Rabbit, Run (9 page)

“So,” Rabbit says. “We go out there and there are these five farmers clumping up and down, and we get about fifteen points up right away and I just take it easy. And there are just a couple dozen people sitting up on the stage and the game isn’t a league game so nothing matters much, and I get this funny feeling I can do anything, just drifting around, passing the ball, and all of a sudden I know, you see, I
know
I can do anything. The second half I take maybe just ten shots, and every one goes right in, not just bounces in, but doesn’t touch the rim, like I’m dropping stones down a well. And these farmers running up and down getting up a sweat, they didn’t have more than two substitutes, but we’re not in their league either, so it doesn’t matter much to them, and the one ref just leans over against the edge of the stage talking to their coach. Oriole High. Yeah, and then afterwards their coach comes down into the locker room where both teams are changing and gets a jug of cider out of a locker and we all passed it around. Don’t you remember?” It puzzles him, yet makes him want to laugh, that he can’t make the others feel what was so special. He resumes eating. The others are done and on their second drinks.

“Yes, sir, Whosie, you’re a real sweet kid,” Margaret tells him.

“Pay no attention, Harry,” Tothero says, “that’s the way tramps talk.”

Margaret hits him: her hand flies up from the table and across her body into his mouth, flat, but without a slapping noise.

“Socko,” Ruth says. Her voice is indifferent. The whole thing is so quiet that the Chinaman, clearing their dishes away, doesn’t look up, and seems to hear nothing.

“We’re going,” Tothero announces, and tries to stand up, but the edge of the table hits his thighs, and he can stand no higher than a hunchback. The slap has left a little twist in his mouth that Rabbit can’t bear to look at, it’s so ambiguous and blurred, such a sickly mixture of bravado and shame and, worst, pride or less than pride, conceit. This deathly smirk issues the words, “Are you coming, my dear?”

“Son of a bitch,” Margaret says, yet her little hard nut of a body slides over, and she glances behind her to see if she is leaving anything, cigarettes or a purse. “Son of a bitch,” she repeats, and there is something pretty in the level way she says it. Both she and Tothero seem calmer now, determined and kind of rigid.

Rabbit starts to push up from the table, but Tothero sets a rigid urgent hand on his shoulder, the coach’s touch, that Rabbit had so often felt on the bench, just before the pat on the bottom that sent him into the game. “No no, Harry. You stay. One apiece. Don’t let our vulgarity distract you. I couldn’t borrow your car, could I?”

“Huh? How would I get anywhere?”

“Quite right, you’re quite right. Forgive my asking.”

“No, I mean, you can if you want—” In fact he feels deeply reluctant to part with a car that is only half his.

Tothero sees this. “No no. It was an insane thought. Good night.”

“You bloated old bastard,” Margaret says to him. He glances toward her, then down fuzzily. She is right, Harry realizes, he is bloated; his face is lopsided like a tired balloon. Yet this balloon peers down at him as if there was some message bulging it, heavy and vague like water.

“Where will you go?” Tothero asks.

“I’ll be fine. I have money. I’ll get a hotel,” Rabbit tells him. He wishes, now that he has refused him a favor, that Tothero would go.

“The door of my mansion is open,” Tothero says. “There’s the one cot only, but we can make a mattress—”

“No, look,” Rabbit says severely. “You’ve saved my life, but I don’t want to saddle you. I’ll be fine. I can’t thank you enough anyway.”

“We’ll talk sometime,” Tothero promises; his hand twitches, and accidentally taps Margaret’s thigh.

“I could kill you,” Margaret says at his side, and they go off, looking from the back like father and daughter, past the counter where the waiter whispers with the American girl, and out the glass door, Margaret first. The whole thing seems so
settled
: like little wooden figures going in and out of a barometer.

“God, he’s in sad shape.”

“Who isn’t?” Ruth asks.

“You don’t seem to be.”

“I eat, is what you mean.”

“No, listen, you have some kind of complex about being big. You’re not fat. You’re right in proportion.”

She laughs, catches herself, looks at him, laughs again and squeezes his arm and says, “Rabbit, you’re a Christian gentleman.” Her using his own name enters his ears with unsettling warmth.

“What she hit him for?” he asks, giggling in fear that her hands, resting on his forearm, will playfully poke his side. He feels in her grip the tension of this possibility.

