Rabbit, Run by John Updike

      John Updike's Rabbit, Run is a classic story of dissatisfaction and restlessness. Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom was a star basketball player in high school. Now twenty-six, his life seems full of traps, the biggest being his pregnant wife and two-year-old son. He sets out to escape, but it's not clear if Rabbit is really following his heart or only chasing his tail. Powerfully written, Rabbit, Run gave American literature one of its most enduring characters.

Rabbit, Run by John Updike (Extract)

     During this sleep he has an intense dream. He and his mother and father and some others are sitting around their kitchen table. It's the old kitchen. A girl at the table reaches with a very long arm weighted with a bracelet and turns a handle of the wood icebox and cold air sweeps over Rabbit. She has opened the door of the square cave where the cake of ice sits; and there it is, inches from Harry's eyes, lopsided from melting but still big, holding within its semi-opaque bulk the white partition that the cakes have when they come bumping down the chute at the ice plant. He leans closer into the cold breath of the ice, a tin-smelling coldness he associates with the metal that makes up the walls of the cave and the ribs of its floor, delicate rhinoceros gray, mottled with the same disease the linoleum has. Having leaned closer he sees that under the watery skin are hundreds of clear white veins like the capillaries on a leaf, as if ice too were built up of living cells. And further inside, so ghostly it comes to him last, hangs a jagged cloud, the star of an explosion, whose center is uncertain in refraction but whose arms fly from the core of pallor as straight as long eraser-marks diagonally into all planes of the cube. The rusted ribs the cake rests on wobble through to his eyes like the teeth of a grin. Fear probes him; the cold lump is alive.

His mother speaks to him. 'Close the door.'

'I didn't open it.'

'I know.'

'She did.'

'I know. My good boy wouldn't hurt anyone.' The girl at the table fumbles a piece of food and with terrible weight Mother turns and scolds her. The scolding keeps on and on, senselessly, the same thing over and over again, a continuous pumping of words like a deep inner bleeding. It is himself bleeding; his grief for the girl distends his face until it feels like a huge white dish. 'Tart can't eat decently as a baby,' Mother says.

'Hey, hey, hey,' Rabbit cries, and stands up to defend his sister. Mother rears away, scoffing. They are in the narrow place between the two houses; only himself and the girl; it is Janice Springer. He tries to explain about his mother. Janice's head meekly stares at his shoulder; when he puts his arms around her he is conscious of her eyes being bloodshot. Though their faces are not close he feels her breath, hot with tears. They are out behind the Mt. Judge Recreation Hall, out in back with the weeds and tramped-down bare ground and embedded broken bottles; through the wall they hear music on loudspeakers. Janice has a pink dance dress on, and is crying. He repeats, sick at heart, about his mother, that she was just getting at him but the girl keeps crying, and to his horror her face begins to slide, the skin to slip slowly from the bone, but there is no bone, just more melting stuff underneath; he cups his hands with the idea of catching it and patting it back; as it drips in loops into his palms the air turns white with what is his own scream.

The white is light; the pillow glows against his eyes and sunlight projects the bubble flaws of the window panes onto the drawn shade. This woman is curled up under the blankets between him and the window. Her hair in sunlight sprays red, brown, gold, white, and black across her pillow. Smiling with relief, he gets up on an elbow and kisses her solid slack cheek, admires its tough texture of pores. He sees by faint rose streaks how imperfectly he scrubbed her face in the dark. He returns to the position in which he slept, but he has slept too much in recent hours. As if to seek the entrance to another dream he reaches for her naked body across the little distance and wanders up and down broad slopes, warm like freshly baked cake. Her back is toward him; he cannot see her eyes. Not until she sighs heavily and stretches and turns toward him does he know she is awake.

Again, then, they make love, in morning light with cloudy mouths, her breasts floating shallow on her ridged rib cage. Her nipples are sunken brown buds, her bush a brass froth. It is almost too naked; his climax seems petty in relation to the wealth of brilliant skin, and he wonders if she pretends. She says not; no, it was different but all right. Really all right. He goes back under the covers while she pads around on bare feet getting dressed. Funny how she puts on her bra before her underpants. Her putting on her underpants makes him conscious of her legs as separate things: thick pink liquid twists dimin­ishing downward into her ankles. They take a rosy light from the reflection of each other as she walks around. Her accepting his watching her flatters him, shelters him. They have become domestic.

Church bells ring loudly. He moves to her side of the bed to watch the crisply dressed people go into the limestone church across the street, whose lit window had lulled him to sleep. He reaches and pulls up the shade a few feet. The rose window is dark now, and above the church, above Mt. Judge, the sun glares in a façade of blue. It strikes a shadow down from the church steeple, a cool stumpy negative in which a few men with flowers in their lapels stand and gossip while the common sheep of the flock stream in, heads down. The thought of these people having the bold idea of leaving their homes to come here and pray pleases and reassures Rabbit, and moves him to close his own eyes and bow his head with a movement so tiny that Ruth won't notice. Help me, Christ. Forgive me. Take me down the way. Bless Ruth, Janice, Nelson, my mother and father, Mr. and Mrs. Springer, and the unborn baby. Forgive Tothero and all the others. Amen.

He opens his eyes to the day and says, 'That's a pretty big congregation.'

'Sunday morning,' she says. 'I could throw up every Sunday morning.'

'Why?'

