. The coins: worse than toast crumbs. So wet he feels almost nothing, Janice straddles him, vast and globular in the patchy light that filters from the streetlight through the big copper beech. She picks up a stray coin and places it glinting in her eye, as a monocle. Lording it over him, holding him captive, she grinds her wet halves around him; self to self, bivalve and tuber, this is what it comes to. "Don't come," she says, alarmed enough so that her mock-monocle drops to his tense abdomen with a thud. "Better get underneath," he grunts. Her body then seems thin and black, silhouetted by the scattered circles, reflecting according to their tilt. Gods bedded among stars, he gasps in her ear, then she in his.

After this payoff, regaining their breaths, they can count in the semi-dark only twenty-nine Krugerrands on the rumpled bedspread, its landscape of ridged green patches. He turns on the overhead light. It hurts their eyes. By its harshness their naked skins seem also rumpled. Panic encrusts Harry's drained body; he does not rest until, naked on his knees on the rug, a late strand of spunk looping from his reddened glans, he finds, caught in the crack between the mattress and the bed side-rail, the precious thirtieth.

He stands with Charlie gazing out at the bleak September light. The tree over beyond the Chuck Wagon parking lot has gone thin and yellow at its top; above its stripped twigs the sky holds some diagonal cirrus, bands of fat in bacon, promising rain tomorrow. "Poor old Carter," Harry says. "D'ya see where he nearly killed himself running up some mountain in Maryland?"

"He's pushing," Charlie says. "Kennedy's on his tail." Charlie has returned from his two weeks' vacation with a kiss of Florida tan undermined by a weak heart and the days intervening. He did not come from Florida directly. Simultaneously with his return Monday a card sent from Ohio arrived at Springer Motors, saying in his sharply slanted book-keeper's hand,

Hi Gang -

Detoured on way back from Fla. thru Gt. Smokies. Southern belles, mile after mile. Now near Akron, exploded radial capital of the world. Fuel economy a no-no out here, big fins & V-8s still reign.

Miss you all lots.Chas.

The joke especially for Harry was on the other side: a picture of a big flat-roofed building like a quarter of a pie, identified as KENT STATE STUDENT COMPLEX,
embracing the largest open-stack library in northeastern Ohio.

"Sort of pushing yourself these days, aren't you?" Harry asks him. "How was Melanie all that while?"

"Who says I was with Melanie?"

"You did. With that card. Jesus, Charlie, a young kid like that grinding your balls could kill you."

"What a way to go, huh champ? You know as well as I do it's not the chicks that grind your balls, it's these middle-aged broads time is running out on."

Rabbit remembers his bout with Janice amid their gold, yet still remains jealous. "Whajja do in Florida with her?"

"We moved around. Sarasota, Venice, St. Pete's. I couldn't talk her out of the Atlantic side so we drove over from Naples on 75, old Alligator Alley, and did the shmeer - Coral Gables, Ocean Boulevard, up to Boca and West Palm. We were going to take in Cape Canaveral but ran out of time. The bimbo didn't even bring a bathing suit, the one we bought her was one of these new ones with the sides wide open. Great figure. Don't know why you didn't appreciate her."

"I couldn't appreciate her, it was Nelson brought her into the house. It'd be like screwing your own daughter."

Charlie has a toothpick left over from lunch downtown, a persimmon-colored one, and he dents his lower lip with it as he gazes out the tired window. "There's worse things," he offers bleakly. "How's Nelson and the bride-to-be?"

"Pru." Harry sees that Charlie is set to guard the details of his trip, to make him pull them out one by one. Miles of Southern belles. Fuck this guy. Rabbit has secrets too. But, thinking this, he can picture only a farm, its buildings set down low in a hollow.

"Melanie had a lot to say about Pru."

"Like what?"

"Like she thinks she's weird. Her impression is that shy as she seems she's a tough kid up from a really rocky upbringing and isn't too steady on her feet, emotionally speaking."

"Yeah well, some might say a girl who gets her kicks screwing an old crow like you is pretty weird herself."

Charlie looks away from the window straight up into his eyes, his own eyes behind their tinted spectacles looking watery. "You shouldn't say things like that to me, Harry. Both of us getting on, two guys just hanging in there ought to be nice to each other."

Harry wonders from this if Charlie knows how threatened his position is, Nelson on his tail.

