You leave the clubs with the pro shop, and the shoes. Rabbit ?walks in his moccasins, worn so loose his feet move in them without seeming to rub leather, across the parking lot and a striped piece of driveway and one of the complex's little traffic islands covered in green outdoor carpeting to the entryway of Building B. He uses his key and punches in the code on the panel in the narrow space where two closed?circuit television cameras are watching him, pulls the door ? it doesn't buzz, it goes ding ding ding like a fire truck backing up ? and takes the elevator to the fourth floor. In 413, his home away from home, Janice and Pru and the kids are playing Hearts, that is three of them are and Roy is holding a fistful of cards while his mother tells him what to do and which to discard. His face has a puffy look as though it's been an afternoon of frustrations and disappointments. They all greet Harry as if he's going to rescue them from death by boredom, but he feels so beat all he wants to do is lie down and let his body soak in nothingness. He asks, "Where's Nelson?"

 

It's not the right question, at least in front of the kids. Janice and Pru glance toward one another and then Pru volunteers, "He's out doing a few errands in the car." Down here they only have one car, the Camry, leaving Harry's Celica back in Penn Park. It works out, since most everything they need ?drugs, magazines, haircuts, bathing suits, tennis balls ? they can find within the Valhalla complex. The little food commissary in Building C charges airport prices, so Janice usually does a big shopping once a week at the Winn Dixie a half?mile down Pindo Palm Boulevard. About once a week also they visit their bank in downtown Deleon, on a plaza two blocks back from the beachfront where elevator music is always playing, both inside the bank and outside; they must have speakers hidden in the trees. Maybe twice a month they go to a movie at a cineplex in a giant mall over on Palmetto Palm Boulevard two miles away. But days at a stretch go by when the car just sits there in its parking slot, attracting rust and white splotches of birdshit.

 

"What kind of errands does he have to do?"

 

"Oh Harry," Janice says. "People need things. He doesn't like the kind of beer you buy. He likes a special kind of dental floss, tape instead of thread. And he likes to drive around; he gets claus-trophobic."

 

"We all get claustrophobic," he tells her. "Most of us don't go stealing cars about it."

 

"You look exhausted. Did you lose?"

 

"How'd you guess?"

 

"You always lose. He plays with these three Jewish men," she explains to her daughter?in?law, "and they always take twenty dollars off of him."

 

"Don't be so prejudiced, you sound like your mother. And for your information I win as often as not."

 

"I never hear about it when you do. They keep telling you how good you are, and then take your money."

 

"You dope, one of them lost twenty dollars with me, he was my partner!"

 

Serenely she says, just like her mother, addressing nobody in particular, "They probably give it back to him; they're all in cahoots."

 

It occurs to him that she is saying these disagreeable and absurd things as a distraction from Nelson's rude and mysterious absence.

 

Judy says, "Grandpa, come take Roy's hand and play. He doesn't know how to even hold the cards and he's being fussy."

 

Roy obligingly proves her point by throwing the cards down on the round glass table, much as this morning he threw the spoon. "I hate games," he says, with a curious precision, like one of those old?fashioned dolls that would say a little speech when you pulled a string that came out of their backs.

 

Judy swiftly whomps him, with the hand not holding her cards. She chops with her fist at his shoulders and neck, and when he squalls in self?defense explains to him, "You messed up the trick so now nobody can play. And I was going to shoot the moon!" Pru neatly fans her hand face down on the table and with the other arm, a downy arm oflong loving bones, pulls the wailing little boy against her chest; seeing this, Judy flares into jealousy, goes pink-eyed the way women do before they decide to cry, and races off toward Harry and Janice's bedroom.

 

Pru smiles wanly, looking exhausted herself. "Everybody's tired and cranky," she sort of sings, over the top of Roy's head so Judy can hear it too.

 

Janice stands, a bit wobbly for a second. She knocks the glass 'table with her shin, and next to her abandoned hand of Hearts an orange juice glass half full of Campari shivers, the scarlet circlet of it, making him think of the pond when Ed's ball skipped in. She is back into her tennis dress. Dried sweat?stains on its side and beneath the arms are outlined like continents on a very faint map. "Maybe we made them do too much," she explains to Harry. "We did this enormous shopping, went to lunch at Burger King, came back here, Pru took them for swimming and shufeboard for two hours, and then Judy and I went over to the tennis courts and knocked the ball around."

 

"How'd she do?" he asks.

 

Janice laughs as if surprised. "Terrific, actually. She's going to be a jock, just like you."

 

Rabbit goes into his bedroom. If nobody but Janice were here, he would lie on this bed, push his eyes through a few pages of the history book she gave him for Christmas, close his eyes on the sound of the bird dryly chirping in the Norfolk pine, and succumb to the great heaviness of being. But Judy has beat him to his own king?size bed with its jade?green fitted coverlet. She is curled up and hiding her face. He lies down close to the edge and lets her press her knees against his presence. He admires her hair, the amazing protein perfection of it, the long pale strands that in sun deepen to a shiny orange. "Better rest up for Bingo tonight," he says.

 

"If Roy goes I'm not going," she says.

 

"Don't be down on Roy," he tells her. "He's a good scout."

 

"He's not. I was going to shoot the moon. I'd already took the Queen of Spades, and I had the Ace of Hearts and the Jack and some others and then he ruins it all and Mommy thinks that's so cute. He gets all the attention and everything ever since he was born, just because he's a boy!"

 

He admits, "It's tough. I was in your shoes, except it was reversed. I had a sister instead of a brother."

 

"Didn't you hate her?" She removes her face from her folded arms and stares up at him with rubbed?looking green eyes.

 

He answers, "No. I guess, to be honest, I loved her. I loved Mim." The truth of this shocks him: he realizes how few others in his life he has loved so bluntly, without something of scorn, as his little wiry Mim. Her face seemed a narrower, harder version of his, with the same short upper lip, only a brunette, and a girl. Himself transposed into quite another key, and yet the melody recognizable. He remembers the sticky grip of her fingers in his when Mom and Pop would lead them on their Sunday walk, up the mountain to the Pinnacle Hotel and then back along the edge of the quarry; Mim hung on and roused protectiveness in him and perhaps used it up for everybody else, for every other female. Mim as his own blood sister had a certain unforced claim over him no woman since has been able to establish.

 

"Was she younger than you or older?"

 

"Younger. Younger even than me than Roy is than you. But she was a girl and girls are less ornery than boys. Though I guess Mim was ornery in her way. Once she got to be sixteen, she put my parents through hell."

