Rabbit Is Rich

by John Updike

  In silence father and son wind along Cityview Drive, with its glimpses through trees grown too tall of the flowerpot-colored city that German workers built on a grid laid out by an English surveyor and where now the Polacks and spics and blacks sit crammed in listening to each other’s television sets jabber through the walls, and each other’s babies cry, and each other’s Saturday nights turn ugly. Tricky to drive now, all these bicycles and mopeds and worst of all the roller skaters in jogging shorts with earphones on their heads, looking like boxers, all doped up, roller skating as though they owned the street. The Corona coasts along Locust, where the doctors and lawyers hole up in their long brick single-family dwellings, set back and shady, with retaining walls and plantings of juniper fighting the slope of the ground, and passes on the right Brewer High, that he thought of as a kid as a castle, the multiple gyms and rows of lockers you wouldn’t believe, receding to infinity it seemed, the few times he went there, the times the Mt. Judge varsity played the Brewer JV squad, more or less for laughs (theirs). He thinks of telling Nelson about this, but knows the kid hates to have him reminisce about his sporting days. Brewer kids, Rabbit remembers in silence, were mean, with something dirty-looking about their mouths, as if they’d all just sucked raspberry popsicles. The girls fucked and some of the really vicious types smoked things called reefers in those days. Now even Presidents’ kids, that Ford son and who knows about Chip, fuck and smoke reefers. Progress. In a way, he sees now, he grew up in a safe pocket of the world, like Melanie said, like one of those places you see in a stream where the twigs float backward and accumulate along the mud.

  As they swing down into the steep part of Eisenhower, Nelson breaks the silence and asks, “Didn’t you used to live up on one of these cross streets?”

  “Yeah. Summer. For a couple of months, ages ago. Your mother and I were having some problems. What makes you ask?”

  “I just remembered. Like when you feel you’ve been someplace before, only it must have been in a dream. When I’d miss you real bad Mom used to put me in the car and we’d drive over here and look at some house hoping you’d come out. It was in a row that all looked alike to me.”

  “And did I? Come out.”

  “Not that I can ever remember. But I don’t remember much about it, just being there in the car, and Mom having brought some cookies along to keep me entertained, and her starting to cry.”

  “Jesus, I’m sorry. I never knew about this before, that she drove you over.”

  “Maybe it just happened once. But it feels like more than once. I remember her being so big.”

  Eisenhower flattens out and they pass without comment number 1204, where Janice years later had fled to Charlie Stavros, and where Nelson used to come on his bicycle and look up at the window. The kid had been desperate for a mini-bike at the time, and Mim had finally gotten him one, but he hadn’t used it much, a sadness had attached to it, it was a piece ofjunk somewhere now. Funny about feelings, they seem to come and go in a flash yet outlast metal.

  Down over the abandoned car yards they go, through the factory outlet district, and left on Third, then right on lower Weiser, past white windowless Schoenbaum Funeral Directors, and then over the bridge. The traffic is mostly composed of old ladies poking back from their restaurant lunch they owed themselves after church and of carloads of kids already beered-up heading for the ballgame in the stadium north of Brewer where the Blasts play. Left on Route 111. D I S C O. FUEL ECONOMY. They have forgotten to turn on the radio, so distracting has the tension between them been. Harry clears his throat and says, “So Melanie’s getting set to go back to college. You must be too.”

