"After she talked to Billy Peggy called up Ollie for a better description."

"And that was his description. Gee. They got along famously at the time. She was better-looking than those two old crows Ollie had along, I tell ya."

"Harry, you"re horrible. I consider this a very negative development. I suppose I have no right to say anything about how you dispose ofyour s.e.xual needs, but I will not have my son corrupted."

"He"s not corrupted, she"s got him to help with the dishes, that"s more than we could ever do. She"s like a sister to him."

"And what is she to you, Harry?" When he is slow to answer, she repeats, her voice taunting, aching, like her mother"s, "Harry, what is she to you? A little wifey?"

He thinks and tells her, "Come on back to the house, I"m sure she"ll go."

Now Janice thinks. Finally she states: "If I come back to the house, it"ll be to take Nelson away."

"Try it," he says, and hangs up.

He sits a minute in Pajasek"s chair to give the phone a chance to ring. It does. He picks it up. "Yeah?"

Janice says, near tears, "Harry, I don"t like to tell you this, but if you"d been adequate I would never have left. You drove me to it. I didn"t know what I was missing but now that I have it I know. I refuse to accept all the blame, I really do."

"O.K. No blame a.s.signed. Let"s keep in touch."

"I want that girl away from my son."

"They"re getting along fine, relax."

"I"ll sue you. I"ll take you to court."

"Fine. After the stunts you"ve been pulling, it"ll at least give the judge a laugh."

"That"s my house legally. At least half of it is."

"Tell me which my half is, and l"ll try to keep Jill in it."

Janice hangs up. Maybe using Jill"s name had hurt. He doesn"t wait for another ring this time, and leaves the cubicle of frosted gla.s.s. The trembling in his hands, which feel frightened and inflated, merges with the clatter of the machines; his body sweat is lost in the smell of oil and ink. He resettles himself at his Mergenthaler and garbles three lines before he can put her phone call in the back of his mind. He supposes Stavros can get her legal advice. But, far from feeling Stavros as one of the enemy camp, he counts on him to keep this madwoman, his wife, under control. Through her body, they have become brothers.

Jill through the succession of nights adjusts Rabbit"s body to hers. He cannot overcome his fear of using her body as a woman"s her c.u.n.t stings, is part of it; he never forces his way into her without remembering those razor blades -but she, beginning the damp-haired night after the boat ride, perfects ways with her fingers and mouth to bring him off. Small curdled puddles of his s.e.m.e.n then appear on her skin, and though easily wiped away leave in his imagination a mark like an acid-b.u.m on her shoulders, her throat, the small of her back; he has the vision of her entire slender fair flexible body being eventually covered with these invisible burns, like a napalmed child in the newspapers. And he, on his side, attempting with hands or mouth to reciprocate, is politely dissuaded, pushed away, rea.s.sured she has already come, serving him, or merely asked for the mute pressure of a thigh between hers and, after some few minutes during which he can detect no spasm of relief, thanked. The August nights are sticky and close; when they lie on their backs the ceiling of heavy air seems a foot above their faces. A car, loud on the soft tar and loose gravel, slides by. A mile away across the river a police siren bleats, a new sound, more frantic than the old rising and falling cry. Nelson turns on a light, makes water, flushes the toilet, turns out the light with a snap close to their ears. Had he been listening? Could he even be watching? Jill"s breath saws in her throat. She is asleep.

He finds her when he comes back from work sitting and reading, sitting and sewing, sitting and playing Monopoly with Nelson. Her books are spooky: yoga, psychiatry, zen, plucked from racks at the Acme. Except to shop, she reluctantly goes outdoors, even at night. It is not so much that the police of several states are looking for her - they are looking as well for thousands like her - as that the light of common day, and the sights and streets that have been the food of Rabbit"s life, seem to nauseate her. They rarely watch television, since she leaves the room when they turn the set on, though when she"s in the kitchen he sometimes sneaks himself a dose of six-o"clock news. Instead, in the evenings, she and Nelson discuss G.o.d, beauty, meaning.

