Rabbit, Run (20 page)

“I’d like to talk to him for just a few minutes. It’s a problem that involves our two congregations.”

“Go up to his room, why do-an tcha? I’ll fetch him.”

The house—foyer, halls, staircase, even the minister’s leathery den upstairs—is flooded with the smell of beef roasting. As if every day, when the house is cleaned, the odor is rubbed into the wood with a damp rag. Eccles sits by the window of Kruppenbach’s den on an oak-backed choir pew left over from some renovation. Seated on the bench he feels an adolescent compulsion to pray but instead peers across the valley at the pale green fragments of the golf course where he would like to be, with Harry. He lied somewhat to Mrs. Angstrom. Harry does not play golf better than he. He seems to have trouble in making the club part of himself, to be tense with the fear that this stick of steel will betray him. Between Harry’s alternately fine and terrible shots and his own consistent weakness there is a rough equality that makes each match unpredictable. Eccles has found other partners either better or worse than he; only Harry is both, and only Harry gives the game a desperate gaiety, as if they are together engaged in an impossible, startling, bottomless quest set by a benevolent but absurd lord, a quest whose humiliations sting them almost to tears but one that is renewed at each tee, in a fresh flood of green. And for Eccles there is an additional hope, a secret determination to trounce Harry. He feels that the thing that makes Harry unsteady, that makes him unable to repeat his beautiful effortless swing every time, is the thing at the root of all the problems that he has created; and that by beating him decisively he, Eccles, will get on top of this weakness, this flaw, and hence solve the problems. In the meantime there is the pleasure of hearing Harry now and then cry, “Yes, yes,” or “That’s the one!” Their rapport at moments attains for Eccles a pitch of pleasure, a harmless ecstasy, that makes the world with its endless circumstantiality seem remote and spherical and green.

The house shudders to the master’s step. Of the ministers in the town, he likes Kruppenbach least. The man is rigid in his creed and a bully in manner. Eccles loves rectories; he grew up in one. But in this one he feels all the humorlessness, the pious oppression, that people falsely imagine. Yet Kruppenbach’s son must not have found it so: witness the motorcycle.

The man comes up the stairs into his den, angry at being taken from his lawn-mowing. He wears old black pants and an undershirt soaked with sweat. His shoulders are coated with wiry gray wool and a wide tangled bush of black-speckled hair bubbles out of the U of the undershirt neck and froths across the wet red skin of his chest.

“Hello, Chack,” he says at pulpit volume, with no intonation of greeting. His German accent makes his words seem stones, set angrily one on top of another. “What is it?”

Eccles doesn’t dare “Fritz” with the older man, and instead laughs and exclaims, “Hello!”

Kruppenbach grimaces. He has a massive square head, crew-cut. He is a man of brick. As if he was born as a baby literally of clay and decades of exposure have baked him to the color and hardness of brick. He repeats, “What?”

“You have a family called Angstrom.”

“Yes.”

“The father’s a printer.”

“Yes.”

“Their son, Harry, deserted his wife over two months ago; her people, the Springers, are in my church.”

“Yes, well. The boy. The boy’s a
Schussel
.”

Eccles isn’t certain what that means. He supposes that Kruppenbach doesn’t sit down because he doesn’t want to stain his furniture with his own sweat. His continuing to stand puts Eccles in a petitionary position, sitting on the bench like a choirboy. The odor of meat cooking grows more insistent as he explains what he thinks happened: how Harry has been in a sense spoiled by his athletic successes; how the wife, to be fair, had perhaps showed little imagination in their marriage; how he himself, as minister, had tried to keep the boy’s conscience in touch with his wife without pressing him into a premature reunion—for the boy’s problem wasn’t so much a lack of feeling as an uncontrolled excess of it; how the four parents, for various reasons, were of little help; how he had witnessed, just minutes ago, a quarrel between the Angstroms that perhaps offered a clue as to why their son—

“Do you think,” Kruppenbach interrupts; Jack hadn’t expected him to be quiet this long—the man certainly was no listener; even in his undershirt he somehow wore vestments—“do you think this is your job, to meddle in these people’s lives? I know what they teach you at seminary now: this psychology and that. But I don’t agree with it. You think now your job is to be an unpaid doctor, to run around and plug up the holes and make everything smooth. I don’t think that. I don’t think that’s your job.”

