A life knows few revelations; these must be followed when they come. Rabbit sees clearly what to do. His acts take on a decisive haste. He goes upstairs and packs. The brown canvas suit bag. The big yellow rigid Tourister with the dent in one corner where an airline handler slung it. Jockey shorts, T?shirts, socks, polo shirts in their pastel tints, dress shirts in their plastic envelopes, golf slacks, Bermuda shorts. A few ties though he has never liked ties. All his clothes are summer clothes these days; the wool suits and sweaters wait in mothproof bags for fall days, October into November, that will not come this year, for him. He takes four lightweight sports coats and two suits, one a putty?colored and the other the shiny gray like armor. In case there's a wedding or a funeral. A raincoat, a couple of sweaters. A pair of black laced shoes tucks into two pockets of his folding suit bag and blue?and?white Nikes into the sides of the suitcase. He should start jogging again. His toothbrush and shaving stuff. His pills, buckets of them. What else? Oh yes. He grabs The First Salute from his bedside table and tucks it in, he'll finish it if it kills him. He leaves a light burning in the upstairs hall to discourage burglars, and the carriage lamp beside the front door numbered 14 1/2. He loads the car in two trips, feeling the weight of the suitcases in his chest. He looks around the bare hall. He goes into the den, his feet silent on the Antron wall?to?wall carpeting, and looks out the lozenge panes at the glowing night?time silhouette of the weeping cherry. He plumps the pillow and straightens the arm guards on the wing chair he fell asleep in, not long ago but on the far side of a gulf: The he who fell asleep was somebody else, a pathetic somebody. At the front door again, he feels a night breeze on his face, hears the muffled rush of traffic over on Penn Boulevard. He sets the latch and softly slams the door. Janice has her key. He thinks of her over there in the Springers' big stucco house that always reminded him of an abandoned enormous ice?cream stand. Forgive me.
Rabbit gets into the Celica. Take a Ride in the Great Indoors: one of the new slogans they'd been trying to push. You can have too many slogans, they begin to cancel out. The engine starts up; reverse gear carries him smoothly backwards. 1 Love When You Set Me Free, Toyota. The digital clock says 10:07. Traffic on Penn Boulevard is starting to thin, the diners and gas stations are beginning to darken. He turns right at the blinking red light and then right again at the Brewer bypass along the Running Horse River. The road lifts above the trees at a point near the elephant?gray gas tanks and the bypassed old city shows a certain grandeur. Its twentystory courthouse built in the beginning of the Depression is still the tallest building, the concrete eagles with flared wings at each corner lit by spotlights, and the sweeping shadow of Mt. Judge, crowned by the star?spatter of the Pinnacle Hotel, hangs behind everything like an unmoving tidal wave. The streetlamps show Brewer's brick tint like matches cupped in ruddy hands. Then, quite quickly, the city and all it holds are snatched from view. Groves of weed trees half?hide the empty factories along the river, and one might be anywhere in the United States on a four?lane divided highway.
He and Janice have done this Southward drive so often he knows the options: he can get off at 222 and proceed directly but pokily toward Lancaster through a string of stoplight?ridden Brewer suburbs, or he can stay on 422 a few miles to 176 and head directly south and then cut west to Lancaster and York. The first time he tried this trip, thirty years ago last spring come to think of it, he made the mistake of heading south too soon, toward Wilmington and a vision ofbarefoot du Pont women. But the East slants west, and the trick is to bear west until 83, which didn't exist in those days, and then drive south right into the maw of that two?headed monster, Baltimore?Washington. Monstrous, she said. Well, in a way, you could say, being alive is monstrous. Those crazy molecules. All by themselves? Never.
He turns on the radio, searching among the jabber of rock music and talk shows for the sweet old tunes, the tunes he grew up on. It used to be easier to search with the old dial you twisted, instead of these jumpy digitized scan buttons: you could feel your way. The scan comes suddenly upon the silky voices of Dinah Shore and Buddy Clark entwined in the duet of "Baby, It's Cold Outside." Thrilling, it turns his spine to ice water, when, after all that melodious banter it's hard to understand every word of, they halt, and harmonize on the chorus line. Coooold, out, side. Then this same station of oldies, fading under the underpasses, crackling when the road curves too close to power lines, offers up a hit he's totally forgotten, how could he have? ? the high?school dances, the dolled?up couples shuffling to the languid waltz beat, the paper streamers drooping from the basketball nets, the rusty heater warmth of the dash?lit interior of Pop's Plymouth, the living warm furtive scent, like the flavor of a food so strong you must choke it down at first, rising from between Mary Ann's thighs. Vaya con Dios, my darling. The damp triangle of underpants, the garter belts girls wore then. The dewy smooth freshness of their bodies, all of them, sweatily wheeling beneath the crépe paper, the colored lights. Vaya con Dios, my love. Oh my. It hurts. The emotion packed into these phrases buried in some d j.'s dusty racks of 78s like the cotton wadding in bullets, like those seeds that come to life after a thousand years in some pyramid. Though the stars recycle themselves and remake all the heavy atoms Creation needs, Harry will never be that person again, that boy with that girl, his fingertips grazing the soft insides of her thighs, a few atoms rubbing off; a few molecules.
