Rabbit, Run
Chapter One
Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole
with a backboard bolted to it. Legs, shouts. The scrape
and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their
voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.
Rabbit Angstrom, coming up the alley in a business suit, stops
and watches, though he's twenty-six and six three. So tall, he
seems an unlikely rabbit, but the breadth of white face, the
pallor of his blue irises, and a nervous flutter under his brief
nose as he stabs a cigarette into his mouth partially explain the
nickname, which was given to him when he too was a boy.
He stands there thinking, the kids keep coming, they keep
crowding you up.
His standing there makes the real boys feel strange. Eyeballs
slide. They're doing this for themselves, not as a show for some
adult walking around town in a double-breasted cocoa suit. It
seems funny to them, an adult walking up the alley at all.
Where's his car? The cigarette makes it more sinister still. Is
this one of those going to offer them cigarettes or money to go out
in back of the ice plant with him? T ... read full excerpt from: Rabbit, Run ebook
