The spaceship is upon him, with all its rivets and blinking lights. “She said that?”
“Yes she did. She said she doesn’t know how it happened, except there’d always been this little attraction between you two and that night everything seemed so desperate.”
A little attraction. He supposes that was fair, though tough. It had felt like more than that from his side. It had felt like he was seeing himself reflected, mirrored in a rangy young long-haired left-handed woman.
“Well? Is she telling the truth?”
“Well, honey, what can I say, I guess in a way -“
A big sob: he can picture Janice’s face exactly, twisted and helpless and ugly, old age collapsing in upon her.
“- but at the time,” Rabbit goes on, “it seemed sort of natural, and we haven’t done anything since, not even said a word. We’ve been pretending it didn’t happen.”
“Oh, Harry. How could you? Your own daughter-in-law. Nelson’s wife.”
He feels she is beginning to work from a script, saying standard things, and into the vault of his shocked and shamed consciousness there is admitted a whiff of boredom.
“This is the worst thing you’ve ever done, ever, ever,” Janice tells him. “The absolute worst. That time you ran away, and then Peggy, my best friend, and that poor hippie girl, and Thelma don’t think for one moment I didn’t know about Thelma - but now you’ve done something truly unforgivable.”
“Really?” The word comes out with an unintended hopeful lilt.
“I will never forgive you. Never,” Janice says, returning to a dead-level tone.
“Don’t say that,” he begs. “It was just a crazy moment that didn’t hurt anybody. Whajou put me and her in the same house at night for? Whajou think I was, dead already?”
“I had to go to class, there was a quiz, I wouldn’t have gone ordinarily, I felt so guilty. That’s a laugh. I felt guilty. I see now why they have gun laws. If I had a gun, I’d shoot you. I’d shoot you both.”
“What else did Pru say?” Answering, he figures, will bring her down a bit from this height of murderous rage.
Janice answers, “She didn’t say much of anything. Just the flat facts and then folded her hands in her lap and kept giving me and Nelson that defiant stare of hers. She didn’t seem repentant, just tough, and obviously not wanting me to come live in the house. That’s why she told.”
He feels himself being drawn into alignment with Janice, against the others, with a couple’s shared vision, squinting this way at Pru. He feels relieved, beginning already to be forgiven, and faintly disappointed.
“She is tough,” he agrees, soothingly. “Pru. Whaddeya expect, from an Akron steamfitter’s daughter?” He decides against telling Janice, now at least, how in making their love Pru had come twice, and he had faintly felt used, expertly.
His reprieve is only just beginning. It will take weeks and months and years of whittling at it. With her new business sense Janice won’t give anything away cheap. “We want you over here, Harry,” she says.
“Me? Why? It’s late,” he says. “I’m bushed from all those bushes.”
“Don’t think you’re out of this and can be cute. This is a hideous thing. None of us will ever be the same.”
“We never are,” he dares say.
“Think of how Nelson feels.”
This hurts. He hadn’t wanted to think about it.
She tells him, “Nelson is being very calm and using all that good psychological work they did at the treatment center. He says this will need a lot of processing and we must begin right now. If we don’t start right in we’ll all harden in our positions.”
Rabbit tries to conspire again, to elicit another wifely description. “Yeah -how did the kid take it?”
But she only says, “I think he’s in shock. He himself said he hasn’t begun to get in touch with his real feelings.”
Harry says, “He can’t be on too high a horse after all the stunts he’s been pulling all these years. Coke whores all over Brewer, and if you ask me that Elvira over at the lot is more than just a token skirt. When she’s around he sounds like he’s been given a shot of joy juice.”
But Janice doesn’t relent. “You have hurt Nelson incredibly much,” she says. “Anything he does from now on you can’t blame him. I mean, Harry, what you’ve done is the kind of perverted thing that makes the newspapers. It was monstrous.”
“Honey -“
“Quit it with the ‘honey.”’
“What’s this `perverted’? We aren’t at all blood-related. It was just like a normal one-night stand. She was hard-up and I was at death’s door. It was her way of playing nurse.”