She just says, 'Fuh,' as if he knows the answer. After thinking a bit, and seeing him lie there looking out the window seriously, she says, 'I once had a guy in here who woke me up at eight o'clock because he had to teach Sunday school at nine-thirty.'

'You don't believe anything?'

'No. You mean you do?'

'Well, yeah. I think so.' Her rasp, her sureness, makes him wince; he wonders if he's lying. If he is, he is hung in the middle of nowhere, and the thought hollows him. Across the street a few people in their best clothes walk on the pavement past the row of worn brick homes; are they walking on air? Their clothes, they put on their best clothes: he clings to the thought giddily; it seems a visual proof of the unseen world. 'Well, if you do what are you doing here?' she asks. 'Why not? You think you're Satan or somebody?' This stops her a moment, standing there with her comb, before she laughs. 'Well you go right ahead if it makes you happy.'

He presses her. 'Why don't you believe anything?' 'You're kidding.' 'No. Doesn't it ever, at least for a second, seem obvious to you?' 'God, you mean? No. It seems obvious just the other way. All the time.' 'Well now if God doesn't exist, why does anything?'

'Why? There's no why to it. Things just are.' She stands before the mirror, and her comb pulling back on her hair pulls her upper lip up; women are always looking that way in the movies.

'That's not the way I feel about you,' he says, 'that you just are.'

'Hey, why don't you get some clothes on instead of just lying there giving me the Word?'

This, and her turning, hair swirling, to say it, stir him. 'Come here,' he asks. The idea of making it while the churches are full excites him.

'No,' Ruth says. She is really a little sore. His believing in God grates against her. 'You don't like me now?' 'What does it matter to you?' 'You know it does.' 'Get out of my bed.' 'I guess I owe you fifteen more dollars.' 'All you owe me is getting the hell out.'

'What! Leave you all alone?' He says this as with comical speed, while she stands there startled, he jumps from bed and gathers up some of his clothes and ducks into the bathroom and closes the door. When he comes out, in underclothes, he says, still clowning, 'You don't like me any more,' and moves pouting to where his trousers are neatly laid on the chair. While he was out of the room she made the bed.

'I like you enough,' she says in a preoccupied voice, tugging the bedspread smooth.

'Enough for what?'

'Enough.'

'Why do you like me?'

''Cause you're bigger than I am.' She moves to the next corner and tugs. 'Boy that used to gripe hell out of me, the way these little women everybody thinks are so cute grab all the big men.'

'They have something,' he tells her. 'They seem easier to nail down.'

She laughs and says, 'To nail down or screw?'

He pulls up his trousers and buckles the belt. 'Why else do you like me?'

She looks at him. 'Shall I tell you?'

'Tell me.'

''Cause you haven't given up. In your stupid way you're still fighting.'

He loves hearing this; pleasure spins along his nerves, making him feel immense. But American modesty has been drilled into him, and 'the will to achievement' glides out of his mouth, which he tries to make look lopsided. She gets it.

'That poor old bastard,' she says. 'He really is a bastard too.'

'Hey, I'll tell you what,' Rabbit says. 'I'll run out and get some stuff at that grocery store you can cook for our lunch.'

'Say, you settle right in, don't you?'

'Why? Were you going to meet somebody?'

'No, I don't have anybody today.'

'Well, then. You said last night you liked to cook.'

'I said I used to.'

'Well, if you used to you still do. What shall I get?'

'How do you know the store's open?'

'Isn't it? Sure it is. Those little stores make all their money on Sundays, what with the supermarkets.' He goes to the window and looks up at the corner. Sure, the door of the store opens and a man comes out with a newspaper.

'Your shirt's filthy,' she says behind him.

'I know.' He moves away from the window light. 'It's Tothero's shirt. I got to get my own clothes. But let me get us food now. What shall I get?'

'What do you like?' she asks.

He leaves pleased. The thing about her is, she's good-natured. He knew it the second he saw her standing by the parking meters. He could just tell from the way her thighs made a lap. With women, you keep bumping against them, because they want different things; they're a different race. The good ones develop give. In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature. The pavement kicks under his feet as he runs to the grocery store in his dirty shirt. What do you like? He has her. He knows he has her.

He brings back eight hot dogs in cellophane, a package of frozen lima beans, a package of frozen French fries, a quart of milk, a jar of relish, a loaf of raisin bread, a ball of cheese wrapped in red cellophane, and, on top of the bag, a Ma Sweitzer's shoo-fly pie. It all costs $2.43. As she brings the things out of the bag in her tiny stained kitchen, Ruth says, 'You're not a very healthy eater.'
'I wanted lamb chops but he only had hot dogs and salami and hash in cans.'

While she cooks he wanders around her living room and finds a row of pocketbook mysteries on a shelf under a table beside a chair. The Jewish guy in the bunk beside his at Fort Larson used to read those all the time. Ben Shamberger. A smart mouth but mournful inky eyes. Hated the Army. Broke his arm from riding a steer one weekend on a dare from that maniac Jarzylo. Ruth has opened the windows, and the cool March air is sharp­ened by this memory of baking Texas. Ruth's curtains of dingy dotted Swiss blow; their gauze skin gently fills and they lean in toward him as he stands paralyzed by another memory: his home, when he was a child, the Sunday papers rattling on the floor, stirred by the afternoon draft, and his mother rattling the dishes in the kitchen. When she is done, she will organize them all, Pop and him and baby Miriam, to go for a walk. Because of the baby, they will not go far, just a few blocks maybe to the old gravel quarry, where the ice pond of winter, melted into a lake a few inches deep, doubles the height of the quarry cliff by throwing its rocks upside down into a pit of reflection. But it is only water; they take a few steps farther along the edge and from this new angle the pond mirrors the sun, the illusion of inverted cliffs is wiped out, and the water is as solid as ice with light. Rabbit holds little Mim hard by the hand. 'Hey,' he calls to Ruth. 'I got a terrific idea. Let's go for a walk this afternoon.'

