Rabbit, Run (14 page)

Trees darken; pavilions slide downhill. They walk through the upper region of the park, which thugs haunt at night, scattering 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, people 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 on an unevenness hidden below the coating of gravel. Her backside lurches, her arms grab out 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. Thin ankles under the swell of calf. In a gesture of gratitude he takes off his shoes, to share whatever pain there is. The dirt is trod smooth, but embedded pebbles negligible to the eye do stab the skin, with the force of your 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, birdwatchers, pass them on the way down; as soon as they have 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 that 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, fevered with exertion, sob, and he clings to her tough body with the weakness of grief. 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. They put their shoes back on and climb the stairs and watch the city slowly flatten under them.

Rails guard the cliff edge. He grips one white beam, warmed by the sun now sinking steeply 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. The hard silhouette of her cheekbone in the high vigilant air is still. Is she feeling like an Indian? She said she might be Mexican.

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 an access of security that he asks, voicing like a loved child a teasing doubt, “Were you really a whore?”

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 grinning 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.

“Tuesday afternoon, overcast, he takes a bus to Mt. Judge. Eccles’ address is at the north end of town; he rides past his own neighborhood in safety, gets off at Spruce, and walks along singing in a high voice to himself the phrase, “Oh,
I’m
just
wild
about Har-ry”—not the beginning of the song, but the place at the end where the girl, repeating, goes way up on “I’m.”

He feels on even keel. For two days he and Ruth have lived on his money and he still has fourteen dollars left. Furthermore he has discovered, poking through her bureau this morning while she was out shopping, that she has an enormous checking account, with over five hundred dollars in it at the end of February. They have gone bowling once and have seen four movies—
Gigi, Bell, Book and Candle
,
The Inn of the Sixth Happiness
, and
The Shaggy Dog
. He saw so many snippets from
The Shaggy Dog
on the Mickey Mouse Club that he was curious to see the whole thing. It was like looking through a photograph album with about half familiar faces. The scene where the rocket goes through the roof and Fred MacMurray runs out with the coffee pot he knew as well as his own face.

Ruth was funny. Her bowling was awful; she just sort of paddled up to the line and dropped the ball.
Plok
. Every time, in
Gigi
, the stereophonic-sound loudspeaker behind them in the theater would blare out she turned around and said “Shh” as if it were somebody in the theater talking too loud. In
The Inn of the Sixth Happiness
, every time Ingrid Bergman’s face appeared on the screen she leaned over to Rabbit and asked him in a whisper, “Is she really a whore?” He was upset by Robert Donat; he looked awful. He knew he was dying. Imagine knowing you’re dying and going ahead pretending you’re a mandarin. Ruth’s comment about
Bell, Book and Candle
last night was, “Why don’t you ever see any bongo drums around here?” He vowed secretly to get some. A half-hour ago, waiting for the bus on Weiser Street, he priced a set in the window of the Chords ‘n’ Records music store. $19.95. All the way out on the bus he beat bongo patterns on his knees.

“For
I’m
just
wild
about Harry-ree—”

Number 61 is a big brick place with white wood trim, a little porch imitating a Greek temple, and a slate roof that shines under the clouds’ sullen luster. Out back a wire fence encloses a yellow swing frame and a sandbox. A puppy yaps in this pen as Harry goes up the walk. The grass wears that intense greasy green that promises rain, the color of grass in color snapshots. The place looks too cheerful to be right; Rabbit thinks of ministers as living in black shingled castles. But a small plate above the fish-shaped door-knocker says in engraved script
The Rectory
. He bangs the fish twice and, after waiting, twice again.

A crisp little number with speckled green eyes opens the door. “What is it?” Her voice as good as says, “How dare you?” As she adjusts her face to his height her eyes enlarge, displaying more of the vividly clear whites to which her moss-colored irises are buttoned.

At once, absurdly, he feels in control of her, feels she likes him. Freckles dot her little bumpy nose, kind of a pinched nose, narrow and pale under the dots of tan. Her skin is fair, and fine-grained as a child’s. She is wearing orange shorts. With a pleasantness that amounts to arrogance he says, “Hi.”

“Hello.”

“Say, is Reverend Eccles in?”

“He’s asleep.”

“In the middle of the day?”

“He was up much of the night.”

