“Elvira,” he says, always enjoying pronouncing her name, “did you see this morning in the paper where four men were charged with a felony for chaining themselves to a car in front of an abortion clinic? And with contributing to the delinquency of a minor since they had a seventeen-year-old boy along?” He knows where she stands: pro-choice. All these independent bimbos are. He takes a kind of pro-life tilt to gall her but his heart isn’t really in it and she knows it. She leaves her desk and comes striding toward him, thrillingly thin, holding the completed NV-1s, her wide jawed little head balanced with its pulled-back shiny-brown hair on her slender neck, her dangling big gold earrings shaped like Brazil nuts. He retreats a step and the three of them stand together at the window, Harry between them and a head taller.
“Wouldn’t you know,” she says, “it would be all men. Why do they care so much? Why are they so passionate about what some women they don’t even know do with their bodies?”
“They think it’s murder,” Harry says. “They think the fetus is a little separate person from the morning after on.”
His way ofputting it feeds into her snort of disgust. “Tccha, they don’t know what they think,” she says. “If men could get knocked up this wouldn’t even be a debate. Would it, Benny?”
She is bringing him in to dilute whatever Harry is trying to do to her with this provocative topic. Benny says carefully, huskily, “My church says abortion is a sin.”
“And you believe them, until you want to do it, right? Tell us about you and Maria - you use birth control? Seventy per cent of young married Catholics do, you know that?”
A strange aspect of his encounter with Pru, Harry remembers, had been the condom she had produced, out of the pocket of her shorty bathrobe. Either she always kept one there or had foreseen fucking him before coming into the room. He wasn’t used to them, not since the Army, but went along with it without a protest, it was her show. The thing had been a squeeze, he had been afraid he couldn’t keep up his own pressure against it, and his pubic hair, where he had some left after the angioplasty, the way they shaved him, got caught at the base in the unrolling, a little practical fussing there, she helped in the dim light, it maybe had made him slower to come, not a bad thing, as she came twice, under him once and then astraddle, rain whipping at the window behind the drawn shade, her hips so big and broad in his hands he didn’t feel fat himself, her tits atwitter as she jiggled in pursuit of the second orgasm, he near to fainting with worry over joggling his defective heart. A certain matter-of-fact shamelessness about Pru reduced a bit the poetry of his first sight of her naked and pale like that street of blossoming trees. She did it all but was blunt about it and faintly wooden, as if the dressmaker’s dummy in the dark behind him had grown limbs and a head with swinging carrot-colored hair. To keep his prick up he kept telling himself, This is the first time I’ve ever fucked a left-handed woman.
Benny is blushing. He’s not used to talking this way with a woman. “Maybe so,” he admits. “If it’s not a mortal sin, you don’t have to confess it unless you want to.”
“That saves the priest a lot of embarrassment,” Elvira tells him. “Suppose no matter what you two use Maria kept getting knocked up, what would you do? You don’t want that precious little girl of yours to feel crowded, you can give her the best the way things are. What’s more important, quality of life for the family you already have, or a little knot of protein the size of a termite?”
Benny has a kind of squeaking girlish voice that excitement can bring out. “Lay off, Ellie. Don’t make me think about it. You’re offending my religion. I wouldn’t mind a couple more kids, what the hell. I’m young.”
Harry tries to help him out. “Who’s to say what’s the quality of life?” he asks Elvira. “Maybe the extra kid is the one that’s going to invent the phonograph.”
“Not out of the ghetto he isn’t. He’s the kid that mugs you for crack money sixteen years later.”
“You don’t have to get racist about it,” Harry says, having been mugged in a sense by a white kid, his own son.
“It’s the opposite of racist, it’s realistic,” Elvira tells him. “It’s the poor black teenage mother whose right to abortion these crazy fundamentalist jerks are trying to take away.”
“Yeah,” he responds, “it’s the poor black teenage mother who wants to have the baby, because she never had a doll to play with and she loves the idea of sticking the taxpayer with another welfare bill. Up yours, Whitey - that’s what the birth statistics are saying.”