'Walk! I walk all the time.'

'Let's walk up to the top of Mt. Judge from here.' He can't remember having ever gone up the mountain from the Brewer side. Gusts of anticipation sweep over him, and as he turns, exalted, away from the curtains stiff and leaning with the breeze, huge church bells ring. 'Yeah let's,' he calls into the kitchen. 'How about it?' Out on the street people leave church carrying wands of green absentmindedly at their sides.

When Ruth serves lunch he sees she is a better cook than Janice; she has boiled the hot dogs somehow without splitting them. With Janice, they always arrived at the table torn and twisted and tortured-looking. He and Ruth eat at a small porcelain table in the kitchen. As he touches his fork to his plate he remembers the cold feel in his dream of Janice's face dropping into his hands, and the memory spoils his first bite, makes it itself a kind of horror. Nevertheless he says 'Terrific' and gamely goes ahead and eats and does regain his appetite.

Ruth's face across from him takes some of the pale glare of the table-top; the skin of her broad forehead shines and the two blemishes beside her nose are like spots something spilled has left. She seems to sense that she has be come unattractive, and eats with quick little self-effacing bites.

'Hey,' he says.

'What?'

'You know I still have that car parked over on Cherry Street.'

'You're O.K. The meters don't matter on Sunday.'

'Yeah, but they will tomorrow.'

'Sell it.'

'Huh?'

'Sell the car. Simplify your life. Get rich quick.'

'No, I mean – oh. You mean for you. Look, I still have thirty dollars, why dontcha let me give it to you now?' He reaches toward his hip pocket.

'No, no, I did not mean that. I didn't mean anything. It just popped into my fat head.' She is embarrassed; her neck goes splotchy and his pity is roused, to think how beautiful she appeared last night.

He explains. 'You see, my wife's old man is a used-car dealer and when we got married he sold us this car at a pretty big discount. So in a way it's really my wife's car and anyway since she has the kid I think she ought to have it. And then as you say my shirt's dirty and I ought to get my clothes if I can. So what I thought was, after lunch why don't I sneak over to my place and leave the car and pick up my clothes?'

'Suppose she's there?'

'She won't be. She'll be at her mother's.'

'I think you'd like it if she was there,' Ruth says.

He wonders; he imagines opening the door and finding Janice sitting there in the armchair with an empty glass watching television and feels, like a piece of food stuck in his throat at last going down, his relief at finding her face still firm, still its old dumb tense self of a face. 'No, I wouldn't,' he tells Ruth. 'I'm scared of her.'

'Obviously,' Ruth says.

'There's something about her,' he insists. 'She's a menace.'

'This poor wife you left? You're the menace, I'd say.'

'Me?'

'Oh that's right. You think you're a rabbit.' Her tone in saying this is faintly jeering and irritable, he doesn't know why.

She asks, 'What do you think you're going to do with these clothes?'

He admits, 'Bring them here.'

She takes in the breath but comes out with nothing.

'Just for tonight,' he pleads. 'You're not doing anything are you?

'Maybe. I don't know. Probably not.'

'Well then, great. Hey. I love you.'

She rises to clear away the plates and stands there, thumb on china, staring at the center of the white table. She shakes her head heavily and says, 'You're bad news.'

Across from him her broad pelvis, snug in a nubbly brown skirt, is solid and symmetrical as the base of a powerful column. His heart rises through that strong column and, enraptured to feel his love for her founded anew yet not daring to lift his eyes to the test of her face, he says, 'I can't help it. You're such good news.'

He eats three pieces of shoo-fly pie and a crumb in the corner of his lips comes off on her sweater when he kisses her breasts goodbye in the kitchen. He leaves her with the dishes. His car is waiting for him on Cherry Street in the cool spring noon mysteriously; it is as if a room of a house he owned had been detached and scuttled by this curb and now that the tide of night was out stood up glistening in the sand, slightly tilting but unharmed, ready to sail at the turn of a key. Under his rumpled dirty clothes his body feels clean, narrow, hollow. He has scored. The car smells of rubber and dust and painted metal hot in the sun: a sheath for the knife of himself. He cuts through the Sunday-stunned town, the soft rows of domestic brick, the banistered porches of wood. He drives around the southern flank of Mt. Judge; its slope by the highway is dusted the yellow-green of new leaves; higher up, the evergreens make a black horizon with the sky. The view has changed since the last time he came this way. Yesterday morning the sky was ribbed with thin-stretched dawn clouds, and he was exhausted, heading into the center of the net, where alone there seemed a chance of rest. Now the noon of another day has burned away the clouds, and the sky in the windshield is blank and cold, and he feels nothing ahead of him, Ruth's blue-eyed nothing, the nothing she told him she did, the nothing she believes in. Your heart lifts forever through that blank sky.

His mood of poise crumbles as he descends into the familiar houses of Mt. Judge. He becomes cautious, nervous. He turns up Jackson, up Potter, up Wilbur, and tries to make out from some external sign if there is anyone in his apartment. No telltale light would show; it is the height of day. No car is out front. He circles the block twice, straining his neck to see a face at the window. The panes are high and opaque. Ruth was wrong; he does not want to see Janice.