 

"Grandpa, what's `ornery'?"

 

"Oh, you know. Mean. Contrary. Rebellious."

 

"Like Daddy?"

 

"I don't think of your daddy as ornery, just, what's the word? ? uptight. People get to him more than they do to most people. He's sensitive." Formulating even this much thickens his tongue and blurs his mind. "Judy, let's have a contest. You lie over there and I'll lie here and we'll see who can fall asleep soonest."

 

"Who'll be the judge?"

 

"Your mother," he says, letting his moccasins fall from his feet onto the floor over the edge of the bed. He closes his eyes on the posterlike Florida sunshine and in the intimate red of his brain envisions swooping on a bicycle down Jackson Road and then Potter Avenue with Mim on the handlebars of his rattly old blue Elgin, she maybe six and he twelve, if they hit a rock or pothole she'll go flying with him and the bike on top of her grinding her into the asphalt and ruining her pretty face forever, a woman's face is her fortune, but in her faith in him she sings, he can't remember the song, just the sensation of snatches of words flicked back into his ears as her long black hair whips against his eyes and mouth, making the bicycle ride more dangerous still. He led Mim into danger but always led her out. Shoo?fly pie. That was one of the songs she used to sing around the house, day after day until it drove them all crazy. Shoo?fly pie and apple pan dowdy, makes your eyes light up, your tummy say "howdy!" And then she would do a thing with her eyes that would make the whole rest of the family laugh.

 

He feels Judy ease her weight from his side and with that exaggerated, creaking stealth of small children move around the foot of the bed and out of the room. The door clicks, female voices whisper. Their whispers merge with a dream, involving an enormous scoop?shaped space, an amphitheater, an audience somehow for whom he is performing, though there is no other person in the dream, just this sense of presence, of echoing august dreadfully serious presence. He wakes frightened, with dribble down from one comer of his mouth. He feels like a drum that has just been struck. The space he was dreaming of he now recognizes as his rib cage, as if he has become his own heart, a huffing puffing pumping man at mid?court, waiting for the whistle and the highreaching jump?off. At some point in his sleep his chest began to ache, a stale sorrowful ache he associates with the pathetically bad way he played golf this afternoon, unable to concentrate, unable to loosen up. He wonders how long he has slept. The poster of sunshine and palm tops and distant pink red?roofed buildings pasted on the outer skin of the sliding windows has dulled in tint, gone shadowy, and the sounds of golf, its purposeful concussions alternating with intent silence and involuntary cries of triumph or disappointment, have subsided. And in the air outside, like the fluttering tinsel above a used?car lot, birds of many makes are calling to each other to wrap up the day. This hour or two before supper, when play ? the last round of Horse at the basket out by the garage in the alley ? used to be most intense, has become nap time as he slowly sinks toward earth with his wasting muscles and accumulating fat. He must lose some weight.

 

Only Judy is in the living room. She is flicking silently back and forth between channels. Faces, black in The Jeffersons, white in Family Ties, imploringly pop into visibility and then vanish amid shots of beer cans plunged into slow?motion waterfalls, George Bush lugging a gun through Texas underbrush, a Florida farmer gesturing toward his burnt fields, a Scotland Yard detective doing a little lecture with a diagram of an airplane's hold. "What's he saying?" Harry asks, but even as he asks, the image is gone, replaced by another, of a manatee being implanted with an electronic tracking device by a male pony?tailed manatee?conservation freak. An impatient rage within the child, a gluttony for images, brushes the manatee away. "Two channels back," Harry begs. "About the Pan Am plane."

 

"It was a bomb, silly," Judy says. "It had to be."

 

Children, they believe that headlines always happen to other people. "For Chrissake, cool it with the channel?changer. Lemme get a beer and I'll show you a neat card game. Where is everybody?"

 

"Grandma went to her women's group, Mom put Roy down for his nap."

 

"Your daddy ??" He thinks midway he shouldn't bring it up, but the words are out.

 

Judy shrugs and finishes the sentence. "Hasn't checked in yet."

 

It turns out she already knows how to play Rummy. In fact, she catches him with his hand full of three?of?a?kinds he was waiting to lay down when he had gin. Caught. Their laughter brings Pru out of her bedroom, in little white shorts her widened hips have stretched into horizontal wrinkles. Her face has taken wrinkles from the pillow, and seems a bit blurred and bloated by sleep, or a spell of crying. How suggestible female flesh is. Her feet are long and bare, with that chipped toenail polish. He asks his daughter?in?law, "What's up?"

 

She too shrugs. "I guess we'll go to dinner when Janice comes back. I'll feed Roy some applesauce to hold him."

 

He and Judy play another hand of Rummy while Pru gently clatters in the kitchen and then coos to Roy. Evening down here comes without much ceremony; suddenly the air beyond the balcony is gray as if with fine fog, and sea?scent drifts in through the sliding doors, and the sounds of birds and golf have gone away. This is peace. He resents it when Janice comes back, with that aggressive glow her women's group gives her. "Oh Harry, you men have been so awful! Not only were we considered chattel, but all those patriarchal religions tried to make us feel guilty about menstruating. They said we were unclean."

 

"Sorry," he says. "That was a crummy thing to do."

 

"That was Eve's basic sin, the lady professor told us," Janice goes on, half to Pru. "Something about apples being the color of blood, I couldn't quite follow it."

 

Harry interrupts, "By any chance are either of you two Eves like me, sort of starving?"

 

"We bought you lots of healthy snacks," Pru says. "Apricots dried without sulphur, unsalted banana chips."

 

"Is that what that stuff was in little plastic bags? I thought it might be for Chinese food and I shouldn't touch it."

 

"Yes," Janice decides, "let's just go to dinner. We'll leave a note for Nelson. Pru, any old dress. Evenings, they won't seat shorts and men without jackets."

 

The Mead Hall, on the floor of Building B above Club Nineteen, is a combination restaurant and function room. On the one hand, there are menus with choices and prices, and waitresses in brief gold outfits echoing Valhalla's ring?gold theme, that figures here and there in the decor when the interior decorator remembered it, and there is even a wine steward in a summer tux and a kind of bicycle lock around his neck; on the other hand, as you go in a bulletin board is loaded with announcements and leaflets and tinted sheets about this or that set of lessons or lecture or concert or square dance or travelogue you could attend in the area, and all the time you're eating, on Wednesday and Saturday nights, Bingo goes on on the other side of the room, run from a stage and microphone somewhat out of sight behind an enormous flanged pillar that holds up the room's starry curved ceiling. The ceiling is a skylight for part of its breadth. That strange, scooping, personified space in his dream: could it have been simply this hall, conjured up because his stomach wanted food? Rabbit feels like Marty Tothero, looking at the menu, faced for the thousandth time with the same old choices among steak and veal, pork and ham, shrimps and scallops, swordfish Cajun style and fillets of sole stuffed with mussels, mushrooms, and artichoke hearts.

