Rabbit, Run (4 page)

Route 23 works west through little tame country towns, Coventryville, Elverson, Morgantown. Rabbit likes these. Square high farmhouses nuzzle the road. Soft chalk sides. In one town a tavern blazes and he stops at a hardware store opposite with two gasoline pumps outside. He knows from the radio it’s about seven-thirty, but the hardware store is still open, shovels and seeders and post-hole diggers and axes, metal painted blue and orange and yellow, in the window, along with some fishing rods and a string of fielder’s gloves. A middle-aged man comes out in boots, baggy suntans, and two shirts. “Yes
sir
,” he says, coming down on the second word with forced weight, like a lame man stepping.

“Couldya fill it up with regular?”

The man starts to pump it in and Rabbit gets out of the car and goes around to the back and asks. “How far am I from Brewer?”

The farmer looks up with a look of curt distrust from listening to the gas gurgle. He lifts a finger. “Back up and take that road and it’s sixteen miles to the bridge.”

Sixteen. He had driven forty miles to get sixteen miles away.

But it was far enough, this was another world. It smells differently, smells older, of nooks and pockets in the ground that nobody’s stirred yet. “Suppose I go straight?”

“That’ll take you to Churchtown.”

“What’s after Churchtown?”

“New Holland. Lancaster.”

“Do you have any maps?”

“Son, where do you want to go?”

“Huh? I don’t know exactly.”

“Where are you headed?” The man is patient. His face at the same time seems fatherly and crafty and stupid.

For the first time, Harry realizes he is a criminal. He hears the gasoline rise in the neck of the tank and notices with what care the farmer squeezes every drop he can into the tank without letting it slosh over the lip insolently the way a city garageman would. Out here a drop of gas isn’t supposed to escape and he’s in the middle of it at night. Laws aren’t ghosts in this country, they walk around with the smell of earth on them. Senseless fear cakes over Rabbit’s body.

“Check the oil?” the man asks in a voice of startling softness after hanging up the hose on the side of the rusty pump, one of the old style, with the painted bubble head.

“No. Wait. Yeah. You better had. Thanks.” Simmer down. All he’d done was ask for a map. Damn dirtdigger so stingy, what was suspicious about that? Somebody was always going somewhere. He better get the oil checked because he wasn’t going to stop again until he was halfway to Georgia. “Hey, how far is Lancaster south of here?”

“Due south? Don’t know. It’s about twenty-five miles on the road. Your oil’s all right. You think you’re going to Lancaster now?”

“Yeah, I might.”

“Check your water?”

“No. It’s O.K.”

“Batteries?”

“They’re fine. Let’s go.”

The man lets the hood slam down and smiles over at Harry. “That’s three-ninety on the gas, young fella”: the words are pronounced in that same heavy cautious crippled way.

Rabbit puts four ones in his paw. He disappears into the hardware store; maybe he’s phoning the state cops. He acts like he knows something, but how could he? Rabbit itches to duck into the car and drive off. To steady himself he counts the money left in his wallet. Seventy-three. Today was payday. Fingering so much lettuce strengthens his nerves. Switching off the lights in the hardware store as he comes, the farmer comes back with the dime and no map. Harry cups his hand for the dime and the man pushes it in with his broad thumb and says, “Looked around inside and the only road map is New York State. You don’t want to go that way, do you now?”

“No,” Rabbit answers, and walks to his car door. He feels through the hairs on the back of his neck the man following him. He gets into the car and slams the door and the farmer is right there, the meat of his face hung in the open door window. He bends down and nearly sticks his face in. His cracked thin lips with a scar tilting toward his nose move thoughtfully. He’s wearing glasses, a scholar. “The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you’re going before you go there.”

Rabbit catches a whiff of whisky. He says in a level way, “I don’t think so.” The lips and spectacles and black hairs poking out of the man’s tear-shaped nostrils show no surprise. Rabbit pulls out, going straight. Everybody who tells you how to act has whisky on their breath.

