Tuesday afternoon, overcast, he takes a bus to Mt. judge. Eccles' address is at the north end of town; he rides past his own neighborhood in safety, gets off at Spruce, and walks along singing in a high voice to himself the phrase, "Oh I'm just wild about Harry" ? not the beginning of the song, but the place at the end where the girl, repeating, goes way up on "I'm."

 

He feels on even keel. For two days he and Ruth have lived on his money and he still has fourteen dollars left. Furthermore he has discovered, poking through her bureau this morning while she was out shopping, that she has an enormous s checking account, with over five hundred dollars in it at the end of February. They have gone bowling once and have seen four movies ? Gigi; Bell, Book and Candle; The Inn of the Sixth Happiness; and The Shaggy Dog. He saw so many snippets from The Shaggy Dog on the Mickey Mouse Club that he was curious to see the whole thing. It was like looking through a photograph album with about half familiar faces. The scene where the rocket goes through the roof and Fred MacMurray runs out with the coffee pot he knew as well as his own face.

 

Ruth was funny. Her bowling was awful; she just sort of paddled up to the line and dropped the ball. Plok. Every time, in Gígi, the stereophonic?sound loudspeaker behind them in the theater would blare out she turned around and said "Shh" as if it were somebody in the theater talking too loud. In The Inn of the Sixth Happiness every time Ingrid Bergman's face appeared on the screen she leaned over to Rabbit and asked him in a whisper, "Is she really a hooer?" He was upset by Robert Donat; he looked awful. He knew he was dying. Imagine knowing you're dying and going ahead pretending you're a mandarin. Ruth's comment about Bell, Book and Candle last night was, "Why don't you ever see any bongo drums around here?" He vowed secretly to get her some. A half?hour ago, waiting for the bus on Weiser Street, he priced a set in the window of the Chords 'n' Records music store. $19.95. All the way out on the bus he was beating bongo patterns on his knees.

 

"For I'm just wild about Harrr?ree?"

 

Number 61 is a big brick place with white wood trim, a little porch imitating a Greek temple, and a slate roof that shines like the scales of a big fish. Out back a wire fence encloses a yellow swing frame and a sandbox. A puppy yaps in this pen as Harry goes up the walk. The grass wears that intense greasy green that promises rain, the color of grass in color snapshots. The place looks too cheerful to be right; Rabbit thinks of ministers as living in gloomy Lutheran houses. But a small plate above the fish?shaped door?knocker says in engraved script The Rectory. He bangs the fish twice and, after waiting, twice again.

 

A crisp little number with speckled green eyes opens the door. "What is it?" Her voice as good as says, "How dare you?" As she adjusts her face to his height her eyes enlarge, displaying more of the vividly clear whites to which her bright irises are buttoned.

 

At once, absurdly, he feels in control of her, feels she likes him. Freckles dot her little bumpy nose, kind of a pinched nose, narrow and pale under the dots of tan. Her skin is fair, and fine?grained as a child's. She is wearing orange shorts. With a pleasantness that amounts to arrogance he says, "Hi."

 

"Hello."

 

"Say, is Reverend Eccles in?"

 

"He's asleep."

 

"In the middle of the day?"

 

"He was up much of the night."

 

"Oh gosh. The poor guy."

 

"Do you want to come in?"

 

"Well gee, I don't know. He told me to be here. He really did."

 

"He might well have. Please come in."

 

She leads him past a hall and staircase into a cool room with a high ceiling and silver wallpaper, a piano, watercolors of scenery, a lot of sets of books in a recessed bookcase, a fireplace whose mantel supports one of those clocks with a pendulum of four gold balls that are supposed to run practically for ever. Photographs in frames all around. Furniture heavy brown and red except for a long sofa with a scrolling back and arms whose cushions are cream white. The room smells coldly kept. From far off comes the warmer odor of cake baking. She stops in the center of the rug and says, "Listen."