 

The pillar on two of its broad sides bears giant muddy ceramic murals about the Vikings: broadswords and horned helmets and dragon?headed ships protrude from the enamelled mass in its numerous blotchy colors, but the men wielding and wearing and sailing these protrusions are swallowed up in a crazy weave of anus and legs and lightning bolts, a kind ofbloody basketwork in honor of history. "Seventy?one," the lugubrious male voice hidden behind the pillar intones. It repeats, "Seven one."

 

It is hard to carry on a conversation with the numbers blaring from the loudspeakers. Pru mothers Roy and coaxes a little baked potato and a single stir?fried shrimp into him. Janice talks Judy into ordering a lobster and then has to show her how to crack it, how to push out the big curved piece of white meat with a finger up through the poor boiled creature's ass, how to suck the little tail segments, the same way you suck artichoke leaves. Rabbit, who has ordered eye?of?round steak, can hardly bear to watch; to him, eating lobster ? its many little feathery legs, its eyes on stalks, its antennae roasted red like the rest ? is nightmarish, a descent back into the squirmy scrabbly origins of life. Crabs, too, and oysters and clams: all around him in Florida he sees old people stuffing their faces with this filthy gluey unspeakable stuff; and telling you furthermore it's good for you, better than steak and hamburger, which is what he usually orders, though he doesn't mind a breaded pork chop or piece of veal, or a slice of ham with a pineapple ring or some moon?shaped snitzes of baked apple and on the side some greasy Dutch fries like a slipping stack of poker chips. That's how ham comes in Pennsylvania. You can't get sausage down here, at least not the spicy pork sausage he was raised on, or scrapple drenched in maple syrup, or apple pie with enough cinnamon in it, or shoo?fly pie at all. Janice went to a nutrition group a few winters ago and came back telling him how he was clogging his arteries with all this fat and dough. So for a while there was a rash of salads and low?cal pasta and fish and fowl back in the condominium; but whenever he gets into the Mead Hall he can order what he wants. With steak, you have to specify well?done or it comes rubbery and blue?rare. Disgusting. All the things that satisfy your appetite and seem so beautiful are disgusting when you don't have the appetite. Disposable meat.

 

Judy's perfect little hands are shiny with lobster. She asks her mother something and he can see Pru's mouth move in response but the Godlike voice blocks their words right out with its solemn "Twenty?seven. Two seven."

 

"What're you saying, sweetie?" he asks, embarrassed. Is his hearing going, or do people talk a little differently, more rapidly and softly, than they used to? On these TV shows that have British actors, there are stretches, especially when they put on the lower?class accents, where he can't understand a fucking word. And movies, especially in the love scenes, when the stars are establishing their coolness with the teen?age audience, just tossing the phrases away.

 

Pru explains, "She's worried about Daddy not getting anything to eat," and makes her wry one?sided mouth. Is this grimace a communication to him, a little lament, inviting him to conspire with her against Nelson?

 

Judy's shiny green eyes turn up toward her grandfather, as if she expects him to make an unsympathetic response. Instead he tells her, "Don't you worry, Judy. People can get served here until nine, and then at Club Nineteen downstairs they have sandwiches until midnight. And you saw Route 41: there's tons of eating places in Florida for your poor hungry daddy."

 

The girl's lower lip trembles and she gets out, "He might not have any money."

 

"Why wouldn't he have any money?"

 

The girl explains, "A lot of times he doesn't have any money. Bills come and even men come to the house and Mommy can't pay them." Her eyes shift over to her mother's face as she realizes she has said too much.

 

Pru looks away, wiping a crumb of potato from the corner of Roy's lips. "Things have been a bit tight," she admits almost inaudibly.

 

Harry wants to pursue it. "Really? That can't be. He's making fifty grand a year, with the benefits and bonuses. My father used to support us all on less than two thousand."

 

"Harry," Janice breaks in, in a voice that sounds like her mother's, toward the end, when the old widow got into the habit of laying down the law, "people now need more things than your father did. That was a simpler world. I remember it, I was there too. What did we use to do for fun, when we went out for a date? Go to the movies for seventy?five cents apiece or maybe the miniature?golf course out on 422 for even less. And then a soda at the Pensupreme, and that was considered a very adequate good time."

 

More than adequate, he remembers, if in the car after all that kissing and bare tit it took to warm her up Janice let him into herself, her inside warm and wet and softly grainy like a silk slipper. If she was having her period or feeling virtuous, she might hold him in her hand while he supplied the motion and the come, white as lobster meat. A shocking white, really, and tough to mop up. What he loved best in the car with Janice was when she'd sit on him, her ass in his hands and her tits in his face. And tidily take his come away with her. Like mailing a letter.

 

Her mind on a track far distant from his, she is going on, "Nelson has to have good suits to make a good presentation of himself at the lot, and children now aren't just content with blocks and a ball, they have to have these video games -"

 

"Jesus ? fifty thousand buys a lot of video games, he'll have enough to open an arcade soon if that's what he's spending it all on."

 

"Well, you joke, but that big barn of Mother's, it's no end of expense, isn't that the case, Pru?"

 

Hauled back from a politely smiling daze, Pru grins and admits, "It eats up the dollars."

 

They are hiding something from him, Harry sees. The unseen man portentously intones, "Fifty?six. Five six," and a quavery old voice, so frantic it nearly chokes itself, croaks, "Bingo!" Eff one eleven, Joe Gold had said. Fly 'em into Libya.

 

Harry says, "Well I don't know what the hell's going on."

 

No one contradicts him.

 

Roy is falling asleep with a sliver of shrimp shell on his slack lower lip. Harry has a sudden hankering for pecan pie. He tries to tease Judy into having dessert to keep him company. "Key?lime pie," he croons to her. "You can only get it in Florida. The chance of a lifetime."

 

"What makes it so special?"

 

He isn't quite sure. He lies. "Tiny delicate limes that only grow on the Florida Keys. Anywhere else is too coarse for them, too cold and mean."

