John Updike - Rabbit At Rest

Hugo aims at SE coast. USAir jet crashes in N. Y. river. Bomb probably caused crash of French DC-10. Lee slows boaters in manatee territory. Harry feeds himself oat bran and digests the News-Press. Chaos reigned on St. Croix, as police and National Guardsmen joined machetearmed mobs on a post-Hugo looting spree. Tourists pleaded with reporters landing on the island to get them off: What fucking crybabies. It occurs to him that his dream might relate to all this Caribbean news, the pre-weekend party they have at resort hotels, to welcome the new arrivals and jolly everybody into a melting pot. He steps out onto his narrow balcony to seize the day. The paper said today would be sunny despite Hugo and so it is. The distant blue-green skyscrapers hurl back blobs of light from the morning sun at his back. The Gulf cannot be seen but he can smell it out there. He tries to remember who all was at the party but can't; dream people don't stick to the ribs. The plane in New York skidded off the end of the runway and two people were killed. Just two. One hundred seventy-one died in the Sahara. A caller in London gave all the credit to Allah. Harry doesn't mind that one as much as the Lockerbie Pan Am bomb. Like everything else on the news, you get bored, disasters get to seem a gimmick, like all those TV timeouts in football.

While other, younger men shout and kid on the golf course behind the curtained sliding doors, Harry makes the bed and sweeps the kitchen floor, and adds his orange juice glass and cereal bowl to the orderly array in the dishwasher waiting to add up to a load's worth. Not quite there yet. When Janice shows up at last he wants the state of the place to give her an object lesson in housekeeping.

At ten, he goes out for his morning walk. He looks at the northeast sky, toward the hurricane that is snubbing Florida, and is struck by the clouds, how intricate they are, tattered, gray on white on blue, with tilted sheets of fishscales and rows of long clouds shaggy underneath but rounded on top as if by action of swiftly running water, like the rhythmic ribs of sand the tide leaves. A glassy wind blows through the sunlight. There is something in the air that makes it slightly difficult to breathe. Lack of ozone? Or too much ozone? It may be his imagination, but the sky seems clean of airplanes. Usually you can see them layered in their slow circling slants, coming in to land at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport. The planes have been chased from the sky. Under the sun a kind of highway of haze in bars recedes to the northeast horizon like the reflections the moon stacks up in a calm ocean.

On an impulse he decides to take the Celica and drive downtown and park at a meter near the First Federal Bank and walk toward the black section. This afternoon, he thinks, he might feel like trying to get in some holes of golf. The pro shop called up a few days ago and said they found his shoes.

At the recreation field beyond the empty ochre high school, a lone tall boy in denim cutoffs is shooting baskets by himself. His tank top is an electric turquoise stencilled with a snarling tiger head – orange-and-white-striped fur, yellow eyes, the tongue and end of the nose an unreal violet. On this boy, though, the outfit has a certain propriety, the dignity of a chosen uniform. Older than the kids yesterday, eighteen at least, he is a deliberate performer, making good serious economical moves, dribbling in, studying the ground, staring at the hoop, sizing up the shot with two hands on the ball, letting go with the left hand underneath only at the last while shooting. He wears ankle-high black sneakers and no socks; his haircut is one of those muffin-shapes on the top of the skull, with a series of X's along the sides and back where the shaved part begins. Sitting on the bench, the opposite end from a small red knapsack the boy has evidently left there, Rabbit watches him a good while, while the sun shines and the glassy wind blows and passing clouds dip the dirt field and the surrounding frame houses in shadow. The houses have the colors of sun-faded wash and seem remote and silent. You don't see people going in and out.

To vary his attitude Harry sometimes tips his white face back as if to sunbathe, coating his vision in red, letting photons burn through his translucent eyelids. One time when he opens his eyes the boy is standing close, darker than a cloud. There is something matte about his blackness, and his high cheekbones and the thinness of his lips hint at Indian blood.

"You want sumpin'?" His voice is light, level, unsmiling. It seems to come out of the tiger's snarling violet mouth.

"No, nothing," Rabbit says. "My sitting here bother you?"

"You after no Scotty?" With the hand not holding the basketball against his hip he makes the smallest, most delicate little motion of cracking a whip. Rabbit darts his eyes at the knapsack and brings them back to the tiger's mouth.