  Silence. The subject of college is hot, too hot to touch. He should have been asking the kid what he’s been learning at the lot. SPRINGER MOTORS. They pull in. Three weeks since Harry’s seen it, and as with the house there’s been a pollution. That Caprice he sometimes drove when the Corona was out of action isn’t there, must have been sold. Six new Corollas are lined up next to the highway in their sweet and sour colors. Harry can never quite get over how small their wheels look, almost like tricycle wheels compared to the American cars he grew up with. Still, they’re the guts of the line: buy cheap, most people are still poor, face it. You don’t -get something for nothing but hope springs eternal. Like a little sea of melting candy his cars bake in the sun. Since it’s Sunday Harry parks right next to the hedge that struggles up front around the entrance and that collects at its roots all the stray wrappers and napkins that blow across 111 from the Chuck Wagon. The display windows need washing again. A paper banner bearing the slogan of the new TV campaign, OH WHAT A FEELING, fills the top half of the lefthand pane. The showroom has two new Celicas, one black with a yellow side stripe and one blue with a white one. Under the OH WHAT A FEELING poster, featuring some laughing cunt in a bathing suit splashing around in some turquoise pool with an Alp or Rocky in the background, lurks something different, a little low roachlike car that is no Toyota. Harry has no key; Nelson lets them in the double glass door with his. The strange car is a TR-6 convertible, polished up for sale but unmistakably worn, the windshield dull with the multiplied scratches of great mileage, the fender showing that slight ripple where metal has been bruised and healed. “What the hell is this?” Harry asks, lifted to a great height by the comparative lowness of this intruding automobile.

  “Dad, that’s my idea we talked about, to sell convertibles. Honest, hardly anybody makes ‘em anymore, even Jaguar has quit, they’re bound to go up and up. We’re asking fifty-five hundred and already a couple of guys have almost bought it.”

  “Why’d the owner get rid of it if it was worth so much? What’d you give him on the trade?”

  “Well, it wasn’t a trade-in exactly -“

  “What was it, exactly?”

  “We bought it -“

  “You bought it!”

  “A friend of Billy Fosnacht’s has this sister who’s marrying some guy who’s moving to Alaska. It’s in great shape, Manny went all over it.”

  “Manny and Charlie let you go ahead with this?”

  “Why wouldn’t they? Charlie’s been telling me how he and old man Springer used to do all these crazy things, they’d give away stuffed animals and crates of oranges and have these auctions with girls in evening gowns where the highest bid got the car even if it was only five dollars - guys from car rodeos used to come -“

  “That was the good old days. These are the bad new days. People come in here looking for Toyotas, they don’t want some fucking British sports car -“

  “But they will, once we have the name.”

  “We have a name. Springer Motors, Toyota and used. That’s what we’re known for and that’s what people come in here for.” He hears his voice straining, feels that good excited roll of anger building in him, like in a basketball game when you’re down ten points and less than five minutes left on the clock and you’ve just taken one too many elbows in the ribs, and all the muscles go loose suddenly and something begins lifting you and you know nothing is impossible, with faith. He tries to hold himself back, this is a fragile kid and his son. Still, this has been his lot. “I don’t remember discussing any convertibles with you.”

  “One night, Dad, we were sitting in the living room just the two of us, only you got sore about the Corona and changed the subject.”

  “And Charlie really gave you the green light?”

  “Sure; he kind of shrugged. With you gone he had the new cars to manage, and this whole shipment came in early -“

  “Yeah. I saw. That close to the road they’ll pick up all the dust.”

  “- and anyway Charlie’s not my boss. We’re equals. I told him Mom-mom had thought it was a good idea.”

  “Oh. You talked to Ma Springer about this?”

  “Well not exactly at the time, she was off with you and Mom, but I know she wants me to plug into the lot, so it’ll be three generations and all that stuff.”

  Harry nods. Bessie will back the kid, th
ey’re both black-eyed Springers. “O.K., I guess no harm done. How much you pay for this crate?”

  “He wanted forty-nine hundred but I jewed him down to forty-two.”

  “Jesus. That’s way over book. Did you look at the book? Do you know what the book is?”

  “Dad of course I know what the fucking book is, the point is convertibles don’t go by the book, they’re like antiques, there’s only so many and there won’t be any more. They’re what they call collectibles.”

  “You paid forty-two for a ‘76 TR that cost six new. How many miles on it?”

  “A girl drove it, they don’t drive a car hard.”

