by John Updike
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.
He turns off the radio; its music no longer seems a river he is riding down but instead speaks with the voice of the cities and brushes his head with slippery hands. Yet into the silence that results he refuses to let thoughts come. He doesn’t want to think, he wants to fall asleep and wake up pillowed by sand. How stupid, how frigging, frigging stupid it was, not to be further than this. At midnight, the night half gone.
The land refuses to change. The more he drives the more the region resembles the country around Mt. Judge. The same scruff on the embankments, the same weathered billboards for the same insane products. At the upper edge of his headlight beams the naked tree-twigs make the same net. Indeed the net seems thicker now.
The animal in him swells its protest that he is going west. His mind stubbornly resists. The only way to get somewhere is to decide where you’re going and go. His plan calls for him to bear left 28 miles after Frederick and that 28 miles is used up now and, though his instincts cry out against it, when a broad road leads off to the left, though it’s unmarked, he takes it. It is unlikely that the road would be marked, from its thickness on the map. But it is a shortcut, he knows. He remembers that when Marty Tothero began to coach him he didn’t want to shoot fouls underhand but that it turned out in the end to be the way.
The road is broad and confident for miles, but there is a sudden patched stretch, and after that it climbs and narrows. Narrows not so much by plan as naturally, the edges crumbling in and the woods on either side crowding down. The road twists more and more wildly in its struggle to gain height and then without warning sheds its skin of asphalt and worms on in dirt. By now Rabbit knows this is not the road but he is afraid to stop the car to turn it around. He has left the last light of a house miles behind. When he strays from straddling the mane of weeds, brambles rake his painted sides. Tree-trunks and low limbs are all his headlights pick up; the scrabbling shadows spider backward through the web of wilderness into a black core where he fears his probe of light will stir some beast or ghost. He supports speed with prayer, praying that the road not stop, remembering how on Mt. Judge even the shaggiest most forgotten logging lane eventually sloped to the valley. His ears itch; his height presses on them.
The prayer’s answer is blinding. The trees at a far bend leap like flame and a car comes around and flies at him with its beams tilted high. Rabbit slithers over into the ditch and, faceless as death, the bright car rips by at a speed twice his own. For more than a minute Rabbit drives through this bastard’s insulting dust. Yet the good news makes him meek, the news that this road goes two ways. And shortly he seems to be in a park. His lights pick up green little barrels stenciled PLEASE and the trees are thinned on both sides and in among them picnic tables and pavilions and outhouses show their straight edges. The curves of cars show too, and a few are parked close to the road, their passengers down out of sight. So the road of horror is a lovers’ lane. In a hundred yards it ends.
It meets at right angles a smooth broad highway overhung by the dark cloud of a mountain ridge. One car zips north. Another zips south. There are no signs. Rabbit puts the shift in neutral and pulls out the emergency brake and turns on the roof light and studies his map. His hands and shins are trembling. His brain flutters with fatigue behind sandy eyelids; the time must be 12:30 or later. The highway in front of him is empty. He has forgotten the numbers of the routes he has taken and the names of the towns he has passed through. He remem
bers Frederick but can’t find it and in time realizes he is searching in a section due west of Washington where he has never been. There are so many red lines and blue lines, long names, little towns, squares and circles and stars. He moves his eyes north but the only line he recognizes is the straight dotted line of the Pennsylvania-Maryland border. The Mason-Dixon Line. The schoolroom in which he learned this recurs to him, the rooted desk rows, the scarred varnish, the milky black of the blackboard, the sweet pieces of ass all up and down the aisles in alphabetical order. His eyes blankly founder. Rabbit hears a clock in his head beat, monstrously slow, the soft ticks as far apart as the sound of waves on the shore he had wanted to reach. He burns his attention through the film fogging his eyes down into the map again. At once “Frederick” pops into sight, but in trying to steady its position he loses it, and fury makes the bridge of his nose ache. The names melt away and he sees the map whole, a net, all those red lines and blue lines and stars, a net he is somewhere caught in. He claws at it and tears it; with a gasp of exasperation he rips away a great triangular piece and tears the large remnant in half and, more calmly, lays these three pieces on top of each other and tears them in half, and then those six pieces and so on until he has a wad he can squeeze in his hand like a ball. He rolls down the window and throws the ball out; it explodes, and the bent scraps like disembodied wings flicker back over the top of the car. He cranks up the window. He blames everything on that farmer with glasses and two shirts. Funny how the man sticks in his throat. He can’t think past him, his smugness, his solidity, somehow. He stumbled over him back there and is stumbling still, can’t get him away from his feet, like shoelaces too long or a stiff stick between his feet; the man mocked, whether out of his mouth or in the paced motions of his hands or through his hairy ears, somewhere out of his body mocked the furtive wordless hopes that at moments made the ground firm for Harry. Decide where you want to go and then go: it missed the whole point and yet there is always the chance that, little as it is, it is everything. At any rate Rabbit feels if he’d trusted to instinct he’d be in South Carolina now. He wishes he had a cigarette, to help him decide what his instinct is. He decides to go to sleep in the car for a few hours.
