"Thanks," he hoarsely tells his son. "I'll read it when you go. Those damn Arabs. I'm nervous about your missing your plane."
"Don't be. We got tons of time still. Even Mom can't get lost on the way, can she?"
"Drive east from here to 75 and then south to Exit 21. The road feels like it's going nowhere but after three miles the airport shows up." Harry remembers his own drive along that weird highway, the lack of billboards, the palm trees skinny as paint drips, the cocoa-colored chick in the red Camaro convertible and stewardess cap who tailgated him and then didn't give him a sideways glance, her tipped-up nose and pushed-out lips, and it seems unreal, coated in a fake sunshine like enamel, like that yellow sunlight they make on TV shows from studio lights. He didn't have a worry in the world back then. He was in paradise and didn't know it. He feels his body sweating from fear, he smells his own sweat,- clammy like something at the bottom of a well, and sees Nelson standing there bathed in the artificial light of the world that hasn't broken through into death yet, neat and taut in the puttycolored suit he is wearing instead of the denim jacket he wore on the flight down, but with his shirt collar still open, so he looks like an all-night gambler who took off his tie in a poker game, down here nearly a week and hardly ever saw the sun. The little smudge of his mustache annoys Harry and the kid keeps calling attention to it, sniffing and touching the underside of his nose as if he smells his father's clammy fear.
He says, "Also, Dad, I noticed the Deion Sanders case is being pushed back into the sports pages and somewhere in Section B there's an article about fighting flab that'll give you a laugh."
"Yeah, flab. I'm flabby on the inside even."
This is the cue for his son to look sincere and ask, "How're you doing anyway?" The kid's face goes a little white around the gills, as if he fears his father will really tell him. His haircut is annoying, too – short on top and too long in the back, that pathetic rat-tail. And the tiny earring.
"Pretty good, considering."
"Great. This big beefy doctor with the funny accent came out and talked to us and said that the first one is the one a lot of people don't survive and in your case now, for a while at least, it's just a matter of changing your lifestyle a little."
"That guy has a thing about potato chips and hot dogs. If God didn't want us to eat salt and fat, why did He make them taste so good?"
Nelson's eyes get dark and swarmy, the way they do whenever his father mentions God. The conversation keeps sticking, it doesn't flow, Harry keeps thinking how he is falling, the kid is like a weight on his chest. Come on, he says to himself, try. You only live once.
"Pru told me you were up all night with worry."
"Yeah, well, she exaggerates, but sort of. I don't know why I can't sleep down here. It all feels phony to me, and there's all this stuff back in Brewer I should be tending to."
"Like at the lot? Between holidays is a slow week usually. Everybody's feeling broke after Christmas."
"Well, yeah, and other stuff. I keep feeling hassled."
"That's life, Nelson. Hassle."
"I suppose."
Harry says, "I been thinking about our conversation, about Toyotas being so dull. Give 'em credit, they're trying to sex the line up. They're coming out with this Lexus luxury sedan next fall. V-8 engine even."
"Yeah, but they won't let us regular dealerships handle it. They're establishing a whole new retail network. Let 'em, it's going to flop anyway. The Japanese aren't Italians. Luxury isn't their bag."
"I forgot about that separate Lexus network. I tell ya, Nelson, I'm not quite with it. I'm in a fog."
"Join the crowd," Nelson says.
"And oh yeah – the stat sheets. I've been thinking about that. Are you having trouble moving the used? Don't get greedy. Ten per cent markup is all you should expect, it's worth shaving the profit just to keep the inventory flowing."
"O.K., Dad. If you say so. I'll check it out."
The conversation sticks again. Roy squirms in his father's grip. Harry is falling, the light is just a skin of the dark, thinner than an airplane's skin, thinner than an aluminum beer can. Grab something, anything. "She's turned out to be quite a fine woman, Pru," he volunteers to his son.
The boy looks surprised. "Yeah, she's not bad." And he volunteers, "I should try to be nicer to her."
"How?"
"Oh – you know. Clean up my act. Try to be more mature."
"You always seemed pretty mature to me. Maybe too, early on. Maybe I didn't set such a good example of maturity."
"All the more reason, then. For me, I mean."
Does Harry imagine it, or is there a stirring, a tiny dry coughing, behind the curtain next to him, in the bed he cannot see? His phantom roommate lives. He says, "I'm really getting anxious about you making your plane."
"Sorry about that, by the way. I feel crummy leaving. Pru and I were talking last night, if we ought to stay a few more days, but, I don't know, you make plans, you get socked in."
"Don't I know it. What could you do, staying? Your old man's fine. He's in great hands. I just have to learn to live with a not so great heart. A bum ticker. Charlie's done it for twenty years, I can do it." But then Rabbit adds, threatening to pass into the maudlin, the clingy, the elegiac, "But, then, he's a wiry little Greek and I'm a big fat Swede."
Nelson has become quite tense. He radiates a nervous desire to be elsewhere. "O.K., Dad. You're right, we'd better get moving. Give Grandpa a kiss," he tells Roy.
He leans the boy in, like shovelling off a wriggling football, to kiss his grandfather's cheek. But Roy, instead of delivering a kiss, grabs the double-barrelled baby-blue oxygen tube feeding into Harry's nose and yanks it out.
`Jesus!" Nelson says, showing emotion at last. "You all right? Did that hurt?" He whacks his son on the bottom, and sets him down on the floor.
It did hurt slightly, the sudden smarting violence of it, but Harry has to laugh. "No problem," he says. "It just sits in there, like upside-down glasses. Oxygen, I don't really need it, it's just one more perk."
Roy has gone rubber-legged with rage and collapses on the shiny floor beside the bed. He writhes and makes a scrawking breathless noise and Nelson bends down and hits him again.
"Don't hit the kid," Harry tells him, not emphatically. "He just wanted to do me a favor." As best he can with his free hand, he resettles the two pale-blue tubes one over each ear as they come from the oxygen box hung on the wall behind him and resettles the clip, with its gentle enriching whisper, on his septum. "He maybe thought it was like blowing my nose for me."
"You little shit, you could have killed your own grandfather," Nelson explains down at the writhing child, who has to be hauled, kicking, out from under the bed.
"Now who's exaggerating," Harry says, "I'm tougher to kill than that," and begins to believe it. Roy, white in the gills just like his dad, finds his voice and lets loose a yell and tries to throw himself out of Nelson's grasp. The rubber heels of nurses are hurrying toward them down the hall. The unseen roommate suddenly groans behind his white curtain, with a burbly, deep-pulmonary-trouble kind of groan. Roy is kicking like a landed fish and must be catching Nelson in the stomach; Harry has to chuckle, to think of the child doing that. On one grab: deft. Maybe in his four-yearold mind he thought the tubes were snakes eating at his grandfather's face; maybe he just thought they were too ugly to look at.