The morning radio news is dull. Giamatti's death, warmed over. Baseball mourns. Economy shows moderate growth. Bombardments in Beirut between Christians and Muslims worse than ever. Ex-HUD aide says files were shredded. Supreme Court ruling against organized prayer before football games is rousing indignation all over the Southland. In Montgomery, Mayor Emory Folmar marched to the fifty-yard line and led a prayer there. His remarks over the public-address system linked football and prayer as American tradition. In Sylacauga, Alabama, local ministers rose in the bleachers and led the crowd of three thousand in the Lord's Prayer. In Pensacola, Florida, preachers equipped with bullhorns led spectactors in prayer. Fanatics, Rabbit tells himself. Southerners are as scary as the Amish.
From here on down to the Florida line Route 95 is like a long green tunnel between tall pines. Little shacks peek through. A sign offers Pecan Rolls 3 for $ 2.00. Bigger signs in Hispanic colors, orange and yellow on black, lime green, splashy and loud, miles and miles of them, begin to advertise something called South of the Border. Bear Up a Leetle Longer. You Never Sausage a Place! With a big basketball curving right off the billboard, Have a Ball. When you finally get there, after all these miles of pine tunnel, it's a junky amusement park just across the South Carolina border: a village of souvenir shops, a kind of a space needle wearing a sombrero. Tacos, tacky. South Carolina is a wild state. The first to secede. The pines get taller, with a tragic feeling. FIREWORKS are offered everywhere for sale. The land gets hillier. Trucks loaded with great tree trunks rumble unstoppably by on the downslope and labor to nearly a standstill on the up. Rabbit is nervously aware now of his Pennsylvania plates being Northern. Swerve out of line a bit and they'll throw him in the Pee Dee River. The Lynches River. The Pocatoligo River. Animals on this highway are hit so hard they don't squash, they explode, impossible to know what they were. Possums. Porcupines. Some dear old Southern lady's darling pet pussycat. Reduced to fur stains amid the crescent fragments of exploded truck tires. Just think, he lay down for lunch and that was it.
Janice must have got the message from Pru, she may be already at the condo waiting, flying down from Philly and renting a car at the airport, better enjoy his freedom while he has it. He has come upon a black gospel station, an elastic fat voice shouting, "He'll be there, but you got to call him names." Endlessly repeated, with unexpected rhythmic variations. "Roll that stone away, do you know the story?" A commercial interrupts at last and, would you believe, it's for Toyotas. Those Japs don't miss a trick, you have to hand it to them. Selling right in the slave quarters. Your pruraristic society. Harry's neck hurts from holding his head in one position so long. He's beginning to feel bloated on radio, on travel. God's country. He could have made it smaller and still made the same point.
He'll be there. Funny, about Harry and religion. When God hadn't a friend in the world, back there in the Sixties, he couldn't let go of Him, and now when the preachers are all praying through bullhorns he can't get it up for Him. He is like a friend you've had so long you've forgotten what you liked about Him. You'd think after that heart scare, but in a way the closer you get the less you think about it, like you're in His hand already. Like you're out on the court instead of on the bench swallowing down butterflies and trying to remember the plays.
Perry Como comes on and sings "Because." Rabbit's scalp prickles at the end, the skin of his eyes stings. Because – you – are miiiine! Como the best, probably: Crosby had something sly-Irish about him, clowning around with Lamour and Hope, and Sinatra – if there's one way in which Rabbit Angstrom has been out of step with mankind, it's Sinatra. He doesn't like his singing. He didn't like it when bobbysoxers were jumping out of their underpants for this skinny hollow-cheeked guy up on the stage at the Paramount, and he didn't like it when he mellowed into this Las Vegas fat cat making all these moony albums you're supposed to screw to all across the nation: oceans of jism. White with foam. His singing has always sounded flat to Rabbit, like he's grinding it out. Now, to Mim, Sinatra is a god, but that's more a matter of lifestyle, turning night into day and pally with gangsters and Presidents and that square gangster way of carrying your shoulders (Charlie Stavros has it) and Chairman of the Board and Sammy Davis, Jr., and Dean Martin before they dried out finally, if in fact they did, both men have terrible health problems he read somewhere, in one of those ridiculous scandal sheets Janice brings home from the Minit Market. Sometimes Harry envies Mim the glamorous dangerous life he guesses she's lived, he's glad for her, she always had that edge, wanting speed even if it killed her, even if it flipped her off the handlebars of his old Elgin. But the fast lane too gets to be a rut. He doesn't regret the life he led, though Brewer isn't New York New York or Chicago my kind of town the way Sinatra grinds it out. What he enjoyed most, it turns out in retrospect, and he didn't know it at the time, was standing around in the showroom, behind the dusty big window with the banners, bouncing on the balls of his feet to keep up his leg muscles, waiting for a customer, shooting the bull with Charlie or whoever, earning his paycheck, filling his slot in the big picture, doing his bit, getting a little recognition. That's all we want from each other, recognition. Your assigned place in the rat race. In the Army, too, you had it: your number, your bunk, your assigned duties, your place in line, your pass for Saturday night, four beers and fuck a whore in a ranch house. Honey, you didn't pay to be no two-timer. There's more to being a human being than having your own way. Fact is, it has come to Rabbit this late in life, you don't have a way apart from what other people tell you. Your mother first, and poor Pop, then the Lutheran minister, that tough old heinie Fritz Kruppenbach, you had to respect him though, he said what he believed, and then all those schoolteachers, Marty Tothero and the rest, trying to give you an angle to work from, and now all these talk-show hosts. Your life derives, and has to give. Maybe if your mother was in the fast lane like Annabelle's you are naturally leery of the opposite sex. We haven't set these kids terrific examples.
The pine trees have gaps now. Marshy stretches open the sky up, there are cabins on stilts, trees with shaggy balls on them, colored wash hanging on lines. Homely hand-lettered signs. Dad's Real Southern Cookin'. Bi-Lo. A long bridge over Lake Marion, this enormous body ofwater in the middle of nowhere. Highways branch off to the capital, Columbia, where he's never been, though he and Janice did once detour over to Charleston and back on Route 17. Another time, they diverted to Savannah and spent the night in a made-over plantation house with high domed ceilings and louvers on the windows. They did do some fun things, he and Jan. The thing about a wife, though, and he supposes a husband for that matter, is that almost anybody would do, inside broad limits. Yet you're supposed to adore them till death do you part. Till the end of time. Ashepoo River. Wasn't that a comic strip, years ago?
He gets off the highway at a vast rest stop, an oasis in this wilderness – gas pumps, a restaurant, a little department store selling groceries, beer, fireworks, suntan lotion. At the counter a couple of young black men, glittery black in the heat, arms bare up to the shoulder, a mean little Malcolm X goatee on one of them. They have a menace down here, their color shouts, they are a race, they are everywhere. But the elderly white waitress has no trouble with these two black boys. The three chat and smile in the same dragged accent, making a little breeze with their mouths. Nice to see it. For this, the Civil War.
To test if he can still use his own voice, Rabbit asks the fat white man one empty stool away from him at the counter, a man who has made for himself at the salad bar a mountain of lettuce and red beets and coleslaw and cottage cheese and kidney beans and chickpeas, "About how many more hours is it to the Florida line?" He lets his Pennsylvania accent drag a little extra, hoping to pass.