"No reason at all?" Jill asks. Her mouth pouts forward, vexed and aggressive, yet her spark of interest dies before her breath is finished with the question.

Rabbit thinks. "I think I bored her. Also, we didn"t agree politically."

"What about?"

"The Vietnam war. I"m all for it."

Jill s.n.a.t.c.hes in her breath.

Babe says, "I knew those knuckles looked bad."

Buchanan offers to smooth it over. "Everybody at the plant is for it. We think, you don"t hold "em over there, you"ll have those black-pajama fellas on the streets over here."

Jill says to Rabbit seriously, "You should talk to Skeeter about it. He says it was a fabulous trip. He loved it."

"I wouldn"t know about that. I"m not saying it"s pleasant to fight in or be caught in. I just don"t like the kids making the criticisms. People say it"s a mess so we should get out. If you stayed out of every mess you"d never get into anything."

"Amen," Babe says. "Life is generally s.h.i.t."

Rabbit goes on, feeling himself get rabid, "I guess I don"t much believe in college kids or the Viet Cong. I don"t think they have any answers. I think they"re minorities trying to bring down everything that halfway works. Halfway isn"t all the way but it"s better than no way."

Buchanan smooths on frantically. His upper lip is bubbling with sweat under his slit of a mustache. "I agree ninety-nine per cent. Enlightened self-interest is the phrase I like. The way I see, enlightened self-interest"s the best deal we"re likely to get down here. I don"t buy pie in the sky whoever is slicing it. These young ones like Skeeter, they say All power to the people, you look around for the people, the only people around is them."

"Because of Toms like you," Jill says.

Buchanan blinks. His voice goes deeper, hurt. "I ain"t no Tom, girl. That kind of talk doesn"t help any of us. That kind of talk just shows how young you are. What I am is a man trying to get from Point A to Point B, from the cradle to the grave hurting the fewest people I can. Just like Harry here, if you"d ask him. Just like your late daddy, G.o.d rest his soul."

Babe says, hugging the stubbornly limp girl, "I just likes Jilly"s s.p.u.n.k, she"s less afraid what to do with her life than fat old smelly you, sittin" there lickin" yourself like an old cigar end." But while talking she keeps her eyes on Buchanan as if his concurrence is to be desired. Mothers and fathers, they turn up everywhere.

Buchanan explains to Jill with a nice levelness, "So that is the problem. Young Harry here lives in this fancy big house over in the fanciest part of West Brewer, all by himself, and never gets any tail."

Harry protests. "I"m not that alone. I have a kid with me."

"Man has to have tail," Buchanan is continuing.

"Play, Babe," a dark voice shouts from a dark booth. Rufe bobs his head and switches on the blue spot. Babe sighs and offers Jill what is left of Skeeter"s joint. Jill shakes her head and gets out of the booth to let Babe out. Rabbit thinks the girl is leaving and discovers himself glad when she sits down again, opposite him. He sips his Stinger and she chews the ice from her lemonade while Babe plays again. This time the boys in the poolroom softly keep at their game. The clicking and the liquor and the music mix and make the s.p.a.ce inside him very big, big enough to hold blue light and black faces and "Honeysuckle Rose" and stale smoke sweeter than alfalfa and this apparition across the way, whose wrists and forearms are as it were translucent and belonging to another order of creature; she is not yet grown. Her womanliness is attached to her, it floats from her like a little zeppelin he can almost see. And his inside s.p.a.ce expands to include beyond Jimbo"s the whole world with its arrowing wars and polychrome races, its continents shaped like ceiling stains, its strings of gravitational attraction attaching it to every star, its glory in s.p.a.ce as of a blue marble swirled with clouds; everything is warm, wet, still coming to birth but himself and his home, which remains a strange dry place, dry and cold and emptily spinning in the void of Penn Villas like a cast-off s.p.a.ce capsule. He doesn"t want to go there but he must. He must. "I must go," he says, rising.

"Hey, hey," Buchanan protests. "The night hasn"t even got itself turned around to get started yet."

"I ought to be home in case my kid can"t stand the kid he"s staying with. I promised I"d visit my parents tomorrow, if they didn"t keep my mother in the hospital for more tests."

"Babe will be sad, you sneaking out. She took a shine to you."

"Maybe that other guy she took a shine to will be back. My guess is Babe takes a shine pretty easy."

"Don"t you get nasty."

"No, I love her, Jesus. Tell her. She plays like a whiz. This has been a terrific change of pace for me." He tries to stand, but the table edge confines him to a crouch. The booth tilts and he rocks slightly, as if he is already in the slowly turning cold house he is heading toward. Jill stands up with him, obedient as a mirror.

