Rabbit at rest (36 page)

"Yeah, because your precious son was beating up on her."

"According to
her,"
Janice states. "We haven't heard
Nelson's side of it."

The underside of his tongue bums. "What makes you think he has a
side? What're you saying, you think she's lying? Why would she lie?
Why would she call us up at two in the morning to lie?"

"She has her agenda, as people say. He was a good bet for her
when she got herself pregnant but now that he's in a little trouble
he's not such a good bet and if she's going to get herself another
man she better move fast because her looks won't last forever."

He laughs, in applause. "You've got it all figured out."
Discreetly, distantly, his asshole tingles, from the pill. "She is
good-looking, isn't she? Still."

"To some men she would seem so. The kind that don't mind big
tough women. What I never liked about her, though, was she makes
Nelson look short."

"He is short," Harry says. "Beats me why. My parents were both
tall. My whole family's always been tall."

Janice considers in silence her responsibility for Nelson's
shortness.

There are any number of ways to get to Mt. Judge through Brewer
but tonight, the streets all but deserted and the stoplights
blinking yellow, he opts for the most direct, going straight over
the Running Horse Bridge, that once he and Jill walked over in
moonlight though not so late at night as this, straight up Weiser
past the comer building that used to house JIMBO's
Friendly
LOUNGE until trouble with the police finally
closed it and that now has been painted pastel condo colors and
remodelled into a set of offices for yuppie lawyers and financial
advisers, past Schoenbaum Funeral Directors with its stately
building of white brick on the left and the shoeshine parlor that
sells New York papers and hot roasted peanuts, the best peanuts in
town, still selling them all those years since he was a kid not
much older than Judy now. His idea then of the big time was to take
the trolley around the mountain and come into downtown Brewer on a
Saturday morning and buy a dime bag of peanuts still warm from the
roaster and walk all around cracking them and letting the shells
fall where they would, at his feet on the sidewalks of Weiser
Square. Once an old bum grumbled at him for littering; even the
bums had a civic conscience then. Now the old downtown is ghostly,
hollow in lunar colors and closed to traffic at Fifth Street, where
the little forest planted by the city planners from Atlanta to make
a pedestrian mall looms with ghostly branches under the intense
blue lights installed to discourage muggings and sex and drug
transactions beneath these trees which grow taller every year and
make the downtown gloomier. Rabbit turns left on Fifth, past the
post office and the Ramada Inn that used to be the Ben Franklin
with its grand ballroom, which always makes him think of Mary Ann
and her crinolines and the fragrance between her legs, and over to
Eisenhower Avenue, above number 1204 where Janice hid out with
Charlie that time, and takes an obtuse-angled turn right,
heading up through the Hispanic section, which used to be German
working-class, across Winter, Spring, and Summer streets with
the blinding lights and occasional moving shadow, spics out looking
for some kind of a deal, the nights still a little cool to bring
out all the street trash, to Locust Boulevard and the front of
Brewer High School, a Latin-inscribed Depression monument,
ambitious for the common good like something Communists would put
up, the whole country close to Communism in the Thirties, people
not so selfish then, built the year Harry was born, 1933, and going
to outlast him it looks like. Of pale-yellow brick and
granite quoins, it clings to the greening mountainside like a grand
apparition.

"What do you think she meant," he asks Janice, " `gone crazy'?
How crazy can you go from cocaine?"

"Doris Kaufmann, I mean Eberhardt, has a
brother-in-law whose stepson by his wife's first
marriage had to go to a detox center out near the middle of the
state. He got to be paranoid and thought Hitler was still alive and
had agents everywhere to get just him. He was Jewish."

"Did he beat up his wife and children?"

"He didn't have a wife, I think. We don't know for sure Nelson's
threatened the children."

"Pru said he did."

"Pru was very upset. It's the money I think upsets her, more
than anything."

"It doesn't upset you?"

"Not as much as it seems to you and Pru. Money isn't something I
worry about, Harry. Daddy always said, `If I don't have two nickels
to rub together, I'll rub two pennies.' He had faith he could
always make enough, and he did, and I guess I inherited his
philosophy."

"Is that the reason you keep letting Nelson get away with
murder?"

Janice sighs and sounds more than ever like her mother, Bessie
Koerner Springer, who lived her whole life overweight, without a
lick of exercise except housework, sitting in her big house with
its shades down to protect the curtains and upholstery from
sunlight and sighing about the pains in her legs. "Harry, what can
I do, seriously? It's not as if he's still a child, he's
thirty-two."

