John Updike - Rabbit At Rest

Rabbit gets into the Celica. Take a Ride in the Great Indoors: one of the new slogans they'd been trying to push. You can have too many slogans, they begin to cancel out. The engine starts up; reverse gear carries him smoothly backwards. 1 Love When You Set Me Free, Toyota. The digital clock says 10:07. Traffic on Penn Boulevard is starting to thin, the diners and gas stations are beginning to darken. He turns right at the blinking red light and then right again at the Brewer bypass along the Running Horse River. The road lifts above the trees at a point near the elephant-gray gas tanks and the bypassed old city shows a certain grandeur. Its twentystory courthouse built in the beginning of the Depression is still the tallest building, the concrete eagles with flared wings at each corner lit by spotlights, and the sweeping shadow of Mt. Judge, crowned by the star-spatter of the Pinnacle Hotel, hangs behind everything like an unmoving tidal wave. The streetlamps show Brewer's brick tint like matches cupped in ruddy hands. Then, quite quickly, the city and all it holds are snatched from view. Groves of weed trees half-hide the empty factories along the river, and one might be anywhere in the United States on a four-lane divided highway.

He and Janice have done this Southward drive so often he knows the options: he can get off at 222 and proceed directly but pokily toward Lancaster through a string of stoplight-ridden Brewer suburbs, or he can stay on 422 a few miles to 176 and head directly south and then cut west to Lancaster and York. The first time he tried this trip, thirty years ago last spring come to think of it, he made the mistake of heading south too soon, toward Wilmington and a vision ofbarefoot du Pont women. But the East slants west, and the trick is to bear west until 83, which didn't exist in those days, and then drive south right into the maw of that two-headed monster, Baltimore-Washington. Monstrous, she said. Well, in a way, you could say, being alive is monstrous. Those crazy molecules. All by themselves? Never.

He turns on the radio, searching among the jabber of rock music and talk shows for the sweet old tunes, the tunes he grew up on. It used to be easier to search with the old dial you twisted, instead of these jumpy digitized scan buttons: you could feel your way. The scan comes suddenly upon the silky voices of Dinah Shore and Buddy Clark entwined in the duet of "Baby, It's Cold Outside." Thrilling, it turns his spine to ice water, when, after all that melodious banter it's hard to understand every word of, they halt, and harmonize on the chorus line. Coooold, out, side. Then this same station of oldies, fading under the underpasses, crackling when the road curves too close to power lines, offers up a hit he's totally forgotten, how could he have? – the high-school dances, the dolled-up couples shuffling to the languid waltz beat, the paper streamers drooping from the basketball nets, the rusty heater warmth of the dash-lit interior of Pop's Plymouth, the living warm furtive scent, like the flavor of a food so strong you must choke it down at first, rising from between Mary Ann's thighs. Vaya con Dios, my darling. The damp triangle of underpants, the garter belts girls wore then. The dewy smooth freshness of their bodies, all of them, sweatily wheeling beneath the crépe paper, the colored lights. Vaya con Dios, my love. Oh my. It hurts. The emotion packed into these phrases buried in some d j.'s dusty racks of 78s like the cotton wadding in bullets, like those seeds that come to life after a thousand years in some pyramid. Though the stars recycle themselves and remake all the heavy atoms Creation needs, Harry will never be that person again, that boy with that girl, his fingertips grazing the soft insides of her thighs, a few atoms rubbing off; a few molecules.

Then, "Mule Train," by Frankie Laine, not one of the great Laines but great enough, and "It's Magic," by Doris Day. Those pauses back then: It's ma- gic. They knew how to hurt you, back then when there were two eight-team baseball leagues and you could remember all the players. People then were not exactly softer, they were harder in fact, but they were easier to hurt, though in fewer places.

He has to leave 176 for 23 through Amish country, it's the one really local stretch of road, but there shouldn't be any buggies out this late to slow him down. Rabbit wants to see once more a place in Morgantown, a hardware store with two pumps outside, where a thickset farmer in two shirts and hairy nostrils had advised him to know where he was going before he went there. Well, now he does. He has learned the road and figured out the destination. But what had been a country hardware store was now a slick little realestate office. Where the gas pumps had been, fresh black asphalt showed under the moonlight the stark yellow stripes of diagonal parking spaces.

