felt like the whole business was fetching and hauling, all the time trying to hold this mess together she was making all the time. I don’t know, it seemed like I was glued in with a lot of busted toys and empty glasses and television going and meals late and no way of getting out. Then all of a sudden it hit me how easy it was to get out, just walk out, and by damn it was easy.”
“For less than two days, it’s been.”
“Oh. There’s the law I suppose—”
“I wasn’t thinking of that so much. Your mother-in-law thought of it immediately, but your wife and Mr. Springer are dead against it. I imagine for different reasons. Your wife seems almost paralyzed; she doesn’t want anyone to do anything.”
“Poor kid. She’s such a mutt.”
“Why are you here?”
“ ‘Cause you caught me.”
“I mean why were you in front of your home?”
“I came back to get clean clothes.”
“Do clean clothes mean so much to you? Why cling to that decency if trampling on the others is so easy?”
Rabbit feels now the danger of talking; his words are coming back to him, little hooks and snares are being fashioned. “Also I was leaving her the car.”
“Why? Don’t you need it, to escape?”
“I just thought she should have it. Her father sold it to us cheap. Anyway it didn’t do me any good.”
“No?” Eccles stubs his cigarette out in the car ashtray and goes to his coat pocket for another. They are rounding the mountain, at the highest stretch of road, where the hill rises too steeply on one side and falls too steeply on the other to give space to a house or gasoline station. The river down below. “Now if I were to leave my wife,” he says, “I’d get into a car and drive a thousand miles.” It almost seems like advice; coming calmly from above the white collar.
“That’s what I did!” Rabbit cries, delighted by how much they have in common. “I drove as far as West Virginia. Then I thought the hell with it and came back.” He must try to stop swearing; he wonders why he’s doing it. To keep them apart, maybe; he feels a dangerous tug drawing him toward this man in black.
“Should I ask why?”
“Oh I don’t know. A combination of things. It seemed safer to be in a place I know.”
“You didn’t come back to protect your wife?”
Rabbit is wordless at the idea.
Eccles continues, “You speak of this feeling of muddle. What do you think it’s like for other young couples? In what way do you think you’re exceptional?”
“You don’t think I can tell ya but I will. I once played a game real well. I really did. And after you’re first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate. And that little thing Janice and I had going, boy, it was really second-rate.”
The dashboard lighter pops. Eccles uses it and quickly returns his eyes to his driving. They’ve come down into the outskirts of Brewer. He asks, “Do you believe in God?”
Having rehearsed that this morning, Rabbit answers promptly, “Yes.”
Eccles blinks in surprise. The furry lid in his one-eyed profile shutters, but his face does not turn. “Do you think, then, that God wants you to make your wife suffer?”
“Let me ask you. Do you think God wants a waterfall to be a tree?” This question of Jimmy’s sounds, Rabbit realizes, ridiculous; he is annoyed that Eccles simply takes it in, with a sad drag of smoke. He realizes that no matter what he says, Eccles will take it in with the same weary smoke; he is a listener by trade. His big fair head seems stuffed with a gray mash of everybody’s precious secrets and passionate questions, a mash that nothing, young as he is, can color. For the first time, Rabbit dislikes him.
“No,” Eccles says after thought. “But I think He wants a little tree to become a big tree.”
“If you’re telling me I’m not mature, that’s one thing I don’t cry over since as far as I can make out it’s the same thing as being dead.”
“I’m immature myself,” Eccles offers.
It’s not enough of an offering. Rabbit tells him off. “Well, I’m not going back to that little dope no matter how sorry you feel for her. I don’t know what she feels. I never have. All I know is what’s inside me. That’s all I have. Do you know what I was