"It sounds to me like you did too much mystic meditation at that detox place."
"You say detox just to bug me. It was a treatment center, and then a halfway house for rehab. The detox part of it just takes a couple days. It's getting the relational poison out of your system that takes longer."
"Is that what I am to you? Relational poison?" Being snubbed by Ronnie Harrison won't stop rankling, underneath this conversation. Just because you boffed a man's dead wife, he shouldn't get bitter about it. He's known Ronnie all his life.
Again, Nelson is silent. Then: "Maybe, but not only. I keep trying to love you, but you don't really want it. You're afraid of it, it would tie you down. You've been scared all your life of being tied down."
Rabbit cannot speak; he is letting a Nitrostat dissolve under his tongue. It burns like a little pellet of red candy, and induces a floating dilated feeling that adds inches to his sensation of height. The kid will make him cry if he thinks about it. He says, "Let's cut the psychology and get down to earth. What the hell do you and your mother intend to do about that hundred fifty thousand dollars Toyota has to have by the end of the month or else it will prosecute?"
"Oh," the boy says airily, "didn't Mom tell you? That's been settled. They've been paid. We took out a loan."
"A loan? Who would trust you?"
"Brewer Trust. A second mortgage on the lot property, it's worth at least half a million. A hundred forty-five, and they consolidated it with the seventy-five for Slims five cars, which will be coming back to us pretty much as a credit on the rolling inventory we were maintaining with Mid-Atlantic Motors. As soon as they took our inventory over to Rudy's lot, don't forget, they started owing us."
"And you're somehow going to pay back Brewer Trust selling water scooters?"
"You don't have to pay a loan back, they don't want you to pay it back; they just want you to keep up the installments. Meanwhile, the value of the dollar goes down and you get to taxdeduct all the interest. We were underfinanced, in fact, before."
"Thank God you're back in the saddle. How does your mother like the Yamaha connection?"
"She likes it. She's not like you; she's open, and willing to be creative. Dad, there's something I think we should try to process sometime. Why do you resent it so, me and Mom getting out into the world and trying to learn new things?"
"I don't resent it. I respect it."
"You hate it. You act jealous and envious. I say this in love, Dad. You feel stuck, and you want everybody to be stuck with you."
He tries giving back the kid a little of his own medicine, some therapeutic silence. His Nitrostat rings that little bell in the seat of his pants, and his dilated blood vessels lift weight from the world around him, making it seem delicate and distant, like Neptune's rings. "It wasn't me," he says at last, "who ran Springer Motors into the ground. But do what you want. You're the Springer, not me."
He can hear a voice in the background, a female voice, and then that seashell sound of a telephone mouthpiece with a hand placed over it. When Nelson's voice returns, it has changed tint, as if dipped in something, by what has passed between him and Elvira. Love juices have flowed. Maybe the kid is normal after all. "Elvira has something she wants to ask you. What do you think of the Pete Rose settlement?"
"Tell her I think it was the best both sides could do. And I think he should get into the Hall of Fame anyway, on the strength of his numbers. But tell her Schmidt is my idea of a classy ballplayer. Tell her I miss her."
Hanging up, Harry pictures the showroom, the late-afternoon light on the dust on the display windows, tall to the sky now with all the banners down, and the fun going on, amazingly, without him.
The thready lawn behind their little limestone house at 14Vz Franklin Drive has the dry kiss of autumn on it: brown patches and the first few fallen leaves, cast off by the weeping cherry, his neighbor's black walnut, the sweet cherry that leans close to the house so he can watch the squirrels scrabble along its branches, and the willow above the empty cement fish pond with the bluepainted bottom and rim of real seashells. These trees still seem green and growing but their brown leaves are accumulating in the grass. Even the hemlock toward the neighboring house of thin yellow bricks, and the rhododendrons along the palisade fence separating the Angstroms' yard from the property of the big mockTudor house of clinker bricks, and the shaggy Austrian pines whose cast-off needles clutter the cement pond, though all evergreen, are tinged by summer's end, dusty and sweetly dried-out like the smell that used to come from the old cedar hope chest where Mom kept spare blankets and their good embroidered linen tablecloth for Thanksgiving and Christmas and the two old crazy quilts she had inherited from the Renningers. It was family legend that these quilts were fabulously valuable but when, in some family crunch when Harry was in his early teens, they tried to sell them, the best offer they could get was sixty dollars apiece. After much talk around the porcelain kitchen table, they took the offer, and now authentic old quilts like that bring thousands if in good condition. When he thinks about those old days and the amounts of money they considered important it's as if they were being cheated, getting by on slave wages, eating bread that cost eleven cents a loaf. They were living in a financial dungeon, back there on Jackson Road, and the fact that everybody else was in it too only makes it sadder. Just thinking about those old days lately depresses him; it makes him face life's constant depreciation. Lying awake at night, afraid he will never fall asleep or will fall asleep forever, he feels a stifling uselessness in things, a kind of atomic decay whereby the precious glowing present turns, with each tick of the clock, into the leaden slag of history.
The forsythia and beauty bush both have been getting out of hand during this wet summer and Harry, on this cloudy cool Thursday before the Labor Day weekend, has been trying to prune them back into shape for the winter. With the forsythia, you take out the oldest stem from the base, making the bush younger and thinner and more girlish suddenly, and then cut back the most flagrant skyward shoots and the down-drooping branches on their way to reroot in among the day lilies. It doesn't do to be tenderhearted; the harder you cut back now, the more crammed with glad yellow blossoms the stubby branches become in the spring. The beauty bush poses a tougher challenge, an even tighter tangle. Any attempt to follow the tallest stems down to their origin gets lost in the net of interwoven branchlets, and the bottom thicket of small trunks is so dense as to repel a clipper or pruning saw; there is not a knife's-width of space. The bush in this season of neglect has grown so tall he really should go to the garage for the aluminum stepladder. But Rabbit is reluctant to face the garage's grimy tumble of cast-aside tires and stiff hoses and broken flowerpots and rusted tools inherited from the previous owners, who failed to clean out the garage the same way they left a stack of Playboys in an upstairs closet. In ten years he and Janice have added their own stuff to the garage, so that gradually there wasn't space for one car let alone two in it; it has become a cave of deferred decisions and sentimentally cherished junk so packed that if he tries to extract the ladder several old paint cans and a lawn sprinkler bereft of its washers will come clattering down. So he stretches and reaches into the beauty bush until his chest begins to ache, with the sensation of an inflexible patch stitched to the inner side of his skin. His nitroglycerin pills got left in the sweat-rimmed pocket of his plaid golf slacks last night when he went to bed early, alone, having fed himself a beer and some Corn Chips after that match with Ronnie ended so sourly.