"Whatever men make," she says, "what they felt when they made it is there. If it was made to make money, it will smell of money. That"s why these houses are so ugly, all the corners they cut to make a profit are still in them. That"s why the cathedrals are so lovely; n.o.bles and ladies in velvet and ermine dragged the stones up the ramps. Think of a painter. He stands in front of the canvas with a color on his brush. Whatever he feels when he makes the mark -if he"s tired or bored or happy and proud - will be there. The same color, but we"ll feel it. Like fingerprints. Like handwriting. Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things."

"What"s the point?" Nelson asks.

"The point is ecstasy," she says. "Energy. Anything that is good is in ecstasy. The world is what G.o.d made and it doesn"t stink of money, it"s never tired, too much or too little, it"s always exactly full. The second after an earthquake, the stones are calm. Everywhere is play, even in thunder or an avalanche. Out on my father"s boat I used to look up at the stars and there seemed to be invisible strings between them, tuned absolutely right, playing thousands of notes I could almost hear."

"Why can"t we hear them?" Nelson asks.

"Because our egos make us deaf. Our egos make us blind. Whenever we think about ourselves, it"s like putting a piece of dirt in our eye."

"There"s that thing in the Bible."

"That"s what He meant. Without our egos the universe would be absolutely clean, all the animals and rocks and spiders and moon-rocks and stars and grains of sand absolutely doing their thing, unself-consciously. The only consciousness would be G.o.d"s. Think of it, Nelson, like this: matter is the mirror of spirit. But it"s three-dimensional, like an enormous room, a ballroom. And inside it are these tiny other mirrors tilted this way and that and throwing the light back the wrong way. Because to the big face looking in, these little mirrors are just dark spots, where He can"t see Himself."

Rabbit is entranced to hear her going on like this. Her voice, laconic and dry normally, moves through her sentences as through a memorized recitation, pitched low, an underground murmur. She and Nelson are sitting on the floor with the Monopoly board between them, houses and hotels and money, the game has been going on for days. Neither gives any sign of knowing he has come into the room and is towering above them. Rabbit asks, "Why -doesn"t He just do away with the spots then? I take it the spots are us."

Jill looks up, her face blank as a mirror in this instant. Remembering last night, he expects her to look burned around the mouth; it had been like filling a slippery narrow-mouthed pitcher from an uncontrollable faucet. She answers, "I"m not sure He"s noticed us yet. The cosmos is so large and our portion of it so small. So small and recent."

"Maybe we"ll do the erasing ourselves," Rabbit offers helpfiilly. He wants to help, to hold his end up. Never too late for education. With Janice and old man Springer you could never have this kind of conversation.

"There is that death-wish," Jill concedes.

Nelson will talk only to her. "Do you believe in life on other planets? I don"t."

"Why Nelson, how ungenerous of you! Why not?"

"I don"t know, it"s silly to say -"

"Say it."

"I was thinking, if there was life on other planets, they would have killed our moon men when they stepped out of the s.p.a.ce ship. But they didn"t, so there isn"t."

"Don"t be dumb," Rabbit says. "The moon is right down our block. We"re talking about life in systems millions of light years away."

"No, I think the moon was a good test," Jill says. "If n.o.body bothered to defend it, it proves how little G.o.d is content with. Miles and miles of gray dust."

Nelson says, "One guy at school I know says there"s people on the moon but they"re smaller than atoms, so even when they grind the rocks up they won"t find them. He says they have whole cities and everything. We breathe them in through our nostrils and they make us think we see flying saucers. That"s what this one guy says."

"I myself," Rabbit says, still offering, drawing upon an old Vat feature article he set, "have some hopes for the inside of Jupiter. It"s gas, you know, the surface we see. A couple of thousand miles down inside the skin there might be a mix of chemicals that could support a kind of life, something like fish."

"It"s your Puritan fear of waste makes you want that," Jill tells him. "You think the other planets must be used for something, must be farmed. Why? Maybe the planets were put there just to teach men how to count up to seven."

"Why not just give us seven toes on each foot?"

