The Chums of Chance and the Search for the Dictionary

Say what you will about Thomas Pynchon ("Oh dear, here we go again...") but he does perform a valuable service with his propensity to rescue obscure words from, well, obscurity. It's not often I encounter an English word that I've never seen before*, but it only takes seven pages of Against the Day (You can see I'm positively racing through it) before the reader is confronted with the word "absquatulate" - which I'm assuming means something along the lines of abscond.

But I'm guessing here because it's in no dictionary I own.

* Though living in Denmark every day is a veritable fusillade of words that, not only have I not heard before, but I'm not even sure I even heard properly.