John Updike - Rabbit At Rest

"Ah," the one in charge says, "just the guy we need. Does the name Angus Barfield mean anything to you?" The rings under his eyes are so deep and deeply bruised they go all the way around his sockets; he looks like a raccoon. Though his face shows a lot of wear, his hair is black as shoe polish, and lies as flat on his head as if painted in place. These accountants have to be tidy, all those numbers they write down, thousands and millions, and never a five that could be confused with a three or a seven with a one. As he cocks a ringed eye at Harry waiting for an answer, his rubbery mouth slides around in a restless wise-guy motion.

"No," Harry says, "and yet, wait. There's a faint bell. Barfield."

"A good guy for you to know," the accountant says, with a sly grimace and twist of his lips. "From December to April, he was buying a Toyota a month." He checks a paper under his shirtsleeved forearm. He has very long black hairs on his wrists. "A Corolla four-door, a Tercel five-speed hatchback, a Canny wagon, a deluxe two-passenger 4-Runner, and in April he really went fancy and took on a Supra Turbo with a sport roof, to the tune of twenty-five seven. Totals up to just under seventy-five K. All in the same name and the same address on Willow Street."

"Where's Willow?"

"That's one of the side streets up above Locust, you know. The area's gotten kind of trendy."

"Locust," Harry repeats, struggling to recall. He has heard the odd name "Angus" before, from Nelson's lips. Going off to a party in north Brewer.

"Single white male. Excellent credit ratings. Not much of a haggler, paid list price every time. The only trouble with him as a customer," the accountant says, "is according to city records he's been dead for six months. Died before Christmas." He purses his lips into a little bunch under one nostril and lifts his eyebrows so high his nostrils dilate in sympathy.

"I got it," Harry says, with a jarring pounce of his heart. "That's Slim. Angus Barfield was the real name of a guy everybody called Slim. He was a, a gay I guess, about my son's age. Had a good job in downtown Brewer – administered one of those HUD jobtraining programs for high-school dropouts. He was a trained psychologist, I think Nelson once told me."

The moronic assistant, who has been listening with the staring effort of a head that can only hold one thing at a time, giggles: the humor of insanity spills over onto psychologists. The other twists up the lower part of his face in a new way, as if demonstrating knots. "Bank loan officers love government employees," he says. "They're sure and steady, see?"

Since the man seems to expect it, Harry nods, and the accountant dramatically slaps the tidy chaos of papers spread out on the desk. "December to April, Brewer Trust extended five car loans to this Angus Barfield, made over to Springer Motors."

"How could they, to the same guy? Common sense -"

"Since computers, my friend, common sense has gone out the window. It's joined your Aunt Matilda's ostrich-feather hat. The auto-loan department of a bank is just tiddledywinks; the computer checked his credit and liked it and the loan was approved. The checks were cashed but never showed up in the company credits. We think your pal Lyle opened a dummy somewhere." The man stabs a stack of bank statements with a finger; it has black hairs between the knuckles and bends back so far Rabbit winces and looks away. This rubbery guy is one of those born teachers Rabbit has instinctively avoided all his life. "Let me put it like this. A computer is like a Frenchman. It seems real smart until you know the language. Once you know the language, you realize it's dumb as hell. Quick, sure. But quick ain't the same as smart."

"But," Harry gropes to say, "but for Lyle and Nelson, Lyle especially, to use poor Slims name in a scam like this when he had just died, when he was just about buried – would they have actually been so hard-hearted?"

The accountant slumps a little under the weight of such naiveté. "These were hungry boys. The dead have no feelings, that I've heard about. The guy's credit hadn't been pulled from the computer, and between these loans from Brewer Trust and the diddled inventory with Mid-Atlantic Toyota, some two hundred grand was skimmed from this operation, that we can verify so far. That's a lot of Toll House cookies."

The assistant giggles again. Rabbit, hearing the sum, goes cold with the premonition that this debt will swallow him. Here amid all these papers arrayed on the desk where he himself used to work, keeping a roll of Life Savers in the lefthand middle drawer, a fatal hole is being hatched. He taps his jacket pocket for the reassuring lump of the Nitrostat bottle. He'll take one as soon as he gets away. The night he and Pru fucked, both of them weary and half crazy with their fates, the old bed creaking beneath them had seemed another kind of nest, an interwoven residue of family fortunes, Ma Springer's musty old-lady scent released from the mattress by this sudden bouncing where for years she had slept alone, an essence of old mothballed blankets stored in attic cedar chests among plushbound family albums and broken cane-seated rockers and veiled hats in round hat-boxes, an essence arising not only from the abused bed but from the old sewing apparatus stored here and Fred's forgotten neckties in the closet and the dust balls beneath the venerable four-poster. All those family traces descended to this, this coupling by thunder and lightning. It was now as if it had never been. He and Pru are severely polite with each other, and Janice, ever more the working girl, has ceased to create many occasions when the households mingle. The Father's Day cookout was an exception, and the children were tired and cranky and bug-bitten by the time the grilled hamburgers were finally ready to be consumed.

Harry laughs, as idiotically as the assistant accountant. "Poor Slim," he says, trying to harmonize with the head accountant's slanginess. "Some pal Lyle turned out to be, buying him all those wheels he didn't need."

On July Fourth, for Judy's sake, he marches in a Mt. Judge parade. Her Girl Scout troop is in it and the troop leader's husband, Clarence Eifert, is on the organizing committee. They needed a man tall enough to be Uncle Sam and Judy told Mrs. Eifert that her grandfather was wonderfully tall. Actually, six three isn't tall by today's standards, you'd be a dwarf in the NBA at that height, but several members of the committee, a generation older than Mr. Eifert, remembered Rabbit Angstrom from his highschool glory days and became enthusiastic, even though Harry lives now in Penn Park on the other side of Brewer. He was a Mt. Judge boy and something of a hero once. He has become more corpulent than our national symbol should be but he has the right fair skin and pale blue eyes and a good soldierly bearing. He served during Korea. He did his bit.

The bell-bottom trousers with their broad red stripes have to be left unbuttoned at the stomach, but since they are held up by tricolor suspenders, and a pale-blue vest patterned in stars comes down over the belt area, it doesn't much matter. Harry and Janice fuss a good deal at the costume in the week before the Fourth. They actually go buy a formal shirt with French cuffs and a wing collar to go with the floppy red cravat, and decide that somehow his suede Hush Puppies go better with the red-striped trousers, look more like boots, than the formal black shoes he keeps for weddings and funerals. The swallowtail coat, of a wool darker blue than the vest, with three unbuttonable brass buttons on both sides, fits well enough, but the fuzzy flared top hat with its hatband of big silver stars perches on his high head unsteadily, a touch tight with the white nylon wig, so it feels like it might totter and fall off.

Janice bites the tip of her tongue thoughtfully. "Do you need the wig? Your hair's so pale anyway."