by John Updike
Skeeter awakes blind and gropes for his glasses on the rubber floor. "Chuck baby," he says, looking up with twin circles of glass. His Afro is flattened on one side. Bad fruit. "All by yourself, right?"
"Yeah." The little car holds a concentration of that smell which in the mornings would spice the living room, give it animal substance, sleep's sweetness made strong.
"How long's it been light?"
"Just started. It's around six. How long've you been here?"
"Since I saw you and Babychuck pull in. I called you from a booth up on Weiser and then watched to see if you'd go by. The car wasn't you but the head was, right, so I snuck along through the back yards and got in after you parked. The old briar patch theory, right? Shit if I didn't fall asleep. Hey get in man, you're lettin' in the air."
Rabbit gets in and sits in the driver's seat, listening without turning his head, trying to talk without moving his mouth. Penn Villas is coming to life; a car just passed. "You ought to know," he says, "they're looking for you. They think you set it."
"Count on the fuzz to fuck up. Why would I go burn my own pad?"
"To destroy evidence. Maybe Jill – what do you call it? O.D.'d."
"Not on the scag she was getting from me, that stuff was so cut sugar water has more flash. Look, Chuck, that up at your house was honky action. Will you believe the truth, or shall I save my breath for the pigpen?"
"Let's hear it."
Skeeter's voice, unattached to his face, is deeper than Harry remembers, with a hypnotic rasping lilt that reminds him of childhood radio. "Jill sacked out early and I made do with the sofa, right? Since getting back on the stuff she wasn't putting out any of her own, and anyway I was pretty spaced and beat, we went twice around the county unloading that bullshit car. Right? So I wake up. There was this rattling around. I placed it coming from the kitchen, right? I was thinkin' it was Jill coming to bug me to shoot her up again, instead there was this whoosh and soft woomp, reminded me of an APM hitting in the bush up the road, only it wasn't up any road, I say to myself The war is come home. Next thing there's this slam of a door, garage door from the rumble of it, and I flip to the window and see these two honky cats makin' tail across the lawn, across the street, into between those houses there, and disappear, right? They had no car I could see. Next thing, I smell smoke."
"How do you know these were white men?"
"Shit, you know how honkies run, like with sticks up their ass, right?"
"Could you identify them if you saw them again?"
"I ain't identifying Moses around here. My skin is fried in this county, right?"
"Yeah," Rabbit says. "Something else you should know. Jill is dead."
The silence from the back seat is not long. "Poor bitch, doubt if she knows the difference."
"Why didn't you get her out?"
"Hell, man, there was heat, right? I thought lynching time had come, I didn't know there wasn't twelve hundred crackers out there, I was in no shape to take care of some whitey woman, let Whitey take care of his own."
"But nobody stopped you."
"Basic training, right? I eluded as they say my pursuers."
"They didn't want to hurt you. It was me, they were trying to tell me something. People around here don't lynch, don't be crazy."
"Crazy, you've been watching the wrong TV channel. How about those cats in Detroit?"
"How about those dead cops in California? How about all this Off the Pigs crap you brothers have been pushing? I should take you in. The Brewer cops would love to see you, they love to re-educate crazy coons."
Two more cars swish by; from the height of a milk truck the driver looks down curiously. "Let's drive," Skeeter says.
"What's in it for me?"
"Nothing much, right?"
The car starts at a touch. The motor is more silent than their tires swishing in the puddles along Vista Crescent, past the apple-green ruin and the man in the green raincoat dozing on the doorstep. Rabbit heads out the curved streets to where they end, to where they become truck tracks between muddy house foundations. He finds a lost country lane. Tall rows of poplars, a neglected potholed surface. Skeeter sits up. Rabbit waits for the touch of metal on the back of his neck. A gun, a knife, a needle: they always have something. Poison darts. But there is nothing, nothing but the fluctuating warmth of Skeeter's breathing on the back of his neck. "How could you let her die?" he asks.
"Man, you want to talk guilt, we got to go back hundreds of years."
