"What"d she say? Mom."

"Nothing you don"t know, except Janice calls her a lot."

"I knew that. She"s called a couple times since Sunday, I can"t stand it to talk to her."

"Why not?"

"She"s too wild. She doesn"t make any sense. She says she"s getting a divorce but never starts it, she says she"ll sue me for burning her house and I tell her I only burned my half. Then she says she"ll come get Nelson but never comes, I wish the h.e.l.l she would."

"What does it mean to you, her being wild like this?"

"I think she"s losing her b.u.t.tons. Probably drinking like a fish."

Mim turns her profile to blunt the cigarette in the saucer serving as an ashtray. "It means she wants back in." Mim knows things, Rabbit realizes proudly. Wherever you go in some directions, Mim has been there. The direction where she hasn"t been is the one that has Nelson in it, and the nice hot slap of the slug being made beside your left hand. But these are old directions, people aren"t going that way any more. Mim repeats, "She wants you back."

"People keep telling me that," Rabbit says, "but I don"t see much evidence. She can find me if she wants to."

Mim crosses her pants legs, aligns the stripes, and lights another cigarette. "She"s trapped. Her love for this guy is the biggest thing she has, it"s the first step out she"s taken since she drowned that baby. Let"s face it, Harry. You kids back here in the sticks still believe in ghosts. Before you screw you got to square it with old Jack Frost, or whatever you call him. To square skipping out with herself she has to make it a big deal. So. Remember as kids those candy jars down at Spottsie"s you reached inside of to grab the candy and then you couldn"t get your fist out? If Janice lets go to pull her hand out she"ll have no candy. She wants it out, but she wants the candy too; no, that"s not exactly it, she wants the idea of what she"s made out of the candy in her own mind. So. Somebody has to break the jar for her."

"I don"t want her back still in love with this greaseball."

"That"s how you have to take her."

"The son of a b.i.t.c.h, he even has the nerve, sitting there in these snappy suits, he must make three times what I do just cheating people, he has the f.u.c.king nerve to be a dove. One night we all sat in this restaurant with him and me arguing across the table about Vietnam and them playing touch-a.s.s side by side. You"d like him, actually, he"s your type. A gangster."

Patiently Mim is sizing him up: one more potential customer at the bar. "Since when," she asks, "did you become such a war lover? As I remember you, you were d.a.m.n glad to wriggle out of that Korean thing."

"It"s not all war I love," he protests, "it"s this war. Because n.o.body else does. n.o.body else understands it."

"Explain it to me, Harry."

"It"s a, it"s a kind of head fake. To keep the other guy off balance. The world the way it is, you got to do something like that once in a while, to keep your options, to keep a little s.p.a.ce around you." He is using his arms to show her his crucial concept of s.p.a.ce. "Otherwise, he gets so he can read your every move and you"re dead."

Mim asks, "You"re sure there is this other guy?"

"Sure I"m sure." The other guy is the doctor who shakes your hand so hard it hurts. I know best. Madness begins in that pinch.

"You don"t think there might just be a lot of little guys trying to get a little more s.p.a.ce than the system they"re under lets them have?"

"Sure there are these little guys, billions of "em" - billions, millions, too much of everything - "but then also there"s this big guy trying to put them all into a big black bag. He"s crazy, so so must we be. A little."

She nods like a type of doctor herself. "That fits," she says. "Be crazy to keep free. The life you been leading lately sounds crazy enough to last you a while."

"What did I do wrong? I was a f.u.c.king Good Samaritan. I took in these orphans. Black, white, I said Hop aboard. Irregardless of color or creed, Hop aboard. Free eats. I was the f.u.c.king Statue of Liberty."

"And it got you a burned-down house."

"O.K. That"s other people. That"s their problem, not mine. I did what felt right." He wants to tell her everything, he wants his tongue to keep pace with this love he feels for this his sister; he wants to like her, though he feels a forbidding denseness in her, of too many conclusions reached when he wasn"t there. He tells her, "I learned some things."

"Anything worth knowing?"

"I learned I"d rather f.u.c.k than be blown."

Mim removes a crumb, as of tobacco but the cigarette is filtered, from her lower lip. "Sounds healthy," she says. "Rather unAmerican, though."

"And we used to read books. Aloud to each other."

"Books about what?"

