He gets off the bus early, on the other side of the bridge, and walks along the river through the old brick neighborhoods burdened with great green highway signs. Peggy Fosnacht"s buzzer buzzes back and when he gets off the elevator she is at the door in a shapeless blue bathrobe. "Oh, you," she says. "I thought it would be Billy having lost his key again."

"You alone?"

"Yes, but Harry, he"ll be back from school any minute."

"I only need a minute." She leads him in, pulling her bathrobe tighter about her body. He tries to wrap his errand in a little courtesy. "How"ve you been?"

"I"m managing. How have you been?"

"Managing. Just."

"Would you like a drink?"

"This early in the day?"

"I"m having one."

"No, Peggy, thanks. I can only stay a minute. I got to see what"s cooking back at the ranch."

"Quite a lot, I hear."

"That"s what I wanted to say something about."

"Please sit down. I"m getting a crick in my neck." Peggy takes a sparkling gla.s.s of beaded fluid from the sill of the window that overlooks Brewer, a swamp of brick sunk at the foot of its mountain basking westward in the sun. She sips, and her eyes slide by on either side of his head. "You"re offended by my drinking. I just got out of the bathtub. That"s often how I spend my afternoons, after spending the morning with the lawyers or walking the streets looking for a job. Everybody wants younger secretaries. They must wonder why I keep my sungla.s.ses on. I come back and take off all my clothes and get into the tub and ever so slowly put a drink inside me and watch the steam melt the ice cubes."

"It sounds nice. What I wanted to say -"

She is standing by the window with one hip pushed out; the belt of her bathrobe is loose and, though she is a shadow against the bright colorless sky, he can feel with his eyes as if with his tongue the hollow between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s that would still be dewy from her bath.

She prompts, "What you wanted to say -"

"Was to ask you a favor: could you kind of keep it quiet about the Negro staying with us that Billy saw? Janice called me today and I guess you"ve already told her, that"s O.K. if you could stop it there, I don"t want everybody to know. Don"t tell Ollie, if you haven"t already, I mean. There"s a legal angle or I wouldn"t bother." He lifts his hands helplessly; it wasn"t worth saying, now that he"s said it.

Peggy steps toward him, stabbingly, too much liquor or trying to keep the hip out seductively or just the way she sees, two of everything, and tells him, "She must be an awfully good lay, to get you to do this for her."

"The girl? No, actually, she and I aren"t usually on the same wavelength."

She brushes back her hair with an approximate flicking motion that lifts the bathrobe lapel and exposes one breast; she is drunk. "Try another wavelength."

"Yeah, I"d love to, but right now, the fact is, I"m running too scared to take on anything else, and anyway Billy"s about to come home."

"Sometimes he hangs around Burger Bliss for hours. Ollie thinks he"s getting bad habits."

"Yeah, how is old Ollie? You and he getting together at all?"

She lets her hand down from her hair; the lapel covers her again. "Sometimes he comes by and f.u.c.ks me, but it doesn"t seem to bring us any closer."

"Probably it does, he just doesn"t express it. He"s too embarra.s.sed at having hurt you."

"That"s how you would be, but Ollie isn"t like that. It would never enter his head to feel guilty. It"s the artist in him, you know he really can play almost any instrument he picks up. But he"s a cold little b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

"Yeah, I"m kind of cold too." He has stood in alarm, since she has come closer another clumsy step.

Peggy says, "Give me your hands." Her eyes fork upon him, around him. Her face unchanging, she reaches down and lifts his hands from his sides and holds them to her chest. "They"re warm." He thinks, Cold heart. She inserts his left hand into her bathrobe and presses it around a breast. He thinks of spilling guts, of a cow"s stomach tumbling out; elastically she overflows his fingers, her nipple a clot, a gumdrop stuck to his palm. Her eyes are closed -veins in her lids, crow"s feet at the corners - and she is intoning, "You"re not cold, you"re warm, you"re a warm man, Harry, a good man. You"ve been hurt and I want you to heal, I want to help you heal, do whatever you want with me." She is talking as if to herself, rapidly, softly, but has brought him so close he hears it all; her breath beats at the base of his throat. Her heartbeat is sticking to his palm. The skin of her brow is vexed and the piece of her body her bathrobe discloses is lumpy and strange, blind like the brow of an ox, but eased by liquor she has slid into that state where the body of the other is her own body, the body of secretive self-love that the mirror we fill and the bed we warm alone give us back; and he is enclosed in this body of love of hers and against all thought and wish he thickens all over tenderly and the one-eyed rising beneath his waist begins.

He protests "I"m not good" but is also sliding; he relaxes the hand that is holding her breast to give it air to sway in.