"I wasn't there then. But you were there last night."
"I was severely disadvantaged."
Harry's head is light with lack of sleep; he knows he shouldn't be making decisions. "Tell you what. I'll drive you ten miles south and you take it from there."
"That's cutting it fine, man, but let's say sold. One embarrassment remains. We brothers call it bread."
"You just got six hundred for selling her car."
"My wallet back next to that sofa, every mothering thing, right?"
"How about that black suitcase in the closet?"
"Say. You been snooping, or what?"
"I have maybe thirty dollars," Rabbit says. "You can have that. I'll keep this ride from the cops but then that's quits. Like you said, you've had it in this county."
"I shall return," Skeeter promises, "only in glory."
"When you do, leave me out of it."
Miles pass. A hill, a cluster of sandstone houses, a cement factory, a billboard pointing to a natural cave, another with a huge cutout of a bearded Amishman. Skeeter in yet another of his voices, the one that sounds most like a white man and therefore in Rabbit's ears most human, asks, "How'd Babychuck take it, Jill's being wasted?"
"About like you'd expect."
"Broken up, right?"
"Broken up."
"Tell him, there's a ton of cunt in the world."
"I'll let him figure that out himself."
They come to a corner where two narrow roads meet in sunlight. On the far side of a tan cut cornfield a whitewashed stone house sends up smoke. A wooden arrow at the intersection says Galilee 2. Otherwise it could be nowhere. A jet trail smears in the sky. Pennsylvania spreads south silently, through green and brown. A dry stone conduit underlies the road here; a roadside marker is a metal keystone rusted blank. Rabbit empties his wallet into Skeeter's pink palm and chokes off the impulse to apologize for its not being more. He wonders now what would be proper. A Judas kiss? They have scarcely touched since the night they wrestled and Harry won. He holds out his hand to shake farewell. Skeeter studies it as if like Babe he will tell a fortune, takes it into both his slick narrow hands, tips it so the meaty pink creases are skyward, contemplates, and solemnly spits into the center. His saliva being as warm as skin, Harry at first only knows it has happened by seeing: moisture full of bubbles like tiny suns. He chooses to take the gesture as a blessing, and wipes his palm dry on his pants. Skeeter tells him, "Never did figure your angle."
"Probably wasn't one," is the answer.
"Just waiting for the word, right?" Skeeter cackles. When he laughs there is that complexity about his upper lip white men don't have, a welt in the center, a genial seam reminding Rabbit of the stitch of flesh that holds the head of your cock to the shaft. As Harry backs Peggy's Fury around in the strait intersection, the young black waits by a bank of brown weed stalks. In the rearview mirror, Skeeter looks oddly right, blends right in, even with the glasses and goatee, hanging empty-handed between fields of stubble where crows settle and shift, gleaning.
COL. EDWIN E. ALDRIN, JR.: Now you're clear. Over toward me. Straight down, to your left a little bit. Plenty of room. You're lined up nicely. Toward me a little bit. Down. O.K. Now you're clear. You're catching the first hinge. The what hinge? All right, move. Roll to the left. O.K., now you're clear. You're lined up on the platform. Put your left foot to the right a little bit. O.K., that's good. More left. Good.
NEIL ARMSTRONG: O.K., Houston, I'm on the porch.
IV. Mi
m
RABBIT is at his machine. His fmgers feather, the matrices rattle on high, the molten lead comfortably steams at his side.
ARSON SUSPECTED IN
PENN VILLAS BLAZE
Out-of-Stater Perishes
West Brewer police are still collecting testimony from neighbors in connection with the mysterious fire that destroyed the handsome Penn Villas residence of Mr. and Mrs. Harold Angstrom.
A guest in the home, Mill Jiss
A guest in the home, Miss Jill Pendleton, 18, of Stonington, Connecticut, perished of smoke inhalation and burns. Rescue attempts by valiant firemen were to no avail.