More sobbing, he never knows what will trigger it. “Harry, you can’t make jokes.”
“Those weren’t jokes.” But he feels chastised, dry-mouthed, spanked.
“You get right over here and help undo some of the damage you’ve done for once in your life.” And she hangs up, having sounded comically like her mother in the juicy way she pronounced “for once.”
A life knows few revelations; these must be followed when they come. Rabbit sees clearly what to do. His acts take on a decisive haste. He goes upstairs and packs. The brown canvas suit bag. The big yellow rigid Tourister with the dent in one corner where an airline handler slung it. Jockey shorts, T-shirts, socks, polo shirts in their pastel tints, dress shirts in their plastic envelopes, golf slacks, Bermuda shorts. A few ties though he has never liked ties. All his clothes are summer clothes these days; the wool suits and sweaters wait in mothproof bags for fall days, October into November, that will not come this year, for him. He takes four lightweight sports coats and two suits, one a putty-colored and the other the shiny gray like armor. In case there’s a wedding or a funeral. A raincoat, a couple of sweaters. A pair of black laced shoes tucks into two pockets of his folding suit bag and blue-and-white Nikes into the sides of the suitcase. He should start jogging again. His toothbrush and shaving stuff. His pills, buckets of them. What else? Oh yes. He grabs The First Salute from his bedside table and tucks it in, he’ll finish it if it kills him. He leaves a light burning in the upstairs hall to discourage burglars, and the carriage lamp beside the front door numbered 14 1/2. He loads the car in two trips, feeling the weight of the suitcases in his chest. He looks around the bare hall. He goes into the den, his feet silent on the Antron wall-to-wall carpeting, and looks out the lozenge panes at the glowing night-time silhouette of the weeping cherry. He plumps the pillow and straightens the arm guards on the wing chair he fell asleep in, not long ago but on the far side of a gulf: The he who fell asleep was somebody else, a pathetic somebody. At the front door again, he feels a night breeze on his face, hears the muffled rush of traffic over on Penn Boulevard. He sets the latch and softly slams the door. Janice has her key. He thinks of her over there in the Springers’ big stucco house that always reminded him of an abandoned enormous ice-cream stand. Forgive me.
Rabbit gets into the Celica. Take a Ride in the Great Indoors: one of the new slogans they’d been trying to push. You can have too many slogans, they begin to cancel out. The engine starts up; reverse gear carries him smoothly backwards. 1 Love When You Set Me Free, Toyota. The digital clock says 10:07. Traffic on Penn Boulevard is starting to thin, the diners and gas stations are beginning to darken. He turns right at the blinking red light and then right again at the Brewer bypass along the Running Horse River. The road lifts above the trees at a point near the elephant-gray gas tanks and the bypassed old city shows a certain grandeur. Its twentystory courthouse built in the beginning of the Depression is still the tallest building, the concrete eagles with flared wings at each corner lit by spotlights, and the sweeping shadow of Mt. Judge, crowned by the star-spatter of the Pinnacle Hotel, hangs behind everything like an unmoving tidal wave. The streetlamps show Brewer’s brick tint like matches cupped in ruddy hands. Then, quite quickly, the city and all it holds are snatched from view. Groves of weed trees half-hide the empty factories along
the river, and one might be anywhere in the United States on a four-lane divided highway.
He and Janice have done this Southward drive so often he knows the options: he can get off at 222 and proceed directly but pokily toward Lancaster through a string of stoplight-ridden Brewer suburbs, or he can stay on 422 a few miles to 176 and head directly south and then cut west to Lancaster and York. The first time he tried this trip, thirty years ago last spring come to think of it, he made the mistake of heading south too soon, toward Wilmington and a vision ofbarefoot du Pont women. But the East slants west, and the trick is to bear west until 83, which didn’t exist in those days, and then drive south right into the maw of that two-headed monster, Baltimore-Washington. Monstrous, she said. Well, in a way, you could say, being alive is monstrous. Those crazy molecules. All by themselves? Never.
