Rabbit, Run Page 5

  The man turns, looking more tired than Rabbit had ex­pected. A short man with a big balding head, he had played when basketball was still a quick man’s game. He seems foreshortened: this big head and a massive checkered sports coat and then stubby legs in blue trousers that are too long, so the crease buckles and zigzags above the shoes. As he brakes his run, and walks the last strides, Rabbit fears he’s made a mistake.

  But Tothero says the perfect thing. “Harry,” he says, “the great Harry Angstrom.” He puts out his hand for Harry to seize and with the other squeezes the boy’s arm in a clasp of rigor. It comes back to Rabbit how he always had his hands on you. Tothero just stands there holding on and look­ing at him, smiling crookedly, the nose bent, one eye wide open and the other heavy-lidded. His face has grown more lopsided with the years. He is not going bald evenly; brushed strands of gray and pale brown patch his skull.

  “I need your advice,” Rabbit says, and corrects him­self. “What I really need is a place to sleep.”

  Tothero is silent before replying. His great strength is in these silences; other men hasten to respond instantly, as if they were always embarrassed, but Tothero has the dis­ciplinarian’s trick of waiting a moment. As if he considers everything. It gives him great weight. At last he asks, “What’s happened to your home?”

  “Well it kind of went.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “It was no good. I’ve run out. I really have.”

  Another pause. Rabbit narrows his eyes against the sun­light that rebounds off the asphalt. His left ear aches. His teeth on that side feel as if they might start hurting.

  “That doesn’t sound like very mature behavior,” Tothero states.

  “It was a mess as it was.”

  “What sort of mess?”

  “I don’t know. My wife’s an alcoholic.”

  “And have you tried to help her?”

  “Sure. How?”

  “Did you drink with her?”

  “No sir, never. I can’t stand the stuff, I just don’t like the taste.” He says this readily, proud to be able to report to- his old coach that he has not abused his body.

  “Perhaps you should have,” Tothero offers after a mo­ment. “Perhaps if you had shared this pleasure with her, she could have controlled it.”

  Rabbit, dazed by the sun, numb through weariness, can’t follow this thought.

  “It’s Janice Springer, isn’t it?” Tothero asks.

  “Yeah. God she’s dumb. She really is.”

  “Harry, that’s a harsh thing to say. Of any human soul.”

  Rabbit nods because Tothero himself seems certain of this. He is beginning to feel weak under the weight of the man’s pauses. These pauses seem longer than he remembered them, as if Tothero too feels their weight. Fear touches Rabbit again; he suspects his old coach is addled, and begins all over. “I thought maybe I could sleep a couple hours some­where in the Sunshine. Otherwise I might as well go home. I’ve had it.”

  To his relief Tothero becomes all bustling action, taking his elbow, steering him back along the alley, saying, “Yes of course, Harry, you look terrible, Harry. Terrible.” His hand holds Rabbit’s arm with metallic inflexibility and as he pushes him along Rabbit’s bones jolt, pinned at this point. Something frantic in so tight a grip diminishes the comfort of its firmness. Tothero’s voice, too, having turned precise, hasty, and gay, cuts into Rabbit’s woolly state too sharply. “You asked me for two things,” he says. “Two things. A place to sleep, and advice. Now, Harry, I’ll give you the place to sleep provided, provided, Harry, that when you wake up the two of us have a serious, a long and serious talk about this crisis in your marriage. I’ll tell you this now, it’s not so much you I’m worried about, I know you well enough to know you always land on your feet, Harry; it’s not so much you as Janice. She doesn’t have your co-ordination. Do you promise?”

  “Sure. Promise what?”

  “Promise, Harry, we’ll thrash out a way between us to help her.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t think I can. I mean I’m not that in­terested in her.”

  They reach the cement steps and the wood weather-box of the entrance. Tothero opens the door with a key he has. The place is empty, the silent bar shadowy and the small round tables looking rickety and weak without men sitting at them. The electrical advertisements behind the bar are unplugged and dead: dusty tubing and tinsel. Tothero says, in a voice too loud, “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe that my greatest boy would grow into such a monster.”