 

He stops. The faint bump that he also heard is not repeated. She explains, "I thought that brat was asleep."

 

"Are you the babysitter?"

 

"I'm the wife," she says, and sits down in the center of the white sofa, to prove it.

 

He takes a padded wing chair opposite. The plum fabric feels softly gritty against his naked forearms. He is wearing a checked sports shirt, with the sleeves turned back to his elbows. "Oh, I'm sorry." Of course. Her bare legs, crossed, show the blue dabs of varicose veins. Her face, when she sits, is not as young as at the door. Double chin when she relaxes, head tucked back. Smug little cookie. Firm little knockers. He asks, "How old is your child?"

 

"Two children. Two girls, one and three."

 

"I have a boy who's two."

 

"I'd like a boy," she says. "The girls and I have personality problems; we're too much alike. We know exactly what the other's thinking."

 

Dislikes her own children! Rabbit is shocked, this from a minister's wife. "Does your husband notice this?"

 

"Oh, it's wonderful for Jack. He loves to have women fighting over him. It's his little harem. I think a boy would threaten him. Do you feel threatened?"

 

"Not by the kid, no. He's only two."

 

"It starts earlier than two, believe me. Sexual antagonism begins practically at birth."

 

"I hadn't noticed."

 

"Good for you. I expect you're a primitive father. I think Freud is like God; you make it true."

 

Rabbit smiles, supposing that Freud has some connection with the silver wallpaper and the watercolor of a palace and a canal above her head. Class. She brings her fingertips to her temples, pushes her head back, shuts her lids, and through plump open lips sighs. He is struck; she seems at this moment a fine?grained Ruth. There is a world of women beyond Janice.

 

Eccles' thin voice, oddly amplified in his home, cries down the stairs, "Lucy! Joyce is getting into bed with me!"

 

Lucy opens her eyes and says to Rabbit proudly, "See?"

 

"She says you told her it's all right," the voice whines on, piercing banisters, walls, and layers of wallpaper.

 

Mrs. Eccles gets up and goes to the archway. The seat of her orange shorts is wrinkled from sitting; the hitched?up legs expose most of the oval backs of her thighs. Whiter than the sofa. The blush of pink from the pressure of sitting fades from her skin. "I told her no such thing!" she calls upward while an aware hand tugs the shorts down and smooths the cloth around her mussed rump. A pocket is stitched with black thread to the right half. "Jack," she goes on, "you have a visitor! A very tall young man who says you invited him!"

 

At the mention of himself Rabbit has risen, and right behind her he says, "To play golf."

 

"To play golf!" she echoes in a yell.

 

"Oh, dear," the voice upstairs says to itself, then shouts, "Hello, Harry! I'll be right down."

 

A child up there is crying, "Mommy did too! Mommy did too!"

 

Rabbit shouts in answer, "Hello!"

 

Mrs. Eccles turns her head with an inviting twist. "Harry ??"

 

"Angstrom."

 

"What do you do, Mr. Angstrom?"

 

"Well. I'm kind of out of work."

 

"Angstrom. Of course. Aren't you the one who disappeared? The Springers' son?in?law?"

 

"Right," he replies smartly and, in a mindless follow?through, an overflow of coordination, she having on the drop of his answer turned with prim dismissal away from him again, slaps! her sassy ass. Not hard: a cupping hit, rebuke and fond pat both, well=placed on the pocket.

 

She swiftly pivots, swinging her backside to safety behind her. Her freckles dart sharp as pinpricks from her shocked face. Her leaping blood bleaches her skin, and her rigidly cold stare is so incongruous with the lazy condescending warmth he feels toward her, that he pushes his upper lip over his lower in a burlesque expression of penitence.

 

A chaotic tumble on the stairs shakes the wall. Eccles jolts to a stop in front of them, off?balance, tucking a dirty white shirt into rumpled suntans. His shadowed eyes weep between his furry lids. "I'm sorry," he says. "I hadn't really forgotten."

