Rabbit, Run - By John Updike Page 0,17

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.

The man turns, looking more tired than Rabbit had expected. A short man with a big balding head, he had played when basketball was still a quick man’s game. He seems foreshortened: this big head and a massive checkered sports coat and then stubby legs in blue trousers that are too long, so the crease buckles and zigzags above the shoes. As he brakes his run, and walks the last strides, Rabbit fears he’s made a mistake.

But Tothero says the perfect thing. “Harry,” he says, “the great Harry Angstrom.” He puts out his hand for Harry to seize and with the other squeezes the boy’s arm in a clasp of rigor. It comes back to Rabbit how he always had his hands on you. Tothero just