Rabbit at Rest

by John Updike

  He does not always gravitate in his health walks to the black section of Deleon; he discovers and explores posh streets he never dreamed were there, long roads parallel to the beach, giving the passerby glimpses of backs of houses that front on the ocean, wooden back stairs and sundecks, three-car garages at the end of driveways surfaced in crushed seashells, plantings of hibiscus and jacaranda, splashing sounds coming from a fenced-in swimming pool, the purr of air-conditioners lost amid the retreating and advancing shush of the surf. Posh, shoosh. Some people have it made; not for them a condo where they steal your view of the Gulf from the balcony. No matter how hard you climb, there are always the rich above you, who got there without effort. Lucky stiffs, holding you down, making you discontent so you buy more of the crap advertised on television.

  Occasional breaks in the developed oceanfront property permit a look at the Gulf, its striped sails and scooting jet skis, its parachutes being pulled by powerboats, its far gray stationary freighters. Bicyclers in bathing suits pass him with a whirr; a beefy young mailman in blue-gray shorts and socks to match pushes along one of these pouches on rubber wheels they have now, like baby strollers. We’re getting soft. A nation of couch potatoes. The man who brought the mail to Jackson Road, he forgets his name, an iron-haired man with a handsome unhappy face, Mom said his wife had left him, used to carry this scuffed leather pouch, leaning to one side against its pull especially on Fridays when the magazines came to the houses, Life and the Post. Mr. Abendroth. That was his name. Left by his wife: Harry as a boy used to try to imagine what could have been so terribly wrong with him, to earn such a disgrace in life.

  His Nikes with the bubbles of air in the heels take him along crushed-shell sidewalks, so white they hurt his eyes when the sun is high. And he walks through an area of marinas cut into coral shell, neat straight streets of water sliced out, full of powerboats tied up obedient and empty, their rub rails tapping the sliced coral, their curved sides seeming to tremble and twitch in the sunlight reflected in bobbling stripes off the calm water as it lightly kicks and laps. Tap. Lap. No Trespassing signs abound, but not so much for him, a respectable-looking white man past middle age. Each boat ties up as much money as a house used to cost and a number of them no doubt are involved in cocaine smuggling, put-putting out in the dead of the night when the moon is down, crime and the sea have always mixed, pirates ever since there have been ships, law ends with the land, man is nothing out there, a few bubbles as he goes down under the mindless waves: that must be why Harry has always been afraid of it, the water. He loves freedom but a grassy field is his idea of enough. People down here are crazy about boats but not him. Give him terra firma. Away from the water he walks miles of plain neighborhoods, glorified cabins put up after the war for people without much capital who yet wanted a piece of the sun Washington won for them or else were born here, this strange thin vacation-land their natural home, their houses shedding paint like a sunbather’s clothes, surrounded not by barberry and yew bushes but spiky cactuses fattening in the baking heat, America too hot and dry really for European civilization to take deep root.

  But it is the widespread black section that draws him back, he doesn’t quite know why, whether because he is exerting his national right to go where he pleases or because this ignored part of Deleon is in some way familiar, he’s been there before, before his life got too soft. On the Monday after a pretty good weekend for blacks - a black Miss America got elected, and Randall Cunningham brought the Eagles back from being down to the Redskins twenty to nothing - Rabbit ventures several blocks farther than he has dared walk before and comes upon, beyond an abandoned high school built about when Brewer High was, an ochre-brick edifice with tall gridded windows and a piece of Latin in cement over the main entrance, a recreation field - a wide tan emptiness under the sun, with a baseball diamond and backstop at the far end, a pair of soccer goals set up in the outfield, and, nearer the street, two pitted clay tennis courts with wire nets slack and bent from repeated assaults and, also of pale tamped earth, a basketball court. A backboard and netless hoop lifted up on pipe legs preside at either end. A small pack of black boys are scrimmaging around one basket. Legs, shouts. Puffs of dust rise from their striving, stop-and-starting feet. Some benches have been placed in an unmowed strip of seedy blanched weeds next to the cement sidewalk. The benches are backless so you can sit facing the street or facing the field. Rabbit seats himself on the end of one, facing neither way, so he can watch the basketball while seeming to be doing something else, just resting a second on his way through, not looking at anything, minding his own business.