  Monster: the word seems to clatter after them as they climb the stairs to the second floor. Rabbit apologizes “I’ll try to think when I get some sleep.”

  “Good boy. That’s all we want.” What does he mean, we? All these tables are empty. Sunlight strikes blond squares into the drawn tan shades above a low radiator dyed black with dust. Men’s steps have zoom paths in the narrow bare floorboards.

  Tothero leads him to a door he has never entered; they go up a steep flight of attic stairs, a kind of nailed-down ladder between whose steps he sees sections of insulated wire and ragged gaps of carpentry. They climb into comparative light. “Here’s my mansion,” Tothero says, and fidgets with his coat pocket flaps.

  The tiny room faces east. A slash in a window shade throws a long knife of sun on a side wall, above an unmade Army cot. The other shade is up. Between the windows stands a bureau cleverly made of six beer cases wired to­gether, three high and two wide. In the six boxes are ar­ranged shirts in their laundry cellophane, folded undershirts and shorts, socks balled in pairs, handkerchiefs, shined shoes, and a leatherbacked brush with a comb stuck in the bristles. From two thick nails some sport coats, jarringly gay in pattern, are hung on hangers. Tothero’s housekeeping stops at caring for his clothes. The floor is dotted with rolls of fluff. Newspapers and all kinds of magazines, from the Na­tional Geographic to teen-age crime confessions and comic books, are stacked around. The space where Tothero lives merges easily with the rest of the attic, which is storage space, containing old pinochle tournament charts and pool tables and some lumber and metal barrels and broken chairs with cure bottoms and a roll of chickenwire and a rack of soft­ball uniforms, hung on a pipe fixed between two slanting beams and blocking out the light from the window at the far end.

  “Is there a men’s?” Rabbit asks.

  “Downstairs, Harry.” Tothero’s enthusiasm has died; he seems embarrassed. While Rabbit uses the toilet he can hear the old man fussing around upstairs, but when he returns he can see nothing changed. The bed is still unmade.

  Tothero waits and Rabbit waits and then realizes Tothero wants to see him undress and undresses, sliding into the rum­pled lukewarm bed in his T shirt and Jockey shorts. Though the idea is distasteful, getting into the old man’s hollow, the sensations are good, being able to stretch out at last and feeling the solid cool wall close to him and hearing cars moving maybe hunting him far below. He twists his neck to say something to Tothero and is surprised by solitude. The door at the foot of the attic steps has closed and footsteps diminish down one, two flights of stairs, and a key scratches in the outside door and a bird cries by the window and the clangor of the body shop comes up softly. The old man’s standing there was disturbing but Rabbit is sure that’s not his problem. Tothero’s problem he knows is in the other direc­tion, female. Why watch? Suddenly Rabbit knows. It takes Tothero back in time. Because of all the times he had stood in locker rooms watching his boys change clothes. Solving this problem relaxes Rabbit’s muscles. He remembers the couple with linked hands running on the parking lot outside the diner in West Virginia and regrets that it hadn’t been him about to nail her. Feel her open up in the cavity of the car, her seaweed hair sprawling. Red hair? There? He imagines West Virginia girls as coarse hard-bodied laugh­ers, like the young whores in Texas. Their sugar drawls al­ways seemed to be poking fun but then he was so young. Coming down the street Hanley and Jarzylo and Shamberger the tight khaki making him feel nervous and the
plains breaking away on all sides the horizon no higher than his it seemed and the houses showing families sitting on inside like chickens at roost facing TV’s. Jarzylo a maniac, cackling. Rabbit couldn’t believe this house was right. It had flowers in the window, actual living flowers in­nocent in the window and he was tempted to turn and run. Sure enough the woman who came to the door could have been on television selling cake mix. But she said, “Come on in boys, don’t be shaaeh, come on in and heyiv a good taam,” said it so motherly, and there they were, not as many as he had pictured, in the parlor on old-fashioned-looking furni­ture with scrolls and knobs. That they were pretty homely made him less timid, just ordinary factory-looking women, you wouldn’t even call them girls, with a glaze on their faces like under fluorescent lights. They pelted the soldiers with remarks like balls of dust and the men sneezed into laughter and huddled together surprised and numb. The one he took, but she took him, came up and touched him, hadn’t buttoned her blouse more than one button from the last one and upstairs asked him in her gritty sugar voice if he wanted the light on or off and when out of choked throat he answered “Off” laughed, and then now and then smiled under him, working around to get him right, and even speaking kindly: “You’re all right, honey. You’re gone along all right.” So that when it was over he was hurt to learn, from the creases of completion at the sides of her lips and the hard way she wouldn’t keep lying beside him but got up and sat on the edge of the metal-frame bed looking out the dark window at the green night sky, that she hadn’t meant her half. Her mute back showing in yellow-white the bar of a swimming-suit bra angered him; he took the ball of her shoulder in his hand and turned her roughly. It was kid stuff; the weighted shadows of her front hung so care­less and undefended he looked away. She said down into his ear, “Honey, you didn’t pay to be no two-timer.” Sweet woman, she was money. The clangor of the body shop comes up softly. Its noise comforts him, tells him he is hidden and safe, that while he hides men are busy nailing the world down, and toward the disembodied sounds his heart makes in darkness a motion of love.