 

She consents but then only picks nibbles off the crust at the back, so he, having sold it to her, has to eat it for her, on top of his pecan pie topped by a big oozing dip of butter?pecan ice cream. Nelson's absence grows bigger as their meal wears on. Janice and Pru have decaf coffee and, preoccupied, dying to talk to each other, watch Harry finish Judy's dessert. In a way, gluttony is an athletic feat, a stretching exercise. Makes your tummy say "howdy!" The waitress in her pleats of gold finally comes with the check and as he signs it with their condo number he feels like a god casually dispatching thunderbolts; the sum will appear on his monthly statement, next year, when the world has moved greatly on. How full he feels, stepping into the night air! A majestic float of a man, in a parade of dependents. Harry carries Roy, who fell asleep during dessert. Janice and Pru hold Judy one by each hand and, because she has been good during the boring long meal, allow her to swing herself between them, giggling as they grunt with the strain.

 

Between Buildings A and B, several of the overhead sodium lights on their tall burnished wands of aluminum have been mysteriously smashed: they're out there, the criminals, watching and waiting for the security guards to nod, so the fortress of sleeping retirees can be stormed. In this gap of unillumination, the stars leap down at them out of the black warm sky. At night Florida recovers something of its old subtropical self, before men tamed its teeming flatness. Being here is exciting, like being on the deck of a ship; the air tastes of salt, of rotting palm thatch, of swamp. The stars are moister here, more plummy. The St. Augustine grass has its strange spongy matted texture and each blade seems darkly metallic; the lawn snugly conceals round sprinkler heads. The skin that men have imposed on nature is so thin it develops holes, which armadillos wriggle through, the pathetic intricate things appearing in the middle of Pindo Palm Boulevard at dawn and being squashed flat by the first rush of morning traffic, they don't even have the sense to curl up into balls but jump straight into the air. Harry, Roy's breath moist on his neck and the child's head heavy as a stone on his shoulder, looks up at the teeming sky and thinks, There is no mercy. The stark plummy stars press down and the depth of the galactic void for an instant makes him feel suspended upside down. The entrance to Building Blooms alluringly with its cabined yellow glow. The five Angstroms each cope in their way with the sore place inside them, Nelson's gnawing absence. They fumble through the protected entrances, the elevator, the peachand?silver hallway, avoiding each other's eyes in embarrassment.

 

As her mother tucks her brother in, Judy settles before the television and flicks from The Wonder Years to Night Court to a French movie, starring that lunky Depardieu who is in all of them, this time about a man who comes to a village and usurps another man's identity, including his wife. In a moment's decision the young widow, besmirched and lonely, accepts him as her husband, and this thrills Harry; there ought to be a law that we change identities and families every ten years or so. But Judy keeps flicking away from the story and Pru finally yells at the kid and tells her to get ready for bed on the sofa, they'll all clear out of the living room for her sake, though why she didn't accept Grandma and Grandpa's nice offer of a little room of her own is beyond her, Pru's, understanding. The girl breaks into tears and this is a relief for all of them, giving vent to their common unspoken sense of abandonment.

 

Janice tells Harry, "You go to bed, hon. You look beat. I'm too jazzed up by the coffee to sleep, Pru and I will sit in the kitchen."

 

"I thought the coffee was decal" He had looked forward to having her, her little firm brown body, in bed beside him; with these other people here they don't have a second to themselves. His memories had stirred him. Fifty?two years old and she still has a solid ass. Not like Thelma, who's been losing it lately.

 

"That's what I ordered," Janice says, "but I never trust them really. I think a lot of the time now they just tell you it's decaf to shut you up."

 

"Don't sit up too late." On an impulse he adds to reassure her, "The kid's all right, he's just having some kind of a toot."

 

Pru glances at him in surprise, as if he's said more than he knows.

 

He feels goaded to elaborate: "Both me and Toyota give him a royal pain in the ass for some reason."

 

Again, he is not contradicted.

 

Fantasies about America produced two strongly contradictory conclusions that in the end came to the same point of injecting some caution into the golden dreams, he reads in bed. It's a history book Janice gave him for Christmas, by a woman historian yet, about the Dutch role in the American Revolution, which he hadn't thought up to 'now had been much. According to one school, America was too big, too divided, ever to become a single country, its communications too distended for the country ever to be united. Just that sentence makes him feel enormous, slack, distended. The beautiful thing about history is it puts you right to sleep. He looks back up the page for something amusing he remembered reading last night. Climate in the New World, according to a best?selling French treatise translated into Dutch in 1775, made men listless and indolent; they might become happy but never stalwart. America, armed this scholar, "was formed for happiness, but not for empire." Another European scholar reported that the native Indians "have small organs of generation" and "little sexual capacity."

 

Maybe if Nelson had been bigger he'd be happier. But being big doesn't automatically make you happy. Harry was big enough, and look at him. At times the size of his reflection in a clothingstore mirror or plate?glass window startles him. Appalls him, really: taking up all that space in the world. He pushes on for a few more pages: Expectation of lucrative commerce . . . Combat at sea . . . tangled issue . . . increased tension . . . neutral bottoms . . . French vigorously . . . Debate in the provincial states . . . Unlimited convoy would become another test of ego as a casus belli. He rereads this last sentence twice before realizing he has no idea what it means, his brain is making those short?circuit connections as in dreams. He turns out the light. This conjures up a thin crack of light under the door like a phosphorescent transmitter, emitting sounds. He hears Janice and Pru murmuring, a clink of glass, a footstep, and then a buzzer rasping, and hasty footsteps, a woman's voice in the nervous pitch you use for talking over a loudspeaker, not trusting it, and then in a later fold of his restless, distended consciousness the door opening, Nelson's voice, deep among the women's, and most dreamlike of all, laughter, all of them laughing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4

 

A gnashing sound, the greens being mowed by kids on those big ugly reel mowers. Excited seagulls weeping. The Norfolk pine, its branches as regularly spaced as the thin metal balusters of his balcony rail. Amazing. He is still in Florida, still alive. Morning?chilly salt air wafts from the Gulf through the two?inch crack that the sliding door was left open. Janice is asleep in bed beside him. The warmth of her body is faintly rank; night sweat has pasted dark wiggly hairs to the nape of her neck. Her hair is least gray at the nape, a secret nest of her old dark silky self. She sleeps on her stomach turned away from him, and if the night is cool pulls the covers off him onto herself, and if hot dumps them on top of him, all this supposedly in her sleep. Rabbit eases from the king?size bed, goes into their bathroom with its rose?colored one?piece Fiberglas tub and shower stall, and urinates into the toilet of a matching rose porcelain. He sits down, as it is quieter, splashing against the front of the bowl. He brushes his teeth but is too curious to shave; if he takes the time to shave Janice might get away from him and hide among the others as she has been doing. He slides back into bed, stealthily but hoping that the unavoidable rustling of sheets and the soft heaving of the mattress might wake her. When it doesn't, he nudges her shoulder. ` Janice?" he whispers. "Dreamboat?"