Miss Pendleton was pronounced dead on arrival at the Sister of Mercy Homeopathic Sisters of Mercy Homeopathic Hospital in Brewer.
A man reported seen in the vicinity of the dwelling, Hubert Johnson last of Plum Street, is being sought for questioning. Mr. Johnson is also known as "Skeeter" and sometimes gives his last name as ]Farnsworth.
Furnace Township fire chief Raymond "Buddy" Fessler told VAT reporters, "The fire was set I'm pretty sure, but we have no evidence of a Molotov cocktail or anything of that nature. This was not a bombing in the ordinary sense."
Neighbors are baffled by the event, reporting nothing unusual about the home but the skulking presence of a black man thought
Pajasek taps him on the shoulder.
"If that's my wife," Rabbit says. "Tell her to bug off. Tell her I'm dead."
"It's nobody on the phone, Harry. I need to have a word with you privately. If I may."
That "if I may" is what puts the chill into Harry's heart. Pajasek is imitating somebody higher up. He shuts his frosted-glass door on the clatter and with a soft thump sits at his desk; he slowly spreads his fingers on the mass of ink-smirched papers there. "More bad news, Harry," he says. "Can you take it?"
"Try me."
"I hate like Jesus to put this into you right on top of your misfortune with your home, but there's no use stalling. Nothing stands still. They've decided up top to make Verity an offset plant. We'll keep an old flatbed for the job work, but the Vat said either go offset or have them print in Philly. It's been in the cards for years. This way, we'll be geared up to take other periodicals, there's some new sheets starting up in Brewer, a lot of it filth in my book but people buy it and the law allows it, so there you are." From the way he sighs, he thinks he's made his point. His forehead, seen from above, is global; the worried furrows retreat to the horizon of the skull, where the brass-pale hair begins, wisps brushed straight back.
Rabbit tries to help him. "So no Linotypers, huh?"
Pajasek looks up startled; his eyebrows arch and drop and there is a moment of spherical smoothness, with a long clean highlight from the fluorescent tubes overhead. "I thought I made that point. That's part of the technical picture, that's where the economy comes. Offset, you operate all from film, bypass hot metal entirely. Go to a cathode ray tube, Christ, it delivers two thousand lines a minute, that's the whole Vat in seven minutes. We can keep a few men on, retrain them to the computer tape, we've worked the deal out with the union, but this is a sacrifice, Harry, from the management point of view. I'm afraid you're far down the list. Nothing to do with your personal life, understand me – strictly seniority. Your Dad's secure, and Buchanan, Christ, let him go we'd have every do-good outfit in the city on our necks, it's not the way I'd do things. If they'd come to me I would have told them, that man is half-soused from eleven o'clock on every morning, they're all like that, I'd just as soon have a moron with mittens on as long he was white -"
"O.K.," Rabbit says. "When do I knock off?"
"Harry, this hurts me like hell. You learned the skill and now the bottom's dropping out. Maybe one of the Brewer dailies can take you on, maybe something in Philly or up in Allentown, though what with papers dropping out or doubling up all over the state there's something of a glut in the trade right now."
"I'll survive. What did Kurt Schrack do?"
"Who he?"
"You know. The Schockelschtuhl guy."
"Christ, him. That was back in B.C. As I remember he bought a farm north of here and raises chickens. If he's not dead by now."
"Right. Die I guess would be the convenient thing. From the management point of view."
"Don't talk like that, Harry, it hurts me too much. Give me credit for some feelings. You're a young buck, for Chrissake, you got the best years still ahead of you. You want some fatherly advice? Get the hell out of the county. Leave the mess behind you. Forget that slob you married, no offense."
"No offense. About Janice, you can't blame her, I wasn't that great myself. But I can't go anywhere, I got this kid."
"Kid, schmid. You can't live your life that way. You got to reason outwards from Number One. To you, you're Number One, not the kid."
"That's not how it feels, exactly," Rabbit begins, then sees from the sudden gleaming globe of Pajasek's head bent to study the smirched slips on his desk that the man doesn't really want to talk, he wants Harry to go. So Rabbit asks, "So when do I go?"