"I don"t know. Slaves. History, sort of."

Mim in her stripey clown costume laughs. "You went back to school," she says. "That"s sweet." She used to get better marks than he did, even after she began with boys: A"s and B"s against his B"s and C"s. Mom at the time told him girls had to be smarter, just to pull even. Mim asks, "So what"d you learn from these books?"

"I learned" - he gazes at a corner of a room, wanting to get this right: he sees a cobweb above the sideboard, gesturing in some ceiling wind he cannot feel -"this country isn"t perfect." Even as he says this he realizes he doesn"t believe it, any more than he believes at heart that he will die. He is tired of explaining himself. "Speaking of sweet," he says, "how is your life?"

"Ca va. That"s French for, It goes. Va bene."

"Somebody keeping you, or is it a new one every night?"

She looks at him and considers. A glitter of reflexive anger snipes at her mask of eye makeup. Then she exhales and relaxes, seeming to conclude, Well he"s my brother. "Neither. I"m a career girl, Harry. I perform a service. I can"t describe it to you, the way it is out there. They"re not bad people. They have rules. They"re not very interesting rules, nothing like Stick your hand in the fire and make it up to Heaven. They"re more like, Ride the exercise bicycle the morning after. The men believe in flat stomach muscles and sweating things out. They don"t want to carry too much fluid. You could say they"re puritans. Gangsters are puritans. They"re narrow and hard because off the straight path you don"t live. Another rule they have is, Pay for what you get because anything free has a rattlesnake under it. They"re survival rules, rules for living in the desert. That"s what it is, a desert. Look out for it, Harry. It"s coming East."

"It"s here. You ought to see the middle of Brewer; it"s all parking lots."

"But the things that grow here you can eat, and the sun is still some kind of friend. Out there, we hate it. We live underground. All the hotels are underground with a couple of the windows painted blue. We like it best at night, about three in the morning, when the big money comes to the c.r.a.p table. Beautiful faces, Harry. Hard and blank as chips. Thousands flow back and forth without any expression. You know what I"m struck by back here, looking at the faces? How soft they are. G.o.d they"re soft. You look so soft to me, Harry. You"re soft still standing and Pop"s soft curling under. If we don"t get Janice propped back under you you"re going to curl under too. Come to think of it, Janice is not soft. She"s hard as a nut. That"s what I never liked about her. I bet I"d like her now. I should go see her."

"Sure. Do. You can swap stories. Maybe you could get her a job on the West Coast. She"s pretty old but does great things with her tongue."

"That"s quite a hang-up you have there."

"I just said, n.o.body"s perfect. How about you? You have some specialty, or just take what comes?"

She sits up. "She really hurt you, didn"t she?" And eases back. She stares at Harry interested. Perhaps she didn"t expect in him such reserves of resentful energy. The living room is dark though the noises that reach them from outside say that children are still playing in the sun. "You"re all soft," she says, lulling, "like slugs under fallen leaves. Out there, Harry, there are no leaves. People grow these tan sh.e.l.ls. I have one, look." She pulls up her pinstripe blouse and her belly is brown. He tries to picture the rest and wonders if her p.u.s.s.y is tinted honey-blonde to match the hair on her head. "You never see them out in the sun but they"re all tan, with -flat stomach muscles. Their one flaw is, they"re still soft inside. They"re like those chocolates we used to hate, those chocolate creams, remember how we"d pick through the Christmas box they"d give us at the movie theater, taking out only the square ones and the caramels in cellophane? The other ones we hated, those dark brown round ones on the outside, all ooky inside. But that"s how people are. It embarra.s.ses everybody but they need to be milked. Men need to be drained. Like boils. Women too for that matter. You asked me my specialty and that"s it, I milk people. I let them spill their insides on me. It can be dirty work but usually it"s clean. I went out there wanting to be an actress and that"s in a way what I got, only I take on the audience one at a time. In some ways it"s more of a challenge. So. Tell me some more about your life."

"Well I was nursemaid to this machine but now they"ve retired the machine. I was nursemaid to Janice but she upped and left."

"We"ll get her back."

"Don"t bother. Then I was nursemaid to Nelson and he hates me because I let Jill die."

"She let herself die. Speaking of that, that"s what I do like about these kids: they"re trying to kill it. Even if they kill themselves in the process."