The bare possibility makes him so faint that when he gets out of the car the bright sun almost knocks him down. As he climbs the stairs, the steps seem to calibrate, to restrain by notches, a helpless tendency in his fear-puffed body to rise. He raps on the door, braced to run. Nothing answers on the other side. He taps again, listens, and takes the key out of his pocket.

Though the apartment is empty, it is yet so full of Janice he begins to tremble; the sight of that easy chair turned to face the television attacks his knees. Nelson's broken toys on the floor derange his head; all the things inside his skull, the gray matter, the bones of his ears, the apparatus of his eyes, seem clutter clogging the tube of his self; his sinuses choke, with a sneeze or tears he doesn't know. The living room smells of desertion. The shades are still drawn. Janice drew them in the afternoons to keep glare off the television screen. Someone has made gestures of cleaning up; her ashtray and her empty glass have been taken away. Rabbit puts the door key and the car keys on top of the television case, metal painted brown in imitation of wood grain. As he opens the closet door the knob bumps against the edge of the set. Some of her clothes are gone.

He means to reach for his clothes but instead turns and wanders toward the kitchen, trying to gather up the essence of what he has done. Their bed sags in the filtered sunlight. Never a good bed. Her parents had given it to them. On the bureau there is a square glass ashtray and a pair of fingernail scissors and a spool of white thread and a needle and some hairpins and a tele­phone book and a Baby Ben with luminous numbers and a recipe she never used torn from a magazine and a necklace made of sandalwood beads carved in Java he got her for Christmas. Insecurely tilted against the wall is the big oval mirror they took away when her parents had a new bathroom put in; he always meant to attach it to the plaster above her bureau for her but never got around to buying molly bolts. A glass on the windowsill, half full of stale, bubbled water, throws a curved patch of diluted sun onto the bare place where the mirror should have been fixed. Three long nicks, here, scratched in the wall, parallel; what ever made them, when? Beyond the edge of the bed a triangle of linoleum bathroom floor shows; the time after her shower, her bottom blushing with steam, lifting her arms gladly to kiss him, soaked licks of hair in her armpits. What gladness had seized her, and then him, unasked?

In the kitchen he discovers an odd oversight: the pork chops never taken from the pan, cold as death, riding congealed grease. He dumps them out in the paper bag under the sink and with a spatula scrapes crumbs of the stiff speckled fat after them. The bag, stained dark brown at the bottom, smells of something sweetly rotting. He puzzles. The garbage can is downstairs out back, he doesn't want to make two trips. He decides to forget it. He draws scalding water into the sink and puts the pan in to soak. The breath of steam is a whisper in a tomb.

In frightened haste he takes clean Jockey pants, T-shirts, and socks from a drawer, three shirts in cellophane and blue cardboard from another, a pair of laundered suntans from a third, draws his two suits and a sports shirt from the closet, and wraps the smaller clothing in the suits to form a bundle he can carry. The job makes him sweat. Clutching his clothes between two arms and a lifted thigh, he surveys the apartment once more, and the furniture, carpeting, wallpaper all seem darkly glazed with the murk filming his own face; the rooms are filled with the flavor of an awkward job, and he is glad to get out. The door snaps shut behind him irrevocably. His key is inside.

Toothbrush. Razor. Cufflinks. Shoes. At each step down he remembers something he forgot. He hurries, his feet patter. He jumps. His head almost hits the naked bulb burning at the end of a black cord in the vestibule. His name on the mailbox seems to call at him as he sweeps past; its letters of blue ink crowd the air like a cry. He feels ridiculous, ducking into the sunlight like one of those weird thieves you read about in the back pages of newspapers who instead of stealing money and silver carry away a porcelain washbasin, twenty rolls of wallpaper, or a bundle of old clothes.

'Good afternoon, Mr. Angstrom.'

A neighbor is passing, Miss Arndt, in a lavender church hat, carrying a palm frond in clutched hands. 'Oh. Hello. How are you?' She lives three houses up; they think she has cancer.

'I am just splendid,' she says. 'Just splendid.' And stands there in sunshine, bewildered by splendor, flatfooted, leaning unconsciously against the slope of the pavement. A gray car goes by too slowly. Miss Arndt sticks in Rabbit's way, amiably confused, grateful for something, her simple adherence to the pavement it seems, like a fly who stops walking on the ceiling to marvel at itself.

'How do you like the weather?' he asks.

'I love it, I love it; Palm Sunday is always blue. It makes the sap rise in my legs.' She laughs and he follows; she stands rooted to the hot cement between the feathery shade of two young maples. She knows nothing, he becomes certain.

'Yes,' he says, for her eyes have fixed on his arms. 'I seem to be doing spring cleaning.' He shrugs the bundle to clarify.

'Good,' she says, with a surprising sarcastic snarl. 'You young husbands, you certainly take the bit in your teeth.' Then she twists, and exclaims, 'Why, there's a clergyman in there!'

The gray car has come back, even more slowly, down the center of the street. With a dismay that makes the bundle of clothes double its weight in his arms, Rabbit realizes he is pinned. He lurches from the porch and strides past Miss Arndt saying, 'I got to run,' right on top of her considered remark, 'It's not Reverend Kruppenbach.'