  “Depends on the girl. Some of these tootsies I see on the road are really pushing. How many miles did you say?”

  “Well, it’s kind of hard to say; this guy who went to Alaska was trying to fix something under the dashboard and I guess he didn’t know which -“

  “Oh boy. O.K., let’s see if we can unload it for wholesale and chalk it up to experience. I’ll call Hornberger in town tomorrow, he still handles TR and MG, maybe he’ll take it off our hands as a favor.”

  Harry realizes why Nelson’s short haircut troubles him: it reminds him of how the boy looked back in grade school, before all that late Sixties business soured everything. He didn’t know how short he was going to be then, and wanted to become a baseball pitcher like Jim Bunning, and wore a cap all summer that pressed his hair in even tighter to his skull, that bony freckled unsmiling face. Now his necktie and suit seem like that baseball cap to be the costume of doomed hopes. Nelson’s eyes brighten as if at the approach of tears. “Take if off our hands for cost? Dad, I know we can sell it, and clear a thousand. And there’s two more.”

  “Two more TRs?”

  “Two more convertibles, out back.” By now the kid is scared, white in the face so his eyelids and eartips look pink. Rabbit is scared too, he doesn’t want any more of this, but things are rolling, the kid has to show him, and he has to react. They walk back along the corridor past the parts department, Nelson leading the way and picking a set of car keys offthe pegboard fastened next to the metal doorframe, and then they let themselves into the great hollow space of the garage, so silent on Sunday, a bare-girdered ballroom with its good warm stink of grease and acetylene. Nelson switches off the burglar alarm and pushes against the crash bar of the back door. Air again. Brewer far across the river, the tip of the tall courthouse with its eagle in concrete relief peeking above the forest of weeds, thistle and poke, at the lot’s unvisited edge. This back area is bigger than it should be and always makes Rabbit think somehow of Paraguay. Making a little island of their own on the asphalt, two extinct American convertibles sit: a ‘72 Mercury Cougar, its top a tattered cream and its body that intense pale scum-color they called Nile Green, and a ‘74 Olds Delta 88 Royale, in color the purply-red women wore as nail polish in the days of spy movies. They were gallant old boats, Harry has to admit to himself, all that stretched tin and aerodynamical razzmatazz, headed down Main Street straight for a harvest moon with the old accelerator floored. He says, “These are here on spec, or what? I mean, you haven’t paid for them yet.” He senses that even this is the wrong thing to say.

  “They’re bought, Dad. They’re ours.”

  “They’re mine?”

  “They’re not yours, they’re the company’s.”

  “How the hell’d you work it?”

  “What do you mean, how the hell? I just asked Mildred Kroust to write the checks and Charlie told her it was O.K.”

  “Charlie said it was O.K.?”

  “He thought we’d all agreed. Dad, cut it out. It’s not such a big deal. That’s the idea here, isn’t it - buy cars and sell ‘em at a profit?”

  “Not those crazy cars. How much were they?”

  “I bet we make six, seven hundred on the Merc and more on the Olds. Dad, you’re too uptight. It’s only money. Was I supposed to have any responsibility while you were away, or not?”

  “How much?”

  “I forget exactly. The Cougar was about two thousand and the Royale, some dealer toward Pottsville that Billy knows had it but I thought we should be able to offer, you know, a selection, it came to I think around two-five.”

  “Two thousand five hundred dollars.”

  Just repeating the numbers slowly makes him feel good, in a bad kind ofway. Any debt he ever owed Nelson is being paid back now. He goes at it again. “Two thousand five hundred good American -“

  The child almost screams. “We’ll get it back, I promise! It’s like antiques, it’s like gold! You can’t lose, Dad.”

  Harry can’t stop adding. “Forty-two hundred for the little chop-clock TR, four thousand five hundred -“

  The boy is begging. “Leave me alone, I’ll do it myself. I’ve already put an ad in the paper, they’ll be gone in two weeks. I promise.”

