What he sees reminds him, in the first flash, of the printing process, an inked plate contiguous at some few points to white paper. As his eyes adjust, he sees Skeeter is not black, he is a gentle brown. These are smooth-skinned children being gently punished, one being made to stand and the other to kneel. Skeeter crouches and reaches down a long hand, fingernails like baby rose petals, to shield Jill"s profile from the glare. Her eyelids remain closed, her mouth remains open, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s cast no shadow they are so shallow, she is feminine most in the swell of her backside spread on her propping heels and in the white lily of a hand floating beside his b.a.l.l.s as if to receive from the air a baton. An inch or two of Skeeter"s long c.o.c.k is un-enclosed by her face, a purplish inch bleached to lilac, below his metallic pubic explosion, the shape and texture of his goatee. Keeping his protective crouch, Skeeter turns his face sheepishly toward the light; his eyegla.s.ses glare opaquely and his upper lip lifts in imitation of pain. "Hey man, what"s with that? Cut that light."

"You"re beautiful," Rabbit says.

"O.K., strip and get into it, she"s full of holes, right?"

"I"m scared to," Rabbit confesses: it is true, they seem not only beautiful but in the same vision an interlocked machine that might pull him apart.

Though the slap of light left her numb, this confession pierces Jill"s trance; she turns her head, Skeeter"s p.e.n.i.s falling free, a bright string of moisture breaking. She looks at Harry, past him; as he reaches to switch off the light mercifully, she screams. In the corner of his vision, he saw it too: a face. At the window. Eyes like two cigarette burns. The lamp is out, the face is vanished. The window is a faintly blue rectangle in a black room. Rabbit runs to the front door and opens it. The night air bites. October. The lawn looks artificial, lifeless, dry, no-color: a snapshot of gra.s.s. Vista Crescent stretches empty but for parked cars. The maple is too slender to hide anyone. A child might have made it across the front of the house along the flowerbeds and be now in the garage. The garage door is up. And, if the child is Nelson, a door from the garage leads into the kitchen. Rabbit decides not to look, not to give chase; he feels that there is no s.p.a.ce for him to step into, that the vista before him is a flat, stiff, cold photograph. The only thing that moves is the vapor of his breathing. He closes the door. He hears nothing move in the kitchen. He tells the living room, "n.o.body."

"Bad," Skeeter says. His p.r.i.c.k has quite relaxed, a whip between his legs as he squats. Jill is weeping on the floor; face down, she has curled her naked body into a knot. Her bottom forms the top half of a valentine heart, only white; her fleshcolored hair fans spilled over the sullen green carpet. Rabbit and Skeeter together squat to pick her up. She fights it, she makes herself roll over limply; her hair streams across her face, clouds her mouth, adheres like cobwebs to her chin and throat. A string as of milkweed spittle is on her chin; Rabbit wipes her chin and mouth with his handkerchief and, for weeks afterward, when all is lost, will take out this handkerchief and bury his nose in it, in its scarcely detectable smell of distant ocean.

Jill"s lips are moving. She is saying, "You promised. You promised." She is talking to Skeeter. Though Rabbit bends his big face over hers, she has eyes only for the narrow black face beside him. There is no green in her eyes, the black pupils have eclipsed the irises. "It"s such dumb h.e.l.l," she says, with a little whimper, as if to mock her own complaint, a Connecticut housewife who knows she exaggerates. "Oh Christ," she adds in an older voice and shuts her eyes. Rabbit touches her; she is sweating. At his touch, she starts to shiver. He wants to blanket her, to blanket her with his body if there is nothing else, but she will talk only to Skeeter. Rabbit is not there for her, he only thinks he is here.

Skeeter asks down into her, "Who"s your Lord Jesus, Jill honey?"

"You are."

"I am, right?"

"Right."

"You love me more"n you love yourself?"

"Much more."

"What do you see when you look at me, Jill honey?"

"I don"t know."

"You see a giant lily, right?"

"Right. You promised."

"Love my c.o.c.k?"

"Yes."

"Love my j.i.s.m, sweet Jill? Love it in your veins?"

"Yes. Please. Shoot me. You promised."

"I your Savior, right? Right?"

"You promised. You must. Skeeter."

"O.K. Tell me I"m your Savior."

"You are. Hurry. You did promise."

"O.K." Skeeter explains hurriedly. "I"ll fix her up. You go upstairs, Chuck. I don"t want you to see this."

"I want to see it."

