"Well," Harry says, back on the weird brief highway, "it's a helluva thing, to have your own son accuse you of kidnapping. And as to the big deal ofhaving two children, it can't be that much worse than having one. Either way, your freedom's gone."
Actually Nelson has, unwittingly or not, touched a sore point, for Harry and Janice did have two children. Their dead child lives on with them as a silent glue of guilt and shame, an inexpungeable sourness at the bottom of things. And Rabbit suspects himself of having an illegitimate daughter, three years younger than Nelson, by a woman called Ruth, who wouldn't admit it the last time Harry saw her.
Nelson goes on, helpless in the grip of his hardened resentments, "You go run off with Judy all palsy-walsy and haven't said boo to little Roy."
"Say boo? – I'd wake him up, saying boo, he's been asleep all the time, it's like he's drugged. And how much longer you gonna let him suck his thumb? Shouldn't he be outgrowing it by now?"
"What does it matter to you if he sucks his thumb? How is it hurting you?"
"He'll get buck teeth."
"Dad, that's an old wives' tale. Pru asked our pediatrician and he said you don't suck your thumb with your teeth."
Pru says quietly, "He did say he should outgrow it soon."
"What makes you so down on everything, Dad?" Nelson whines, unable it seems to find another pitch. The kid is itching and his voice can't stop scratching. "You used to be a pretty laidback hombre; now everything you say is kind of negative."
Rabbit wants to lead the boy on, to see how bad he can make him look in front of the women. "Rigid," he smilingly agrees. "The older you get, the more you get set in your ways. Nobody at Valhalla Village sucks their thumb. There may even be a rule against it, like swimming in the pool without a bathing cap. Like swimming with an earring on. Tell me something. What's the significance of an earring when you're married with two children?"
Nelson ignores the question in dignified silence, making his father look bad.
They are breezing along, between shoulders of unreal grass, the palms clicking by like telephone poles. Pru says from the back seat, to change the subject, "I can never get over how flat Florida is."
"It gets a little rolling," Harry tells her, "away from the coasts. Ranch and orange-grove country. Rednecks and a lot of Mexicans. We could all go for a drive inland some day. See the real Florida."
"Judy and Roy are dying to see Disney World," Nelson says, trying to become reasonable.
"Too far," his father swiftly tells him. "It'd be like driving to Pittsburgh from Brewer. This is a big state. You need reservations to stay overnight and this time of year there aren't any. Absolutely impossible."
This flat statement renders them all wordless. Through the rushing noise of the air-conditioning fan and the humming of the tires Harry hears from the way-back that for a second time in this first half-hour he has made his granddaughter cry. Pru turns and murmurs to her. Harry shouts back, "There's lots else to do. We can go to that circus museum in Sarasota again."
"I hate the circus museum," he hears Judy's small voice say.
"We've never been to the Edison house in Fort Myers," he announces, speaking now as patriarch, to the entire carful. "The people at the condo say it's fascinating, he even invented television it turns out."
"And the beach, baby," Pru softly adds. "You know how you love the beach at the Shore." In a less maternal voice she tells Janice and Harry, "She's a lovely swimmer now."
"Driving to the Jersey Shore used to be absolutely the most boring thing we did," Nelson tells his parents, trying to get down out of his dark cloud into a family mode, willing now in recollection to be a child again.
"Driving is boring," Rabbit pontificates, "but it's what we do. Most of American life is driving somewhere and then driving back wondering why the hell you went."
"Harry," Janice says. "You're going too fast again. Do you want to take 75, or push on to Route 41?"
Of all the roads Harry has seen in his life, Route 41, the old Tamiami Trail, is the most steadily depressing. It is wider than commercial-use, unlimited-access highways tend to be up north, and somehow the competitive roadside enterprise looks worse in constant sunlight, as if like plastic garbage bags it will never rot away. WINN DIXIE. PUBLIX. Eckerd Drugs. K Mart. Wal-Mart. TACO BELL. ARK PLAZA. Joy Food Store. Starvin' Marvin Discount Food Wine and Beer. Among the repeating franchises selling gasoline and groceries and liquor and drugs all mixed together in that peculiar lawless way they have down here, low -pale buildings cater especially to illness and age. Arthritic Rehabilitation Center. Nursefinder, Inc. Cardiac Rehabilitation Center. Chiropractix. Legal Offices – Medicare and Malpractice Cases a Speciality. Hearing Aids and Contact Lenses. West Coast Knee Center. Universal Prosthetics. National Cremation Society. On the telephone wires, instead of the sparrows and starlings you see in Pennsylvania, lone hawks and buzzards sit. Banks, stylish big structures in smoked glass, rise higher than the wires with their glossy self-advertisements. First Federal. Southeast. Barnett Bank with its Superteller. C amp; S proclaiming All Services, servicing the millions and billions in money people bring down here along with their decrepit bodies, the loot of all those lifetimes flooding the sandy low land, floating these big smoked-glass superliners.
Alongside 41, between the banks and stores and pet suppliers and sprinkler installers, miles of low homes are roofed with fat white cooling tile. A block or two back from the highway in the carbon-monoxide haze tall pink condos like Spanish castles or Chinese pagodas spread sideways like banyan trees. Banyan trees fascinate Harry down here, the way they spread by dropping down vines that take root; they look to him like enormous chewing gum on your shoe. Easy Drugs. Nu-VIEW. Ameri-Life and Health. Starlite Motel. JESUS CHRIST Is LORD. His carful of family grows silent and dazed as he drives the miles, stopping now and then at the overhead lights that signal an intersecting road, a secondary road heading west to beaches and what mangrove swamps survive and east to the scruffy prairie being skinned in great square tracts for yet more development. Development! We're being developed to death. Each turning off of Route 41 takes some people home, to their little niche in the maze, their own parking spot and hard-bought place in the sun. The sun is low enough over the Gulf now to tinge everything pink, the red of the stoplights almost invisible. At the Angstroms' own turnoff, two more miles of streets unfold, some straight and some curving, through blocks of single-family houses with half-dead little front yards ornamented by plumes of pampas grass and flowering bushes on vacation from flowering in this dry butt-end of the year. Janice and Harry at first thought they might purchase one of these pale one-story houses lurking behind their tropical bushes and orange trees, caves of coolness and dark, with their secret pools out back behind the garages with their automatic doors, but such houses reminded them unhappily of the house they had in Penn Villas that saw so much marital misery and strangeness before it burned down, half of it, so they settled for a two-bedroom condominium up high in the air, on the fourth floor, overlooking a golf course from a narrow balcony screened by the top branches of Norfolk pines. Of all the addresses where Harry has lived in his life – 303 Jackson Road; Btry A, 66th FA Bn, Fort Larson, Texas; 447 Wilbur Street, Apt. #5; whatever the number on Summer Street was where he parked himself with Ruth Leonard that spring long ago; 26 Vista Crescent; 89 Joseph Street for ten years, courtesy of Ma Springer; 14%2 Franklin Drive – this is the highest number by far: 59600 Pindo Palm Boulevard, Building B, #413. He hadn't been crazy about the thirteen, in fact he thought builders didn't put that number in things, but maybe people are less superstitious than they used to be. When he was a kid there was all sorts of worry, not altogether playful, about black cats and spilled salt and opening umbrellas in the house and kicking buckets and walking under ladders. The air was thought then to have eyes and ears and to need placating.