  The kids, six of them, in shorts and tank tops, vary in heights and degrees of looseness, but all have that unhurried look he likes to see, missing shots or making them, passing back out and then crossing over in a screen, dribbling as if to drive in and then stopping dead to pass off in a droll behind-the-back toss, imitating the fancy stuff they see on television, all together making a weave, nobody trying too hard, it’s a long life, a long afternoon. Their busy legs are up to their knees in a steady haze of pink dust lifting from the clay, their calves dulled but for where sweat makes dark rivulets, their sneakers solidly coated a rosy earth color. There is a breeze here, stirred up by the empty space stretching to the baseball backstop. Rabbit’s watch says four o’clock, school is over, but the brick high school has been abandoned, the real action is elsewhere, at some modern low glassy high school you take a bus to, out on the bulldozed edges of the city. Rabbit is happy to think that the world isn’t yet too crowded to have a few of these underused pockets left. Grass, he observes, has crept onto the dirt court, in the middle, where the pounding, pivoting feet rarely come. Shallow semicircular troughs have been worn around the baskets at either end.

  Though he is sitting some distance away - a good firm chip shot, or a feathered wedge - the players eye him. They’re doing this for themselves, not as a show for some fat old honky walking around where he shouldn’t be. Where’s his car? Feeling heat from their sidelong glances, not wanting so delicate a relation to turn awkward, Harry sighs ostentatiously and heaves himself up from the bench and walks away the way he came, taking note of the street signs so he can find this peaceful place again. If he comes every day he’ll blend in. Blacks don’t have this racist thing whites do, about keeping their neighborhoods pure. They can’t be too angry these days, with their third Miss America just elected. The funny thing about the final judges’ panel, it held two celebrities he feels he knows, has taken into himself, loves, actually: Phylicia Rashad, who for his money is the real star of The Cosby Show, with those legs and that nice loose smile, and Mike Schmidt, who had the grace to pack it in when he could no longer produce. So there is life after death of a sort. Schmidt judges. Skeeter lives. And the weekend before last, a young black girl beat Chrissie Evert in the last U.S. Open match she’ll ever play. She packed it in too. There comes a time.

  Now the News-Press wears daily banner headlines tracking Hurricane Hugo -Deadly Hugo roars into islands, Hugo rips into Puerto Rico. Tuesday, he walks in the expensive beachfront areas and scans the sky for hurricane signs, for clouds God’s finger might write, and reads none. In the hall that evening, happening to be standing with him at the elevators, Mrs. Zabntski turns those veiny protuberant eyes up at him out of her skeletal face and pronounces, “Terrible thing.”

  “What is?”

  “The thing coming,” she says, her white hair looking already wind-tossed, lifted out from her skull in all directions.

  “Oh, it’ll never get here,” Harry reassures her. “It’s all this media hype. You know, hype, phony hullabaloo. They have to make news out of something, every night.”

  “Yeah?” Mrs. Zabritski says, coyly. The way her neck twists into her hunched shoulders gives her head a flirtatious tilt she may not mean. But then again she may. Didn’t he hear on some TV show that even in the Nazi death camps there were romances? This windowless corridor, with its peach-and-silver wallpaper, is an eerie cryptli
ke space he is always anxious to get out of. The big vase on the marble half-moon table, with green glaze running into golden, could be holding someone’s ashes. Still the elevator refuses to arrive. His female companion clears her throat and volunteers, “Wednesday buffet tomorrow. I like extra much the buffet.”

  “Me too,” he tells her. “Except I can’t choose and then I wind up taking too much and then eating it all.” What is she suggesting, that they go together? That they have a date? He’s stopped telling her that Janice is coming down.

  “Do you do the kosher?”

  “I don’t know. Those scallops wrapped in bacon, are they kosher?”

