Rabbit Redux

by John Updike

Buchanan swiftly squeezes his forearm. “What you want to do that for, Br’er Rabbit? You haven’t achieved your objective, friend.”

  “My only objective was to be polite.” She’ll ooze in the letter slot: haunted by this image and the smoke inside him, he feels he can lift up from the booth, pass across Buchanan’s shoulders like a shawl, and out the door. Nothing can hold him, not Mom, not Janice. He could slip a posse dribbling, Tothero used to flatter him.

  “You going to go off half-cocked,” Buchanan warns.

  “You ain’t heard Babe play,” the other man says.

  He stops rising. “Babe plays?”

  She is flustered, stares at her thin ringless hands, fiddles, mumbles. “Let him go. Let the man run. I don’t want him to hear.”

  The boy teases her. “Babe now, what sort of bad black act you putting on? He wants to hear you do your thing. Your darkie thing, right? You did the spooky card-reading bit and now you can do the banjo bit and maybe you can do the hot momma bit afterwards but it doesn’t look like it right now, right?”

  “Ease off, nigger,” she says, face still bent low. “Sometime you going to lean too hard.”

  Rabbit asks her shyly, “You play the piano?”

  “He gives me bad vibes,” Babe confesses to the two black men. “Those knuckles of his aren’t too good. Bad shadows in there.”

  Buchanan surprises Harry by reaching and covering her thin bare hands with one of his broadened big pressman’s hands, a ring of milk-blue jade on one finger, battered bright copper on another. His other arm reaches around Harry’s shoulders, heavy. “Suppose you was him,” he says to Babe, “how would that make you feel?”

  “Bad,” she says. “As bad as I feel anyway.”

  “Play for me Babe,” Rabbit says in the lovingness of pot, and she lifts her eyes to his and lets her lips pull back on long yellow teeth and gums the color of rhubarb stems. “Men,” Babe gaily drawls. “They sure can retail the shit.” She pushes herself out of the booth, hobbling in her comb-red dress, and crosses through a henscratch of applause to the piano painted as if by children in silver swirls. She signals to the bar for Rufe to turn on the blue spot and bows stiffly, once, grudging the darkness around her a smile and, after a couple of runs to burn away the fog, plays.

  What does Babe play? All the good old ones. All show tunes. “Up a Lazy River,” “You’re the Top,” “Thou Swell,” “Summertime,” you know. There are hundreds, thousands. Men from Indiana wrote them in Manhattan. They flow into each other without edges, flowing under black bridges of chords thumped six, seven times, as if Babe is helping the piano to remember a word it won’t say. Or spanking the silence. Or saying, Here I am, find me, find me. Her hands, all brown bone, hang on the keyboard hushed like gloves on a table; she gazes up through blue dust to get herself into focus, she lets her hands fall into another tune: “My Funny Valentine,” “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” “I Can’t Get Started,” starting to hum along with herself now, lyrics born in some distant smoke, decades when Americans moved within the American dream, laughing at it, starving on it, but living it, humming it, the national anthem everywhere. Wise guys and hicks, straw boaters and bib overalls, fast bucks, broken hearts, penthouses in the sky, shacks by the railroad tracks, ups and downs, rich and poor, trolley cars, and the latest news by radio. Rabbit had come in on the end of it, as the world shrank like an apple going bad and America was no longer the wisest hick town within a boat ride of Europe and Broadway forgot the tune, but here it all still was, in the music Babe played, the little stairways she climbed and came tap-dancing down, twinkling in black, and there is no other music, not really, though Babe works in some Beatles songs, “Yesterday” and “Hey Jude,” doing it rinky-tink, her own style of ice to rattle in the glass. As Babe plays she takes on swaying and leaning backwards; at her arms’ ends the standards go root back into ragtime. Rabbit sees circus tents and fireworks and farmers’ wagons and an empty sandy river running so slow the sole motion is catfish sleeping beneath the golden skin.

  The boy leans forward and murmurs to Rabbit, “You want ass, right? You can have her. Fifty gets you her all night, all ways you can think up. She knows a lot.”

  Sunk in her music, Rabbit is lost. He shakes his head and says, “She’s too good.”

  “Good, man; she got to live, right? This place don’t pay her shit.”