"You could fire him from the lot, for starters."

"Yes, and shall I fire him as my son, too - tell him I'm
sorry, but he hasn't worked out? He's my father's grandson, don't
forget. Daddy built that lot up out of nothing and he would have
wanted Nelson to run it, run it even if he runs it into the
ground."

"Really?" Such a ruinous vision startles him. Having money makes
people reckless. Bet a million. Junk bonds. "Couldn't you fire him
provisionally, until he shapes up?"

Janice's tone has the bite of impatience, of fatigue. "All this
is so easy for you to say - you're just sore since Lyle told
you I was the real boss, you're trying to make me suffer for it.
You do it, you do whatever you think should be done at the lot and
tell them I said you should. I'm tired of it. I'm tired of you and
Nelson fighting your old wars through me."

Streetlights flicker more swiftly on his hands as the Celica
moves more rapidly through the city park, above the tennis courts
and the World War II tank painted a thick green to forestall rust,
repainted so often they've lost the exact military green Harry
remembers. What did they call it? Olive drab. He feels under the
barrage of streetlights bombarded, and Brewer seems empty of life
like those bombed-out German cities after the war. "They
wouldn't believe me," he tells her spitefully, "they'd still come
to you. And I'm like you," he tells her more gently, "scared of
what I'll stir up."

After the park there is a stoplight that says red, and a locally
famous old turreted house roofed in round fishscale slate shingles,
and then a shopping mall where the cineplex sign advertises SEE YOU
DREAM TEAM SAY ANYTHING OUT OF CONTROL. Then they're on 422 and a
territory bred into their bones, streets they crossed and recrossed
in all seasons as children, Central, Jackson, Joseph, the hydrants
and mailboxes of the borough of Mt. Judge like buttons fastening
down their lives, their real lives, everything drained of color at
this nadir of the night, the streets under the burning blue mercury
lights looking rounded like bread-loaves and crusted with
snow, the brick-pillared porches treacherous emplacements up
behind their little flat laps oflawn and tulip bed. Number 89
Joseph, the Springers' big stucco house where when Rabbit was
courting Janice in his old Nash he used to hate to come because it
made his own family's semi-detached house on Jackson Road
look poor, has all its lights ablaze, like a ship going down amid
the silent darkened treetops and roof peaks of the town. The huge
spreading copper-beech tree on the left side where Harry and
Janice's bedroom used to be, a tree so dense the sun never shone in
and its beech nuts popping kept Harry awake all fall, is gone,
leaving that side bare, its windows exposed and on fire. Nelson had
it cut down.
Dad, it was eating up the whole house. You
couldn't keep paint on the woodwork on that side, it was so damp.
The lawn wouldn't even
grow. Harry couldn't argue, and
couldn't tell the boy that the sound of the rain in that great
beech had been the most religious experience of his life. That, and
hitting a pure golf shot.

They park outside, under the maples that are shedding chartreuse
fuzz and sticky stuff this time of year. He always hates that about
parking here. He'll get the car washed Monday.

Pru has been watching for their arrival. She pulls the door open
as their feet hit the porch, as if there's an electric eye. Like
Thelma the other week. Judy is with her, in some fuzzy Oshkosh
B'Gosh pajamas that are too small for her. The child's feet look
surprisingly long and white and bony, with the inches of exposed
ankle.

"Where's Roy?" Harry asks instantly.

"Nelson's putting him in bed," Pru says, with a wry downward tug
of one side of her mouth, a kind of apology.

"To bed?" Harry says. "You trust him with the kid?"

She says, "Oh yes. He's calmed down since I called. I think he
shocked himself, hitting me so hard. It did him good." In the
illumination of the front hall they can see the pink welt along one
cheekbone, the lopsided puffiness of her upper lip, the redness
around her eyes as if rubbed and rubbed with a scouring pad. She is
wearing that quilted shorty morning-glory bathrobe but not as
in Florida over bare legs; under it she has on a long blue
nightgown. But you can see the outline of her legs through the thin
cloth, like fish moving through murky water.
Fake-fur-lined bedroom slippers clothe her feet, so he
can't check out her toenail polish.

"Hey, is this some kind of false alarm?" Harry asks.