  She stares at him as if he were the crazy one, stares so hard her eyeballs seem in danger of snapping the bloody threads that hold them fast in their sockets. Then she must have decided he was joking, for a careful stiff smile slowly spreads across the lower half of her face, crisscrossed by wrinkles like a quilt sewn of tiny squares of skin. He thinks of that little sniffly slut in the Polish-American Club, her silken skin below the waist, below the sweater, and feels bitter toward Janice, for leaving him at his age at the mercy of women. He eats at his table alone but is so disturbed by Mrs. Zabritski’s making a pass at him that he takes two Nitrostats to quell his heart.

  After dinner, in bed, on September 1, 1781, the French troops make a dazzling impression upon the citizens of Philadelphia. Ecstatic applause greeted the dazzling spectacle of the French as they passed in review in their bright white uniforms and white plumes. Wearing colored lapels and collars of pink, green, violet or blue identifying their regiments, they were the most brilliantly appointed soldiers in Europe. Joseph Reed, the President of the State of Pennsylvania, entertained the French officers at a ceremonial dinner of which the main feature was an immense ninety pound turtle with soup served in its shell. Talk about cholesterol. Didn’t seem to bother them, but, then, how old did those poor devils get to be? Not fifty-six, most of them. The troops are scared to march south for fear of malaria. Rochambeau has talked Washington out of attacking New York, and at this point seems to be the brains of the Revolution. He wants to rendezvous with De Grasse at the head of the Chesapeake. De Grasse has evaded Hood by sailing the back-alley route between the Bahamas and Cuba. It will never work.

  Hugo headingfor U.S., the News-Press headline says next morning. For breakfast now, Harry has switched from Frosted Flakes to Nabisco Shredded Wheat ‘n’ Bran, though he forgets exactly why, something about fiber and the bowels. He does hope he never reaches the point where he has to think all the time about shitting. Ma Springer, toward the end, got to talking about her bowel movements like they were family heirlooms, each one precious. On the evening news half the commercials are for laxatives and the other half for hemorrhoid medicine, as if only assholes watch the news. That walking corpse in the locker room. After breakfast Harry walks along Pindo Palm Boulevard and brings back a bag of groceries from Winn Dixie, passing up the Keystone Corn Chips and going heavy on the low-cal frozen dinners. The day’s predicted showers come at noon but seem over by three and in a kind of trance Rabbit drives into downtown Deleon, parks at a two-hour meter, and walks the mile to the playing field he discovered Monday. Today two sets of boys are on the dirt court, each using one basket. One set is energetically playing a two-on-two, but the other consists of three boys at a desultory game of what he used to call Horse. You take a shot, and if it goes in the next guy has to make the same shot, and if he misses he’s an H, or an H-O, and when he’s a HORSE he’s out. Rabbit takes the bench within a chip shot of this group and frankly watches - after all, is it a free country or not?

  The three are in their early teens at best, and don’t know what to make of this sudden uninvited audience. One of these old ofays after some crack or a black boy’s dick? Their languid motions stiffen, they jostle shoulders and pass each other sliding silent messages that make one another giggle. One of them perhaps deliberately lets a pass flip off his hands and bounce Harry’s way. He leans off his bench end and stops it left-handed, not his best hand but it remembers. It remembers exactly. That taut pebbled roundness, the smooth seams between, the little circlet for taking the air valve. A big pebbled ball that wants to fly. He flips it back, a bit awkwardly, sitting, but still with a little zing to show he’s handled one before. Somewhat satisfied, the trio resume Horse, trying skyhooks, under-the-basket layups, fall-back jumpers, crazy improvised underhanded or sidearm shots that now and then go in, by accident or miracle. One such wild toss rockets off the rim and comes Rabbit’s way. This time he stands up with the ball and advances with it toward the boys. He feels himself big, a big shape with the sun behind him. His shadow falls across the face of the nearest boy, who wears an unravelling wool cap of many colors. Another boy has the number 8 on his tank top. “What’s the game?” Harry asks them. “You call it Horse?”