"Not this. It"s bad, man. Bad, bad, bad. It"s s.h.i.t. Stay clean, you in deep enough trouble on account of me without being party to this, right? Split. I"m begging, man."

Rabbit understands. They are in country. They have taken a hostage. Everywhere out there, there are unfriendlies. He checks the front door, staying down below the three windows echoing the three chime-tones. He sneaks into the kitchen. n.o.body is there. He slips the bolt across, in the door that opens from the garage. Sidling to make his shadow narrow, he climbs upstairs. At Nelson"s door he listens for the sound of unconscious breathing. He hears the boy"s breath rasp, touching bottom. In his own bedroom, the streetlamp prints negative spatters of the maple leaves on his wallpaper. He gets into bed in his underwear, in case he must rise and run; as a child, in summer, he would have to sleep in his underwear when the wash hadn"t dried on the line. Rabbit listens to the noises downstairs - clicking, clucking kitchen noises, of a pan being put on the stove, of a bit of gla.s.s clinking, of footsteps across the linoleum, the sounds that have always made him sleepy, of Mom up, of the world being tended to. His thoughts begin to dissolve, though his heart keeps pounding, waves breaking on Jill"s white valentine, stamped on his retinas like the sun. Offset versus letterpress, offset never has the bite of the other, looks greasy, the wave of the future. She slips into bed beside him; her valentine nestles cool against his belly and silken limp c.o.c.k. He has been asleep. He asks her, "Is it late?"

Jill speaks very slowly. "Pretty late."

"How do you feel?"

"Better. For now."

"We got to get you to a doctor."

"It won"t help."

He has a better idea, so obvious he cannot imagine why he has never thought of it before. "We got to get you back to your father."

"You forget. He"s dead."

"Your mother, then."

"The car"s dead."

"We"ll get it out of hock."

"It"s too late," Jill tells him. "It"s too late for you to try to love me."

He wants to answer, but there is a puzzling heavy truth in this that carries him under, his hand caressing the inward dip of her waist, a warm bird dipping toward its nest.

Sunshine, the old clown. So many maple leaves have fallen that morning light slants in baldly. A headache grazes his skull, his dream (Pajasek and he were in a canoe, paddling upstream, through a dark green country; their destination felt to be a distant mountain striped and folded like a tablecloth. "When can I have my silver bullet?" Rabbit asked him. "You promised."

"Fool," Pajasek told him. "Stupid."

"You know so much more," Rabbit answered, nonsensically, and his heart opened in a flood of light) merges with the night before, both unreal. Jill sleeps dewily beside him; at the base of her throat, along her hairline, sweat has collected and glistens. Delicately, not to disturb her, he takes her wrist and turns it so he can see the inside of her freckled arm. They might be bee-stings. There are not too many. He can talk to Janice. Then he remembers that Janice is not here, and that only Nelson is their child. He eases from the bed, amused to discover himself in underwear, like those times when Mom had left his pajamas on the line to dry.

After breakfast, while Jill and Skeeter sleep, he and Nelson rake and mow the lawn, putting it to bed for the winter. He hopes this will be the last mowing, though in fact the gra.s.s, parched in high spots, is vigorously green where a depression holds moisture, and along a line from the kitchen to the street -perhaps the sewer connection is broken and seeping, that is why the earth of Penn -Villas has a sweetish stink. And the leaves-he calls to Nelson, who has to shut off the razzing mower to listen, "How the h.e.l.l does such a skinny little tree produce so many leaves?"

"They aren"t all its leaves. They blow in from the other trees."

And he looks, and sees that his neighbors have trees, saplings like his, but some already as tall as the housetops. Someday Nelson may come back to this, his childhood neighborhood, and find it strangely dark, buried in shade, the lawns opulent, the homes venerable. Rabbit hears children calling in other yards, and sees across several fences and driveways kids having a Sat.u.r.day scrimmage, one voice piping, "I"m free, I"m free," and the ball obediently floating. This isn"t a bad neighborhood, he thinks, this could be a nice place if you gave it a chance. And around the other houses men with rakes and mowers mirror him. He asks Nelson, before the boy restarts the mower, "Aren"t you going to visit your mother today?"

"Tomorrow. Today she and Charlie were driving up to the Poconos, to look at the foliage. They went with some brother of Charlie"s and his wife."

"Boy, she"s moving right in." A real Springer. He smiles to himself, perversely proud. The legal stationery must be on the way. And then he can join that army of the unattached, of Brewer geezers. Human garbage, Pop used to say. He better enjoy Vista Crescent while he has it. He resumes raking, and listens for the mower"s razzing to resume. Instead, there is the lurch and rattle of the starter, repeated, and Nelson"s voice calling, "Hey Dad. I think it"s out of gas."

