Rabbit, Run - By John Updike Page 0,19

fidgets with his coat pocket flaps.

The tiny room faces east. A slash in a window shade throws a long knife of sun on a side wall, above an unmade Army cot. The other shade is up. Between the windows stands a bureau cleverly made of six beer cases wired together, three high and two wide. In the six boxes are arranged shirts in their laundry cellophane, folded undershirts and shorts, socks balled in pairs, handkerchiefs, shined shoes, and a leatherbacked brush with a comb stuck in the bristles. From two thick nails some sport coats, jarringly gay in pattern, are hung on hangers. Tothero’s housekeeping stops at caring for his clothes. The floor is dotted with rolls of fluff. Newspapers and all kinds of magazines, from the National Geographic to teen-age crime confessions and comic books, are stacked around. The space where Tothero lives merges easily with the rest of the attic, which is storage space, containing old pinochle tournament charts and pool tables and some lumber and metal barrels and broken chairs with cure bottoms and a roll of chickenwire and a rack of softball uniforms, hung on a pipe fixed between two slanting beams and blocking out the light from the window at the far end.

“Is there a men’s?” Rabbit asks.

“Downstairs, Harry.” Tothero’s enthusiasm has died; he seems embarrassed. While Rabbit uses the toilet he can hear the old man fussing around upstairs, but when he returns he can see nothing changed. The bed is still unmade.

Tothero waits and Rabbit waits and then realizes Tothero wants to see him undress and undresses, sliding into the rumpled lukewarm bed in his T shirt and Jockey shorts. Though the idea is distasteful, getting into the old man’s hollow, the sensations are good, being able to stretch out at last and feeling the solid cool wall close to him and hearing cars moving maybe hunting him far below. He twists his neck to say something to Tothero and is surprised by solitude. The door at the foot of the attic steps has closed and footsteps diminish down one, two flights of stairs, and a key scratches in the outside door and a bird cries by the window and the clangor of the body shop comes up softly. The old man’s standing there was disturbing but Rabbit is sure that’s not his problem. Tothero’s problem he knows is in the other direction, female. Why watch? Suddenly Rabbit knows. It takes Tothero back in time. Because of all the times he had stood in locker rooms watching his boys change clothes. Solving this problem relaxes Rabbit’s muscles. He remembers the couple with linked hands running on the parking lot outside the diner in West Virginia and regrets that it hadn’t been him about to nail her. Feel her open up in the cavity of the car, her seaweed hair sprawling. Red hair? There? He imagines West Virginia girls as coarse hard-bodied laughers, like the young whores in Texas. Their sugar drawls always seemed to be poking fun but then he was so young. Coming down the street Hanley and Jarzylo and Shamberger the tight khaki making him feel nervous and the plains breaking away on all sides the horizon no higher than his it seemed and the houses showing families sitting on inside like chickens at roost facing TV’s. Jarzylo a maniac, cackling. Rabbit couldn’t believe this house was right. It had flowers in the window, actual living flowers innocent in the window and he was tempted to turn and run. Sure enough the woman who came to the door could have been on television selling cake mix. But she said, “Come on in boys, don’t be shaaeh, come on in and heyiv a good taam,” said it so motherly, and there they were, not as many as he had pictured, in the parlor on old-fashioned-looking furniture with scrolls and knobs. That they were pretty homely made him less timid, just ordinary factory-looking women, you wouldn’t even call them girls, with a glaze on their faces like under fluorescent lights. They pelted the soldiers with remarks like balls of dust and the men sneezed into laughter and huddled together surprised and numb. The one he took, but she took him, came up and touched him, hadn’t buttoned her blouse more than one button from the last one and upstairs asked him in her gritty sugar voice if he wanted the light on or off and when out of choked throat he answered “Off”