But a car starts up in the petting grove behind him and the headlights wheel around and press on Rabbit’s neck. He stopped his car right in the middle of the road, for a glance at the map. Now he must move. He feels unreasoning fear of being overtaken; the other headlights swell in the rearview mirror and fill it like a cup. He stamps the clutch, puts .the shift in first, and releases the handbrake. Hopping onto the highway, he turns instinctively right, north.
The trip home is easier. Though he has no map and hardly any gas, an all-night Mobilgas magically appears near Hagerstown and green signs begin to point to the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The music on the radio is soothing now, lyrical and unadvertised, and, coming first from Harrisburg and then from Philadelphia, makes a beam he infallibly flies in on. He has broken through the barrier of fatigue and come into a calm flat world where nothing matters much. The last quarter of a basketball game used to carry him into this world; you ran not as the crowd thought for the sake of the score but for yourself, in a kind of idleness. There was you and sometimes the ball and then the hole, the high perfect hole with its pretty skirt of net. It was you, just you and that fringed ring, and sometimes it came down right to your lips it seemed and sometimes it stayed away, hard and remote and small. It seemed silly for the crowd to applaud or groan over what you had already felt in your fingers or even in your arms as you braced to shoot or for that matter in your eyes: when he was hot he could see the separate threads wound into the strings looping the hoop. Yet at the start of the night when you came out for warm-up and could see all the town clunkers sitting in the back of bleachers elbowing each other and the cheerleaders wisecracking with the racier male teachers, the crowd then seemed right inside you, your liver and lungs and stomach. There was one fat guy used to come who’d get on the floor of Rabbit’s stomach and really make it shake. “Hey, Gunner! Hey, Showboat, shoot! Shoot!” Rabbit remembers him fondly now; to that guy he had been a hero of sorts.
Throughout the early morning the music keeps coming and the signs keep pointing. His brain feels like a frail but alert invalid packed inside among a lot of deep pillows with messengers bringing him down long corridors all this music and geographical news. At the same time he feels abnormally sensitive on the surface, as if his skin is thinking. The steering wheel is thin as a whip in his hands. As he turns it lightly he can feel the shaft stiffly pivot, and the differential gears part, and the bearings rotate in their sealed tunnels of grease. The phosphorescent winkers at the side of the road beguile him into thinking of young Du Pont women: strings of them winding through huge glassy parties, potentially naked in their sequined sheath gowns.
He wonders why there are so many signs coming back and so few going down. Of course he didn’t know what he was going toward going down. He takes the Brewer turnoff off the Pike and the road takes him through the town where he first bought gas. As he takes the road marked BREWER 16 he can see cattycornered across the main street the dirtdigger’s pumps and his dark window full of glinting shovels and fishing rods. The window looks pleased. There is just a touch of light in the air. The radio’s long floe of music is breaking up in warm-weather reports and farm prices.