  “We call it Three,” the wool cap answers reluctantly. “Three misses, you out.” He reaches for the ball but Rabbit lifts it out of his reach.

  “Lemme take a shot, could I?”

  The boys’ eyes consult, they figure this is the way to get the ball back. “Go ‘head,” Wool Cap says.

  Harry is out on an angle to the left maybe twenty feet and as his knees dip and his right arm goes up he feels the heaviness of the years, all those blankets of time, since he did this last. A bank shot. He has the spot on the backboard in his sights, but the ball doesn’t quite have the length and, instead of glancing off and in, jams between the wood and hoop and kicks back into the hands of Number 8.

  “Hey man,” the third one, the one who looks most Hispanic and most sullen, taunts him, “you’re history!”

  “I’m rusty,” Rabbit admits. “The air down here is different than I’m used to.”

  “You want to see somebody sink that shot?” Number 8, the tallest, asks him. He stands where Harry stood, and opens his mouth and lets his pink tongue dangle the way Michael Jordan does. He gently paws the air above his forehead so the ball flies from his long loose brown hand. But he misses also, hitting the rim on the right. This breaks some of the ice. Rabbit holds still, waiting to see what they will do with him.

  The boy in the hat of concentric circles, a Black Muslim hat, Harry imagines, takes the rebound and now says, “Let me sink that mother,” and indeed it does go in, though the boy kind of flings it and, unlike Number 8, will never be a Michael Jordan.

  Now or never. Harry asks, “Hey, how about letting me play one game of, whaddeya call it, Three? One quick game and I’ll go. I’m just out walking for exercise.”

  The sullen Hispanic-looking boy says to the others, “Why you lettin’ this man butt in? This ain’t for my blood,” and goes off and sits on the bench. But the other two, figuring perhaps that one white man is the tip of the iceberg and the quickest way around trouble is through it, oblige the interloper and let him play. He goes a quick two misses down - a floating double-pump Number 8 pulls off over the stretched hands of an imaginary crowd of defenders, and a left-handed pop the wool hat establishes and Number 8 matches - but then Rabbit finds a ghost of his old touch and begins to dominate. Take a breath of oxygen, keep your eye on the front of the rim, and it gets easy. The distance between your hands and the hoop gets smaller and smaller. You and it, ten feet off the ground, above it all. He even shows them a stunt he perfected in the gravel alleys of Mt. Judge, the two-handed backwards set, the basket sighted upside, the head bent way back.

  Seen upside down, how blue and stony-gray the cloudy sky appears - an abyss, a swallowing, upheaving kind of earth! He sinks the backwards set shot and all three of them laugh. These kids never take two-handed set shots, it’s not black style, and by doing nothing else from five steps out Rabbit might have cleaned up. But, since they were good sports to let him in, he lets himself get sloppysilly on a few one-handers, and Number 8 gains back control.

  “Here you see a Kareem sky-hook,” the boy says, and does sink a hook from about six feet out, on the right.

  “When I wa
s a kid,” Rabbit tells them, “a guy called Bob Pettit, played for St. Louis, used to specialize in those.” Almost on purpose, he misses. “That gives me three. I’m out. Thanks for the game, gentlemen.”

  They murmur wordlessly, like bees, at this farewell. To the boy sitting on the bench out of protest, he says, “All yours, amigo.” Bending down to pick up the furled golf umbrella he brought along in case it rained again, Harry smiles to see that his walking Nikes are coated with a pink-tan dust just like these black boys’ sneakers.

  He walks back to his car at the meter feeling lightened, purged like those people on the Milk of Magnesia commercials who drift around in fuzzy focus in their bathrobes ecstatic at having become “regular.” His bit of basketball has left him feeling cocky. He stops at a joy Food Store on the way back to Valhalla Village and buys a big bag of onion-flavored potato chips and a frozen lasagna to heat up in the oven instead of going down to the buffet and risking running into Mrs. Zabritski. He’s beginning to think he owes her something, for keeping him company on the floor, for being another lonely refugee.