Rabbit, Run - John Updike [44]
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 his gray eyes seem round and as pale as glass. “Can I give you a lift?”
“No. Hell. Don’t bother.”
“I’d like to talk to you.”
“No; you don’t really want to, do you?”
“I do, yes. Very much.”
“Yeah. O.K.” Rabbit picks up his clothes and walks around the front of the Buick and gets in. The interior has that sweet tangy plastic new-car smell; he takes a deep breath of it and cools his fear. “This is about Janice?”
Eccles nods, staring out the rear window as he backs away from the curb. His upper lip overhangs his lower; there are scoops of weary violet below his eyes.
“How is she? What did she do?”
“She seems much saner today. She and her father came to church this morning.” They drive down the street. Eccles adds nothing, just gazes through the windshield, blinking. He pokes the lighter in on the dashboard.
“I thought she’d be with them,” Rabbit says. He is getting slightly annoyed at the way the minister isn’t bawling him out or something; he doesn’t seem to know his job.
The lighter pops. Eccles puts it to his cigarette, inhales, and seems to come back into focus. “Evidently,” be says, “when you didn’t come back in half an hour she called your parents and had your father bring your boy over to your apartment. Your father, I gather, was very reassuring and told her you had probably been sidetracked somewhere. She remembered you had been late getting home because of some street game and thought you might have gone back to it. I believe your father even walked around town looking for the game.”
“Where