Rabbit, Run (18 page)

“Well now what do you know about my son-in-law that I don’t?”

“That he’s a good man, for one thing.”

“Good for what?”

“Must you be good
for
something?” He tries to think. “Yes, I suppose you must.”

“Nelson! Stop that this minute!” She turns rigid in the glider but does not rise to see what is making the boy cry. Eccles, sitting by the screen, can see. The Fosnacht boy stands by the swing, holding two red plastic trucks. Angstrom’s son, some inches shorter, is batting with an open hand toward the bigger boy’s chest, but does not quite dare to move forward a step and actually strike him. Young Fosnacht stands with the maddening invulnerability of the stupid, looking down at the flailing hand and contorted face of the smaller boy without even a smile of satisfaction, a true scientist, observing without passion the effect of his experiment. Mrs. Springer’s voice leaps to a frantic hardness and cuts through the screen: “Did you hear me I said stop that bawling!”

Nelson’s face turns up toward the porch and he tries to explain, “Pilly have—Pilly—” But just trying to describe the injustice gives it unbearable force, and as if struck from behind he totters forward and slaps the thief’s chest and receives a mild shove that makes him sit on the ground. He rolls on his stomach and spins in the grass, revolved by his own incoherent kicking. Eccles’ heart seems to twist with the child’s body; he knows so well the propulsive power of a wrong, the way the mind batters against it and each futile blow sucks the air emptier until it seems the whole frame of blood and bone must burst in a universe that can be such a vacuum.

“The boy’s taken his truck,” he tells Mrs. Springer.

“Well let him get it himself,” she says. “He must learn. I can’t be getting up on these legs and running outside every minute; they’ve been at it like that all afternoon.”

“
Billy
.” The boy looks up in surprise toward Eccles’ male voice. “Give it back.” Billy considers this new evidence and hesitates indeterminately. “
Now
, please.” Convinced, Billy walks over and pedantically drops the toy on his sobbing playmate’s head.

The new pain starts fresh grief in Nelson’s throat, but seeing the truck on the grass beside his face chokes him. It takes him a moment to realize that the cause of his anguish is removed and another moment to rein the emotion in his body. His great dry gasps as he rounds these corners seem to heave the sheet of trimmed grass and the sunshine itself. A wasp bumping persistently against the screen dips and the aluminum chair under Eccles threatens to buckle; as if the wide world participates in Nelson’s readjustment.

“I don’t know why the boy is such a sissy,” Mrs. Springer says. “Or maybe I do.”

Her sly adding this irks Eccles. “Why?”

The purple skin under her eyes lifts and the corners of her mouth pull down in an appraising scowl. “Well, he’s like his dad: spoiled. He’s been made too much of and thinks the world owes him what he wants.”

“It was the other boy; Nelson only wanted what was his.”

“Yes and I suppose you think with his dad it was all Janice’s fault.” She pronounces “Janice” with German juice, Channiss, making the girl seem thicker, darker, more precious and important than the tenuous, pathetic image in Eccles’ mind. He wonders if she’s not, after all, right: if he hasn’t gone over to the other side.

“No I don’t,” he says. “I think his behavior has no justification. This isn’t to say, though, that his behavior doesn’t have reasons, reasons that in part your daughter could have controlled. With my Church, I believe that we are all responsible beings, responsible for ourselves and for each other.” The words, so well turned-out, taste chalky in his mouth. He wishes she’d offer him something to drink. Spring is turning hot.

The old gypsy sees his uncertainty. “Well that’s easy to say,” she says. “It’s not so easy maybe to take such a view if you’re nine months expecting and from a respectable home and your husband’s running around a few miles away with some bat and everybody thinks it’s the funniest thing since I don’t know what.” The word “bat” darts into the air like one, quick and black.

“Nobody thinks it’s funny, Mrs. Springer.”

“You don’t hear the talk I do. You don’t see the smiles. Why, one woman as good as said to me the other day if she can’t keep him she has no right to him. She had the gall to grin right in my face. I could have strangled her. I said to her, ‘A man has duty too. It isn’t all one way.’ It’s women like her give men the ideas they have, that the world’s just here for their pleasure. From the way you act you half-believe it too. Well if the world is going to be full of Harry Angstroms how much longer do you think they’ll need your church?”

