Mom has the phone by her bed; downstairs Rabbit hears it ring, then hears it stop, but some time passes before she makes him understand it is for him. She cannot raise her voice above a kind of whimper now, but she has a cane, an intimidating knobby briar Pop brought home one day from the Brewer Salvation Army store. She taps on the floor with it until attention comes up the stairs. She is quite funny with it, waving it around, thumping. "All my life," she says. "What I wanted. A cane."

 

He hears the phone ring twice and then only slowly the tapping of the cane sinks in; he is vacuuming the living?room rug, trying to get some of the fustiness up. In Mom's room, the smell is more powerful, the perverse vitality of rot. He has read somewhere that what we smell are just tiny fragments of the thing itself tickling a plate in our nose, a subtler smoke. Everything has its cloud, a flower's bigger than a rock's, a dying person's bigger than ours. Mom says, "For you." The pillows she is propped on have slipped so she sits at a slant. He straightens her and, since the word ` Janice" begins with a sound difficult for her throat muscles to form, she is slow to make him understand who it is.

 

He freezes, reaching for the phone. "I don't want to talk to her."

 

"Why. Not."

 

"O.K., O.K." It is confusing, having to talk here, Janice's voice filling his ear while Mom and her rumpled bed fill his vision. Her blue?knuckled hands clasp and unclasp; her eyes, open too wide, rest on him in a helpless stare, the blue irises ringed with a thin white circle like a sucked Life Saver. "Now what?" he says to Janice.

 

"You could at least not be rude right away," she says.

 

"O.K., I'll be rude later. Let me guess. You're calling to tell me you've finally gotten around to getting a lawyer."

 

Janice laughs. It's been long since he heard it, a shy noise that tries to catch itself halfway out, like a snagged yo?yo. "No," she says, "I haven't gotten around to that yet. Is that what you're waiting for?" She is harder to bully now.

 

"I don't know what I'm waiting for."

 

"Is your mother there? Or are you downstairs?"

 

"Yes. Up."

 

"You sound that way. Harry ? Harry, are you there?"

 

"Sure. Where else?"

 

"Would you like to meet me anyplace?" She hurries on, to make it business. "The insurance men keep calling me at work, they say you haven't filled out any of the forms. They say we ought to be making some decisions. I mean about the house. Daddy already is trying to sell it for us."

 

"Typical."

 

"And then there's Nelson."

 

"You don't have room for him. You and your greaseball."

 

His mother looks away, shocked; studies her hands, and by an effort of will stops their idle waggling. Janice has taken a quick high breath. He cannot bump her off the line today. "Harry, that's another thing. I've moved out. It's all decided, everything's fine. I mean, that way. With Charlie and me. I'm calling from Joseph Street, I've spent the last two nights here. Harry?"

 

"I'm listening. I'm right here. Whatcha think ? I'm going to run away?"

 

"You have before. I was talking to Peggy yesterday on the phone, she and Ollie are back together, and he had heard you had gone off to some other state, a newspaper in Baltimore had given you a job."

 

"Fat chance."

 

"And Peggy said she hadn't heard from you at all. I think she's hurt."

 

"Why should she be hurt?"

 

"She told me why."

 

"Yeah. She would. Hey. This is a lot of fun chatting, but did you have anything definite you want to say? You want Nelson to come live with the Springers, is that it? I suppose he might as well, he's -" He is going to confess that the boy is unhappy, but his mother is listening and it would hurt her feelings. Considering her condition, she has really put herself out for Nelson this time.

 

Janice asks, "Would you like to see me? I mean, would it make you too mad, looking at me?"

 

And he laughs; his own laugh is unfamiliar in his ears. "It might," he says, meaning it might not.

 

"Oh, let's," she says. "You want to come here? Or shall I come there?" She understands his silence, and confirms, "We need a third place. Maybe this is stupid, but what about the Penn Villas house? We can't go in, but we need to look at it and decide what to do; I mean somebody's offering to buy it, the bank talked to Daddy the other day."

 

"O.K. I got to make Mom lunch now. How about two?"

 

"And I want to give you something," Janice is going on, while Mom is signalling her need to be helped to the commode; her blue hand tightens white around the gnarled handle of the cane.

 

"Don't let her wriggle," is her advice, when he hangs up, "her way. Around you." Sitting on the edge of the bed, Mom thumps the floor with her cane for emphasis, drawing an arc with the tip as illustration.

 

After putting the lunch dishes in the drainer Harry prepares for a journey. For clothes, he decides on the suntans he is wearing and has worn for two weeks straight, and a fresh white shirt as in his working days, and an old jacket he found in a chest in the attic: his high school athletic jacket. It carries MJ in pistachio green on an ivory shield on the back, and green sleeves emerge from V?striped shoulders. The front zips. Zipped, it binds across his chest and belly, but he begins that way, walking down Jackson Road under the chill maples; when the 12 bus lets him out at Emberly, the warmer air of this lower land lets him unzip, and he walks jauntily flapping along the curving street where the little ranch houses have pumpkins on their porchlets and Indian corn on their doors.