"A kid at school," Nelson volunteers, "was born with an extra finger. The doctor cut it off but you can still see where it was."

"Also," Jill says, "astronomy. Without the planets the night sky would have been one rigid thing, and we would never have guessed at the third dimension."

"Pretty thoughtful of G.o.d," Rabbit says, "if we"re just some specks in His mirror."

Jill waves his point away blithely. "He does everything," she says, "by the way. Not because it"s what He has to do."

She can be blithe. After he told her once she ought to go outdoors more, she went out and sunbathed in just her bikini underpants, on a blanket beside the barbecue, in the view of a dozen other houses. When a neighbor called up to complain, Jill justified herself, "My t.i.ts are so small, I thought they"d think I was a boy." Then after Harry began giving her thirty dollars a week to shop with, she went and redeemed her Porsche from the police. Its garage parking fees had quadrupled the original fine. She gave her address as Vista Crescent and said she was staying the summer with her uncle. "It"s a nuisance," she told Rabbit, "but Nelson ought to have a car around, at his age, it"s too humiliating not to. Everybody in America has a car except you." So the Porsche came to live by their curb. Its white is dusty and the pa.s.senger-side front fender is sc.r.a.ped and one convertible top snap is broken. Nelson loves it so much he nearly cries, finding it there each morning. He washes it. He reads the manual and rotates the tires. That crystalline week before school begins, Jill takes him for drives out into the country, into the farmland and the mountains of Brewer County; she is teaching him how to drive.

Some days they return after Rabbit is home an hour from work. "Dad, it was a blast. We drove way up into this mountain that"s a hawk refuge and Jill let me take the wheel on the twisty road coming down, all the way to the highway. Have you ever heard of shifting down?"

"I do it all the time."

"It"s when you go into a lower gear instead of braking. It feels neat. Jill"s Porsche has about five gears and you can really zoom around curves because the center of gravity is so low."

Rabbit asks Jill, "You sure you"re handling this right? The kid might kill somebody. I don"t want to be sued."

"He"s very competent. And responsible. He must get that from you. I used to stay in the driver"s seat and let him just steer but that"s more dangerous than giving him control. The mountain was really quite deserted."

"Except for hawks, Dad. They sit on all these pine trees waiting for the guys to put out whole carca.s.ses of cows and things. It"s really grungy."

"Well," Rabbit says, "hawks got to live too."

"That"s what I keep telling him," Jill says. "G.o.d is in the tiger as well as in the lamb."

"Yeah. G.o.d really likes to chew himself up."

"You know what you are?" Jill asks, her eyes the green of a meadow, her hair a finespun cedar-colored tangle dissolving into windowlight; a captured idea is fluttering in her head. "You are cynical."

"Just middle-aged. Somebody came up to me and said, "I"m G.o.d," I"d say, "Show me your badge." "

Jill dances forward, on fire with some fun and wickedness the day has left in her, and gives him a hug that dances off, a b.u.t.terfly hug. "I think you"re beautiful. Nelson and I both think so. We often talk about it."

"You do? That"s the only thing you can think of to do, talk about me?" He means to be funny, to keep her mood alive, but her face stops, hovers a second; and Nelson"s tells him he has struck on something. What they do. In that little car. Well, they don"t need much s.p.a.ce, much contact: young bodies. The kid"s faint mustache, black hairs; her cedar mane. Bodies not sodden yet like his. At that keen age the merest touch. Their brother-sister shyness, touching hands in the flicker of wet gla.s.s at the sink. If she"d offer to lay hairy old heavy him the first night, what wouldn"t she do to bring the kid along; somebody has to. Why not? Chief question facing these troubled times. Why not.