Charlie continues, "Ask me whatever you want about Melanie. Like I said, she's a good kid. Solid, emotionally. The trouble with you, champ, is you have screwing on the brain. My biggest kick was showing this young woman something of the world she hadn't seen before. She ate it up - the cypresses, that tower with the chimes. She said she'd still take California though. Florida's too flat. She said if this Christmas I could get my ass out to Carmel she'd be happy to show me around. Meet her mother and whoever else is around. Nothing heavy."

"How much - how much future you think you two have?"

"Harry, I don't have much future with anybody." His voice is whispery, barely audible. Harry would like to take it and wirebrush it clean.

"You never know," he reassures the smaller man.

"You know,"
Stavros insists. "You know when your time is running out. If life offers you something, take it."

"O.K., O.K. I will. I do. What'd your poor old
Manna mou
do, while you were bombing around with Bimbo in the Everglades?"

"Well," he says, "funny thing there. A female cousin of mine, five or so years younger, I guess has been running around pretty bad, and her husband kicked her out this summer, and kept the kids. They lived in Norristown. So Gloria's been living in an apartment by herself out on Youngquist a couple blocks away and was happy to babysit for the old lady while I was off and says she'll do it again any time. So I have some freedom now I didn't used to have." Everywhere, it seems to Harry, families are breaking up and different pieces coming together like survivors in one great big lifeboat, while he and Janice keep sitting over there in Ma Springer's shadow, behind the times.

"Nothing like freedom," he tells his friend. "Don't abuse it now. You asked about Nelson. The wedding's this Saturday. Immediate family only. Sorry."

"Wow. Poor little Nellie. Signed, sealed, and delivered."

Harry hurries by this. "From what Janice and Bessie let drop the mother will probably show up. The father's too sore."

"You should see Akron," Charlie tells him. "I'd be sore too if I had to live there."

"Isn't there a golf course out there where Nicklaus holds a tournament every year?"

"What I saw wasn't any golf course."

Charlie has come back from his experiences tenderized, nostalgic it seems for his life even as he lives it. So aged and philosophical he seems, Harry dares ask him, "What'd Melanie think of me, did she say?"

A very fat couple are prowling the lot, looking at the little cars, testing by their bodies, sitting down on air beside the driver's doors, which models might be big enough for them. Charlie watches this couple move among the glittering roofs and hoods a minute before answering. "She thought you were neat, except the women pushed you around. She thought about you and her balling but got the impression you and Janice were very solid."

"You disillusion her?"

"Couldn't. The kid was right."

"Yeah how about ten years ago?"

"That was just cement."

Harry loves the way he ticks this off, Janice's seducer; he loves this savvy Greek, dainty of heart beneath his coat of summer checks. The couple have wearied of trying on cars for size and get into their old car, a '77 Pontiac Grand Prix with cream hardtop, and drive away. Harry asks suddenly, "How do you feel about it? Think we can live with Nelson over here?"

Charlie shrugs, a minimal brittle motion. "Can he live with me? He wants to be a cut above Jake and Rudy, and there aren't that many cuts in an outfit like this."

"I've told them, Charlie, if you go I go."

"You can't go, Chief. You're family. Me, I'm old times. I can go."

"You know this business cold, that's what counts with me."

"Ah, this isn't selling. It's like supermarkets now: it's shelfstacking, and ringing it out at the register. When it was all used, we used to try to fit a car to every customer. Now it's take it or leave it. With this seller's market there's no room to improvise. Your boy had the right idea: go with convertibles, antiques, something with a little amusement value. I can't take these Jap bugs seriously. This new thing called the Tercel we're supposed to start pushing next month, have you seen the stars? One point five liter engine, twenty-inch tires. It's like those little cars they used to have on merry-go-rounds for the kids who were too scared to ride the horses."

"Forty-three m.p.g. on the highway, that's the star people care about, the way the world's winding."

Charlie says, "You don't see too many bugs down in Florida. The old folks are still driving the big old hogs, the Continentals, the Toronados, they paint 'em white and float around. Of course the roads, there isn't a hill in the state and never any frost. I've been thinking about the Sun Belt. Go down there and thumb my nose at the heating-oil bills. Then they get you on the air-conditioning. You can't escape."

Harry says, "Sodium wafers, that's the answer. Electricity straight from sunlight. It's about five years off; that's what
Consumer Reports
was saying. Then we can tell those Arabs to take their fucking oil and grease their camels with it."

