Rabbit Redux (34 page)

            "It won't go," she says; one aster rests on the toe of one ballet slipper. Her face has shed expression.

            Skeeter's voice whines and snarls in its metal shell. "Knew I should never come out of that house. Jill honey, I know why. Can't stay off the stuff; right? No will at all, right? Easier than having any will, hand old Skeeter over to the law, hey, right?"

            Rabbit asks her, "What's he saying?"

            "He's saying he's scared."

            Skeeter is shouting, "Get them dumb honkies out of the way, I'm making a run for it. How far down on the other side of that fence?"

            Rabbit says, "Smart move, you'll really stick out up here in the boondocks. Talk about a nigger in the woodpile."

            "Don't you nigger me, you honky prick. Tell you one thing, you turn me in I'll get you all greased if I have to send to Philly to do it. It's not just me, we're everywhere, hear? Now you fuckers get this car to go, hear me? Get it to go."

            Skeeter issues all this while crouched down between the leather backs of the bucket seats and the rear window. His panic is disgusting and may be contagious. Rabbit lusts to pull him out of his shell into the sunshine, but is afraid to reach in; he might get stung. He slams the Porsche door shut on the churning rasping voice, and at the rear of the car slams down the hood. "You two stay here. Calm him down, keep him in the car. I'll walk to a gas station, there must be one up the road."

            He runs for a while, Skeeter's venomous fright making his own bladder burn. After all these nights together betrayal is the Negro's first thought. Maybe natural, three hundred years of it. Rabbit is running, running to keep that black body pinned back there, so it won't panic and flee. Like running late to school. Skeeter has become a duty. Late, late. Then an antique red flying-horse sign suspended above sunset-dyed fields. It is an old-fashioned garage: an unfathomable work space black with oil, the walls precious with wrenches, fan belts, peen hammers, parts. An old Coke machine, the kind that dispenses bottles, purrs beside the hydraulic lift. The mechanic, a weedy young man with a farmer's drawl and black palms, drives him in a jolting tow truck back up the highway. The side window is broken; air whistles there, hungrily gushes.

            "Seized up," is the mechanic's verdict. He asks Jill, "When'd you last put oil in it?"

            "Oil? Don't they do it when they put the gas in?"

            "Not unless you ask."

            "You dumb mutt," Rabbit says to Jill.

            Her mouth goes prim and defiant. "Skeeter's been driving the car too."

            Skeeter, while the mechanic was poking around in the engine and pumping the gas pedal, uncurled from behind the seats and straightened in the air, his glasses orange discs in the last of the sun. Rabbit asks him, "How far've you been taking this crate?"

            "Oh," the black man says, fastidious in earshot of the mechanic, _"here and there. Never recklessly. I wasn't aware;" he minces on, "the automobile was your property."

            "It's just," he says lamely, "the waste. The carelessness."

            Jill asks the mechanic, "Can you fix it in an hour? My little brother here has homework to do."

            The mechanic speaks only to Rabbit. "The enchine's destroyed. The pistons have fused to the cylinders. The nearest place to fix a car like this is probably Pottstown."

            "Can we leave it with you until we arrange to have somebody come for it?"

            "I'll have to charge a dollar a day for the parking."

            "Sure. Swell."

            "And that'll be twenty for the towing."

            He pays. The mechanic tows the Porsche back to the garage. They ride with him, Jill and Harry in the cab ("Careful now," the mechanic says as Jill slides over, "I don't want to get grease on that nice white dress"), Skeeter and Nelson in the little car, dragged backwards at a slant. At the garage, the mechanic phones for a cab to take them into West Brewer. Skeeter disappears behind a smudged door and flushes the toilet repeatedly. Nelson settles to watching the mechanic unhitch the car and listens to him talk about "enchines." Jill and Harry walk outside. Crickets are shrilling in the dark cornfields. A quarter-moon, with one sick eye, scuds above the flying horse sign. The garage's outer lights are switched off. He notices something white on her slipper. The little flower that fell has stuck there. He stoops and hands it to her. She kisses it to thank him, then, silently lays it to rest in a trash barrel full of oil-wiped paper towels and punctured cans. "Don't get your dress greasy." Car tires crackle; an ancient fifties Buick, with those tailfins patterned on B-19s, pulls into their orbit. The taxi driver is fat and chews gum. On the way back to Brewer, his head bulks as a pyramid against the oncoming headlights, motionless but for the rhythm of chewing. Skeeter sits beside him. "Beautiful day," Rabbit calls forward to him.