She insists "You"re good, you"re lovely" and fumbles at his fly; with the free hand he pulls aside the lapel of the bathrobe so the other breast is free and the bathrobe belt falls unknotted.

An elevator door sucks shut in the hall. Footsteps swell toward their door. They spring apart; Peggy wraps the robe around herself again. He keeps on his retinas the afterimage of a ferny triangle, broader than his palm, beneath a belly whiter than crystal, with silvery stretch-marks. The footsteps pa.s.s on by. The would-be lovers sigh with relief, but the spell has been broken. Peggy turns her back, reknots her belt. "You"re keeping in touch with Janice," she says.

"Not really."

"How did you know I told her about the black?"

Funny, everybody else has no trouble saying "black." Or hating the war. Rabbit must be defective. Lobotomy. A pit opens where guilt gnaws, at the edge of his bladder. He must hurry home. "She called me to say a lawyer was starting divorce proceedings."

"Does that upset you?"

"I guess. Sort of. Sure."

"I suppose I"m dumb, I just never understood why you put up with Janice. She was never enough for you, never. I love Janice, but she is about the most childish, least sensitive woman I"ve ever known."

"You sound like my mother."

"Is that bad?" She whirls around; her hair floats. He has never seen Peggy so suddenly soft, so womanly frontal. Even her eyes he could take. In play, mocking the pressure of Billy impending at his back, he rubs the back of his hand across her nipples. Nibs and Dots.

"Maybe you"re right. We should try out our wavelengths."

Peggy flushes, backs off, looks stony, as if an unexpected mirror has shown her herself too harshly. She pulls the blue terrycloth around her so tight her shoulders huddle. "If you want to take me out to dinner some night," she says, "I"m around," adding irritably, "but don"t count your chickens."

Hurry, hurry. The 12 bus takes forever to come, the walk down Emberly is endless. Yet his house, third from the end of Vista Crescent, low and new and a sullen apple-green on the quarter-acre of lawn scraggly with plantain, is intact, and all around it the unpopulated stretches of similar houses hold unbroken the intensity of duplication. That the blot of black inside his house is unmirrored fools him into hoping it isn"t there. But, once up the three porch steps and through the door of three stepped windows, Rabbit sees, to his right, in the living room, from behind - the sofa having been swung around - a bushy black sphere between Jill"s cone of strawberry gold and Nelson"s square-cut ma.s.s of Janice-dark hair. They are watching television. Skeeter seems to have reinstated the box. The announcer, ghostly pale because the adjustment is too bright and mouthing as rapidly as a vampire because there is too much news between too many commercials, enunciates, "... after a five-year exile spent in Communist Cuba, various African states, and Communist China, landed in Detroit today and was instantly taken into custody by waiting FBI men. Elsewhere on the racial front, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights sharply charged that the Nixon Administration has made quote a major retreat unquote pertaining to school integration in the southern states. In Fayette Mississippi three white Klansmen were arrested for the attempted bombing of the supermarket owned by newly elected black mayor of Fayette, Charles Evers, brother of the slain civil rights leader. In New York City Episcopal spokesmen declined to defend further their controversial decision to grant two hundred thousand dollars toward black church leader James Forman"s demand of five hundred million dollars in quote reparations unquote from the Christian churches in America for quote three centuries of indignity and exploitation unquote. In Hartford Connecticut and Camden New Jersey an uneasy peace prevails after last week"s disturbances within the black communities of these cities. And now, an important announcement."

"h.e.l.lo, h.e.l.lo," Rabbit says, ignored.

Nelson turns and says, "Hey Dad. Robert Williams is back in this country."

"Who the h.e.l.l is Robert Williams?"

Skeeter says, "Chuck baby, he"s a man going to fry your a.s.s."

"Another black Jesus. How many of you are there?"

"By many false prophets," Skeeter tells him, "you shall know my coming, right? That"s the Good Book, right?"

"It also says He"s come and gone."

"Conlin" again, Chuck. Gonna fry your a.s.s. You and Nixon"s, right?"

"Poor old Nixon, even his own commissions beat on him. What the h.e.l.l can he do? He can"t go into every ghetto and fix the plumbing himself. He can"t give every copped-out junkie a million dollars and a Ph. D. Nixon, who"s Nixon? He"s just a typical flatfooted Chamber of Commerce type who lucked his way into the hot seat and is so dumb he thinks it"s good luck. Let the poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d alone, he"s trying to bore us to death so we won"t commit suicide."

"Nixon, s.h.i.t. That honky was put there by the cracker vote, right? Strom Stormtrooper is his very bag. He is Herod, man, and all us black babies better believe it."