"Kill what?"

"The softness. s.e.x, love; me, mine. They"re doing it in. I have no playmates under thirty, believe it. They"re burning it out with dope. They"re going to make themselves hard clean through. Like, oh, c.o.c.kroaches. That"s the way to live in the desert. Be a c.o.c.kroach. It"s too late for you, and a little late for me, but once these kids get it together, there"ll be no killing them. They"ll live on poison.

Mim stands; he follows. For all that she was a tall girl and is enlarged by womanhood and makeup, her forehead comes to his chin. He kisses her forehead. She tilts her face up, slime-blue eyelids shut, to be kissed again. Pop"s loose mouth under Mom"s chiselled nose. He tells her, "You"re a cheerful broad," and pecks her dry cheek. Perfumed stationery. A smile in her cheek pushes his lips. She is himself, with the combination jiggled.

She gives him a sideways hug, patting the fat around his waist. "I swing," Mim confesses. "I"m no s...o...b..at like Rabbit Angstrom, but in my quiet way I swing." She tightens the hug, and linked like that they walk to the foot of the stairs, to go up and console their parents.

Next day, Thursday, when Pop and Harry come home, Mim has Mom and Nelson downstairs at the kitchen table, having tea and laughing. "Dad," Nelson says, the first time since Sunday morning he has spoken to his father without first being spoken to, "did you know Aunt Mim worked at Disneyland once? Do Abraham Lincoln for him, please do it again."

Mim stands. Today she wears a knit dress, short and gray; in black tights her legs show skinny and a little knock-kneed, the same legs she had as a kid. She wobbles forward as to a lectern, removes an imaginary piece of paper from a phantom breast pocket, and holds it wavering a little below where her eyes would focus if they could see. Her voice as if on rustling tape within her throat emerges: "Fow-er scow-er and seven yaars ago -"

Nelson is falling off the chair laughing; yet his careful eyes for a split second check his father"s face, to see how he takes it. Rabbit laughs, and Pop emits an appreciative snarl, and even Mom: the bewildered foolish glaze on her features becomes intentionally foolish, amused. Her laughter reminds Rabbit of the laughter of a child who laughs not with the joke but to join the laughter of others, to catch up and be human among others. To keep the laughter swelling Mim sets out two more cups and saucers in the jerky trance of a lifesize Disney doll, swaying, nodding, setting one cup not in its saucer but on the top of Nelson"s head, even to keep the gag rolling pouring some hot water not in the teacup but onto the table; the water runs, steaming, against Mom"s elbow. "Stop, you"ll scald her!" Rabbit says, and seizes Mim, and is shocked by the tone of her flesh, which for the skit has become plastic, not hers, flesh that would stay in any position you twisted it to. Frightened, he gives her a little shake, and she becomes human, his efficient sister, wiping up, swishing her lean tail from table to stove, taking care of them all.

Pop asks, "What kind of work did Disney have you do, Mim?"

"I wore a little Colonial get-up and led people through a replica of Mt. Vernon." She curtseys and with both hands in artificial unison points to the old gas stove, with its crusty range and the crazed mica window in the oven door. "The Fa-ther of our Country," she explains in a sweet, clarion, idiot voice, "was himself nev-er a fa-ther."

"Mim, you ever get to meet Disney personally?" Pop asks.

Mim continues her act. "His con-nu-bi-al bed, which we see before us, measures five feet four and three-quarter inches from rail to rail, and from head-board to foot-board is two inch-es under sev-en feet, a gi-ant"s bed for those days, when most gentle-men were no bigger than warming pans. Here" -she plucks a plastic fly swatter off the fly-specked wall - "you see a warm-ing pan."

"If you ask me," Pop says to himself, having not been answered, "it was Disney more than FDR kept the country from going under to the Commies in the Depression."

"The ti-ny holes," Mim is explaining, holding up the flyswatter, "are de-signed to let the heat e-scape, so the fa-ther of our coun-try will not suf-fer a chill when he climbs into bed with his be-lov-ed Mar-tha. Here" - Mim gestures with two hands at the Verity Press giveaway calendar on the wall, turned to October, a grinning jack-o-lantern - "is Mar-tha."

