Rabbit at rest (66 page)

Rabbit moves toward his car with a racing heart, as the bum
follows and mumbles behind him about spare change. He fiddles with
the key and gets in and slams the door. The Celica, thank God,
isn't too overheated after all its miles to start promptly; George
Custer, locked outside, blinks and turns, pretending not to notice.
Harry drives cautiously through the outdoor rooms, around the tall
monument, and gets lost on the way out of Savannah. He is caught in
endless black neighborhoods, gently collapsing houses built of wood
clapboard that last saw fresh paint in the days of Martin Luther
King. They talk about assassination conspiracies but that was one
that Harry could believe in. He can believe in it but he can't
remember the name of the man they put in jail for it. A
three-name name. Escaped once, but they caught him. James
Earl something. So much for history. Panicking, he stops at a
grocery store, the kind with a troughed wooden floor with
shiny-headed nails that used to be in Mt. Judge when he was a
boy, except that everybody in here is black; a lanky man the color
of a dried bean pod, much amused, tells him how to get back to the
superhighway, gesturing with long hands that flap loosely on his
wrists.

Back on 95, Rabbit pushes through Georgia. As darkness comes on,
it begins to rain, and with his old eyes, that can't sort out the
lights too well at night any more, the rain is oppressive. He even
turns off the radio, he feels so battered by pellets of experience.
His body from being in one position so long feels as if somebody's
been pounding it with sandbags. He better pull in. He finds a
Ramada Inn beyond Brunswick. He eats a fried-catfish special
that doesn't sit too well on top of the pastrami, especially the
candied yams and the pecan pie; but why be in Georgia if you can't
have pecan pie? The walk back to his room past the other motel
doors, on cement sheltered by the continuous balcony overhead, is
quietly blissful. In out of the rain. Sense enough. They can't
catch me. But his snug moment of happiness reminds him of all those
exposed unhappy loved ones back in Diamond County. Guilt gouges at
his heart like a thumb in a semi-sensitive eye.

Halfway through
The Golden Girls,
it seems suddenly
tedious, all that elderly sexiness, and the tough-mouthed old
grandmother, people ought to know when to give up. He watches
instead on the educational channel a
Living Planet
segment
about life at the polar extremes. He's seen it before, but it's
still surprising, how David Attenborough turns over those rocks in
this most desolate place in Antarctica and there are lichens
underneath, and all through the sunless abysmal winter these male
penguins shuffling around in continuous blizzards with eggs on the
tops of their webbed feet. Life, it's incredible, it's wearing the
world out. A teno'clock news on the same channel tells the same old
stuff he's been hearing on the radio all day. Poor Giamatti. A
female baby panda born in the National Zoo in Washington. Reagan
thought AIDS was as mild as measles until Rock Hudson died, reveals
his former physician Brigadier General John Hutton. Another
tattletale: Navy Commander David R. Wilson claims in this month's
U.S.
Naval Institute Proceedings
magazine that the
U.S.S. Vincennes
was known among other ships in the
Persian Gulf for her aggressive and imprudent actions for at least
a month before the
Vincennes
gunned down an Iranian civil
airliner containing over two hundred seventy men, women, and
children. Poor devils, Iranians or not. Little children, women in
shawls, end over end, hitting the dark hard water. New head of
Japan in Washington, provisional government in Panama, mobs of East
Germans in Hungary waiting to cross the border into the free world.
Poor devils, they don't know the free world is wearing out.

Rabbit makes himself ready for bed, sleeping in the day's
underwear, and tries to think about where he is, and who. This is
the last night when he is nowhere. Tomorrow, life will find him
again. Janice on the phone, the Golds next door. He feels less
light than he thought he would, escaping Brewer. You are still you.
The U.S. is still the U.S., held together by credit cards and
Indian names. Harry becomes dead weight on the twin bed. Lost in
the net of thread-lines on the map, he sleeps as in his
mother's womb, another temporary haven.

Morning. The rain is just a memory of puddles on the sunstruck
asphalt. Sunday. He goes for the French toast and link sausages,
figuring tomorrow morning he'll be back to stale oat bran. Janice
never cleans out the cupboards when they leave. Efficient, in a
way, if you don't mind feeding ants and roaches. He keeps tasting
maple syrup and eggs he didn't quite like. French toast is never as
good as what Mom would cook up before sending him off to Sunday
school: the flat baked golden triangles of bread, the syrup from
the can shaped and painted like a log cabin, its spout the chimney.
Putting his suitcase in the trunk, he is struck, not for the first
time, by how the Celica's taillights are tipped, giving it, from
the back, a slant-eyed look.

