Rabbit, Run

by John Updike

  His face burns; forgiveness had been big in his heart and now it’s hate. He hates her dumb face. She doesn’t see. She had a chance to join him in truth, just the simplest factual truth, and turned away in horror. He sees that among the heads even his own mother’s is horrified, blank with shock, a wall against him; she asks him what have they done to him and then she does it too. A suffocating sense of injustice blinds him. He turns and runs.

  Uphill with broad strength. He dodges among gravestones exultantly. Dandelions grow bright as butter among the graves. Behind him his name is called in Eccles’ voice “Harry! Harry!” He feels Eccles chasing him but does not turn to look. He cuts diagonally through the stones across the grass toward the woods. The distance to the dark cres­cent of trees is greater than it seemed from beside the grave. The romping of his body turns heavy; the slope of land grows steeper. Yet there is a softness in the burial ground that sustains his flight, a gentle settled bumpiness that buoys him up with its reminiscence of the dodging spurting runs down a crowded court. He arrives between the arms of the woods and aims for the center of the cres­cent. Once inside, he is less sheltered than he expected; turning, he can see through the leaves back down the grave­yard to where, beside the small green tent, the human be­ings he has left cluster. Eccles is halfway between them and him. His black chest heaves. His wide-set eyes concentrate into the woods. The others, thick stalks in dark clothes, jiggle: maneuvering, planning, testing each other’s strengths, holding each other up. Their pale faces flash mute signals toward the woods and turn away, in disgust or despair, and then flash again full in the declining sun, fascinated. Only Eccles’ gaze is steady. He may be gathering energy to renew the chase.

  Rabbit crouches and runs raggedly. His hands and face are scratched from plowing through the bushes and saplings that rim the woods. Deeper inside there is more space. The pine trees smother all other growth. Their brown needles muffle the rough earth with a slippery blanket; sunshine falls in narrow slots on this dead floor. It is dim but hot in here, like an attic; the unseen afternoon sun bakes the dark shin­gles of green above his head. Dead lower branches thrust at the level of his eyes. His hands and face feel hot where they were scratched. He turns to see if he has left the people behind. No one is following. Far off, through a tiny patch at the end of the aisle of pines he is in, a green glows which is perhaps the green of the cemetery; but it seems as far off as the patches of sky he can glimpse above the treetops. In turning he loses some sense of direc­tion. But the tree-trunks are at first in neat rows that carry him along between them, and he walks always against the slope of the land. If he walks far enough uphill he will in time reach the scenic drive that runs along the ridge. Only by going downhill can he be returned to the others.

  The trees cease to march in rows and grow together more thickly. These are older trees. The darkness under them is denser and the ground is steeper. Rocks jut up through the blanket of needles, scabby with lichen; collapsed trunks hold intricate claws across his path. At places where a hole has been opened up in the roof of evergreen, berrying bushes and yellow grass grow in a hasty sweet-smelling tumble. These patches, some of them broad enough to catch a bit of sun slanting down the mountainside, make the surrounding darkness darker, and in pausing in them he becomes con­scious, by its cessation, of a whisper that fills the brown tunnels all around him. Midges circle thickly in the sunshine above these holes. The surrounding trees are too tall for him to see any sign, even a remote cleared landscape, of civiliza­tion. Islanded in light he becomes frightened. He is con­spicuous; the bears and nameless menaces that whisper through the forest can see him clearly. Rather than hang vulnerable in these wells of visibility he rushes toward the menaces across the rocks and rotting trunks and slithering needles. Insects follow him out of the sun; his sweat is a strong perfume. His chest binds and his shins hurt from jarring uphill into pits and flat rocks that the needles con­ceal. He takes off his coat and carries it in a twisted bundle. He struggles against his impulse to keep turning his head, to see what is behind him; there is never anything, just the hushed, deathly life of the woods, but his fear fills the wind­ing space between the tree-trunks with agile threats, that just dodge out of the corner of his eye each time he whips his head around. He must hold his head rigid. He’s terrorizing himself. As a kid he often went up through the woods. But maybe as a kid he walked under a magic protection that has now been lifted; he can’t believe the woods were this dark then. They too have grown. Such an unnatural dark­ness, clogged with spider-fine twigs that finger his face in­cessantly, a darkness in defiance of the broad daylight whose sky leaps in jagged patches from treetop to treetop above him like a blue monkey.

