by John Updike
It is too early to meet Buchanan. He walks back through the West Brewer side streets toward Weiser, through the dulling summer light and the sounds of distant games, of dishes rattled in kitchen sinks, of television muffled to a murmur mechanically laced with laughter and applause, of cars driven by teenagers laying rubber and shifting down. Children and old men sit on the porch steps beside the lead-colored milk-bottle boxes. Some stretches of sidewalk are brick; these neighborhoods, the oldest in West Brewer, close to the river, are cramped, gentle, barren. Between the trees there is a rigid flourishing of hydrants, meters, and signs, some of them – virtual billboards in white on green – directing motorists to superhighways whose number is blazoned on the federal shield or on the commonwealth keystone; from these obscure West Brewer byways, sidewalks and asphalt streets rumpled comfortably as old clothes, one can be arrowed toward Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington the national capital, New York the headquarters of commerce and fashion. Or in the other direction can find Pittsburgh and Chicago. But beneath these awesome metal insignia of vastness and motion fat men in undershirts loiter, old ladies move between patches of gossip with the rural waddle of egg-gatherers, dogs sleep curled beside the cooling curb, and children with hockey sticks and tape-handled bats diffidently chip at whiffle balls and wads of leather, whittling themselves into the next generation of athletes and astronauts. Rabbit’s eyes sting in the dusk, in this smoke of his essence, these harmless neighborhoods that have gone to seed. So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls. He stops at a corner grocery for a candy bar, an Oh Henry, then at the Burger Bliss on Weiser, dazzling in its lake of parking space, for a Lunar Special (double cheeseburger with an American flag stuck into the bun) and a vanilla milkshake, that tastes toward the bottom of chemical sludge.
The interior of Burger Bliss is so bright that his fingernails, with their big mauve moons, gleam and the coins he puts down in payment seem cartwheels of metal. Beyond the lake of light, unfriendly darkness. He ventures out past a dimmed drive-in bank and crosses the bridge. High slender arc lamps on giant flower stems send down a sublunar light by which the hurrying cars all appear purple. There are no other faces but his on the bridge. From the middle, Brewer seems a web, to which glowing droplets adhere. Mt. Judge is one with the night. The luminous smudge of the Pinnacle Hotel hangs like a star.
Gnats bred by the water brush Rabbit’s face; Janice’s desertion nags him from within, a sore spot in his stomach. Ease off beer and coffee. Alone, he must take care of himself. Sleeping alone, he dreads the bed, watches the late shows, Carson, Griffin, cocky guys with nothing to sell but their brass. Making millions on sheer gall. American dream: when he first heard the phrase as a kid he pictured God lying sleeping, the quilt-colored map of the U.S. coming out of his head like a cloud. Peggy’s embrace drags at his limbs. Suit feels sticky. Jimbo’s Friendly Lounge is right off the Brewer end of the bridge, a half-block down from Plum. Inside it, all the people are black.
Black to him is just a political word but these people really are, their faces shine of blackness turning as he enters, a large soft white man in a sticky gray suit. Fear travels up and down his skin, but the music of the great green-and-mauve-glowing jukebox called Moonmood slides on, and the liquid of laughter and tickled muttering resumes flowing; his entrance was merely a snag. Rabbit hangs like a balloon waiting for a dart; then his elbow is jostled and Buchanan is beside him.
“Hey, man, you made it.” The Negro has materialized from the smoke. His overtrimmed mustache looks wicked in here.
“You didn’t think I would?”
“Doubted it,” Buchanan says. “Doubted it severely.”
“It was your idea.”
“Right. Harry, you are right. I’m not arguing, I am rejoicing. Let’s fix you up. You need a drink, right?”
“I don’t know, my stomach’s getting kind of sensitive.”
“You need two drinks. Tell me your poison.”
“Maybe a Daiquiri?”
“Never. That is a lady’s drink for salad luncheons. Rufe, you old rascal.”
“Yazzuh, yazzuh,” comes the answer from the bar.
“Do a Stinger for the man.”
“Yaz-zuh.”
