Rabbit, Run (35 page)

The light widens enough for him to spy off to his right a nest of old tin cans and bottles sunken into the needles and then he strikes the road. He jacks his long legs over the guard fence and straightens up. Gold spots are switching on and off in the corners of his eyes. The asphalt scrapes under his shoes and he seems entered, with the wonderful resonant hollowness of exhaustion, on a new life. Cold air strokes his shoulder blades; somewhere in there he split old man Springer’s shirt right down the back. He has come out of the woods about a half-mile below the Pinnacle Hotel. As he swings along, jauntily hanging his blue coat over his shoulder on the hook of one finger, Janice and Eccles and his mother and his sins seem a thousand miles behind. He decides to call Eccles, like you’d send somebody a postcard. Eccles had liked him and put a lot of trust in him and deserves at least a phone call. Rabbit rehearses what he’ll say. “It’s O.K.,” he’ll tell him, “I’m on the way. I mean, I think there are several ways; don’t worry. Thanks for everything.” What he wants to get across is that Eccles shouldn’t be discouraged.

On the top of the mountain it is still broad day. Up in the sea of sky a lake of fragmented mackerel clouds drifts in one piece like a school of fish. There are only a couple cars parked around the hotel, jalopies, ‘52 Pontiacs and ‘51 Mercs like Springer Motors sells to these blotchy kids that come in with a stripper in their wallets and a hundred dollars in the bank. Inside the cafeteria a few of them are playing a pinball machine called
BOUNCING BETSY
. They look at him with their long hair and make wise faces and one of them even calls, “Did she rip your shirt?” But, it’s strange, they don’t really know anything about him except he looks mussed. You do things and do things and nobody really knows. The clock says twenty of six. He goes to the pay phone on the butterscotch wall and looks up Eccles’ number in the book. His wife answers dryly, “Hello?” Rabbit shuts his eyes and her freckles dance in the red of his lids.

“Hi. Could I speak to Reverend Eccles please?”

“Who is this?” Her voice has gotten up on a hard little high horse; she knows who. He smiles and pictures her solid sweet butt, that he tapped.

“Hey, this is Harry Angstrom. Is Jack there?”

The receiver at the other end of the line is replaced; that bitch. Just because I wouldn’t go into her frigging house with her. Poor Eccles probably sitting there his heart bleeding to hear the word from me and she going back and telling him wrong number, that poor bastard being married to that bitch. He hangs up himself, hears the dime rattle down, and feels simplified by this failure. He goes out across the parking lot.

He seems to leave behind him in the cafeteria all the poison she must be dripping into the poor tired guy’s ears. He imagines her telling Eccles about how he slapped her fanny and thinks he hears Eccles laughing and himself smiles. He’ll remember Eccles as laughing; there was that in him that held you off, that you couldn’t reach, the nasal business, but through the laughter you could get to him. Sort of sneaking in behind him, past the depressing damp gripping clinging front. What made it depressing was that he wasn’t sure, but couldn’t tell you, and worried his eyebrows instead, and spoke every word in a different voice. All in all, a relief to be loose from him. Soggy.

From the edge of the parking lot, Brewer is spread out like a carpet, its flowerpot red going dusty. Some lights are already turned on. The great neon sunflower at the center of the city looks small as a daisy. Now the low clouds are pink but up above, high in the dome, tails of cirrus still hang pale and pure. As he starts down the steps he wonders, Would she have? Lucy.

He goes down the mountainside on the flight of log stairs and through the part where some people are still playing tennis and down Weiser Street, putting his coat back on, and up Summer. His heart is murmuring in suspense but it is in the center of his chest. That lopsided kink about Becky is gone, he has put her in Heaven, he felt her go. If Janice had felt it he maybe might have stayed. The outer door is open and an old lady in a Polish sort of kerchief is coming mumbling out of F. X. Pelligrini’s door. He rings Ruth’s bell.

The buzzer answers and he quickly snaps open the inner door and starts up the steps. Ruth comes to the banister and looks down and says, “Go away.”

“Huh? How’d you know it was me?”

“Go back to your wife.”

“I can’t. I just left her.”

She laughs; he has climbed to the step next to the top one, and their faces are on a level. “You’re always leaving her,” she says.

