Read Online Rabbit Redux by John Updike - Free Book Online

thousand sons of American mothers killed by shit-smeared bamboo. People don't like having Sonny killed in the jungle anymore. Maybe they never liked it, but they used to think it was necessary."
                "And it isn't?"
                Stavros blinks. "I see. You say war has to be."
                "Yeah, and better there than here. Better little wars than big ones."
                Stavros says, his hands on edge, ready to chop, "But you like it." His hands chop. "Burning up gook babies is right where you're at, friend." The "friend" is weak.
                Rabbit asks him, "How did you do your Army bit?"
                Stavros shrugs, squares his shoulders. "I was 4-F. Tricky ticker. I hear you sat out the Korean thing in Texas."
                "I went where they told me. I'd still go where they told me."
                "Bully for you. You're what made America great. A real gunslinger."
                "He's silent majority," Janice says, "but he keeps making noise," looking at Stavros hopefully, for a return on her quip. God, she is dumb, even if her ass has shaped up in middle age.
                "He's a normal product," Stavros says. "He's a typical goodhearted imperialist racist." Rabbit knows, from the careful level way this is pronounced, with that little tuck of a sold-car smile, that he is being flirted with, asked - his dim feeling is - for an alliance. But Rabbit is locked into his intuition that to describe any of America's actions as a "power play" is to miss the point. America is beyond power, it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains and darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible. He fights back, "I don't follow this racist rap. You can't turn on television now without some black face spitting at you. Everybody from Nixon down is sitting up nights trying to figure out how to make 'em all rich without putting 'em to the trouble of doing any work." His tongue is reckless; but he is defending something infinitely tender, the low flame of loyalty lit with his birth. "They talk about genocide when they're the ones planning it, they're the ones, the Negroes plus the rich kids, who want to pull it all down; not that they can't run squealing for a lawyer whenever some poor cop squints funny at 'em. The Vietnam war in my opinion - anybody want my opinion? -"
                "Harry," Janice says, "you're making Nelson miserable."
                "My opinion is, you have to fight a war now and then to show you're willing, and it doesn't much matter where it is. The trouble isn't this war, it's this country. We wouldn't fight in Korea now. Christ, we wouldn't fight Hitler now. This country is so zonked out on its own acid, sunk so deep in its own fat and babble and laziness, it would take H-bombs on every city from Detroit to Atlanta to wake us up and even then, we'd probably think we'd just been kissed."
                "Harry," Janice asks, "do you want Nelson to die in Vietnam? Go ahead, tell him you do."
                Harry turns to their child and says, "Kid, I don't want you to die anyplace. Your mother's the girl that's good at death."
                Even he knows how cruel this is; he is grateful to her for not collapsing, for blazing up instead. "Oh," she says. "Oh. Tell him why he has no brothers or sisters, Harry. Tell him who refused to have another child."
                "This is getting too rich," Stavros says.
                "I'm glad you're seeing it," Janice tells him, her eyes sunk deep; Nelson gets that from her.
                Mercifully, the food arrives. Nelson balks, discovering the meatballs drenched in gravy. He looks at Rabbit's tidily skewered lamb and says, "That's what I wanted."