            Jill giggles. Nelson is asleep on her lap. She toys with his hair, winding it around her silent fingers.

            "Fair for this time of the year," is the slow answer.

            "Beautiful country up here. We hardly ever get north of the city. We were driving around sightseeing."

            "Not too many sights to see."

            "The engine seized right up on us, I guess the car's a real mess."

            "I guess."

            "My daughter here forgot to put any oil in it, that's the way young people are these days, ruin one car and on to the next. Material things don't mean a thing to 'em."

            "To some, I guess."

            Skeeter says sideways to him, "Yo' sho' meets a lot Bo nice folks hevin' en acci-dent lahk dis, a lot ob naas folks way up no'th heah."

            "Yes, well," the driver says, and that is all he says until he says to Rabbit, having stopped on Vista Crescent, "Eighteen."

            "Dollars? For ten miles?"

            "Twelve. And I got to go back twelve now."

            Rabbit goes to the driver's side to pay, while the others run into the house. The man leans out and asks, "Know what you're doing?"

            "Not exactly."

            "They'll knife you in the back every time."

            "Who? "

            The driver leans closer; by street-lamplight Rabbit sees a wide sad face, sallow, a whale's lipless mouth clamped in a melancholy set, a horseshoe-shaped scar on the meat of his nose. His answer is distinct: "Jigaboos."

            Embarrassed for him, Rabbit turns away and sees - Nelson is right - a crowd of children. They are standing across the Crescent, some with bicycles, watching this odd car unload. This crowd phenomenon on the bleak terrain of Penn Villas alarms him: as if growths were to fester on the surface of the moon.

            The incident emboldens Skeeter. His skin has dared the sun again. Rabbit comes home from work to find him and Nelson shooting baskets in the driveway. Nelson bounces the ball to his father and Rabbit's one-handed set from twenty feet out swishes. Pretty. "Hey," Skeeter crows, so all the homes in Penn Villas can -hear, "where'd you get that funky old style of shooting a basketball? You were tryin' to be comical, right?"

            "Went in," Nelson tells him loyally.

            "Shit, boy, a one-armed dwarf could have blocked it. T'get that shot off you need a screen two men thick, right? You gotta jump and shoot, jump and shoot." He demonstrates; his shot misses but looks right: the ball held high, a back-leaning ascent into the air, a soft release that would arch over any defender. Rabbit tries it, but finds his body heavy, the effort of lifting jarring. The ball flies badly. Says Skeeter, "You got a white man's lead gut, but I adore those hands." They scrimmage one on one; Skeeter is quick and slick, slithering by for the layup on the give-and-go to Nelson again and again. Rabbit cannot stop him, his breath begins to ache in his chest, but there are moments when the ball and his muscles and the air overhead and the bodies competing with his all feel taut and unified and defiant of gravity. Then the October chill bites into his sweat and he goes into the house. Jill has been sleeping upstairs. She sleeps more and more lately, a dazed evading sleep that he finds insulting. When she comes downstairs, in that boring white dress, brushing back sticky hair from her cheeks, he asks roughly, "Dja do anything about the car?"

            "Sweet, what would I do?"

            "You could call your mother."

            "I can't. She and Stepdaddy would make a thing. They'd come for me."

            "Maybe that's a good idea."

            "Stepdaddy's a creep." She moves past him, not focusing, into the kitchen. She looks into the refrigerator. "You didn't shop."

            "That's your job."

            "Without a car?"

            "Christ, you can walk up to the Acme in five minutes."

            "People would see Skeeter."

            "They see him anyway. He's outside horsing around with Nelson. And evidently you've been letting him drive all around Pennsylvania." His anger recharges itself lead gut. "Goddammit, how can you just run an expensive car like that into the ground and just let it sit? There's people in the world could live for ten years on what that car cost."

