Rabbit Redux

by John Updike

  “I believe all of it,” Rabbit says.

  “Do you believe, do you believe I’m so mad just telling this if I had a knife right now I’d poke it down your throat and watch you gargle your life away and would love it, oh, would I love it.” Skeeter is weeping. Tears and smoke mix on the skin of his face.

  “O.K., O.K.,” Rabbit says.

  “Skeeter, don’t cry,” Nelson says.

  “Skeeter, it was too rich, I’m going to lose it,” Jill says and stands. “I’m dizzy.”

  But Skeeter will talk only to Harry. “What I want to say to you,” he says, “what I want to make ever so clear, Chuck, is you had that chance. You could have gone some better road, right? You took that greedy turn, right? You sold us out, right? You sold yourselves out. Like Lincoln said, you paid in blood, sword for the lash and all that, and you didn’t lift us up, we held out our hands, man, we were like faithful dogs waiting for that bone, but you gave us a kick, you put us down, you put us down.”

  “Skeeter, please don’t ever give me any more of that whatever it was, ever, ever,” Jill says, drifting away.

  Skeeter controls his crying, lifts his face darkened in streaks like ashes wetted down. “It wasn’t just us, you sold yourselves out, right? You really had it here, you had it all, and you took that greedy mucky road, man, you made yourself the asshole of the planet. Right? To keep that capitalist thing rolling you let those asshole crackers have their way and now you’s all asshole crackers, North and South however you look there’s assholes, you lapped up the poison and now it shows, Chuck, you say America to you and you still get bugles and stars but say it to any black or yellow man and you get hate, right? Man the world does hate you, you’re the big pig keeping it all down.” He jabs blearily with his skinny finger, and hangs his head.

  From upstairs, discreet as the noise a cat makes catching a bird, comes a squeezed heaving noise, Jill being sick.

  Nelson asks, “Dad, shouldn’t you call a doctor?”

  “She’ll be O.K. Go to bed. You have school tomorrow.”

  Skeeter looks at Rabbit; his eyeballs are fiery and rheumy. “I said it, right?”

  “Trouble with your line,” Rabbit tells him, “it’s pure self-pity. The real question is, Where do you go from here? We all got here on a bad boat. You talk as if the whole purpose of this country since the start has been to frustrate Negroes. Hell, you’re just ten per cent. The fact is most people don’t give a damn what you do. This is the freest country around, make it if you can, if you can’t, die gracefully. But Jesus, stop begging for a free ride.”

  “Friend, you are wrong. You are white but wrong. We fascinate you, white man. We are in your dreams. We are technology’s nightmare. We are all the good satisfied nature you put down in yourselves when you took that mucky greedy turn. We are what has been left out of the industrial revolution, so we are the next revolution, and don’t you know it? You know it. Why else you so scared of me, Rabbit?”

  “Because you’re a spook with six loose screws. I’m going to bed.”

  Skeeter rolls his head loosely, touches it dubiously. In the light from the driftwood lamp his round mass of hair is seen as insubstantial, his skull narrow as the bone handle of a knife. He brushes at his forehead as if midges are there. He says, “Sweet dreams. I’m too spaced to sleep right now, I got just to sit here, nursing the miseries. Mind if I play the radio if I keep it low?”

  “No.”

  Upstairs, Jill, a sudden warm wisp in his arms, begs with rapid breath, “Get him out of here, Harry, don’t let him stay, he’s no good for me, no good for any of us.”

  “You brought him here.” He takes her talk as the exaggerating that children do, to erase their fears by spelling them out; and indeed in five minutes she is dead asleep, motionless. The electric clock burns beyond her head like a small moon’s skeleton. Downstairs, a turned-down radio faintly scratches. And shortly Rabbit too is asleep. Strangely, he sleeps soundly, with Skeeter in the house.

  “Harry, how about a quick one?” His father tells the bartender, as always, “Let’s make it a Schlitz.”

  “Whisky sour,” he says. Summer is over, the air-conditioning in the Phoenix has been turned off. He asks, “How’s Mom doing?”

  “As good as can be hoped, Harry.” He nudges a conspiratorial inch closer. “That new stuff really seems to do the job, she’s on her feet for hours at a time now. For my money, though, the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question is what the long-range effects will be. The doctor, he’s perfectly honest about it. He says to her when we go on in to the hospital, ‘How’s my favorite guinea pig?’”

  “What’s the answer?” Rabbit abruptly asks.

  His father is startled. “Her answer?”

  “Anybody’s.”

  His father now understands the question and shrugs his narrow shoulders in his faded blue shirt. “Blind faith,” he suggests. In a mutter he adds, “One more bastard under the ground.”

  On the television above the bar men are filing past a casket, but the sound is turned off and Rabbit cannot tell if it is Everett Dirksen’s funeral service in Washington, or Ho Chi Minh’s ceremonies in Hanoi. Dignitaries look alike, always dressed in mourning. His father clears his throat, breaks the silence. “Janice called your mother last night.”

