Rabbit At Rest

Brewer, too, that torpid hive, speaks to him of himself, of his past grown awesomely deep, so that things he remembers personally, V-E day or the Sunday Truman declared war on North Korea, are history now, which most of the people in the world know about only from books. Brewer was his boyhood city, the only city he knew. It still excites him to be among its plain flowerpot-colored blocks, its brick factories and row housing and great grim churches all mixed together, everything heavy and solid and built with an outmoded decorative zeal. The all but abandoned downtown, wide Weiser Street which he can remember lit up and as crowded as a fairgrounds in Christmas season, has become a patchwork of rubble and parking lots and a few new glass-ski

In Rabbit's limited experience, the more improvements they've loaded onto ru

And the drugs that most of them are into, and AIDS. But, then, who does live forever? We all take a beating. Must be the way they figure, it's sooner or later. They're just like us only more so. These guys in prison now who bite the guards to give them AIDS with their saliva. We're turning into mad dogs -the human race is one big swamp of viruses.

Back from the hollow center of Brewer, in the tight brick rows built a century ago when the great mills now abandoned or turned into factory outlet stores still smoked and vibrated, spi

In the slate-gray two-door Celica he and Janice lock into their garage when they take the pearl-gray Ca

There has been a lot of living in these tired streets. The old row houses have been repainted, residinged, updated with aluminum awnings and ironwork railings themselves grown old. They are slots still being filled, with street numbers the builders set in stained-glass fanlights above the doors. The blocks were built solid, there would never be any renumbering. Once he lived in one of these – number 326, the number of his hospital room reminded him – with Ruth, and used to shop for quick necessities at that corner store there, now called ROSA'S GROCERIES (Tienda de Comestibles), and stare out the window at the rose window of a limestone church now become the PAL Community Center / Centro Comunidad. The city is quicker than he remembers it, faster on the shuffle, as the blocks flicker by, and buildings that he felt when a boy were widely spaced now appear adjacent. The coughdrop factory, the skyscraper courthouse, the Y where he tried to take swimming lessons and caught pneumonia instead, coming out into the winter streets with wet hair, are all around corners from one another, and close to the post office with its strange long empty lobby, busy and lighted only at one end where a grate or two is up, and to the Ben Franklin, a proud gilded downtown hotel now a Ramada Motor I

Two blocks toward the mountain from the Ben Franklin, under Eisenhower Avenue where it lifts up in a wooden-railed hump to pass over, the laborers of old hand-dug a great trench to bring the railroad tracks into the city, tracks disused now, and the cut, walled in limestone, a pit for tossing beer cans and soda bottles down into, whole garbage bags even, mattresses; Brewer was always a tough town, a railroad town, these blocks along the tracks full of tough men, bleary hoboes who'd offer to blow you for a quarter, sooty hotels where card games went on for days, bars whose front windows were cracked from the vibration of the trains going past, the mile-long trains of coal cars pulling right across Weiser, stopping all traffic, like the time he and Ruth waited for one to pass, the neon lights of a long-gone Chinese restaurant flickering in her many-colored hair.