Rufe has a bald head like one of the stone hatchets in the Brewer Museum, only better polished. He bows into the marine underglow of the bar and Buchanan leads Rabbit to a booth in the back. The place is deep and more complicated than it appears from the outside. Booths recede and lurk: darkwood cape-shapes. Along one wall, Rufe and the lowlit bar; behind and above it, not only the usual Pabst and Bud and Miller’s gimcracks bobbing and shimmering, but two stuffed small deer-heads, staring with bright brown eyes that will never blink. Gazelles, could they have been gazelles? A space away, toward a wall but with enough room for a row of booths behind, a baby grand piano, painted silver with one of those spray cans, silver in circular swirls. In a room obliquely off the main room, a pool table: colored boys all arms and legs spidering around the idyllic green felt. The presence of any game reassures Rabbit. Where any game is being played a hedge exists against fury. “Come meet some soul,” Buchanan says. Two shadows in the booth are a man and a woman. The man wears silver circular glasses and a little pussy of a goatee and is young. The woman is old and wrinkled and smokes a yellow cigarette that requires much sucking in and holding down and closing of the eyes and sighing. Her brown eyelids are gray, painted blue. Sweat shines below the base of her throat, on the slant bone between her breasts, as if she had breasts, which she does not, though her dress, the blood-color of a rooster’s comb, is cut deep, as if she did. Before they are introduced she says “Hi” to Harry, but her eyes slit to pin him fast in the sliding of a dream.
“This man,” Buchanan is announcing, “is a co-worker of mine, he works right beside his daddy at Ver-i-ty Press, an expert Lino-typist,” giving syllables an odd ticking equality, a put-on or signal of some sort? “But not only that. He is an ath-e-lete of renown, a basketball player bar none, the Big O of Brewer in his day.”
“Very beautiful,” the other dark man says. Round specs tilt, glint. The shadow of a face they cling to feels thin in the darkness. The voice arises very definite and dry.
“Many years ago,” Rabbit says, apologizing for his bulk, his bloated pallor, his dead fame. He sits down in the booth to hide.
“He has the hands,” the woman states. She is in a trance. She says, “Give old Babe one of those hands, white boy.” A-prickle with nervousness, wanting to sneeze on the sweetish smoke, Rabbit lifts his right hand up from his lap and lays it on the slippery table. Innocent meat. Distorted paw. Reminds him of, on television, that show with chimpanzees synchronized with talk and music, the eerie look of having just missed the winning design.
The woman touches it. Her touch reptilian cool. Her eyes lift, brooding. Above the glistening bone her throat drips jewels, a napkin of rhinestones or maybe real diamonds; Cadillacs after all, alligator shoes, they can’t put their money into real estate like whites; Springer’s thrifty Toyotas not to the point. His mind is racing with his pulse. She has a silver sequin pasted beside one eye. Accent the ugly until it becomes gorgeous. Her eyelashes are great false crescents. That she has taken such care of herself leads him to suspect she will not harm him. His pulse slows. Her touch slithers nice as a snake. “Do dig that thumb,” she advises the air. She caresses his thumb’s curve. Its thin-skinned veined ball. Its colorless moon nail. “That thumb means sweetness and light. It is an indicator of pleasure in Sagittarius and Leo.” She gives one knuckle an affectionate pinch.
The Negro not Buchanan (Buchanan has hustled to the bar to check on the Stinger) says, “Not like one of them usual little sawed-off nuggers these devils come at you with, right?”
Babe answers, not yielding her trance, “No, sir. This thumb here is extremely plausible. Under the right signs it would absolutely function. Now these knuckles here, they aren’t so good, I don’t get much music
out of these knuckles.” And she presses a chord on them, with fingers startlingly hard and certain. “But this here thumb,” she goes back to caressing it, “is a real enough heartbreaker.”
“All these Charlies is heartbreakers, right? Just cause they don’t know how to shake their butterball asses don’t mean they don’t get Number One in, they gets it in real mean, right? The reason they so mean, they has so much religion, right? That big white God go tells ’em, Screw that black chick, and they really wangs away ’cause God’s right there slappin’ away at their butterball asses. Cracker spelled backwards is fucker, right?”
Rabbit wonders if this is how the young Negro really talks, wonders if there is a real way. He does not move, does not even bring back his hand from the woman’s inspection, her touches chill as teeth. He is among panthers.
