"You and who else?" he asks, determined to be debonair Bogie at the airport in Casablanca, Flynn at Little Big Horn, George Sanders in the collapsing temple to Dagon, Victor Mature having pushed apart the pillars.
"Nelson, obviously. I don't think he slept a wink last night, you were so much on his mind. He can't say it, but he loves you."
Harry laughs, gently, since there is this valentine inside him that might rip. "The kid and I have something going between us. Not sure love is what you'd call it." Since she hesitates in replying, looking at him with those staring mud-flecked greenish eyes that Judy's clearer paler eyes were distilled from, he goes on, "I love him all right, but maybe it's a him that's long gone. A little tiny kid, looking right up to you while you're letting him down – you never forget it."
"It's still there, under it all," Pru assures him, without saying what '`it all" is. Her Sphinx-do hair is slightly wild, Harry sees in the brilliant hospital light -colorless stray filaments stand out all around her head. He feels there is a lot she wants to say but doesn't dare. He remembers how she appeared hovering above him as he lay breathless on the beach, in her white suit with its spandex crotch, anxious and womanly, her face in shadow, unlookable at, and right beside it like a thunder-head the face of Ed Silberstein's son, his salt-stiffened black curls, his butternut skin, his prick making its bump in his tight black trunks, beside the five-sided Omni logo – a smoothie, on the make, on the rise. Hi-ho, Silvers.
"Tell me about you, Pru," Rabbit says, the words gliding out of his hoarse throat as if his being in bed and chemically relaxed has moved them to a new level of intimacy. "How's it going for you, with the kid? With Nelson."
People do respond, surprisingly, to the direct approach, as if we're all just waiting in our burrows to be ferreted out. She says without hesitation, "He's a wonderful father to the children. That I can say sincerely. Protective and concerned and involved. When he can focus."
"Why can't he always focus?"
Now she hesitates, unthinkingly revolving the ring on her finger.
As if all of Florida is made up of interchangeable parts, a Norfolk pine stands outside his hospital window and holds an invisible bird that makes the sound of wet wood squeaking. He heard it this morning and he hears it now. His chest seems to echo with a twinge. Just to be on the safe side he takes another nitroglycerin.
Pru blurts out, "The lot worries him, I think. Sales have been off these last years with the weaker dollar and all, and what he says are boring models, and I think he's afraid Toyota might lift the dealership."
"It would take a bomb to make them do that. We've done O.K. by Toyota over the years. When Fred Springer got that franchise Japanese products were still considered a joke."
"That was a long time ago, though. Things don't stand still," Pru says. "Nelson has trouble being patient, and to tell the truth I think it scares him to have none of the old-timers around any more, Charlie and then Manny and now Mildred, even though he fired her, and you down here half the year, and f Jake gone over to Volvo-Olds over near that new mall in Oriole, and Rudy opening his own Toyota-Mazda over on 422. He feels alone, and all he has for company are these flaky types from north Brewer."
At the thought of "these flaky types" more of her hairs, glowing like electric filaments here in Florida's fluorescent light, stand out from her head in agitation. She is trying to tell him something, something is slipping, but how can a man tied up helpless in bed track it down? Rabbit has his heart to nurse. This is life and death. His drugs must be wearing off. The deadly awfulness of his situation is beginning to rise in his throat, burning like an acid regurgitation. His asshole tingles, right on schedule. He has something evil and weak inside him that might betray him at any minute into that icy blackness Bernie talked about.
Pru shrugs her wide shoulders in delayed answer to his question about how it was going. "What's a life supposed to be? They don't give you another for comparison. I love the big house, and Pennsylvania. In Akron we only ever had apartments, and the rent was always behind, and it seemed like the toilet bowl always leaked."
