Rabbit Redux (r-2) by John Updike

Author:John Updike [Updike, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: prose_contemporary

III. SKEETER,

"We've been raped, we've been raped!"

– BACKGROUND VOICE ABOARD SOYUZ 5

ONE DAY in September Rabbit comes home from work to find another man in the house. The man is a Negro. "What the hell," Rabbit says, standing in the front hall beside the three chime tubes.

"Hell, man, it's revolution, right?" the young black says, not rising from the mossy brown armchair. His glasses flash two silver circles; his goatee is a smudge in shadow. He has let his hair grow out so much, into such a big ball, that Rabbit didn't recognize him at first.

Jill rises, quick as smoke, from the chair with the silver threads. "You remember Skeeter?"

"How could I forget him?" He goes forward a step, his hand lifted ready to be shaken, the palm tingling with fear; but since Skeeter makes no move to rise, he lets it drop back to his side, unsullied.

Skeeter studies the dropped white hand, exhaling smoke from a cigarette. It is a real cigarette, tobacco. "I like it," Skeeter says. "I like your hostility, Chuck. As we used to say in Nam, it is my meat."

"Skeeter and I were just talking," Jill says; her voice has changed, it is more afraid, more adult. "Don't I have any rights?"

Rabbit speaks to Skeeter. "I thought you were in jail or something."

"He is out on bail," Jill says, too hastily.

"Let him speak for himself."

Wearily Skeeter corrects her. "To be precise, I am way out on bail. I have jumped the blessed thing. I am, as they would say, desired by the local swine. I have become one hot item, right?"

"It would have been two years," Jill says. "Two years for nothing, for not hurting anybody, not stealing anything, for nothing, Harry."

"Did Babe jump bail too?"

"Babe is a lady," Skeeter goes on in this tone of weary mincing precision. "She makes friends easy, right? I have no friends. I am known far and wide for my lack of sympathetic qualities." His voice changes, becomes falsetto, cringing. "Ali is one baad niggeh." He has many voices, Rabbit remembers, and none of them exactly his.

Rabbit tells him, "They'll catch you sooner or later. Jumping bail makes it much worse. Maybe you would have gotten off with a suspended sentence."

"I have one of those. Officialdom gets bored with handing them out, right?"

"How about your being a Vietnam veteran?"

"How about it? I am also black and unemployed and surly, right? I seek to undermine the state, and Of Massah State, he cottons on."

Rabbit contemplates the set of shadows in the old armchair, trying to feel his way. The chair has been with them ever since their marriage, it comes from the Springers' attic. This nightmare must pass. He says, "You talk a cool game, but I think you panicked, boy."

"Don't boy me."

Rabbit is startled; he had meant it neutrally, one outlaw to another. He tries to amend: "You're just hurting yourself. Go turn yourself in, say you never meant to jump."

Skeeter stretches luxuriously in the chair, yawns, inhales and exhales.

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