Rabbit At Rest

"How's it going?" he asks.

"O.K."

"You looking forward to school starting next week?"

"Kind of. Summer gets kind of boring."

"How's Roy? Is he bored by summer too?"

"He's so stupid he doesn't know what boring is. He's been put down for his nap now but is still bawling. Mommy's flipping out." Since Harry seems stuck for a response, she volunteers, "Daddy's not here, he's over at the lot."

"That's O.K., I'd just as soon talk to your mommy actually. Could you get her for me? Judy," he impulsively adds, before the child can leave the phone.

"Yeah?"

"You study hard, now. Don't you worry about those kids who think they're so much. You're a very lovely girl and everything will come to you if you wait. Don't force it. Don't force growing up. Everything will be fine."

This is too much to try to cram into her. She is only nine. Ten more years before she can go west like Mim and break out. "I know," Judy says, with a sigh, and perhaps she does. After a rattle of thereceiver on wood and voices in the background and footsteps hastily enlarging, Pru arrives at the telephone, breathless.

"Harry! "

"Hi there, Teresa. How's it going?" This seductive nonchalant tone, all wrong, but it just came out.

"Not so good," she says. "Where on earth are you?"

"Far away, where everybody wants me. Hey. Whajou tell for?"

"Oh Harry, I had to." She starts to cry. "I couldn't let Nelson not know, he's trying to be so straight. It's pathetic. He's been confessing all this dreadful stuff to me, I can't tell you or anybody the half of it, and at night we pray together, pray aloud kneeling by the bed, he's just so desperate to lick the drugs and be a decent father and husband, just be normal."

"He is, huh? Well, great. Still, you didn't need to turn us in, it only happened once, and there wasn't any follow-up, in fact I thought you'd totally forgotten about it."

"How could you think I'd forgotten? You must think I'm a real slut."

"Well, no, but, you know, you've been having a lot on your mind. For me, it was almost like I'd dreamed it." He means this as a compliment.

But Pru's voice hardens. "Well, it meant a little more to me than that." Women: you never know which side they want to dance on. "It was a terrible betrayal of my husband," she pronounces solemnly.

"Well," Rabbit says, "he hasn't been all that great a husband, as far as I can see. Hey, is Judy listening to all this?"

"I'm on the upstairs phone. I asked her to hang up downstairs."

"And did she? Judy!" Harry shouts. "I see you there!"

There is a fumbling soft rattle and a new clarity in the co

Rabbit reassures her. "I forget exactly what we said but I doubt if she understood much."

"She understands more than she lets on. Girls do."

"Well, anyway," he says. "Did he confess to affairs with men as well as women? Nelson."

"I can't possibly answer that question," she says, in a flat dry voice forever closed to him. Another woman's voice, warmer, courteous, faintly lazy, probably black, breaks in, saying, "Sir, yore three minutes are u-up. Please deposit a dollar ten saints if you wish continuation."

"Maybe I'm done," he says, to both women.

Pru shouts, over their imperilled co

"On the road!" he shouts back. He still has a little stack of change in front of him and inserts four quarters and a dime. As they gong away, he sings a snatch of a song he just heard on the radio, Willie Nelson's signature: "On the road again…"

This makes Pru sob; it's as bad as talking to Janice. "Oh don't," she cries. "Don't tease us all, we can't help it we're all tied down back here."

Pity touches him, with the memory of her beauty naked like blossoms that night in the narrow musty room as the rain intensified. She is stuck back there, she is saying, with the living. "I'm tied down too," he tells her. "I'm tied to my carcass."

"What shall I tell Janice?"

"Tell her I'm on the way to the condo. Tell her she can come join me whenever she wants. I just didn't like the squeeze you all put on me last night. I get claustrophobic in my old age."

"I never should have slept with you, it's just at the time…"

"It was," he says. "It was a great idea at the time. Tell me how'd you think I did, looking back on it? For an old guy."

She hesitates, then says, "That's it, that's the trouble. I don't see you as an old guy, Harry. I never did."

O.K., he has won this from her. This woman-to-man voice. Who could ask for anything more? Let her go. He says, "Don't you fret, Pru. You're a great dish. Tell Nelson to loosen up. Just because he got over crack he doesn't have to turn into Billy Graham." Or Jim Bakker. Harry hangs up, and the telephone startles him by returning, with a pang and clatter, the dime and four quarters. That operator with the Southern voice must have been listening and taken a shine to him.

As the afternoon wears on toward Fayetteville, North Carolina, where there is a Comfort I

Fayetteville used to be a hot town, with all the soldiers from Fort Bragg, Rabbit remembers from a segment of 60 Minutes he once watched. The downtown had some blocks of triple-X movies and sleazy hotels the city fathers finally in despair tore down entirely and made into a park. After a di