 

Her voice comes mufed. "What? Leave me alone."

 

"What time 'dyou come to bed?"

 

"I didn't dare look. One."

 

"Where had Nelson been? What was his explanation?"

 

She says nothing. She wants him to think she has fallen back to sleep. He waits. Lovingly, he caresses her shoulder. His glimpse of that French movie last night had stirred him with the idea of a wife as a total stranger, of moving right in, next to her little warm brown body. A wife can be as strange as a whore, that's the beauty of male?female relations. She says, still without turning her head, "Harry, touch me once more and I'll kill you."

 

He thinks this over and decides upon counteraggression. "Where the hell had he been?" he asks.

 

She rolls over, giving up. Her breath has stale tobacco in it. She has given up smoking supposedly but whenever she's around Nelson with his Camels and Pru with her Pall Malls she takes it up again. "He didn't know exactly. Just driving around. He said he needed to get out, Florida is so claustrophobic."

 

The kid is right: life down here is confined to the narrow paths you make. To Winn Dixie, to the Loew's cineplex and the shops in the Palmetto Palm Mall, to the doctor's, to the pro shop and back. Between these paths there's somehow nothing, a lot of identical palm trees and cactus and thirsty lawn and empty sunshine, hotels you're not staying at and beaches you're not admitted to and inland areas where there's never any reason to go. In Pennsylvania, at least in Diamond County, everything has been paved solid by memory and in any direction you go you've already been there.

 

Licking her lips and making a face as if her throat aches, Janice goes on, "He drove on 41 as far as what sounds like Naples and stopped at a restaurant when he got hungry and called us but the phone didn't answer, I wondered at the time if we shouldn't have waited to go over but you said you were starving ?'

 

"That's right. Blame me."

 

"I wasn't, honey. It wasn't just you. The children were antsy and worried and I thought, Life must go on, dinner will distract us; but then he says he did call just about when we were heading out the door and where he was one beer led to another and on the way back he got a little lost, you know yourself how if you miss the Pindo Palm turnoff everything looks identical, for miles."

 

"I can't believe it," Harry says. He feels rage coming to boil in his chest and sits up in bed to relieve the pressure. "Without so much as a fucking word to anybody he disappears for, what, eight hours? He is really becoming crazy. He's always been moody but this is crazy behavior. The kid needs help."

 

Janice says, "He was perfectly sober when he came back and brought a bunch of those little tiny stuffed alligators they make for souvenirs; Pru and I had to laugh. One for each of the children and even one for you, where they've made it stand and put a golf club in its little feet." She flicks the blanket back from his lap and touches his drowsy penis in his open pajama fly. "How're we doing down there? We never make love any more."

 

But now he is out of the mood. He slaps her hand primly and tugs up the blanket and says, "We just did make love. Before Christmas."

 

"Way before Christmas," Janice says, not moving her head, and for a second he has the mad hope she will turn the blanket down again and simply, quickly, take his prick in her mouth, like Thelma used to do almost first thing when they would secretly meet in this last decade; but blowing has never been Janice's style. She has to be very drunk, and he never did like her drunk, a kind of chaos wells up within her that threatens him, that threatens to swamp the whole world. She says, "O.K. for you, buster," to register with him that she's been rejected, in case he wants her later, and pushes out of her side of the bed. Her damp nightie is stuck up above her waist and before she tugs it down he admires the taut pale buttocks above the tan backs of her thighs. Guiltily he hears her flush the toilet in the bathroom and with an angry rattle and rush of water start to run the shower. He pictures exactly how she looks stepping out of the shower, with her hair in a transparent shower cap and her bottom rosy and her pussy all whitened with dew, and regrets that they must live, he and his little dark woman, his stubborn shy mutt of a Springer, in a world of mostly missed signals. Down here they have been thrown together more than at any time of their lives and they have coped by turning their backs and growing thicker skins. He plays golf three or four times a week and she has her tennis and her groups and her errands. When she comes back from the bathroom, in a terrycloth robe, he is still in the bed, reading in his book about British interference with Dutch merchant ships and France needing to build up her decayed fleet with Baltic timber delivered by Dutch vessels, in case Janice wants to try at sex again, but now from the other end of the condo the sounds of children can be heard, and of Pru hushing them in her burdened maternal voice.

 

Harry says to jamce, "Let's try to concentrate on Judy and Roy today. They seem sort of woebegone, don't they?"

 

She doesn't answer, guardedly. She takes his remark as a slam at Nelson's parenting. Maybe it is. Nelson's the one who needs parenting; he always did and never got enough. When you don't get enough of something at the right biological moment, Rabbit has read somewhere, you keep after it until you die. He asks, "What do you and Pru talk about all the time?"

 

She answers, thin?upped, "Oh, women things. You'd find them boring."Janice always gets a funny intense frowny look on her face when she's dressing herself. Even if it's just slacks and a blouse to go to Winn Dixie in, she pinches off an accusatory stare into the mirror, to face down the worst.

 

"Maybe so," he agrees, ending the conversation, and knowing this will make Janice want to continue it.

 

Sure enough, she volunteers, "She's worried about Nelson," and falters for the next words, the tip of her tongue sneaking out and pressing on her upper lip in the effort of thought.

 

But Rabbit says curtly, "Who wouldn't be?" He turns his back to put on his underpants. He still wears Jockey shorts. Ruth was amused by them that night ages ago, and he always thinks of it. Today he wants to be a grandfather and tries to dress for the role. Long eggshell?colored linen pants with cuffs, instead of his dirty old plaid bell?bottom golf slacks, and instead of a polo knit a real shirt, 100?per?cent cotton, with blue pinstripes and short sleeves. He looks at himself in the mirror that Janice's image has vacated and is stunned, deep inside, by the bulk of what he sees ? face swollen to a kind of moon, with his little sunburned nose and icy eyes and nibbly small mouth bunched in the center, above the jowls, boneless jowls that come up and put a pad of fat even in front of his ears, where Judy has a silky shine. Talk about Nelson ? Harry's own hair, its blondness dirtied and dulled by gray, is thinning back from his temples. Tall as he is, there is no carrying the slope under his shirt as anything other than a loose gut, a paunch that in itself must weigh as much as a starving Ethiopian child. He must start to cut down. He can feel, every motion he makes, his weight tugging at his heart ? that singeing sensation he gets as if a child inside him is playing with lighted matches.