 

His own house sticks out from way down Vista Crescent: black coal in a row of candies. His station wagon is parked there. The American flag decal is still on the back window. It looks aggressive, fading.

 

Janice gets out of the driver's seat and stands beside the car looking lumpy and stubborn in a camel?colored loden coat he remembers from winters past. He had forgotten how short she is, how the dark hair has thinned back from the tight forehead, with that oily shine that puts little bumps along the hairline. She has abandoned the madonna hairdo, wears her hair parted way over on one side, unflatteringly. But her mouth seems less tight; her lips have lost the crimp in the corners and seem much readier to laugh, with less to lose, than before. His instinct, crazy, is to reach out and pet her ? do something, like tickle behind her ear, that you would do to a dog; but they do nothing. They do not kiss. They do not shake hands. "Where'd you resurrect that corny old jacket? I'd forgotten what awful school colors we had. Ick. Like one of those fake ice creams."

 

"I found it in an old trunk in my parents' attic. They've kept all that stuff. It still fits."

 

"Fits who?"

 

"A lot of my clothes got burned up." This note of apology because he sees she is right, it was an ice?cream world he made his mark in. Yet she too is wearing something too young for her, with a hairdo reverting to adolescence, parted way over like those South American flames of the Forties. Chachacha.

 

She digs into a side pocket of the loden coat awkwardly. "I said I had a present for you. Here." What she hands him twinkles and dangles. The car keys.

 

"Don't you need it?"

 

"Not really. I can drive one of Daddy's. I don't know why I ever thought I did need it, I guess at first I thought we might escape to somewhere. California. Canada. I don't know. We never even considered it."

 

He asks, "You're gonna stay at your parents'?"

 

Janice looks up past the jacket to him, seeking his face. "I can't stand it, really. Mother nags so. You can see she's been primed not to say anything to me, but it keeps coming out, she keeps using the phrase `public opinion.' As if she's a Gallup poll. And Daddy. For the first time, he seems pathetic to me. Somebody is opening a Datsun agency in one of the shopping centers and he feels really personally threatened. I thought," Janice says, her dark eyes resting on his face lightly, ready to fly if what she sees there displeases her, "I might get an apartment somewhere. Maybe in Peggy's building. So Nelson could walk to school in West Brewer again. I'd have Nelson, of course." Her eyes dart away.

 

Rabbit says, "So the car is sort of a swap."

 

"More of a peace offering."

 

He makes the peace sign, then transfers it to his head, as horns. She is too dumb to get it. He tells her, "The kid is pretty miserable, maybe you ought to take him. Assuming you're through with Whatsisname."

 

"We're through."

 

"Why? "

 

Her tongue flicks between her lips, a mannerism that once struck him as falsely sensual but seems inoffensive now, like licking a pencil. "Oh," Janice says. "We'd done all we could together. He was beginning to get jittery. Your sweet sister didn't help, either."

 

"Yeah. I guess we did a number on him." The "we" ? him, her, Mim, Mom; ties of blood, of time and guilt, family ties. He does not ask her for more description. He has never understood exactly about women, why they have to menstruate for instance, or why they feel hot some times and not others, and how close the tip of your prick comes to their womb or whether the womb is a hollow place without a baby in it or what, and instinct disposes him to consign Stavros to that same large area of feminine mystery. He doesn't want to bring back any lovelight into her eyes, that are nice and quick and hard on him, the prey.

 

Perhaps she had prepared to tell him more, how great her love was and how pure it will remain, for she frowns as if checked by his silence. She says, "You must help me with Nelson. All he'll talk to me about is this terrible mini?bike your sister bought him."

 

He gestures at the burned green shell. "My clothes weren't the only thing went up in that."

 

"The girl. Were she and Nelson close?"

 

"She was sort of a sister. He keeps losing sisters."

 

"Poor baby boy."

 

Janice turns and they look together at where they lived. Some agency, the bank or the police or the insurance company, has put up a loose fence of posts and wire around it, but children have freely approached, picking the insides clean, smashing the windows, storm windows and all, in the half that still stands. Some person has taken the trouble to bring a spray can of yellow paint and has hugely written NIGGER on the side. Also the word KILL. The two words don't go together, so it is hard to tell which side the spray can had been on. Maybe there had been two spray cans. Demanding equal time. On the broad stretch of aluminum clapboards below the windows, where in spring daffodils come up and in summer phlox goes wild, yellow letters spell in half?script, Pig Power = Clean Power. Also there is a peace sign and a swastika, apparently from the same can. And other people, borrowing charred sticks from the rubble, have come along and tried to edit and add to these slogans and symbols, making Pig into Black and Clean into Cong. It all adds up no better than the cluster of commercials TV stations squeeze into the chinks between programs. A clown with a red spray can has scrawled between two windows TRICK OR TREAT.