  “Boy, I think she’s cracking up, she’s on the phone all the time. Stavros must be losing his muscle.”

  “She was very disturbed, she said you’d taken a colored man into your house.”

  “I didn’t exactly take him, he kind of showed up. Nobody’s supposed to know about it. I think he’s Farnsworth’s son.”

  “That can’t be, Jerry’s never married to my knowledge.”

  “They don’t marry generally, right? They weren’t allowed to as slaves.”

  This bit of historical information makes Earl Angstrom grimace. He takes, what for him, with his boy, is a tough line. “I must say, Harry, I’m not too happy about it either.”

  The funeral (the flag on the coffin has stars and stripes, so it must be Dirksen’s) vanishes, and flickering in its place are shots of cannons blasting, of trucks moving through the desert, of planes soundlessly batting through the sky, of soldiers waving. He cannot tell if they are Israeli or Egyptian. He asks, “How happy is Mom about it?”

  “I must say, she was very short with Janice. Suggested if she wanted to run your household she go back to it. Said she had no right to complain. I don’t know what all else. I couldn’t bear to listen; when women get to quarrelling, I head for the hills.”

  “Janice talk about lawyers?”

  “Your mother didn’t mention it if she did. Between you and me, Harry, she was so upset it scared me. I don’t believe she slept more than two, three hours; she took twice the dose of Seconal and still it couldn’t knock her out. She’s worried and, pardon my crust for horning in where I have no business, Harry, so am I.”

  “Worried about what?”

  “Worried about this new development. I’m no nigger-hater, I’m happy to work with ’em and I have for twenty years, if needs be I’ll live next to ’em though the fact is they haven’t cracked Mt. Judge yet, but get any closer than that, you’re playing with fire, in my experience.”

  “What experience?”

  “They’ll let you down,” Pop says. “They don’t have any feeling of obligation. I’m not blaming a soul, but that’s the fact, they’ll let you down and laugh about it afterwards. They’re not ethical like white men and there’s no use saying they are. You asked me what experience, I don’t want to go into stories, though there’s plenty I could tell, just remember I was raised in the Third Ward back when it was more white than black, we mixed it up in every sense. I know the people of this county. They’re good-natured people. They like to eat and drink and like to have their red-light district and their numbers, they’ll elect the scum to political office time and time again; but they don’t like seeing their women desecrated.”

  “Who’s being desecrated?”

&
nbsp; “Just that menagerie over there, the way you’re keeping it, is a desecration. Have you heard from your neighbors what they think about it yet?”

  “I don’t even know my neighbors.”

  “That black boy shows his face outside, you’ll get to know them; you’ll get to know them as sure as I’m sitting here trying to be a friend and not a father. The day when I could whip sense into you is long by, Harry, and anyway you gave us a lot less trouble than Mim. Your mother always says you let people push you around and I always answer her, Harry knows his way around, he lands on his feet; but I’m beginning to see she may be right. Your mother may be all crippled up but she’s still hard to fool, ask the man who’s tried.”

  “When did you try?”

  But this secret – had Pop played Mom false? – stays dammed behind those loose false teeth the old man’s mouth keeps adjusting, pensively sucking. Instead he says, “Do us a favor, Harry, I hate like hell to beg, but do us a favor and come over tonight and talk about it. Your mother stiff-armed Janice but I know when she’s been shook.”

  “Not tonight, I can’t. Maybe in a couple of days, things’ll clear up.”

  “Why not, Harry? We promise not to grill you or anything, Lord, I wouldn’t ask for myself, it’s your mother’s state of mind. You know” – and he slides so close their shirt sleeves touch and Rabbit smells the sour fog of his father’s breath – “she’s having the adventure now we’re all going to have to have.”

  “Stop asking, Pop. I can’t right now.”

  “They’ve gotcha in their clutches, huh?”

  He stands straight, decides one whisky sour will do, and answers, “Right.”

  That night after supper they discuss slavery. Jill and Skeeter have done the dishes together, Rabbit has helped Nelson with his homework. The kid is into algebra this year but can’t quite manage that little flip in his head whereby a polynomial cracks open into two nice equalities of x, one minus and one plus. Rabbit had been good at math, it was a game with limits, with orderly movements and a promise of completion at the end. The combination always cracked open. Nelson is tight about it, afraid to let go and swing, a smart kid but tight, afraid of maybe that thing that got his baby sister: afraid it might come back for him. They have half an hour before Laugh-In, which they all want to watch. Tonight Skeeter takes the big brown chair and Rabbit the one with silver threads. Jill and Nelson sit on the airfoam sofa. Skeeter has some books; they look childishly bright under his thin brown hands. School days. Sesame Street.