"No, thanks," he says. "Never touch it. How about a little one-on-one, though? Since you seem to be out here alone."

"I heard some cheesecake come here yesterday was foolin' around."

"Just foolin', that's what I do. I'm retired."

"How come you come out here to do your foolin'? Lot of foolin'-around places over there in your end of Deleon." He pronounces it the local way, Dealya-in.

"It's pretty boring over there," Harry tells him. "I like it here, where there isn't so much glitz. D'ya mind?"

The boy, taken a bit off balance, thinks for an answer, and Rabbit's hands dart out and rest on the basketball, a more worn one than the boys yesterday had, and not leather-colored but scuffed red, white, and blue. Its rough-smooth surface feels warm. "Come on," he begs, growling the "on." "Gimme the ball."

Tiger's expression doesn't change, but the ball comes loose. With it, Harry strides onto the packed dirt. He feels precariously tall, as when this summer he stepped out alone onto the macadam street. He put on Bermuda shorts this morning, in case he got to play. Dust and reflected sun caress his bare calves, his chalky old man's calves that never had much hair and now have almost none – actually none, where socks have rubbed for over fifty years.

He goes for a jumper from pretty far out and it lucks in. He and Tiger take shots alternately, careful not to touch and bouncing their passes to each other. "You played once," the tall boy says.

"Long time ago. High school. Never got to college. Different style then than you guys have now. But if you feel like practicing your moves one-on-one, I'm game. Play to twenty-one. Honor system – call fouls on yourself."

There seems a leaden sadness in Tiger's stare, but he nods, and takes the ball bounced to him. He walks with a cocky slump shoulders down, butt out -out to the half-court line scratched in the dirt with the heels of sneakers. From the back, the kid is all bones and tendons, polished by sweat but not too much, the sloped shoulders matte beneath the turquoise straps.

"Wait," Harry says. "I better take a pill first. Don't mind me."

The Nitrostat burns under his tongue, and by the time Tiger has come in and has his layup blocked, and Rabbit has dribbled out and missed a twenty-footer, the pill's little kick has reached his other end. He feels loose and deeply free at first. Tiger has some good herky-jerky moves, and can get a step on the heavier older man whenever he wants, but he wastes a lot of shots. The stopand-pop style doesn't give you quite the time to get in harmony with the target, and there isn't enough height to Tiger's arc. The ball comes off his hands flat and turns the hoop's circle into a slot. And he is giving Harry an inch or two in height; Rabbit lifts a few close-in jumpers over the boy's fingertips – soft, high, in, just like that, air balls only right through the netless hoop, a scabby orange circle bent awry by too many show offs practicing slam-dunks and hanging on imitating Darryl Dawkins – and Tiger begins to press tighter, inviting a turn around the corner and a break for the basket if Harry can find the surge. Tiger's elbows and sharp knees rattle off his body and he has to laugh at the old sensation, the jostle and press. He is aware of his belly being slung up and down by the action and of a watery weariness entering into his knees, but adrenaline and nostalgia overrule. Tiger begins to exploit his opponent's slowness more cruelly, more knifingly, slipping and slashing by, and Rabbit kicks himself up a notch, feeling his breath come harder, through a narrower passage. Still, the sun feels good, springing sweat from his pores like calling so many seeds into life. The nature of this exertion is to mix him with earth and sky: earth, the packed pink-tan glaring dust printed over and over with the fanned bars of his Nikes and the cagelike grid of Tiger's black sneakers, stamped earth in the rim of his vision as he dribbles; and sky, wide white sky when he looks up to follow his shot or the other's. The clouds have gathered in an agitated silvery arena around the blinding sun, a blue bullring. Rabbit accidentally in one twist of upward effort stares straight into the sun and can't for a minute brush away its blinking red moon of an afterimage. His chest feels full, his head dizzy; his pulse rustles in his ears, the soaked space between his shoulder blades holds a jagged pain. Tiger retrieves his own rebound and holds the ball against his hip in his graceful way and gives Harry a deliberate stare. His skin is like a grinding stone of fine black grits. His ears are small and flat to his head and his hair above the row of X's is kinked as tight as nature can make it; sun glints from every circular particle.