Though he doesn"t pursue this guilt he has startled from her, that night he does make her take him squarely, socks it into her, though she offers her mouth and her c.u.n.t is so tight it sears. She is frightened when he doesn"t lose his hardness; he makes her sit up on him and pulls her satin hips down, the pelvis bones starved, and she sucks in breath sharply and out of pained astonishment pitched like delight utters, "You"re wombing me!" He tries to picture it. A rosy-black floor in her somewhere, never knows where he is, in among kidneys, intestines, liver. His child bride with flesh-colored hair and cloudy innards floats upon him, stings him, sucks him up like a cloud, falls, forgives him. His love of her coats him with distaste and confusion, so that he quickly sleeps, only his first dreams jostled when she gets from bed to go wash, check on Nelson, talk to G.o.d, take a pill, whatever else she needs to do to heal the wound where his seared c.o.c.k was. How sad, how strange. We make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.

Harry"s father sidles up to him at the coffee break. "How"s every little thing, Harry?"

"Not bad."

"I hate like h.e.l.l to nag like this, you"re a grown man with your own miseries, I know that, but I"d be appreciative as h.e.l.l if you"d come over some evenings and talk to your mother. She hears all sorts of malicious folderol about you and Janice now, and it would help settle her down if you could put her straight. We"re no moralists, Harry, you know that; your mother and I tried to live by our own lights and to raise the two children G.o.d was good enough to give us by those same lights, but I know d.a.m.n well it"s a different world now, so we"re no moralists, me and Mary."

"How is her health, generally?"

"Well, that"s another of these problematical things, Harry. They"ve gone ahead and put her on this new miracle drug, they have some name for it I can never remember, L-dopa, that"s right, L-dopa, it"s still in the experimental stage I guess, but there"s no doubt in a lot of cases it works wonders. Trouble is, also it has these side effects they don"t know too much about, depression in your mother"s case, some nausea and lack of appet.i.te; and nightmares, Harry, nightmares that wake her up and she wakes me up so I can hear her heart beating, beating like a tom-tom. I never heard that before, Harry, another person"s heart in the room as clear as footsteps, but that"s what these L-dopa dreams do for her. But there"s no doubt, her talk comes easier, and her hands don"t shake that way they have so much. It"s hard to know what"s right, Harry. Sometimes you think, Let Nature take its course, but then you wonder, What"s Nature and what isn"t? Another side effect" - he draws closer, glancing around and then glancing down as his coffee slops in the paper cup and burns his fingers - "I shouldn"t mention it but it tickles me, your mother says this new stuff she"s taking, whatever you call it, makes her feel, how shall I say?" - he glances around again, then confides to his son -"lovey-dovey. Here she is, just turned sixty-five, lying in bed half the day, and gets these impulses so bad she says she can hardly stand it, she says she won"t watch television, the commercials make it worse. She says she has to laugh at herself. Now isn"t that a h.e.l.luva thing? A good woman like that. I"m sorry to talk your ear off I live alone with it too much, I suppose, what with Mim on the other side of the country. Christ knows it isn"t as if you don"t have your problems too."

"I don"t have any problems," Rabbit tells him. "Right now I"m just holding my breath to when the kid gets back into school. His state of mind"s pretty well stabilized, I"d say. One of the reasons, you know, I don"t make it over to Mt. Judge as often as I should, Mom was pretty rough on Nelson when he was little and the kid is still scared of her. On the other hand I don"t like to leave him alone in the house, with all these robberies and a.s.saults all over the county, they come out into the suburbs and steal anything they can get their hands on. I was just setting an item, some woman over in Perley Township, they stole her vacuum cleaner and a hundred feet of garden hose while she was upstairs going to the bathroom."

"It"s these G.o.d, d.a.m.n, blacks, is what it is." Earl Angstrom lowers his voice so it turns husky, though Buchanan and Farnsworth always take their coffee break outside in the alley, with Boonie and the other drinkers. "I"ve always called"em black and they call themselves blacks now and that suits me fine. They can"t do a white man"s job, except for a few, and take even Buck, he"s never made head of makeup though he"s been here the longest; so they have to rob and kill, the ones that can"t be pimps and prizefighters. They can"t cut the mustard and never could. This country should have taken whosever advice it was, George Washington if memory serves, one of the founding fathers, and shipped "em all back to Africa when we had a chance. Now, Africa wouldn"t take "em. Booze and Cadillacs and white p.u.s.s.y, if you"ll pardon my saying so, have spoiled "em rotten. They"re the garbage of the world, Harry. American Negroes are the lowest of the low. They steal and then they have the nerve to say the country owes it to "em."

