Rabbit, Run by John Updike Read Free Book Online

puts the shift in neutral and pulls out the emergency brake and turns on the roof light and studies his map. His hands and shins are trembling. His brain flutters with fatigue behind sandy eyelids; the time must be 12:30 or later. The highway in front of him is empty. He has forgotten the numbers of the routes he has taken and the names of the towns he has passed through. He remembers Frederick but can’t find it and in time realizes he is searching in a section due west of Washington where he has never been. There are so many red lines and blue lines, long names, little towns, squares and circles and stars. He moves his eyes north but the only line he recognizes is the straight dotted line of the Pennsylvania-Maryland border. The Mason-Dixon Line. The schoolroom in which he learned this recurs to him, the rooted desk rows, the scarred varnish, the milky black of the blackboard, the sweet pieces of ass all up and down the aisles in alphabetical order. His eyes blankly founder. Rabbit hears a clock in his head beat, monstrously slow, the soft ticks as far apart as the sound of waves on the shore he had wanted to reach. He burns his attention through the film fogging his eyes down into the map again. At once “Frederick” pops into sight, but in trying to steady its position he loses it, and fury makes the bridge of his nose ache. The names melt away and he sees the map whole, a net, all those red lines and blue lines and stars, a net he is somewhere caught in. He claws at it and tears it; with a gasp of exasperation he rips away a great triangular piece and tears the large remnant in half and, more calmly, lays these three pieces on top of each other and tears them in half, and then those six pieces and so on until he has a wad he can squeeze in his hand like a ball. He rolls down the window and throws the ball out; it explodes, and the bent scraps like disembodied wings flicker back over the top of the car. He cranks up the window. He blames everything on that farmer with glasses and two shirts. Funny how the man sticks in his throat. He can’t think past him, his smugness, his solidity , somehow. He stumbled over him back there and is stumbling still, can’t get him away from his feet, like shoelaces too long or a stiff stick between his feet; the man mocked, whether out of his mouth or in the paced motions of his hands or through his hairy ears, somewhere out of his body mocked the furtive wordless hopes that at moments made the ground firm for Harry. Decide where you want to go and then go: it missed the whole point and yet there is always the chance that, little as it is, it is everything. At any rate Rabbit feels if he’d trusted to instinct he’d be in South Carolina now. He wishes he had a cigarette, to help him decide what his instinct is. He decides to go to sleep in the car for a few hours.
    But a car starts up in the petting grove behind him and the headlights wheel around and press on Rabbit’s neck. He stopped his car right in the middle of the road, for a glance at the map. Now he must move. He feels unreasoning fear of being overtaken; the other headlights swell in the rearview mirror and fill it like a cup. He stamps the clutch, puts .the shift in first, and releases the handbrake. Hopping onto the highway, he turns instinctively right, north.
    The trip home is easier. Though he has no map and hardly any gas, an all-night Mobilgas magically appears near Hagerstown and green signs begin to point to the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The music on the radio is soothing now, lyrical and unadvertised, and, coming first from Harrisburg and then from Philadelphia, makes a beam he infallibly flies in on. He has broken through the barrier of fatigue and come into a calm flat world where nothing matters much. The last quarter of a basketball game used to carry him into this world; you ran not as the crowd thought for the sake of the score but for yourself, in a kind of idleness. There was you and sometimes the ball and