He’ll be there. Funny, about Harry and religion. When God hadn’t a friend in the world, back there in the Sixties, he couldn’t let go of Him, and now when the preachers are all praying through bullhorns he can’t get it up for Him. He is like a friend you’ve had so long you’ve forgotten what you liked about Him. You’d think after that heart scare, but in a way the closer you get the less you think about it, like you’re in His hand already. Like you’re out on the court instead of on the bench swallowing down butterflies and trying to remember the plays.
Perry Como comes on and sings “Because.” Rabbit’s scalp prickles at the end, the skin of his eyes stings. Because - you - are miiiine! Como the best, probably: Crosby had something sly-Irish about him, clowning around with Lamour and Hope, and Sinatra - if there’s one way in which Rabbit Angstrom has been out of step with mankind, it’s Sinatra. He doesn’t like his singing. He didn’t like it when bobbysoxers were jumping out of their underpants for this skinny hollow-cheeked guy up on the stage at the Paramount, and he didn’t like it when he mellowed into this Las Vegas fat cat making all these moony albums you’re supposed to screw to all across the nation: oceans of jism. White with foam. His singing has always sounded flat to Rabbit, like he’s grinding it out. Now, to Mim, Sinatra is a god, but that’s more a matter of lifestyle, turning night into day and pally with gangsters and Presidents and that square gangster way of carrying your shoulders (Charlie Stavros has it) and Chairman of the Board and Sammy Davis, Jr., and Dean Martin before they dried out finally, if in fact they did, both men have terrible health problems he read somewhere, in one of those ridiculous scandal sheets Janice brings home from the Minit Market. Sometimes Harry envies Mim the glamorous dangerous life he guesses she’s lived, he’s glad for her, she always had that edge, wanting speed even if it killed her, even if it flipped her off the handlebars of his old Elgin. But the fast lane too gets to be a rut. He doesn’t regret the life he led, though Brewer isn’t New York New York or Chicago my kind of town the way Sinatra grinds it out. What he enjoyed most, it turns out in retrospect, and he didn’t know it at the time, was standing around in the showroom, behind the dusty big window with the banners, bouncing on the balls of his feet to keep up his leg muscles, waiting for a customer, shooting the bull with Charlie or whoever, earning his paycheck, filling his slot in the big picture, doing his bit, getting a little recognition. That’s all we want from each other, recognition. Your assigned place in the rat race. In the Army, too, you had it: your number, your bunk, your assigned duties, your place in line, your pass for Saturday night, four beers and fuck a whore in a ranch house. Honey, you didn’t pay to be no two-timer. There’s more to being a human being than having your own way. Fact is, it has come to Rabbit this late in life, you don’t have a way apart from what other people tell you. Your mother first, and poor Pop, then the Lutheran minister, that tough old heinie Fritz Kruppenbach, you had to respect him though, he said what he believed, and then all those schoolteachers, Marty Tothero and the rest, trying to give you an angle to work from, and now all these talk-show hosts. Your life derives, and has to give. Maybe if your mother was in the fast lane like Annabelle’s you are naturally leery of the opposite sex. We haven’t set these kids terrific examples.
The pine trees have gaps now. Marshy stretches open the sky up, there are cabins on stilts, trees with shaggy balls on them, colored wash hanging on lines. Homely hand-lettered signs. Dad’s Real Southern Cookin’. Bi-Lo. A long bridge over Lake Marion, this enormous body ofwater in the middle of nowhere. Highways branch off to the capital, Columbia, where he’s never been, though he and Janice did once detour over to Charleston and back on Route 17. Another time, they diverted to Savannah and spent the night in a made-over plantation house with high domed ceilings and louvers on the windows. They did do some fun things, he and Jan. The thing about a wife, though, and he supposes a husband for that matter, is that almost anybody would do, inside broad limits. Yet you’re supposed to adore them till death do you part. Till the end of time. Ashepoo River. Wasn’t that a comic strip, years ago?
He gets off the highway at a vast rest stop, an oasis in this wilderness - gas pumps, a restaurant, a little department store selling groceries, beer, fireworks, suntan lotion. At the counter a couple of young black men, glittery black in the heat, arms bare up to the shoulder, a mean little Malcolm X goatee on one of them. They have a menace down here, their color shouts, they are a race, they are everywhere. But the elderly white waitress has no trouble with these two black boys. The three chat and smile in the same dragged accent, making a little breeze with their mouths. Nice to see it. For this, the Civil War.
To test if he can still use his own voice, Rabbit asks the fat white man one empty stool away from him at the counter, a man who has made for himself at the salad bar a mountain of lettuce and red beets and coleslaw and cottage cheese and kidney beans and chickpeas, “About how many more hours is it to the Florida line?” He lets his Pennsylvania accent drag a little extra, hoping to pass.
“Four,” the man answers with a smile. “I just came from there. Where you headin’ for in Florida?”