 

"It's kind of cloudy anyway," Rabbit says, and smiles involuntarily. Her backside had felt so good, just right, dense yet springy: kind of smacked back. He supposes she'll tell, which will finish him here. Just as well. He doesn't know why he's here anyway.

 

Maybe she would have told, but her husband starts annoying her immediately. "Oh, I'm sure we can get in nine before it rains," he tells Rabbit.

 

"Jack, you aren't really going to play golf again. You said you had all those calls to make this afternoon."

 

"I made calls this morning."

 

"Two. You made two. On Freddy Davis and Mrs. Landis. The same old safe ones. What about the Ferrys? You've been talking about the Ferrys for six months."

 

"What's so sacred about the Ferrys? They never do anything for the church. She came on Christmas Sunday and went out by the choir door so she wouldn't have to speak to me."

 

"Of course they don't do anything for the church and that's why you should call as you know perfectly well. I don't think anything's sacred about the Ferrys except that you've been brooding about her going out the side door and making everybody's life miserable for months. Now if she comes on Easter it'll be the same thing. To tell you my honest opinion you and Mrs. Ferry would hit it off splendidly, you're both equally childish."

 

"Lucy, just because Mr. Ferry owns a shoe factory doesn't make them more important Christians than somebody who works in a shoe factory."

 

"Oh Jack, you're too tiresome. You're just afraid of being snubbed and don't quote Scripture to justify yourself. I don't care if the Ferrys come to church or stay away or become Jehovah's Witnesses."

 

"At least the Jehovah's Witnesses put into practice what they say they believe." When Eccles turns to Harry to guffaw conspiratorially after this dig, bitterness cripples his laugh, turns his lips in tightly, so his small jawed head shows its teeth like a skull.

 

"I don't know what that's supposed to mean," Lucy says, "but when you asked me to marry you I told you what I felt and you said all right fine."

 

"I said as long as your heart remained open for Grace." Eccles pours these words on her in a high strained blast that burns his broad forehead, soils it with a blush.

 

"Mommy I had a rest." The little voice, shyly penetrating, surprises them from above. At the head of the carpeted stairs a small tan girl in underpants hangs in suspense. She seems to Rabbit too dark for her parents, braced on silhouetted legs of baby fat knotted on longer stalks. Her hands rub and pluck her naked chest in exasperation. She hears her mother's answer before it comes.

 

"Joyce. You go right back into your own bed and have a nap."

 

"I can't. There's too many noises."

 

"We've been screaming right under her head," Eccles tells his wife.

 

"You've been screaming. About Grace."

 

"I had a scary dream," Joyce says, and thumpingly descends two steps.

 

"You did not. You were never asleep." Mrs. Eccles walks to the foot of the stairs, holding her throat as if to keep some emotion down.

 

"What was the dream about?" Eccles asks his child.

 

"A lion ate a boy."

 

"That's not a dream at all," the woman snaps, and turns on her husband: "It's those hateful Belloc poems you insist on reading her."

 

"She asks for them."

 

"They're hateful. They give her traumas."

 

"Joyce and I think they're funny."

 

"Well you both have perverted senses of humor. Every night she asks me about that damn pony Tom and what does `die' mean?"

 

"Tell her what it means. If you had Belloc's and my faith in the afterlife these perfectly natural questions wouldn't upset you."

 

"Don't harp, Jack. You're awful when you harp."

 

"I'm awful when I take myself seriously, you mean."

 

"Hey. I smell cake burning," Rabbit says.

 

She looks at him and recognition frosts her eyes. That there is some kind of cold call in her glance, a faint shout from the midst of her enemies, he feels but ignores, letting his gaze go limp on the top of her head, showing her the sensitive nostrils that sniffed the cake.

 

"If only you would take yourself seriously," she says to her husband, and on glimpsey bare legs flies down the sullen hall of the rectory.

