Rabbit, Run (8 page)

“Where is our young Confucian?” Tothero asks and looks around with his free arm uplifted. When the boy comes he asks, “Can we be served alcoholic beverages here?”

“We bring in from next door,” the boy says. Funny the way the eyebrows of Chinese people look embedded in the skin instead of sticking out from it. Their faces look washed always.

“Double Scotch whisky,” Tothero says. “My dear?”

“Daiquiri,” Margaret says; it sounds like a wisecrack.

“Children?”

Rabbit looks at Ruth. Her face is caked with orange dust. Her hair, her hair which seemed at first glance dirty blond or faded brown, is in fact many colors, red and yellow and brown and black, each hair passing in the light through a series of tints, like the hair of a dog. “Hell,” she says. “I guess a Daiquiri.”

“Three,” Rabbit tells the boy, thinking a Daiquiri will be like a limeade.

The waiter recites, “Three Daiquiri, one double whisky Scotch on the rocks,” and goes.

Rabbit asks Ruth, “When’s your birthday?”

“August. Why?”

“Mine’s April,” he says. “I win.”

“You win.” As if she knows how this makes him feel warmer; you can’t feel master, quite, of a woman who’s older.

“If you recognized me,” he asks, “why didn’t you recognize Mr. Tothero? He was coach of that team.”

“Who looks at coaches? They don’t do any good, do they?”

“Don’t do any good? A high-school team is all coach; isn’t it?”

Tothero answers, “It’s all boy, Harry. You can’t make gold out of lead. You can’t make gold out of lead.”

“Sure you can,” Rabbit says. “When I came out in my freshman year I didn’t know my feet from my, elbow.”

“Yes you did, Harry, yes you did. I had nothing to teach you; I just let you run.” He keeps looking around. “You were a young deer,” he continues, “with big feet.”

Ruth asks, “How big?”

Rabbit tells her, “Twelve D. How big are yours?”

“They’re tiny,” she says. “Teeny weeny little.”

“It looked to me like they were falling out of your shoes He pulls his head back and slumps slightly, to look down past the table edge, into the submarine twilight where her fore-shortened calves hang like tan fish. They dart back under the seat.

“Don’t look too hard, you’ll fall out of the booth,” she says, ruffled, which is good. Women like being mussed. They never say they do, but they do.

The waiter comes with the drinks and begins laying their places with paper placemats and lusterless silver. He does Margaret and is halfway done on Tothero when Tothero takes the whisky glass away from his lips and says in a freshened, tougher voice, “Cutlery? For Oriental dishes? Don’t you have chopsticks?”

“Chopsticks, yes.”

“Chopsticks all around,” Tothero says positively. “When in Rome.”

“Don’t take mine!” Margaret cries, slapping her hand with a clatter across her spoon and fork when the waiter reaches. “I don’t want any sticks.”

“Harry and Ruth?” Tothero asks. “Your preference?”

The Daiquiri does have the taste of limeade, riding like oil on the top of a raw transparent taste. “Sticks,” Rabbit says in a deep voice, delighted to annoy Margaret. “In Texas we never touched metal to chicken hoo phooey.”

“Ruth?” Tothero’s facial attitude toward her is timid and forced.

“Oh I guess. If this dope can I can.” She grinds out her cigarette and fishes for another.

The waiter goes away like a bridesmaid with his bouquet of unwanted silver. Margaret is alone in her choice, and this preys on her. Rabbit is glad; she is a shadow on his happiness.

“You ate Chinese food in Texas?” Ruth asks.

“All the time. Give me a cigarette.”

“You’ve stopped.”

“I’ve started. Give me a dime.”

“A dime! The hell I will.”

The needless urgency of her refusal offends him, it sounds as if she wants a profit. Why does she think he’d steal from her? What would he steal? He dips into his coat pocket and comes up with coins and takes a dime and puts it into the little ivory tune-selector that burns mildly on the wall by their table. Leaning over, past her face, he turns the leaves listing titles and finally punches the buttons for “Rocksville, P-A.” “Chinese food in Texas is the best Chinese food in the United States except Boston,” he says.

“Listen to the big traveler,” Ruth says. She gives him a cigarette. He forgives her about the dime.

“So you think,” Tothero says steadily, “that coaches don’t do anything.”

“They’re worthless,” Ruth says.

“Hey come on,” Rabbit says.

