by John Updike
“Why not?”
“I’m scared.”
“Of what? Of me?”
“Of you and him together.”
“We’re not together. We hate each other’s guts.”
She asks, “When are you kicking him out?”
“They’ll put him in jail.”
“Good.”
The rain is heavy above them, beating everywhere, inserting itself in that chimney flashing that always leaked. He pictures a wide brown stain on the bedroom ceiling. He asks, “What’s with you and him?”
She doesn’t answer. Her lean cameo profile is lit by a flash. Seconds pass before the thunder arrives.
He asks shyly, “He getting at you?”
“Not that way anymore. He says that’s not interesting. He wants me another way now.”
“What way can that be?” Poor girl, crazy suspicious.
“He wants me to tell him about God. He says he’s going to bring some mesc for me.”
The thunder follows the next flash more closely.
“That’s crazy.” But exciting: maybe she can do it. Maybe he can get music out of her like Babe out of the piano.
“He is crazy,” Jill says. “I’ll never be hooked again.”
“What can I do?” Rabbit feels paralyzed, by the rain, the thunder, by his curiosity, by his hope for a break in the combination, for catastrophe and deliverance.
The girl cries out but thunder comes just then and he has to ask her to repeat it. “All you care about is your wife,” she shouts upward into the confusion in heaven.
Pajasek comes up behind him and mumbles about the phone. Rabbit drags himself up. Worse than a liquor hangover, must stop, every night. Must get a grip on himself. Get a grip. Get angry. “Janice, for Chrissake –”
“It isn’t Janice, Harry. It’s me. Peggy.”
“Oh. Hi. How’s tricks? How’s Ollie?”
“Forget Ollie, don’t ever mention his name to me. He hasn’t been to see Billy in weeks or contributed anything to his keep, and when he finally does show up, you know what he brings? He’s a genius, you’ll never guess.”
“Another mini-bike.”
“A puppy. He brought us a Golden Retriever puppy. Now what the hell can we do with a puppy with Billy off in school and me gone from eight to five every day?”
“You got a job. Congratulations. What do you do?”
“I type tape for Brewer Fealty over at Youngquist, they’re putting all their records on computer tape and not only is the work so boring you could scream, you don’t even know when you’ve made a mistake, it comes out just holes in this tape, all these premium numbers.”
“It sounds nifty. Peggy, speaking of work, they don’t appreciate my being called here.”
Her voice retreats, puts on dignity. “Pardon me. I wanted to talk to you when Nelson wasn’t around. Ollie has promised Billy to take him fishing next Sunday, not this Sunday, and I wondered, since it doesn’t look as if you’ll ever ask me, if you’d like to have dinner Saturday when you bring him over.”
Her open bathrobe, that pubic patch, the silver stretchmarks, don’t count your chickens. Meaning do count your chickens. “That might be great,” he says.
“Might be.”
“I’ll have to see, I’m kind of tied up these days –”
“Hasn’t that man gone yet? Kick him out, Harry. He’s taking incredible advantage of you. Call the police if he won’t go. Really, Harry, you’re much too passive.”
“Yeah. Or something.” Only after shutting the office door behind him and starting to walk through the solid brightness toward his machine does he feel last night’s marijuana clutch at him, drag at his knees like a tide. Never again. Let Jesus find him another way.
“Tell us about Vietnam, Skeeter.” The grass is mixing with his veins and he feels very close, very close to them all: the driftwood lamp, Nelson’s thatch of hair an anxious tangle, Jill’s bare legs a touch unshaped at the ankles. He loves them. All. His voice moves in and out behind their eyes. Skeeter’s eyes roll red toward the ceiling. Things are pouring for him through the ceiling.
“Why you want to be told?” he asks.
“Because I wasn’t there.”
“Think you should have been there, right?”
“Yes.”
“Why would that be?”
“I don’t know. Duty. Guilt.”
“No sir. You want to have been there because that is where it was at, right?”
“O.K.”
“It was the best place,” Skeeter says, not quite as a question.
“Something like that.”
Skeeter goes on, gently urging, “It was where you would have felt not so de-balled, right?”
“I don’t know. If you don’t want to talk about it, don’t. Let’s turn on television.”