  The small of his back aches from crouching. He begins to doubt his method. As a kid he never entered from the cemetery. Perhaps walking against the steepest slope is stupid, carrying him along below the ridge of the mountain when a few yards to his left the road is running. He bears to his left, trying to keep himself in a straight path; the whisper of woods seems to swell louder and his heart lifts with hope: he was right, he is near a road. He hurries on, scrambling ruthlessly, expecting the road to appear with every step, its white posts and speeding metal to gleam. The slope of the ground dies unnoticed under his feet. He stops, stunned, on the edge of a precipitate hollow whose near bank is strewn with the hairy bodies of dead trees locked against trunks that have managed to cling erect to the steep soil and that cast into the hollow a shadow as deep as the last stage of twilight. Something rectangular troubles this gloom; it dawns on him that on the floor of the hollow lie the cellarhole and the crumbled sandstone walls of a forgotten house. To his shrill annoyance at having lost his way and headed himself down­hill again is added a clangorous horror, as if this ruined evidence of a human intrusion into a world of blind life tolls bells that ring to the edges of the universe. The thought that this place was once self-conscious, that its land was tramped and cleared and known, blackens the air with ghosts that climb the ferny bank toward him like children clambering up from a grave. Perhaps there were children, fat girls in calico fetching water from a nearby spring, taming the trees, scarring them with marks of play, growing old on boards stretched above the cellarhole, dying with a last look out the window at the bank where Harry stands. He feels more conspicuous and vulnerable than in the little clearings of sunshine; he obscurely feels lit by a great spark, the spark whereby the blind tumble of matter recognized itself, a spark struck in the collision of two opposed realms, an encounter a terrible God willed. His stomach slides; his ears seem sud­denly open to the sound of a voice. He scrambles back up­hill, thrashing noisily in the deepening darkness to drown out the voice that wants to cry out to him from a source that flits from tree to tree in the shadows. He runs always against the rise of land, chasing it in treacherous light, the steep solid land like some fleeing, twisting thing.

  The light widens enough for him to spy off to his right a nest of old tin cans and bottles sunken into the needles and then he strikes the road. He jacks his long legs over the guard fence and straightens up. Gold spots are switching on and off in the corners of his eyes. The asphalt scrapes under his shoes and he seems entered, with the wonderful resonant hollowness of exhaustion, on a new life. Cold air strokes his shoulder blades; somewhere in there he split old man Springer’s shirt right down the back. He has come out of the woods about a half-mile below the Pinnacle Hotel. As he swings along, jauntily hanging his blue coat over his shoulder on the hook of one finger, Janice and Eccles and his mother and his sins seem a thousand miles behind. He decides to call Eccles, like you’d send somebody a postcard. Eccles had liked him and put a lot of trust in him and deserves at least a phone call. Rabbit rehearses what he’ll say. “It’s O.K.,” he’ll tell him, “I’m on the way. I mean, I think there are several ways; don’t worry. Thanks for everything.” What he wants to get across is that Eccles shouldn’t be discouraged.

  On the top of the mountain it is still broad day. Up in the sea of
sky a lake of fragmented mackerel clouds drifts in one piece like a school of fish. There are only a couple cars parked around the hotel, jalopies, ‘52 Pontiacs and ‘51 Mercs like Springer Motors sells to these blotchy kids that come in with a stripper in their wallets and a hundred dollars in the bank. Inside the cafeteria a few of them are playing a pin­ball machine called BOUNCING BETSY. They look at him with their long hair and make wise faces and one of them even calls, “Did she rip your shirt?” But, it’s strange, they don’t really know anything about him except he looks mussed. You do things and do things and nobody really knows. The clock says twenty of six. He goes to the pay phone on the butter­scotch wall and looks up Eccles’ number in the book. His wife answers dryly, “Hello?” Rabbit shuts his eyes and her freckles dance in the red of his lids.