"Black babies, black leaders, Jesus am I sick of the word black. If I said white one-eightieth as often as you say black you"d scream yourself blue. For Chrissake, forget your skin."

"I"ll forget it when you forget it, right?"

"Lord I"d love to forget not only your skin but everything inside it. I thought three days ago you said you were getting out in three days."

"Dad, don"t." The kid"s face is tense. Mom was right, too delicate, too nervous. Thinks the world is going to hurt him, so it will. The universal instinct to exterminate the weak.

Jill rises to shield the other two. Three on one: Rabbit is exhilarated. Faking and dodging, he says before she can speak, "Tell the darker of your boyfriends here I thought he promised to pull out when he got a stake. I have twenty bucks here to give him. Which reminds me of something else."

Skeeter interrupts, addressing the air. "I love him when he gets like this. He is the Man."

And Jill is saying her piece. "Nelson and I refuse to live with this quarrelling. Tonight after supper we want to have an organized discussion. There"s a crying need for education in this household."

"Household," Rabbit says, "I"d call it a refugee camp." He persists in what he has been reminded of. "Hey, Skeeter. Do you have a last name?"

"X," Skeeter tells him. "42X."

"Sure it"s not Farnsworth?"

Skeeter"s body sheds its sh.e.l.l, hangs there outfeinted a second, before regathering hardness. "That Super Tom," he says definitively, "is not the slightest relation of mine."

"The Vat had your last name as Farnsworth."

"The Vat," Skeeter p.r.o.nounces mincingly, "is a Fascist rag."

Having scored, you put your head down and run back up the floor; but with that feeling inside, of having made a mark that can"t be rubbed out. " Just wondering," Rabbit smiles. He stretches out his arms as if from wall to wall. "Who wants a beer besides me?"

After supper, Nelson washes the dishes and Skeeter dries. Jill tidies up the living room for their discussion; Rabbit helps her swing the sofa back into place. On the shelves between the living room and the breakfast nook that he and Janice had kept empty Rabbit notices now a stack of tired paperbacks, their spines chafed and biased by handling. The Selected Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, The Wretched of the Earth, Soul on Ice, Life and Times of Frederick Dougla.s.s, others, history, Marx, economics, stuff that makes Rabbit feel sick, as when he thinks about what surgeons do, or all the plumbing and gas lines there are under the street. "Skeeter"s books," Jill explains. "I went into Jimbo"s today for them, and his clothes. Babe had them."

"Hey Chuck," Skeeter calls from the sink, through the shelves, "know where I got those books? Over in Nam, at the Longbinh base bookstore. They love us to read, that crazy Army of yours. Teach us how to read, shoot, dig pot, sniff stag, black man"s best friend, just like they say!" He snaps his towel, pap!

Rabbit ignores him and asks Jill, "You went in there? It"s full of police, they could easy tail you."

Skeeter shouts from the kitchen, "Don"t you worry Chuck, those poor pigs"ve bigger n.i.g.g.e.rs than me to fry. You know what happened over in York, right? Brewer"s gone to make that look like the Ladies Aid ball!" Pap!

Nelson washing beside him asks. "Will they shoot every white person?"

"Just the big old ugly ones, mostly. You stay away from that gruesome Billy and stick next to me, Babychuck, you"ll be all right."

Rabbit pulls down a book at random and reads, Government is for the people"s progress and not for the comfort of an aristocracy. The object of industry is the welfare of the workers and not the wealth of the owners. The object of civilization is the cultural progress of the ma.s.s of workers and not merely of an intellectual elite.

It frightens him, as museums used to frighten him, when it was part of school to take trips there and to see the mummy rotting in his casket of gold, the elephant tusk filed into a hundred squinting Chinamen. Unthinkably distant lives, abysses of existence, worse than what crawls blind on ocean floors. The book is full of Skeeter"s underlinings. He reads, Awake, awake, put on thy strength, O Zion! Reject the weakness of missionaries who teach neither love nor brotherhood, but chiefly the virtues of private profit from capital, stolen from your land and labor. Africa, awake! Put on the beautiful robes of Pan-African socialism.

Rabbit replaces the book feeling better. There are no such robes. It is all c.r.a.p. "What"s the discussion about?" he asks, as they settle around the cobbler"s bench.

Jill says nervously, blushing, "Skeeter and Nelson and I were talking about it today after school and agreed that since there seems to be such a painful communications problem -"

"Is that what it is?" Rabbit asks. "Maybe we communicate too well."

"- a structured discussion might be helpful and educational."

"Me being the one who needs to be educated," Rabbit says.

