Rabbit, Run (Rabbit Angstrom, #1)

by John Updike

With his white collar he forges God’s name on every word he speaks.

as if pity is, as he has been taught, not a helpless outcry but a powerful tide that could redeem the world—

The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don’t—whichever seems likelier to win an effect.

“Yes, well, years. Some die young; some are born old.”

The day is declining through the white afternoon to the long blue spring evening. He drives past a corner where someone is practicing on a trumpet

Eccles isn’t certain what that means. He supposes that Kruppenbach doesn’t sit down because he doesn’t want to stain his furniture with his own sweat. His continuing to stand puts Eccles in a petitionary position, sitting on the bench like a choirboy. The odor of meat cooking grows more insistent as he explains what he thinks happened: how Harry has been in a sense spoiled by his athletic successes; how the wife, to be fair, had perhaps showed little imagination in their marriage; how he himself, as minister, had tried to keep the boy’s conscience in touch with his wife without pressing him into a premature reunion, for the boy’s problem wasn’t so much a lack of feeling as an uncontrolled excess of it; how the four parents, for various reasons, were of little help; how he had witnessed, just minutes ago, a quarrel between the Angstroms that perhaps offered a clue as to why their son—

“Do you think,” Kruppenbach at last interrupts, “do you think this is your job, to meddle in these people’s lives? I know what they teach you at seminary now: this psychology and that. But I don’t agree with it. You think now your job is to be an unpaid doctor, to run around and plug up the holes and make everything smooth. I don’t think that. I don’t think that’s your job.” “I only—” “No now let me finish. I’ve been in Mt. Judge twenty-seven years and you’ve been here two. I’ve listened to your story but I wasn’t listening to what it said about the people, I was listening to what it said about you. What I heard was this: the story of a minister of God selling his message for a few scraps of gossip and a few games of golf. What do you think now it looks like to God, one childish husband leaving one childish wife? Do you ever think any more what God sees? Or have you grown beyond that?” “No, of course not. But it seems to me our role in a situation like this—” “It seems to you our role is to be cops, cops without handcuffs, without guns, without anything but our human good nature. Isn’t it right? Don’t answer, just think if I’m not right. Well, I say that’s a Devil’s idea. I say, let the cops be cops and look after their laws that have nothing to do with us.” “I agree, up to a point—” “There iss no up to a point! There is no reason or measure in what we must do.” His thick forefinger, woolly between the knuckles, has begun to tap emphasis on the back of a leather chair. “If...

“Will you kneel a moment with me and pray for Christ to come into this room?” “No. No I won’t. I’m too angry. It would be hypocritical.” The refusal, unthinkable from a layman, makes Kruppenbach, not softer, but stiller. “Hypocrisy,” he says mildly. “You have no seriousness. Don’t you believe in damnation? Didn’t you know when you put that collar on, what you risked?”

He turns without waiting for Jack to answer and goes downstairs for supper. Jack descends behind him and continues out the door. His heart is beating like a scolded child’s and his knees are weak with fury. He had come for an exchange of information and been flagellated with an insane spiel. Unctuous old thundering Hun, no conception of the ministry as a legacy of light, probably himself scrambled into it out of a butcher’s shop. Jack realizes that these are spiteful and unworthy thoughts but he can’t stop them. His depression is so deep that he tries to gouge it deeper by telling himself He’s right, he’s right as he sits behind the pearl-gray steering wheel. He bows his head so his forehead touches an arc of its perfect plastic circle, but he can’t cry; he’s parched. His shame and failure hang downward in him heavy but fruitless.

Club Castanet was named during the war when the South American craze was on and occupies a triangular building where Warren Avenue crosses Running Horse Street at an acute angle. It’s in the south side of Brewer, the Italian-Negro-Polish side, and Rabbit distrusts it. With its glass-brick windows grinning back from the ridge of its face it looks like a fortress of death; the interior is furnished in the glossy low-lit style of an up-to-date funeral parlor, potted green plants here and there, music piped soothingly, and the same smell of strip rugs and fluorescent tubes and Venetian-blind slats and, the most inner secretive smell, of alcohol. You drink it and then you’re embalmed in it. Ever since a man down from them on Jackson Road lost his job as an undertaker’s assistant and became a bartender, Rabbit thinks of the two professions as related; men in both talk softly and are always seen standing up. He and Ruth sit at a booth near the front, where they get through the window a faint fluctuation of red light as the neon castanet on the sign outside flickers back and forth between its two positions, that imitate clicking.

Momentarily drained of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which it has driven him. His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief. There is no God; Janice can die: the two thoughts come at once, in one slow wave. He feels underwater, caught in chains of transparent slime, ghosts of the urgent ejaculations he has spat into the mild bodies of women. His fingers on his knees pick at persistent threads.

Harry sits wordless staring through the windshield, rigid in body, rigid in spirit. The curving highway seems a wide straight road that has opened up in front of him. There is nothing he wants to do but go down it.