"One of these times," Buchanan continues beneath them, "maybe you can get to know Babe better. She is one good egg."

"I don"t doubt it." He tells Jill, "Sit down."

"Aren"t you going to take me with you? They want you to."

"Gee. I hadn"t thought to."

She sits down.

"Friend Harry, you"ve hurt the little girl"s feelings. Nasty must be your middle name."

Jill says, "Far as creeps like this are concerned, I have no feelings. I"ve decided he"s queer anyway."

"Could be," Buchanan says. "It would explain that wife."

"Come on, let me out of the booth. I"d like to take her -"

"Then help yourself, friend. On me."

Babe is playing "Time After Time." I tell myself that I"m.

Harry sags. The table edge is killing his thighs. "O.K., kid. Come along."

"I wouldn"t dream of it."

"You"ll be bored," he feels in honesty obliged to add.

"You"ve been had," she tells him.

"Jilly now, be gracious for the gentleman." Buchanan hastily pushes out of the booth, lest the combination tumble, and lets Harry slide out and leans against him confidentially. Geezers. His breath rises bad, from under the waxed needles. "Problem is," he explains, the last explaining he will do tonight, "it don"t look that good, her being in here, under age and all. The fuzz now, they aren"t absolutely unfriendly, but they hold us pretty tight to the line, what with public opinion the way it is. So it"s not that healthy for anybody. She"s a poor child needs a daddy, is the simple truth of it."

Rabbit asks her, "How"d he die?"

Jill says, "Heart. Dropped dead in a New York theater lobby. He and my mother were seeing Hair."

"O.K. Let"s shove." To Buchanan Rabbit says, "How much for the drinks? Wow. They"re just hitting me."

"On us," is the answer, accompanied by a wave of a palm the color of silver polish. "On the black community." He has to wheeze and chuckle. Struggling for solemnity: "This is real big of you, man. You"re a big man."

"See you at work Monday."

"Jilly-love, you be a good girl. We"ll keep in touch."

"I bet."

Disturbing, to think that Buchanan works. We all work. Day selves and night selves. The belly hungers, the spirit hungers. Mouths munch, c.u.n.ts swallow. Monstrous. Soul. He used to try to picture it when a child. A parasite like a tapeworm inside. A sprig of mistletoe hung from our bones, living on air. A jellyfish swaying between our lungs and our liver. Black men have more, bigger. c.o.c.ks like eels. Night feeders. Their touching underbelly smell on buses, their dread of those clean dry places where Harry must be. He wonders if he will be sick. Poison in those Stingers, on top of moonburgers.

Babe shifts gears, lays out six chords like six black lead slugs slapping into the tray, and plays, "There"s a Small Hotel." With a wishing well.

With this Jill, then, Rabbit enters the street. On his right, toward the mountain, Weiser stretches sallow under blue street lights. The Pinnacle Hotel makes a tattered blur, the back of the Sunflower Beer clock shows yellow neon petals; otherwise the great street is dim. He can remember when Weiser with its five movie marquees and its medley ofneon outlines appeared as gaudy as a carnival midway. People would stroll, children between them. Now the downtown looks deserted, sucked dry by suburban shopping centers and haunted by rapists. LOCAL HOODS a.s.sAULT ELDERLY, last week"s Vat had headlined. In the original version of the head LOCAL had been BLACK.

They turn left, toward the Running Horse Bridge. River moisture cools his brow. He decides he will not be sick. Never, even as an infant, could stand it; some guys, Ronnie Harrison for one, liked it, throw up after a few beers or before a big game, joke about the corn between their teeth, but Rabbit needed to keep it down, even at the cost of a bellyache. He still carries from sitting in Jimbo"s the sense of the world being inside him; he will keep it down. The city night air. The ginger of tar and concrete baked all day, truck traffic lifted from it like a lid. Infrequent headlights stroke this girl, catching her white legs and thin dress as she hangs on the curb hesitant.

She asks, "Where"s your car?"

"I don"t have any."

"That"s impossible."

"My wife took it when she left me."

"You didn"t have two?"

"No." This is really a rich kid.

"I have a car," she says.

"Where is it?"

"I don"t know."

"How can you not know?"

"I used to leave it on the street up near Babe"s place off of Plum, I didn"t know it was somebody"s garage entrance, and one morning they had taken it away."

"And you didn"t go after it?"

"I didn"t have the money for any fine. And I"m scared of the police, they might check me out. The staties must have a bulletin on me."

"Wouldn"t the simplest thing for you be to go back to Connecticut?"

"Oh, please," she says.

"What didn"t you like about it?"

"It was all ego. Sick ego."

"Something pretty egotistical about running away, too. What"d that do to your mother?"