"O.K., O.K." To see his father pa.s.sionate about anything disagrees with Rabbit. He shifts to the most sobering subject they have between them: "Does she mention me much? Mom."

The old man licks spittle from his lips, sighs, slumps confidingly lower, glancing down at the cooled sc.u.mmed coffee in his hands. "All the time, Harry, every minute of the day. They tell her things about you and she raves against the Springers; oh, how she carries on about that family, especially the women of it. Apparently, the Mrs. is saying you"ve taken up with a hippie teenager, that"s what drove Janice out of the house in the first place."

"No, Janice went first. I keep inviting her back."

"Well, whatever the actualities of the case are, I know you"re trying to do the right thing. I"m no moralist, Harry, I know you young people nowadays have more tensions and psychological pressures than a man my age could tolerate. If I"d of had the atomic bomb and these rich-kid revolutionaries to worry about, I"d no doubt just have put a shotgun to my head and let the world roll on without me."

"I"ll try to get over. I ought to talk to her," Rabbit says. He looks past his father"s shoulder to where the yellow-faced wall clock jumps to within a minute of 11:10, the end of the coffee break. He knows that in all this rolling-on world his mother is the only person who knows him. He remembers from the night we touched the moon the nudge delivered out of her dying, but doesn"t want to open himself to her until he understands what is happening inside him enough to protect it. She has something happening to her, death and L-dopa, and he has something happening to him, Jill. The girl has been living with them three weeks and is learning to keep house and to give him a wry silent look saying I know you when he offers to argue about Communism or kids today or any of the other sore spots where he feels rot beginning and black madness creeping in. A little wry green look that began the night he hurt her upwards and touched her womb.

His father is more with him than he suspects, for the old man draws still closer and says, "One thing it"s been on my mind to say, Harry, forgive me talking out of turn, but I hope you"re taking all the precautions, knock up one of these minors, the law takes a very dim view. Also, they say they"re dirty as weasels and giving everybody the clap." Absurdly, as the clock ticks the last minute and the end-of-break bell rasps, the old man claps.

In his clean crisp after-work shirt he opens the front door of the apple-green house and hears guitar music from above. Guitar chords slowly plucked, and two high small voices moving through a melody. He is drawn upstairs. In Nelson"s room, the two are sitting on the bed, Jill up by the pillows in a yoga position that displays the crotch of her black lace underpants. A guitar is cradled across her thighs. Rabbit has never seen the guitar before; it looks new. The pale wood shines like a woman oiled after a bath. Nelson sits beside Jill in Jockey shorts and T-shirt, craning his neck to read from the sheet of music on the bedspread by her ankles. The boy"s legs, dangling to the floor, look suddenly sinewy, long, beginning to be shaded with Janice"s dark hair, and Rabbit notices that the old posters of Brooks Robinson and Orlando Cepeda and Steve McQueen on a motorcycle have been removed from the boy"s walls. Paint has flaked where the Scotch tape was. They are singing, ". . . must a man wa-alk down"; the delicate thread breaks when he enters, though they must have heard his footsteps on the stairs as warning. The kid"s being in his underclothes is O.K.: far from dirty as a weasel, Jill has gotten Nelson to take a shower once a day, before his father"s homecoming, perhaps because her own father came home to Stonington only on Fridays and deserved a ceremony.

"Hey, Dad," Nelson says, "this is neat. We"re singing harmony."

"Where did you get the guitar?"

"We hustled."

Jill nudges the boy with a bare foot, but not quick enough to halt the remark.

Rabbit asks him, "How do you hustle?"