No, of course not Kruppenbach; Rabbit knows who it is, though he doesn't know his name. The Episcopa­lian. The Springers were Episcopalians, more of the old phony's social climbing, they were originally Reformeds. Rabbit doesn't quite run. The downhill pavement jars his heels at every stride. He can't see the cement under the bundle he carries. If he can just make the alley. His one hope is the minister can't be sure it's him. He feels the gray car crawling behind him; he thinks of throwing the clothes away and really running. If he could get into the old ice plant. But it's a block away. He feels Ruth, the dishes done, waiting on the other side of the mountain.

As a shark nudges silent creases of water ahead of it, the gray fender makes ripples of air that break against the back of Rabbit's knees. The faster he walks the harder these ripples break. Behind his ear a childishly twanging voice pipes, 'I beg your pardon. Are you Harry Angstrom?'

With a falling sensation of telling a lie Rabbit turns and half-whispers, 'Yes.'

The fair young man with his throat manacled in white lets his car glide diagonally against the curb, yanks on the handbrake, and shuts off the motor, thus parking on the wrong side of the street, cockeyed. Funny how ministers ignore small laws. Rabbit remembers how Kruppenbach's son used to tear around town on a motorcycle. It seemed somehow blasphemous. 'Well, I'm Jack Eccles,' this minister says, and inconsequently laughs a syllable. The white stripe of an unlit cigarette hanging from his lips makes with the echoing collar a comic picture in the car window. He gets out of his car, a '58 Buick four-door Special, with those canted fins and that rocket-arc of chrome on the side, and offers his hand. To accept it Rabbit has to put his big ball of clothes down in the strip of grass between the pavement and curb.

Eccles' handshake, eager and practiced and hard, seems to symbolize for him an embrace. For an instant Rabbit fears he will never let go. He feels caught, foresees explan­ations, embarrassments, prayers, reconciliations rising up like dank walls; his skin prickles in desperation. He senses tenacity in his captor.

The minister is about his age or a little older and a good bit shorter. But not small; a sort of needless muscularity runs under his black coat. He stands edgily, with his chest faintly cupped. He has long reddish eyebrows that push a worried wrinkle around above the bridge of his nose, and a little pale pointed knob of a chin tucked under his mouth. Despite his looking vexed there is something friendly and silly about him.

'Where are you going?' he asks.

'Huh? Nowhere.' Rabbit is distracted by the man's suit; it only feigns black. It is really blue, a sober but elegant, lightweight, midnight blue. While his little vest or bib or whatever is black as a stove. The effort of keeping the cigarette between his lips twists Eccles' laugh into a snort. He slaps the breasts of his coat. 'Do you have a match by any chance?'

'Gee I'm sorry, no. I quit smoking.'

'You're a better man than I am.' He pauses and thinks, then looks at Harry with startled, arched eyebrows. The distention makes his gray eyes seem round and as pale as glass. 'Can I give you a lift?'

'No. Hell. Don't bother.'

'I'd like to talk to you.'

'No; you don't really want to, do you?'

'I do, yes. Very much.'

'Yeah. O.K.' Rabbit picks up his clothes and walks around the front of the Buick and gets in. The interior has that sweet tangy plastic new-car smell; he takes a deep breath of it and it cools his fear. 'This is about Janice?'

Eccles nods, staring out the rear window as he backs away from the curb. His upper lip overhangs his lower; there are scoops of weary violet below his eyes. Sunday would be his heavy day.

'How is she? What did she do?'

'She seems much saner today. She and her father came to church this morning.' They drive down the street. Eccles adds nothing, just gazes through the windshield, blinking. He pokes the lighter in on the dashboard.

'I thought she'd be with them,' Rabbit says. He is getting slightly annoyed at the way the minister isn't bawling him out or something; he doesn't seem to know his job.

The lighter pops. Eccles puts it to his cigarette, inhales, and seems to come back into focus. 'Evidently,' he says, 'when you didn't come back in half an hour she called your parents and had your father bring your boy over to your apartment. Your father, I gather, was very reassuring and told her you had probably been sidetracked somewhere. She remembered you had been late getting home because of some street game and thought you might have gone back to it. I believe your father even walked around town looking for the game.'

'Where was old man Springer?'

'She didn't call them. She didn't call them until two o'clock that morning, when I suppose the poor thing had given up all hope.' 'Poor thing' is one word on his lips, worn smooth.

Harry asks, 'Not until two?' Pity grips him; his hands tighten on the bundle, as if comforting Janice.

'Around then. By then she was in such a state, alcoholic and otherwise, that her mother called me.'

'Why you?'

'I don't know. People do.' Eccles laughs. 'They're supposed to; it's comforting. To me at least. I always thought Mrs. Springer hated me. She hadn't been to church in months.' As he turns to face Rabbit, to follow up this joke, a little quizzical pang lifts his eyebrows and forces his broad mouth open.

'This was around two in the morning?'

'Between two and three.'

'Gee, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to get you out of bed.'

The minister shakes his head irritably. 'That's not a consideration.'

'Well I feel terrible about this.'

'Do you? That's hopeful. Uh, what, exactly, is your plan?'

'I don't really have a plan. I'm sort of playing it by ear.'

Eccles' laughter surprises him; it occurs to Rabbit that the minister is an expert on affairs like this – broken homes, fleeing husbands – and that 'playing it by ear' has struck a fresh note. He feels flattered. Eccles has this knack.

'Your mother has an interesting viewpoint,' the minister says. 'She thinks it's all an illusion your wife and I have, that you've deserted. She says you're much too good a boy to do anything of the sort.'

