Rabbit, Run Read Online Free PDF

And then, as if the world were just standing around waiting to serve his thoughts, a broad road to the right is advertised, ROUTE 100 WEST CHESTER WILMINGTON . Route 100 had a fine ultimate sound. He doesn’t want to go to Wilmington but it’s the right direction. He’s never been to Wilmington. The Du Ponts own it. He wonders what it’s like to make it to a Du Pont.
    He doesn’t drive five miles before this road begins to feel like a part of the same trap. The first road offered him he turns right on. A keystone marker in the headlights says 23. A good number. The first varsity game be played in he made 23 points. A sophomore and a virgin. Trees overshadow this narrower road.
    A barefoot Du Pont. Brown legs probably, bitty birdy breasts. Beside a swimming pool in France. Something like money in a naked woman, deep, millions. You think of millions as being white. Sink all the way in softly still lots left. Rich girls frigid? Nymphomaniacs? Must vary. Just women after all, descended from some old Indian-cheater luckier than the rest, inherit the same stuff if they lived in a slum. Glow all the whiter there, on drab mattresses. That wonderful softness they have when they want it. Otherwise just fat weight. That wonderful softness, but they want you up and hard on their little ledge. The thing is play them until just a touch. You can tell: their skin under the fur gets all loose like a puppy’s neck.
    Route 23 works west through little tame country towns, Coventryville, Elverson, Morgantown. Rabbit likes these. Square high farmhouses nuzzle the road. Soft chalk sides. In one town a tavern blazes and he stops at a hardware store opposite with two gasoline pumps outside. He knows from the radio it’s about seven-thirty, but the hardware store is still open, shovels and seeders and post-hole diggers and axes, metal painted blue and orange and yellow, in the window, along with some fishing rods and a string of fielder’s gloves. A middle-aged man comes out in boots, baggy suntans, and two shirts. “Yes sir ,” he says, coming down on the second word with forced weight, like a lame man stepping.
    “Couldya fill it up with regular?”
    The man starts to pump it in and Rabbit gets out of the car and goes around to the back and asks. “How far am I from Brewer?”
    The farmer looks up with a look of curt distrust from listening to the gas gurgle. He lifts a finger. “Back up and take that road and it’s sixteen miles to the bridge.”
    Sixteen. He had driven forty miles to get sixteen miles away.
    But it was far enough, this was another world. It smells differently, smells older, of nooks and pockets in the ground that nobody’s stirred yet. “Suppose I go straight?”
    “That’ll take you to Churchtown.”
    “What’s after Churchtown?”
    “New Holland. Lancaster.”
    “Do you have any maps?”
    “Son, where do you want to go?”
    “Huh? I don’t know exactly.”
    “Where are you headed?” The man is patient. His face at the same time seems fatherly and crafty and stupid.
    For the first time, Harry realizes he is a criminal. He hears the gasoline rise in the neck of the tank and notices with what care the farmer squeezes every drop he can into the tank without letting it slosh over the lip insolently the way a city garageman would. Out here a drop of gas isn’t supposed to escape and he’s in the middle of it at night. Laws aren’t ghosts in this country, they walk around with the smell of earth on them. Senseless fear cakes over Rabbit’s body.
    “Check the oil?” the man asks in a voice of startling softness after hanging up the hose on the side of the rusty pump, one of the old style, with the painted bubble head.
    “No. Wait. Yeah. You better had. Thanks.” Simmer down. All he’d done was ask for a map. Damn dirtdigger so stingy, what was suspicious about that? Somebody was always going somewhere. He better get the oil checked because he wasn’t going to stop again until he was halfway to