Nelson asks, "Did they used to ever chop the clock?"
"Where'd you learn that phrase?"
"From the book."
"Well…" This isn't so bad, Harry thinks, talking to the kid sensibly while the rain drums down. He doesn't know why it makes him nervous to see the kid read. Like he's plotting something. They say you should encourage it, reading, but they never say why. "You know chopping the clock is a felony. But maybe in the old days sometimes a mechanic, up in the dashboard anyway, kind of had his screwdriver slip on the odometer. People who buy a used car know it's a gamble anyway. A car might go twenty thousand miles without trouble or pop a cylinder tomorrow. Who's to say? I've seen some amazing wear on cars that were running like new. Those VW bugs, you couldn't kill 'em. The body so rotten with rust the driver can see the road under his feet but the engine still ticking away." He tosses the chunky green book back. Nelson fumbles the catch. Harry asks him, "How do you feel, about your girlfriend's going out with somebody else?"
"I've told you before, Dad, she's not my girlfriend, she's my friend. Can't you have a friend of the opposite sex?"
"You can try it. How come she settled on moving back here with you then?"
Nelson's patience is being tried but Harry figures he might as wéll keep pushing, he's not learning anything playing the silent game. Nelson says, "She needed to blow the scene in Colorado and I was coming east and told her my grandmother's house had a lot of empty rooms. She's not been any trouble, has she?"
"No, she's charmed old Bessie right out of her sneakers. What was the matter with the scene in Colorado, that she needed to blow it?"
"Oh, you know. The wrong guy was putting a move on her, and she wanted to get her head together."
The rain restates its theme, hard, against the thin windows. Rabbit has always loved that feeling, of being inside when it rains. Shingles in the attic, pieces of glass no thicker than cardboard keeping him dry. Things that touch and yet not.
Delicately Harry asks, "You know the guy she's out with?"
"Yes, Dad, and so do you."
"Billy Fosnacht?"
"Guess again. Think older. Think Greek."
"Oh my God. You're kidding. That old crock?"
Nelson watches him with an alertness, a stillness of malice. He is not laughing, though the opportunity has been given. He explains, "He called up the Crépe House and asked her, and she thought Why not? It gets pretty boring around here, you have to admit. Just for a meal. She didn't promise to go to bed with him. The trouble with your generation, Dad, you can only think along certain lines."
"Charlie Stavros," Harry says, trying to get a handle on it. The kid seems in a pretty open mood. Rabbit dares go on, "You remember he saw your mother for a while."
"I remember. But everybody else around here seems to have forgotten. You all seem so cozy now."
"Times change. You don't think we should be? Cozy."
Nelson sneers, sinking lower into the depths of the old sofa. "I don't give that much of a damn. It's not my life."
"It was," Harry says. "You were right there. I felt sorry for you, Nelson, but I couldn't think what else to do. That poor girl Jill -"
"Dad -"
"Skeeter's dead, you know. Killed in a Philadelphia shootout. Somebody sent me a clipping."
"Mom wrote me that. I'm not surprised. He was crazy."
"Yeah, and then not. You know he said he'd be dead in ten years. He really did have a certain -"
"Dad. Let's cool this conversation."
"O.K. Suits me. Sure.
Rain. So sweet, so solid. In the garden the smallest scabs of earth, beneath the lettuce and lopsided bean leaves perforated by Japanese beetles, are darkening, soaking, the leaves above them glistening, dripping, in the widespread vegetable sharing of this secret of the rain. Rabbit returns his eyes to his magazine from studying Nelson's stubborn clouded face. The best type of fourslice toaster, he reads, is the one that has separate controls for each pair of toast slots. Stavros and Melanie, can you believe? Charlie had kept saying he had liked her style.
As if in apology for having cut his father off when the rain was making him reminiscent, Nelson breaks the silence. "What's Charlie's title over there, anyway?"
"Senior Sales Rep. He's in charge of the used cars and I take care of the new. That's more or less. In practice, we overlap. Along with Jake and Rudy, of course." He wants to keep reminding the kid of Jake and Rudy. No rich men's sons, they give a good day's work for their dollar.
"Are you satisfied with the job Charlie does for you?"
"Absolutely. He knows the ropes better than I do. He knows half the county."
"Yeah, but his health. How much energy you think he has?"
The question has a certain collegiate tilt to it. He hasn't asked Nelson enough about college, maybe that's the way through to him. All these women around, it's too easy for Nelson to hide. "Energy? He has to watch himself and take it easy, but he gets the job done. People don't like to be hustled these days, there was too much of that, the way the car business used to be. I think a salesman who's a little – what's the word? – laid back, people trust more. I don't mind Charlie's style." He wonders if Melanie does. Where are they, in some restaurant? He pictures her face, brighteyed almost like a thyroid bulge and her cheeks that look always rouged, rosy with exertion even before she bought the Fuji, her young face dense and smooth as she smiles and keeps smiling opposite old Charlie's classic con-man's profile, as he puts his move on her. And then later that business down below, his thick cock that blue-brown of Mediterranean types and, he wonders if her hair there is as curly as the hair on her head, in and out, he can't believe it will happen, while the rest of them sit here listening to the rain.
Nelson is saying, "I was wondering if something couldn't be done with convertibles." A heavy shamed diffidence thickens his words so they seem to drop one by one from his face, downturned where he sits in the tired gray sofa with his muskrat cut.
"Convertibles? How?"
"You know, Dad, don't make me say it. Buy 'em and sell 'em. Detroit doesn't make 'em anymore, so the old ones are more and more valuable. You could get more than you paid for Mom's Mustang."
"If you don't wreck it first."
This reminder has the effect Rabbit wants. "Shit," the boy exclaims, defenseless, darting looks at every comer of the ceiling looking for the escape hatch, "I didn't wreck your damn precious Corona, I just gave it a little dent."
"It's still in the shop. Some dent."
"I didn't do it on purpose, Christ, Dad, you act like it was some divine chariot or something. You've gotten so uptight in your old age."
"Have I?" He asks sincerely, thinking this might be information.
"Yes. All you think about is money and things."
"That's not good, is it?"
"No."
"You're right. Let's forget about the car. Tell me about college." "It's yukky," is the prompt response. "It's Dullsville. People think because of that shooting ten years ago it's some great radical place but the fact is most of the kids are Ohio locals whose idea of a terrific time is drinking beer till they throw up and having shaving cream fights in the dorms. Most of 'em are going to go into their father's business anyway, they don't care."
Harry ignores this, asking, "You ever have reason to go over to the big Firestone plant? I keep reading in the paper where they kept making those steel-belted radial five hundreds even after they kept blowing up on everybody."
"Typical," the boy tells him. "All the products you buy are like that. All the American products."
"We used to be the best," Harry says, staring into the distance as if toward a land where he and Nelson can perfectly agree.