Charlie says, "Traffic fatalities are up. You want to know why they're up? Two reasons. One, the kids are pretty much off drugs now and back into alcohol. Two, everybody's gone to compacts and they crumple like paper bags."

He chuckles and twirls the flavored toothpick against his lower lip as the two men gaze out the window at the river of dirty tin. An old low-slung station wagon pulls into the lot but it has no wooden rack on top; though Harry's heart skips, it is not his daughter. The station wagon noses around and heads out into 111 again, just casing. Burglaries are up. Harry asks Charlie, "Melanie really thought about" - he balks at "balling," it is not his generation's word -"going to bed with me?"

"That's what the lady said. But you know these kids, they come right out with everything we used to keep to ourselves. Doesn't mean there's more of it. Probably less as a matter of fact. By the time they're twenty-five they're burnt out."

"I was never attracted to her, to tell you the truth. Now this new girl of Nelson's -"

"I don't want to hear about it," Charlie says, pivoting to go back to his desk. "They're about to get married, for Chrissake."

Running. Harry has continued the running he began up in the Poconos, as a way of getting his body back from those sodden years when he never thought about it, just ate and did what he wanted, restaurant lunches downtown in Brewer plus the Rotary every Thursday, it begins to pack on. The town he runs through is dark, full of slanty alleys and sidewalks cracked and tipped from underneath, whole cement slabs lifted up by roots like crypt lids in a horror movie, the dead reach up, they catch at his heels. He keeps moving, pacing himself, overriding the protest of his lungs and fashioning of his stiff muscles and tired blood a kind of machine that goes where the brain directs, uphill past the wideeaved almost Chinese-looking house where the butch women hammer, their front windows never lit, must watch a lot of television or else snuggle into whatever it is they do early or else saving electricity, women won't get paid the same as men until ERA passes, at least having a nest of them moving into the neighborhood not like blacks or Puerto Ricans, they don't breed.

Norway maples shade these streets. Not much taller than when he was a boy. Grab a low branch and hoist yourself up into a hornets' nest. Split the seeds and stick them to your nose to make yourself a rhinoceros. Panting, he cuts through their shadow. A slim pain cuts through his high left side. Hold on, heart. Old Fred Springer popped off in a blaze of red, anyway Rabbit has always imagined the last thing you'd see in a heart attack would be a bright flash of red. Amazing, how dark these American houses are, at nine o'clock at night. A kind of ghost town, nobody else on the sidewalk, all the chickens in their coop, only a brownish bit of glow showing through a window crack here and there, night light in a child's room. His mind strides on into a bottomless sorrow, thinking of children. Little Nellie in his room newly moved into Vista Crescent, his teddies stacked in a row beside him, his eyes like theirs unable to close, scared of dying while asleep, thinking of baby Becky who did fall through, who did die. A volume of water still stood in the tub many hours later, dust on the unstirring gray surface, just a little rubber stopper to lift and God in all His strength did nothing. Dry leaves scrape and break underfoot, the sound of fall, excitement in the air. The Pope is coming, and the wedding is Saturday. Janice asks him why is his heart so hard toward Nelson. Because Nelson has swallowed up the boy that was and substituted one more pushy man in the world, hairy wrists, big prick. Not enough room in the world. People came north from the sun belt in Egypt and lived in heated houses and now the heat is being used up, just the oil for the showroom and offices and garage has doubled since '74 when he first saw the Springer Motors books and will double in the next year or two again and when you try to cut it down to where the President says, the men in the garage complain, they have to work with their bare hands, working on a concrete slab they can wear thick socks and heavy soles, he thought at one point he should get them all that kind of golf glove that leaves the fingertips bare but it would have been hard to find ones for the right hand, guys under thirty now just will not work without comfort and all the perks, a whole new ethic, soft, socialism, heat tends to rise in a big space like that and hang up there amid the crossbraces, if they built it now they'd put in twenty inches of insulation. If the Pope is so crazy about babies why doesn't
he
try to keep them warm?