Buchanan, that old rascal, bustles back and sets before Rabbit a tall pale glass of poison and shoves in so Rabbit has to shove over opposite the other man. Buchanan’s eyes check around the faces and guess it’s gotten heavy. Lightly he says, “This man’s wife, you know what? That woman, I never had the pleasure of meeting her, not counting those Verity picnics where Farnsworth, you all know Farnsworth now – ?”
“Like a father,” the young man says, adding, “Right?”
“– gets me so bombed out of my mind on that barrel beer I can’t remember anybody by face or name, where was I? Yes, that woman, she just upped and left him the other week, left him flat to go chasing around with some other gentleman, something like an I-talian, didn’t you say Harry?”
“A Greek.”
Babe clucks. “Honey, now what did he have you didn’t? He must of had a thumb long as this badmouth’s tongue.” She nudges her companion, who retrieves from his lips this shared cigarette, which has grown so short it must burn, and sticks out his tongue. Its whiteness shocks Rabbit; a mouthful of luminous flesh. Though fat and pale, it does not look very long. This man, Rabbit sees, is a boy; the patch of goatee is all he can grow. Harry does not like him. He likes Babe, he thinks, even though she has dried hard, a prune on the bottom of the box. In here they are all on the bottom of the box. This drink, and his hand, are the whitest thing around. Not to think of the other’s tongue. He sips. Too sweet, wicked. A thin headache promptly begins.
Buchanan is persisting, “Don’t seem right to me, healthy big man living alone with nobody now to comfort him.”
The goatee bobs. “Doesn’t bother me in the slightest. Gives the man time to think, right? Gets the thought of cunt off his back, right? Chances are he has some hobby he can do, you know, like woodwork.” He explains to Babe, “You know, like a lot of these peckerwoods have this clever thing they can do down in their basements, like stamp collecting, right? That’s how they keep making it big. Cleverness, right?” He taps his skull, whose narrowness is padded by maybe an inch of tight black wool. The texture reminds Rabbit of his mother’s crocheting, if she had used tiny metal thread. Her blue bent hands now helpless. Even in here, family sadness pokes at him, probing sore holes.
“I used to collect baseball cards,” he tells them. He hopes to excite enough rudeness from them so he can leave. He remembers the cards’ bubble-gum smell, their silken feel from the powdered sugar. He sips the Stinger.
Babe sees him make a face. “You don’t have to drink that piss.” She nudges her neighbor again. “Let’s have one more stick.”
“Woman, you must think I’m made of hay.”
“I know you’re plenty magical, that’s one thing. Off that uptight shit, the ofay here needs a lift and I’m nowhere near spaced enough to pee-form.”
“Last drag,” he says, and passes her the tiny wet butt.
She crushes it into the Sunflower Beer ashtray. “This roach is hereby dead.” And holds her thin hand palm up for a hit.
Buchanan is clucking. “Mother-love, go easy on yourself,” he tells Babe.
The other Negro is lighting another cigarette; the paper is twisted at the end and flares, subsides. He passes it to her saying, “Waste is a sin, right?”
“Hush now. This honeyman needs to loosen up, I hate to see ’em sad, I always have, they aren’t like us, they don’t have the insides to accommodate it. They’s like little babies that way, they passes it off to someone else.” She is offering Rabbit the cigarette, moist end toward him.
He says, “No thanks, I gave up smoking ten years ago.”
Buchanan chuckles, with thumb and forefinger smooths his mustache sharper.
The boy says, “They’re going to live forever, right?”
Babe says, “This ain’t any of that nicotine shit. This weed is kindness itself.”
While Babe is coaxing him, Buchanan and the boy diagonally discuss his immortality. “My daddy used to say, Down home, you never did see a dead white man, any more’n you’d see a dead mule.”
“God’s on their side, right? God’s white, right? He doesn’t want no more Charlies up there to cut into his take, he has it just fine the way it is, him and all those black angels out in the cotton.”
“Your mouth’s gonta hurt you, boy. The man is the lay of the land down here.”
“Whose black ass you hustling, hers or yours?”
“You just keep your smack in the heel of your shoe.”
Babe is saying, “You suck it in as far as it’ll go and hold it down as long as you absolutely can. It needs to mix with you.”