Then, "Mule Train," by Frankie Laine, not one of the great Laines but great enough, and "It's Magic," by Doris Day. Those pauses back then: It's ma? gic. They knew how to hurt you, back then when there were two eight?team baseball leagues and you could remember all the players. People then were not exactly softer, they were harder in fact, but they were easier to hurt, though in fewer places.
He has to leave 176 for 23 through Amish country, it's the one really local stretch of road, but there shouldn't be any buggies out this late to slow him down. Rabbit wants to see once more a place in Morgantown, a hardware store with two pumps outside, where a thickset farmer in two shirts and hairy nostrils had advised him to know where he was going before he went there. Well, now he does. He has learned the road and figured out the destination. But what had been a country hardware store was now a slick little realestate office. Where the gas pumps had been, fresh black asphalt showed under the moonlight the stark yellow stripes of diagonal parking spaces.
No, it isn't moonlight, he sees; it is the sulfurous illumination that afflicts busy paved places all night. Though the hour is near eleven, a traffic of giant trucks heaves and snorts and groans through the sleepy stone town; the realtor's big window is full of Polaroid snapshots of property for sale, and Route 23, once a narrow road on the ridge between two farm valleys as dark at night as manure, now blazes with the signs that are everywhere. PIZZA HUT. BURGER KING. Rent a Movie. Turkey Hill MINIt MARKET. Quilt World. Shady Maple SMORGASBORD. Village Herb Shop. Country Knives. Real estate makes him think of Janice and his heart dips at the picture of her waiting with Nelson and Pru for him to show up over at the Springers' and panicking by now, probably imagining he's had a car accident, and coming back with her key to the deserted house, all fluttery and hotbreathed the way she gets. Maybe he should have left a note like she did him that time. Harry dear?1 must go off a few days to think. But she said never forgive him, shoot you both, she upped the stakes, let her stew in her own juice, thinks she's so smart suddenly, going back to school. Nelson the same way. Damned if they're going to get him sitting in on some family?therapy session run by his own son whose big redheaded wife he's boffed. Only really good thing he's done all year, as he looks back on it. Damned if he'll face the kid, give him the satisfaction, all white in the gills from this new grievance. Rabbit doesn't want to get counselled.
The eleven?o'clock news comes on the radio. Jim Bakker, on trial in Charlotte, North Carolina, on twenty?four counts of fraud in connection with his scandal?ridden PTL television ministry, collapsed today in court and is being held for up to sixty days for psychiatric evaluation at the Federal Correctional Institute. Dr. Basil Jackson, a psychiatrist who has been treating Bakker for nine months, said that the once?charismatic evangelist has been hallucinating: leaving the courtroom Wednesday after former PTL executive Steve Nelson collapsed on the witness stand, Bakker saw the people outside as animals intent upon attacking and injuring him. Bakker's wife, Tammy, said from her luxurious home in Orlando, Florida, that Bakker over the phone had seemed to be experiencing a terrible emotional trauma and that she prayed with him and they agreed that they would trust in the Lord. In Los Angeles, Jessica Hahn, the former PTL secretary whose sexual encounter with Bakker in 1980 led to his downfall, told reporters, quote, I'm not a doctor but I do know about Jim Bakker. I believe Jim Bakker is a master manipulator. I think this is a sympathy stunt just like it is every time Tammy gets on TV and starts crying and saying how abused they are, end quote. In Washington, the Energy Department is searching for mysteriously missing amounts of tritium, the heavy?hydrogen isotope necessary to the making of hydrogen bombs. Also in Washington, Science magazine reports that the new bomb detector, called a TNA for thermal neutron analysis, installed today at JFK Airport in New York City, is set to detect two point five pounds of plastic explosives and would not have detected the bomb, thought to contain only one pound of Semtex explosive, which brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. In Toronto, movie superstar Marlon Brando told reporters that he has made his last movie. "It's horrible," he said of the motion picture, entitled The Freshman. "It's going to be a flop, but after this, I'm retiring. You can't imagine how happy I am." In Bonn, West Germany, Chancellor Helmut Kohl telephoned the new Polish Prime Minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, in a plea for better relations between their two countries. It was fifty years ago tomorrow, indeed almost right to this minute when allowances are made for time zones, that Germany under Adolf Hitler invaded Poland, precipitating World War II, in which an estimated fifty million persons were to perish. Like, wow! In sports, the Phillies are losing in San Diego and Pittsburgh is idle. As to the weather, it could be better, and it could be worse. Mezzo, mezzo. I didn't say messy, but look out for thundershowers, you Lancaster County night owls. Oh yes, Brando also called his new and terminal movie a "stinker." No sweat, for a fellow who began his career in a torn undershirt.