Within an hour he crosses the St. Marys River and a highway sign
says WELCOME TO FLORIDA and the radio commercials are for Blue
Cross, denture fixatives, pulmonary clinics. The roadside becomes
sandy and the traffic thickens, takes on glitter. Jacksonville
suddenly looms, an Oz of blue-green skyscrapers, a city of
dreams at the end of the pine-tree tunnel, gleaming glass
boxes heaped around the tallest, the Baptist Hospital. You rise up
onto bridges over the St. Johns River far below, and Jacksonville
shines from a number of angles like a jewel being turned in your
hand, and you pay a toll, and must stay alert not to wind up
heading toward Green Cove Springs or Tallahassee. Route 95 is now
just one among many superhighways. The cars get wide and fat, the
trucks carry rolls of fresh sod instead of skinned pine trunks. All
around him, floating like misplaced boats, are big white campers
and vans, Winnebagos and Starcrafts, Pathfinders and Dolphins,
homes on wheels, the husband at the helm, his elbow out the window,
the wife at home behind him, making the bed. From all of the states
these caravans come to Florida, wearing even Colorado's green
mountain profile and Maine's gesturing red lobster. He notices a
new kind of Florida license plate, a kind of misty tricolor
memorial to the Challenger, among the many still with the green
Florida-shaped stain in the middle like something spilled on
a necktie. And wasn't that the disgrace of the decade, sending that
poor New Hampshire schoolteacher and that frizzy-haired
Jewish girl, not to mention the men, one of them black and another
Oriental, all like some Hollywood cross-section of America,
up to be blown into bits on television a minute later? Now the
probers think they were probably conscious, falling toward the
water, conscious for two or three minutes. Harry descends deeper
into Florida, glad to be back among the palms and white roofs and
tropical thinness, the clouds blue on gray on white on blue, as if
the great skymaker is working here with lighter materials.

You take 95 parallel to the East Coast to 4, and then skim
diagonally over through all that Disney World that poor little Judy
wanted to go to, next time they come they must schedule it in.
Where some of the self-appointed travel experts at the condo
(he always did think Ed Silberstein a know-it-all, even
before his son tried to put the make on Pru) advise staying on 4
all the way to 75 and saving in minutes what you lose in miles, or
at least taking 17 to Port Charlotte, he likes to move south on 27,
right through the hot flat belly of the state, through Haines City
and Lake Wales, into the emptiness west of the Seminole reservation
and Lake Okeechobee, and then over to Deleon on Route 80.

In Florida, there is no trouble finding Golden Oldies stations
on the car radio. We're all oldies down here. The music of your
life, some of the announcers like to call it, and it keeps tumbling
in, Patti Page begging "Never let me gooooo, I love you soooooo,"
and then doing so perkily that Latin-American bit with "Aye
yi yi" and the caballeros, and finishing "I've waited all my life,
to give you all my love, my heart belongs to you," and then Tony
Bennett or one of those other mooing Italians with "Be My Love,"
speaking of all my love, and then Gogi Grant and "The Wayward
Wind," he hasn't thought of Gogi Grant for ages, it's a rare song
that doesn't light up some of his memory cells, while the landscape
outside the car windows beyond the whoosh of the airconditioner
gets more and more honkytonk
- Flea World, Active Adult
Living
and car after car goes by with an orange Garfield stuck
to the back window with paws that are suction cups. "Why you
ramble, no one knows," Nat "King" Cole singing "Rambling Rose,"
ending so gently, "Why I want you, no one knows," you can just
about see that wise slow smile, and then "Tzena, Tzena," he hasn't
heard that for years either, the music doesn't come ethnic any
more, and "Oh, My Papa," speaking of ethnic, and Kay Starr really
getting her back into "Wheel of Fortune," all those hiccups,
hard-driving,
"Puleazzze
let it be now," and
"A-Tisket, A-Tasket," that really goes back, he was
walking to grade school then with Lottie Bingaman, in love with
Margaret Schoelkopf, and Presley's "Love Me Tender," knock him all
you want, before he got fat and druggy and spooked in the end he
had a real voice, a beautiful voice, not like foghorn Sinatra, and
then Ray Charles, now there's another real voice, "I Can't Stop
Loving You," "dreaming of yesterdayssss," the way it trails off
like that, that funny blind man's waggle of the head, and Connie
Francis, "Where the Boys Are," a voice to freeze your scalp all
right, but whose life
are
these songs? That was beachparty
era, he was all married and separated and reconciled and working at
Verity Press by then, no more parties for him. Ronnie Harrison and
Ruth fucking all weekend at the Jersey Shore: that still
rankles.