The waiter comes back with their chopsticks and two menus. Rabbit is disappointed in the chopsticks; they feel like plastic instead of wood. The cigarette tastes rough, a noseful of straw. He puts it out. Never again.

“We’ll each order a dish and then share it,” Tothero tells them. “Now who has favorites?”

“Sweet and sour pork,” Margaret says. One thing about her, she is very definite.

“Harry?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where’s the big Chinese-food specialist?” Ruth says.

“This is in English. I’m used to ordering from a Chinese menu.”

“Come on, come on, tell me what’s good.”

“Hey cut it out; you’re getting me rattled.”

“You were never in Texas,” she says.

He remembers the house on that strange treeless residential street, the green night growing up from the prairie, the flowers in the window, and says, “Absolutely I was.”

“Doing what?”

“Serving Uncle.”

“Oh, in the Army; well that doesn’t count. Everybody’s been to Texas with the Army.”

“You order whatever you think is good,” Rabbit tells Tothero. He is irritated by all these Army veterans Ruth seems to know, and strains to hear the final bars of the song he spent a dime to play. In this Chinese place he can just make out a hint, coming it seems from the kitchen, of the jangling melody that exhilarated him last night in the car.

Tothero gives the waiter the order and when he goes away tries to give Ruth the word. The old man’s thin lips are wet with whisky, and saliva keeps trying to sneak out of the corner of his mouth. “The coach,” he says, “the coach is concerned with developing the three tools we are given in life; the head, the body, and the heart.”

“And the crotch,” Ruth says. Margaret, of all people, laughs. She really gives Rabbit the creeps.

“Young woman, you’ve challenged me, and I deserve the respect of your attention.” He speaks with grave weight.

“Shit,” she says softly, and looks down. “Don’t sob on
me
.” He has hurt her. The wings of her nostrils whiten; her coarse make-up darkens.

“One. The head. Strategy. Most boys come to a basketball coach from alley games and have no conception of the, of the
elegance
of the game played on a court with two baskets. Won’t you bear me out, Harry?”

“Yea, sure. Just yesterday—”

“Second—let me finish, Harry, and then you can talk—second, the body. Work the boys into condition. Make their legs hard.” He clenches his fist on the slick table. “Hard. Run, run, run. Run every minute their feet are on the floor. You can’t run enough. Thirdly”—he puts the index finger and thumb of one hand to the corners of his mouth and flicks away the moisture—“the heart. And here the good coach, which I, young lady, certainly tried to be and some say was, has his most solemn opportunity. Give the boys the will to achieve. I’ve always liked that better than the will to win, for there can be achievement even in defeat. Make them feel the, yes, I think the word is good, the
sacredness
of achievement, in the form of giving our best.” He dares a pause now, and wins through it, glancing at each of them in turn to freeze their tongues. “A boy who has had his heart enlarged by an inspiring coach,” he concludes, “can never become, in the deepest sense, a failure in the greater game of life.” Confident that he has sold them, he draws on his glass, which is mostly ice cubes. As he tilts it up they ride forward and rattle against his lips.

Ruth turns to Rabbit and asks quietly, as if to change the subject, “What do you do?”

He laughs. “Well I’m not sure I do anything any more. I should have gone to work this morning. I uh, it’s kind of hard to describe, I demonstrate something called the MagiPeel Kitchen Peeler.”

“And I’m sure he does it well,” Tothero says. “I’m sure that when the MagiPeel Corporation board sits down at their annual meeting, and ask themselves ‘Now who has done the most to further our cause with the American public?’ the name of Harry Rabbit Angstrom leads the list.”

“What do you do?” Rabbit asks her in turn.

“Nothing,” Ruth answers. “Nothing.” And her eyelids make a greasy blue curtain as she sips her Daiquiri. Her chin takes something of the liquid’s green light.

The Chinese food arrives. Delicious saliva fills his mouth. He really hasn’t had any since Texas. He loves this food that contains no disgusting proofs of slain animals, a bloody slab of cow haunch, a hen’s sinewy skeleton; these ghosts have been minced and destroyed and painlessly merged with the shapes of insensate vegetables, plump green bodies that invite his appetite’s innocent gusto. Candy. Heaped on a smoking breast of rice. Each is given such a tidy hot breast, and Margaret is in a special hurry to muddle hers with glazed chunks; all eat well. Their faces take color and strength from the oval plates of dark pork, sugar peas, chicken, stiff sweet sauce, shrimp, water chestnuts, who knows what else. Their talk grows hearty.