Nelson is still laughing, but it is time to let go, and Mim does. She pecks her father on the forehead and asks him, "How"s the Prince of Pica today? Remember that, Daddy? When I thought pica was the place where they had the leaning tower."

"North of Brewer somewhere," Nelson tells her, "I forget the exact place, there"s some joint that calls itself the Leaning Tower of Pizza." The boy waits to see if this is funny, and though the grown-ups around the table laugh obligingly, he decides that it wasn"t, and shuts his mouth. His eyes go wary again. "Can I be excused?"

Rabbit asks sharply, "Where"re you going?"

"My room."

"That"s Mim"s room. When"re you going to let her have it?"

"Any rime."

"Whyncha go outdoors? Kick the soccer ball around, do something positive, for Chrissake. Get the self-pity out ofyour system."

"Let. Him alone," Mom brings out.

Mim intercedes. "Nelson, when will you show me your famous mini-bike?"

"It"s not much good, it keeps breaking down." He studies her, his possible playmate. "You can"t ride it in clothes like that."

"Out West," she says, "everybody rides motorcycles in trendy knits."

"Did you ever ride a motorcycle?"

"All the time, Nelson. I used to be den mother for a pack of h.e.l.l"s Angels. We"ll ride over and look at your bike after supper."

"It"s not the kid"s bike, it"s somebody else"s," Rabbit tells her.

"It"ll be dark after supper," Nelson tells Mim.

"I love the dark," she says. Rea.s.sured, he clumps upstairs, ignoring his father. Rabbit is jealous. Mim has learned, these years out of school, what he has not: how to manage people.

Shakily, Mom lifts her teacup, sips, sets it down. A perilous brave performance. She is proud of something; he can tell by the way she sits, upright, her neck cords stretched. Her hair has been brushed tight about her head. Tight and almost glossy. "Mim," she says, "went calling today."

Rabbit asks, "On who?"

Mim answers. "On Janice. At Springer Motors."

"Well." Rabbit pushes back from the table, his chair legs sc.r.a.ping. "What did the little mutt have to say for herself?"

"Nothing. She wasn"t there."

"Where was she?"

"He said seeing a lawyer."

"Old man Springer said that?" Fear slides into his stomach, nibbling. The law. The long white envelope. Yet he likes the idea of Mim going over there and standing in one of her costumes in front of the Toyota cutout, a gaudy knife into the heart of the Springer empire. Mim, their secret weapon.

"No," she tells him, "not old man Springer. Stavros."

"You saw Charlie there? Huh. How does he look? Beat?"

"He took me out to lunch."

"Where?"

"I don"t know, some Greek place in the black district."

Rabbit has to laugh. People dead and dying all around him, he has to let it out. "Wait"ll he tells her that."

Mim says, "I doubt he will."

Pop is slow to follow. "Who"re we talking about, Mim? That slick talker turned Janice"s head?"

Mom"s face gropes; her eyes stretch as if she is strangling while her mouth struggles to frame a droll thought. In suspense they all fall silent. "Her lover," she p.r.o.nounces. A sick feeling stabs Rabbit.

Pop says, "Well I"ve kept my trap shut throughout this mess, don"t think Harry there wasn"t a temptation to meddle but I kept my peace, but a lover in my book is somebody who loves somebody through thick and thin and from all I hear this smooth operator is just after the a.s.s. The a.s.s and the Springer name. Pardon the expression."

"I think," Mom says, faltering though her face still shines. "It"s nice. To know Janice has."

"An a.s.s," Mim finally completes for her. And it seems to Rabbit wicked that these two, Pop and Mim, are corrupting Mom on the edge of the grave. Coldly he asks Mim, "What"d you and Chas talk about?"

"Oh," Mim says, "things." She shrugs her knitted hip off the kitchen table, where she has been perched as on a bar stool. "Did you know, he has a rheumatic heart? He could kick off at any minute."

"Fat chance," Rabbit says.

"That type of operator," Pop says, snarling his teeth back into place, "lives to be a hundred, while they bury all the decent natural Americans. Don"t ask me why it works that way, the Lord must have His reasons."

Mim says, "I thought he was sweet. And quite intelligent. And much nicer about you all than you are about him. He was very thoughtful about Janice, he"s probably the first person in thirty years to give her some serious attention as a person. He sees a lot in her."

"Must use a microscope," Rabbit says.