Rabbit, Run - By John Updike Page 0,11

bridge.”

Sixteen. He had driven forty miles to get sixteen miles away.

But it was far enough, this was another world. It smells differently, smells older, of nooks and pockets in the ground that nobody’s stirred yet. “Suppose I go straight?”

“That’ll take you to Churchtown.”

“What’s after Churchtown?”

“New Holland. Lancaster.”

“Do you have any maps?”

“Son, where do you want to go?”

“Huh? I don’t know exactly.”

“Where are you headed?” The man is patient. His face at the same time seems fatherly and crafty and stupid.

For the first time, Harry realizes he is a criminal. He hears the gasoline rise in the neck of the tank and notices with what care the farmer squeezes every drop he can into the tank without letting it slosh over the lip insolently the way a city garageman would. Out here a drop of gas isn’t supposed to escape and he’s in the middle of it at night. Laws aren’t ghosts in this country, they walk around with the smell of earth on them. Senseless fear cakes over Rabbit’s body.

“Check the oil?” the man asks in a voice of startling softness after hanging up the hose on the side of the rusty pump, one of the old style, with the painted bubble head.

“No. Wait. Yeah. You better had. Thanks.” Simmer down. All he’d done was ask for a map. Damn dirtdigger so stingy, what was suspicious about that? Somebody was always going somewhere. He better get the oil checked because he wasn’t going to stop again until he was halfway to Georgia. “Hey, how far is Lancaster south of here?”

“Due south? Don’t know. It’s about twenty-five miles on the road. Your oil’s all right. You think you’re going to Lancaster now?”

“Yeah, I might.”

“Check your water?”

“No. It’s O.K.”

“Batteries?”

“They’re fine. Let’s go.”

The man lets the hood slam down and smiles over at Harry. “That’s three-ninety on the gas, young fella”: the words are pronounced in that same heavy cautious crippled way.

Rabbit puts four ones in his paw. He disappears into the hardware store; maybe he’s phoning the state cops. He acts like he knows something, but how could he? Rabbit itches to duck into the car and drive off. To steady himself he counts the money left in his wallet. Seventy-three. Today was payday. Fingering so much lettuce strengthens his nerves. Switching off the lights in the hardware store as he comes, the farmer comes back with the dime and no map. Harry cups his hand for the dime and the man pushes it in with his broad thumb and says, “Looked around inside and the only road map is New York State. You don’t want to go that way, do you now?”

“No,” Rabbit answers, and walks to his car door. He feels through the hairs on the back of his neck the man following him. He gets into the car and slams the door and the farmer is right there, the meat of his face hung in the open door window. He bends down and nearly sticks his face in. His cracked thin lips with a scar tilting toward his nose move thoughtfully. He’s wearing glasses, a scholar. “The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you’re going before you go there.”

Rabbit catches a whiff of whisky. He says in a level way, “I don’t think so.” The lips and spectacles and black hairs poking out of the man’s tear-shaped nostrils show no surprise. Rabbit pulls out, going straight. Everybody who tells you how to act has whisky on their breath.

He drives to Lancaster and all the way his good airy feeling inside is spoiled. That that guy didn’t know a thing but was just half-crocked makes the whole region sinister. Outside of Churchtown he passes an Amish buggy in the dark and catches a glimpse of a bearded man and a woman in black in this horsedrawn shadow glaring like devils. The beard inside the buggy like hairs in a nostril. He tries to think of the good life these people lead, of the way they keep clear of all this phony business, this twentieth-century vitamin racket, but in his head they stay devils, risking getting killed trotting along with one dim pink reflector behind, hating Rabbit and his kind, with their big furry tail lights. Who they think they were? He can’t shake them, mentally. They never appeared in his rear-view mirror. He passed them and there was nothing. It was just that one sideways glance; the woman’s face a hatchet of smoke in