Rabbit, Run (3 page)

Rabbit stealthily approaches his old home on the grass, hopping the little barberry hedge and the wire meant to keep kids on the pavement. He sneaks down the strip of grass between the two cement walks that go with the two brick walls; he used to live behind the one and the Zims behind the other. All day long Mrs. Zim, who was plain, with big thyroid eyes and bluish, slack skin, screamed at her daughter Carolyn, who was prettier than you’d think a five-year-old girl could be. Mr. Zim was a thick-lipped redhead, and in Carolyn thick and thin, red and blue, health and high-strungness had blended just right; her beauty was not merely precocious but somehow absolutely, apart from age, exotic. Even Harry, six years older, saw this. All day long Mrs. Zim screamed at her and when Mr. Zim came home from work the two of them would shout together for hours. It would begin with Mr. defending the little girl, and then as the neighbors listened old wounds opened like complicated flowers in the night. Sometimes Mom said that Mr. would murder Mrs., sometimes she said that the little girl would murder them both, as they lay asleep. It was true there was something cold-blooded about Carolyn; when she reached school age, she never left the house without a smile on her little heart-face, swinging herself along like she owned the world, though the Angstroms had just heard her mother throw hysterics at her all through breakfast, the kitchen windows not six feet apart. How does that poor man endure? If Carolyn and her mother don’t settle their differences they’re going to wake up some fair morning without a protector. But Mom was never proved right in any of her predictions. When the Zims left, it was together, Mr. and Mrs. and Carolyn, vanishing in a station wagon while half their furniture still stood on the sidewalk beside the mover’s truck. He had a new job in Cleveland, Ohio. Poor souls, they won’t be missed. But they were. They had sold their half-house to an old couple, strict Methodists, and the old man refused to cut the strip of grass between his house and the Angstroms’. Mr. Zim, who worked outdoors rain or shine on weekends, as if it’s his only pleasure in life and I don’t wonder, had always cut it. The old Methodist cut exactly his half, one swath of a lawnmower, and then pushed his lawnmower back inverted on his own walk, when it would have been just as easy to push it back along the other half of the strip and not leave such a ridiculous job. When I hear that old fool’s wheels rattle along his walk so self-righteously, my blood pressure goes up so I hear my ears pop. Mother refused to let him or his father mow their half for one whole summer, and the grass grew knee-high in that little sunless space and stalks of like wheat came up and one or two goldenrod until a man from the town came around in August and said they must cut it on account of an ordinance; he was sorry. Harry had gone to the door and was saying, Sure, O.K., when Mother came up behind him saying, What did he mean? That was her flowerbed. She had no intention of letting it be destroyed. As her son, Rabbit felt terribly embarrassed. The man just looked at her and got a little thumbed book out of his hip pocket and showed her the ordinance. She still said it was her flowerbed. The man read to her what the fine was and went off the porch. That Saturday when she was in Brewer shopping, Pop got the sickle out of the garage and chopped all the weeds down and Harry pushed the lawnmower back and forth across the stubble until it looked as trim as the Methodist’s half, though browner. He felt guilty doing it, and was frightened of the fight his parents would have when Mother came back. He dreaded their quarrels: when their faces went angry and flat and words flew, it was as if a pane of glass were put in front of him; cutting off air; his strength drained away and he had to go to a far corner of the house. This time there was no fight. His father shocked him by simply lying, and doubled the shock by winking as he did. He told her the Methodist had at last broken down and cut the strip of grass himself. Mother believed it but wasn’t pleased; she talked all the rest of the day and off and on all week about suing the old holy-roller. In a way she had come to think it
was
her flowerbed. From cement to cement the strip is not much more than a foot across. Walking along it feels slightly precarious to Harry, like treading the top of a wall.

