by John Updike
Stavros shrugs. “Well, a team of blacks like that, you need a slogan. They all grew up on television commercials, the box was the only mother they had. That’s the tragedy of blacks these days.”
It relieves Harry, to hear Charlie talk. He came in half expecting to find him crushed. “At least the Eagles screwed the Steelers,” he says. “That felt good.”
“They were lucky. That fumble going into the end zone. Bradshaw you can expect to throw some interceptions, but you don’t expect Franco Harris to fumble going into the end zone.”
Harry laughs aloud, in remembered delight. “How about that barefoot rookie kicker the Eagles got? Wasn’t that beautiful?”
Charlie says, “Kicking isn’t football.”
“A forty-eight-yard field goal barefoot! That guy must have a big toe like a rock.”
“For my money they can ship all these old soccer players back to Argentina. The contact in the line, that’s football. The Pit. That’s where the Steelers will get you in the end. I’m not worried about the Steelers.”
Harry sniffs anger here and changes the subject, looking out at the weather. Drops on the glass enlarge and then abruptly dart down, dodgingly, leaving trails. The way he wept. Ever since earliest childhood, his consciousness dawning by the radiators in the old half-house on Jackson Road, it has been exciting for Harry to stand near a window during a rain, his face inches from the glass and dry, where a few inches away everything is wet. “Wonder if it’s going to rain on the Pope.” The Pope is flying into Boston that afternoon.
“Never. He’ll just wave his arms and the sky’ll be full of bluebirds. Bluebirds and horseshit.”
Though no Catholic, Harry feels this is a bit rude; no doubt about it, Charlie is prickly this morning. “Ja see those crowds on television? The Irish went wild. One crowd was over a million, they said.”
“Micks are dumb,” Charlie says, and starts to turn away. “I gotta get hot on some NV-1s.”
Harry can’t let him go. He says, “And they gave the old Canal back last night.”
“Yeah. I get sick of the news. This country is sad, everybody can push us around.”
“You were the guy wanted to get out of Vietnam.”
“That was sad too.”
“Hey.”
“Yeah?”
“I hear you had a talk with Ma Springer.”
“The last of along series. She’s not so sad. She’s tough.”
“Any thoughts about where you’re going to be going?” Nelson and Pru are due back from the Poconos Friday.
“Nowhere, for a while. See a few movies. Hit a few bars.”
“How about Florida, you’re always talking about Florida.”
“Come on. I can’t ask the old lady to move down there. What would she do, play shuffleboard?”
“I thought you said you had a cousin taking care of her now.”
“Gloria. I don’t know, something’s cooking there. She and her husband may be getting back together. He doesn’t like scrambling his own eggs in the morning.”
“Oh. Sorry.” Harry pauses. “Sorry about everything.”
Charlie shrugs. “What can you do?”
This is what he wants to hear; relief bathes him like a kind of light. When you feel better, you see better; he sees all the papers, wrappers and take-out cup lids that have blown across the highway from the Chuck Wagon, lying in the bushes just outside the window, getting soaked. He says, “I could quit myself.”
“That’s crazy, champ. What would you do? Me, I can sell anywhere, that’s no worry. Already I’ve had some feelers. News travels fast in this business. It’s a hustling business.”
“I told her, `Ma, Charlie’s the heart of Springer Motors. Half the clients come in because of him. More than half.”’
“I appreciate your putting in a word. But you know, there comes a time.”
“I guess.” But not for Harry Angstrom. Never, never.
“How about Jan? What’d she have to say about giving me the gate?”
A tough question. “Not much, that I heard. You know she can’t stand up to the old lady; never could.”
“Ifyou want to know what I think cooked my goose, it was that trip with Melanie. That cooled it with both the Springer girls.”
“You think Janice still cares that much?”
“You don’t stop caring, champ. You still care about that little girl whose underpants you saw in kindergarten. Once you care, you always care. That’s how stupid we are.”
A rock in space, is the image these words bring to Rabbit’s mind. He is interested in space, and scans the paper every day for more word on these titanic quasars on the edge of everything, and in the Sunday section studies the new up-close photos of Jupiter, expecting to spot a clue that all those scientists have missed; God might have a few words to say yet. In the vacuum of the heart love falls forever. Janice jealous of Charlie, we get these ideas and can’t let go, it’s been twenty years since he slept with Ruth but when ever in some store downtown or along Weiser he sees from behind a woman with gingery hair bundled up carelessly with a few loops flying loose, his heart bumps up. And Nelson, he was young at the time but you’re never too young to fall, he loved Jill and come to think of it Pru has some of the hippie style, long hair flat down the back and that numb look daring you to hurt her, though Jill of course was of a better class, she was no Akron steamfitter’s daughter. Harry says to Charlie, “Well at least now you can run out to Ohio from time to time.”
Charlie says, “There’s nothing out there for me. Melanie’s more like a daughter. She’s smart, you know. You ought to hear her go on about transcendental meditation and this crazy Russian philosopher. She wants to go on and get a Ph.D. if she can worm the money out of her father. He’s out there on the West Coast fucking Indian maidens.”
