Janice is harder to put down than formerly; she tidies her bangs with a fiddling raking motion of her fingers and answers, "Some of the girls at the club, their children have come home too and don't know what to do with themselves. It even has a name now, the back-to-the-nest something."
"Syndrome," he says; he is being brought round. He and Pop and Mom sometimes after Mim had been put to bed would settle like this around the kitchen table, with cereal or cocoa if not tea. He feels safe enough to sound plaintive. "If he'd just ask for help," he says, "I'd try to give it. But he doesn't ask. He wants to take without asking."
"And isn't that just human nature," Ma Springer says, in a -spruced-up voice. The tea tastes to her satisfaction and she adds as if to conclude, "There's a lot of sweetness in Nelson, I think he's just a little overwhelmed for now."
"Who isn't?" Harry asks.
In bed, perhaps it's the rain that sexes him up, he insists they make love, though at first Janice is reluctant. "I would have taken a bath," she says, but she smells great, deep jungle smell, of precious rotting mulch going down and down beneath the ferns. When he won't stop, crazy to lose his face in this essence, the cool stem fury of it takes hold of her and combatively she comes, thrusting her hips up to grind her clitoris against his face and then letting him finish inside her beneath him. Lying spent and adrift he listens again to the rain's sound, which now and then quickens to a metallic rhythm on the window glass, quicker than the throbbing in the iron gutter, where ropes of water twist.
"I like having Nelson in the house," Harry says to his wife. "It's great to have an enemy. Sharpens your senses."
Murmurously beyond their windows, yet so close they might be in the cloud of it, the beech accepts, leaf upon leaf, shelves and stairs of continuous dripping, the rain.
"Nelson's not your enemy. He's your boy and needs you more now than ever though he can't say it."
Rain, the last proof left to him that God exists. "I feel," he says, "there's something I don't know."
Janice admits, "There is."
"What is it?" Receiving no answer, he asks then, "How do you know it?"
"Mother and Melanie talk."
"How bad is it? Drugs?"
"Oh Harry no." She has to hug him, his ignorance must make him seem so vulnerable. "Nothing like that. Nelson's like you are, underneath. He likes to keep himself pure."
"Then what the fuck's up? Why can't I be told?"
She hugs him again, and lightly laughs. "Because you're not a Springer."
Long after she has fallen into the steady soft rasping of sleep he lies awake listening to the rain, not willing to let it go, this sound of life. You don't have to be a Springer to have secrets. Blue eyes so pale in the light coming into the back seat of that Corolla. Janice's taste is still on his lips and he thinks maybe it wouldn't be such a good idea for Sealtest. Twice as he lies awake a car stops outside and the front door opens: the first time from the quietness of the motor and the lightness of the steps on the porch boards, Stavros dropping off Melanie; the next time, not many minutes later, the motor brutally raced before cut-off and the footsteps loud and defiant, must be Nelson, having had more beers than was good for him. From the acoustical quality surrounding the sounds of this second car Rabbit gathers that the rain is letting up. He listens for the young footsteps to come upstairs but one set seems to trap the other in the kitchen, Melanie having a snack. The thing about vegetarians, they seem always hungry. You eat and eat and it's never the right food. Who told him that, once? Tothero, he seemed so old there at the end but how much older than Harry is now was he? Nelson and Melanie stay in the kitchen talking until the eavesdropper wearies and surrenders. In his dream, Harry is screaming at the boy over the telephone at the lot, but though his mouth is open so wide he can see all his own teeth spread open like in those dental charts they marked your cavities on that looked like a scream, no sound comes out; his jaws and eyes feel frozen open and when he awakes it seems it has been the morning sun, pouring in hungrily after the rain, that he has been aping.
The display windows at Springer Motors have been recently washed and Harry stands staring through them with not a fleck of dust to show him he is not standing outdoors, in an airconditioned outdoors, the world left rinsed and puddled by last night's rain, with yet a touch of weariness in the green of the tree across Route 111 behind the Chuck Wagon, a dead or yellow leaf here and there, at the tips of the crowded branches that are dying. The traffic this weekday flourishes. Carter keeps talking about a windfall tax on the oil companies' enormous profits but that won't happen, Harry feels. Carter is smart as a whip and prays a great deal but his gift seems to be the old Eisenhower one of keeping much from happening, just a little daily seepage.
Charlie is with a young black couple wrapping up the sale of a trade-in, unloading a '73 Buick eight-cylinder two-tone for three K on good folks too far behind in the rat race to know times have changed, we're running out of gas, the smart money is into foreign imports with sewing-machine motors. They even got dressed up for the occasion, the wife wears a lavender suit with the skirt old-fashionedly short, her calves hard and high up on her skinny bow legs. They really aren't shaped like we are; Skeeter used to say they were the latest design. Her ass is high and hard along the same lines as her calves as she revolves gleefully around the garish old Buick, in the drench of sunshine, on the asphalt still wet and gleaming. A pretty sight, out of the past. Still it does not dispel the sour unease in Harry's stomach after his short night's sleep. Charlie says something that doubles them both up laughing and then they drive the clunker off. Charlie comes back to his desk in a corner of the cool showroom and Harry approaches him there.
"How'd you dig Melanie last night?" He tries to keep the smirk out of his voice.
"Nice girl." Charlie keeps his pencil moving. "Very straight."
Harry's voice rises indignantly. "What's straight about her? She's kooky as a bluebird, for all I can see."
"Not so, champ. Very level head. She's one of those women you worry about, that they see it all so clearly they'll never let themselves go."
"You're telling me she didn't let herself go with you."
"I didn't expect her to. At my age – who needs it?"
"You're younger than I am."
"Not at heart. You're still learning."
It is as when he was a boy in grade school, and there seemed to be a secret everywhere, flickering up and down the aisles, bouncing around like the playground ball at recess, and he could not get his hands on it, the girls were keeping it from him, they were too quick. "She mention Nelson?"
"A fair amount."
"Whatcha think is going on between them?"
"I think they're just buddies."
"You don't think anymore they got to be fucking?"
Charlie gives up, slapping his desk and pushing back from his paperwork. "Hell, I don't know how these kids have it organized. In our day if you weren't fucking you'd move on. With them it may be different. They don't want to be killers like we were. If they are fucking, from the way she talks about him it has about the charge of cuddling a teddy bear before you go to sleep."
"She sees him that way, huh? Childish."
"Vulnerable is the way she'd put it."
Harry offers, "There's some piece missing here. Janice was dropping hints last night."
Stavros delicately shrugs. "Maybe it's back in Colorado. The piece."
"Did she say anything specific?"
Stavros ponders before answering, pushing up his amber glasses with a forefinger and then resting that finger on the bridge of his nose. "No."
Harry tries outright grievance. "I can't figure out what the kid wants."
"He wants to get started at the real world. I think he wants in around here."
"I know he wants in, and I don't want him in. He makes me uncomfortable. With that sorehead look of his he couldn't sell -"
"Coke in the Sahara," Charlie finishes for him. "Be that as it may, he's Fred Springer's grandson. He's engonaki."