  His dreams are shallow, furtive things. His legs switch. His lips move a little against the pillow. The skin of his eyelids shudders as his eyeballs turn, surveying the inner wall of vision. Otherwise be is as dead, beyond harm. The slash of sun on the wall above him slowly knifes down, cuts across his chest, becomes a coin on the floor, and vanishes. In shadow he suddenly awakes, his ghostly blue irises searching the unfamiliar planes for the source of men’s voices. These voices are downstairs, and a rumble suggests that they are moving the furniture, tramping in circles, hunting him. But a familiar bulbous basso rings out, it is Tothero, and around this firm center the noises downstairs crystallize as the sounds of card-playing, drinking, horse­play, companionship. Rabbit rolls in his hot hollow and turns his face to his cool companion, the wall, and through a red cone of consciousness falls asleep again.

  “Harry! Harry!” The voice is plucking at his shoulder, rumpling his hair. He rolls away from the wall, squinting upward into vanished sunshine. Tothero sits in the shadows, a hulk of darkness dense with some anxiousness. His dirty-­milk face leans forward, scarred by a lopsided smile. There is a smell of whisky. “Harry, I’ve got a girl for you!”

  “Great. Bring her in.”

  The old man laughs, uneasily? What does he mean?

  “You mean Janice?”

  “It’s after six o’clock. Get up, get up, Harry; you’ve slept like a beautiful baby. We’re going out.”

  “Why?” Rabbit meant to ask “Where?”

  “To eat, Harry, to dine. D-I-N-E. Rise my boy. Aren’t you hungry? Hunger. Hunger.” He’s a madman. He jumps off the bed, pivots a few times on his quick man’s little feet, and goes through the motions of bringing things to his mouth. “Oh Harry, you can’t understand an old man’s hunger, you eat and eat and it’s never the right food. You can’t under­stand that.” He walks to the window and looks down into the alley, his lumpy profile leaden in the dull light.

  Rabbit slides back the covers, angles his naked legs over the edge, and holds himself in a sitting position. The sight of his thighs, parallel, pure, aligns his groggy brain. The hair on his legs, once a thin blond fur, is getting dark and whiskery. The odor of his sleep-soaked body rises to him. “Whatsis girl business?” he asks.

  “What is it, yes, what is it?” he asks and utters three obscenities in a stream touching a woman in her three parts, and in the gray light by the window his face falls; he seems amazed to hear himself. Yet he’s also watching, as if this was some sort of test. The result determined, he corrects himself, “No. I have an acquaintance, an acquaintance in Brewer, a ladylove perhaps; whom I stand to a meal once in a blue moon. But it’s nothing more than that, little more than that. Harry, you’re so innocent.”

  Rabbit begins to be afraid of Tothero, these phrases are so inconsequential, and stands up in his underclothes. “I think I just better run along.” The flour-fluff sticks to the soles of his bare feet.