The girl makes no answer, but crosses the street, from Jimbo"s to the beginning of the bridge. Rabbit has to follow. "What kind of car was it?"

"A white Porsche." Wow."

"My father gave it to me for my sixteenth birthday."

"My father-in-law runs the Toyota agency in town."

They keep arriving at this place, where a certain symmetry snips their exchanges short. Having crossed the bridge, they stand on a little pond of sidewalk squares where in this age of cars few feet tread. The bridge was poured in the Thirties - sidewalks, broad bal.u.s.trades, and lamp plinths - of reddish rough concrete; above them an original light standard, iron fluted and floral toward the top, looms stately but unlit at the entrance to the bridge, illumined since recently with cold bars of violet on tall aluminum stems rooted in the center of the walkway. Her white dress is unearthly in this light. A man"s name is embedded in a bronze plaque, illegible. Jill asks impatiently, "Well, how shall we do?"

He a.s.sumes she means transportation. He is too shaky still, too full of smoke and Stinger, to look beyond that. The way to the center of Brewer, where taxis prowl and doze, feels blocked. In the gloom beyond Jimbo"s neon nimbus, brown shadows, local hoods, giggle in doorways, watching. Rabbit says, "Let"s walk across the bridge and hope for a bus. The last one comes around eleven, maybe on Sat.u.r.days it"s later. Anyway, if none comes at all, it"s not too far to walk to my place. My kid does it all the time."

"I love walking," she says. She touchingly adds, "I"m strong. You mustn"t baby me."

The bal.u.s.trade was poured in an X-pattern echoing rail fences; these Xs click past his legs not rapidly enough. The gritty breadth he keeps touching runs tepid. Flecks as if of rock salt had been mixed into it. Not done that way anymore, not done this color, reddish, the warmth of flesh, her hair also, cut cedar color, lifting as she hurries to keep up.

"What"s the rush?"

"Shhh. Dontcha hear "em?"

Cars thrust by, rolling b.a.l.l.s of light before them. An anvil-drop below, to the black floor of the river: white shards, boat shapes. Behind them, pattering feet, the press of pursuit. Rabbit dares stop and peek backwards. Two brown figures are chasing them. Their shadows shorten and multiply and lengthen and simplify again as they fly beneath the successive mauve angles, in and out of strips of light; one man is brandishing something white in his hand. It glitters. Harry"s heart jams; he wants to make water. The West Brewer end of the bridge is forever away. LOCAL MAN STABBED DEFENDING OUT-OF-STATE GIRL. Body Tossed From Historic Bridge. He squeezes her arm and tries to make her run. Her skin is smooth and narrow yet tepid like the bal.u.s.trade. She snaps, "Cut it out," and pulls away. He turns and finds, unexpectedly, what he had forgotten was there, courage; his body fits into the hardsh.e.l.l blindness of meeting a threat, rigid, only his eyes soft spots, himself a sufficient shield. Kill.

The Negroes halt under the near purple moon and back a step, frightened. They are young, their bodies liquid. He is bigger than they. The white flash in the hand of one is not a knife but a pocketbook of pearls. The bearer shambles forward with it. His eyewhites and the pearls look lavender in the light. "This yours, lady?"

"Oh. Yes."

"Babe sent us after."

"Oh. Thank you. Thank her."

"We scare somebody?"

"Not me. Him."

"Yeah."

"Dude scared us too."

"Sorry about that," Rabbit volunteers. "Spooky bridge."

"O.K.".

"O.K." Their mauve eyeb.a.l.l.s roll; their purple hands flip as their legs in the st.i.tched skin of Levis seek the rhythm of leaving. They giggle together; and also at this moment two giant trailer trucks pa.s.s on the bridge, headed in opposite directions: their rectangles thunderously overlap and, having clapped the air between them, hurtle each on its way, corrosive and rumbling. The bridge trembles. The Negro boys have disappeared. Rabbit walks on with Jill.

The pot and brandy and fear in him enhance the avenue he knows too well. No bus comes. Her dress flutters in the corner of his eye as he tries, his skin stretched and his senses shuffling and circling like a cloud of gnats, to make talk. "Your home was in Connecticut."

"A place called Stonington."

"Near New York?"

"Near enough. Daddy used to go down Mondays and come back Fridays. He loved to sail. He said about Stonington it was the only town in the state that faces the open sea, everything else is on the Sound."

"And he died, you said. My mother - she has Parkinson"s Disease."

"Look, do you like to talk this much? Why don"t we just walk? I"ve never been in West Brewer before. It"s nice."

"What"s nice about it?"

"Everything. It doesn"t have a past like the city does. So it"s not so disappointed. Look at that, Burger Bliss. Isn"t it beautiful, all goldy and plasticky with that purple fire inside?"