“Mod Squad will be on,” Nelson says.
Skeeter explains: “If you can’t fuck, dirty pictures won’t do it for you, right? And then if you can, they don’t do it either.”
“O.K., don’t tell us anything. And try to watch your language in front of Nelson.”
At night when Jill turns herself to him in bed he finds the unripe hardness of her young body repels him. The smoke inside him severs his desires from his groin, he is full of flitting desires that prevent him from directly answering her woman’s call, a call he helped create in her girl’s body. Yet in his mind he sees her mouth defiled by Skeeter’s kiss and feels her rotting with his luminous poison. Nor can he forgive her for having been rich. Yet through these nightly denials, these quiet debasements, he feels something unnatural strengthening within him that may be love. On her side she seems, more and more, to cling to him; they have come far from that night when she went down on him like a little girl bobbing for apples.
* * *
This fall Nelson has discovered soccer; the junior high school has a team and his small size is no handicap. Afternoons Harry comes home to find the child kicking the ball, sewn of black-and-white pentagons, again and again against the garage door, beneath the unused basketball backboard. The ball bounces by Nelson, Harry picks it up, it feels bizarrely seamed in his hands. He tries a shot at the basket. It misses clean. “The touch is gone,” he says. “It’s a funny feeling,” he tells his son, “when you get old. The brain sends out the order and the body looks the other way.”
Nelson resumes kicking the ball, vehemently, with the side of his foot, against a spot on the door already worn paintless. The boy has mastered that trick of trapping the ball to a dead stop under his knees.
“Where are the other two?”
“Inside. Acting funny.”
“How funny?”
“You know. The way they act. Dopey. Skeeter’s asleep on the sofa. Hey, Dad.”
“What?”
Nelson kicks the ball once, twice, hard as he can, until it gets by him and he has worked up nerve to tell. “I hate the kids around here.”
“What kids? I never see any. When I was a kid, we were all over the streets.”
“They watch television and go to Little League and stuff.”
“Why do you hate them?”
Nelson has retrieved the ball and is shuffling it from one foot to the other, his feet clever as hands. “Tommy Frankhauser said we had a nigger living with us and said his father said it was ruining the neighborhood and we’d better watch out.”
“What’d you say to that?”
“I said he better watch out himself.”
“Did you fight?”
“I wanted to but he’s a head taller than me even though we’re in the same grade and he just laughed.”
“Don’t worry about it, you’ll shoot up. All us Angstroms are late bloomers.”
“I hate them, Dad, I hate them!” And he heads the ball so it bounces off the shadow-line shingles of the garage roof.
“Mustn’t hate anybody,” Harry says, and goes in.
Jill is in the kitchen, crying over a pan of lamb chops. “The flame keeps getting
too big,” she says. She has the gas turned down so low the little nipples of blue are sputtering. He turns it higher and Jill screams, falls against him, presses her face into his chest, peeks up with eyes amusement has dyed deep green. “You smell of ink,” she tells him. “You’re all ink, so clean, just like a new newspaper. Every day, a new newspaper comes to the door.”
He holds her close; her tears tingle through his shirt. “Has Skeeter been feeding you anything?”
“No, Daddy. I mean lover. We stayed in the house all day and watched the quizzes, Skeeter hates the way they always have Negro couples on now, he says it’s tokenism.”
He smells her breath and, as she has promised, there is nothing, no liquor, no grass, just a savor of innocence, a faint tinge of sugar, a glimpse of a porch swing and a beaded pitcher. “Tea,” he says.
“What an elegant little nose,” she says, of his, and pinches it. “That’s right. Skeeter and I had iced tea this afternoon.” She keeps caressing him, rubbing against him, making him sad. “You’re elegant all over,” she says. “You’re an enormous snowman, twinkling all over, except you don’t have a carrot for a nose, you have it here.”
“Hey,” he says, hopping backwards.
Jill tells him urgently, “I like you there better than Skeeter, I think being circumcised makes men ugly.”
“Can you make the supper? Maybe you should go up and lie down.”
