Rabbit, Run - John Updike [56]
And the ball feels it too, the ball he hits after a little advice from Eccles. It sputters away to one side, crippled by a perverse topspin that makes it fall from flight as dumpily as a blob of clay.
Eccles laughs. “That’s the best first drive I ever saw.”
“It’s not a first drive. I used to hit the ball around when I was a caddy. I should do better than that.”
“You expect too much of yourself. Watch me, that’ll make you feel better.”
Rabbit stands back and is surprised to see Eccles, who has a certain spring in his unconscious movements, swing with a quaint fifty-year-old stiffness. As if he has a pot to keep out of the way. He punches the ball with weak solidity. It goes straight, though high and weak, and he seems delighted with it. He fairly prances into the fairway. Harry trails after him heavily. The soggy turf, raw and wet from recently thawing, sinks beneath his big suede shoes. They’re on a seesaw; Eccles goes up, he comes down.
Down in the pagan groves and green alleys of the course Eccles is transformed. Brainless gaiety animates him. He laughs and swings and clucks and calls. Harry stops hating him; he himself is so awful. Ineptitude seems to coat him like a scabrous disease; he is grateful to Eccles for not fleeing from him. Often Eccles, fifty yards further on—he has an excited gleeful habit of running ahead—comes all the way back to find a ball Harry has lost. Somehow Rabbit can’t tear his attention from where the ball should have gone, the little ideal napkin of clipped green pinked with a pretty flag. His eyes can’t keep with where it did go. “Here it is,” Eccles says. “Behind a root. You’re having terrible luck.”
“This must be a nightmare for you.”
“Not at all, not at all. You’re extremely promising. You’ve never played and yet you haven’t once missed the ball completely.”
This does it; he aims and in the murderous strength of his desire to knock it out in spite of the root he misses the ball completely.
“You only mistake is trying to use your height,” Eccles says. “You have a beautiful natural swing.” Rabbit whacks again and the ball flops out and wobbles a few yards.
“Bend to the ball,” Eccles says. “Imagine you’re about to sit down.”
“I’m about to lie down,” Harry says. He feels sick, giddily sick, sucked deeper into a vortex whose upper rim is marked by the tranquil tips of the leafing trees. He seems to remember having been up there once. He skids into puddles, is swallowed by trees, infallibly sinks into the mangy scruff at the sides of the fairways.
Nightmare is the word. In waking life only animate things slither and jerk for him this way. He’s always had a touch with objects. His unreal hacking dazes his brain; half-hypnotized, it plays tricks whose strangeness dawns on him slowly. In his head he talks to the clubs as if they’re women. The irons, light and thin yet somehow treacherous in his hands, are Janice. Come on, you dope, be calm; here we go, easy. When the slotted club face gouges the dirt behind the ball and the shock jolts up his arms to his shoulders his thought is that Janice has struck him. Oh, dumb, really dumb. Screw her. Just screw her. Anger turns his skin rotten, so the outside seeps through; his insides go jagged with the tiny dry forks of bitter scratching brambles, the brittle silver shaft one more stick, where words hang like caterpillar nests that can’t be burned away. She stubs stubs fat she stubs the dirt torn open in a rough brown mouth