Coast to coast, Rabbit thinks, we’re one big funhouse. It’s done with mirrors. “Still,” he tells Charlie, “I wish I had some of your freedom.”
“You got freedom you don’t even use. How come you and Jan keep living in that shabby old barn with her mother? It’s not doing Jan any good, it’s keeping her childish.”
Shabby? Harry had never thought of the Springer place as shabby: old-fashioned maybe but with big rooms full of the latest and best goods, just the way he saw it the first time, when he began to take Janice out, the summer they were both working at Kroll’s. Everything looked new and smelled so clean, and in the side room off the living room a long wrought-iron table held a host of tropical plants, a jungle of their own that seemed the height of luxury. Now the table stands there hollow and you can see where it’s stained the hardwood floor with rusty drippings. And he thinks of the gray sofa and the wallpaper and watercolors that haven’t changed since the days he used to pick Jan up for a night of heavy petting in the back of the old Nash he bought in the Army and maybe it is shabby. Ma doesn’t have the energy she did and what she does with all her money nobody knows. Not buy new furniture. And now that it’s fall the copper beech outside their bedroom window is dropping its nuts, the little triangular seedpods explode and with all the rustling and crackling it’s not so easy to sleep. That room has never been ideal. “Childish, huh?”
“Speaking of which,” Charlie says, “remember those two kids who came in at the beginning of the summer, the girl that turned you on? The boy came back Saturday, while you were out on the golf course, I can’t think of his name.”
“Nunemacher.”
“Right. He bought that orange Corolla liftback with standard transmission out on the lot. No trade-in, and these new models coming in, I quoted him two hundred off the list. I thought you’d want me to be nice to him.”
“Right. Was the girl with him?”
“Not that I could see.”
“And he didn’t trade in that Country Squire?”
“You know these farmers, they like to keep junk in their yards. Probably hitch it up to a band saw.”
“My God,” Harry says. “Jamie bought the orange Coroll
a.”
“Well come on, it’s not that much of a miracle. I asked him why he waited so long and he said he thought if he waited to fall the ‘79s would be down in price a little. And the dollar would be worth less. The yen too as it turns out.”
“When’s he taking delivery?”
“He said around noon tomorrow. That’s one of the NV-1s I gotta do.”
“Shit. That’s when I have Rotary.”
“The girl wasn’t with him, what do you care? You talk about me; she was younger than Melanie. That girl might have been as young as sixteen, seventeen.”
“Nineteen is what she’d be,” Rabbit says. “But you’re right. I don’t care.” Rain all around them leads his heart upward by threads; he as well as Charlie has his options.
* * *
Tuesday after Rotary with the drinks still working in him Harry goes back to the lot and sees the orange Corolla gone and can hardly focus with happiness, God has kissed him out of space. Around four-thirty, with Rudy on the floor and Charlie over in Allenville trying to wrap up a used-car package with a dealer there to clear the books a little before Nelson takes over, he eases out of his office and down the corridor and out through the shop where Manny’s men are still whacking metal but their voices getting louder as the bliss of quitting time approaches and out the back door, taking care not to dirty his shirt cuffs on the crash bar, and out into air. Paraguay. On this nether portion of the asphalt the Mercury with its mashed-in left side and fender and grille still waits upon a decision. It turns out Charlie was able to unload the repaired Royale for thirty-six hundred to a young doctor from Royersford, he wasn’t even a regular doctor but one of these homeopathic or holistic doctors as they call it now who looks at your measles and tells you to eat carrots or just hum at a certain pitch for three hours a day, he must be doing all right because he snapped up that old Olds, said a guy he admired at college had driven one like it and he’d always wanted one just that color, evidently - that purply-red nail-polish color. Harry squeezes himself into his Corona the color of tired tomato soup and slides out of the lot softly and heads down 111 the way away from Brewer, toward Galilee. Springer Motors well behind him, he turns on the radio and that heavy electrified disco beat threatens to pop the stereo speakers. Tinny sounds, wiffling sounds, sounds like a kazoo being played over the telephone come at him from the four corners of the vinyl-upholstered interior, setting that hopeful center inside his ribs to jingling. He thinks back to the Rotary luncheon and Eddie Pastorelli of Pastorelli Realty with his barrel chest and stiff little bow legs now, that used to do the 440 in less than fifty seconds, giving them a slide show on the proposed planned development of the upper blocks of Weiser, which were mostly parking lots and bars these days, and little businesses like vacuum-cleaner repair and pet supplies that hadn’t had the capital to move out to the malls, Eddie trying to tell them that some big glass boxes and a corkscrew-ramped concrete parking garage are going to bring the shoppers back in spite of all the spic kids roaming around with transistors glued to their ears and knives up their wrists. Harry has to laugh, he remembers Eddie when he was a second-string guard for Hemmigtown High, a meaner greaseball never stayed out of reform school. Donna Summer comes on singing, Dim all the lights sweet darling … When you see pictures of her she’s much less black than you imagine, a thin-cheeked yellow staring out at you like what are you going to do about it. The thing about those Rotarians, if you knew them as kids you can’t stop seeing the kid in them, dressed up in fat and baldness and money like a cardboard tuxedo in a play for high-school assembly. How can you respect the world when you see it’s being run by a bunch of kids turned old? That’s the joke Rabbit always enjoys at Rotary. With a few martinis inside him Eddie can be funny as hell, when he told that joke about the five men in the airplane the tip of his nose bent down like it was on a little string and his laugh came out as an old woman’s wheeze. Knapsack! hee hee hee. Rabbit must try to remember and try it out on the gang at the Flying Eagle. Five men: a hippie, a priest, a policeman, and Henry Kissinger, the smartest man in the world. But who was the fifth? Donna Summer says to turn her brown body white, at least that’s what he thinks she’s said, you can’t be sure with all this disco wowowow, some doped-up sound engineer wiggling the knobs to give that sound, the words don’t matter, it’s that beat pushed between your ribs like a knife, making the soul jingle.