'You've been busy on this, haven't you?'

'This, and a death yesterday.'

'Gee, I'm sorry.'

They have been driving idly, at low speed, through the familiar streets; once they passed the ice plant, and at another point rounded a corner from which you can see across the valley to the next ridge of hills. 'Say, if you really want to give me a lift,' Rabbit says, 'you could drive over into Brewer.'

'You don't want me to take you to your wife?'

'No. Good grief. I mean I don't think it would do any good, do you?'

For a long time it seems that the other man didn't hear him; his tidy, tired profile stares through the windshield as the big car hums forward steadily. Harry has taken the breath to repeat himself when Eccles says, 'Not if you don't want good to come of it.'

The matter seems ended this simply. They drive down Potter Avenue toward the highway. The sunny streets have just children on them, some of them still in their Sunday-school clothes. Little girls wear pastel organdy dresses that stick straight out from their waists. Their ribbons match their socks.

Eccles asks, 'What did she do that made you leave?'

'She asked me to buy her a pack of cigarettes.'

Eccles doesn't laugh as he had hoped; he seems to dismiss the remark as impudence, a little over the line. But it was the truth. 'It's the truth. It just felt like the whole business was fetching and hauling, all the time trying to hold this mess together she was making all the time. I don't know, it seemed like I was glued in with a lot of busted toys and empty glasses and the television going and meals late or never and no way of getting out. Then all of a sudden it hit me how easy it was to get out, just walk out, and by damn it was easy.'

'For less than two days, it's been.'

'It's been not only easy. It's been strange, too.' Rather than try to describe the strangeness, he asks, 'What's Janice going to do, do you think?'

'She doesn't know. Your wife seems almost paralyzed; she doesn't want anyone to do anything.'

'Poor kid. She's such a mutt.'

'Why are you here?'

''Cause you caught me.'

'I mean why were you in front of your home?'

'I came back to get clean clothes.'

'Do clean clothes mean so much to you? Why cling to that decency if trampling on the others is so easy?'

Rabbit feels now the danger of talking; his words are coming back to him, little hooks and snares are being fashioned. 'Also I was leaving her the car.'

'Why? Don't you need it, to explore your freedom in?'

'I just thought she should have it. Her father sold it to us cheap. Anyway it didn't do me any good.'

'No?' Eccles stubs his cigarette out in the car ashtray and goes to his coat pocket for another. They are rounding the mountain, at the highest stretch of road, where the hill rises too steeply on one side and falls too steeply on the other to give space to a house or gasoline station. The river darkly shines down below. 'Now if I were to leave my wife,' he says, 'I'd get into a car and drive a thousand miles.' It almost seems like advice, coming calmly from above the white collar.

'That's what I did!' Rabbit cries, delighted by how much they have in common. 'I drove as far as West Virginia. Then I thought the hell with it and came back.' He must try to stop swearing; he wonders why he's doing it. To keep them apart, maybe; he feels a dangerous tug drawing him toward this man.

'Should I ask why?'

'Oh I don't know. A combination of things. It seemed safer to be in a place I know.'
'You didn't come back to protect your wife?'

Rabbit is wordless at the idea.

Eccles continues, 'You speak of this feeling of muddle. What do you think it's like for other young couples? In what way do you think you're exceptional?'

'You don't think there's any answer to that but there is. I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball. I really did. And after you're first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate. And that little thing Janice and I had going, boy, it was really second-rate.'

The dashboard lighter pops. Eccles uses it and quickly returns his eyes to his driving. They've come down into the outskirts of Brewer. He asks, 'Do you believe in God?'

Having rehearsed that this morning, Rabbit answers without hesitation, 'Yes.'

Eccles blinks in surprise. The furry lid in his one-eyed profile shutters, but his face does not turn. 'Do you think, then, that God wants you to make your wife suffer?'

'Let me ask you. Do you think God wants a waterfall to be a tree?' This question of Jimmie's sounds, Rabbit realizes, ridiculous; he is annoyed that Eccles simply takes it in, with a sad drag of smoke. He realizes that no matter what he says, Eccles will take it in with the same weary smoke; he is a listener by trade. His big fair head must be stuffed with a gray mash of everybody's precious secrets and passionate questions, a mash that nothing, young as he is, can color. For the first time, Rabbit dislikes him.

'No,' Eccles says after thought. 'But I think He wants a little tree to become a big tree.'

'If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead.'

'I'm immature myself,' Eccles offers.

It's not enough of an offering. Rabbit tells him off. 'Well, I'm not going back to that little soppy dope no matter how sorry you feel for her. I don't know what she feels. I haven't known for years. All I know is what's inside me. That's all I have. Do you know what I was doing to support that bunch? I was demonstrating a penny's worth of tin called a frigging MagiPeeler in McCrory's five and dime!'

Eccles looks at him wide-eyed. 'Well that explains your oratorical gifts,' he says.

This aristocratic sneer rings true; puts them both in place. Rabbit feels less at sea. 'Hey, I wish you'd let me out,' he says. They're on Weiser Street, heading toward the great sunflower, dead in day.

'Won't you let me take you to where you're staying?'

'I'm not staying anywhere.'

'All right.' With a trace of boyish bad temper Eccles pulls over and stops in front of a fire hydrant. As he brakes racily, something clatters in the trunk.

'You're coming apart,' Rabbit tells him.

'Just my golf clubs.'

'You play?'