“I hate you when you’re so uptight,” she tells him, but without hate, in a voice swinging as a child wandering home swings a basket, “can I cook the supper, I can do anything, I can fly, I can make men satisfied, I can drive a white car, I can count in French up to any number; look!” – she pulls her dress way up above her waist – “I’m a Christmas tree!”
But the supper comes to the table badly cooked. The lamb chops are rubbery and blue near the bone, the beans crunch underdone in the mouth. Skeeter pushes his plate away. “I can’t eat this crud. I ain’t that primitive, right?”
Nelson says, “It tastes all right, Jill.”
But Jill knows, and bows her thin face. Tears fall onto her plate. Strange tears, less signs of grief than chemical condensations: tears she puts forth as a lilac puts forth buds. Skeeter keeps teasing her. “Look at me, woman. Hey you cunt, look me in the eye. What do you see?”
“I see you. All sprinkled with sugar.”
“You see Him, right?”
“Wrong.”
“Look over at those drapes, honey. Those ugly home-made drapes where they sort of blend into the wallpaper.”
“He’s not there, Skeeter.”
“Look at me. Look.”
They all look. Since coming to live with them, Skeeter has aged; his goatee has grown bushy, his skin has taken on a captive’s taut glaze. He is not wearing his glasses tonight.
“Skeeter, He’s not there.”
“Keep looking at me, cunt. What do you see?”
“I see – a chrysalis of mud. I see a black crab. I just thought, an angel is like an insect, they have six legs. Isn’t that true? Isn’t that what you want me to say?”
Skeeter tells them about Vietnam. He tilts his head back as if the ceiling is a movie screen. He wants to do it justice but is scared to let it back in. “It was where it was coming to an end,” he lets out slowly. “There was no roofs to stay under, you stood out in the rain like a beast, you slept in holes in the ground with the roots poking through, and, you know, you could do it. You didn’t die of it. That was interesting. It was like you learned there was life on another world. In the middle of a recon action, a little old gook in one of them hats would come out and try to sell you a chicken. There were these little girls pretty as dolls selling you smack along the road in those little cans the press photogs would throw away, right? It was very complicated, there isn’t any net” – he lifts his hand – “to grab it all in.”
Colored fragments pour down toward him through the hole in the ceiling. Green machines, an ugly green, eating ugly green bushes. Red mud pressed in patterns to an ooze by Amtrac treads. The emerald of rice paddies, each plant set there with its reflection in the water pure as a monogram. The color of human ears a guy from another company had drying under his belt like withered apricots, yellow. The black of the ao dai pajamas the delicate little whores wore, so figurine-fine he couldn’t believe he could touch them though this clammy guy in a white suit kept pushing, saying, “Black GI, number one, most big pricks, Viet girls like suck.” The red, not of blood, but of the Ace of Diamonds a guy in his company wore in his helmet for luck. All that luck-junk: peace-signs of melted lead, love beads, beads spelling LOVE, JESUS, MOTHER, BURY ME DEEP, Ho Chi Minh sandals cut from rubber tires for tiny feet, Tao crosses, Christian crosses, the cross-shaped bombs the Phantoms dropped on the trail up ahead, the X’s your laces wore into your boots over the days, the shiny green body bags tied like long mail sacks, sun on red dust, on blue smoke, sun caught in shafts between the canopies of the jungle where dinks with Russian rifles waited quieter than orchids, it all tumbles down on him, he is overwhelmed. He knows he can never make it intelligible to these three ofays that worlds do exist beyond these paper walls.
“Just the sounds,” Skeeter says. “When one of them Unfriendly mortar shells hits near your hole it is as if a wall were there that was big and solid, twenty feet thick of noise, and you is just a gushy bug. Feet up there just as soon step on you as not, it doesn’t matter to them, right? It does blow your mind. And the dead, the dead are so weird, they are so – dead. Like a stiff chewed mouse the cat fetches up on the lawn. I mean, they are so out of it, so peaceful, there is no word for it, this same grunt last night he was telling you about his girl back in Oshkosh, making it so real you had to jack off, and the VC trip a Claymore and his legs go this way and he goes the other. It was bad. They used to say, ‘A world of hurt,’ and that is what it was.”
Nelson asks, “What’s a grunt?”