“She likes to hit people. She once hit me.”

“Yeah, but you probably asked for it.”

She replaces her hands on the table. “So did he. He likes being hit.”

He asks, “You know him?”

“I’ve heard her talk about him.”

“Well, that’s not knowing him. That girl is dumb.”

“Isn’t she. She’s dumber than you can know.”

“Look, I know. I’m married to her twin.”

“Ohhh. Married.”

“Hey, what’s this about Ronnie Harrison? Do you know him?”

“What’s this about you being married?”

“Well, I was. Still am.” He regrets that they have started talking about it. A big bubble, the enormity of it, crowds his heart. It’s like when he was a kid and suddenly thought, coming back from somewhere at the end of a Saturday afternoon, that this—these trees, this pavement—was life, the real and only thing.

“Where is she?”

This makes it worse, picturing Janice, where would she go? “Probably with her parents. I just left her last night.”

“Oh. Then this is just a holiday. You haven’t left her.”

“I think I have.”

The waiter brings them a plate of sesame cakes. Rabbit takes one tentatively, thinking they will be hard, and is delighted to have it become in his mouth mild elastic jelly, through the shell of bland seeds. The waiter asks, “Gone for good, your friends?”

“It’s O.K., I’ll pay,” Rabbit says.

The Chinaman nods and retreats.

“You’re rich?” Ruth asks.

“No, poor.”

“Are you really going to a hotel?” They both take several sesame cakes. There are perhaps twenty on the plate.

“I guess I’ll tell you about Janice. I never thought of leaving her until the minute I did; all of a sudden it seemed obvious. She’s about five-six, sort of dark-complected—”

“I don’t want to hear about it.” Her voice is positive; her many-colored hair, as she tilts back her head and squints at a ceiling light, settles into one grave shade. The light was more flattering to her hair than it is to her face; on this side of her nose there are some spots in her skin, blemishes that make bumps through her powder.

“You don’t,” he says. The bubble rolls off his chest. If it doesn’t worry anybody else why should it worry him? “O.K. What shall we talk about? What’s your weight?”

“One-fifty.”

“Ruth, you’re tiny. You’re just a welterweight. No kidding. Nobody wants you to be all bones. Every pound you have on is priceless.”

He’s talking just for happiness, but something he says makes her tense up. “You’re pretty wise, aren’t you?” she asks, tilting her empty glass toward her eyes. The glass is a shallow cup on a short stem, like an ice-cream dish at a fancy birthday party. It sends pale arcs of reflection swimming across her face.

“You don’t want to talk about your weight, either. Huh.” He pops another sesame cake into his mouth, and waits until the first pang, the first taste of jelly, subsides. “Let’s try this. What you need, Mrs. America, is the MagiPeel Kitchen Peeler. Preserve those vitamins. Shave off fatty excess. A simple adjustment of the plastic turn screw, and you can grate carrots and sharpen your husband’s pencils. A host of uses.”

“Don’t Don’t be so funny.”

“O.K.”

“Let’s be nice.”

“O.K. You start.”

She plops a cake in and looks at him with a funny full-mouth smile, the corners turned down tight, and a frantic look of agreeableness strains her features while she chews. She swallows, her blue eyes widened round, and gives a little gasp before launching into what he thinks will be a remark but turns out to be a laugh, right in his face. “Wait,” she begs. “I’m trying.” And returns to looking into the shell of her glass, thinking, and the best she can do, after all that, is to say, “Don’t live in a hotel.”

“I got to. Tell me a good one.” He instinctively thinks she knows about hotels. At the side of her neck where it shades into her shoulder there is a shallow white hollow where his attention curls and rests.

“They’re all expensive,” she says. “Everything is. Just my little apartment is expensive.”

“Where do you have an apartment?”

“Oh a few blocks from here. On Summer Street. It’s one flight up, above a doctor.”

“It’s yours alone?”

“Yeah. My girl friend got married.”

“So you’re stuck with all the rent and you don’t do anything.”

“Which means what?”

“Nothing. You just said you did nothing. How expensive is it?”

She looks at him curiously, with that alertness he had noticed right off, out by the parking meters.

“The apartment,” he says.

“A hundred-ten a month. Then they make you pay for light and gas.”

“And you don’t do anything.”

She gazes into her glass, making reflected light run around the rim with a rocking motion of her hands.