She has sat up and her dark eyes are lacquered by tears that do not fall. Her voice has risen in pitch and scratches at Eccles’ face like a file; he feels covered with cuts. Her talk of the smiling gossip encircling this affair has surrounded him with a dreadful reality, like the reality of those hundred faces when on Sunday mornings at 11:30 he mounts the pulpit and the text flies from his mind and his notes dissolve into nonsense. He fumbles through his memory and manages to bring out, “I feel Harry is in some respects a special case.”

“The only thing special about him is he doesn’t care who he hurts or how much. Now I mean no offense Reverend Eccles and I’m sure you’ve done your best considering how busy you are but to be honest I wish that first night I had called the police like I wanted to.”

He seems to hear that she is going to call the police to arrest
him
. Why not? With his white collar he forges God’s name on every word he speaks. He steals belief from the children he is supposed to be teaching. He murders faith in the minds of any who really listen to his babble. He commits fraud with every schooled cadence of the service, mouthing Our Father when his heart knows the real father he is trying to please, has been trying to please all his life. When he asks her, “What can the police do?” he seems to himself to mean what can they do to
him
.

“Well I don’t know but more than play golf I expect.”

“I’m quite sure he will come back.”

“You’ve been saying that for two months.”

“I still believe it.” But he doesn’t, he doesn’t believe anything. Silence.

“Could you”—her voice is changed; it beseeches—“bring me over that stool there in the corner? I have to get my legs up.”

When he blinks, his eyelids scratch. He rouses from his daze and gets the stool and takes it to her. Her broad shins in their green childlike socks lift meekly, and as he places the stool under the heels, his bending, with its echo of religious-pamphlet paintings of Christ washing the feet of beggars, fits his body to receive a new flow of force. He straightens up and towers above her. She plucks at her skirt at the knees, tugging it down.

“Thank you,” she says. “That’s a real relief for me.”

“I’m afraid it’s the only sort of relief I’ve given you,” he confesses with a simplicity that he finds, and mocks himself for finding, admirable.

“Ah,” she sighs. “There’s not much anybody can do I guess.”

“No, there are things to do. Perhaps you’re right about the police. The law provides protection for wives; why not use it?”

“Fred’s against it.”

“Mr. Springer has good reasons. I don’t mean merely business reasons. All the law can extract from Harry is financial support; and I don’t think, in this case, that money is really the point. In fact I’m not sure money is
ever
really the point.”

“That’s easy to say if you’ve always had enough.” He doesn’t mind. It seemed to slip from her automatically, with less malice than lassitude; he is certain she wants to listen.

“That may be. I don’t know. But at any rate my concern—everyone’s concern for that matter, I’m sure—is with the general health of the situation. And if there’s to be a true healing, it must be Harry and Janice who act. Really, no matter how much we want to help, no matter how much we try to do on the fringes, we’re
outside
.” In imitation of his father he has clasped his hands behind him and turned his back on his auditor; through the screen he watches the one other who, perhaps, is not outside, Nelson, lead the Fosnacht boy across the lawn in pursuit of a neighbor’s dog. Nelson’s laughter spills from his head as his clumsy tottering steps jar his body. The dog is old, reddish, small, and slow; the Fosnacht boy is puzzled yet pleased by his friend’s cry of “Lion! Lion!” It interests Eccles to see that under conditions of peace Angstrom’s boy leads the other. The green air seen through the muzzy screen seems to vibrate with Nelson’s noise. Eccles feels the situation: this constant translucent outpour of selfish excitement must naturally now and then dam in the duller boy’s narrower passages and produce a sullen backflow, a stubborn bullying act. He pities Nelson, who will be stranded in innocent surprise many times before he locates in himself the source of this strange reverse tide. It seems to Eccles that he himself was this way as a boy, always giving and giving and always being suddenly swamped. The old dog’s tail wags as the boys approach. It stops wagging and droops in an uncertain wary arc when they surround it like hunters, crowing. Nelson reaches out and beats the dog’s back with both hands. Eccles wants to shout; the dog might bite; he can’t bear to watch.

“Yes but he drifts further
away
,” Mrs. Springer is whining. “He’s well off. He has no reason to come back if we don’t give him one.”

Eccles sits down in the aluminum chair again. “No. He’ll come back for the same reason he left. He’s fastidious. He has to loop the loop. The world he’s in now, the world of this girl in Brewer, won’t continue to satisfy his fantasies. Just in seeing him from week to week, I’ve noticed a change.”