  Babe has become a railroad, prune-head bobbing, napkin of jewels flashing blue, music rolling through crazy places, tunnels of dissonance and open stretches of the same tinny thin note bleeding itself into the sky, all sad power and happiness worn into holes like shoe soles. From the dark booths around voices call out in a mutter “Go Babe” and “Do it, do it.” The spidery boys in the adjacent room are frozen around the green felt. Into the mike that is there no bigger than a lollipop she begins to sing, sings in a voice that is no woman’s voice at all and no man’s, is merely human, the words of Ecclesiastes. A time to be born, a time to die. A time to gather up stones, a time to cast stones away. Yes. The Lord’s last word. There is no other word, not really. Her singing opens up, grows enormous, frightens Rabbit with its enormous black maw of truth yet makes him overjoyed that he is here; he brims with joy, to be here with these black others, he wants to shout love through the darkness of Babe’s noise to the sullen brother in goatee and glasses. He brims with this itch but does not spill. For Babe stops. As if suddenly tired or insulted Babe breaks off the song and shrugs and quits.

  That is how Babe plays.

  She comes back to the table stooped, trembling, nervous, old.

  “That was beautiful, Babe,” Rabbit tells her.

  “It was,” says another voice. A small white girl is standing there prim, in a white dress casual and dirty as smoke.

  “Hey. Jill,” Buchanan says.

  “Hi Buck. Skeeter, hi.”

  So Skeeter is his name. He scowls and looks at the cigarette of which there is not even butt enough to call a roach.

  “Jilly-love,” Buchanan says, standing until his thighs scrape the table edge, “allow me to introduce. Harry the Rabbit Angstrom, he works at the printing plant with me, along with his daddy.”

  “He has a daddy?” Jill asks, still looking at Skeeter, who will not look at her.

  “Jilly, you go sit in here where I am,” Buchanan says. “I’ll go get a chair from Rufe.”

  “Down, baby,” Skeeter says. “I’m splitting.” No one offers to argue with him. Perhaps they are all as pleased as Rabbit to see him go.

  Buchanan chuckles, he rubs his hands. His eyes keep in touch with all of them, even though Babe seems to be dozing. He says to Jill, “How about a beverage? A 7-Up? Rufe can make a lemonade even.”

  “Nothing,” Jill says. Teaparty manner. Hands in lap. Thin arms. Freckles. Rabbit scents in her the perfume of class. She excites him.

  “Maybe she’d like a real drink,” he says. With a white woman here he feels more in charge. Negroes, you can’t blame them, haven’t had his advantages. Slave ships, cabins, sold down the river, Ku Klux Klan, James Earl Ray: Channel 44 keeps having these documentaries all about it.

  “I’m under age,” Jill tells him politely.

  Rabbit says, “Who cares?”

  She answers, “The police.”

  “Not up the street they wouldn’t mind so much,” Buchanan explains, “if the girl halfway acted the part, but down here they get a touch fussy.”

  “The fuzz is fussy,” Babe says dreamily. “The fuzz is our fussy friends. The fuzzy motherfuckers fuss.”

  “Don’t, Babe,” Jill begs. “Don’t pretend.”

  “You let your old black mamma have a buzz on,” Babe says. “Don’t I take good care of you mostly?”

  “How would the police know if this kid has a drink?” Rabbit asks, willing to be indignant.

  Buchanan makes his high short wheeze. “Friend Harry, they’d just have to turn their heads.”

  “There’re cops in here?”

  “Friend” – and from the way he sidl
es closer Harry feels he’s found another father – “if it weren’t for po-lice spies, poor Jimbo’s wouldn’t sell two beers a night. Po-lice spies are the absolute backbone of local low life. They got so many plants going, that’s why they don’t dare shoot in riots, for fear of killing one of their own.”

  “Like over in York.”

  Jill asks Rabbit, “Hey. You live in Brewer?” He sees that she doesn’t like his being white in here, and smiles without answering. Screw you, little girl.

  Buchanan answers for him. “Lady, does he live in Brewer? If he lived any more in Brewer he’d be a walking advertisement. He’d be the Owl Pretzel owl. I don’t think this fella’s ever gotten above Twelfth Street, have you Harry?”

  “A few times. I was in Texas in the Army, actually.”

  “Did you get to fight?” Jill asks. Something scratchy here, but maybe like a kitten it’s the way of making contact.

  “I was all set to go to Korea,” he says. “But they never sent me.” Though at the time he was grateful, it has since eaten at him, become the shame of his life. He had never been a fighter but now there is enough death in him so that in a way he wants to kill.

  “Now Skeeter,” Buchanan is saying, “he’s just back from Vietnam.”

  “That’s why he so rude,” Babe offers.