Rabbit tries to comply, but coughing undoes every puff. Also he is afraid of getting “hooked,” of being suddenly jabbed with a needle, of starting to hallucinate because of something dropped into his Stinger. AUTOPSY ORDERED IN FRIENDLY LOUNGE DEATH. Coroner Notes Atypical Color of Skin.
Watching him cough, the boy says, “He is beautiful. I didn’t know they still came with all those corners. Right out of the crackerbox, right?”
This angers Rabbit enough to keep a drag down. It burns his throat and turns his stomach. He exhales with the relief of vomiting and waits for something to happen. Nothing. He sips the Stinger but now it tastes chemical like the bottom of that milkshake. He wonders how he can get out of here. Is Peggy’s offer still open? Just to feel the muggy kiss of summer night on the Brewer streets would be welcome. Nothing feels worse than other people’s good times.
Babe asks Buchanan, “What’d you have in mind, Buck?” She is working on the joint now and the smoke includes her eyes.
The fat man’s shrug jiggles Rabbit’s side. “No big plans,” Buchanan mutters. “See what develops. Woman, way you’re goin’, you won’t be able to tell those black keys from the white.”
She plumes smoke into his face. “Who owns who?”
The boy cuts in. “Ofay doesn’t dig he’s a John, right?”
Buchanan, his smoothness jammed, observes, “That mouth again.”
Rabbit asks loudly, “What else shall we talk about?” and twiddles his fingers at Babe for the joint. Inhaling still burns, but something is starting to mesh. He feels his height above the others as a good, a lordly, thing.
Buchanan is probing the other two. “Jill in tonight?”
Babe says, “Left her back at the place.”
The boy asks, “On a nod, right?”
“You stay away, hear, she got herself clean. She’s on no nod, just tired from mental confusion, from fighting her signs.”
“Clean,” the boy says, “what’s clean? White is clean, right? Cunt is clean, right? Shit is clean, right? There’s nothin’ not clean the law don’t go pointing its finger at it, right?”
“Wrong,” Babe says. “Hate is not clean. A boy like you with hate in his heart, he needs to wash.”
“Wash is what they said to Jesus, right?”
“Who’s Jill?” Rabbit asks.
“Wash is what Pilate said he thought he might go do, right? Don’t go saying clean to me, Babe, that’s one darkie bag they had us in too long.”
Buchanan is still delicately prying at Babe. “She coming in?”
The other cuts in, “She’ll be in,
can’t keep that cunt away; put locks on the doors, she’ll ooze in the letter slot.”
Babe turns to him in mild surprise. “Now you loves little Jill.”
“You can love what you don’t like, right?”
Babe hangs her head. “That poor baby,” she tells the tabletop, “just going to hurt herself and anybody standing near.”
Buchanan speaks slowly, threading his way. “Just thought, man might like to meet Jill.”
The boy sits up. Electricity, reflected from the bar and the streets, spins around his spectacle rims. “Gonna match ’em up,” he says, “you’re gonna cut yourself in on an all-honky fuck. You can out-devil these devils any day, right? You could of out-niggered Moses on the hill.”
He seems to be a static the other two put up with. Buchanan is still prying at Babe across the table. “Just thought,” he shrugs, “two birds with one stone.”
A tear falls from her creased face to the tabletop. Her hair is done tight back like a schoolgirl’s, a red ribbon in back. It must hurt, with kinky hair. “Going to take herself down all the way, it’s in her signs, can’t slip your signs.”
“Who’s that voodoo supposed to boogaboo?” the boy asks. “Whitey here got so much science he don’t even need to play the numbers, right?”
Rabbit asks, “Is Jill white?”
The boy tells the two others angrily, “Cut the crooning, she’ll be here, Christ, where else would she go, right? We’re the blood to wash her sins away, right? Clean. Shit, that burns me. There’s no dirt made that cunt won’t swallow. With a smile on her face, right? Because she’s clean.” There seems to be not only a history but a religion behind his anger. Rabbit sees this much, that the other two are working to fix him up with this approaching cloud, this Jill, who will be pale like the Stinger, and poisonous.
He announces, “I think I’ll go soon.”