 

Janice asks, "Where was she sleeping?"

 

"Upstairs. Where we did."

 

"Did you love her?" For this her eyes leave his face and contemplate the trampled lawn. He remembers that this camel coat has a detachable hood for winter, that snaps on.

 

He confesses to her, "Not like I should have. She was sort of out of my class." Saying this makes him feel guilty, he imagines how hurt Jill would be hearing it, so to right himself he accuses Janice: "If you'd stayed in there, she'd still be alive somewhere."

 

Her eyes lift quickly. "No you don't. Don't try to pin that rap on me, Harry Angstrom. Whatever happened in there was your trip." Her trip drowns babies; his burns girls. They were made for each other. She offers to bring the truth into neutral. "Peggy says the Negro was doping her, that's what Billy says Nelson told him."

 

"She wanted it, he said. The Negro."

 

"Strange he got away."

 

"Underground Railroad."

 

"Did you help him? Did you see him after the fire?"

 

"Slightly. Who says I did?"

 

"Nelson."

 

"How did he know?"

 

"He guessed."

 

"I drove him south into the county and let him off in a cornfield."

 

"I hope he's not ever going to come back. I'd call the police, I mean, I would if-" Janice lets the thought die, premature.

 

Rabbit feels heightened and frozen by this giant need for tact; he and she seem to be slowly revolving, afraid of jarring one another away. "He promised he won't." Only in glory.

 

Relieved, Janice gestures toward the half?burned house. "It's worth a lot of money," she says. "The insurance company wants to settle for eleven thousand. Some man talked to Daddy and offered nineteen?five as is. I guess the lot is worth eight or nine by itself, this is becoming such a fashionable area."

 

"I thought Brewer was dying."

 

"Only in the middle."

 

"I tell you what. Let's sell the bastard."

 

"Let's."

 

They shake hands. He twirls the car keys in front of her face. "Lemme drive you back to your parents'."

 

"Do we have to go there?"

 

"You could come to my place and visit Mom. She'd love to see you. She can hardly talk now."

 

"Let's save that," Janice says. "Couldn't we just drive around?"

 

"Drive around? I'm not sure I still know how to drive."

 

"Peggy says you drove her Chrysler."

 

"Gee. A person doesn't have many secrets in this county."

 

As they drive east on Weiser toward the city, she asks, "Can your mother manage the afternoon alone?"

 

"Sure. She's managed a lot of them."

 

"I'm beginning to like your mother, she's quite nice to me, over the phone, when I can understand what she's saying."

 

"She's mellowing. Dying I guess does that to you." They cross the bridge and drive up Weiser in the heart of Brewer, past the Wallpaper Boutique, the roasted peanut newsstand, the expanded funeral home, the great stores with the facades where the pale shadow of the neon sign for the last owner underlies the hopeful bright sign the new owners have put up, the new trash disposal cans with tops like flying saucers, the blank marquees of the deserted movie palaces. They pass Pine Street and the Phoenix Bar. He announces, "I ought to be out scouting printshops for a job, maybe move to another city. Baltimore might be a good idea."

 

Janice says, "You look better since you stopped work. Your color is better. Wouldn't you be happier in an outdoor job?"

 

"They don't pay. Only morons work outdoors anymore."

 

"I would keep working at Daddy's. I think I should."

 

"What does that have to do with me? You're going to get an apartment, remember?"

 

She doesn't answer again. Weiser is climbing too close to the mountain, to Mt. Judge and their old homes. He turns left on Summer Street. Brick three?stories with fanlights; optometrists' and chiropractors' signs. A limestone church with a round window. He announces, "We could buy a farm."

 

She makes the connection. "Because Ruth did."

 

"That's right, I'd forgotten," he lies, "this was her street." Once he ran along this street toward the end and never got there. He ran out of steam after a few blocks and turned around. "Remember Reverend Eccles?" he asks Janice. "I saw him this summer. The Sixties did a number on him, too."

 

Janice says, "And speaking of Ruth, how did you enjoy Peggy?"

 

"Yeah, how about that? She's gotten to be quite a girl about town."

 

"But you didn't go back."

 

"Couldn't stomach it, frankly. It wasn't her, she was great. But all this fucking, everybody fucking, I don't know, it just makes me too sad. It's what makes everything so hard to run."

 

"You don't think it's what makes things run? Human things."

 

"There must be something else."

 

She doesn't answer.

 

"No? Nothing else?"

............