  “I couldn’t tell if he was rude or not,” Rabbit confesses.

  “That’s nice,” Buchanan says.

  “He was rude,” Babe says.

  Jill’s lemonade arrives. She is still girl enough to look happy when it is set before her: cakes at the teaparty. Her face lights up. A crescent of lime clings to the edge of the glass; she takes it off and sucks and makes a sour face. A child’s plumpness has been drained from her before a woman’s bones could grow and harden. She is the reddish type of fair; her hair hangs dull, without fire, almost flesh-color, or the color of the flesh of certain soft trees, yews or cedars. Harry feels protective, timidly. In her tension of small bones she reminds him of Nelson. He asks her, “What do you do, Jill?”

  “Nothing much,” she says. “Hang around.” It had been square of him to ask, pushing. The blacks fit around her like shadows.

  “Jilly’s a poor soul,” Babe volunteers, stirring within her buzz. “She’s fallen on evil ways.” And she pats Rabbit’s hand as if to say, Don’t you fall upon these ways.

  “Young Jill,” Buchanan clarifies, “has run away from her home up there in Connec-ticut.”

  Rabbit asks her, “Why would you do that?”

  “Why not? Let freedom ring.”

  “Can I ask how old you are?”

  “You can ask.”

  “I’m asking.”

  Babe hasn’t let go of Rabbit’s hand; with the fingernail of her index finger she is toying with the hairs on the back of his fist. It makes his teeth go cold, for her to do that. “Not so old you couldn’t be her daddy,” Babe says.

  He is beginning to get the drift. They are presenting him with this problem. He is the consultant honky. The girl, too, unwilling as she is, is submitting to the interview. She inquires of him, only partly parrying, “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-six.”

  “Divide by two.”

  “Eighteen, huh? How long’ve you been on the run? Away from your parents.”

  “Her daddy dead,” Buchanan interposes softly.

  “Long enough, thank you.” Her face pales, her freckles stand out sharply: blood-dots that have dried brown. Her dry little lips tighten; her chin drifts toward him. She is pulling rank. He is Penn Villas, she is Penn Park. Rich kids make all the trouble.

  “Long enough for what?”

  “Long enough to do some sick things.”

  “Are you sick?”

  “I’m cured.”

  Buchanan interposes, “Babe helped her out.”

  “Babe is a beautiful person,” Jill says. “I was really a mess when Babe took me in.”

  “Jilly is my sweetie,” Babe says, as suddenly as in playing she moves from one tune to another, “Jilly is my baby-love and I’m her mamma-love,” and takes her brown hands away from Harry’s to encircle the girl’s waist and hug her against the rooster-comb-red of her dress; the two are women, though one is a prune and the other a milkweed. Jill pouts in pleasure. Her mouth is lovable when it moves, Rabbit thinks, the lower lip bumpy and dry as if chapped, though this is not winter but the humid height of summer.

  Buchanan is further explaining. “Fact of it is, this girl hasn’t got no place regular to go. Couple weeks ago, she comes in here, not knowing I suppose the place was mostly for soul, a little pretty girl like this get in with some of the brothers they would tear her apart limb by sweet limb” – he has to chuckle – “so Babe takes her right away under her wing. Only trouble with that is” – the fat man rustles closer, making the booth a squeeze – “Babe’s place is none too big, and anyways. . .”

  The child flares up. “Anyways I’m not welcome.” Her eyes widen: Rabbit has not seen their color before, they have been shadowy, moving slowly, as if their pink lids are tender or as if, rejecting instruction and inventing her own way of moving through the world, she has lost any vivid idea of what to be looking for. Her eyes are green. The dry tired green, yet one of his favorite colors, of August grass.

  “Jilly-love,” Babe says, hugging, “you the most welcome little white baby there could be.”

  Buchanan is talking only to Rabbit, softer and softer. “You know, those things happen over York way, they could happen here, and how could we protect” – the smallest wave of his hand toward the girl lets the sentence gracefully hang; Harry is reminded of Stavros’s gestures. Buchanan ends chuckling: “We be so busy keepin’ holes out of our own skins. Dependin’ where you get caught, being black’s a bad ticket both ways!”

  Jill snaps, “I’ll be all right. You two stop it now. Stop trying to sell me to this creep. I don’t want him. He doesn’t want me. Nobody wants me. That’s all right. I don’t want anybody.”

  “Everybody wants somebody,” Babe says. “I don’t mind your hangin’ around my place, some gentlemen mind, is all.”