 

On the breakfast table, today's News?Press has the color photograph of a tiny sickly one?year?old girl who died last night for lack of a liver transplant. Her name was Amber. Also a headline saying that according to Scotland Yard Pan Am Flight 103 was definitely bombed, just like Ed Silberstein and Judy say. Fragments of metal. Luggage compartment. Plastic explosive, can be molded into any form, probably a high?performance Czech type called Semtex: Harry can hardly bear to read about it, the thought of all those conscious bodies suddenly with nothing all around them, freezing, Ber?nie, Ber?nie, and Lockerbie a faint spatter of stars below, everything in one split second upside?down and void of merry. Also the mayor of Fort Myers now thinks his police acted properly in the arrest of Deion Sanders. Also Deadly pollution infects Lake Okeechobee. Also Partly cloudy, Highs in low to mid?80s. "Today's the day," he announces, "Grandpa's going to take you to amazing places!"

 

Judy and Roy look doubtful but not entirely.

 

Janice says, "Harry, have another of these cherry Danishes before they go stale. We bought them thinking mostly of the children but they both say they hate red runny things."

 

"Why do you want to kill me with carbos?" he asks, but eats the Danish anyway, and cleans up the sweet sugary crumbs with his fingertips.

 

Pru, tall from Harry's seated angle, her hips level with his eyes, hesitantly asks, "Would you two possibly enjoy having the grandchildren to yourselves for this expedition? Nelson couldn't get to sleep last night and kept me pretty much up too. I just can't face a day in the car." She does look pale and drawn, the kid keeping her up all night with his whining and whatever else. Even her freckles look pale, and her lips, that felt so soft and warm at the airport, are resigned and tight and wryly pulled down on one side.

 

Janice says, "Of course, dear. You get some sleep and then maybe you and Nellie could do something healthy and fun. If you use the Valhalla pool remind him he's supposed to shower before and after and not to do any diving."

 

Judy laughs and interrupts: "Daddy does belly flops."

 

Roy says, "Daddy does not flop. You flop."

 

"Hey Jesus," Harry tells them, "don't start fighting yet. We aren't even in the car."

 

In the car by nine?thirty, provisioned with a triple?barrelled package of Double Stuf Oreos and a sixpack of Classic Coke, they begin the long day that for years to come will be known in fond family legend as The Day Grandpa Ate the Parrot Food, though it wasn't exactly for parrots, and he didn't eat much of it. They start by driving down Route 41 (PATIOLAND, Kissin' Kuzzins, Easy Drugs, LAND of SLEEP) to Fort Myers and visiting the Thomas Alva Edison Winter Home, which nearly does them in. They park the Canny and pass underneath a giant banyan tree, a tree (a helpful sign tells them) given to Edison when it was a twig by some financial giant of the time, Harvey Firestone or Henry Ford, and that has since become the biggest banyan tree outside of India, where a single such gigantic tree may shelter an entire bazaar. Banyans spread by dangling down roots and making new trunks that become like crutches as the limbs spread out and out ? these creepy trees will go for miles if nobody stops them. Harry wonders, How do they die?

 

It turns out you can't just walk around the house and grounds, you have to join a tour, for five bucks a pop. Judy and Roy both freak out when that's explained to them. They see themselves surrounded by busloads of old retired people wearing baseball caps and flip?up sunglasses and carrying those little sticks that open out into a kind of saddle to be one?legged chairs. Several wrecks in wheelchairs join their accumulating tour group as it waits to begin. Judy, looking prematurely long?legged in short pink shorts, with funny red shadows of blusher on her cheekbones, says, "I don't care about any dumb grounds, I want to see the machine that makes lightning," and Roy, his loose little mouth dyed by Oreo chocolate, stares with his glazed brown eyes as if he's going to melt in the heat.

 

Harry tells Judy, "I don't think there's any machine that makes lightning, just the very first light bulb ever invented." He tells Roy, "I'll carry you if you get too tired."

 

At some signal he misses, so they get caught in the back, everybody including the wheelchairs pushes out of the shed into a space of dusty gray earth and outdoor jungle stuffiness and knifelike leaf shadows. Their guide is a prissy old blue?haired girl in a billed cap reciting what she's memorized. First she points out to them Kigelia pinnata, the sausage tree of Africa. "The fruit resembles a sausage and that is why the name. It is not edible, but is used as a medicine by the natives of Africa and because of their superstitious nature they worship the tree for its healing power. Just across Memory Garden is the fried?egg tree. The flower looks very much like an egg, sunny side up. It was planted there just in case you like eggs with your sausage."

 

The group politely laughs. Some of the old folks indeed laugh more than politely, as if this is the funniest thing they've ever in their long lives heard. When do the gray cells start winking out in significant numbers? When will it start happening to him, Harry wonders. Or has it already? You don't know what you don't know. A void inside, a void outside. Their guide, heartened by the good audience response, points out more funny trees ? the dynamite tree, Hura crepitans, whose fruit explodes when it is ripe, and the very rare Cecropia of South America, the sloth tree, indeed the only mature Cecropia palmata in the United States, whose leaves have the texture of chamois skin and never disintegrate. Harry wonders, Why did God bother to do all these tricks, off by Himself in the Amazon jungle? "They are chocolate brown on one side and white on the other and because of their unusual shapes and lasting qualities are in great demand for dried floral arrangements. You can purchase these leaves in our gift shop." So He did it so people would have something to buy in gift shops.

 

Next we come to Enterolobium cyclocarpum, known as the ear tree. "The seed pods," the guide recites, "resemble the human ear." The crowd, warmed up now to laugh at almost any ridiculous thing God does, titters, and the guide allows herself a selfcongratulatory smile; she knows these trees, these words, and these docile senile tourists backwards and forwards.

 

A little human hand tugs Harry's with a chamoislike softness of its own. He bends down to little Judy's exquisite, tarted?up, green?eyed face. He sees that Pru allowed her to put on a little lipstick, too. To sweeten this outing for her, to make it seem an occasion. Going sightseeing with Grandpa and Grandma. You'll always remember this. When they're gone to their reward. "Roy wants to know," Judy says as softly as she can, but anxiety driving her voice up, "how soon it's over."

