slope of the pavement. A green car goes by too slowly. Miss Arndt sticks in his way, amiably confused, grateful for something, her simple adherence to the pavement it seems, like a fly who stops walking on the ceiling to marvel at itself.
“How do you like the weather?” he asks.
“I love it, I love it; Palm Sunday is always blue. It makes the sap rise in my legs.” She laughs and he follows; she stands rooted to the hot cement between the feathery shade of two maples. She knows nothing, he becomes certain.
“Yes,” he says, for her eyes have snagged on his arms. “I seem to be doing spring cleaning.” He shrugs the bundle to clarify.
“Good,” she says, with a surprising sarcastic snarl. “You young husbands, you certainly take the bit in your teeth.” Then she twists, and exclaims, “Why, there’s a clergyman in there!”
The green car has come back, even more slowly, down the center of the street. With a dismay that makes the bundle of clothes double its weight in his arms, Rabbit realizes he is pinned. He lurches from the porch and strides past Miss Arndt saying, “I got to run,” right on top of her considered remark, “It’s not Reverend Kruppenbach.”
No, of course not Kruppenbach; Rabbit knows who it is, though he doesn’t know his name. Episcopal. The Springers were Episcopalians, more of the old bastard’s social climbing, everyone else was Lutheran or Reformed if they were anything. He doesn’t quite run; the downward pavement jars his heels at every stride, he can’t see the cement under the bundle he carries. If he can just make the alley. His one hope is the preacher can’t be sure it’s him. He feels the green car crawling behind him; he thinks of throwing the clothes away and really running. If he could get into the old ice plant. But it’s a block away. He feels Ruth, the dishes done, waiting on the other side of the mountain. Blue beyond blue under blue.
As a shark nudges silent creases of water ahead of it the green fender makes ripples of air that break against the back of Rabbit’s knees. The faster he walks the harder these ripples break. Behind his ear a childishly twanging voice pipes, “I beg your pardon. Are you Harry Angstrom?”
With a falling sensation of telling a lie Rabbit turns and half-whispers, “Yes.”
The fair young man with his throat manacled in white lets his car glide diagonally against the curb, yanks on the handbrake, and shuts off the motor, thus parking on the wrong side of the street, cockeyed. Funny how ministers ignore small laws. Rabbit remembers how Kruppenbach’s son used to tear around town on a motorcycle. It always impressed him. “Well, I’m Jack Eccles,” this minister says, and inconsequently laughs a syllable. The white stripe of an unlit cigarette hanging from his lips makes with the echoing collar a comic picture in the car window. He gets out of his car, a ‘58 olive Buick four-door, and offers his hand. To accept it Rabbit has to put his big ball of clothes down in the strip of grass between the pavement and curb.
Eccles’ handshake, eager and practiced and hard, seems to symbolize for him an embrace. For an instant Rabbit fears he will never let go. He feels caught, foresees explanations, embarrassments, prayers, reconciliations rising up like dank walls; his skin prickles in desperation. He feels tenacity in his captor.
The minister is about his age or a little older and a good bit shorter. But not small; a sort of needless muscularity runs under his black coat. He stands edgily, with his chest faintly cupped. He has long reddish eyebrows that push a worried wrinkle around above the bridge of his nose, and a little pale pointed knob of a chin tucked under his mouth. Despite his looking vexed there is something friendly and silly about him.
“Where are you going?” he asks.
“Huh? Nowhere.” Rabbit is distracted by the man’s suit; it only feigns black. It is really blue, a sober but elegant, lightweight, midnight blue. While his little vest or bib or whatever is black as a stove. The effort of keeping the cigarette between his lips twists Eccles’ laugh into a snort. He slaps the breasts of his coat. “Do you have a match by any chance?”
“Gee I’m sorry, no. I quit smoking.”
“You’re a better man than I am.” He- pauses and thinks, then looks at Harry with startled, arched eyebrows. The distention makes