"Not necessarily." The care with which Jill speaks makes Rabbit feel pity; we are too much for her, he thinks. "You"re older than we are and we respect your experience. We all agree, I think, that your problem is that you"ve never been given a chance to formulate your views. Because of the compet.i.tive American context, you"ve had to convert everything into action too rapidly. Your life has no reflective content; it"s all instinct, and when your instincts let you down, you have nothing to trust. That"s what makes you cynical. Cynicism, I"ve seen it said somewhere, is tired pragmatism. Pragmatism suited a certain moment here, the frontier moment; it did the work, very wastefully and ruthlessly, but it did it."

"On behalf of Daniel Boone," Rabbit says, "I thank you."

"It"s wrong," Jill goes on gently, "when you say Americans are exploiters, to forget that the first things they exploit are themselves. You," she says, lifting her face, her eyes and freckles and nostrils a constellation, "you"ve never given yourself a chance to think, except on techniques, basketball and printing, that served a self-exploitative purpose. You carry an old G.o.d with you, and an angry old patriotism. And now an old wife." He takes breath to protest, but her hand begs him to let her finish. "You accept these things as sacred not out of love or faith but fear; your thought is frozen because the first moment when your instincts failed, you raced to the conclusion that everything is nothing, that zero is the real answer. That is what we Americans think, it"s win or lose, all or nothing, kill or die, because we"ve never created the leisure in which to take thought. But now, you see, we must, because action is no longer enough, action without thought is violence. As we see in Vietnam."

He at last can speak. "There was violence in Vietnam before we ever heard of the f.u.c.king place. You can see by just the way I"m sitting here listening to this c.r.a.p I"m a pacifist basically." He points at Skeeter. "He"s the violent son of a b.i.t.c.h."

"But you see," Jill says, her voice lulling and nagging, with just a teasing ragged hem showing of the voice she uses in bed, "the reason Skeeter annoys and frightens you is you don"t know a thing about his history, I don"t mean his personal history so much as the history of his race, how he got to where he is. Things that threaten you like riots and welfare have jumped into the newspapers out of nowhere for you. So for tonight we thought we would just talk a little, have a kind of seminar, about Afro-American history."

"Please, Dad," Nelson says.

"Jesus. O.K. Hit me. We were beastly to the slaves so why do so few American Negroes want to give up their Cadillacs and, excuse the expression, colored televisions and go back to Africa?"

"Dad, don"t."

Skeeter begins. "Let"s forget the slavery, Chuck. It was forever ago, everybody used to do it, it was a country kind of thing, right? Though I must say, the more it began to smell like s.h.i.t, the more you crackers rolled around in it, right?"

"We had more country."

"Easy, sit back. No arguments, right? You had cotton come along, right? Anybody but black folks die working those cotton swamps, right? Anyhoo, you had this war. You had these crazies up North like Garrison and Brown agitating and down South a bunch of supercrackers like Yancy and Rhett who thought they could fatten their own pie by splitting, funny thing is" - he chuckles, wheezes, Rabbit pictures him with a shaved head and sees Farnsworth - "they didn"t, the Confederacy sent "em away on a ship and elected all play-it-safes to office! Same up North with cats like Sumner. Come to the vote, people scared of the man with the idea, right? Do you know, suppose you don"t, dude called Ruffin, bright as could be, invented modern agriculture or next thing to it, hated the Yankees so much he pulled the string on the first cannon at Sumter and shot himself in the head when the South lost? Wild men. Beautiful, right? So anyhoo, Lincoln got this war, right, and fought it for a bunch of wrong reasons - what"s so sacred about a Union, just a power trust, right? - and for another wrong reason freed the slaves, and it was done. G.o.d bless America, right? So here I begin to get mad."

"Get mad, Skeeter," Rabbit says. "Who wants a beer?"

"Me, Dad."

"Half a one."

Jill says, "I"ll split it with him."

Skeeter says, "That stuff rots the soul. Mind if I burn some good Red?"

"It"s not legal."

"Right. But everybody does it. All those swish cats over in Penn Park, you think they have a Martini when they come home at night? That"s yesterday. They blow gra.s.s. Sincerely, it is more in than chewing gum. Over in Nam, it was the fighting boy"s candy."

"O.K. Light up. I guess we"ve gone this far."

"There is far to go," Skeeter says, rolling his joint, from a rubber pouch he produces from within the sofa, where he sleeps, and thin yellow paper, licking it rapidly with that fat pale tongue, and twisting the ends. When he lights it, the twisted end flames. He sucks in hungrily, holds it in as if about to dive very deep, and then releases the sweet used smoke with a belch. He offers the wet end to Rabbit. "Try?"