 

"It's just begun," Harry says.

 

Janice begins to whisper with them. Her attention span is as poor as theirs. "Could we make a break for it before they make us cross the street?"

 

"It's a one?way tour," Harry says. "Come on, everybody. Let's stick with it."

 

He picks up little Roy, whose body weight has been doubled by boredom, and carries him, and they all cross the street, a street that in the very old days was a cow trail and that "Mr. Edison," as the woman keeps calling him, simpering like he's some big?dicked boyfriend of hers, took it into his head to line with royal palms. "These royal palms grow wild sixty miles of us on the fringe of the Everglades; however, it was much easier, in 1900, to bring them in from Cuba by great sailboats than to drag them by ox teams through our virtually impenetrable Florida swamplands."

 

On winding paths they drag themselves, dodging wheelchairs, trying not to step on the little beds of cactus and flowers that line the paths, trying to hear their guide as her voice fades in and out of its scratchy groove, trying to take an interest in the embowering green enigmas that Edison brought from afar in his heavily financed search for a substitute rubber. Here are the kapok tree and the Java plum, the cannonball tree from Trinidad and the mango from India, the lipstick tree and the birdseye bush, the sweetheart orchid, which is not as many people think a parasite, and the lychee nut, whose fruit is much sought after by the Chinese. Harry's legs ache, and the small of his back, and that suspect area behind his left ribs, which gives him a twinge, but he cannot put Roy down because the kid is asleep: he must be one of the sleepingest four?year?olds in the world. Janice and Judy have conspiratorially separated from the group and wandered ahead to the Edison house, a house brought in four sailing schooners from Maine in 1886, the first prefabricated house in the world you could say, a house without a kitchen because Edison didn't like the smell of cooking food, a house with a wide veranda on all four sides and with the first modern pool in Florida, of blue cement reinforced not with steel but with bamboo and not a crack or leak in it to this day. Marvels! So much endeavor, ingenuity, oddity, and bravery has been compressed into history: Harry can hardly stand under the weight of it all, bending his bones, melting his mind, pressing like a turnscrew on the segments of his skull, giving him a fantastic itch under his shoulder blades, where his 100?per?cent cotton blue?pinstriped shirt has moistened and then dried. He catches up to Janice, his heart twanging, and softly begs her, "Scratch." Softly so as not to wake the child.

 

"Where?" She shifts her cigarette, a Pall Mall she must have borrowed from Pru, to the other hand and rakes at his back, up, down, to the right and left as he directs, until the demon feels exorcised. This jungly garden of old Edison's is a devilish place. His breathing is bothered; he makes a determined effort not to hyperventilate. The commotion wakes Roy and he drowsily announces, "I got to go pee."

 

"I bet you do," Harry says, and tells him, "You can't go behind any of these bushes, they're all too rare."

 

"The scarlet dombeya wallichi is known as the pink ball tree of India," the guide is telling her less unruly students with a lilt. "It has a very heavy fragrance. Mrs. Edison loved birds and always kept canaries, parakeets, and parrots. These birds live out of doors the year around and love it here."

 

"How does she know they love it here?" Judy asks her grandparents, a bit noisily, so that several venerable heads turn. "She's not a parrot."

 

"Who says she's not?" Harry whispers.

 

"I got to go pee," Roy repeats.

 

"Yeah well, your need to pee isn't the exact fucking center of the universe," Harry tells him. He is badly out of practice in this fathering business, and never was that great at it.

 

Janice offers, "I'll take him back along the path, there were bathrooms in the building we came in at."

 

Judy is alarmed to see these two escaping. "I want to come with!" she cries, so loudly the tour guide stops her recital for a moment. "Maybe I got to go pee too!"

 

Harry grabs her hand and holds it tight and even gives it a sadistic squeeze. "And maybe you don't," he says. "Come on, stick it out. Go with the flow, for Chrissake. You'll miss the world's oldest Goddamn light bulb."

 

A woman in a wheelchair, not so crippled her hair isn't dyed orange and permed into more curlicues than a monkey's ass, looks over and gives them a glare. Knowing when to quit, Harry thinks. Nobody knows when to quit. Their guide has lifted her voice up a notch and is saying, "Here is the sapodilla of the American tropics. From the sap of this tree comes chicle, used in making chewing gum."

 

"Hear that?" Harry asks Judy, out of breath with the social tension of this endless tour and sorry about the hurtful squeeze. "The tree Chiclets come from."

 

"What are Chiclets?" Judy asks, looking up at him with a little new nick of a squint taken in those clear green eyes. She is sore, slightly, and wary of him now. He has nicked her innocence. Can it be she's never heard of Chiclets? Have they really gone the way of penny candy, of sugar?soaked Fosnacht doughnuts, of those little red ration tokens you had to use during the war? All as real as yesterday to Harry. Realer.

 

"Mr. Edison planted this chewing?gum tree for children," the guide is going on. "He loved his children and his grandchildren very much and spent long hours with them, though because of his deafness he had to do most of the talking." There is a munnur of laughter, and she preens, stretching her neck and pursing her lips, as if she hadn't expected this, though she must have, she has done this spiel so often she must have their reactions taped down to every stray chuckle. Now she leads her herd of oldsters, shuffling and bobbing solemnly in their splashy playclothes, toward a link fence and a new phase of their five?dollar pilgrimage. They are about to cross the road lined with the unnaturally straight and concrete?colored palm trunks that Edison, the amazing great American, floated in from Cuba when the century was an infant. But she can't let them cross without socking them with one more cute plant. "The shrub with the long red tassels is the chenille plant from the Bismarck Islands. The chenille is French and means caterpillar. You can readily see the meaning for the name of the plant."

 

"Yukko, caterpillars," little Judy pipes up to Harry, and he recognizes this as a female attempt to rebridge the space between them, and he feels worse than ever about that hurtful squeeze. He wonders why he did it, why he tends to do mean things like that, to women mostly, as if blaming them for the world as it is, full of chenille plants and without mercy. He feels fragile, on the edge of lousy. That bad child inside his chest keeps playing with matches.

 

The guide announces, "We are now going across the street to the laboratory where Mr. Edison did his last experimental work."