 

Eccles calls, "Joyce, go back to your room and put on a shirt and you can come down."

 

The child instead thumps down three more steps.

 

"Joyce, did you hear me?"

 

"You get it, Dayud?dee."

 

"Why should I get it? Daddy's all the way downstairs."

 

"I don't know where it is."

 

"You do too. Right on your bureau."

 

`I don't know where my bruro is."

 

"In your room, sweet. Of course you know where it is. You get your shirt and I'll let you downstairs."

 

But she is already halfway down.

 

"I'm frightened of the li?un," she sighs with a little smile that betrays consciousness of her own impudence. Her voice has a spaced, testing quality; Rabbit heard this note of care in her mother's voice too, when she was teasing the same man.

 

"There's no lion up there. There's nobody up there but Bonnie sleeping. Bonnie's not afraid."

 

"Please, Daddy. Please please please please please." She has reached the foot of the stairs and seizes and squeezes her father's knees.

 

Eccles laughs, bracing his unbalanced weight on the child's head, which is rather broad and flat?topped, like his own. "All right," he says. "You wait here and talk to this funny man." And bounds up the stairs with that unexpected athleticism.

 

Called into action, Rabbit says, `Joyce, are you a good girl?"

 

She waggles her stomach and pulls her head into her shoulders. The motion forces a little guttural noise, "cukk," out of her throat. She shakes her head; he has the impression she is trying to hide behind a screen of dimples. But then she says with unexpectedly firm enunciation, "Yes."

 

"And is your mommy good?"

 

"Yes."

 

"What makes her so good?" He hopes Mrs. Eccles hears this in the kitchen. The hurried oven sounds have stopped.

 

Joyce looks up at him and like a sheet being rippled fear tugs a corner of the surface of her face. Really tears seem close. She scampers from him down the hall, the way her mother went. Fled from, Rabbit wanders uneasily in the hall, trying to attach his excited heart to the pictures hanging there. Surfaces of foreign capitals, a woman in white beneath a tree whose every leaf is rimmed in gold, a laborious pen rendering, brick by brick, of the St. John's Episcopal Church, dated 1927 and signed large by Mildred L. Kramer. Above a small table halfway down the hall hangs a studio photograph of some old rock with white hair above his ears and a clerical collar staring over your shoulder as if square into the heart of things; stuck into the frame is a yellowed photo clipped from a newspaper showing in coarse dots the same old gent gripping a cigar and laughing like a madman with three others in robes. He looks a little like Jack but fatter and stronger. He holds the cigar in a fist. Further on is a colored print of a painted scene in a workshop where the carpenter works in the light given off by his Helper's head: the glass this print is protected by gives back to Rabbit the shadow of his own head. There is a tangy scent in the hallway of, spot cleaner? new varnish? mothballs? old wallpaper? He hovers among these possibilities, "the one who disappeared." Sexual antagonism begins practically at birth ? what a bitch, really. Yet with a nice low flame in her, lighting up her legs. Those bright white legs. She'd have an anxious little edge and want her own. A cookie. A sharp little vanilla cookie. In spite of herself he loves her.

 

There must be a back stairs, because he next hears Eccles' voice in the kitchen, arguing Joyce into her sweater, asking Lucy if the cake was ruined, explaining, not knowing Rabbit's ears were around the corner, "Don't think this is pleasure for me. It's work."

 

"There's no other way to talk to him?"

 

"He's frightened."

 

"Sweetie, everybody's frightened to you."

 

"But he's even frightened of me."

 

"Well he came through that door cocky enough."

 

This was the place for, And he slapped my sweet ass, that's yours to defend.

 

What! Your sweet ass! I'll murder the rogue. I'll call the police.

 

In reality Lucy's voice stopped at "enough," and Eccles is talking about if so?and?so telephoned, where are those new golfballs?, Joyce you had a cookie ten minutes ago, and at last calling, in a voice that has healed too smooth over the scratches of their quarrel, "Goodbye, my dears." Rabbit pads up the hall and is leaning on the front radiator when Eccles, looking like a young owl ? awkward, cross ? pops out of the kitchen.