“Way the other end. Deleon. My wife and I have a condo there, I’m driving down alone, she’ll be following later.”
The man keeps smiling, smiling and chewing. “I know Deleon. Nice old town.”
Rabbit has never noticed much that is old about it. “From our balcony we used to have a look at the sea but they built it up.”
“Lot of building on the Gulf side now, the Atlantic side pretty well full. Began my day in Sarasota.”
“Really? That’s a long way to come.”
“That’s why I’m makin’ such a pig of myself. Hadn’t eaten more than a candy bar since five o’clock this morning. After a while you got to stop, you begin to see things.”
“What sort of things?”
“This stretch I just came over, lot of patchy ground fog, it gets to you. just coffee gets to your stomach.” This man has a truly nice way of smiling and chewing and talking all at once. His mouth is wide but lipless, like a Muppet’s. He has set his truck driver’s cap, with a bill and a mesh panel in the back, beside his plate; his good head of gray hair, slightly wavy like a rich man’s, is permanently dented by the edge of the cap.
“You drivin’ one of those big trucks? I don’t know how you guys do it. How far you goin’?”
All the salad on the plate has vanished and the smile has broadened. “Boston.”
“Boston! All that way?” Rabbit has never been to Boston, to him it is the end of the world, tucked up in under Maine. People living that far north are as fantastic to him as Eskimos.
“Today, tomorrow, whatever you call it, I expect to have this rig in Boston Sunday afternoon, twenty-four hours from now.”
“But when do you sleep?”
“Oh, you pull over and get an hour here, an hour there.”
“That’s amazing.”
“Been doin’ it for fifteen years. I had retired, but came back to it. Couldn’t stand it around the house. Nothin’ on TV that was any good. How about you?”
“Me?” On the lam. A bad LAD. He realizes what the question means, and answers, “Retired, I guess.”
“More power to ya, fella. I couldn’t take it,” the truck driver says. “Retirement taxed my brain.” The elderly waitress so friendly with the two young blacks brings the hungry man an oval platter heavy with fried steak soaking in a pink mix of oil and blood, and three vegetables in little round side dishes, and a separate plate of golden-brown corn pone.
Harry somewhat reluctantly - he has made a friend - pushes away from the counter. “Well, more power to you,” he says.
And now this fat pale miracle man, who will be in Boston faster than a speeding bullet, who like Thomas Alva Edison only needs a catnap now and then, has his wide Muppet mouth too full to speak, and merely smiles and nods, and loses a snaky droplet of steak juice down the far side of his egg-shaped little chin. Nobody’s perfect. We’re o
nly human. Look at Jim Bakker. Look at Bart Giamatti.
In his Celica Harry crosses the Tuglifinny River. The Salkehatchie. The Little Combahee. The Coosawatchie. The Turtle. Kickapoo, he thinks - not Ashepoo. Kickapoo joy juice in Li‘1 Abner. Between spates of black music that has that peculiar exciting new sound of boards being slapped on the floor, he hears commercials for the Upchurch Music Company (“an instrument that brings musical pleasure to generations to come”) and a deodorizer called Tiny Cat. Why would a deodorizer be called Tiny Cat? He crosses the Savannah and leaves South Carolina and its fireworks at last. Because he is punchy from miles of miles, he turns off at the city exit and drives into the downtown and parks by a grand old courthouse and buys a hot pastrami sandwich at a little sandwich joint on the main street there. He sits eating it, trying not to have any of the juice spill out of the waxpaper and spot his pants, like that sickening driblet from the mouth of the guy back at the lunch place hours ago. This piece of Savannah, a block from the river, seems a set of outdoor rooms, walled in by row houses with high steps and curtains of dusty trees; a huge heat still rests on the day though the shadows are deepening, thickening on the soft old façades, sadder and rosier than those in Brewer. A group of pigeons gathers around his bench, curious to see if he will spare any of the bun or Bar-B-Q potato chips. A young bum with long yellow hair like George Custer and that brown face you get from being homeless gives him a glittering wild eye from a bench behind a tree, in the next room as it were. A tall obelisk rises in commemoration of something, no doubt the glorious dead. Little chattering brown birds heave in and out of the trees as they try to decide whether the day is over. He better push on. He neatly packages his wastepaper and milk carton in the bag the sandwich came in and leaves it in a public trash basket, his gift to Savannah, the trace he will leave, like the cloud of finger-moisture on the edge of the bureau back home. The pigeons chuff and chortle off in indignant disappointment. The bum has silently come up behind him and asks him in no particular accent, the limp snarl of the drugged, if he has a cigarette. “Nope,” Rabbit tells him. “Haven’t smoked in thirty years.” He remembers the moment when on a sudden resolve he canned a half-pack of Philip Moms, the nice old tobacco-brown pack, in somebody’s open barrel in an alley in Mt. Judge. Left that trace too.
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.