'Badly. Do you?' He seems animated; the cigarette burns forgotten in his fingers.
'I used to caddy.'

'Could I invite you for a game?' Ah. Here's the hook.

Rabbit gets out hugging his great ball of clothes and stands on the curb and sidesteps, clowning in his freedom. 'I don't have clubs.'

'They're easy to rent. Please. I mean it.' Eccles leans far over, to speak through the door. 'It's hard for me to find partners. Everybody works except me.' He laughs.

Rabbit knows he should run, but the thought of a game, and an idea that it's safest to see the hunter, make resistance.

Eccles presses. 'I'm afraid you'll go back to demon­strating peelers if I don't catch you soon. Tuesday? Tuesday at two? Shall I pick you up?'

'No; I'll come to your house.'

'Promise?'

'Yeah. But don't trust a promise from me.'

'I have to.' Eccles names an address in Mt. Judge and they call goodbye at the curb. An old cop walks with a wise squint along the pavement beside the shut, stunned Sunday storefronts. To him it must look like a priest parting from the president of his Youth Group, who is carrying a bundle of clothes for the poor. Harry grins at this cop, and walks along the sparkling pavement with his stomach singing. Funny, the world just can't touch you once you follow your instincts.

Ruth lets him in, a pocket mystery in one hand. Her eyes look sleepy from reading. She has changed into another sweater. Her hair is loose and seems darker. He dumps the clothes on her bed. 'Do you have hangers?'

'Say. You really think you have it made.'

'I made you,' he says. 'I made you and the sun and the stars.' Squeezing her in his arms it seems that he did. She is tepid and solid in his embrace, not friendly, not not. The filmy smell of soap lifts into his nostrils while dampness touches his jaw. She has washed her hair. Clean, she is clean, a big clean woman; he puts his nose against her skull to drink in the demure sharp scent. He thinks of her naked in the shower, her hair hanging oozy with lather, her neck bowed to the whipping water. 'I made you bloom,' he says.

'Oh you're a wonder,' she answers, and pushes away from his chest. As he hangs up his suits tidily, Ruth asks, 'You give your wife the car?'

'There was nobody there. I snuck in and out. I left the key inside.'

'And nobody caught you?'

'As a matter of fact somebody did. The Episcopal minister gave me a ride back into Brewer.'

'Say; you are religious, aren't you?'

'I didn't ask him.'

'What did he say?'

'Nothing much.'

'What was he like?'

'Kind of creepy. Giggled a lot.'

'Maybe just you make him giggle.'

'I'm supposed to play golf with him on Tuesday.'

'You're kidding.'

'No, really. I told him I don't know how.'

She laughs, on and on, in that prolonged way women use when they're excited by you and ashamed of it. 'Oh my Rabbit,' she exclaims in a fond final breath. 'You just grab what comes, don't you?'

'He got hold of me,' he insists, knowing his attempts to explain will amuse her, for shapeless reasons. 'I didn't do anything.'

'You poor soul,' she says. 'You're just irresistible.'

With keen secret relief, he at last takes off his dirty clothes and changes into clean underwear, fresh socks, and suntans. He left his razor at home but Ruth has a little curved female one for armpits that he uses. He chooses a wool sports shirt, for these afternoons in spring cool off sharply, and puts his suede shoes back on. He forgot to steal any other shoes. 'Let's go for that walk,' he announces, dressed.

'I'm reading,' Ruth says from a chair. The book is open to near the end. She reads books nicely, without cracking their backs, though they cost only 35¢. She has combed her hair and put it back in a roll at the nape of her neck.

'Come on. Get out in the weather.' He goes over and tries to tug the mystery from her hand. The title is The Deaths at Oxford. Now what should she care about deaths at Oxford? When she has him here, wonderful Harry Angstrom.

'Wait,' she pleads, and turns a page, and reads some sentences as the book is pulled slowly up, her eyes shut­tling, and then suddenly lets him take it. 'God, you're a bully.'

He marks her place with a burnt match and looks at her bare feet. 'Do you have sneakers or anything? You can't wear heels.'

'No. Hey I'm sleepy.'

'We'll go to bed early.'

Her eyeballs turn on him at this, her lips pursed a little. There is this vulgarity in her, that just couldn't let that just go by.

'Come on,' he says. 'Put on flat shoes and we'll get your hair dry.'

'I'll have to wear heels, they're all I have.' As she bows her head to pinch them on, the white line of her parting makes him smile, it's so straight. Like a little birthday girl's parting.

They approach the mountain through the city park. The trash baskets and movable metal benches have not been set out yet. On the concrete-and-plank benches fluffy old men sun like greater pigeons, dressed in patches of gray multiple as feathers. The trees in small leaf dust the half-bare ground with shadow. Sticks and strings protect the newly seeded margins of the unraked gravel walks. The breeze, flowing steadily down the slope from the empty bandshell, is cool out of the sun. The wool shirt was right. Pigeons with mechanical heads waddle away from their shoetips and resettle, chuffling, behind them. A derelict stretches an arm along the back of a bench to dry, and out of a gouged face daintily sneezes like a cat. A few toughs, fourteen or younger, smoke and jab near the locked equipment shed of a play pavilion on whose yellow boards someone has painted in red tex & josie, rita & jay. Where would they get red paint? He takes Ruth's hand. The ornamental pool in front of the bandshell is drained and scum-stained; they move along a path parallel to the curve of its cold lip, which echoes back the bandshell's silence. A World War II tank, made a monument, points its empty guns at far-off clay tennis courts. The nets are not up, the lines unlimed.