“No, this time it’s different. It’s really bad.”

“You’re bad all around. You’re bad with me, too.”

“Why?” He has come up the last step and stands there a yard away from her, excited and helpless. He thought when he saw her, instinct would tell him what to do but in a way it’s all new, though it’s only been a few weeks. She is changed, graver in her motions and thicker in the waist. The blue of her eyes is darker.

She looks at him with a contempt that is totally new.
“Why?”
she repeats in an incredulous hard voice.

“Let me guess,” he says. “You’re pregnant.”

Surprise softens the hardness a moment.

“That’s great,” he says, and takes advantage of her softness to push her ahead of him into the room. Her arms and sweater give like little cushions when he pushes. “Great,” he repeats, closing the door. He tries to embrace her and she fights him successfully and backs away behind a chair. She had meant that fight; his neck is scraped.

“Go away,” she says. “Go
away
.”

“Don’t you need me?”

“
Need
you,” she cries, and he squints in pain at the straining note of hysteria; he feels she has imagined this encounter so often she is determined to say everything, which will be too much. He sits down in an easy chair. His legs ache. She says, “I needed you that night you walked out. Remember how much I needed you? Remember what you made me do?”

“She was in the hospital,” he says. “I had to go.”

“God, you’re cute. God, you’re so holy. You had to go. You had to stay, too, didn’t you? You know, I was stupid enough to think you’d at least call.”

“I wanted to but I was trying to start clean. I didn’t know you were pregnant.”

“You didn’t, why not? Anybody else would have. I was sick enough.”

“When, with me?”

“God, yes. Why don’t you look outside your own pretty skin once in a while?”

“Well why didn’t you tell me?”

“Why should I? What would that have done? You’re no help. You’re nothing. You know why I didn’t? You’ll laugh, but I didn’t because I thought you’d leave me if you knew. You wouldn’t ever let me do anything to prevent it but I figured once it happened you’d leave me. You left me anyway so there you are. Why don’t you get out? Please get out. I begged you to get out the first time. The damn first time I begged you. Why are you
here
?”

“I want to be here. It’s right. Look. I’m happy you’re pregnant.”

“It’s too late to be happy.”

“Why? Why is it too late?” He’s frightened, remembering how she wasn’t here when he came before. She’s here now, she had been away then. Women went away to have it done, he knew.

“How can you sit there?” she asks him. “I can’t understand it, how you can sit there; you just killed your baby and there you sit.”

“Who told you that?”

“Your ministerial friend. Your fellow saint. He called about a half-hour ago.”

“God. He’s still trying.”

“I said you weren’t here. I said you’d never be here.”

“I didn’t kill the poor kid. Janice did. I got mad at her one night and came looking for you and she got drunk and drowned the poor kid in the bathtub. Don’t make me talk about it. Where
were
you, anyway?”

She looks at him with dull wonder and says softly, “Boy, you really have the touch of death, don’t you?”

“Hey; have you done something?”

“Hold still. Just sit there. I see you very clear all of a sudden. You’re Mr. Death himself. You’re not just nothing, you’re worse than nothing. You’re not a rat, you don’t stink, you’re not enough to stink.”

“Look, I didn’t do anything. I was coming to see you when it happened.”

“No, you don’t do anything. You just wander around with the kiss of death. Get out. Honest to God, Rabbit, just looking at you makes me sick.” Her sincerity in saying this leaves her kind of limp, and she grips the top slat of a straight chair bearing a Pennsylvania Dutch design stenciled in faded flowers.

He, who always took pride in dressing neatly, who had always been led to think he was all right to look at, blushes to feel this sincerity. The sensation he had counted on, of being by nature her master, of getting on top of her, hasn’t come. He looks at his fingernails, with their big cuticle moons. His hands and legs are suffused with a paralyzing sense of reality; his child is really dead, his day is really done, this woman is really sickened by him. Realizing this much makes him anxious to have all of it, to be pressed tight against the wall. He asks her flat, “Did you get an abortion?”

She smirks and says hoarsely, “What do
you
think?”

