Rabbit at rest (69 page)

The doctor has grown smaller, or his desk has grown bigger,
since Harry's last visit here. He sits down, dressed, at the desk
and begins, "The pains -"

"The pains will moderate with better conditioning. Your heart
doesn't like what you're feeding it. Have you been under any
special stress lately?"

"Not really. Just the normal flack. A couple family problems,
but they seem to be clearing up."

The doctor is writing on his prescription pad. "I want you to
have blood tests and an EKG at the Community General. Then I want
to consult with Dr. Olman. Depending on how the results look, it
may be time for another catheterization."

"Oh Jesus. Not that again."

The messy eyebrows go up again, the prim dry lips pinch in. Not
a clever generous Jewish mouth. A crabby Scots economy in the way
he thinks and talks, on the verge of impatience, having seen so
many hopelessly deteriorating patients in his life. "What didn't
you like? Were the hot flashes painful?"

"It just felt funny," Harry tells him, "having that damn thing
inside me. It's the
idea of
it."

"Well, do you prefer the idea of a life-threatening
restenosis of your coronary artery? It's been, let's see, nearly
six months since you had the angioplasty at" -he reads his
records, with difficulty - "St. Joseph's Hospital in Brewer,
Pennsylvania."

"They made me
watch,"
Harry tells him. "I could see my
own damn heart on TV, full of like Rice Krispies."

A tiny Scots smile, dry as a thistle. "Was that so bad?"

"It was" - he searches for the word - "insulting."
In fact when you think about it his whole life from here on in is
apt to be insulting. Pacemakers, crutches, wheelchairs. Impotence.
Once in the Valhalla locker room a very old tall guy -
somebody's guest, he never saw him again - came out of the
shower and his muscles were so shrivelled his thighs from the back
blended right up into his buttocks so his asshole seemed to flow
down into the entire long space between his legs. His ass had lost
its cheeks and Harry couldn't stop staring at the fleshly
chasm.

Dr. Morris is making, in a deliberate, tremulous hand, notes to
add to his folder. Without looking up, he says, "There are a number
of investigative instruments now that don't involve a catheter.
Scans using IV technetium 99 can identify acutely damaged heart
muscle. Then there is echocardiography. We won't rush into
anything. Let's see what you can do on your own, with a healthier
regimen."

"Great."

"I want to see you in four weeks. Here are slips for the blood
tests and EKG, and prescriptions for a diuretic and a relaxant for
you at night. Don't forget the diet lists. Walk. Not violently, but
vigorously, two or three miles a day."

"O.K.," Rabbit says, beginning to rise from his chair, feeling
as light as a boy called into the principal's office and dismissed
with a light reprimand.

But Dr. Morris fixes him with those sucked-out old blue
eyes and says, "Do you have any sort of a job? According to my last
information here, you were in charge of a car agency."

"That's gone. My son's taken over and my wife wants me to stay
out of the kid's way. The agency was founded by her father. They'll
probably wind up having to sell it off."

"Any hobbies?"

"Well, I read a lot of history. I'm a kind of a buff, you could
say."

"You need more than that. A man needs an occupation. He needs
something to do. The best thing for a body is a healthy interest in
life. Get interested in something outside yourself, and your heart
will stop talking to you."

The smell of good advice always makes Rabbit want to run the
other way. He resumes rising from the chair and takes Dr. Morris'
many slips of paper out into the towering heat. The few other
people out on the parking lot seem tinted smoke rising from their
shadows, barely cxisting. The radio in the Celica is full of voices
yammering about Deion Sanders, about Koch losing the New York
Democratic primary to a black, about the SAT scores dropping in Lee
County, about President Bush's televised appeal to America's
schoolchildren yesterday. "The man's not
doing
anything!"
one caller howls.

Well, Rabbit thinks, doing nothing works for Bush, why not for
him? On the car seat next to him Dr. Morris' prescriptions and
medical slips and Xeroxed diet sheets lift and scatter in the
breeze from the car air-conditioning. On another station he
hears that the Phillies beat the Mets last night, two to one.
Dickie Thon homered with one out in the ninth, dropping the
pre-season pennant favorites five and a half games behind the
once-lowly Chicago Cubs. Harry tries to care but has trouble.
Ever since Schmidt retired. Get interested is the advice, but in
truth you are interested in less and less. It's Nature's way.