"We stood on streetcorners in Brewer, mostly at Weiser and Seventh, but then we moved over to Cameron when a pig car slowed down to look us over. It was a gas, Dad. Jill would stop these people and tell "em I was her brother, our mother was dying of cancer and our father had lit out, and we had a baby brother at home. Sometimes she said a baby sister. Some of the people said we should apply to welfare, but enough gave us a dollar or so so finally we had the twenty dollars Ollie promised was all he"d charge us for a forty-four dollar guitar. And he threw in the music free after Jill talked to him in the back room."

"Wasn"t that nice of Ollie?"

"Harry, it really was. Don"t look like that."

He says to Nelson, "I wonder what they talked about."

"Dad, there was nothing dishonest about it, these people we stopped felt better afterwards, for having got us off their conscience. Anyway, Dad, in a society where power was all to the people money wouldn"t exist anyway, you"d just be given what you need."

"Well h.e.l.l, that"s the way your life is now."

"Yeah, but I have to beg for everything, don"t I? And I never did get a mini-bike."

"Nelson, you get some clothes on and stay in your room. I want to talk to Jill a second."

"If you hurt her, l"ll kill you."

"If you don"t shut up, l"ll make you live with Mommy and Charlie Stavros."

In their bedroom, Rabbit carefully closes the door and in a soft shaking voice tells Jill, "You"re turning my kid into a beggar and a wh.o.r.e just like yourself," and, after waiting a second for her to enter a reb.u.t.tal, slaps her thin disdainful face with its prim lips and its green eyes drenched so dark in defiance their shade is as of tree leaves, a shufing concealing mult.i.tude, a microscopic forest he wants to bomb. His slap feels like slapping plastic: stings his fingers, does no good. He slaps her again, gathers the dry flesh of her hair into his hand to hold her face steady, feels cold fury when she buckles and tries to slither away but, after a fist to the side of her neck, lets her drop onto the bed.

Still shielding her face, Jill hisses up at him, strangely hisses out of her little s.p.a.ced inturned teeth, until her first words come. They are calm and superior. "You know why you did that, you just wanted to hurt me, that"s why. You just wanted to have that kick. You don"t give a s.h.i.t about me and Nelson hustling. What do you care about who begs and who doesn"t, who steals and who doesn"t?"

A blankness in him answers when she asks; but she goes on. "What have the pig laws ever done for you except screw you into a greasy job and turn you into such a gutless creep you can"t even keep your idiotic wife?"

He takes her wrist. It is fragile. Chalk. He wants to break it, to feel it snap; he wants to hold her absolutely quiet in his arms for the months while it will heal. "Listen. I earn my money one f.u.c.king dollar at a time and you"re living on it and if you want to go back b.u.mming off your n.i.g.g.e.r friends, go. Get out. Leave me and my kid alone."

"You creep," she says, "you baby-killing creep."

"Put another record on," he says. "You sick b.i.t.c.h. You rich kids playing at life make me sick, throwing rocks at the poor dumb cops protecting your daddy"s loot. You"re just playing, baby. You think you"re playing a great game of happy c.u.n.t but let me tell you something. My poor dumb mutt of a wife throws a better piece of a.s.s backwards than you can manage frontwards."

"Backwards is right, she can"t stand facing you."

He squeezes her chalk wrist tighter, telling her, "You have no juice, baby. You"re all sucked out and you"re just eighteen. You"ve tried everything and you"re not scared of nothing and you wonder why it"s all so dead. You"ve had it handed to you, sweet baby, that"s why it"s so dead. f.u.c.king Christ you think you"re going to make the world over you don"t have a f.u.c.king clue what makes people run. Fear. That"s what makes us poor b.a.s.t.a.r.ds run. You don"t know what fear is, do you, poor baby? That"s why you"re so dead." He squeezes her wrist until he can picture the linked curved bones in it bending ghostly as in an X ray; and her eyes widen a fraction, a hairs.p.a.ce of alarm he can see only because he is putting it there.

She tugs her wrist free and rubs it, not lowering her eyes from his. "People"ve run on fear long enough," Jill says. "Let"s try love for a change."

"Then you better find yourself another universe. The moon is cold, baby. Cold and ugly. If you don"t want it, the Commies do. They"re not so f.u.c.king proud."