 

They go to his car. Under the threat of rain the skin of the Buick has a greasy waxiness. Eccles lights a cigarette and they go down, across Route 422, into the valley toward the golf course. Eccles says, after getting several deep drags settled in his chest, "So your trouble isn't really lack of religion."

 

"Huh?"

 

"I was remembering our other conversation. About the waterfall and the tree."

 

"Yeah well: I stole that from Mickey Mouse."

 

Eccles laughs, puzzled; Rabbit notices how his mouth stays open after he laughs, the little inturned rows of teeth waiting a moment while his eyebrows go up and down expectantly. "It stopped me short," he admits, closing this flirtatious cave. "Then you said you know what's inside you. I've been wondering all weekend what that was. Can you tell me?"

 

Rabbit doesn't want to tell him anything. The more he tells, the more he loses. He's safe inside his own skin, he doesn't want to come out. This guy's whole game is to get him out into the open where he can be manipulated. But the fierce convention of courtesy pries open Rabbit's lips. "Hell, it's nothing much," he says. "It's just that, well, it's all there is. Don't you think?"

 

Eccles nods and blinks and drives without saying a word. In his way he's very sure of himself.

 

"How's Janice now?" Rabbit asks.

 

Eccles is startled to feel him veer off. "I dropped by Monday morning to tell them you were in the county. Your wife was in the back yard with your boy and what I took to be an old girl friend, a Mrs. ? Foster? Fogleman?"

 

"What did she look like?"

 

"I don't really know. I was distracted by her sunglasses. They were the mirror kind, with very wide sidepieces."

 

"Oh, Peggy Gring. She's walleyed. She was in Janice's highschool class and married that jerk Ollie Fosnacht."

 

"Fosnacht. That's right. Like the doughnut. I knew there was something local about the name."

 

"You'd never heard of Fosnacht Day before you came here?"

 

"Never. Not in Norwalk."

 

"The thing I remember about it, when I was, oh I must have been six or seven, because he died in 1940, my grandfather would wait upstairs until I came down so I wouldn't be the Fosnacht. He lived with us then." Rabbit hasn't thought or spoken of his grandfather in years, it seems; a mild dry taste comes into his mouth.

 

"What was the penalty for being a Fosnacht?"

 

"I forget. It was just something you didn't want to be. Wait. I remember, one year I was the last downstairs and my parents or somebody teased me and I didn't like it and I guess I cried, I don't know. Anyway that's why the old man stayed up."

 

"He was your father's father?"

 

"My mother's. He lived with us."

 

"I remember my father's father," Eccles says. "He used to come to Connecticut and have dreadful arguments with my father. My grandfather was the Bishop of Providence, and had kept his church from going under to the Unitarians by becoming almost Unitarian himself. He used to call himself a Darwinian Deist. My father, in reaction I suppose, became very orthodox; almost Anglo?Catholic. He loved Belloc and Chesterton. In fact he used to read to us those poems you heard my wife objecting to."

 

"About the lion?"

 

"Yes. Belloc has this bitter mocking streak my wife can't appreciate. He mocks children, which she can't forgive. It's her psychology. Children are very sacred in psychology. Where was I? Yes; along with his watered?down theology my grandfather had kept in his religious practice a certain color and a, a rigor that my father had lost. Grandpa felt Daddy was extremely remiss in not having a family worship service every night. My father would say he didn't want to bore his children the way he had been bored with God and anyway what was the good of worshipping a jungle god in the living room? `You don't think God is in the forest?' my grandfather would say. Just behind stained glass?' And so on. My brothers and I used to tremble, because it put Daddy into a terrible depression, ultimately, to argue with him. You know how it is with fathers, you never escape the idea that maybe after all they're right. A little dried?up old man with a Yankee accent who was really awfully dear. I remember he used to grab us by the knee at mealtimes with this brown bony hand and croak, `Has he made you believe in Hell?' "

 

Harry laughs; Eccles' imitation is good; being an old man fits him. "Did he? Do you?"