He drives to Lancaster and all the way his good airy feeling inside is spoiled. That that guy didn’t know a thing but was just half-crocked makes the whole region sinister. Outside of Churchtown he passes an Amish buggy in the dark and catches a glimpse of a bearded man and a woman in black in this horsedrawn shadow glaring like devils. The beard inside the buggy like hairs in a nostril. He tries to think of the good life these people lead, of the way they keep clear of all this phony business, this twentieth-century vitamin racket, but in his head they stay devils, risking getting killed trotting along with one dim pink reflector behind, hating Rabbit and his kind, with their big furry tail lights. Who they think they were? He can’t shake them, mentally. They never appeared in his rear-view mirror. He passed them and there was nothing. It was just that one sideways glance; the woman’s face a hatchet of smoke in the square window. Tall coffin lined with hair clopping along to the tune of a dying horse. Amish overworked their animals, he knew. Fanatics. Hump their women standing up, out in the fields, wearing clothes, just hoist black skirts and there it was, nothing underneath. No underpants. Fanatics. Worship manure.

The rich earth seems to cast its darkness upward into the air. The farm country is somber at night. He is grateful when the lights of Lancaster merge with his dim beams. He stops at a diner whose clock says 8:04. He hadn’t intended to eat until he got out of the state. He takes a map from the rack by the door and while eating three hamburgers at the counter studies his position. He is in Lancaster, surrounded by funny names, Bird in Hand, Paradise, Intercourse, Mt. Airy, Mascot. They probably didn’t seem funny if you lived in them. Like Mt. Judge; you get used. A town has to be called something.

Bird in Hand, Paradise: his eyes keep going back to this dainty lettering on the map. He has an impulse, amid the oil-filmed shimmer of this synthetic and desultory diner, to drive there. Little plump women, toy dogs in the street, candy houses in lemon sunshine.

But no, his goal is the huge white sun of the south. And from the map he’s been traveling more west than south; if the dirtdigger back there had had a map he could have gone due south on 10. Now the only thing to do is go into the heart of Lancaster and take 222 out and take it all the way down into Maryland and then catch 1. He remembers reading in the
Saturday Evening Post
how 1 goes from Florida to Maine through the most beautiful scenery in the world. He asks for a glass of milk and to go with it a piece of apple pie; the crust is crisp and bubbled but the filling is watery and lavender in color. He pays by cracking a ten and goes out into the parking lot feeling pleased. The hamburgers had been fatter and warmer than the ones you get in Brewer, and the buns had seemed steamed.

It takes him a half-hour to pick his way through the city. On 222 he drives south through Refton, Hessdale, New Providence, and Quarryville, through Mechanics Grove and Unicorn and then a long stretch so dull and unmarked he doesn’t know he’s entered Maryland until he hits Oakwood. On the radio he hears “No Other Arms, No Other Lips,” “Stagger Lee,” a commercial for Raiko Clear Plastic Seat Covers, “If I Didn’t Care” by Connie Francis, a commercial for Radio-Controlled Garage Door Operators, “I Ran All the Way Home Just to Say I’m Sorry,” “That Old Feeling” by Mel Torme, a commercial for Big Screen Westinghouse TV Set with One-Finger Automatic Tuning, “needle-sharp pictures a nose away from the screen,” “The Italian Cowboy Song,” “Yep,” by Duane Eddy, a commercial for Papermate Pens, “Almost Grown,” a commercial for Tame Cream Rinse, “Let’s Stroll,” news (President Eisenhower and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan began a series of talks in Gettysburg, Tibetans battle Chinese Communists in Lhasa, the whereabouts of the Dalai Lama, spiritual ruler of this remote and backward land, are unknown, a $250,000 trust fund has been left to a Park Avenue maid, Spring scheduled to arrive tomorrow), sports news (Yanks over Braves in Miami, somebody tied with somebody in St. Petersburg Open, scores in a local basketball tournament), weather (fair and seasonably warm), “The Happy Organ,” “Turn Me Loose,” a commercial for Savings Bank Life Insurance, “Rocksville, P-A” (Rabbit loves it), “A Picture No Artist Could Paint,” a commercial for New Formula Barbasol Presto-Lather, the daily cleansing action tends to prevent skin blemishes and emulsifies something, “Pink Shoe Laces” by Dody Stevens, a letter about a little boy called Billy Tessman who was hit by a car and would appreciate cards or letters, “Petit Fleur,” “Fungo” (great), a commercial for Wool-Tex All-Wool Suits, “Fall Out” by Henry Mancini, “Everybody Likes to Cha Cha Cha,” a commercial for Lord’s Grace Table Napkins and the gorgeous Last Supper Tablecloth, “The Beat of My Heart,” a commercial for Speed-Shine Wax and Lanolin Clay, “Venus,” and then the same news again. Where is the Dalai Lama?