A Sat.u.r.day, then, of small sunlit tasks, acts of caretaking and commerce. He and Nelson stroll with the empty five-gallon can up to Weiser Street and get it filled at the Getty station. Returning, they meet Jill and Skeeter emerging from the house, dressed to kill. Skeeter wears stovepipe pants, alligator shoes, a maroon turtleneck and a peach-colored cardigan. He looks like the newest thing in golf pros. Jill has on her mended white dress and a brown sweater of Harry"s; she suggests a cheerleader, off to the noon pep rally before the football game. Her face, though thin, and the skin of it thin and brittle like isingla.s.s, has a pink flush; she seems excited, affectionate. "There"s some salami and lettuce in the fridge for you and Nelson to make lunch with if you want. Skeeter and I are going into Brewer to see what we can do about this wretched car. And we thought we might drop in on Babe. We"ll be back late this after. Maybe you should visit your mother this afternoon, I feel guilty you never do."

"O.K., I might. You O.K.?" To Skeeter: "You have bus fare?"

In his clothes Skeeter puts on a dandy"s accent; he thrusts out his goatee and says between scarcely parted teeth, " Jilly is loaded. And if we run short, your name is good credit, right?" Rabbit tries to recall the naked man of last night, the dangling p.e.n.i.s, the jutting heels, the squat as by a jungle fire, and cannot; it was another terrain.

Serious, a daylight man, he scolds: "You better get back before Nelson and I go out around six. I don"t want to leave the house empty." He drops his voice so Nelson won"t hear. "After last night, I"m kind of spooked."

"What happened last night?" Skeeter asks. "Nothin" spooky that I can remember, we"se all jest folks, livin" out life in these Benighted States." He has put on all his armor, nothing will get to him.

Rabbit tests it: "You"re a baad n.i.g.g.e.r."

Skeeter smiles in the sunshine with angelic rows of teeth; his spectacles toss halos higher than the TV aerials. "Now you"re singing my song," he says.

Rabbit asks Jill, "You O.K. with this crazyman?"

She says lightly, "He"s my sugar daddy," and puts her arm through his, and linked like that they recede down Vista Crescent, and vanish in the shufe of picture windows.

Rabbit and Nelson finish the lawn. They eat, and toss a football around for a while, and then the boy asks if he can go off and join the scrimmage whose shouts they can hear, he knows some of the kids, the same kids who look into windows but that"s O.K., Dad; and really it does feel as though all can be forgiven, all will sink into Sat.u.r.day"s America like rain into earth, like days into time. Rabbit goes into the house and watches the first game of the World Series, Baltimore outcla.s.sing the Mets, for a while, and switches to Penn State outcla.s.sing West Virginia at football, and, unable to sit still any longer with the bubble of premonition swelling inside him, goes to the phone and calls his home. "Hi Pop, hey. I thought of coming over this after but the kid is outside playing a game and we have to go over to Fosnachts tonight anyhow, so can she wait until tomorrow? Mom. Also I ought to get hot on changing the screens around to storm windows, it felt chilly last night."

"She can wait, Harry. Your mother does a lot of waiting these days."

"Yeah, well." He means it"s not his fault, he didn"t invent old age. "When is Mim coming in?"

"Any day now, we don"t know the exact day. She"ll just arrive, is how she left it. Her old room is ready."

"How"s Mom sleeping lately? She still having dreams?"

"Strange you should ask, Harry. I always said, you and your mother are almost psychic. Her dreams are getting worse. She dreamed last night we buried her alive. You and me and Mim together. She said only Nelson tried to stop it."

"Gee, maybe she"s warming up to Nelson at last."

"And Janice called us this morning."

"What about? I"d hate to have Stavros"s phone bill."

"Difficult to say, what about. She had nothing concrete that we could fathom, she just seems to want to keep in touch. I think she"s having terrible second thoughts, Harry. She says she"s exceedingly worried about you."

"I bet."

"Your mother and I spent a lot of time discussing her call; you know our Mary, she"s never one to admit when she"s disturbed -"

"Pop, there"s somebody at the door. Tell Mom I"ll be over tomorrow, absolutely."