“He was terrific,” Rabbit says of Tothero. “He was the greatest coach in the county. I would’ve been nothing without him.”

“No, Harry, no. You did more for me than I did for you. Girls, the first game he played he scored twenty points.”

“Twenty-three,” Harry says.

“Twenty-three points! Think of it.” The girls eat on. “Remember, Harry, the state tournaments in Harrisburg; Dennistown and their little set-shot artist.”

“He was tiny,” Harry tells Ruth. “About five two and ugly as a monkey. Really a dirty player too.”

“Ah, but he knew his trade,” Tothero says, “he knew his trade. He had us, too, until Harry went wild.”

“All of a sudden the basket looked big as a well. Everything I threw went in. Then this runt trips me.”

“So he did,” Tothero says. “I’d forgotten.”

“He trips me, and over I go, bonk, against the mat. If the walls hadn’t been padded I’da been killed.”

“Then what happened, Harry? Did you cream him? I’ve forgotten this whole incident.” Tothero’s mouth is full of food and his hunger for revenge is ugly.

“Why, no,” Rabbit says slowly. “I never fouled. The ref saw it and it was his fifth foul and he was out. Then we smothered ‘em.”

Something fades in Tothero’s expression; his face goes slack. “That’s right, you never fouled. Harry was always the idealist.”

Rabbit shrugs. “I didn’t have to.”

“The other strange thing about Harry,” Tothero tells the two women. “He was never hurt.”

“No, I once sprained my wrist,” Rabbit corrects.
^T
he thing you said that really helped me—”

“What happened next in the tournaments? I’m frightened at how I’ve forgotten this.”

“Next? Pennoak, I think. Nothing happened. They beat us.”

“They won? Didn’t we beat them?”

“Oh hell no. They were good. They had five good players. What’d we have? Just me, really. We had Harrison, who was O.K., but after that football injury he never had the touch, really.”

“
Ronnie
Harrison?” Ruth asks.

Rabbit is startled. “You
know
him?” Harrison had been a notorious bedbug.

“I’m not sure,” she says, complacently enough.

“Shortish guy with kinky hair. A little bitty limp.”

“No, I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t think so.” She is pleasingly dexterous with the chopsticks, and keeps one hand lying palm up on her lap. He loves when she ducks her head, that thick simple neck moving forward making the broad tendons on her shoulder jump up, to get her lips around a piece of something. Pinched with just the right pressure between the sticks; funny how plump women have that delicate touch. Margaret shovels it in with her dull bent silver.

“We didn’t win,” Tothero repeats, and calls, “Waiter.” When the boy comes Tothero asks for another round of the same drinks.

“No, not for me, thanks,” Rabbit says. “I’m high enough on this as it is.”

“You’re just a big clean-living kid, aren’t you, you,” Margaret says. She doesn’t even know his name yet. God, he hates her.

“The thing, I started to say, the thing you said that really helped me,” Rabbit says to Tothero, “is that business about almost touching your thumbs on the two-handers. That’s the whole secret, really, getting the ball in front of your hands, where you get that nice lifty feeling. Just zwoops off.” His hands show how.

“Oh, Harry,” Tothero says sadly, “you could shoot when you came to me. All I gave you was the will to win. The will to achievement.”

“You know my best night,” Rabbit says, “my best night wasn’t that forty-pointer that time against Allenville, it was in my junior year, we went down to end of the county real early in the season to play, a funny little hick school, about a hundred in all six grades; what was its name? Bird’s Nest? Something like that. You’ll remember.”

“Bird’s Nest,” Tothero says. “No.”

“It was the only time I think we ever scheduled them. Funny little square gymnasium where the crowd sat up on the stage. Some name that meant something.”

“Bird’s Nest,” Tothero says. He is bothered. He keeps touching his ear.

“Oriole!” Rabbit exclaims, perfect in joy. “Oriole High. This little kind of spread-out town, and it was early in the season, so it was kind of warm still, and going down in the bus you could see the things of corn like wigwams out in the fields. And the school itself kind of smelled of cider; I remember you made some joke about it. You told me to take it easy, we were down there for practice, and we weren’t supposed to try, you know, to
smother
‘em.”

“Your memory is better than mine,” Tothero says. The waiter comes back and Tothero takes his drink right off the tray, before the boy has a chance to give it to him.