  “Oh Harry, Harry,” Tothero cries in a rich voice mixed of pain and affection, and comes forward and hugs him with one arm. “You and I are two of a kind.” The big lopsided face looks up into his with confidence, but Rabbit sees no resemblance. Yet his memory of the man as his coach still disposes him to listen. “You and I know what the score is, we know—” And right here, arriving at the kernel of his lesson, Tothero is balked, and becomes befuddled. He repeats, “We know,” and removes his arm.

  Rabbit says, “I thought we were going to talk about Janice when I woke up.” He picks up his trousers from the floor and puts them on. Their being rumpled disturbs him; re­minds him that he has taken a giant step, and makes ner­vous wrinkles in his stomach and throat.

  “We will, we will,” Tothero says, “the moment our social obligations are satisfied.” A pause. “Do you want to go back now? You must tell me if you do.”

  Rabbit remembers the dumb slot of her mouth, the way the closet door bumps against the television set. “No. God.”

  Tothero is overjoyed; it is happiness making him talk so much. “Well then, well then; get dressed. We can’t go to Brewer undressed. Do you need a fresh shirt?”

  “Yours wouldn’t fit me, would it?”

  “No, Harry, no? What’s your size?”

  “Fifteen three.”

  “Mine! Mine exactly. You have short arms for your height. Oh, this is wonderful, Harry. I can’t tell you how much it means to me that you came to me when you needed help. All those years,” he says, taking a shirt from the bureau made of beer cases and stripping off the cellophane, “all those years, all those boys, they pass through your hands, and into the blue. And never come back, Harry; they never come back.”

  Rabbit is startled to feel and to see in Tothero’s mirror that the shirt fits. Their difference must be all in their legs. With the rattling tongue of a proud mother Tothero watches him dress. His talk makes more sense, now that the embarrassment of explaining what they’re going to do is past. “It does my heart good,” he says. “Youth before the mirror. How long has it been, Harry, now tell me truly, since you had a good time? A long time?”

  “I had a good time last night,” Rabbit says. “I drove to West Virginia and back.”

  “You’ll like my lady, I know you will, a city flower,” Tothero goes on. “The girl she’s bringing I’ve never met. She says she’s fat. All the world looks fat to my lady—how she eats, Harry: the appetite of the young. That’s a fascinating knot, you young people have so many tricks I never learned.”

  “It’s just a Windsor.” Dressed, Rabbit feels a return of calm. Waking up had in a way returned him to the world he deserted. He had missed Janice’s crowding presence, the kid and his shrill needs, his own walls. He had wondered what he was doing. But now these reflexes, shallowly scratched, are spent, and deeper instincts flood forward, telling him he is right. He feels freedom like oxygen everywhere around him; Tothero is an eddy of air, and the building he is in, the streets of the town
, are mere stairways and alley­ways in space. So perfect, so consistent is the freedom into which the clutter of the world has been vaporized by the simple trigger of his decision, that all ways seem equally good, all movements will put the same caressing pressure on his skin, and not an atom of his happiness would be altered if Tothero told him they were not going to meet two girls but two goats, and they were going not to Brewer but to Tibet. He adjusts his necktie with infinite attention, as if the little lines of this juncture of the Windsor knot, the collar of Tothero’s shirt, and the base of his own throat were the arms of a star that will, when he is finished, extend outward to the rim of the universe. He is the Dalai Lama. Like a cloud breaking in the corner of his vision Tothero drifts to the !window. “Is my car still there?” Rabbit asks.

  “Your car is blue. Yes. Put on your shoes.”

  “I wonder if anybody saw it there. While I was asleep, did you hear anything around town?” For in the vast blank of his freedom Rabbit has remembered a few imperfections, his home, his wife’s, their apartment, clots of concern. It seems impossible that the passage of time should have so soon dissolved them, but Tothero’s answer implies it.

  “No,” he says. He adds, “But then of course I didn’t go where there would have been talk of you.”

  It annoys Rabbit that Tothero shows no interest in him except as a partner on a joyride. “I should have gone to work today,” he says in a pointed voice, as if blaming the old man.

  “What do you do?”

  “I demonstrate a kitchen gadget called the MagiPeel Peel­er in five-and-dime stores.”

  “A noble calling,” Tothero says, and turns from the win­dow. “Splendid, Harry. You’re dressed at last.”