 

They do at last cross over and, in Edison's breezy old laboratories, among dusty beakers and siphons and alembics and big belted black machinery, are reunited with Janice and Roy. The tour guide points out the cot where Edison used to take the tenminute catnaps that enabled him to sit and dream in his big deaf head for hours on end, and the piece of goldenrod rubber on his desk, made from goldenrod grown right here in Fort Myers and still flexible after all these years. Finally, the guide frees them to roam, marvel, and escape. Driving north, Harry asks the three others, "So, what did you like best?"

 

"Going pee," Roy says.

 

"You're dumb," Judy tells him and, to show that she's not, answers, "I liked best the phonograph where to hear because he was deaf he rested his teeth on this wooden frame and you can see the marks his teeth made. That was interesting."

 

"1 was interested," Harry says, "in all those failures he had in developing the storage battery. You wouldn't think it would be so tough. How many ? nine thousand experiments?"

 

Route 41 drones past the windows. Banks. Food and gas. Arthritis clinics. Janice seems preoccupied. "Oh," she says, trying to join in, "I guess the old movie machines. And the toaster and waffle iron. I hadn't realized he had invented those, you don't think of them as needing to be invented. You wonder how different the world would be if he hadn't lived. That one man."

 

Harry says, authoritatively, he and Janice in the front seat like puppet grandparents, just the heads showing, playing for their little audience of two in the back seat, "Hardly at all. It was all there in the technology, waiting to be picked up. If we hadn't done it the Swiss or somebody would have. The only modem invention that wasn't inevitable, I once read somewhere, was the zipper."

 

"The zipper!" Judy shrieks, as if she has decided, since this day with her grandparents looks as though it will never end, to be amused.

 

"Yeah, it's really very intricate," Harry tells her, "all those little slopes and curves, the way they fit. It's on the principle of a wedge, an inclined plane, the same way the Pyramids were built." Feeling he may have wandered rather far, venturing into the terrible empty space where the Pyramids were built, he announces, "Also, Edison had backing. Look at who his friends were down there. Ford. Firestone. The giant fat cats. He got his ideas to sell them to them. All this talk about his love for mankind, I had to laugh."

 

"Oh yes," Janice says, "I liked the old car with daffodil?rubber tires."

 

"Goldenrod," Harry corrects. "Not daffodil."

 

"I meant goldenrod."

 

"I like daffodil better," Judy says from the back seat. "Grandpa, how did you like our tour lady, the awful way she talked, making that mouth like she had a sourball in it?"

 

"I thought she was very kind of sexy," Harry says.

 

"Sexy!" little Judy shrieks.

 

"I'm hungry," Roy says.

 

"Me too, Roy," says Janice. "Thank you for saying that."

 

They eat at a McDonald's where, for some legal reason ? fear of lawsuits, the unapologetic cashier thinks when they ask her about it ? the door is locked out to the playground, with its spiral slide an,' its enticing plastic man with a head, even bigger than Edison's, shaped like a hamburger. Roy throws a fit at the locked door and all through lunch has these big liquid googies of grief to snuffle back up into his nose. He likes to pour salt out of the shaker until he has a heap and then rub the French fries in it, one by one. The French fries and about a pound of salt are all the kid eats; Harry finishes his Big Mac for him, even though he doesn't much care for all the Technicolor glop McDonald's puts on everything ? pure chemicals. Whatever happened to the old?fashioned plain hamburger? Gone wherever the Chiclet went. A little Bingo game is proceeding in a corner; you have to walk right through it on your way to the bathrooms, these old people in booths bent over their cards while a young black girl in a McDonald's brown uniform gravely reads off the numbers with a twang. "Twainty?sevvn . . . Fohty?wuhunn . . ."

 

Back in the hot car, Harry sneaks a look at his watch. Just noon. He can't believe it, it feels like four in the afternoon. His bones ache, deep inside his flesh. "Well now," he announces, "we have some choices." He unfolds a map he carries in the glove compartment. Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago. "Up toward Sarasota there's the Ringling Museum but it's closed, something called Bellm's Cars of Yesterday but maybe we did enough old cars back at Edison's, and this jungle Gardens which a guy I play golf with really swears by."

 

Judy groans and little Roy, taking his cue from her, begins his trembly?lower?lip routine. "Please, Grandpa," she says, sounding almost maternal, "not caterpillar trees again!"

 

"It's not just plants, the plants are the least of it, they have leopards and these crazy birds. Real leopards, Roy, that'd claw your eyes out if you let 'em, and flamingos that fall asleep standing on one leg ? Bernie, this friend of mine, can't get over it, the way they can sleep standing on this one skinny leg!" He holds up a single finger to convey the wonder of it. How ugly and strange a single finger is ? its knuckle?wrinkles, its whorly print, its pretty useless nail. Both the children in the back seat look flushed, the way Nelson used to when he'd be coming down with a cold ? a smothery frantic look in the eyes. "Or," Rabbit says, consulting the map, "here's something called Braden Castle Ruins. How do you two sports like ruins?" He knows the answer, and cinches his point with, "Or we could all go back to the condo and take a nap." He learned this much selling cars: offer the customer something he doesn't want, to make what he half?wants look better. He peeks over at Janice, a bit miffed by her air of detachment. Why is she making this all his show? She's a grandparent too.

 

She rouses and says, "We can't go back so soon ? they may be still resting."

 

"Or whatever," he says. Brawling. Fucking. There is something hot and disastrous about Nelson and Pru that scares the rest of them. Young couples give off this heat; they're still at the heart of the world's' business, making babies. Old couples like him and Janice give off the musty smell of dead flower stalks, rotting in the vase.

 

Judy suggests, "Let's go to a movie."

 

"Yeah. Movie," Roy says, for these two words doing quite a good accidental imitation of a grown?up voice, as if they've taken on a hitchhiker in the back seat.

 

"Let's make a deal," Harry proposes. "We'll drive up and nip into jungle Gardens, and if there's a guided tour or you think it'll depress you we'll nip right out again, the hell with 'em. Otherwise we'll go through and see the flamingos and then buy a Sarasota paper and see what's at the movies. Roy, you big enough to sit through a whole movie?" He starts the engine and gets into gear.

 

Judy says, "He cried so hard during Dumbo Mommy had to take him out."

 

"Dumbo's mommy . . ." Roy begins to explain, then starts to cry.

 

"Yeah," Harry says, turning onto 41 again, casting back his voice, rolling along. "That's a tough one, out there in that little prison car. The business with their trunks, remember? But it all works out. Roy, you should have stayed to the end. If you don't stay to the end the sadness