He walks back as far as the lit kitchen window and steps onto the cement without the sole of his shoe scraping and on tiptoe looks in one bright corner. He sees himself sitting in a high chair, and a quick strange jealousy comes and passes. It is his son. The boy’s little neck gleams like one more clean object in the kitchen among the cups and plates and chromium knobs and aluminum cake-making receptacles on shelves scalloped with glossy oilcloth. His mother’s glasses glitter as she leans in from her place at the table with a spoon of smoking beans at the end of her fat curved arm. Her face shows none of the worry she must be feeling about why nobody comes for the boy and instead is narrowed, her nose a faceted beak, into one wish: that the boy eat. Her mouth is focused into white crinkles. They smooth in a smile; Nelson’s lips, hidden from Rabbit’s angle, must have taken the beans. The others around the table express praise, blurred syllables from his father, piercing from his sister, something thin about both voices. Rabbit, with the intervening glass and the rustle of blood in his head, can’t hear what they say. His father, fresh from work, is in an ink-smeared blue shirt and, when his face lapses from applauding his grandson, looks old: tired and grizzled. His throat a loose bundle of cords. The new teeth he got a year ago have changed his face, collapsed it a fraction of an inch. Miriam, dolled up in gold and jet for Friday night, picks at her food indifferently and offers a spoonful to the kid; the reach of her slender white braceleted arm across the steaming table rings a barbaric chord into the scene. She makes up too much; at nineteen she would be good enough without green eyelids. Because she has buck teeth she tries not to smile. Nelson’s big whorly head dips on its bright neck and his foreshortened hand, dots of pink, dabbles toward the spoon, wants to take it from her. Pop’s face lurches into laughter above his plate, and Mim’s lips leap in a grin that cracks her cautious wised-up squint and breaks through to the little girl Rabbit used to ride on his handlebars, her streaming hair tickling his eyes as they coasted down the steep Mt. Judge streets. She lets Nelson take her spoon and he drops it. The kid cries “Peel! Peel!”: this Rabbit can hear, and understand. It means “spill.” Pop and Mim smile and make . remarks but Mom, mouth set, comes in neatly with her spoon. Harry’s boy is being fed, this home is happier than his, he glides a pace backward over the cement and rewalks the silent strip of grass.

His acts take on decisive haste. In darkness he goes down another block of Jackson. He cuts up Joseph Street, runs a block, strides another, and comes within sight of his car, its grid grinning at him, parked the wrong way on this side of the street. He taps his pocket and fear hits him. He doesn’t have the key. Everything depends, the whole pure idea, on which way Janice was sloppy. Either she forgot to give him the key when be went out or she never bothered to take it out of the ignition. He tries to imagine which is more likely and can’t. He doesn’t know her that well. He never knows what the hell she’ll do. She doesn’t know herself. Dumb.

The back but not the front of the big Springer house is lit up. He moves cautiously in the sweet-smelling shadows under the trees in case the old lady is waiting inside the darkened living-room to tell him what she thinks. He crosses around in front of the car, the ‘55 Ford that old man Springer with his little yellow Hitler mustache sold him for an even thousand in 1957 because the scared bastard was ashamed, cars being his business he was ashamed of his daughter marrying somebody who had nothing but a ‘36 Buick he bought for $125 in the Army in Texas in 1953. Made him cough up a thousand he didn’t have when the Buick had just had eighty dollars’ worth of work. That was the kind of thing. They deserve everything they get. He opens the car from the passenger side, wincing at the
pung
of the brittle door spring and quickly ducking his head into the car. Thank God. Beneath the knobs for lights and wipers the octagon of the ignition key tells in silhouette. Bless that dope. Rabbit slithers in, closing the side door until metal touches metal but not slamming it. The front of the stucco Springer house is still unlit. It reminds him for some reason of an abandoned ice-cream stand. He turns the key through On into Start and the motor churns and catches. In his anxiety to be secret he is delicate on the accelerator and the motor, idle for hours in the air of an early spring day, is cold, sticks, and stalls. Rabbit’s heart rises and a taste of straw comes into his throat. But of course what the hell if she
does
come out? The only thing suspicious is that he doesn’t have the kid and he can say he’s on his way to pick him up. That would have been the logical way to do it anyway. Nevertheless he doesn’t want to be put to the inconvenience of lying, however plausibly. He pulls the hand choke out a fraction, just enough to pinch his fingertips, and starts the motor again. He pumps once, and glances aside to see the Springers’ living-room light flash on, and lets the clutch out, and the Ford bucks away from the curb.