“I only—”

“No now let me finish. I’ve been in Mt. Judge twenty-seven years and you’ve been here two. I’ve listened to your story but I wasn’t listening to what it said about the people, I was listening to what it said about you. What I heard was this: the story of a minister of God selling his message for a few scraps of gossip and a few games of golf. What do you think now it looks like to God, one childish husband leaving one childish wife? Do you ever think any more what God sees? Or have you grown beyond that?”

“No, of course not. But it seems to me our role in a situation like this—”

“It seems to you our role is to be cops, cops without handcuffs, without guns, without anything but our human good nature. Isn’t it right? Don’t answer, just think if I’m not right. Well, I say that’s a Devil’s idea. I say, let the cops be cops and look after their laws that have nothing to do with us.”

“I agree, up to a point—”

“There
is
no up to a point! There is no reason or measure in what we must do.” His thick forefinger, woolly between the knuckles, has begun to tap emphasis on the back of a leather chair. “If Gott wants to end misery He’ll declare the Kingdom now.” Jack feels a blush begin to burn on his face. “How big do you think your little friends look among the billions that God sees? In Bombay now they die in the streets every minute. You say role. I say you don’t know what your role is or you’d be home locked in prayer.
There
is your role: to make yourself an exemplar of faith.
There
is where comfort comes from: faith, not what little finagling a body can do here and there, stirring the bucket. In running back and forth you run from the duty given you by God, to make your faith powerful, so when the call comes you can go out and tell them, ‘Yes, he is dead, but you will see him again in Heaven. Yes, you suffer, but you must
love
your pain, because it is
Christ’s
pain.’ When on Sunday morning then, when we go before their faces, we must walk up not worn out with misery but full of Christ,
hot”
—he clenches his hairy fists—“with Christ, on
fire: burn
them with the force of our belief. That is why they come; why else would they pay us? Anything else we can do or say anyone can do and say. They have doctors and lawyers for that. It’s all in the Book—a thief with faith is worth all the Pharisees. Make no mistake. Now I’m serious. Make no mistake. There is nothing but Christ for us. All the rest, all this decency and busyness, is nothing. It is Devil’s work.”

“Fritz,” Mrs. Kruppenbach’s voice calls carefully up the stairs. “Supper.”

The red man in his undershirt looks down at Eccles and asks, “Will you kneel a moment with me and pray for Christ to come into this room?”

“No. No. I won’t. I’m too angry. It would be hypocritical.” The refusal, unthinkable from a layman, makes Kruppenbach, not softer, but stiller. “Hypocrisy,” he says mildly. “You have no seriousness. Don’t you believe in damnation? Didn’t you know when you put that collar on, what you risked?” In the brick skin of his face his eyes seem small imperfections, pink and glazed with water as if smarting in intense heat.

He turns without waiting for Jack to answer and goes downstairs for supper. Jack descends behind him and continues out the door. His heart is beating like a frightened child’s and his knees are weak with fury. He had come for an exchange of information and been flagellated with an insane spiel. Unctuous old thundering Hun had no conception of the ministry as a legacy of light and probably himself scrambled into it out of a butcher’s shop. Jack realizes that these are spiteful and unworthy thoughts but he can’t stop them. His depression is so deep that he tries to gouge it deeper by telling himself
He’s right, he’s right
and thus springing tears and purging himself, however absurdly, above the perfect green circle of the Buick steering wheel. But he can’t cry; he’s parched. His shame and failure hang downward in him heavy but fruitless.

Though he knows that Lucy wants him home—if dinner is not quite ready he will be in time to give the children their baths—he instead drives to the drugstore in the center of town. The poodle-cut girl behind the counter is in his Youth Group and two parishioners buying medicine or contraceptives or Kleenex hail him gaily. He feels at home in public places; he rests his wrists on the cold clean marble and orders a vanilla ice-cream soda with a scoop of maple-walnut ice cream, and drinks two Coca-Cola glasses full of delicious clear water before it comes.

