Rabbit at rest (14 page)

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!"