Rabbit, Run - John Updike [17]
Throughout the early morning the music keeps coming and the signs keep pointing. His brain feels like a frail but alert invalid packed inside among a lot of deep pillows with messengers bringing him down long corridors all this music and geographical news. At the same time he feels abnormally sensitive on the surface, as if his skin is thinking. The steering wheel is thin as a whip in his hands. As he turns it lightly he can feel the shaft stiffly pivot, and the differential gears part, and the bearings rotate in their sealed tunnels of grease. The phosphorescent winkers at the side of the road beguile him into thinking of young Du Pont women: strings of them winding through huge glassy parties, potentially naked in their sequined sheath gowns.
He wonders why there are so many signs coming back and so few going down. Of course he didn’t know what he was going toward going down. He takes the Brewer turnoff off the Pike and the road takes him through the town where he first bought gas. As he takes the road marked BREWER 16 he can see cattycornered across the main street the dirtdigger’s pumps and his dark window full of glinting shovels and fishing rods. The window looks pleased. There is just a touch of light in the air. The radio’s long floe of music is breaking up in warm-weather reports and farm prices.
He comes into Brewer from the south, seeing it as a gradual multiplication of houses among the trees beside the road and then as a treeless waste of industry, shoe factories and bottling plants and company parking lots and knitting mills converted to electronics parts and elephantine gas tanks lifting above trash-filled swampland yet lower than the blue edge of the mountain from whose crest Brewer was a warm carpet woven around a single shade of brick.
He crossed the Running Horse Bridge and is among streets he knows. He takes Warren Avenue through the south side of town and comes out on 422 near City Park. He drives around the mountain in company with a few hissing trailer trucks. As he turns left from Central into Jackson he nearly sideswipes a milk truck idling yards out from the curb. He continues up Jackson, past his parents’ house, and turns into Kegerise Alley, and in the clear dawn light he glides past the old chicken house, past the silent body shop, and parks the car in front of the Sunshine Athletic Association, a few steps from the boxed-in entrance, where anyone coming out would have to notice. Rabbit glances up hopefully at the third-story windows but no light is showing. Tothero, if he is in there, is still asleep.
Rabbit settles himself to sleep. He takes off his suit coat and lays it over his chest like a blanket. But the daylight is growing, and the front seat is far too short, and the steering wheel crowds his shoulders. He doesn’t move to the back seat because 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