Rabbit Remembered

remembers Michael DiLorenzo confessing that he wanted to kill his parents, and that Michael killed himself, maybe so he wouldn't do it. Nelson tastes the dead iron at the core of even green planets. No fresh start, no mercy. The headlights are picking up flecks, sparks like mayflies; it can't be snow, so it must be flying dirt.

'I didn't like her,' Annabelle announces. 'I identified more with the other one, the pretty one who acted like a tramp but then turned out to be a virgin.'

'And the whole gay business made me upset,' says Billy.

'I thought it was very overdone and unconvincing,' Pru states, her profile almost haggard in the strokes of oncoming headlights, as the tangled traffic burns above asphalt hard to see, the arrows and lines obscure.

'Boy,' Billy rattles on, 'they sure gave you enough blood on the wall when he got shot.'

Annabelle chimes in, 'I loved the routine the cheerleaders did with the bowler hats.'

'Pure Fosse,' says Billy. 'I was afraid somebody's house was going to get burned down, either the hero's or the military man's next to it.'

'It was a picture, really, when you think about it,' Pru persists, 'of cheap shots at everybody. Advertising, the military, blah blah. Oh come on.'

'That was so nice,' Annabelle continues on her track, 'when she is willing but he doesn't sleep with her and makes her a hamburger instead.' Nelson has never heard her voice like this, free-associating and childishly trusting. Maybe this evening isn't such a failure as it felt. He has the persistent sensation that there is one more person in the car than the four of them.

'Hey Nelson,' Billy's voice whines from the back seat. 'Aren't you on this road the wrong way?'

He had been wondering why the traffic was so thin. They have become the only car on the highway, speeding between dark slopes of farmland and distant Christmas lights.

'You're heading toward Maiden Springs!' Billy tells him. 'Brewer is behind us!'

'Son of a fucking bitch,' Nelson says. 'I asked for directions coming out of the parking lot and nobody helped.'

'Nelson, you've lived here all your life,' Pru points out.

'Yeah, but not around the fairgrounds. I hate this area. The fair always depressed me, the way the school made us go every September.'

'Me, too,' Billy says. 'I was terrified of the freaks. And those rides used to do a job on my stomach. I remember once with Belly Majka in one of those that roll you around opposite each other being afraid I was going to throw up in her face.'

'Take the next exit,' Pru says, in a low, sharply aimed wife's voice. 'Go left at the overpass and then right to get you back on the highway going the other way.'

'I know how to reverse direction,' Nelson snaps at her.

'And the animals in cages,' Billy goes on. 'I have a nightmare about being in a cage that gets smaller and smaller, like an egg slicer.'

'You poor dear worried thing,' Annabelle says silkily.

Pru says to Annabelle, as Nelson angrily whips the car up and around the exit ramp, 'I think that was unrealistic, too. Most men would have just screwed her anyway. I mean, he'd been dreaming about almost nothing else.'

But it is hard for her to break into the cocoon of mutual narcissistic regard being woven in the back seat. From the little overpass road, dark farmland seems to stretch in every direction, broken only by a Gulf station, its towering oval sign aglow, level with the profile of the hills. Nelson asks the back seat, 'What do you think, Annabelle? How far would the older man have gone? The father figure?'

Her gentle voice arrives: 'Nelson, what are you asking?'

'How far did Mr. Byer go with you? My gut tells me,' he says, recklessly wheeling through the entrance ramp and heading down the highway toward where Brewer's dome of light stains the sky, 'he went pretty far. That's why you're always saying what a great guy he was. He wasn't. He was into touchy-feely. A good thing he died when you were sixteen, it might have got a lot worse.'

'Baby,' Pru says to her husband, but there is no stopping him, now that he and the Corolla are headed in the right direction. He needs to undress his sister, in front of Billy.

'And your mother was no help, was she? She was a savvy old tramp, she must have guessed. She'd been through the mill, why not you, huh?'