No, it isn't moonlight, he sees; it is the sulfurous illumination that afflicts busy paved places all night. Though the hour is near eleven, a traffic of giant trucks heaves and snorts and groans through the sleepy stone town; the realtor's big window is full of Polaroid snapshots of property for sale, and Route 23, once a narrow road on the ridge between two farm valleys as dark at night as manure, now blazes with the signs that are everywhere. PIZZA HUT. BURGER KING. Rent a Movie. Turkey Hill MINIt MARKET. Quilt World. Shady Maple SMORGASBORD. Village Herb Shop. Country Knives. Real estate makes him think of Janice and his heart dips at the picture of her waiting with Nelson and Pru for him to show up over at the Springers' and panicking by now, probably imagining he's had a car accident, and coming back with her key to the deserted house, all fluttery and hotbreathed the way she gets. Maybe he should have left a note like she did him that time. Harry dear-1 must go off a few days to think. But she said never forgive him, shoot you both, she upped the stakes, let her stew in her own juice, thinks she's so smart suddenly, going back to school. Nelson the same way. Damned if they're going to get him sitting in on some family-therapy session run by his own son whose big redheaded wife he's boffed. Only really good thing he's done all year, as he looks back on it. Damned if he'll face the kid, give him the satisfaction, all white in the gills from this new grievance. Rabbit doesn't want to get counselled.

The eleven-o'clock news comes on the radio. Jim Bakker, on trial in Charlotte, North Carolina, on twenty-four counts of fraud in connection with his scandal-ridden PTL television ministry, collapsed today in court and is being held for up to sixty days for psychiatric evaluation at the Federal Correctional Institute. Dr. Basil Jackson, a psychiatrist who has been treating Bakker for nine months, said that the once-charismatic evangelist has been hallucinating: leaving the courtroom Wednesday after former PTL executive Steve Nelson collapsed on the witness stand, Bakker saw the people outside as animals intent upon attacking and injuring him. Bakker's wife, Tammy, said from her luxurious home in Orlando, Florida, that Bakker over the phone had seemed to be experiencing a terrible emotional trauma and that she prayed with him and they agreed that they would trust in the Lord. In Los Angeles, Jessica Hahn, the former PTL secretary whose sexual encounter with Bakker in 1980 led to his downfall, told reporters, quote, I'm not a doctor but I do know about Jim Bakker. I believe Jim Bakker is a master manipulator. I think this is a sympathy stunt just like it is every time Tammy gets on TV and starts crying and saying how abused they are, end quote. In Washington, the Energy Department is searching for mysteriously missing amounts of tritium, the heavy-hydrogen isotope necessary to the making of hydrogen bombs. Also in Washington, Science magazine reports that the new bomb detector, called a TNA for thermal neutron analysis, installed today at JFK Airport in New York City, is set to detect two point five pounds of plastic explosives and would not have detected the bomb, thought to contain only one pound of Semtex explosive, which brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. In Toronto, movie superstar Marlon Brando told reporters that he has made his last movie. "It's horrible," he said of the motion picture, entitled The Freshman. "It's going to be a flop, but after this, I'm retiring. You can't imagine how happy I am." In Bonn, West Germany, Chancellor Helmut Kohl telephoned the new Polish Prime Minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, in a plea for better relations between their two countries. It was fifty years ago tomorrow, indeed almost right to this minute when allowances are made for time zones, that Germany under Adolf Hitler invaded Poland, precipitating World War II, in which an estimated fifty million persons were to perish. Like, wow! In sports, the Phillies are losing in San Diego and Pittsburgh is idle. As to the weather, it could be better, and it could be worse. Mezzo, mezzo. I didn't say messy, but look out for thundershowers, you Lancaster County night owls. Oh yes, Brando also called his new and terminal movie a "stinker." No sweat, for a fellow who began his career in a torn undershirt.