  “Hi. Could I speak to Reverend Eccles please?”

  “Who is this?” Her voice has gotten up on a hard little high horse; she knows who. He smiles and pictures her solid sweet butt, that he tapped.

  “Hey, this is Harry Angstrom. Is Jack there?”

  The receiver at the other end of the line is replaced; that bitch. Just because I wouldn’t go into her frigging house with her. Poor Eccles probably sitting there his heart bleeding to hear the word from me and she going back and telling him wrong number, that poor bastard being married to that bitch. He hangs up himself, hears the dime rattle down, and feels simplified by this failure. He goes out across the parking lot.

  He seems to leave behind him in the cafeteria all the poison she must be dripping into the poor tired guy’s ears. He imagines her telling Eccles about how he slapped her fanny and thinks he hears Eccles laughing and himself smiles. He’ll remember Eccles as laughing; there was that in him that held you off, that you couldn’t reach, the nasal business, but through the laughter you could get to him. Sort of sneaking in behind him, past the depressing damp gripping clinging front. What made it depressing was that he wasn’t sure, but couldn’t tell you, and worried his eyebrows instead, and spoke every word in a different voice. All in all, a relief to be loose from him. Soggy.

  From the edge of the parking lot, Brewer is spread out like a carpet, its flowerpot red going dusty. Some lights are already turned on. The great neon sunflower at the center of the city looks small as a daisy. Now the low clouds are pink but up above, high in the dome, tails of cirrus still hang pale and pure. As he starts down the steps he wonders, Would she have? Lucy.

  He goes down the mountainside on the flight of log stairs and through the part where some people are still playing tennis and down Weiser Street, putting his coat back on, and up Summer. His heart is murmuring in suspense but it is in the center of his chest. That lopsided kink about Becky is gone, he has put her in Heaven, he felt her go. If Janice had felt it he maybe might have stayed. The outer door is open and an old lady in a Polish sort of kerchief is coming mumbling out of F. X. Pelligrini’s door. He rings Ruth’s bell.

  The buzzer answers and he quickly snaps open the inner door and starts up the steps. Ruth comes to the banister and looks down and says, “Go away.”

  “Huh? How’d you know it was me?”

  “Go back to your wife.”

  “I can’t. I just left her.”

  She laughs; he has climbed to the step next to the top one, and their faces are on a level. “You’re always leaving her,” she says.

  “No, this time it’s different. It’s really bad.”

  “You’re bad all around. You’re bad with me, too.”

  “Why?” He has come up the last step and stands there a yard away from her, excited and helpless. He thought when he saw her, instinct would tell him what to do but in a way it’s all new, though it’s only been a few weeks. She is changed, graver in her motions and thicker in the waist. The blue of her eyes is darker.

  She looks at him with a contempt that is totally new. “Why?” she repeats in an incredulous hard voice.

  “Let me guess,” he says. “You’re pregnant.”

  Surprise softens the hardness a moment.

  “That’s great,” he says, and takes advantage of her soft­ness to push her ahead of him into the room. Her arms and sweater give like little cushions when he pushes. “Great,” he repeats, closing the door. He tries to embrace her and she fights him successfully and backs away behind a chair. She had meant that fight; his neck is scraped.

  “Go away,” she says. “Go away.”

  “Don’t you need me?”

  “Need you,” she cries, and he squints in pain at the strain­ing note of hysteria; he feels she has imagined this en­counter so often she is determined to say everything, which will be too much. He sits down in an easy chair. His legs ache. She says, “I needed you that night you walked out. Remember how much I needed you? Remember what you made me do?”

  “She was in the hospital,” he says. “I had to go.”

  “God, you’re cute. God, you’re so holy. You had to go. You had to stay, too, didn’t you? You know, I was stupid enough to think you’d at least call.”