 

"Yes, I think so. Hell as Jesus described it. As separation from God."

 

"Well then we're all more or less in it."

 

"I don't think so. I don't think so at all. I don't think even the blackest atheist has an idea of what real separation will be. Outer darkness. What we live in you might call" ? he looks at Harry and laughs ? "inner darkness."

 

Eccles' volunteering all this melts Rabbit's caution. He wants to bring something of himself into the space between them. The excitement of friendship, a competitive excitement that makes him lift his hands and jiggle them as if thoughts were basketballs, presses him to say, "Well I don't know all this about theology, but I'll tell you, I do feel, I guess, that somewhere behind all this" ? he gestures outward at the scenery; they are passing the housing development this side of the golf course, half?wood half?brick one?and?a?half?stories in little flat bulldozed yards containing tricycles and spindly three?year?old trees, the un?grandest landscape in the world ? "there's something that wants me to find it."

 

Eccles tamps out his cigarette carefully in the tiny crossnotched cup in the car ashtray. "Of course, all vagrants think they're on a quest. At least at first."

 

Rabbit doesn't see, after trying to give the man something, that he deserved this slap. He supposes this is what ministers need, to cut everybody down to the same miserable size. He says, "Well I guess that makes your friend Jesus look pretty foolish."

 

Mention of the holy name incites pink spots high on Eccles' cheeks. "He did say," the minister says, "that saints shouldn't marry."

 

They turn off the road and go up the winding drive to the clubhouse, a big cinder?block building fronted with a long sign that has CHESTNUT GROVE GOLF COURSE lettered between two Coca-Cola insignia. When Harry caddied here it was just a clapboard shack holding a wood?burning stove and charts of old tournaments and two armchairs and a counter for candy bars and golf balls you fished out of the swamp and that Mrs. Wenrich resold. He supposes Mrs. Wenrich is dead. She was a delicate old rouged widow like a doll with white hair and it always seemed funny to hear talk about greens and divots and tourneys and par come out of her mouth. Eccles parks the long Buick on the asphalt lot and says, "Before I forget."

 

Rabbit's hand is on the door handle. "What?"

 

"Do you want a job?"

 

"What kind?"

 

"A parishioner of mine, a Mrs. Horace Smith, has about eight acres of garden around her home, toward Appleboro. Her husband was an incredible rhododendron enthusiast. I shouldn't say incredible; he was a terribly dear old man."

 

"I don't know beans about gardening."

 

"Nobody does, that's what Mrs. Smith says. There are no gardeners left. For forty dollars a week, I believe her."

 

"A buck an hour. That's pretty poor."

 

"It wouldn't be forty hours. Flexible time. That's what you want, isn't it? Flexibility? So you can be free to preach to the multitudes."

 

Eccles really does have a mean streak. Him and Belloc. Without the collar around his throat, he kind of lets go. Rabbit gets out of the car. Eccles does the same, and his head across the top of the car looks like a head on a platter. The wide mouth moves: "Please consider it."

 

"I can't. I may not even stay in the county."

 

"Is the girl going to kick you out?"

 

"What girl?"

 

"What is her name? Leonard. Ruth Leonard."

 

"Well. Aren't you smart?" Who could have told him? Peggy Gring? By way of Tothero? More likely Tothero's girl Whatsername. She looked like Janice. It doesn't matter; the world's such a web anyway, things just tremble through. "I never heard of her," Rabbit says.

 

The head on the platter grins weirdly in the sunglare off the grease?gray metal.

 

They walk side by side to the cement?block clubhouse. On the way Eccles remarks, "It's the strange thing about you mystics, how often your little ecstasies wear a skirt."

 

"Say. I didn't have to show up today, you know."