He closes his eyes and while the gritty grained fur of the chair arms rushes up against his fingertips prays,
God, dear God, no, not another, you have one, let this one go
. A dirty knife turns in his intricate inner darkness. When he opens his eyes he sees, from the tentative hovering way she is standing there, trying to bring off a hard swagger in her stance, that she means to torment him. His voice goes sharp with hope: “Have you?”

A crumbling film comes over her face. “No,” she says, “
no
. I should but I keep not doing it. I don’t want to do it.”

Up he gets and his arms go around her, without squeezing, like a magic ring, and though she stiffens at his touch and twists her head sideways on her muscled white throat, he has regained that feeling, of being on top. “Oh,” he says, “good. That’s so good.”

“It was too ugly,” she says. “Margaret had it all rigged up but I kept—thinking about—”

“Yes,” he says, “Yes. You’re so good. I’m so glad,” and tries to nuzzle the side of her face. His nose touches wet. “You have it,” he coaxes. “Have it.” She is still a moment, staring at her thoughts, and then jerks out of his arms and says, “Don’t touch me!” Her face flares; her body is bent forward like a threatened animal’s. As if his touch
is
death.

“I love you,” he says.

“That means nothing from you. Have it, have it, you say: how? Will you marry me?”

“I’d love to.”

“You’d love to, you’d love to do anything. What about your wife? What about the boy you already have?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will you divorce her? No. You love being married to her too. You love being married to everybody. Why can’t you make up your mind what you want to
do
?”

“Can’t I? I don’t know.”

“How would you support me? How many wives can you support? Your jobs are a joke. You aren’t worth hiring. Maybe once you could play basketball but you can’t do
any
thing now. What the hell do you think the world is?”

“Please have the baby,” he says. “You got to have it.”

“Why? Why do you
care
?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know any of these answers. All I know is what feels right. You feel right to me. Sometimes Janice used to. Sometimes nothing does.”

“Who cares? That’s the thing. Who cares
what
you feel?”

“I don’t know,” he says again.

She groans—from her face he feared she would spit—and turns and looks at the wall that is all in bumps from being painted over peeling previous coats so often.

He says, “I’m hungry. Why don’t I go out to the delicatessen and get us something. Then we can think.”

She turns, steadier. “I’ve
been
thinking,” she says. “You know where I was when you came here the other day? I was with my parents. You know I have parents. They’re pretty poor parents but that’s what they are. They live in West Brewer. They know. I mean they know some things. They know I’m pregnant. Pregnant’s a nice word, it happens to everybody, you don’t have to think too much what you must do to get that way. Now I’d like to marry you. I would. I mean whatever I said but if we’re married it’ll be all right. Now you work it out. You divorce that wife you feel so sorry for about once a month, you divorce her or forget me. If you can’t work it out, I’m dead to you; I’m dead to you and this baby of yours is dead too. Now; get out if you want to.” Saying all this unsteadies her and makes her cry, but she pretends she’s not. The sides of her nose shine but she doesn’t touch them.

He has nervously felt her watching him for some sign of resolution inspired by this speech. In fact he has hardly listened; it is too complicated and, compared to the vision of a sandwich, unreal. He stands up, he hopes with soldierly effect, and says, “That’s fair. I’ll work it out. What do you want at the store?” A sandwich and a glass of milk, and then undressing her, getting her out of that hot cotton dress harried into wrinkles and seeing that thickened waist calm in its pale cool skin. He loves women when they’re first pregnant; they look so gentle. If he can just once more bury himself in her he knows he’ll come up with his nerves all combed.

“I don’t want anything,” she says.

“Oh you got to eat,” he says.

“I’ve eaten,” she says.

He tries to go kiss her but she says “No” and does not look inviting, fat and flushed and her many-colored hair straggled and damp.

“I’ll be right back,” he says.

As he goes down the stairs worries come as quick as the sound of his footsteps. Janice, money, Eccles’ phone call, the look on his mother’s face all clatter together in sharp dark waves; guilt and responsibility slide together like two substantial shadows inside his chest. The mere engineering of it—the conversations, the phone calls, the lawyers, the finances—seems to complicate, physically, in front of his mouth, so he is conscious of the effort of breathing, and every action, just reaching for the doorknob, feels like a precarious extension of a long mechanical sequence insecurely linked to his heart. The doorknob’s solidity answers his touch, and turns nicely.