  “You promise. You’ll be back in college in two weeks.”

  “Dad. I won’t.”

  “You won’t?”

  “I want to quit Kent and stay here and work.” This little face all frightened and fierce, so pale his freckles seem to be coming forward and floating on the surface, like flecks in a mirror.

  “Jesus, that is all I need,” Harry sighs.

  Nelson looks at him shocked. He holds up the car keys. His eyes blur, his lower lip is unsteady. “I was going to let you drive the Royale for fun.”

  Harry says, “Fun. You know how much gas these old hot rods bum? You think people today with gas a dollar a gallon are going to want these eight-cylinder inefficient guzzlers just to feel the wind in their hair? Kid, you’re living in a dream world.”

  “They don’t care, Dad. People don’t care that much about money anymore, it’s all shit anyway. Money is shit.”

  “Maybe to you but not to me I’ll tell you that now. Let’s keep calm. Think of the parts. These things sure as hell need some work, the years they’ve been around. You know what six-, sevenyear-old parts cost these days, when you can get ‘em at all? This isnit some fancy place dealing in antiques, we sell Toyotas. Toyotas.”

  The child shrinks beneath his thunder. “Dad, I won’t buy any more, I promise, until these sell. These’ll sell, I promise.”

  “You’ll promise me nothing. You’ll promise me to keep your nose out of my car business and get your ass back to Ohio. I hate to be the one telling you this, Nelson, but you’re a disaster. You’ve gotta get yourself straightened out and it isn’t going to happen here.”

  He hates what he’s saying to the kid, though it’s what he feels. He hates it so much he turns his back and tries to get back into the door they came out of but it has locked behind them, as it’s supposed to do. He’s locked out of his own garage and Nelson has the keys. Rabbit rattles the knob and thumps the metal door with the heel of his hand and even as in a blind scrimmage knees it; the pain balloons and coats the world in red so that though he hears a car motor start up not far away he doesn’t connect it to himself until a squeak of rubber and a roar of speed slam metal into metal. That black gnashing cuts through the red. Rabbit turns around and sees Nelson backing off for a second go. Small parts are still settling, tinkling in the sunshine. He thinks the boy might now aim to crush him against the door where he is paralyzed but that is not the case. The Royale rams again into the side of the Mercury, which lifts up on two wheels. The pale green fender collapses enough to explode the headlight; the lens rim flies free.

  Seeing the collision coming, Harry expected it to happen in slow motion, like on television, but instead it happened comically fast, like two dogs tangling and then thinking better of it. The Royale’s motor dies. Through the windshield’s granular fracture Nelson’s face looks distorted, twisted by tears, twisted small. Rabbit feels a wooden sort of choked hilarity rising within him as he contemplates the damage. Pieces of glass finer than pebbles, bright grit, on the asphalt. Shadows on the broad skins of metal where shadows were not designed to be. The boy’s short haircut looking like a round brush
as he bends his face to the wheel sobbing. The whisper of Sunday traffic continuing from the other side of the building. These strange awkward blobs of joy bobbing in Harry’s chest. Oh what a feeling.

  * * *

  Within a week, at the club, it has become a story he tells on himself. “Five thousand bucks’ worth of metal, crunch. I had this terrible impulse to laugh, but the kid was in there crying, they were his cars after all, the way he saw it. The only thing I could think of to do was go stand by the Olds with my arms out like this.” He spreads his arms wide, under the benign curve of the mountain. “If the kid’d come out swinging my gut would’ve been wide open. But sure enough he stumbles out all blubbery and I take him into my arms.” He demonstrates the folding, consoling motion. “I haven’t felt so close to Nelson since he was about two. What makes me really feel rotten, he was right. His ad for the convertibles ran that same Sunday and we must have had twenty calls. The TR was gone by Wednesday, for fifty-five Cs. People aren’t counting their pennies anymore, they’re throwin’ ‘em out the window.”