He comes into Brewer from the south, seeing it as a gradual multiplication of houses among the trees beside the road and then as a treeless waste of industry, shoe factories and bottling plants and company parking lots and knitting mills converted to electronics parts and elephantine gas tanks lifting above trash-filled swampland yet lower than the blue edge of the mountain from whose crest Brewer was a warm carpet woven around a single shade of brick.
He crossed the Running Horse Bridge and is among streets he knows. He takes Warren Avenue through the south side of town and comes out on 422 near City Park. He drives around the mountain in company with a few hissing trailer trucks. As he turns left from Central into Jackson he nearly sideswipes a milk truck idling yards out from the curb. He continues up Jackson, past his parents’ house, and turns into Kegerise Alley, and in the clear dawn light he glides past the old chicken house, past the silent body shop, and parks the car in front of the Sunshine Athletic Association, a few steps from the boxed-in entrance, where anyone coming out would have to notice. Rabbit glances up hopefully at the third-story windows but no light is showing. Tothero, if he is in there, is still asleep.
Rabbit settles himself to sleep. He takes off his suit coat and lays it over his chest like a blanket. But the daylight is growing, and the front seat is far too short, and the steering wheel crowds his shoulders. He doesn’t move to the back seat because that would make him vulnerable; he wants to be able to drive away in a second if he must. Further, he doesn’t want to sleep so heavily he will miss Tothero when he comes out.
So there he lies, his long legs doubled up and no place really for his feet, gazing up with crusty vision across the steering wheel and through the windshield into the sky’s flat fresh blue. Today is Saturday, and the sky has that broad bright blunt Saturday quality Rabbit remembers from boy-hood when the sky of a Saturday morning was the blank scoreboard of a long game about to begin.
A car goes by up the alley, and Rabbit closes his eyes, and the darkness vibrates with the incessant automobile noises of the night past. He sees again the woods, the narrow road, the dark grove full of cars each containing a silent coupling. He thinks again of his goal, lying down at dawn in sand by the Gulf of Mexico, and it seems in a way that the gritty seat of his car is that sand, and the rustling of the waking town the rustling of the sea.
He must not miss Tothero. He opens his eyes and tries to rise from his stiff shroud. He wonders if he has missed any time. The sky is the same.
He becomes anxious about the car windows. He hoists his chest up on one elbow and checks them all. The window above his head is open a crack and he
cranks it tight and pushes down all the lock buttons. This security relaxes him hopelessly. He turns his face into the crack between seat and back. This twisting pushes his knees into the tense upright cushion, and annoyance that for the moment makes him more wakeful. He wonders where his son slept, what Janice has done, where his parents and her parents hunted. Whether the police know. He feels the faded night he left behind in this place as a net of telephone calls and hasty trips, trails of tears and strings of words, white worried threads shuttled through the night and now faded but still existent, an invisible net overlaying the steep streets and in whose center he lies secure in his locked windowed hutch.
Cotton and gulls in half-light and the way she’d come on the other girl’s bed, never as good on their own. But there were good things: Janice so shy about showing her body even in the first weeks of wedding yet one night coming into the bathroom expecting nothing he found the mirror ,clouded with steam and Janice just out of the shower standing there doped and pleased with a little blue towel lazily and unashamed her bottom bright pink with hot water the way a women was of two halves bending over and turning and laughing at his expression whatever it was and putting her arms up to kiss him, a blush of steam on her body and the back of her neck slippery. Rabbit adjusts his position and returns his mind to its dark socket; the back of her neck slippery, the pit of her back pliant, both on their knees together, contortions that never were. His shin knocks the door handle, the pain becoming oddly mixed with the knocks of metal on metal down in the body shop. Work had begun. Eight o’clock? Rabbit writhes and sits up, the covering coat collapsing to his warm lap, and indeed through the splotched windshield there is Tothero’s figure, walking away down the alley. He is up beyond the very old farmhouse; Rabbit jumps from the car, puts on his coat, and runs after him. “Mr. Tothero! Hey Mr. Tothero!” His voice sounds flaked and rusty after hours of disuse.