Pajasek says, "You'll get two months' pay plus the benefits you've accumulated, but the new press is coming in this weekend, faster than we thought. Everything moves faster nowadays."
"Except me," Rabbit says, and goes. His father, in the bright racket of the shop, swivels away from his machine and gives him the thumbs down sign questioningly. Rabbit nods, thumbs down. As they walk down Pine Street together after work, feeling ghostly in the raw outdoor air after their day's immersion in fluorescence, Pop says, "I've seen the handwriting on the wall all along, whole new philosophy operating at the top now at Verity, one of the partner's sons came back from business school somewhere full of beans and crap. I said to Pajasek, `Why keep me on, I have less than a year before retirement?' and he says, `That's the reason.' I said to him, `Why not let me go and give my place to Harry?' and he says, `Same reason.' He's running scared himself, of course. The whole economy's scared. Nixon's getting himself set to be the new Hoover, these moratorium doves'll be begging for LBJ to come back before Tricky Dick's got done giving their bank accounts a squeeze!"
Pop talks more than ever now, as if to keep Harry's mind cluttered; he clings to him like sanity. It has been a dreadful three days. All Sunday, on no sleep, he drove back and forth in Peggy's borrowed Fury through Brewer between Mt. Judge and Penn Villas, through the municipal headache of the Columbus Day parade. The monochrome idyll of early morning, Skeeter dwindling to a brown dot in brown fields, became a four-color nightmare of martial music, throbbing exhaustion, bare-thighed girls twirling bolts of lightning, iridescent drummers pounding a tattoo on the taut hollow of Harry's stomach, cars stalled in the sidestreets, Knights of Columbus floats, marching veterans, American flags. Between entanglements with this monster celebration, he scavenged in warm ashes and trucked useless stained and soaked furniture, including a charred guitar, to the garage at the back of the Jackson Road place. He found no wallet near the sofa, and no black bag in the closet. Jill's bureau had been along the wall of which only charred 2 by 4s remained, yet he prodded the ashes for a scrap of the six hundred dollars. Back on Jackson Road, insurance investigators were waiting for him, and the sheriff of Furnace Township, a little apple-cheeked old man, in suspenders and a soft felt hat, who was mostly interested in establishing that his failure to be present at the fire could in no way be held against him. He was quite deaf, and every time someone in the room spoke he would twirl around and alertly croak, "Let's put that on the record too! I want everything out in the open, everything on the record!"
Worst of all, Harry had to talk to Jill's mother on the telephone. The police had broken the news to her and her tone fluctuated between a polite curiosity about how Jill came to be living in this house and a grieved outrage seeking its ceiling, a bird cramped in a cage of partial comprehension.
"She was staying with me, yes, since before Labor Day," Rabbit told her, over the downstairs phone, in the dark living room, smelling of furniture polish a
nd Mom's medicine. "Before that she had been bumming around in Brewer with a crowd of Negroes who hung out at a restaurant they've closed down since. I thought she'd be better off with me than with them."
"But the police said there was a Negro."
"Yeah. He was a friend of hers. He kind of came and went." Each time he was made to tell this story, he reduced the part Skeeter played, beginning with having to lie about driving him south that morning, until the young black man has become in his backwards vision little more substantial than a shadow behind a chair. "The cops say he might have set the fire but I'm sure he didn't."
"How are you sure?"
"I just am. Look, Mrs. -"
"Aldridge." And this, of all things, her second husband's name, set her to crying.
He fought through her sobbing. "Look, it's hard to talk now, I'm dead beat, my kid's in the next room, if we could talk face to face, I could maybe explain -"
The outrage tested a wing. "Explain! Can you explain her back to life?"
"No, I guess not."
The politeness returned. "My husband and I are flying to Philadelphia tomorrow morning and renting a car. Perhaps we should meet."
"Yeah. I'd have to take off from work, except for the lunch hour."