He drives too fast down Joseph Street, and turns left, ignoring the sign saying
STOP
. He heads down Jackson to where it runs obliquely into Central, which is also 422 to Philadelphia.
STOP
. He doesn’t want to go to Philadelphia but the road broadens on the edge of town beyond the electric-power station and the only other choice is to go back through Mt. Judge around the mountain into the thick of Brewer and the suppertime traffic. He doesn’t intend ever to see Brewer again, that flowerpot city. The highway turns from three-lane to four-lane and there is no danger of hitting another car; they all run along together like sticks on a stream. Rabbit turns on the radio. After a hum a beautiful Negress sings, “Without a song, the dahay would nehever end, without a song.” Rabbit wishes for a cigarette to go with the washed feeling inside and remembers he gave up smoking and feels cleaner still. He slumps down and puts one arm up on the back of the seat and glides down the twilight pike left-handed. “A field of corn” the Negress’s voice bending dark and warm like the inside of a cello “the grasses grow” the countryside dipping around the road like a continuous dark bird “it makes no mind no how” his scalp contracts ecstatically “wihithout a.” The smell of parched rubber says the heater has come on and he turns the little lever to
MOD
.

“Secret Love,” “Autumn Leaves,” and something whose title he missed. Supper music. Music to cook by. His mind nervously shifts away from the involuntary vision of Janice’s meal sizzling in the pan, chops probably, the grease-tinted water bubbling disconsolately, the unfrozen peas steaming away their vitamins. He tries to think of something pleasant. He imagines himself about to shoot a long one-hander; but he feels he’s on a cliff, there is an abyss he will fall into when the ball leaves his hands. He tries to repicture his mother and sister feeding his son, but the boy is crying in backward vision, his forehead red and his mouth stretched wide and his helpless breath hot. There must be something: the water from the ice plant running in the gutter, yellowish, the way it curled on stones and ran in diagonal wrinkles, waving the pretty threads of slime attached to its edges. Suddenly Janice shivers in memory of the other’s girl’s bed in declining daylight. He tries to blot out the sensation with Miriam, Mim on his handlebars, Mim on a sled in dark snowfall being pulled up Jackson Street by him, the little kid laughing in her hood, himself the big brother, the red lights in snowfall marking the trestles the town crew have used to block off the street for sledding, down, down, the runners whistling on the dark packed slick, Hold me Harry, the sparks as the runners hit the cinders spread at the bottom for safety, the scraping stop like the thump of a great heart in the dark. Once more Harry, then we’ll go home, I promise Harry, please, oh I love you, little Mim only seven or so, in her dark hood, the street waxy with snow still falling. Poor Janice would probably have the wind up now, on the phone to her mother or his mother, somebody, wondering why her supper was getting cold. So dumb. Forgive me.

He accelerates. The growing complexity of lights threatens him. He is being drawn into Philadelphia. He hates Philadelphia. Dirtiest city in the world they live on poisoned water. He wants to go south, down, down the map into orange groves and smoking rivers and barefoot women. It seems simple enough, drive all night through the dawn through the morning through the noon park on a beach take off your shoes and fall asleep by the Gulf of Mexico. Wake up with the stars above perfectly spaced in perfect health. But he is going east, the worst direction, into unhealth, soot, and stink, a smothering hole where you can’t move without killing somebody. Yet the highway sucks him on, and a sign says P
OTTSTOWN
2. He almost brakes. But then he thinks.

If he is heading east, south is on his right. And then, as if the world were just standing around waiting to serve his thoughts, a broad road to the right is advertised,
ROUTE
100
WEST CHESTER WILMINGTON
. Route 100 had a fine ultimate sound. He doesn’t want to go to Wilmington but it’s the right direction. He’s never been to Wilmington. The Du Ponts own it. He wonders what it’s like to make it to a Du Pont.

He doesn’t drive five miles before this road begins to feel like a part of the same trap. The first road offered him he turns right on. A keystone marker in the headlights says 23. A good number. The first varsity game be played in he made 23 points. A sophomore and a virgin. Trees overshadow this narrower road.

A barefoot Du Pont. Brown legs probably, bitty birdy breasts. Beside a swimming pool in France. Something like money in a naked woman, deep, millions. You think of millions as being white. Sink all the way in softly still lots left. Rich girls frigid? Nymphomaniacs? Must vary. Just women after all, descended from some old Indian-cheater luckier than the rest, inherit the same stuff if they lived in a slum. Glow all the whiter there, on drab mattresses. That wonderful softness they have when they want it. Otherwise just fat weight. That wonderful softness, but they want you up and hard on their little ledge. The thing is play them until just a touch. You can tell: their skin under the fur gets all loose like a puppy’s neck.