He turns on the radio, searching among the jabber of rock music and talk shows for the sweet old tunes, the tunes he grew up on. It used to be easier to search with the old dial you twisted, instead of these jumpy digitized scan buttons: you could feel your way. The scan comes suddenly upon the silky voices of Dinah Shore and Buddy Clark entwined in the duet of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” Thrilling, it turns his spine to ice water, when, after all that melodious banter it’s hard to understand every word of, they halt, and harmonize on the chorus line. Coooold, out, side. Then this same station of oldies, fading under the underpasses, crackling when the road curves too close to power lines, offers up a hit he’s totally forgotten, how could he have? - the high-school dances, the dolled-up couples shuffling to the languid waltz beat, the paper streamers drooping from the basketball nets, the rusty heater warmth of the dash-lit interior of Pop’s Plymouth, the living warm furtive scent, like the flavor of a food so strong you must choke it down at first, rising from between Mary Ann’s thighs. Vaya con Dios, my darling. The damp triangle of underpants, the garter belts girls wore then. The dewy smooth freshness of their bodies, all of them, sweatily wheeling beneath the crépe paper, the colored lights. Vaya con Dios, my love. Oh my. It hurts. The emotion packed into these phrases buried in some d j.’s dusty racks of 78s like the cotton wadding in bullets, like those seeds that come to life after a thousand years in some pyramid. Though the stars recycle themselves and remake all the heavy atoms Creation needs, Harry will never be that person again, that boy with that girl, his fingertips grazing the soft insides of her thighs, a few atoms rubbing off; a few molecules.
Then, “Mule Train,” by Frankie Laine, not one of the great Laines but great enough, and “It’s Magic,” by Doris Day. Those pauses back then: It’s ma- gic. They knew how to hurt you, back then when there were two eight-team baseball leagues and you could remember all the players. People then were not exactly softer, they were harder in fact, but they were easier to hurt, though in fewer places.
He has to leave 176 for 23 through Amish country, it’s the one really local stretch of road, but there shouldn’t be any buggies out this late to slow him down. Rabbit wants to see once more a place in Morgantown, a hardware store with two pumps outside, where a thickset farmer in two shirts and hairy nostrils had advised him to know where he was going before he went there. Well, now he does. He has learned the road and figured out the destination. But what had been a country hardware store was now a slick little realestate office. Where the gas pumps had been, fresh black asphalt showed under the moonlight the stark yellow stripes of diagonal parking spaces.
No, it isn’t moonlight, he sees; it is the sulfurous illumination that afflicts busy paved places all night. Though the hour is near eleven, a traffic of giant trucks heaves and snorts and groans through the sleepy stone town; the realtor’s big window is full of Polaroid snapshots of property for sale, and Route 23, once a narrow road on the ridge between two farm valleys as dark at night as manure, now blazes with the signs that are everywhere. PIZZA HUT. BURGER KING. Rent a Movie. Turkey Hill MINIt MARKET. Quilt World. Shady Maple SMORGASBORD. Village Herb Shop. Country Knives. Real estate makes him think of Janice and his heart dips at the picture of her waiting with Nelson and Pru for him to show up over at the Springers’ and panicking by now, probably imagining he’s had a car accident, and coming back with her key to the deserted house, all fluttery and hotbreathed the way she gets. Maybe he should have left a note like she did him that time. Harry dear-1 must go off a few days to think. But she said never forgive him, shoot you both, she upped the stakes, let her stew in her own juice, thinks she’s so smart suddenly, going back to school. Nelson the same way. Damned if they’re going to get him sitting in on some family-therapy session run by his own son whose big redheaded wife he’s boffed. Only really good thing he’s done all year, as he looks back on it. Damned if he’ll face the kid, give him the satisfaction, all white in the gills from this new grievance. Rabbit doesn’t want to get counselled.