But he does begin to walk. He even drives to the Palmetto Palm
Mall and buys a pair of walking Nikes, with a bubble of special
hi-tech air to cushion each heel. He sets out between nine
and ten in the morning, after eating breakfast and digesting the
News-Press,
and then again between four and five,
returning to a nap and then dinner and then television and a page
or two of his book and a sound sleep, thanks to the walking. He
explores Deleon. First, he walks the curving streets of low stucco
houses within a mile of Valhalla Village, with unfenced front yards
of tallish tough grass half-hiding bits of dried palm frond,
a Florida texture in that, a cozy sere Florida scent. Encountering
a UPS man delivering or a barking small dog - a
flat-faced Pekinese with its silky long hair done up in
ribbons - is like finding life on Mars. Then, growing ever
fonder of his Nikes (that bubble in the heel, he thought at first
it was just a gimmick but maybe it does add bounce), he makes his
way to the downtown and the river, where the town first began, as a
fort in the Seminole wars and a shipping point for cattle and
cotton.

He discovers, some blocks back from the beachfront and the green
glass hotels, old neighborhoods where shadowy big spicy gentle
trees, live oaks and gums and an occasional banyan widening out on
its crutches, overhang wooden houses once painted white but flaking
down to gray bareness, with louvered windows and roofs of
corrugated tin. Music rises from within these houses, scratchy
radio music, and voices raised in argument or jabbery jubilation,
bright fragments of overheard life. The sidewalks are unpaved,
small paths such as cats make have been worn diagonally between the
trees, in and out of private property, the parched grass growing in
patches, packed dirt littered with pods and nuts. It reminds Harry
of those neighborhoods he blundered into trying to get out of
Savannah, but also of the town of his childhood, Mt. Judge in the
days of Depression and distant war, when people still sat on their
front porches, and there were vacant lots and oddshaped cornfields,
and men back from work in the factories would water their lawns in
the evenings, and people not long off the farm kept chickens in
back-yard pens, and peddled the eggs for odd pennies.
Chickens clucking and pecking and suddenly squawking: he hasn't
heard that sound for forty years, and hasn't until now realized
what he's been missing. For chicken coops tucked here and there dot
this sleepy neighborhood he has discovered.

In the daytime here, under the heavy late-summer sun,
there are few people moving, just women getting in and out of cars
with pre-school children. The slams of their car doors carry
a long way down the dusty straight streets, under the live oaks. At
some corners there are grocery stores that also sell beer and wine
in the permissive Southern way, and pastel-painted bars with
the door open on a dark interior, and video rental places with
horror and kung-fu tapes displayed in the window, the boxes'
colors being bleached by the sun. One day he passes an
old-fashioned variety store, in a clapboarded one-story
building, displaying all sorts of innocent things - erector
sets, model airplane kits, Chinese-checker boards and marbles
- that he hadn't known were still being sold. He almost goes
in but doesn't dare. He is too white.

Toward late afternoon, when he takes his second walk of the day,
the neighborhood begins to breathe, a quickness takes hold, men and
boys return to it, and Rabbit walks more briskly, proclaiming with
his stride that he is out for the exercise, just passing through,
not spying. These blocks are black, and there are miles of them, a
vast stagnant economic marsh left over from Deleon's Southern past,
supplying the hotels and condos with labor, with waiters and
security guards and chambermaids. To Harry, whose Deleon has been a
glitzy community of elderly refugees, these blocks feel like a vast
secret, and as the shadows lengthen under the trees, and the
chickens cease their day-long clucking, his senses widen to
grasp the secret better, as when in whispering knickers he would
move through Mt. Judge unseen, no taller than a privet hedge,
trying to grasp the unspeakable adult meaning of the lit windows,
of the kitchen noises filtering across the yards mysterious and
damp as jungles. An unseen child would cry, a dog would bark, and
he would tingle with the excitement of simply being himself, at
this point of time and space, with worlds to know and forever to
live, Harold C. Angstrom, called Hassy in those lost days never to
be relived. He prolongs his walks, feeling stronger, more
comfortable in this strange city where he is at last beginning to
exist as more than a visitor; but as darkness approaches, and the
music from the glowing slatted windows intensifies, he begins to
feel conspicuous, his whiteness begins to glimmer, and he heads
back to the car, which he has taken to parking in a lot or at a
meter downtown, as base for his widening explorations.