Club Castanet was named during the war when the South American craze was on and occupies a triangular building where Warren Avenue crosses Running Horse Street at an acute angle. It’s in the south side of Brewer, the Italian-Negro-Polish side, and Rabbit doesn’t like it. With its glass-brick windows grinning back from the ridge of its face it looks like a fortress of death; the interior is furnished in the glossy low-lit style of an up-to-date funeral parlor, potted green plants here and there, music piping soothingly, and the same smell of strip rugs and fluorescent tubes and Venetian-blind slats and, the most inner secretive smell, of alcohol. We drink it and then we’re embalmed in it. Ever since a man down from them on Jackson Road lost his job as an undertaker’s assistant and became a bartender, Rabbit thinks of the two professions as related; men in both talk softly, look very clean, and are always seen standing up. He and Ruth sit at a booth near the front, where they get through the window a faint fluctuation of red light as the neon castanet on the sign outside flickers back and forth between its two positions, that imitate clicking.

This pink tremor takes the weight off Ruth’s face. She sits across from him. He tries to picture the kind of life she was leading; a creepy place like this probably seems as friendly to her as a locker room would to him. But just the thought of it that way makes him nervous; her sloppy life, like his having a family, is something he’s tried to keep behind them. He was happy just hanging around her place at night, her reading mysteries and him running down to the delicatessen for ginger ale and some nights going to a movie but nothing like this. That first night he really used that Daiquiri but since then he didn’t care if he ever had another and hoped she was the same way. For a while she was but lately something’s been eating her; she’s heavy in bed and once in a while looks at him as if he’s some sort of pig. He doesn’t know what he’s doing different but knows that somehow the ease has gone out of it. So tonight her so-called friend Margaret calls up. It scares him out of his skin when the phone rings. He has the idea lately it’s going to be the cops or his mother or somebody; he has the feeling of something growing on the other side of the mountain. A couple times after he first moved in, the phone rang and it was some thick-voiced man saying “Ruth?” or just hanging up in surprise at Rabbit’s voice answering. When they hung on, Ruth just said a lot of “No’s” into the receiver and they never had any trouble luckily. She knew how to handle them and anyway there were only about five that ever called. Like the past was a vine hanging on by just these five shallow roots and it tore away easily, leaving her clean and blue and blank. But tonight it’s Margaret out of this past and she wants them to come down to the Castanet and Ruth wants to and Rabbit goes along. Anything for a little change. He’s bored.

He asks her, “What do you want?”

“A Daiquiri.”

“You’re sure? You’re sure now it won’t make you sick?” He’s noticed that, that she seems a little sick sometimes, and won’t eat, and sometimes eats the house down.

“No, I’m not sure but why the hell shouldn’t I be sick?”

“Well I don’t know why you shouldn’t. Why shouldn’t anybody?”

“Look let’s not be a philosopher for once. Just get me the drink.”

A colored girl in an orange uniform that he guesses from the frills is supposed to look South American comes and he tells her two Daiquiris. She flips shut her pad and walks off and he sees her back is open halfway down her spine. So a little bit of black bra shows. Compared with this her skin isn’t black at all, just a nice thick soft color that brings a little honest life into here. Purple shadows swing on the flats of her back where the light hits. She has a pigeon-toed way of sauntering, swinging those orange frills. She doesn’t care about him; he likes that, that she doesn’t care. The thing about Ruth is lately she’s been trying to make him feel guilty about something.

“Don’t fall in,” she tells him.

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You’re right you’re not doing anything.”

If this is a threat, he doesn’t like threats.

Margaret comes and the guy with her, he isn’t very happy to see, is Ronnie Harrison. Margaret says to him, “Hello, you. Are you still hanging on?”

“Hell,” Harrison says, “it’s the great Angstrom,” as if he’s trying to take Tothero’s place in every way. “I’ve been hearing about you,” he adds slimily.

“Hearing what?”

“Oh. The word.”

Harrison was never one of Rabbit’s favorites and has not improved. In the locker room he was always talking about making out and playing with himself under his little hairy pot of a belly and that pot has really grown. Harrison is fat. Fat and half bald. His kinky brass-colored hair has thinned and the skin of his scalp shows, depending on how he tilts his head. This pink showing through seems obscene to Rabbit, like the pink bald idea that is always showing through Harrison’s talk. Still, he remembers one night when Harrison came back into the game after losing two teeth to somebody’s elbow and tries to be glad to see him. There were just five of you out there at one time and the other four for that time were unique in the world.