'That's not true!' Annabelle cries. 'She never knew anything! And he never-what's the word?-'

'Penetrated,' Nelson offers.

'Exactly!' she says. 'He just groped, all in the name of parental affection, of course.' This bit of sarcasm pries her open; she makes a strange shuddering prolonged sound of upheaved regret, then pours out, sobs making her gasp, 'I didn't dare ask him to stop, he'd handled me since I was a baby, it didn't seem right, yet how could it be very wrong? It was as if he couldn't help it, he was, like, sleepwalking. He'd tuck me in afterwards.'

'He knew what you didn't know,' Nelson points out. 'That he wasn't your real father. And your mother knew it loo.'

'She had no idea what he was doing, I'm positive. But it was so much a relief when he died that I blamed myself. It had got to be a secret between us, as if I wanted it too, when I hated it!' Her tears are coming freely now, pent-up, accusing. Nelson squints into the high headlights, trucks and those fucking SUVs, that afflict his eyes from behind and ahead. The traffic is hurrying in both directions toward some disaster, the end of time as they've known it. Annabelle goes the next step, crying, 'I felt I'd killed him! Good for me!' Her round face flashes in his rearview mirror, one teary eye meeting his.

'Right,' Nelson says calmly. 'It really screwed you up with men since, didn't it? How come, do you think, you've never married?'

'Oh stop it!' she protests. 'Why do you want me married, why do you care?' She sinks back, sobbing now with a muffled, burbling quality that suggests Billy is comforting her. Nelson can't risk turning his head to look into the back seat; his sensation of a fifth person in the car is so strong he needs to strengthen his grip on the steering wheel.

Billy says, 'Great going, Nelson. So that's psychotherapy.'

'It helps to get things in the open,' he sulkily says. 'Then you go from there.' He stares ahead. He has always disliked this flat side of Brewer, as opposed to the tilting Mt. Judge side. Serve-yourself gas stations with ranks of pumps, fast-food franchises with plastic mini-playgrounds for obese toddlers, dismal six-store strip malls, carpet and linoleum outlets, vegetable stands boarded up for the winter, cutesy Amish cut-outs beckoning ignorant tourists from the inner cities to Real Pa. Dutch Cuisine. He knows where he is now. If he stays on this new improved 222 a bypass will hurl him right around Brewer southwest toward Lancaster and the Turnpike; instead he turns off, by the mattress warehouse with the Aurora Massage Parlor tucked in behind, on old Route 111, which runs parallel to the river, the silhouette of Mt. Judge far to their right, crowned by the distant lights of the Pinnacle Hotel, where they had been, the four of them, sitting and eating and making polite conversation, a few hours ago. Time does wonders.

Pru says, twisting her head to talk to Annabelle, 'So you got pawed. So did I. My father was a crumb-bum, when you think about it. It's not the end of the world.' She is tough. Her nose looks sharp as a witch's in profile but he senses her bulk, her body in the shimmery silk dress and rust-brown overcoat, as radiating warmth. Her long hands lie idle in her shadowy lap. He reaches down to adjust the car heat, and his own hand and Pru's knees show similarly pale in the dash-light glow. He remembers how once when she was new to their family she surprisingly comforted him by telling him, Why, honey. I think from what I've seen your parents are quite fond of each other. Couples that have stayed together that long, they must have something.

In the back seat, his sister is sniffling and Billy is saying, 'Easy, easy. We're talking ancient history.'

The road has stoplights now, and up ahead somebody, a car dealer or club owner, has gone to the expense of renting a bank of spotlights; three of them stir the sky to the limits of the local haze.

'We are passing,' Nelson announces in a tour guide's droning tone, 'the former site of Springer Motors Toyota Agency, now derelict.'

Mom sold the acreage and building to a computer-components company that never took off; a sudden turn in technology left it behind. By inner moonlight Nelson sees the ghosts of his father and himself and Charlie Stavros and Elvira Ollenbach standing at the boarded-up windows looking out at Route 111 for customers that will never come.