 

"I know. Forgive me. I'm in a very depressed mood."

 

There's nothing exactly wrong with his saying this, but it rubs Harry's inner hair the wrong way. It kind of clings. It says, Pity me. Love me. The prickly sensation makes his lips sticky; he is unable to open them to respond. When Eccles pays his way, he carp scarcely negotiate thanking him. When they pick out a set of clubs for him to rent, he is so indifferent and silent the freckled kid in charge stares at him as if he's a moron. The thought flits through his brain that Eccles is known as a fag and he has become the new pet. As he and Eccles walk together toward the first tee he feels dragged down, lame.

 

And the ball feels it too, the ball he hits after a little advice from Eccles. It sputters away to one side, crippled by a perverse topspin that makes it fall from flight as dumpily as a blob of clay.

 

Eccles laughs. "That's the best first drive I ever saw."

 

"It's not a first drive. I used to hit the ball around when I was a caddy. I should do better than that."

 

"You expect too much of yourself. Watch me, that'll make you feel better."

 

Rabbit stands back and is surprised to see Eccles, who has a certain spring in his unconscious movements, swing with a quaint fifty?year?old stiffness. As if he has a pot to keep out of the way. He punches the ball with a cramped backswing. It goes straight, though high and weak, and he seems delighted with it. He fairly prances into the fairway. Harry trails after him heavily. The soggy turf, raw and wet from recently thawing, sinks beneath his big suede shoes. They're on a seesaw; Eccles goes up, he comes down.

 

Down in the pagan groves and green alleys of the course Eccles is transformed. A brainless gaiety animates him. He laughs and swings and clucks and calls. Harry stops hating him, he himself is so awful. Ineptitude seems to coat him like a scabrous disease; he is grateful to Eccles for not fleeing from him. Often Eccles, fifty yards further on ? he has an excited gleeful habit of running ahead ? comes all the way back to find a ball Harry has lost. Somehow Rabbit can't tear his attention from where the ball should have gone, the little ideal napkin of clipped green pinked with a pretty flag. His eyes can't keep with where it did go. "Here it is," Eccles says. "Behind a root. You're having terrible luck."

 

"This must be a nightmare for you."

 

"Not at all. You're extremely promising. You never play and yet you haven't once missed the ball completely."

 

This does it; Harry sets himself and in the murderous strength of his desire to knock it out in spite of the root he misses the ball completely.

 

"Your only mistake is trying too hard," Eccles says. "You have a beautiful natural swing." Rabbit whacks again and the ball flops out and wobbles a few yards.

 

"Bend to the ball," Eccles says. "Imagine you're about to sit down."

 

"I'm about to lie down," Harry says. He feels sick, giddily sick, sucked deeper into a vortex whose upper rim is marked by the tranquil tips of the leafing trees. He seems to remember having been up there once. He skids into puddles, is swallowed by trees, infallibly sinks into the mangy scruff at the sides of the fairways.

 

Nightmare is the word. In waking life only animate things slither and jerk for him this way. His unreal hacking dazes his brain; half?hypnotized, it plays tricks whose strangeness dawns on him slowly. In his head he is talking to the clubs as if they're women. The irons, light and thin yet somehow treacherous in his hands; are Janice. Come on, you dope, be calm; here wego, easy. When the slotted club face gouges the dirt behind the ball and the shock jolts up his arms to his shoulders, his thought is that Janice has struck him. So dumb, really dumb. Screw her. Just screw her. Anger turns his skin rotten, so the outside seeps through; his insides go jagged with the tiny dry forks of bitter scratching brambles, where words hang like caterpillar nests that can't be burned away. She stubs stubs fat she stubs the dirt torn open in a rough brown mouth dirt stubs fat: with the woods the "she" is Ruth. Holding a three wood, absorbed in its heavy reddish head and grass?stained face and white stripe prettily along the edge, he thinks O.K. if you're so smart and clenches and swirls. Ahg: when she tumbled so easily, to balk at this! The mouth of torn grass and the ball runs, hops and hops, hides in a bush. And when he walks there, the bush is damn somebody, his mother; he lifts the huffy branches like skirts, in a fury of shame but with care not to break any, and these branches bother his legs while he tries to pour his will down into the hard irreducible pellet that is not really himself yet in a way is; just the way it sits there white and Number 1 in the center of everything. As the seven iron chops down please Janice just once awkwardness spiders at his elbows and the ball as he stares bending one way bends the other way into more sad scruff further on, the khaki color of Texas. Oh you moron go home. Home is the hole, and above, in the scheme of the unhappy vision that frets his conscious attention with an almost optical overlay of presences, the mild gray rain sky is his grandfather waiting upstairs so that young Harry will not be a Fosnacht.