There had been n.o.body at the door. He had suddenly been unable to keep talking to his father, every word of the old man"s dragging with reproach. But having lied frightens him now; "n.o.body" has become an evil presence at the door. Moving through the rooms stealthily, he searches the house for the kit Skeeter must use to fix Jill with. He can picture it from having watched television: the syringe and tourniquet and the long spoon to melt the powder in. The sofa cushions divulge a dollar in change, a bent paperback of Soul on Ice, a pearl from an earring or pocketbook. Jill"s bureau drawers upstairs conceal nothing under the underwear but a box of Tampax, a packet of hairpins, a halffull card of Enovid pills, a shy little tube of ointment for acne. The last place he thinks to look is the downstairs closet, fitted into an ill-designed corner beside the useless fireplace, along the wall of stained pine where the seascape hangs that Janice bought at Kroll"s complete with frame, one piece in fact with its frame, a single shaped sheet of plastic, Rabbit remembers from hanging it on the nail. In this closet, beneath the polyethylene bags holding their winter clothes, including the mink stole old man Springer gave Janice on her twenty-first birthday, there is a squat black suitcase, smelling new, with a combination lock. Packed so Skeeter could grab it and run from the house in thirty seconds. Rabbit fiddles with the lock, trying combinations at random, trusting to G.o.d to make a very minor miracle, then, this failing, going at it by system, beginning 111, 112, 113, 114, and then 211, 212, 213, but never hits it, and the practical infinity of numbers opens under him dizzyingly. Some dust in the closet starts him sneezing. He goes outdoors with the Windex bottle for the storm windows.

This work soothes him. You slide up the aluminum screen, putting the summer behind you, and squirt the inside window with the blue spray, give it those big square swipes to spread it thin, and apply the tighter rubbing to remove the film and with it the dirt; it squeaks, like birdsong. Then slide the winter window down from the slot where it has been waiting since April and repeat the process; and go inside and repeat the process, twice: so that at last four flawless transparencies pennit outdoors to come indoors, other houses to enter yours.

Toward five o"clock Skeeter and Jill return, by taxi. They are jubilant; through Babe they found a man willing to give them six hundred dollars for the Porsche. He drove them upcounty, he examined the car, and Jill signed the registration over to him.

"What color was he?" Rabbit asks.

"He was green," Skeeter says, showing him ten-dollar bills fanned in his hand.

Rabbit asks Jill, "Why"d you split it with him?"

Skeeter says, "I dig hostility. You want your cut, right?" His lips push, his gla.s.ses glint.

Jill laughs it off. "Skeeter"s my partner in crime," she says.

"You want my advice, what you should do with that money?" Rabbit says. "You should get a train ticket back to Stonington."

"The trains don"t run any more. Anyway, I thought I"d buy some new dresses. Aren"t you tired of this ratty old white one? I had to pin it up in the front and wear this sweater over it."

"It suits you," he says.

She takes up the challenge in his tone. "Something bugging you?"

"Just your sloppiness. You"re throwing your f.u.c.king life away."

"Would you like me to leave? I could now."

His arms go numb as if injected: his hands feel heavy, his palms tingly and swollen. Her nibbling mouth, her apple hardness, the seafan of her cedar-colored hair on their pillows in the morning light, her white valentine of packed satin. "No," he begs, "don"t go yet."

"Why not?"

"You"re under my skin." The phrase feels unnatural on his lips, puffs them like a dry wind in pa.s.sing; it must have been spoken for Skeeter, for Skeeter cackles appreciatively.

"Chuck, you"re leaming to be a loser. I love it. The Lord loves it: Losers gonna grab the earth, right?"

Nelson returns from the football game with a bruised upper lip, his smile lopsided and happy. "They give you a hard time?" Rabbit asks.

"No, it was fun. Skeeter, you ought to play next Sat.u.r.day, they asked who you were and I said you used to be a quarterback for Brewer High."

"Quarterback, s.h.i.t, I was full back, I was so small they couldn"t find me."

"I don"t mind being small, it makes you quicker."

"O.K.," his father says, "see how quick you can take a bath. And for once in your life brush your hair."

Festively Jill and Skeeter see them off to the Fosnachts. Jill straightens Rabbit"s tie, Skeeter dusts his shoulders like a Pullman porter. "Just think, honey," Skeeter says to Jill, "our little boy"s all growed up, his first date."

"It"s just dinner," Rabbit protests. "I"ll be back for the eleveno"clock news."

"That big honky with the sideways eyes, she may have something planned for dessert."

"You stay as late as you want," Jill tells him. "We"ll leave the porch light on and won"t wait up."

"What"re you two going to do tonight?"