Rabbit, Run - John Updike [28]
“No, Harry, no. You did more for me than I did for you. Girls, the first game he played he scored twenty points.”
“Twenty-three,” Harry says.
“Twenty-three points! Think of it.” The girls eat on. “Remember, Harry, the state tournaments in Harrisburg; Dennistown and their little set-shot artist.”
“He was tiny,” Harry tells Ruth. “About five two and ugly as a monkey. Really a dirty player too.”
“Ah, but he knew his trade,” Tothero says, “he knew his trade. He had us, too, until Harry went wild.”
“All of a sudden the basket looked big as a well. Everything I threw went in. Then this runt trips me.”
“So he did,” Tothero says. “I’d forgotten.”
“He trips me, and over I go, bonk, against the mat. If the walls hadn’t been padded I’da been killed.”
“Then what happened, Harry? Did you cream him? I’ve forgotten this whole incident.” Tothero’s mouth is full of food and his hunger for revenge is ugly.
“Why, no,” Rabbit says slowly. “I never fouled. The ref saw it and it was his fifth foul and he was out. Then we smothered ‘em.”
Something fades in Tothero’s expression; his face goes slack. “That’s right, you never fouled. Harry was always the idealist.”
Rabbit shrugs. “I didn’t have to.”
“The other strange thing about Harry,” Tothero tells the two women. “He was never hurt.”
“No, I once sprained my wrist,” Rabbit corrects. The thing you said that really helped me—”
“What happened next in the tournaments? I’m frightened at how I’ve forgotten this.”
“Next? Pennoak, I think. Nothing happened. They beat us.”
“They won? Didn’t we beat them?”
“Oh hell no. They were good. They had five good players. What’d we have? Just me, really. We had Harrison, who was O.K., but after that football injury he never had the touch, really.”
“Ronnie Harrison?” Ruth asks.
Rabbit is startled. “You know him?” Harrison had been a notorious bedbug.
“I’m not sure,” she says, complacently enough.
“Shortish guy with kinky hair. A little bitty limp.”
“No, I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t think so.” She is pleasingly dexterous with the chopsticks, and keeps one hand lying palm up on her lap. He loves when she ducks her head, that thick simple neck moving forward making the broad tendons on her shoulder jump up, to get her lips around a piece of something. Pinched with just the right pressure between the sticks; funny how plump women have that delicate touch. Margaret shovels it in with her dull bent silver.
“We didn’t win,” Tothero repeats, and calls, “Waiter.” When the boy comes Tothero asks for another round of the same drinks.
“No, not for me, thanks,” Rabbit says. “I’m high enough on this as it is.”
“You’re just a big clean-living kid, aren’t you, you,” Margaret says. She doesn’t even know his name yet. God, he hates her.
“The thing, I started to say, the thing you said that really helped me,” Rabbit says to Tothero, “is that business about almost touching your thumbs on the two-handers. That’s the whole secret, really, getting the ball in front of your hands, where you get that nice lifty feeling. Just zwoops off.” His hands show how.
“Oh, Harry,” Tothero says sadly, “you could shoot when you came to me. All I gave you was the will to win. The will to achievement.”
“You know my best night,” Rabbit says, “my best night wasn’t that forty-pointer that time against Allenville, it was in my junior year, we went down to end of the county real early in the season to play, a funny little hick school, about a hundred in all six grades; what was its name? Bird’s Nest? Something like that. You’ll remember.”
“Bird’s Nest,” Tothero says. “No.”
“It was the only time I think we ever scheduled them. Funny little square gymnasium where the crowd sat up on the stage. Some name that meant something.”
“Bird’s Nest,” Tothero says. He is bothered. He keeps touching his ear.
“Oriole!” Rabbit exclaims, perfect in joy. “Oriole High. This little kind of spread-out town, and it was early in the season, so it was kind of warm still, and going down in the bus you could see the things