Trees darken; pavilions slide downhill. They walk through the upper region of the park, which delinquents haunt at night, scattering condoms and candy-bar wrap­pers. The beginning of the steps is almost hidden in an overgrowth of great bushes tinted dull amber with the first buds. Long ago, when hiking was customary enter­tainment, the city built stairs up the Brewer side of the mountain. They are made of six-foot tarred logs with dirt filled in flat behind them. Iron pipes have since been driven, to hold these tough round risers in place, and fine blue gravel scattered over the packed dirt they dam. The footing is difficult for Ruth; Rabbit watches her body struggle to propel her weight on the digging points of her heels. They catch and buckle. Her backside lurches, her arms swim for balance.

He tells her, 'Take off your shoes.'

'And kill my feet? You're a thoughtful bastard.'

'Well then, let's go back down.'

'No, no,' she says. 'We must be halfway.'

'We're nowhere near half up. Take off your shoes. These blue stones are stopping; it'll just be mashed-down dirt.'

'With chunks of glass in it.'

But further on she does take off her shoes. Bare of stockings, her white feet lift lightly under his eyes; the yellow skin of her heels flickers. Under the swell of calf her ankles are thin. In a fond gesture he takes off his shoes and socks, to share whatever pain there is. The dirt is trod smooth, but embedded pebbles stab his skin with the force of his weight. Also the ground is cold. 'Ouch,' he says. 'Owitch.'

'Come on, soldier,' she says, 'be brave.'

They learn to walk on the grass at the ends of the logs. Tree branches overhang part of the way, making it an upward tunnel. At other spots the air is clear behind them, and they can look over the rooftops of Brewer into the twentieth story of the courthouse, the city's one skyscraper. Concrete eagles stand in relief, wings flared, between its top windows. Two middle-aged couples in plaid scarves, bird-watchers, pass them on the way down; as soon as this couple has descended out of sight behind the gnarled arm of an oak, Rabbit hops up to Ruth's step and kisses her, hugs her hot bulk, tastes the salt in the sweat on her face, which is unresponsive. She thinks this is a silly time; her one-eyed woman's mind is intent on getting up the hill. But the thought of her city girl's paper-pale feet bare on the stones for his sake makes his heart, pumping with exertion, swell, and he clings to her broad body. An airplane goes over, rapidly rattling the air.

'My queen,' he says, 'my good horse.'

'Your what?'

'Horse.'

Near the top, the mountain rises sheer in a cliff, and here modern men have built concrete stairs with an iron railing that in a Z of three flights reach the macadam parking lot of the Pinnacle Hotel. Ruth and Rabbit put their shoes back on and, climbing the stairs, watch the city slowly flatten under them.

Rails guard the cliff edge. He grips one white beam, warmed by the sun that now is sinking away from the zenith, and looks straight down, into the exploding heads of trees. A frightening view, remembered from boyhood, when he used to wonder if you jumped would you die or be cushioned on those green heads as on the clouds of a dream? In the lower part of his vision the stone-walled cliff rises to his feet foreshortened to the narrowness of a knife; in the upper part the hillside slopes down, faint paths revealed and random clearings and the steps they have climbed.

Ruth's gaze, her lids half-closed as if she were reading a book, rests on the city.

O.K. He brought them up here. To see what? The city stretches from dollhouse rows at the base of the park through a broad blurred belly of flowerpot red patched with tar roofs and twinkling cars and ends as a rose tint in the mist that hangs above the distant river. Gas tanks glimmer in this smoke. Suburbs lie like scarves in it. But the city is huge in the middle view, and he opens his lips as if to force the lips of his soul to receive the taste of the truth about it, as if truth were a secret in such low solution that only immensity can give us a sensible taste. Air dries his mouth.

His day has been bothered by God: Ruth mocking, Eccles blinking – why did they teach you such things if no one believed them? It seems plain, standing here, that if there is this floor there is a ceiling, that the true space in which we live is upward space. Someone is dying. In this great stretch of brick someone is dying. The thought comes from nowhere: simple percentages. Someone in some house along these streets, if not this minute then the next, dies; and in that suddenly stone chest the heart of this flat prostrate rose seems to him to be. He moves his eyes to find the spot; perhaps he can see the cancer-blackened soul of an old man mount through the blue like a monkey on a string. He strains his ears to hear the pang of release as this ruddy illusion at his feet gives up this reality. Silence blasts him. Chains of cars creep without noise; a dot comes out of a door. What is he doing here, standing on air? Why isn't he home? He becomes fright­ened and begs Ruth, 'Put your arm around me.'

She carelessly obliges, taking a step and swinging her haunch against his. He clasps her tighter and feels better. Brewer at their feet seems to warm in the sloping sunlight: its vast red cloth seems to lift from the valley in which it is sunk concavely, to fill like a breast with a breath, Brewer the mother of a hundred thousand, shelter of love, ingenious and luminous artifact. So it is in a return of security that he asks, voicing like a loved child a teasing doubt, 'Were you really a hooer?'

To his surprise she turns hard under his arm and twists away and stands beside the railing menacingly. Her eyes narrow; her chin changes shape. In his nervousness he notices three Boy Scouts staring at them across the asphalt.

She asks, 'Are you really a rat?' He feels the need of care in his answer. 'In a way.' 'All right then.' They take a bus down.

http://www.popularpenguins.com.au/default.cfm?page=topten