Houses of sandstone. A billboard pointing to a natural cave. He wonders who goes there anymore, natural caves a thing of the past, like waterfalls. Men in straw hats. Women with not even their ankles showing. Natural wonders. That smartass young female announcer - he hasn’t heard her for a while, he thought maybe the station had fired her, too sassy or got pregnant -comes on and says that the Pope has addressed the UN and is stopping in Harlem on his way to Yankee Stadium. Harry saw the cocky little guy on television last night, getting soaked in Boston in his white robes, you had to admire his English, about his seventh language, and who was the deadpan guy standing there holding the umbrella over him? Some Vatican bigwig, but Pru didn’t seem to know any more than he did, what’s the good of being raised a Catholic? In Europe, gold rose today to a new high of four hundred forty-four dollars an ounce while the dollar slipped to new lows. The station fades and returns as the road twists among the hilly fields. Harry calculates, up eighty dollars in less than three weeks, thirty times eighty is two thousand four hundred, when you’re rich you get richer, just like Pop used to say. In some of the fields the corn stands tall, others are stubble. He glides through the ugly string town of Galilee, on the lookout for the orange Corolla. No need to ask at the post office this time. The vegetable stand is closed for the season. The pond has some geese on it, he doesn’t remember those, migrating already, the green little turds they leave all over the fairways, maybe that was the reason that doctor … He turns off the radio. BLANKENBILLER. MUTH. BYER. He parks on the same widened spot of red dirt road shoulder. His heart is pounding, his hands feel swollen and numb, resting on the steering wheel. He turns off the ignition, digging himself in deeper. It’s not as if he’s doing anything illegal. When he gets out of the car, the pigsty whiff isn’t in the air, the wind is from the other direction, and there is no insect hum. They have died, millions. Across the silence cuts the far-off whine and snarl of a chain saw. The new national anthem. Oho say can you saw … The woods are a half-mile off and can’t be part of the Byer farm. He begins to trespass. The hedgerow that has swallowed the stone wall is less leafy, he is less hidden. A cool small wind slips through the tangled black gum and wild cherry and licks his hands. Poison ivy leaves have turned, a Mercurochrome red, some of them half-dyed as if dipped. As he ventures down through the old orchard, a step at a time, he treads on fallen apples lying thick in the grass grown to hay. Mustn’t turn an ankle, lie up here and rot as well. Poor trees, putting out all this wormy fruit for nothing. Perhaps not nothing from their point of view, when men didn’t exist they were doing the same. Strange thought. Harry looks down upon the farmhouse now, the green door, the birdbath on its pale blue pillar. Smoke is rising from the chimney; the nostalgic smell of burning wood comes to him. So close, he gets behind a dying apple tree with a convenient fork at the height of his head. Ants are active in the velvety light brown rot inside the trunk, touching noses, telling the news, hurrying on. The tree trunk is split open like an unbuttoned overcoat but still carries life up through its rough skin to the small round leaves that tremble where the twigs are young and smooth. Space feels to drop away not only in front of him but on all sides, even through the solid earth, and he wonders what he is doing here in his good beige suit, his backside exposed to any farmer with a shotgun who might be walking along in the field behind him and his face posed in this fork like a tin can up for target practice were anybody to look up from the buildings below, he who has an office with his name on the door and CHIEF SALES REPRESENTATIVE on his business cards and who a few hours back was entertaining other men in suits with the expense and complications of hi
s son’s wedding, the organist going off with this Slim and the couple tuming up so late he thought they were Jehovah’s Witnesses; and for some seconds of panic cannot answer himself why, except that out here, in the air, nameless, he feels purely alive. Then he remembers: he hopes to glimpse his daughter. And what if he were to gather all his nerve and go down and knock at the green door in its deep socket of wall and she were to answer? She would be in jeans this time ofyear, and a sweatshirt or sweater. Her hair would be less loose and damp than in its summer do, maybe pulled back and held by a rubber band. Her eyes, widely spaced, would be pale blue little mirrors.
Hi. You don’t remember me -
Sure 1 do. You’re the car dealer. I’m more than that, 1 think.
Like what?
Is your mother’s name by any chance Ruth Byer? Well … yes.
And has she ever talked to you about your father?
My father’s dead. He used to run the school buses for the township.
That wasn’t your father. I’m your father.