            "Don't, Harry. I'm weak."

            "O.K. I'm sorry." He tugs her into his arms. She rocks sadly against him, rubbing her nose on his shirt. But her body when dazed has an absence, an unconnectedness, that feels disagreeable against his skin. He itches to sneeze.

            Jill is murmuring, "I think you miss your wife."

            "That bitch. Never."

            "She's like anybody else, caught in this society. She wants to be alive while she is alive."

            "Don't you?"

            "Sometimes. But I know it's not enough. It's how they get you. Let me go now. You don't like holding me, I can feel it. I just remembered, some frozen chicken livers behind the ice cream. But they take forever to thaw."

            Six-o'clock news. The pale face caught behind the screen, unaware that his head, by some imperfection in reception at 26 Vista Crescent, is flattened, and his chin rubbery and long, sternly says, "Chicago. Two thousand five hundred Illinois National Guardsmen remained on active duty today in the wake of a day of riots staged by members of the extremist faction of the Students for a Democratic Society. Windows were smashed, cars overturned, policemen assaulted by the young militants whose slogan is" - sad, stern pause; the bleached face lifts toward the camera, the chin stretches, the head flattens like an anvil - "Bring the War Home." Film cuts of white-helmeted policemen flailing at nests of arms and legs, of long-haired girls being dragged, of sudden bearded faces shaking fists that want to rocket out through the television screen; then back to clips of policemen swinging clubs, which seems balletlike and soothing to Rabbit. Skeeter, too, likes it. "Right on!" he cries. "Hit that honky snob again!" In the commercial break he turns and explains to Nelson, "It's beautiful, right?"

            Nelson asks, "Why? Aren't they protesting the war?"

            "Sure as a hen has balls they are. What those crackers protesting is they gotta wait twenty years to get their daddy's share of the -pie. They want it now."

            "What would they do with it?"

            "Do, boy? They'd eat it, that's what they'd do."

            The commercial - an enlarged view of a young woman's mouth - is over. "Meanwhile, within the courtroom, the trial of the Chicago Eight continued on its turbulent course. Presiding Judge Julius J. Hoffman, no relation to Defendant Abbie Hoffman, several times rebuked Defendant Bobby Seale, whose outbursts contained such epithets as" - again, the upward look, the flattened head, the disappointed emphasis - "pig, fascist, and racist." A courtroom sketch of Seale is flashed.

            Nelson asks, "Skeeter, do you like him?"

            "I do not much cotton," Skeeter says, "to establishment niggers."

            Rabbit has to laugh. "That's ridiculous. He's as full of hate as you are."

            Skeeter switches off the set. His tone is a preacher's, ladylike. "I am by no means full of hate. I am full of love, which is a dynamic force. Hate is a paralyzing force. Hate freezes. Love strikes and liberates. Right? Jesus liberated the money-changers from the temple. The new Jesus will liberate the new money-changers. The old Jesus brought a sword, right? The new Jesus will also bring a sword. He will be a living flame of love. Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains. As to Robert Seale, any black man who has John Kennel Badbreath and Leonard Birdbrain giving him fund-raising cocktail parties is one house nigger in my book. He has gotten into the power bag, he has gotten into the publicity bag, he has debased the coinage of his soul and is thereupon as they say irrelevant. We black men came here without names, we are the future's organic seeds, seeds have no names, right?"

            "Right," Rabbit says, a habit he has acquired.

            Jill's chicken livers have burned edges and icy centers.

            Eleven-o'clock news. A gauzy-bearded boy, his face pressed so hard against the camera the focus cannot be maintained, screams, "Off the pigs! All power to the people!"

            An unseen interviewer mellifluously asks him, "How would you describe the goals of your organization?"

            "Destruction of existing repressive structures. Social control of the means of production."

            "Could you tell our viewing audience what you mean by `means of production'?"

            The camera is being jostled; the living room, darkened otherwise, flickers. "Factories. Wall Street. Technology. All that. A tiny clique of capitalists is forcing pollution down our throats, and the SST and the genocide in Vietnam and in the ghettos. All that."

            "I see. Your aim, then, by smashing windows, is to curb a runaway technology and create the basis for a new humanism."