Shortly after Oakwood he comes to Route 1, which with its hot-dog stands and Calso signs and roadside taverns aping log cabins is unexpectedly discouraging. The further he drives the more he feels some great confused system, Baltimore now instead of Philadelphia, reaching for him. He stops at a gas station for two dollars’ worth of regular. What he really wants is another map. He unfolds it standing by a Coke machine and reads it in the light coming through a window stained green by stacked cans of liquid wax.

His problem is to get west and free of Baltimore-Washington, which like a two-headed dog guards the coastal route to the south. He doesn’t want to go down along the water anyway; his image is of himself going right down the middle, right into the broad soft belly of the land, surprising the dawn cottonfields with his northern plates.

Now he is somewhere here. Further on, then, a road numbered 23 will go off to his left—no, his right. That goes up and over and back into Pennsylvania but at this place, Shawsville, he can take a little narrow blue road without a number. Then go down a little and over again on 137. There is a ragged curve then that this road makes with 482 and then 31. Rabbit can feel himself swinging up and through that curve into the red line numbered 26 and down that into another numbered 340. Red, too; he is really gliding and suddenly sees where he wants to go. Over on the left three red roads stream parallel northeast to southwest; Rabbit can just feel them sliding down through the valleys of the Appalachians. Get on one of them it would be a chute dumping you into sweet low cottonland in the morning. Yes. Once he gets on that he can shake all thoughts of the mess behind him.

He gives two dollars for gas to the attendant, a young but tall colored boy whose limber lazy body slumping inside his baggy Amoco coveralls Rabbit has a weird impulse to hug. This far south the air already feels warmer. Warmth vibrates in brown and purple arcs between the lights of the service station and the moon. The clock in the window above the green cans of liquid wax says 9:10. The thin red second band sweeps the numbers calmly and makes Rabbit’s way seem smooth. He ducks into the Ford and in that fusty hot interior starts to murmur, “Ev, reebody loves the, cha cha cha.”

He drives bravely at first. Over blacktop and whitetop, through towns and fields, past false intersections with siren voices, keeping the map on the seat beside him, keeping the numbers straight and resisting the impulse to turn blindly south. Something animal in him knows he is going west.

The land grows wilder. The road evades great lakes and tunnels through pines. In the top of the windshield the telephone wires continually whip the stars. The music on the radio slowly freezes; the rock and roll for kids cools into old standards and show tunes and comforting songs from the Forties. Rabbit pictures married couples driving home to babysitters after a meal out and a movie. Then these melodies turn to ice as real night music takes over, pianos and vibes erecting clusters in the high brittle octaves and a clarinet wandering across like a crack on a pond. Saxes doing the same figure 8 over and over again.

Growing sleepy, Rabbit stops before midnight at a roadside café for coffee. Somehow, though he can’t put his finger on the difference, he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men sitting in zippered jackets in booths three to a girl, the girls with orange hair hanging like seaweed or loosely bound with gold barrettes like pirate treasure. At the counter middle-aged couples in overcoats bunch their faces forward into the straws of gray ice-cream sodas. In the bush his entrance induces, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I’m outside, or is it all America?

Outside in the sharp air, he flinches when footsteps pound behind him. But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark. Their license plate says West Virginia. All the plates do except his. On the other side of the road the wooded land dips down so he can look over the tops of trees at the side of a mountain like a cutout of stiff paper mounted on a slightly faded blue sheet. He climbs into his Ford distastefully, but its stale air is his only haven.

He drives through Frederick, a discouraging town because an hour back he had thought he had reached Frederick when it was really Westminster. He picks up 340. The road unravels with infuriating slowness, its black wall wearilessly rising in front of his headlights no matter how they twist. The tar sucks his tires. He realizes that the heat on his cheeks is anger; he has been angry ever since he left that diner full of mermaids. So angry his cheeks feel parched inside his mouth and his nostrils water. He grinds his foot down as if to squash this snake of a road, and nearly loses the car on a curve, as the two right wheels fall captive to the dirt shoulder. He brings them back but keeps the speedometer needle leaning to the right.