“Now who’s sounding racist?”
“Realistic, you mean.”
Relaxed in the aftermath of love, and grateful to be still alive, he had asked Pru how queer she thought Nelson was, with all this palling around with Lyle and Slim. Her breath, in the watery light from the window, was made visible by fine jets of inhaled cigarette smoke as she thoughtfully answered, only a little taken aback by the question, “No, Nelson likes girls. He’s a mamma’s boy but he takes after you that way. They just look bigger to him than to you.” Coming into the room less than an hour later, Janice had sniffed the cigarette smoke but he had pretended to be too sleepy to discuss it. Pru took the second butt away with the condom but the first one, drowned over on the windowsill, was by next morning so saturated and flattened it could have been there for ages, a historical relic of Nelson and Melanie. Rabbit sighs and says, “You’re right, Elvira. People should have a choice. Even if they make bad ones.” From the room he was in with Pru his mind moves to the one he had shared with Ruth, one flight up on Summer Street, and the last time he saw it: she told him she was pregnant and called him Mr. Death and he begged her to have the baby. Have it, have it you say: how? Will you marry me? She mocked him, but pleaded too, and in the end, yes, to be realistic, probably did have the abortion. If you can’t work it out, I’m dead to you; I’m dead to you and this baby of yours is dead too. That nurse with the round face and sweet disposition in St. Joseph’s had nothing to do with him, just like Ruth told him the last time he saw her, in her farmhouse ten years ago. He had had one daughter and she died; God didn’t trust him with another. He says aloud, “Schmidt did what Rose is too dumb to: quit, when you’ve had it. Take your medicine, don’t prolong the agony with all these lawyers.”
Benny and Elvira look at him, alanned by how his mind has wandered. But he enjoys his sensation, of internal roaming. When he first came to the lot as Chief Sales Rep, after Fred Springer had died, he was afraid he couldn’t fill the space. But now as an older man, with his head so full of memories, he fills it without even trying.
Through the plate glass he sees a couple in their thirties, maybe early forties, everybody looks young to him now, out on the lot among the cars, stooping to peek into the interiors and at the factory sticker on the windows. The woman is plump and white and in a halter top showing her lardy arms, and the man darker, much darker - Hispanics come in all these shades - and skinny, in a grape-colored tank top cut off at the midriff: Their ducking heads move cautiously, as if afraid of an Indian ambush out in the prairie of glittering car roofs, a pioneer couple in their way, at least in this part of the world where the races don’t much mix.
Benny asks Elvira, “You want ‘em, or do I?”
She says, “You do. If the woman needs a little extra, bring her in and I’ll chat her up. But don’t aim it all at her, just because she’s white. They’re both going to be miffed if you snub the man.”
“Whaddeya think I am, a bigot?” Benny says mock-comically, but his demeanor is sad and determined as he walks out of the air-conditioning into the June humidity and heat.
“You shouldn’t ride him about his religion,” Harry tells Elvira.
“I don’t. I just think that damn Pope he’s got ought to be put in jail for what he does to women.”
Peggy Fosnacht, Rabbit remembers, before she had a breast cut off and then upped and died, had been wild with anger toward the Pope. Anger is what gives you cancer, he has read somewhere. If you??
?ve been around long enough, he reflects, you’ve heard it all, the news and the commentary both, churned like the garbage in a Disposall that doesn’t drain, the media every night trying to whip you up into a frenzy so you’ll run out and buy all the depressing stuff they advertise, laxatives and denture adhesive cream, Fixodent and Sominex and Tylenol and hemorrhoid medicine and mouthwash against morning mouth. Why does the evening news assume the people who watch it are in such decrepit plugged-up shape? It’s enough to make you switch the channel. The commercials revolt him, all that friendly jawing among these folksy crackerbarrel types about rectal itching and burning, and the one of the young/old beautiful woman in soft focus stretching so luxuriously in her white bathrobe because she’s just taken a shit and all those people in the Ex-Lax ad saying “Good morning” one after the other so you can’t help picturing the world filling up with our smiling American excrement, we’ll have to pay poor third-world countries to dump it pretty soon, like toxic waste. “Why pick on the Pope?” Harry asks. “Bush is just as bad, anti-choice.”
