• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4417 0

hidden from Rabbit’s angle, must have taken the beans. The others around the table express praise, blurred syllables from his father, piercing from his sister, something thin about both voices. Rabbit, with the intervening glass and the rustle of blood in his head, can’t hear what they say. His father, fresh from work, is in an ink-smeared blue shirt and, when his face lapses from applauding his grandson, looks old: tired and grizzled. His throat a loose bundle of cords. The new teeth he got a year ago have changed his face, collapsed it a fraction of an inch. Miriam, dolled up in gold and jet for Friday night, picks at her food indifferently and offers a spoonful to the kid; the reach of her slender white braceleted arm across the steaming table rings a barbaric chord into the scene. She makes up too much; at nineteen she would be good enough without green eyelids. Because she has buck teeth she tries not to smile. Nelson’s big whorly head dips on its bright neck and his foreshortened hand, dots of pink, dabbles toward the spoon, wants to take it from her. Pop’s face lurches into laughter above his plate, and Mim’s lips leap in a grin that cracks her cautious wised-up squint and breaks through to the little girl Rabbit used to ride on his handlebars, her streaming hair tickling his eyes as they coasted down the steep Mt. Judge streets. She lets Nelson take her spoon and he drops it. The kid cries “Peel! Peel!”: this Rabbit can hear, and understand. It means “spill.” Pop and Mim smile and make . remarks but Mom, mouth set, comes in neatly with her spoon. Harry’s boy is being fed, this home is happier than his, he glides a pace backward over the cement and rewalks the silent strip of grass.

His acts take on decisive haste. In darkness he goes down another block of Jackson. He cuts up Joseph Street, runs a block, strides another, and comes within sight of his car, its grid grinning at him, parked the wrong way on this side of the street. He taps his pocket and fear hits him. He doesn’t have the key. Everything depends, the whole pure idea, on which way Janice was sloppy. Either she forgot to give him the key when be went out or she never bothered to take it out of the ignition. He tries to imagine which is more likely and can’t. He doesn’t know her that well. He never knows what the hell she’ll do. She doesn’t know herself. Dumb.

The back but not the front of the big Springer house is lit up. He moves cautiously in the sweet-smelling shadows under the trees in case the old lady is waiting inside the darkened living-room to tell him what she thinks. He crosses around in front of the car, the ‘55 Ford that old man Springer with his little yellow Hitler mustache sold him for an even thousand in 1957 because the scared bastard was ashamed, cars being his business he was ashamed of his daughter marrying somebody who had nothing but a ‘36 Buick he bought for $125 in the Army in Texas in 1953. Made him cough up a thousand he didn’t have when the Buick had just had eighty dollars’ worth of work. That was the kind of thing. They deserve everything they get. He opens the car from the passenger side, wincing at the pung of the brittle door spring and quickly ducking his head into the car. Thank God. Beneath the knobs for lights and wipers the octagon of the ignition key tells in silhouette. Bless that dope. Rabbit slithers in, closing the side door until metal touches metal but not slamming it. The front of the stucco Springer house is still unlit. It reminds him for some reason of an abandoned ice-cream stand. He turns the key through On into Start and the motor churns and catches. In his anxiety to be secret he is delicate on the accelerator and the motor, idle for hours in the air of an early spring day, is cold, sticks, and stalls. Rabbit’s heart rises and a taste of straw comes into his throat. But of course what the hell if she does come out? The only thing suspicious is that he doesn’t have the kid and he can say he’s on his way to pick him up. That would have been the logical way to do it anyway. Nevertheless he doesn’t want