  Skeeter says to Rabbit, “Chuck, I been thinking I sold out the truth last night when I said your slavery was a country thing. The fact upon reflection appears to be that your style of slavery was uniquely and e-specially bad, about the worst indeed this poor blood-soaked globe has ever seen.” Skeeter’s voice as he speaks exerts a steady pressure, wind rattling a dead tree. His eyes never deviate to Nelson or Jill.

  Rabbit, a game student (in high school he used to get B’s), asks, “What was so bad about it?”

  “Let me guess what you think. You think it wasn’t so bad on the plantations, right? What with banjos and all the fritters you could eat and Ol’ Massah up at the big house instead of the Department of Welfare, right? Those niggers were savages anyway, their chuckleheads pure bone, and if they didn’t like it, well, why didn’t they just up and die in their chains like the noble old redman, right?”

  “Yeah. Why didn’t they?”

  “I love that question. Because I have the answer. The reason is, old Tonto was so primitive farmwork made no sense to him, he was on the moon, right?, and just withered away. Now the black man, he was from West Africa, where they had agriculture. Where they had social organization. How do you think those slaves got to the coast from a thousand miles away? Black men arranged it, they wouldn’t cut the white men in, they kept the pie all for themselves. Organization men, right?”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “I’m glad you said that. I am grateful for your interest.”

  “He meant it,” Jill intercedes.

  “Swallow your tongue,” Skeeter says without looking toward her.

  “Swallow your tongue yourself,” Nelson intervenes. Rabbit would be proud of the boy, but he feels that Nelson’s defense of Jill, like Skeeter’s attack, are automatic: parts of a pattern the three have developed while he is away working.

  “The readings,” Jill prompts.

  Skeeter explains. “Little Jilly and I, today, been talking, and her idea is, to make cosy nights all together more structured, right? We’d read aloud a few things, otherwise I’m apt to do all the talking, that is until you decide to dump me on the floor again.”

  “Let me get a beer then.”

  “Puts pimples on your belly, man. Let me light up some good Tijuana brass and pass it over, old athlete like you shouldn’t be getting a beer gut, right?”

  Rabbit neither agrees nor moves. He glances at Nelson: the kid’s eyes are sunk and shiny, frightened but not to the point of panic. He is learning; he trusts them. He frowns over to stop his father looking at him. Around them the furniture – the fireplace that never holds a fire, the driftwood base like a corpse lying propped on one arm – listens. A quiet rain has begun at the windows, sealing them in. Skeeter holds his lips pinched to seal into himself the first volumes of sweet smoke, then exhales, sighing, and leans back into the chair, vanishing between the brown wings but for the glass-and-silver circles of his spectacles. He says, “He was property, right? From Virginia on, it was profit and capital absolutely. The King of England, all he cared about was tobacco cash, right? Black men just blots on the balance sheet to him. Now the King of Spain, he knew black men from way back; those Moors had run his country and some had been pretty smart. So south of the border a slave was property but he was also other things. King of Spain say, That’s my subject, he has legal rights, right? Church say, That’s an everlasting immortal soul there: baptize him. Teach him right from wrong. His marriage vows are sacred, right? If he rustles up the bread to buy himself free, you got to sell. This was all written in the law down there. Up here, the law said one thing: no rights. No rights. This is no man, this is one warm piece of animal meat, worth one thousand Yoo Hess Hay coldblooded clams. Can’t let it marry, that might mess up selling it when the market is right. Can’t let it go and testify in court, that might mess up Whitey’s property rights. There was no such thing, no such, believe me, as the father of a slave child. That was a legal fact. Now how could the law get that way? Because they did believe a nigger was a piece of shit. And they was scared of their own shit. Man, those crackers were sick and they knew it absolutely. All those years talkin’ about happy Rastus chompin’ on watermelon they was scared shitless of uprisings, uprisings, Chuck, when there hadn’t been more than two or three the whole hundred years and those not amounted to a bucket of piss. They was scared rigid, right? Scared of blacks learning to read, scared of blacks learning a trade, scared of blacks on the job market, there was no place for a freedman to go, once he was freed, all that talk about, free soil, the first thing the free-soil convention in Kansas said was we don’t want no black faces here, keep ’em away from our eyeballs. The thing about these Benighted States all around is that it was never no place like other places where this happens because that happens, and some men have more luck than others so let’s push a little here and give a little here; no, sir, this place was never such a place it was a dream, it was a state of mind from those poor fool pilgrims on, right? Some white man see a black man he don’t see a man he sees a symbol, right? All these people around here are walking around inside their own heads, they don’t even know if you kick somebody else it hurts, Jesus won’t even tell ’em because the Jesus they brought over on the boats was the meanest most de-balled Jesus the good Lord ever let run around scaring people. Scared, scared. I’m scared of you, you scared of me, Nelson scared of us both, and poor Jilly here so scared of everything she’ll run and hide herself in dope again if we don’t all act like b
ig daddies to her.” He offers the smoking wet-licked reefer around. Rabbit shakes his head no.