Rabbit smiles in the whispering, onrushing cave of the car; this guy must think nobody is listening, gagging it up like this. Lonely in those radio studios, surrounded by paper coffee cups and perforated acoustic tiles. Hard to know the effect you're making. Hard to believe God is always listening, never gets bored. The dashboard lights of the Celica glow beneath his line of vision like the lights of a city about to be bombed.
The superhighway crosses the Susquehanna and at York catches 83. As Harry drives south, the station fades behind him, toward the end of Louis Prima's "Just a Gigolo," that fantastic chorus where the chorus keeps chanting "Just a gigolo" in a kind of affectionate mockery of that wheezy wonderful voice: it makes your scalp prickle with joy. Rabbit fumbles with the scan button but can't find another oldies station, just talk shows, drunks calling in, the host sounding punchy himself, his mouth running on automatic pilot, abortion, nuclear waste, unemployment among young black males, CIA complicity in the AIDS epidemic, Boesky, Milken, Bush and North, Nonega, you can't tell me thatRabbit switches the radio off, hating the sound of the human voice. Vermin. We are noisy vermin, crowding even the air. Better the murmur of the tires, the green road signs looming in the lights and parabolically enlarging and then whisked out of sight like magicians' handkerchieves. It's getting close to midnight, but before he stops he wants to be out of the state. Even that botched time ages ago he got as far as West Virginia. To get out of Pennsylvania you have to climb a nameless mountain, beyond Hungerford. Signs and lights diminish. The lonely highway climbs. High lakes gleam under what is, now, in a gap between clouds, true moonlight. He descends into Maryland. There is a different feeling: groomed center strips, advertisements for Park and Ride for commuters. Civilization. Out of the sticks. His eyelids feel sandy, his heart fluttery and sated. He pulls off 83 into a Best Western well north of Baltimore, pleased to think that nobody in the world, nobody but the stocky indifferent Asian?American desk clerk, knows his location. Where oh where is the missing tritium?
He likes motel rooms ? the long clammy slot of hired space, the two double beds, the television set with its invitation to buy an R?rated movie, the shag carpet, the framed prints of big birds, the sanitized towels, the hush of anonymity, the closeted echo of old sex. He sleeps well, as if he has slipped off his body with its troubles and left it lying on the other double bed. In his dream he is back at the lot, with a young woman who seems to be in charge. She wears a white cap and dangly earrings but when he leans close and tries to explain himself to her, to convey his indispensable usefulness to the enterprise, contrary to what she may have heard from Janice, she makes a wry mouth and her face melts under his eyes in a kind of visual scream.
For breakfast, he succumbs to the temptation and has two fried eggs, though the yolks are terrible for your arteries, with bacon on the side. Rabbit likes the very American moment of packing up his car in sleepy unspeaking companionship with the other motel guests, elderly couples, cranky families, as they drift from the breakfast room across the parking lot with its long milky morning shadows. On the road again, with the radio again. The same news as the night before, amplified by the final baseball scores (Phils lost, five to one) and the news from Asia, where it is already afternoon for the busy Japanese currency speculators, the restive Chinese students, the doll?like Filipino hookers, the unhappily victorious Vietnamese, the up?and?coming although riotous Koreans, the tottering Burmese socialists, the warring Cambodian factions including the mindless Khmer Rouge minions of the most atrocious national leader since Hitler and Stalin, the infamous Pol Pot. Like, wow! Wake up, songbirds! The d .j., not last night's but just as crazy and alone with himself, plays some rockabilly song Rabbit likes, about getting down, "make a little love, get down tonight." It occurs to Harry he didn't even jerk off last night, though motel rooms usually excite him. Boy, is he showing his age.