  Rabbit says, “Buchanan minds,” and this perception astonishes them; the two blacks break into first shrill, then jingling, laughter, and another Stinger appears on the table between his hands, pale as lemonade.

  “Honey, it’s just the visibility,” Babe then adds sadly. “You make us ever so visible.”

  A silence grows like the silence when a group of adults is waiting for a child to be polite. Sullenly Jill asks Rabbit, “What do you do?”

  “Set type,” Rabbit tells her. “Watch TV. Babysit.”

  “Harry here,” Buchanan explains, “had a nasty shock the other day. His wife for no good reason upped and left him.”

  “No reason at all?” Jill asks. Her mouth pouts forward, vexed and aggressive, yet her spark of interest dies before her breath is finished with the question.

  Rabbit thinks. “I think I bored her. Also, we didn’t agree politically.”

  “What about?”

  “The Vietnam war. I’m all for it.”

  Jill snatches in her breath.

  Babe says, “I knew those knuckles looked bad.”

  Buchanan offers to smooth it over. “Everybody at the plant is for it. We think, you don’t hold ’em over there, you’ll have those black-pajama fellas on the streets over here.”

  Jill says to Rabbit seriously, “You should talk to Skeeter about it. He says it was a fabulous trip. He loved it.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that. I’m not saying it’s pleasant to fight in or be caught in. I just don’t like the kids making the criticisms. People say it’s a mess so we should get out. If you stayed out of every mess you’d never get into anything.”

  “Amen,” Babe says. “Life is generally shit.”

  Rabbit goes on, feeling himself get rabid, “I guess I don’t much believe in college kids or the Viet Cong. I don’t think they have any answers. I think they’re minorities trying to
bring down everything that halfway works. Halfway isn’t all the way but it’s better than no way.”

  Buchanan smooths on frantically. His upper lip is bubbling with sweat under his slit of a mustache. “I agree ninety-nine per cent. Enlightened self-interest is the phrase I like. The way I see, enlightened self-interest’s the best deal we’re likely to get down here. I don’t buy pie in the sky whoever is slicing it. These young ones like Skeeter, they say All power to the people, you look around for the people, the only people around is them.”

  “Because of Toms like you,” Jill says.

  Buchanan blinks. His voice goes deeper, hurt. “I ain’t no Tom, girl. That kind of talk doesn’t help any of us. That kind of talk just shows how young you are. What I am is a man trying to get from Point A to Point B, from the cradle to the grave hurting the fewest people I can. Just like Harry here, if you’d ask him. Just like your late daddy, God rest his soul.”

  Babe says, hugging the stubbornly limp girl, “I just likes Jilly’s spunk, she’s less afraid what to do with her life than fat old smelly you, sittin’ there lickin’ yourself like an old cigar end.” But while talking she keeps her eyes on Buchanan as if his concurrence is to be desired. Mothers and fathers, they turn up everywhere.

  Buchanan explains to Jill with a nice levelness, “So that is the problem. Young Harry here lives in this fancy big house over in the fanciest part of West Brewer, all by himself, and never gets any tail.”

  Harry protests. “I’m not that alone. I have a kid with me.”

  “Man has to have tail,” Buchanan is continuing.

  “Play, Babe,” a dark voice shouts from a dark booth. Rufe bobs his head and switches on the blue spot. Babe sighs and offers Jill what is left of Skeeter’s joint. Jill shakes her head and gets out of the booth to let Babe out. Rabbit thinks the girl is leaving and discovers himself glad when she sits down again, opposite him. He sips his Stinger and she chews the ice from her lemonade while Babe plays again. This time the boys in the poolroom softly keep at their game. The clicking and the liquor and the music mix and make the space inside him very big, big enough to hold blue light and black faces and “Honeysuckle Rose” and stale smoke sweeter than alfalfa and this apparition across the way, whose wrists and forearms are as it were translucent and belonging to another order of creature; she is not yet grown. Her womanliness is attached to her, it floats from her like a little zeppelin he can almost see. And his inside space expands to include beyond Jimbo’s the whole world with its arrowing wars and polychrome races, its continents shaped like ceiling stains, its strings of gravitational attraction attaching it to every star, its glory in space as of a blue marble swirled with clouds; everything is warm, wet, still coming to birth but himself and his home, which remains a strange dry place, dry and cold and emptily spinning in the void of Penn Villas like a cast-off space capsule. He doesn’t want to go there but he must. He must. “I must go,” he says, rising.