“Whaddeya thinking?” he asks.

“Just wondering.”

“Wondering what?”

“How wise you are.”

Right here, without moving his head, he feels the wind blow. So this is the drift; he hadn’t been sure. He says, “Well I’ll tell ya. Why don’t you let me give you something toward your rent?”

“Why should you do that?”

“Big heart,” he says. “Ten?”

“I need fifteen.”

“For the light and gas. O.K. O.K.” He is uncertain what to do now. They sit looking at the empty plate that had held a pyramid of sesame cakes; they have eaten them all. The waiter, when he comes, is surprised to see this; his eyes go from the plate to Rabbit to Ruth, all in a second. The check amounts to $9.60. Rabbit puts a ten and a one on top of it, and besides these bills he puts a ten and a five. He counts what’s left in his wallet; three tens and four ones. When he looks up, Ruth’s money has vanished from the slick table. He stands up and takes her little soft coat and holds it for her, and like a great green fish, his prize, she heaves across and up out of the booth and coldly lets herself be fitted into it. He calculates, a dime a pound.

And that’s not counting the restaurant bill. He takes the bill to the counter and gives the girl a ten. She makes change with a frown; the frightening vacancy of her eyes is methodically ringed with mascara. The purple simplicity of her kimono does not go with her frizzly permed hair and rouged, concave, deprived face. When she puts his coins on the pink cleats of the change pad, he flicks his band in the air above the silver, adds the dollar to it, and nods at the young Chinese waiter, who is perched attentively beside her. “Thank you very much, sir. Thank you very much,” the boy says to him. But his gratitude does not even last until they are out of sight. As they move toward the glass door he turns to the cashier and in a reedy, perfectly inflected voice completes his story: “—and then this other cat says, ‘But man, mine was
he
lium!’ ”

With this Ruth, Rabbit enters the street. On his right, away from the mountain, the heart of the city shines: a shuffle of lights, a neon outline of a boot, of a peanut, of a top hat, of an enormous sunflower erected, the stem of green neon six stories high, along one building to symbolize Sunflower Beer, the yellow center a second moon, the shuffling headlights glowworms in the grass. One block down, a monotone bell tolls hurriedly, and as long as knives the red-tipped railroad-crossing gates descend, slicing through the soft mass of neon, and the traffic slows, halts.

Ruth turns left, toward the shadow of Mt. Judge, and Rabbit follows; they walk uphill on the rasping pavement. The slope of cement is a buried assertion, an unexpected echo, of the land that had been here before the city. For Rabbit the pavement is a shadow of the Daiquiri’s luminous transparence; he is gay, and skips once, to get in step with his love. Her eyes are turned up, toward where the Pinnacle Hotel adds it coarse constellation to the stars above Mt. Judge. They walk together in silence while behind them a freight train chuffs and screaks through the crossing.

He recognizes his problem; she dislikes him now, like that whore in Texas. “Hey,” he says. “Have you ever been up to the top there?”

“Sure. In a car.”

“When I was a kid,” he says, “we used to walk up from the other side. There’s a sort of gloomy forest, and I remember once I came across an old house, just a hole in the ground with some stones, where I guess a pioneer had had a farm.”

“The only time I ever got up there was in a car with some eager beaver.”

“Well, congratulations,” he says, annoyed by the self-pity hiding in her toughness.

She bites at being uncovered. “What do you think I care about your pioneer?” she asks.

“I don’t know. Why shouldn’t you? You’re an American.”

“How? I could just as easy be a Mexican.”

“You never could be, you’re not little enough.”

“You know, you’re a pig really.”

“Oh now baby,” he says, and puts his arm around the substance of her waist, “I think I’m sort of neat.”

“Don’t tell me.”

She turns left, off Weiser, out of his arm. This street is Summer. Brick rows, not so much run down as well worn. The house numbers are set in fanlights of stained glass above the doors. The apple-and-orange-colored light of a small grocery store shows the silhouettes of some kids hanging around the corner. The supermarkets are driving these little stores out of business, make them stay open all night.

He puts his arm around her and begs, “Come on now, be a pleasant piece.” He wants to show her that her talking tough won’t keep him off. She wants him to be content with just her heavy body, but he wants whole women, light as feathers. To his surprise her arm mirrors his, comes around his waist. Thus locked, they find it awkward to walk, and part at the traffic light.