“A grunt is a leg. An eleven bush, right? He is an ordinary drafted soldier who carries a rifle and humps the boonies. The green machine is very clever. They put the draftees out in the bush to get blown and the re-ups sit back at Longbinh tellin’ reporters the body count. They put old Charlie Company on some bad hills, but they didn’t get me to re-up. I’d had a bushel, right?”
“I thought I was Charlie,” Rabbit says.
“I thought the Viet Cong was,” Nelson says.
“You are, they are, so was I, everybody is. I was Company C for Charlie, Second Battalion, 28th Infantry, First Division. We messed around all up and down the Dongnai River.” Skeeter looks at the blank ceiling and thinks, I’m not doing it, I’m not doing it justice, I’m selling it short. The holy quality is hardest to get. “The thing about Charlie is,” he says, “he’s everywhere. In Nam, it’s all Charlies, right? Every gook’s a Charlie, it got so you didn’t mind greasing an old lady, a little kid, they might be the ones planted punji stakes at night, they might not, it didn’t matter. A lot of things didn’t matter. Nam must be the only place in Uncle Sam’s world where black-white doesn’t matter. Truly. I had white boys die for me. The Army treats a black man truly swell, black body can stop a bullet as well as any other, they put us right up there, and don’t think we’re not grateful, we are indeed, we hustle to stop those bullets, we’re so happy to die alongside Whitey.” The white ceiling still is blank, but beginning to buzz, beginning to bend into space; he must let the spirit keep lifting him along these lines. “One boy I remember, hate the way you make me bring it back, I’d give one ball to forget this, hit in the dark, VC mortars had been working us over since sunset, we never should have been in that valley, lying there in the dark with his guts spilled out. I couldn’t see him, hustling my ass back from the perimeter, I stepped on his insides, felt like stepping on a piece of Jell-O, worse, he screamed out and died right then, he hadn’t been dead to then. Another time, four of us out on recon, bunch of their AK-47s opened up, had an entirely different sound from the M-16, more of a cracking sound, dig?, not so
punky. We were pinned down. Boy with us, white boy from Tennessee, never shaved in his life and ignorant as Moses, slithered away into the bush and wiped ’em out, when we picked him up bullets had cut him in two, impossible for a man to keep firing like that. It was bad. I wouldn’t have believed you could see such bad things and keep your eyeballs. These poor unfriendlies, they’d call in the napalm on ’em just up ahead, silver cans tumbling over and over, and they’d come out of the bush right at you, burning and shooting, spitting bullets and burning like a torch in some parade, come tumbling right into your hole with you, they figured the only place to get away from the napalm was inside our perimeter. You’d shoot ’em to shut off their noise. Little boys with faces like the shoeshine back at base. It got so killing didn’t feel so bad, it never felt good, just necessary, like taking a piss. Right?”
“I don’t much want to hear any more,” Nelson says. “It makes me feel sick and we’re missing Samantha.”
Jill tells him, “You must let Skeeter tell it if he wants to. It’s good for Skeeter to tell it.”
“It happened, Nelson,” Rabbit tells him. “If it didn’t happen, I wouldn’t want you to be bothered with it. But it happened, so we got to take it in. We all got to deal with it somehow.”
“Schlitz.”
“I don’t know. I feel lousy. A ginger ale.”
“Harry, you’re not yourself. How’s it going? D’ya hear anything from Janice?”
“Nothing, thank God. How’s Mom?”
The old man nudges closer, as if to confide an obscenity. “Frankly, she’s better than a month ago anybody would have dared to hope.”
Now Skeeter does see something on the ceiling, white on white, but the whites are different and one is pouring out of a hole in the other. “Do you know,” he asks, “there are two theories of how the universe was done? One says, there was a Big Bang, just like in the Bible, and we’re still riding that, it all came out of nothing all at once, like the Good Book say, right? And the funny thing is, all the evidence backs it up. Now the other, which I prefer, says it only seems that way. Fact is, it says, there is a steady state, and though it is true everything is expanding outwards, it does not thin out to next to nothingness on account of the reason that through strange holes in this nothingness new somethingness comes pouring in from exactly nowhere. Now that to me has the ring of truth.”
