John Updike - Rabbit At Rest

The pine trees have gaps now. Marshy stretches open the sky up, there are cabins on stilts, trees with shaggy balls on them, colored wash hanging on lines. Homely hand-lettered signs. Dad's Real Southern Cookin'. Bi-Lo. A long bridge over Lake Marion, this enormous body ofwater in the middle of nowhere. Highways branch off to the capital, Columbia, where he's never been, though he and Janice did once detour over to Charleston and back on Route 17. Another time, they diverted to Savannah and spent the night in a made-over plantation house with high domed ceilings and louvers on the windows. They did do some fun things, he and Jan. The thing about a wife, though, and he supposes a husband for that matter, is that almost anybody would do, inside broad limits. Yet you're supposed to adore them till death do you part. Till the end of time. Ashepoo River. Wasn't that a comic strip, years ago?

He gets off the highway at a vast rest stop, an oasis in this wilderness – gas pumps, a restaurant, a little department store selling groceries, beer, fireworks, suntan lotion. At the counter a couple of young black men, glittery black in the heat, arms bare up to the shoulder, a mean little Malcolm X goatee on one of them. They have a menace down here, their color shouts, they are a race, they are everywhere. But the elderly white waitress has no trouble with these two black boys. The three chat and smile in the same dragged accent, making a little breeze with their mouths. Nice to see it. For this, the Civil War.

To test if he can still use his own voice, Rabbit asks the fat white man one empty stool away from him at the counter, a man who has made for himself at the salad bar a mountain of lettuce and red beets and coleslaw and cottage cheese and kidney beans and chickpeas, "About how many more hours is it to the Florida line?" He lets his Pennsylvania accent drag a little extra, hoping to pass.

"Four," the man answers with a smile. "I just came from there. Where you headin' for in Florida?"

"Way the other end. Deleon. My wife and I have a condo there, I'm driving down alone, she'll be following later."

The man keeps smiling, smiling and chewing. "I know Deleon. Nice old town."

Rabbit has never noticed much that is old about it. "From our balcony we used to have a look at the sea but they built it up."

"Lot of building on the Gulf side now, the Atlantic side pretty well full. Began my day in Sarasota."

"Really? That's a long way to come."

"That's why I'm makin' such a pig of myself. Hadn't eaten more than a candy bar since five o'clock this morning. After a while you got to stop, you begin to see things."

"What sort of things?"

"This stretch I just came over, lot of patchy ground fog, it gets to you. just coffee gets to your stomach." This man has a truly nice way of smiling and chewing and talking all at once. His mouth is wide but lipless, like a Muppet's. He has set his truck driver's cap, with a bill and a mesh panel in the back, beside his plate; his good head of gray hair, slightly wavy like a rich man's, is permanently dented by the edge of the cap.

"You drivin' one of those big trucks? I don't know how you guys do it. How far you goin'?"

All the salad on the plate has vanished and the smile has broadened. "Boston."

"Boston! All that way?" Rabbit has never been to Boston, to him it is the end of the world, tucked up in under Maine. People living that far north are as fantastic to him as Eskimos.

"Today, tomorrow, whatever you call it, I expect to have this rig in Boston Sunday afternoon, twenty-four hours from now."

"But when do you sleep?"

"Oh, you pull over and get an hour here, an hour there."

"That's amazing."

"Been doin' it for fifteen years. I had retired, but came back to it. Couldn't stand it around the house. Nothin' on TV that was any good. How about you?"

"Me?" On the lam. A bad LAD. He realizes what the question means, and answers, "Retired, I guess."

"More power to ya, fella. I couldn't take it," the truck driver says. "Retirement taxed my brain." The elderly waitress so friendly with the two young blacks brings the hungry man an oval platter heavy with fried steak soaking in a pink mix of oil and blood, and three vegetables in little round side dishes, and a separate plate of golden-brown corn pone.

Harry somewhat reluctantly – he has made a friend – pushes away from the counter. "Well, more power to you," he says.

And now this fat pale miracle man, who will be in Boston faster than a speeding bullet, who like Thomas Alva Edison only needs a catnap now and then, has his wide Muppet mouth too full to speak, and merely smiles and nods, and loses a snaky droplet of steak juice down the far side of his egg-shaped little chin. Nobody's perfect. We're only human. Look at Jim Bakker. Look at Bart Giamatti.

In his Celica Harry crosses the Tuglifinny River. The Salkehatchie. The Little Combahee. The Coosawatchie. The Turtle. Kickapoo, he thinks – not Ashepoo. Kickapoo joy juice in Li'1 Abner. Between spates of black music that has that peculiar exciting new sound of boards being slapped on the floor, he hears commercials for the Upchurch Music Company ("an instrument that brings musical pleasure to generations to come") and a deodorizer called Tiny Cat. Why would a deodorizer be called Tiny Cat? He crosses the Savannah and leaves South Carolina and its fireworks at last. Because he is punchy from miles of miles, he turns off at the city exit and drives into the downtown and parks by a grand old courthouse and buys a hot pastrami sandwich at a little sandwich joint on the main street there. He sits eating it, trying not to have any of the juice spill out of the waxpaper and spot his pants, like that sickening driblet from the mouth of the guy back at the lunch place hours ago. This piece of Savannah, a block from the river, seems a set of outdoor rooms, walled in by row houses with high steps and curtains of dusty trees; a huge heat still rests on the day though the shadows are deepening, thickening on the soft old façades, sadder and rosier than those in Brewer. A group of pigeons gathers around his bench, curious to see if he will spare any of the bun or Bar-B-Q potato chips. A young bum with long yellow hair like George Custer and that brown face you get from being homeless gives him a glittering wild eye from a bench behind a tree, in the next room as it were. A tall obelisk rises in commemoration of something, no doubt the glorious dead. Little chattering brown birds heave in and out of the trees as they try to decide whether the day is over. He better push on. He neatly packages his wastepaper and milk carton in the bag the sandwich came in and leaves it in a public trash basket, his gift to Savannah, the trace he will leave, like the cloud of finger-moisture on the edge of the bureau back home. The pigeons chuff and chortle off in indignant disappointment. The bum has silently come up behind him and asks him in no particular accent, the limp snarl of the drugged, if he has a cigarette. "Nope," Rabbit tells him. "Haven't smoked in thirty years." He remembers the moment when on a sudden resolve he canned a half-pack of Philip Moms, the nice old tobacco-brown pack, in somebody's open barrel in an alley in Mt. Judge. Left that trace too.

Rabbit moves toward his car with a racing heart, as the bum follows and mumbles behind him about spare change. He fiddles with the key and gets in and slams the door. The Celica, thank God, isn't too overheated after all its miles to start promptly; George Custer, locked outside, blinks and turns, pretending not to notice. Harry drives cautiously through the outdoor rooms, around the tall monument, and gets lost on the way out of Savannah. He is caught in endless black neighborhoods, gently collapsing houses built of wood clapboard that last saw fresh paint in the days of Martin Luther King. They talk about assassination conspiracies but that was one that Harry could believe in. He can believe in it but he can't remember the name of the man they put in jail for it. A three-name name. Escaped once, but they caught him. James Earl something. So much for history. Panicking, he stops at a grocery store, the kind with a troughed wooden floor with shiny-headed nails that used to be in Mt. Judge when he was a boy, except that everybody in here is black; a lanky man the color of a dried bean pod, much amused, tells him how to get back to the superhighway, gesturing with long hands that flap loosely on his wrists.