He is running along Potter Avenue now, still uphill, saving the downhill for the homeward leg, along the gutter where the water from the ice plant used to run, an edge of green slime, life tries to get a grip anywhere, on earth that is, not on the moon, that's another thing he doesn't like about the thought of climbing through the stars. Once clowning on the way to school along the gutter that now is dry he slipped on the slime and fell in, got his knickers soaked, those corduroy knickers they used to make you wear,
swish swish,
and the long socks, incredible how far back he goes now, he can remember girls in first grade still wearing highbutton shoes: Margaret Schoelkopf, she was so full of life her nose would start to bleed for no reason. When he fell in the gutter of ice-plant water his knickers were so wet he had to run home crying and change, he hated being late for school. Or for anywhere, it was something Mom drummed into him, she didn't so much care where he went but he had to be home on time, and for most of his life this sensation would overtake him, anywhere, in the locker room, on a 16A bus, in the middle of a fuck, that he was late for somewhere and he was in terrible dark trouble, a kind of tunnel would open in his mind with Mom at the end of it with a switch. Do you
want a switching Hassy?
she would ask him as if asking if he wanted dessert, the switches came off the base of the little pear tree in the narrow back yard on Jackson Road; angry yellowjackets would hover over the fallen rotting fruit. Lately he no longer ever feels he is late for somewhere, a strange sort of peace at his time of life: a thrown ball at the top of its arc is for a second still. His gold is rising in value, ten dollars an ounce or so in the papers every day, ten times thirty is three hundred smackers without his lifting a finger, you think how Pop slaved. Janice putting that monocle on was a surprise, the only trouble with her in bed is she still doesn't like to blow, something mean about her mouth and always was, Melanie had those funny saucy stubborn cherry lips, a wonder Charlie didn't pop his aorta in some motel down there in the sands, how lovely it is when a woman forgets herself and opens her mouth to laugh or exclaim so wide you see the whole round cavern the ribbed pink roof and the tongue like a rug in a hall and the butterfly-shaped blackness in the back that goes down into the throat, Pru did that the other day in the kitchen at something Ma Springer said, her smile usually wider on one side than the other and a bit cautious like she might get burned, but all the girls coming up now blew, it was part of the culture, taken for granted, fuck-and-suck movies they call them, right out in the open, you take your date, ADULT FILMS NEW EACH FRIDAY in the old Baghdad on upper Weiser where in Rabbit's day they used to go see Ronald Reagan being co-pilot against the Japs. Lucky Nelson, in a way. Still he can't envy him. A worn-out world to find his way in. Funny about mouths, they must do so much, and don't tell what went into them, even a minute later. One thing he does hate is seeing bits of food, rice or cereal or whatever, hanging in the little hairs of a face during a meal. Poor Mom in those last years.

His knees are jarring. His big gut jounces. Each night he tries to extend his run among the silent dark houses, through the cones of the streetlights, under the ice-cold lopsided moon, that the other night driving home in the Corona he happened to see through the tinted upper part of the windshield and for a second thought, My God, it is green. Tonight he pushes himself as far as Kegerise Street, a kind of alley that turns downhill again, past black-sided small factories bearing mysterious new names like Lynnex and Data Development and an old stone farmhouse that all the years he was growing up had boarded windows and a yard full of tumbledown weeds milkweed and thistle and a fence of broken slats but now was all fixed up with a little neat sign outside saying
Albrecht Stamm Homestead
and inside all sorts of authentic hand-made furniture and quaint kitchen equipment to show what a farmhouse was like around 1825 and in cases in the hall photographs of the early buildings of Mt. Judge before the turn of the century but not anything of the fields when the area of the town was in large part Stamm's farm, they didn't have cameras that far back or if they did didn't point them at empty fields. Old man Springer had been on the board of the Mt. Judge Historical Society and helped raise the funds for the restoration, after he died Janice and Bessie thought Harry might be elected to take his place on the board but it didn't happen, his checkered past haunting him. Even though a young hippie couple lives upstairs and leads the visitors through, to Harry the old Stamm place is full of ghosts, those old farmers lived weird lives, locking their crazy sisters in the attic and strangling the pregnant hired girl in a fit of demon rum and hiding the body in the potato bin so that fifty years later the skeleton comes to light. Next door the Sunshine Athletic Association used to be, that Harry as a boy had thought was full of athletes, so he hoped he could some day belong, but when twenty years ago he did get inside it smelled of cigar butts and beer gone flat in the bottom of the glass. Then through the Sixties it fell into dilapidation and disrepute, the guys who drank and played cards in there getting older and fewer and more morose. So when the building came up for sale the Historical Society bought it and tore it down and made where it was into a parking lot for the visitors who came by to the Stamm Homestead on their way to Lancaster to look at the Amish or on their way to Philadelphia to look at the Liberty Bell. You wouldn't think people could find it tucked away on what used to be Kegerise Alley but an amazing number do, white-haired most of them. History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.