The eleven-o’clock news comes on the radio. Jim Bakker, on trial in Charlotte, North Carolina, on twenty-four counts of fraud in connection with his scandal-ridden PTL television ministry, collapsed today in court and is being held for up to sixty days for psychiatric evaluation at the Federal Correctional Institute. Dr. Basil Jackson, a psychiatrist who has been treating Bakker for nine months, said that the once-charismatic evangelist has been hallucinating: leaving the courtroom Wednesday after former PTL executive Steve Nelson collapsed on the witness stand, Bakker saw the people outside as animals intent upon attacking and injuring him. Bakker’s wife, Tammy, said from her luxurious home in Orlando, Florida, that Bakker over the phone had seemed to be experiencing a terrible emotional trauma and that she prayed with him and they agreed that they would trust in the Lord. In Los Angeles, Jessica Hahn, the former PTL secretary whose sexual encounter with Bakker in 1980 led to his downfall, told reporters, quote, I’m not a doctor but I do know about Jim Bakker. I believe Jim Bakker is a master manipulator. I think this is a sympathy stunt just like it is every time Tammy gets on TV and starts crying and saying how abused they are, end quote. In Washington, the Energy Department is searching for mysteriously missing amounts of tritium, the heavy-hydrogen isotope necessary to the making of hydrogen bombs. Also in Washington, Science magazine reports that the new bomb detector, called a TNA for thermal neutron analysis, installed today at JFK Airport in New York City, is set to detect two point five pounds of plastic explosives and would not have detected the bomb, thought to contain only one pound of Semtex explosive, which brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. In Toronto, movie superstar Marlon Brando told reporters that he has made his last movie. “It’s horrible,” he said of the motion picture, entitled The Freshman. “It’s going to be a flop, but after this, I’m retiring. You can’t imagine how happy I am.” In Bonn, West Germany, Chancellor Helmut Kohl telephoned the new Polish Prime Minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, in a plea for better relations between their two countries. It was fifty years ago tomorrow, indeed almost right to this minute when allowances are made for time zones, that Germany under Adolf Hitler invaded Poland, precipitating World War II, in which an estimated fifty million persons were to perish. Like, wow! In sports, the Phillies are losing in San Diego and Pittsburgh is idle. As to the weather, it could be better, and it could be worse. Mezzo, mezzo. I didn’t say messy, but look out for thundershowers, you Lancaster County night owls. Oh yes, Brando also called his new and terminal movie a “stinker.” No sweat, for a fellow who began his career in a torn undershirt.
Rabbit smiles in the whispering, onrushing cave of the car; this guy must think nobody is listening, gagging it up like this. Lonely in those radio studios, surrounded by paper coffee cups and perforated acoustic tiles. Hard to know the effect you’re making. Hard to believe God is always listening, never gets bored. The dashboard lights of the Celica glow beneath his line of vision like the lights of a city about to be bombed.
The superhighway crosses the Susquehanna and at York catches 83. As Harry drives south, the station fades behind him, toward the end of Louis Prima’s “Just a Gigolo,” that fantastic choru
s where the chorus keeps chanting “Just a gigolo” in a kind of affectionate mockery of that wheezy wonderful voice: it makes your scalp prickle with joy. Rabbit fumbles with the scan button but can’t find another oldies station, just talk shows, drunks calling in, the host sounding punchy himself, his mouth running on automatic pilot, abortion, nuclear waste, unemployment among young black males, CIA complicity in the AIDS epidemic, Boesky, Milken, Bush and North, Nonega, you can’t tell me thatRabbit switches the radio off, hating the sound of the human voice. Vermin. We are noisy vermin, crowding even the air. Better the murmur of the tires, the green road signs looming in the lights and parabolically enlarging and then whisked out of sight like magicians’ handkerchieves. It’s getting close to midnight, but before he stops he wants to be out of the state. Even that botched time ages ago he got as far as West Virginia. To get out of Pennsylvania you have to climb a nameless mountain, beyond Hungerford. Signs and lights diminish. The lonely highway climbs. High lakes gleam under what is, now, in a gap between clouds, true moonlight. He descends into Maryland. There is a different feeling: groomed center strips, advertisements for Park and Ride for commuters. Civilization. Out of the sticks. His eyelids feel sandy, his heart fluttery and sated. He pulls off 83 into a Best Western well north of Baltimore, pleased to think that nobody in the world, nobody but the stocky indifferent Asian-American desk clerk, knows his location. Where oh where is the missing tritium?