The station fades out and in trying to find another he passes
through a broadcast church service, evangelical, a man shouting
"Jesus knows! Jesus looks into your heart! Jesus sees the death in
your heart!" and Harry passes on, coming upon, too late for all of
the sobbing, Johnny Ray's "Cry," "If your sweetheart sends a letter
of
goodbye," that
was around the time he had to go into
the Army and part from Mary Ann, he didn't know it would be for
good, they argued about Johnny Ray, Rabbit insisting the guy had to
be a fruit to sing that way, and then down in Texas he realized the
song was for him, his sweetheart sent a letter. Next number, Dean
Martin comes on loafing through "That's Amore": by now Harry had
come back and taken up with Janice, the quiet girl behind the nuts
counter at Kroll's, her little tight body, the challenge of her
puzzled dark eyes, he remembers because he would joke, "That's
amore," after they would fuck in the room Linda Hammacher would let
them use, with its view of the dove-gray gas tanks by the
river. "Only the Lonely," the late Roy Orbison warbles. "There goes
my baby, there goes my heart," in that amazing voice that goes
higher and higher till you think it must break like crystal, as in
a way it did; Rabbit supposed his being dead is what makes this one
a Golden Oldie.

The songs roll on, broken every half-hour by summaries of
the news. A bombing in Colombia has injured eighty-four, the
Colombian woes are increased by a drop in coffee prices, President
Bush's upcoming speech on the nation's drug problems rouses
Washington speculation, can he do a Reagan? Also in Washington,
officials are still hopeful that the newborn baby panda, fighting
for its life in an incubator, will survive. Locally, manatees
continue active in the Caloosahatchee Basin, and the Dolphins were
beaten yesterday in Miami by the Philadelphia Eagles, twenty to
ten. Rabbit likes hearing this score, but the old songs, all that
syrup about love, love, the sweetness, the cuteness, the doggies in
the window and Mommy kissing Santa Claus and the naughty lady of
Shady Lane, the background strings and pizzicato bridges and rising
brass crescendos meant to thrill the pants off you, wear him down:
he resents being made to realize, this late, that the songs of his
life were as moronic as the rock the brainless kids now feed on, or
the Sixties and Seventies stuff that Nelson gobbled up - all
of it designed for empty heads and overheated hormones, an ocean
white with foam, and listening to it now is like trying to eat a
double banana split the way he used to. It's all
disposable,
cooked up to turn a quick profit. They lead us
down the garden path, the music manufacturers, then turn around and
lead the next generation down with a slightly different flavor of
glop.

Rabbit feels betrayed. He was reared in a world where war was
not strange but change was: the world stood still so you could grow
up in it. He knows when the bottom fell out. When they closed down
Kroll's, Kroll's that had stood in the center of Brewer all those
years, bigger than a church, older than the courthouse, right at
the head of Weiser Square there, with every Christmas those
otherworldly displays of circling trains and nodding dolls and
twinkling stars in the corner windows as if God Himself put them
there to light up this darkest time of the year. As a little kid he
couldn't tell what God did from what people did; it all came from
above somehow. He can remember standing as a child in the cold with
his mother gazing into this world of tinselled toys as real as any
other, the air biting at his cheeks, the sound of the Salvation
Army bells begging, the smell of the hot soft pretzels sold on
Weiser Square those years, the feeling around him of adult hurrying
-bundled-up bodies pushing into Kroll's where you could
buy the best of everything from drapes to beds, toys to pots, china
to silver. When he worked there back in Shipping you saw the
turnover, the hiring and firing, the discontinued lines, the abrupt
changes of fashion, the panicky gamble of all this merchandising,
but still he believed in the place as a whole, its power, its good
faith. So when the system just upped one summer and decided to
close Kroll's down, just because shoppers had stopped coming in
because the downtown had become frightening to white people, Rabbit
realized the world was not solid and benign, it was a shabby set of
temporary arrangements rigged up for the time being, all for the
sake of the money. You just passed through, and they milked you for
what you were worth, mostly when you were young and gullible. If
Kroll's could go, the courthouse could go, the banks could go. When
the money stopped, they could close down God Himself.