Coming back one day around six-thirty, just in time for a
shower and a look at the news while his TV dinner heats in the
oven, he is startled by the telephone's ringing. He has ceased to
listen for it as intensely as in that first lonely week. When it
does ring, it has been one of those recordings ("Hello there, this
is Sandra") selling health insurance or a no-frills burial
plan or reduced-fee investment services, going through all
the numbers by computer, you wonder how it pays, Harry always hangs
up and can't imagine who would listen and sign up for this stuff.
But this time the caller is Nelson, his son.

"Dad?"

"Yes," he says, gathering up his disused voice, trying to
imagine what you can say to a son whose wife you've boffed.
"Nellie," he says, "how the hell is everybody?"

The distant voice is gingerly, shy, also not sure what is
appropriate. "We're fine, pretty much."

"You're staying clean?" He didn't mean to take the offensive so
sharply; the other voice, fragile in its distance, is stunned into
silence for a moment.

"You mean the drugs. Sure. I don't even think about coke, except
at NA meetings. Like they say, you give your life over to a higher
power. You ought to try it, Dad."

"I'm working on it. Listen, no kidding, I am. I'm proud ofyou,
Nelson. Keep taking it a day at a time, that's all anybody can
do."

Again, the boy seems momentarily stuck. Maybe this came over as
too preachy. Who is he to preach? Shit, he was just trying to
share, like you're supposed to. Harry holds his tongue.

"There's been so much going on around here," Nelson tells him,
"I really haven't thought about myself that much. A lot of my
problem, I think, was idleness. Hanging around the lot all day
waiting for some action, for the customers to show up, really preys
on your selfconfidence. I mean, you have no control. It was
degrading."

"I did it, for fifteen years I did it, every day."

"Yeah, but you have a different sort of temperament. You're more
happy-go-lucky."

"Stupid, you mean."

"Hey Dad, I didn't call up to quarrel. This isn't exactly fun
for me, I've been putting it off. But I got some things to
say."

"O.K., say 'em." This
isn't working out.
He doesn't
want to be this way, he is putting his anger at Janice onto the
kid. Her silence has hurt him. He can't stop, adding, "You've sure
taken your time saying anything, I've been down here all by myself
for two weeks. I saw old Dr. Morris and he thinks I'm so far gone I
should stop eating."

"Well," Nelson says back, "if you were so crazy to talk you
could have come over that night instead of getting in the car and
disappearing. We weren't going to kill you, we just wanted to talk
it through, to understand what had happened, really, in terns of
family dynamics. Pru's as good as admitted it was a way of getting
in touch with her own father."

"With Blubberlips Lubell? Tell her thanks a lot." But he is not
displeased to hear Nelson taking a firmer tone with him. You're not
a man in this world until you've got on top of your father. In his
own case, it was easier, the system had beaten Pop so far down
already. "Coming over there that night felt like a set-up,"
he explains to Nelson.

"Well, Mom didn't think any of us should try to get in touch if
that's the kind of cowardly trick you were going to pull. She
wasn't too happy you telephoned Pru instead of her, either."

"I kept trying our number but she's never home."

"Well, whatever. She wanted me to let you know a couple things.
One, she has an offer on the house, not as much as she'd hoped for,
one eighty-five, but the market's pretty flat right now and
she thinks we should take it. It would reduce the debt to Brewer
Trust to the point where we could manage it."

"Let me get this straight. This is the Penn Park house you're
talking about? The little gray stone house I've always loved?"

"What other house could you think? We can't tell the Mt. Judge
house -where would we all live?"