Rabbit tries to lift himself onto her level, out of his private apprehension of darkness, its regurgitated taste. "You're right," he says. "We ought to be grateful. But it's hard, being grateful. It seems like from the start you're put here in a kind of fix, hungry and scared, and the only way out is no good either. Hey, listen. Listen to me. You're still young. You're great-looking. Smile. Smile for me, Teresa."
Pru smiles and comes around the end of the bed and bends down to give him a kiss, not on the mouth this time like in the airport, but on the cheek, avoiding the tubes feeding oxygen into his nose. Her close presence feels huge, checked, clothy, a cloud come over him like the shadow of that hull on its side out there on the Gulf, where it was cold and hot both at once. He feels sick; the facts of his case keep wanting to rise in his throat, burning, on the verge of making him gag. "You're a sweet man, Harry."
"Yeah, sure. See you in the spring up there."
"It seems terrible, us leaving like this, but there's this party in Brewer Nelson's determined to go to tonight and changing plane reservations is impossible anyway, everything's jammed this time of year, even into Newark."
"What can you do?" he asks her. "I'll be fine. This is probably a blessing in disguise. Put some sense into my old head. Get me to lose some weight. Go for walks, eat less crap. The doc says I gotta become a new man."
"And I'll paint my toenails." Pru, standing tall again, says in a level low voice he has not exactly heard before, aimed flat at him as a man, "Don't change too much, Harry." She adds, "I'll send Nelson in."
"If the kid's wild to go, tell him to just go. I'll catch him later, up there."
Her mouth pinches down at one corner, her face goes slightly stiff with the impropriety of his suggestion. "He has to see his father," she says.
Pru exits; the white clean world around Harry widens. When everybody leaves, he will give himself the luxury of ringing for the nurse and asking for more Demerol. And see how the Eagles are doing in the fog. And close his eyes for a blessed minute.
Nelson comes in carrying little Roy in his arms, though visitors under six years old aren't supposed to be allowed. The kid wears the child like defensive armor: as long as he's carrying a kid of his own, how much can you say against him? Roy stares at Harry indignantly, as if his grandfather being in bed connected with a lot of machinery is a threatening trick. When Harry tries to beam him a smile and a wink, Roy with a snap of his head hides his face in his father's neck. Nelson too seems shocked; his eyes keep going up to the monitor, with its orange twitch of onrunning life, and then gingerly back to his father's face. Cumbersomely keeping his grip on the leaden, staring child, Nelson steps toward the bed and sets a folded copy of the NewsPress on the chrome-edged table already holding the water glass and the telephone and the little brown bottle of nitroglycerin. "Here's the paper when you feel like reading. There's a lot in it about that Pan Am crash you're so interested in. They think they know now exactly what kind of bomb it was – there's a kind with a barometric device that activates a timer when a certain altitude is reached."
Up, up; the air thins, the barometer registers, the timer begins to tick as the plane snugly bores through darkness and the pilot chats on the radio while the cockpit lights burn and wink around him and the passengers nod over their drinks in their slots of pastel plastic. The image, like a seed at last breaking its shell in moist soil, awakens in Harry the realization that even now as he lies here in this antiseptic white fog tangled in tubes and ties of blood and marriage he is just like the people he felt so sorry for, falling from the burst-open airplane: he too is falling, helplessly falling, toward death. The fate awaiting him behind this veil of medical attention is as absolute as that which greeted those bodies fallen smack upon the boggy Scottish earth like garbage bags full of water. Smack, splat, bodies bursting across the golf courses and heathery lanes of Lockerbie drenched in night. What met them was no more than what awaits him. Reality broke upon those passengers as they sat carving their airline chicken with the unwrapped silver or dozing with tubes piping Barry Manilow into their ears and that same icy black reality has broken upon him; death is not a domesticated pet of life but a beast that swallowed baby Amber and baby Becky and all those Syracuse students and returning soldiers and will swallow him, it is truly there under him, vast as a planet at night, gigantic and totally his. His death. His purely own. The burning intensifies in his sore throat and he feels all but suffocated by terror.