  “I wanted to but I was trying to start clean. I didn’t know you were pregnant.”

  “You didn’t, why not? Anybody else would have. I was sick enough.”

  “When, with me?”

  “God, yes. Why don’t you look outside your own pretty skin once in a while?”

  “Well why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Why should I? What would that have done? You’re no help. You’re nothing. You know why I didn’t? You’ll laugh, but I didn’t because I thought you’d leave me if you knew. You wouldn’t ever let me do anything to prevent it but I figured once it happened you’d leave me. You left me any­way so there you are. Why don’t you get out? Please get out. I begged you to get out the first time. The damn first time I begged you. Why are you here?”

  “I want to be here. It’s right. Look. I’m happy you’re pregnant.”

  “It’s too late to be happy.”

  “Why? Why is it too late?” He’s frightened, remembering how she wasn’t here when he came before. She’s here now, she had been away then. Women went away to have it done, he knew.

  “How can you sit there?” she asks him. “I can’t under­stand it, how you can sit there; you just killed your baby and there you sit.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Your ministerial friend. Your fellow saint. He called about a half-hour ago.”

  “God. He’s still trying.”

  “I said you weren’t here. I said you’d never be here.”

  “I didn’t kill the poor kid. Janice did. I got mad at her one night and came looking for you and she got drunk and drowned the poor kid in the bathtub. Don’t make me talk about it. Where were you, anyway?”

  She looks at him with dull wonder and says softly, “Boy, you really have the touch of death, don’t you?”

  “Hey; have you done something?”

  “Hold still. Just sit there. I see you very clear all of a sudden. You’re Mr. Death himself. You’re not just nothing, you’re worse than nothing. You’re not a rat, you don’t stink, you’re not enough to stink.”

  “Look, I didn’t do anything. I was coming to see you when it happened.”

  “No, you don’t do anything. You just wander around with the kiss of death. Get out. Honest to God, Rabbit, just looking at you makes me sick.” Her sincerity in saying this leaves her kind of limp, and she grips the top slat of a straight chair bearing a Pennsylvania Dutch design stenciled in faded flowers.

  He, who always took pride in dressing neatly, who had al­ways been led to think he was all right to look at, blushes to feel this sincerity. The sensation he had counted on, of being by nature her master, of getting on top of her, hasn’t come. He looks at his fingernails, with their big cuticle moons. His hands and legs are suffused with a paralyzing sense of reality; his child is really dead, his day is really done, this woman is really sickened by him. Realizing this much makes him anxious to have all of it, to be pressed tight against the wall. H
e asks her flat, “Did you get an abortion?”

  She smirks and says hoarsely, “What do you think?”

  He closes his eyes and while the gritty grained fur of the chair arms rushes up against his fingertips prays, God, dear God, no, not another, you have one, let this one go. A dirty knife turns in his intricate inner darkness. When he opens his eyes he sees, from the tentative hovering way she is standing there, trying to bring off a hard swagger in her stance, that she means to torment him. His voice goes sharp with hope: “Have you?”

  A crumbling film comes over her face. “No,” she says, “no. I should but I keep not doing it. I don’t want to do it.”

  Up he gets and his arms go around her, without squeez­ing, like a magic ring, and though she stiffens at his touch and twists her head sideways on her muscled white throat, he has regained that feeling, of being on top. “Oh,” he says, “good. That’s so good.”

  “It was too ugly,” she says. “Margaret had it all rigged up but I kept—thinking about—”

  “Yes,” he says, “Yes. You’re so good. I’m so glad,” and tries to nuzzle the side of her face. His nose touches wet. “You have it,” he coaxes. “Have it.” She is still a moment, staring at her thoughts, and then jerks out of his arms and says, “Don’t touch me!” Her face flares; her body is bent for­ward like a threatened animal’s. As if his touch is death.

  “I love you,” he says.

  “That means nothing from you. Have it, have it, you say: how? Will you marry me?”

  “I’d love to.”

  “You’d love to, you’d love to do anything. What about your wife? What about the boy you already have?”