“Yes, but he’ll change when the women start voting Republicans out. There’s no way to vote the Pope out.”
“Do you ever get the feeling,” he asks her, “now that Bush is in, that we’re kind of on the sidelines, that we’re sort of like a big Canada, and what we do doesn’t much matter to anybody else? Maybe that’s the way it ought to be. It’s a kind of relief, I guess, not to be the big cheese.”
Elvira has decided to be amused. She fiddles with one of her Brazil-nut earrings and looks up at him slantwise. “You matter to everybody, Harry, if that’s what you’re hinting at.”
This is the most daughterly thing she has ever said to him. He feels himself blush. “I wasn’t thinking of me, I was thinking of the country. You know who I blame? The old Ayatollah, for calling us the Great Satan. It’s like he put the evil eye on us and we shrank. Seriously. He really stuck it to us, somehow.”
“Don’t live in a dream world, Harry. We still need you down here.”
She goes out to the lot, where a quartet of female teenagers have showed up, all in jackets of stone-washed denim. Who knows, even teenagers these days have money enough for a Toyota. Maybe it’s an all-girl rock band, shopping for a van to tour in. Harry wanders in to the office where the visiting accountants are nesting, day after day, in piles of paper. The one in charge has a rubbery tired face with dark rings under his eyes, and the assistant seems to be a kind of moron, a simpleton at speaking anyway, with not enough back to his head. As if to make up for any deficiency he always wears a clean white shirt with a tight necktie, pinned to his chest with a tieclip.
“Ah,” the one in charge says, “just the guy we need. Does the name Angus Barfield mean anything to you?” The rings under his eyes are so deep and deeply bruised they go all the way around his sockets; he looks like a raccoon. Though his face shows a lot of wear, his hair is black as shoe polish, and lies as flat on his head as if painted in place. These accountants have to be tidy, all those numbers they write down, thousands and millions, and never a five that could be confused with a three or a seven with a one. As he cocks a ringed eye at Harry waiting for an answer, his rubbery mouth slides around in a restless wise-guy motion.
“No,” Harry says, “and yet, wait. There’s a faint bell. Barfield.”
“A good guy for you to know,” the accountant says, with a sly grimace and twist of his lips. “From December to April, he was buying a Toyota a month.” He checks a paper under his shirtsleeved forearm. He has very long black hairs on his wrists. “A Corolla four-door, a Tercel five-speed hatchback, a Canny wagon, a deluxe two-passenger 4-Runner, and in April he really went fancy and took on a Supra Turbo with a sport roof, to the tune of twenty-five seven. Totals up to just under seventy-five K. All in the same name and the same address on Willow Street.”
“Where’s Willow?”
“That’s one of the side streets up above Locust, you know. The area’s gotten kind of trendy.”
“Locust,” Harry repeats, struggling to recall. He has heard the odd name “Angus” before, from Nelson’s lips. Going off to a party in north Brewer.
“Single white male. Excellent credit ratings. Not much of a haggler, paid list price every time. The only trouble with him as a customer,” the accountant says, “is according to city records he’s been dead for six months. Died before Christmas.” He purses his lips into a little bunch under one nostril and lifts his eyebrows so high his nostrils dilate in sympathy.
“I got it,” Harry says, with a jarring pounce of his heart. “That’s Slim. Angus Barfield was the real name of a guy everybody called Slim. He was a, a gay I guess, about my son’s age. Had a good job in downtown Brewer - administered one of those HUD jobtraining programs for high-school dropouts. He was a trained psychologist, I think Nelson once told me.”