“Oh gosh. The poor guy.”

“Do you want to come in?”

“Well gee, I don’t know. He told me to be here. He really did.”

“He might well have. Please come in.”

She leads him past a hall and staircase into a cool room with a high ceiling and silver wallpaper, a piano, watercolors of scenery, a lot of sets of books in a recessed bookcase, a fireplace whose mantel supports one of those clocks with a pendulum of four gold balls that are supposed to run practically forever. Photographs in frames all around. Furniture heavy green and red except for a long sofa with a scrolling back and arms whose cushions are cream white. The room smells coldly kept. From far off comes the warmer odor of cake baking. She stops in the center of the rug and says, “Listen.”

He stops. The faint bump that he also heard is not repeated. She explains, “I thought that brat was asleep.”

“Are you the babysitter?”

“I’m the wife,” she says, and sits down in the center of the white sofa, to prove it.

He takes a padded wing chair opposite. The plum fabric feels softly gritty against his naked forearms. He is wearing a checked sports shirt, with the sleeves turned back to his elbows. “Oh, I’m sorry.” Of course. Her bare legs, crossed, show the blue dabs of varicose veins. Her face, when she sits, is not as young as at the door. Double chin when she relaxes, head tucked back. Smug little cookie. Firm little knockers. He asks, “How old is your child?”

“Two children. Two girls, one and three.”

“I have a boy who’s two.”

“I’d like a boy,” she says. “The girls and I have personality problems; we’re too much alike. We know exactly what the other’s thinking.”

Dislikes her own children! Rabbit is shocked, this from a minister’s wife. “Does your husband notice this?”

“Oh, it’s wonderful for Jack. He loves to have women fighting over him. It’s his little harem. I think a boy would threaten him. Do you feel threatened?”

“Not by the kid, no. He’s only two.”

“It starts earlier than two, believe me. Sexual antagonism begins practically at birth.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“Good for you. I expect you’re a primitive father. I think Freud is like God; you make it true.”

Rabbit smiles, supposing that Freud has some connection with the silver wallpaper and the watercolor of a palace and a canal above her head. Class. She brings her fingertips to her temples, pushes her head back, shuts her lids, and through plump open lips sighs. He is struck; she seems at this moment a fine-grained Ruth.

Eccles’ thin voice, oddly amplified in his home, cries down the stairs. “Lucy! Joyce is getting into bed with me!”

Lucy opens her eyes and says to Rabbit proudly, “See?”

“She says you told her it’s all right,” the voice whines on, piercing bannisters, walls, and layers of wallpaper.

Mrs. Eccles gets up and goes to the archway. The seat of her orange shorts is wrinkled from sitting; the hitched-up legs expose most of the oval backs of her thighs. Whiter than the sofa; the blush of pink from the pressure of sitting fades from the skin. “I told her no such thing!” she calls upward while one fair hand tugs the shorts down and smoothes the cloth around her mussed but smug rump, a pocket stitched with black thread to the right half. “Jack,” she goes on, “you have a visitor! A very tall young man who says you invited him!”

At the mention of himself Rabbit has risen and right behind her says, “To play golf.”

“To play golf!” she echoes in a yell.

“Oh, dear,” the voice upstairs says to itself, then shouts, “Hello, Harry! I’ll be right down.”

A child up there is crying, “Mommy did too! Mommy did too!”

Rabbit shouts in answer, “Hello!”

Mrs. Eccles turns her head with an inviting twist. “Harry—?”

“Angstrom.”

“What do you do, Mr. Angstrom?”

“Well. I’m kind of out of work.”

“Angstrom. Of course. Aren’t you the one who disappeared? The Springers’ son-in-law?”

“Right,” he says smartly and, in a mindless follow-through, a kind of flower of co-ordination, she having on the drop of his answer turned with prim dismissal away from him again, slaps! her sassy fanny. Not hard; a cupping hit, rebuke and fond pat both, well-placed on the pocket.

She swiftly wheels, swinging her backside to safety behind her. Her freckles dart sharp as pinpricks from her shock-bleached face. Her leaping blood freezes her skin, and this rigid effect, of superbly severe stone, is so incongruous with the lazy condescending warmth he feels toward her, that he makes a funny face, pushing his upper lip over his lower in a burlesque of penitence.