As Baltimore nears, the condominiums multiply, thicken, entire hills and valleys loaded with them, pastel gingerbread staircases containing invisible people. 83 ends seamlessly at 695 and with all the commuters in their neckties he drones around the Beltway, jostling for his space in the world as if he still deserves it. Then he takes up 95, which will be his home all the way to Florida. There are two ways around Washington, he and Janice have tried them both, the boringly expert travellers down in the condo like the Silbersteins say 495 passing to the north and west is actually quicker, but he likes the little glimpse of the monuments you get by staying east on 95 and crossing the Potomac on a broad bridge into Alexandria. The frozen far heart, ice?cream white, of the grand old republic.
After all that megalopolis, Virginia feels bucolically vacant. The fields look bigger than those in Pennsylvania, the hills gentler and more open, with meadows and horses, a gracious mist in the air, once in a while a pillared manse on a pale?green rise like something embroidered on a sampler by a slaveowner's spinster daughter. A military tinge: Fort Belvoir Engineer Proving Ground, Quantico Marine Corps Base. Harry thinks of his Army time and it comes back as a lyric tan, a translucent shimmer of aligned faceless men, the curious peace of having no decisions to make, of being told entirely what to do. War is a relief in many ways. Without the Cold War, what's the point of being an American? Still, we held them off. We creamed those oafs. Hitler, Stalin, and now Gorby. History will remember that, if not thank us. There is very little thanks in history. Dog eat dog. It becomes hard now to find stations on the radio that are not country music or religion. "Pray for difficult marriages," one preacher says, his grainy molasses?brown voice digging so deep into himself you can picture his shut eyes, the sweat on his temples, "pray for Christian husbands under stress, for Christian wives worried about their men; pray for all hostages, for prisoners in prison, for victims of the ghetto, for all those with AIDS." Rabbit switches the station and resolves to call home when he stops for lunch.
How many rivers there are! After the Potomac, the Accotink, the Pohick, the Occoquan, the Rappahannock, the Pamunkey, the Ni, the Po, the Matta, the South Anna. The bridges thus marked are mere moments of the highway. Unseen towns are named: Massaponax, Ladysmith, Cedar Forks. North of Richmond, shacks in a thickening scatter mark the beginning of the true South, of rural blacks. Harry pulls into a Howard Johnson's on the Richmond outskirts. His ears ring, the ankle of his accelerator foot aches, his neck is stiff; the heat has gone up several notches since the motel parking lot this morning. Inside the air?conditioned restaurant, salesmen with briefcases are at all the pay phones. He eats too much lunch, consuming the last French fry that came with his tasteless hamburger, mopping up salt with it in his fingers like his grandson Roy does, and then ordering apple pie to see if it's any different in Virginia. It's sweeter and gluier; it lacks that cinnamon they sprinkle on in Pennsylvania. A phone is available after he pays the check and with three dollars' worth of quarters ready he dials not the gray limestone house on Franklin Drive but the house where he used to live, the Springer house in Mt. Judge.
A little girl answers. The operator breaks in and Rabbit inserts three n?linutes' worth of quarters. He says, "Hi, Judy. It's Grandpa."
"Hi, Grandpa," she says, very calmly. Perhaps nothing of last night's revelation has filtered down to her yet. Or perhaps children this young are so innocent of what adulthood involves that nothing surprises them.
"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 the receiver 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 connection. Pru says, "Shit."
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 connection, "Harry, where are you?"
"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 Inn he and Janice have stayed at in years past, he hears an amazing thing on the car radio. They interrupt a string of Forties swing classics to announce that Bartlett Giamatti, Commissioner of Baseball and former president of Yale University, died of a heart attack on the island of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, late this afternoon. Pete Rose strikes back, Rabbit thinks. Professor Giamatti, who was only fifty?one years of age, retired after lunch in his summer home in Edgartown, and at three o'clock was found by his wife and son in full cardiac arrest. Only fifty?one, Rabbit thinks. Police took Giamatti to the Martha's Vineyard Hospital where he was worked upon for an hour and a half, the emergency team several times succeeded in restoring the electric mechanism of the heartbeat, but Giamatti was at last pronounced dead. That little electric twitch: without it we're so much rotting meat. One of the first things he ought to do in Florida is make an appointment with Dr. Morris, to keep himself out of the hands of that hawk?faced Australian, Dr. Olman. Dying to sink hú knife into me. Giamatti had been an English instructor at Yale, the news says, and became the youngest president in the history of the university, and in eleven years reversed that institution's trend into red ink and academic mediocrity. As president of the National League, he had aroused some players' ire by tampering with the strike zone and the balk rule. As commissioner, his brief tenure was dominated by the painful Rose affair, whose settlement a week ago left Giamatti in an apparently strong position. He was a heavy man and a heavy smoker. At least I'm no smoker. And now, a tune our listeners never get tired of requesting, "In the Mood."