The moronic assistant, who has been listening with the staring effort of a head that can only hold one thing at a time, giggles: the humor of insanity spills over onto psychologists. The other twists up the lower part of his face in a new way, as if demonstrating knots. “Bank loan officers love government employees,” he says. “They’re sure and steady, see?”
Since the man seems to expect it, Harry nods, and the accountant dramatically slaps the tidy chaos of papers spread out on the desk. “December to April, Brewer Trust extended five car loans to this Angus Barfield, made over to Springer Motors.”
“How could they, to the same guy? Common sense -“
“Since computers, my friend, common sense has gone out the window. It’s joined your Aunt Matilda’s ostrich-feather hat. The auto-loan department of a bank is just tiddledywinks; the computer checked his credit and liked it and the loan was approved. The checks were cashed but never showed up in the company credits. We think your pal Lyle opened a dummy somewhere.” The man stabs a stack of bank statements with a finger; it has black hairs between the knuckles and bends back so far Rabbit winces and looks away. This rubbery guy is one of those born teachers Rabbit has instinctively avoided all his life. “Let me put it like this. A computer is like a Frenchman. It seems real smart until you know the language. Once you know the language, you realize it’s dumb as hell. Quick, sure. But quick ain’t the same as smart.”
“But,” Harry gropes to say, “but for Lyle and Nelson, Lyle especially, to use poor Slims name in a scam like this when he had just died, when he was just about buried - would they have actually been so hard-hearted?”
The accountant slumps a little under the weight of such naiveté. “These were hungry boys. The dead have no feelings, that I’ve heard about. The guy’s credit hadn’t been pulled from the computer, and between these loans from Brewer Trust and the diddled inventory with Mid-Atlantic Toyota, some two hundred grand was skimmed from this operation, that we can verify so far. That’s a lot of Toll House cookies.”
The assistant giggles again. Rabbit, hearing the sum, goes cold with the premonition that this debt will swallow him. Here amid all these papers arrayed on the desk where he himself used to work, keeping a roll of Life Savers in the lefthand middle drawer, a fatal hole is being hatched. He taps his jacket pocket for the reassuring lump of the Nitrostat bottle. He’ll take one as soon as he gets away. The night he and Pru fucked, both of them weary and half crazy with their fates, the old bed creaking beneath them had seemed another kind of nest, an interwoven residue of family fortunes, Ma Springer’s musty old-lady scent released from the mattress by this sudden bouncing where for years she had slept alone, an essence of old mothballed blankets stored in attic cedar chests among plushbound family albums and broken cane-seated rockers and veiled hats in round hat-boxes, an essence arising not only from the abused bed but from the old sewing apparatus stored here and Fred’s forgotten neckties in the closet and the dust balls beneath the venerable four-poster. All those family traces descended to this, this coupling by thunder and lightning. It was now as if it had never been. He and Pru are severely polite with each other, and Janice, ever mo
re the working girl, has ceased to create many occasions when the households mingle. The Father’s Day cookout was an exception, and the children were tired and cranky and bug-bitten by the time the grilled hamburgers were finally ready to be consumed.
Harry laughs, as idiotically as the assistant accountant. “Poor Slim,” he says, trying to harmonize with the head accountant’s slanginess. “Some pal Lyle turned out to be, buying him all those wheels he didn’t need.”
On July Fourth, for Judy’s sake, he marches in a Mt. Judge parade. Her Girl Scout troop is in it and the troop leader’s husband, Clarence Eifert, is on the organizing committee. They needed a man tall enough to be Uncle Sam and Judy told Mrs. Eifert that her grandfather was wonderfully tall. Actually, six three isn’t tall by today’s standards, you’d be a dwarf in the NBA at that height, but several members of the committee, a generation older than Mr. Eifert, remembered Rabbit Angstrom from his highschool glory days and became enthusiastic, even though Harry lives now in Penn Park on the other side of Brewer. He was a Mt. Judge boy and something of a hero once. He has become more corpulent than our national symbol should be but he has the right fair skin and pale blue eyes and a good soldierly bearing. He served during Korea. He did his bit.