Sleep this night is not a dark haunted domain the mind must consciously set itself to invade, but a cave inside himself, into which he shrinks while the claws of the bear rattle like rain outside.

The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.

Dabbling in the sandbox gives Rabbit a small headache. Over at the pavilion the rubber thump of roof ball and the click of checkers call to his memory, and the forgotten smell of that narrow plastic ribbon you braid bracelets and whistle-chains out of and of glue and of the sweat on the handles on athletic equipment is blown down by a breeze laced with children’s murmuring. He feels the truth: the thing that has left his life has left irrevocably; no search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.

What is this? He has a sensation of touching glass. He doesn’t know if they are talking about nothing or making code for the deepest meanings.

He expects never to go to sleep and, awaking with the slant of sunshine and the noise of doors slamming downstairs, feels his body has betrayed his soul. He dresses in haste, more panicked now than at any time yesterday. The event is realer. Invisible cushions press against his throat and slow his legs and arms; the kink in his chest has grown thick and crusty. Forgive me, forgive me, he keeps saying silently to no one.

They cling together in a common darkness; he feels the walls between them dissolve in a flood of black; but the heavy knot of apprehension remains in his chest, his own.

“Right and wrong aren’t dropped from the sky. We. We make them. Against misery. Invariably, Harry, invariably”—he grows confident of his ability to negotiate long words—“misery follows their disobedience. Not our own, often at first not our own. Now you’ve had an example of that in your own life.”

“I warned you,” he says, “I warned you, Harry, but youth is deaf. Youth is careless.”

hate suits him better than forgiveness. Immersed in hate he doesn’t have to do anything; he can be paralyzed, and the rigidity of hatred makes a kind of shelter for him.

but with his mother there’s no question of liking him they’re not even in a way separate people he began in her stomach and if she gave him life she can take it away and if he feels that withdrawal it will be the grave itself.

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.

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, down 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 that flicker through 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.

These patches, some of them broad enough to catch a bit of the sun slanting down the mountainside, make the surrounding darkness darker, and in pausing in them Rabbit becomes conscious, by its cessation, of a whisper that fills the brown tunnels all around him.

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 the path. At places where a hole has been opened up in a roof of evergreen, prickly bushes and yellow grasses grow in a hasty sweet-smelling tumble, and midges swarm. These patches, some of them broad enough to catch a bit of the sun slanting down the mountainside, make the surrounding darkness darker, and in pausing in them Rabbit becomes conscious, by its cessation, of a whisper that fills the brown tunnels all around him. 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.

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 menace, 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 binding hot blue 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 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 silent monkey.

In the treacherous light the slope of land is like some fleeing, dodging creature.

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 wildly, 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 fear, 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 spring, boys scarring the trees with marks of play, growing old on boards stretched above the cellarhole, dying with a last look out the window at the bank where Rabbit 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 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. In the treacherous light the slope of land is like some fleeing, dodging creature.

You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.

He tries to picture how it will end, with an empty baseball field, a dark factory, and then over a brook into a dirt road, he doesn’t know. He pictures a huge vacant field of cinders and his heart goes hollow.

he doesn’t know, what to do, where to go, what will happen, the thought that he doesn’t know seems to make him infinitely small and impossible to capture. Its smallness fills him like a vastness.

There is light, though, in the streetlights; muffled by trees their mingling cones retreat to the unseen end of Summer Street. Nearby, to his left, directly under one, the rough asphalt looks like dimpled snow. He decides to walk around the block, to clear his head and pick his path. Funny, how what makes you move is so simple and the field you must move in is so crowded. His legs take strength from the distinction, scissor along evenly. Goodness lies inside, there is nothing outside, those things he was trying to balance have no weight. He feels his inside as very real suddenly, a pure blank space in the middle of a dense net. I don’t know, he kept telling Ruth; he doesn’t know, what to do, where to go, what will happen, the thought that he doesn’t know seems to make him infinitely small and impossible to capture. Its smallness fills him like a vastness. It’s like when they heard you were great and put two men on you and no matter which way you turned you bumped into one of them and the only thing to do was pass. So you passed and the ball belonged to the others and your hands were empty and the men on you looked foolish because in effect there was nobody there.

Although this block of brick three-stories is just like the one he left, something in it makes him happy; the steps and windowsills seem to twitch and shift in the corner of his eye, alive. This illusion trips him. His hands lift of their own and he feels the wind on his ears even before, his heels hitting heavily on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: runs. Runs.

Rabbit comes to the curb but instead of going to his right and around the block he steps down, with as big a feeling as if this little sidestreet is a wide river, and crosses. He wants to travel to the next patch of snow. Although this block of brick three-stories is just like the one he left, something in it makes him happy; the steps and windowsills seem to twitch and shift in the corner of his eye, alive. This illusion trips him. His hands lift of their own and he feels the wind on his ears even before, his heels hitting heavily on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: runs. Runs.