John Updike - Rabbit At Rest

The station fades out and in trying to find another he passes through a broadcast church service, evangelical, a man shouting "Jesus knows! Jesus looks into your heart! Jesus sees the death in your heart!" and Harry passes on, coming upon, too late for all of the sobbing, Johnny Ray's "Cry," "If your sweetheart sends a letter of goodbye," that was around the time he had to go into the Army and part from Mary Ann, he didn't know it would be for good, they argued about Johnny Ray, Rabbit insisting the guy had to be a fruit to sing that way, and then down in Texas he realized the song was for him, his sweetheart sent a letter. Next number, Dean Martin comes on loafing through "That's Amore": by now Harry had come back and taken up with Janice, the quiet girl behind the nuts counter at Kroll's, her little tight body, the challenge of her puzzled dark eyes, he remembers because he would joke, "That's amore," after they would fuck in the room Linda Hammacher would let them use, with its view of the dove-gray gas tanks by the river. "Only the Lonely," the late Roy Orbison warbles. "There goes my baby, there goes my heart," in that amazing voice that goes higher and higher till you think it must break like crystal, as in a way it did; Rabbit supposed his being dead is what makes this one a Golden Oldie.

The songs roll on, broken every half-hour by summaries of the news. A bombing in Colombia has injured eighty-four, the Colombian woes are increased by a drop in coffee prices, President Bush's upcoming speech on the nation's drug problems rouses Washington speculation, can he do a Reagan? Also in Washington, officials are still hopeful that the newborn baby panda, fighting for its life in an incubator, will survive. Locally, manatees continue active in the Caloosahatchee Basin, and the Dolphins were beaten yesterday in Miami by the Philadelphia Eagles, twenty to ten. Rabbit likes hearing this score, but the old songs, all that syrup about love, love, the sweetness, the cuteness, the doggies in the window and Mommy kissing Santa Claus and the naughty lady of Shady Lane, the background strings and pizzicato bridges and rising brass crescendos meant to thrill the pants off you, wear him down: he resents being made to realize, this late, that the songs of his life were as moronic as the rock the brainless kids now feed on, or the Sixties and Seventies stuff that Nelson gobbled up – all of it designed for empty heads and overheated hormones, an ocean white with foam, and listening to it now is like trying to eat a double banana split the way he used to. It's all disposable, cooked up to turn a quick profit. They lead us down the garden path, the music manufacturers, then turn around and lead the next generation down with a slightly different flavor of glop.

Rabbit feels betrayed. He was reared in a world where war was not strange but change was: the world stood still so you could grow up in it. He knows when the bottom fell out. When they closed down Kroll's, Kroll's that had stood in the center of Brewer all those years, bigger than a church, older than the courthouse, right at the head of Weiser Square there, with every Christmas those otherworldly displays of circling trains and nodding dolls and twinkling stars in the corner windows as if God Himself put them there to light up this darkest time of the year. As a little kid he couldn't tell what God did from what people did; it all came from above somehow. He can remember standing as a child in the cold with his mother gazing into this world of tinselled toys as real as any other, the air biting at his cheeks, the sound of the Salvation Army bells begging, the smell of the hot soft pretzels sold on Weiser Square those years, the feeling around him of adult hurrying -bundled-up bodies pushing into Kroll's where you could buy the best of everything from drapes to beds, toys to pots, china to silver. When he worked there back in Shipping you saw the turnover, the hiring and firing, the discontinued lines, the abrupt changes of fashion, the panicky gamble of all this merchandising, but still he believed in the place as a whole, its power, its good faith. So when the system just upped one summer and decided to close Kroll's down, just because shoppers had stopped coming in because the downtown had become frightening to white people, Rabbit realized the world was not solid and benign, it was a shabby set of temporary arrangements rigged up for the time being, all for the sake of the money. You just passed through, and they milked you for what you were worth, mostly when you were young and gullible. If Kroll's could go, the courthouse could go, the banks could go. When the money stopped, they could close down God Himself.

For miles in the vicinity of Disney World and beyond, lesser amusement and theme parks hold out their cups for the tourist overflow. Waxworks. Wet 'n' Wild, a water slide. Sea World. Circus World, not the one that's redux down in Sarasota. What a dumb word, as dumb as faux, you see it everywhere suddenly, faux fur, faux jewelry. False is what they mean. A museum of old dolls and toys. Old, old, they sell things as antiques now that aren't even as old as he is, another racket. On Route 27, going due south, you enter slightly rolling dry pale farm country, bleached by heat, with pale cattle in wide parched fields and orange groves with their dark dense irrigated green, and giant tanks holding water, shaped like giant mushrooms, like spaceships come from beyond. At the side of the road little wobbly hand-painted signs offer BOILED PEANUTS, tiny Mexican girls manning the stands, and there is, in faint echo of the giant theme parks to the north, a touching dusty amusement park, spindly structures put together for a minute's giddy sensation, idle, waiting for the evening's little customers.

The sun is high now and the morning's tattered gray clouds have melted away and the heat is serious, crushing, frightening when he steps out of the Celica at a Texaco to use the facilities because there is no escape from it, like snow at the South Pole, it even drifts into the men's room, as humid a heat as in the Pennsylvania summer but more searing, more wrathful. The road is wide but has lights and roads coming from the bleached farmland; the small cities drift by, Lake Wales, Frostproof, Avon Park, Sebring, and he wonders about the lives led there, away from the coasts, away from the condos and the fishing charters, by people who wake up and go to work just like those in Brewer, only everything flattened by the sun: how did they get here, so near the edge of the world, on this sand spit that a little rise in sea level because of Antarctica melting because of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would wash away? A column of thick smoke appears on his left, toward the Seminole reservation, thick and poisonous, a disaster, an atomic bomb, war has been declared while he's been drowning in musical memories; he expects to run into a forest fire, but nothing happens, the column of smoke slowly recedes on his left, he'll never know what it was. A dump most likely. Harry's whole body feels cramped because of long sitting and he takes a Nitrostat because of the cute little rush it gives you, the inner loosening, the tickle.

The land gets less and less settled and more scraggy. The towns take on funny names like Lake Placid and Venus and Old Venus and Palmdale; just beyond Palmdale, after you cross the Fisheating Creek, at Harrisburg no less, the state capital up there but a nothing down here, you bear right on 29, a narrow road so straight and flat you can see for miles, trucks coming at you through a shimmer that cuts off their wheels, rednecks in pickups pushing in the rearview mirror to pass, hardly any signs, a feeling all around of swamp, so remote from civilization the radio station fades, its last song of your life before it finally fades is somebody called Connie Boswell, way before Rabbit's time, singing "Say It Isn't So" with a rueful little lisp, quietly as if she's just talking it to you, "You've found somebody newww," the band behind her soft and tinny like those that used to play in hotel lobbies with lots of potted palms, a Twenties feeling, they lived hard, no worry about smoking and drinking and cholesterol, just do it, "Ssay it isn't sso," he could almost cry, she sounds so sincere, so truly wounded. What ís Janice's game, anyway? He'll find out soon enough.