"When you see Nelson I don't think you'll think so," Pru tells
him, and turns to the other woman. ` Janice, I've had it. I want
out. I've kept the lid on as long as I can and now I've
had
it!" And the eyes that have scoured their lids with
tears begin to water again, and she embraces the older woman before
Janice has quite straightened out from bending down to kiss and hug
Judy hello.

Harry's guts give a tug: he can feel Pru's attempt to make a
sweeping connection; he can feel his wife's resistance. Pru was
raised a Catholic, showy, given to big gestures, and Janice a tight
little Protestant. The embrace breaks up quickly.

Judy takes Harry's fingertips. When he stoops to peck her on the
cheek, her hair gets in his eye. The little girl giggles and says
in his ear, "Daddy thinks ants are crawling all over him."

"He's always feeling itchy," Pru says, sensing that her attempt
to sweep Janice into her escape plan has failed, she must do some
more selling of the situation. "That's the coke. They call it
formication. His neurotransmitters are fucked up. Ask me anything,
I know it all. I've been going to Narc-Anon in Brewer for a
year now.

"Huh," Rabbit says, not quite liking her tough tone. "And what
else do they tell you?"

She looks straight at him, her green eyes glaring with tears and
shock, and manages that smile of hers, downtwisted at the corner.
Her upper lip being puffy gives it a sad strangeness tonight. "They
tell you it's not your problem, the addicts can only do it
themselves. But that still leaves it your problem."

"What happened here tonight, exactly?" he asks. He has to keep
speaking up. He feels Janice pulling back, distancing herself
irritatingly, like that time they took the kids to jungle Gardens
in the Camry.

Judy doesn't find her grandparents as much fun as usual and
leaves Harry's side to go lean against her mother, pressing her
carrot-colored head back against Pru's belly. Pru
protectively encircles the child's throat with a downy freckled
forearm. Now two pairs of greenish eyes stare, as if Harry and
Janice are not the rescue squad but hostile invaders.

Pru's voice sounds tough and weary. "The usual sort of garbage.
He came home after one and I asked him where he'd been and he told
me none of my business and I guess I didn't take it as docilely as
usual because he said if I was going to be that way he needed a hit
to calm his nerves, and when the coke wasn't in the bathroom where
he thought he hid it in an aspirin bottle he smashed things up and
when I didn't like that he came out after me and started slugging
me all over the place."

Judy says, "It woke me up. Mommy came into my room to get away
and Daddy's face was all funny, like he wasn't really seeing
anything."

Harry asks, "Did he have a knife or anything?"

Pru's eyebrows knit crossly at the suggestion. "Nelson would
never go for a knife. He can't stand blood and never helps in the
kitchen. He wouldn't know which end of a knife to use."

Judy says, "He said he was real sorry afterwards."

Pru has been smoothing Judy's long red hair back from her face
and now, just the middle fingers touching her forehead and cheeks,
tucks back her own. She has outgrown the Sphinx look; it hangs limp
to her shoulders. "He calmed down after I called you. He said, `You
called them? I can't believe it. You called my parents?' It was
like he was too stunned to be angry. He kept saying this is the end
and how sorry he was for everything. He makes no sense." She
grimaces and lightly pushes Judy away from her body and tightens
the robe around her middle, with a shiver. For a second they all
seem to have forgotten their lines. In crises there is something in
our instincts which whittles, which tries to reduce the unignorable
event back to the ignorable normal. "I could use a cup of coffee,"
Pru says.

Janice asks, "Shouldn't we go upstairs to Nelson first?"

Judy likes this idea and leads the way upstairs. Following her
milky bare feet up the stair treads, Harry feels guilty that his
granddaughter has to wear outgrown pajamas while all those Florida
acquaintances of theirs have different-colored slacks for
every day of the week and twenty sports coats hanging in cleaner's
bags. The house, which he remembers from way back in the days of
the Springers, when they were younger than he is now, seems rather
pathetically furnished, now that he looks, in remnants from the old
days, including the battered old brown Barcalounger that used to be
Fred Springer's throne, along with nondescript newer stuff from
Schaechner's or one of the shabby furniture places that have sprung
up along the highways leading out of the city, mingled among the
car lots and fast-food joints. The stairs still have the
threadbare Turkish runner the Springers had tacked down forty years
ago. The house has descended to Nelson and Pru in stages and they
never really have taken it on as their own. You try to do something
nice for kids, offer them a shortcut in life, a little padding, and
it turns out to be the wrong thing, undermining them. This was no
house for a young couple.