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 dinner of deep?fried shrimp, with onion rings and white bread fried on one side, a Southern delicacy he guesses, at the Comfort Inn ? one of those restaurants with a salad bar big as a little cafeteria, so you wonder as you sit there waiting for the waitress if you're missing the boat ? Harry cruises in the slate?gray Celica, his private Batmobile, toward the center of wicked Fayetteville. He can find for a hot spot only a shadowy broad street of blacks loitering in doorways here and there, waiting for some message, some event from beyond. No hookers in hotpants or spandex exercise tights, just a big red?bearded white man in studded black leather who keeps revving his motorcycle, twisting the throttle and producing a tremendous noise. The blacks don't blink. They keep waiting. Even at evening the shadowy air is hot, they move through it languidly like sick fish, their hands flapping at the wrists in that angled black way.
Back in his long room with its watery scent of cement from underneath the rug, with walls painted altogether yellow, moldings and pipes and air?conditioning vents and light?switch plates rollered and sprayed yellow, Rabbit thinks of adding $5.50 to his bill to watch something called Horny Housewives but instead watches, free, bits of Perfect Strangers (it makes him uneasy, two guys living together, even if one of them is a comical Russian) and pre?season football between the Seahawks and 49ers. The trouble with these softcore porn movies on hotel circuits, in case some four?year?old with lawyers for parents happens to hit the right buttons they show tits and ass and even some pubic hair but no real cunt and no pricks, no pricks hard or soft at all. It's very frustrating. It turns out pricks are what we care about, you have to see them. Maybe we're all queer, and all his life he's been in love with Ronnie Harrison. Nice, today, the way Pru burst out with that Shit again and then Don't tease. That level woman?to?man voice, as if he had his arms about her, her voice relaxing into their basic relation, cock to cunt, doing Nelson in. In bed at last in the dark he jerks off, picturing himself with a pair of coffee?colored hookers from old Fayetteville, to show himself he's still alive.
The morning radio news is dull. Giamatti's death, warmed over. Baseball mourns. Economy shows moderate growth. Bombardments in Beirut between Christians and Muslims worse than ever. Ex?HUD aide says files were shredded. Supreme Court ruling against organized prayer before football games is rousing indignation all over the Southland. In Montgomery, Mayor Emory Folmar marched to the fifty?yard line and led a prayer there. His remarks over the public?address system linked football and prayer as American tradition. In Sylacauga, Alabama, local ministers rose in the bleachers and led the crowd of three thousand in the Lord's Prayer. In Pensacola, Florida, preachers equipped with bullhorns led spectactors in prayer. Fanatics, Rabbit tells himself. Southerners are as scary as the Amish.
From here on down to the Florida line Route 95 is like a long green tunnel between tall pines. Little shacks peek through. A sign offers Pecan Rolls 3 for $ 2 .00. Bigger signs in Hispanic colors, orange and yellow on black, lime green, splashy and loud, miles and miles of them, begin to advertise something called South of the Border. Bear Up a Leetle Longer. You Never Sausage a Place! With a big basketball curving right off the billboard, Have a Ball. When you finally get there, after all these miles of pine tunnel, it's a junky amusement park just across the South Carolina border: a village of souvenir shops, a kind of a space needle wearing a sombrero. Tacos, tacky. South Carolina is a wild state. The first to secede. The pines get taller, with a tragic feeling. FIREWORKS are offered everywhere for sale. The land gets hillier. Trucks loaded with great tree trunks rumble unstoppably by on the downslope and labor to nearly a standstill on the up. Rabbit is nervously aware now of his Pennsylvania plates being Northern. Swerve out of line a bit and they'll throw him in the Pee Dee River. The Lynches River. The Pocatoligo River. Animals on this highway are hit so hard they don't squash, they explode, impossible to know what they were. Possums. Porcupines. Some dear old Southern lady's darling pet pussycat............