He does not always gravitate in his health walks to the black section of Deleon; he discovers and explores posh streets he never dreamed were there, long roads parallel to the beach, giving the passerby glimpses of backs of houses that front on the ocean, wooden back stairs and sundecks, three-car garages at the end of driveways surfaced in crushed seashells, plantings of hibiscus and jacaranda, splashing sounds coming from a fenced-in swimming pool, the purr of air-conditioners lost amid the retreating and advancing shush of the surf. Posh, shoosh. Some people have it made; not for them a condo where they steal your view of the Gulf from the balcony. No matter how hard you climb, there are always the rich above you, who got there without effort. Lucky stiffs, holding you down, making you discontent so you buy more of the crap advertised on television.
Occasional breaks in the developed oceanfront property permit a look at the Gulf, its striped sails and scooting jet skis, its parachutes being pulled by powerboats, its far gray stationary freighters. Bicyclers in bathing suits pass him with a whirr; a beefy young mailman in blue-gray shorts and socks to match pushes along one of these pouches on rubber wheels they have now, like baby strollers. We're getting soft. A nation of couch potatoes. The man who brought the mail to Jackson Road, he forgets his name, an iron-haired man with a handsome unhappy face, Mom said his wife had left him, used to carry this scuffed leather pouch, leaning to one side against its pull especially on Fridays when the magazines came to the houses, Life and the Post. Mr. Abendroth. That was his name. Left by his wife: Harry as a boy used to try to imagine what could have been so terribly wrong with him, to earn such a disgrace in life.
His Nikes with the bubbles of air in the heels take him along crushed-shell sidewalks, so white they hurt his eyes when the sun is high. And he walks through an area of marinas cut into coral shell, neat straight streets of water sliced out, full of powerboats tied up obedient and empty, their rub rails tapping the sliced coral, their curved sides seeming to tremble and twitch in the sunlight reflected in bobbling stripes off the calm water as it lightly kicks and laps. Tap. Lap. No Trespassing signs abound, but not so much for him, a respectable-looking white man past middle age. Each boat ties up as much money as a house used to cost and a number of them no doubt are involved in cocaine smuggling, put-putting out in the dead of the night when the moon is down, crime and the sea have always mixed, pirates ever since there have been ships, law ends with the land, man is nothing out there, a few bubbles as he goes down under the mindless waves: that must be why Harry has always been afraid of it, the water. He loves freedom but a grassy field is his idea of enough. People down here are crazy about boats but not him. Give him terra firma. Away from the water he walks miles of plain neighborhoods, glorified cabins put up after the war for people without much capital who yet wanted a piece of the sun Washington won for them or else were born here, this strange thin vacation-land their natural home, their houses shedding paint like a sunbather's clothes, surrounded not by barberry and yew bushes but spiky cactuses fattening in the baking heat, America too hot and dry really for European civilization to take deep root.
But it is the widespread black section that draws him back, he doesn't quite know why, whether because he is exerting his national right to go where he pleases or because this ignored part of Deleon is in some way familiar, he's been there before, before his life got too soft. On the Monday after a pretty good weekend for blacks – a black Miss America got elected, and Randall Cunningham brought the Eagles back from being down to the Redskins twenty to nothing – Rabbit ventures several blocks farther than he has dared walk before and comes upon, beyond an abandoned high school built about when Brewer High was, an ochre-brick edifice with tall gridded windows and a piece of Latin in cement over the main entrance, a recreation field – a wide tan emptiness under the sun, with a baseball diamond and backstop at the far end, a pair of soccer goals set up in the outfield, and, nearer the street, two pitted clay tennis courts with wire nets slack and bent from repeated assaults and, also of pale tamped earth, a basketball court. A backboard and netless hoop lifted up on pipe legs preside at either end. A small pack of black boys are scrimmaging around one basket. Legs, shouts. Puffs of dust rise from their striving, stop-and-starting feet. Some benches have been placed in an unmowed strip of seedy blanched weeds next to the cement sidewalk. The benches are backless so you can sit facing the street or facing the field. Rabbit seats himself on the end of one, facing neither way, so he can watch the basketball while seeming to be doing something else, just resting a second on his way through, not looking at anything, minding his own business.
The kids, six of them, in shorts and tank tops, vary in heights and degrees of looseness, but all have that unhurried look he likes to see, missing shots or making them, passing back out and then crossing over in a screen, dribbling as if to drive in and then stopping dead to pass off in a droll behind-the-back toss, imitating the fancy stuff they see on television, all together making a weave, nobody trying too hard, it's a long life, a long afternoon. Their busy legs are up to their knees in a steady haze of pink dust lifting from the clay, their calves dulled but for where sweat makes dark rivulets, their sneakers solidly coated a rosy earth color. There is a breeze here, stirred up by the empty space stretching to the baseball backstop. Rabbit's watch says four o'clock, school is over, but the brick high school has been abandoned, the real action is elsewhere, at some modern low glassy high school you take a bus to, out on the bulldozed edges of the city. Rabbit is happy to think that the world isn't yet too crowded to have a few of these underused pockets left. Grass, he observes, has crept onto the dirt court, in the middle, where the pounding, pivoting feet rarely come. Shallow semicircular troughs have been worn around the baskets at either end.
Though he is sitting some distance away – a good firm chip shot, or a feathered wedge – the players eye him. They're doing this for themselves, not as a show for some fat old honky walking around where he shouldn't be. Where's his car? Feeling heat from their sidelong glances, not wanting so delicate a relation to turn awkward, Harry sighs ostentatiously and heaves himself up from the bench and walks away the way he came, taking note of the street signs so he can find this peaceful place again. If he comes every day he'll blend in. Blacks don't have this racist thing whites do, about keeping their neighborhoods pure. They can't be too angry these days, with their third Miss America just elected. The funny thing about the final judges' panel, it held two celebrities he feels he knows, has taken into himself, loves, actually: Phylicia Rashad, who for his money is the real star of The Cosby Show, with those legs and that nice loose smile, and Mike Schmidt, who had the grace to pack it in when he could no longer produce. So there is life after death of a sort. Schmidt judges. Skeeter lives. And the weekend before last, a young black girl beat Chrissie Evert in the last U.S. Open match she'll ever play. She packed it in too. There comes a time.
Now the News-Press wears daily banner headlines tracking Hurricane Hugo -Deadly Hugo roars into islands, Hugo rips into Puerto Rico. Tuesday, he walks in the expensive beachfront areas and scans the sky for hurricane signs, for clouds God's finger might write, and reads none. In the hall that evening, happening to be standing with him at the elevators, Mrs. Zabntski turns those veiny protuberant eyes up at him out of her skeletal face and pronounces, "Terrible thing."