“Well not to hear Peggy Fosnacht tell it. She says
she
hears he’s leading the life of Riley. I don’t know how many women he has.”

“Just one, I’m sure. The strange thing about Angstrom, he’s by nature a domestic creature.
Oh dear
.”

There is a flurry in the remote group; the boys run one way and the dog the other. Young Fosnacht halts but Nelson keeps coming, his face stretched large by fright.

Mrs. Springer hears his sobbing and says angrily, “Did they get Elsie to snap again? That dog must be sick in the head the way she keeps coming over here for more.”

Eccles jumps up—his chair collapses behind him—and opens the screen door and runs down to meet Nelson in the sunshine. The boy shies from him. He grabs him. “Did the dog bite?”

The boy’s sobbing is paralyzed by this new fright, the man in black grabbing him.

“Did Elsie bite you?”

The Fosnacht boy hangs back at a safe distance.

Nelson, unexpectedly solid and damp in Eccles’ arms, releases great rippling gasps and begins to find his voice.

Eccles shakes him to choke this threat of wailing and, wild to make himself understood, with a quick lunge clicks his teeth at the child’s cheek. “Like that? Did the dog do that?”

The boy’s face goes rapt at the pantomime. “Like dis,” he says, and his fine little lip lifts from his teeth and his nose wrinkles and he jerks his head an inch to one side.

“No bite?” Eccles insists, relaxing the grip of his arms.

The little lip lifts again with that miniature fierceness, as if this tells the whole delightful story. Eccles feels mocked by a petite facial alertness that recalls, in tilt and cast, Harry’s. Sobbing sweeps over Nelson again and he breaks away and runs up the porch steps to his grandmother. Eccles stands up; in just that little time of squatting the sun has started sweat on his black back.

As he climbs the steps he is troubled by something pathetic, something penetratingly touching, in the memory of those tiny square teeth bared in that play snarl. The harmlessness yet the reality of the instinct. The kitten’s instinct to kill the spool with its cotton paws.

He comes onto the porch to find the boy between his grandmother’s legs, his face buried in her belly. In worming against her warmth he has pulled her dress up from her knees, and their exposed breadth and pallor, undesired, laid bare defenselessly, superimposed upon the tiny, gamely gritted teeth the boy exposed for him, this old whiteness strained through this fine mesh, make a milk that feels to Eccles like his own blood. Strong—as if pity is, as he has been taught, not a helpless outcry but a powerful tide that could purge the dust and rubble from every corner of the world—he steps forward and promises to the two bowed heads, “If he doesn’t come back when she has the baby, then we’ll get the law after him. There
are
laws, of course; quite a few.”

“Elsie snaps,” Mrs. Springer says, “because you and Billy tease her.”

“Naughty Elsie,” Nelson says.

“Naughty Nelson,” Mrs. Springer corrects. She lifts her face to Eccles and continues in the same correcting voice, “Yes well she’s a week due now and I don’t see him running in.”

His moment of fondness for her has passed; he leaves her on the porch.
Love never ends
, he tells himself, using the Revised Standard Version. The King James has it that it never fails. Mrs. Springer’s voice carries after him into the house, “Now the next time I catch you teasing Elsie you’re going to get a whipping from your grandmom.”

“No, Mom-mom,” the child begs coyly, fright gone.

Eccles thought he would find the kitchen and take a drink of water from the tap but the kitchen slips by him in the jumbled rooms. He makes a mouth that works up saliva and swallows it as he leaves the stucco house. He gets into his Buick and drives down Joseph Street and then a block along Jackson Road to the Angstroms’ address.

Mrs. Angstrom has four-cornered nostrils. Lozenge-shape, they are set in a nose that is not so much large as extra-anatomical; the little pieces of muscle and cartilage and bone are individually emphatic and divide the skin into many facets in the sharp light. Their interview takes place in her kitchen amid several burning light bulbs. Burning in the middle of day; their home is the dark side of a two-family brick house. She came to the door wearing suds on her red forearms and returns with him to a sink full of bloated shirts and underwear. She plunges at these things vigorously while they talk. She is a vigorous woman. Mrs. Springer’s fat, soft, aching excess, had puffed out from little bones, the bones once of a slip of a girl like Janice; Mrs. Angstrom’s is packed on a great harsh frame. Harry’s size must come from her side. Eccles is continually conscious of the long faucets, heraldic of cool water, shielded by her formidable body; but the opportunity never arises for a request so small.