 

And, now at the corners, now at the center of this striving golf dream, Eccles flits in his grubby shirt like a white flag of forgiveness, crying encouragement, fluttering from the green to guide him home.

 

The greens, still dead from the winter, are salted with a dry dirt: fertilizer? The ball slips along making bits of grit jump. "Don't stab your putts," Eccles says. "A little easy swing, arms stiff. Distance is more important than aim on the first putt. Try again." He kicks the ball back. It took Harry about twelve to get up here on the fourth green, but this arrogant assumption that his strokes are past counting irritates him. Come on, sweet, he pleads as if with his wife, there's the hole, big as a bucket. Everything will be all right.

 

But no, she has to stab in a feeble, panicked way; what was she afraid of? The ball is maybe six feet short. Walking toward Eccles, he says, "You never did tell me how Janice is."

 

"Janice?" Eccles with an effort drags his attention up from the game. He is absolutely in love with winning; he is eating me up, Harry thinks. "She seemed in good spirits on Monday. She was out in the back yard with this other woman, and they were both giggling when I came. You must realize that for a little while, now that she's adjusted somewhat, she'll probably enjoy being back with her parents. It's her own version of your irresponsibility."

 

"Actually," Harry says gratingly, squatting to line up the putt, the way they do it on television, "she can't stand her parents any more than I can. She probably wouldn't've married me if she hadn't been in such a hurry to get away from 'em." His putt slides past on the down side and goes two or three fucking feet too far. Four feet. Fuck.

 

Eccles sinks his. The ball wobbles up and with a glottal rattle bobbles in. The minister looks up with the light of triumph in his eyes. "Harry," he asks, sweetly yet boldly, "why have you left her? You're obviously deeply involved with her."

 

"I told ja. There was this thing that wasn't there."

 

"What thing? Have you ever seen it? Are you sure it exists?"

 

Harry's four?foot putt dribbles short and he picks up the ball with furious fingers. "Well ifyou're not sure it exists don't ask me. It's right up your alley. If you don't know nobody does."

 

"No," Eccles cries in the same strained voice in which he told his wife to keep her heart open for Grace. "Christianity isn't looking for a rainbow. If it were what you think it is we'd pass out opium at services. We're trying to serve God, not be God."

 

They pick up their bags and walk the way a wooden arrow tells them.

 

Eccles goes on, explanatorily, "This was all settled centuries ago, in the heresies of the early Church."

 

"I tell you, I know what it is."

 

"What is it? What is it? Is it hard or soft? Harry. Is it blue? Is it red? Does it have polka dots?"

 

It hits Rabbit depressingly that he really wants to be told. Underneath all this I?know?more?about?it?than?you heresies?of?the?early?Church business he really wants to be told about it, wants to be told that it is there, that he's not lying to all those people every Sunday. As if it's not enough to be trying to get some sense out of this crazy game you have to carry around this madman trying to swallow your soul. The hot strap of the bag gnaws at his shoulder.

 

"The truth is," Eccles tells him with womanish excitement, in a voice embarrassed but determined, "you're monstrously selfish. You're a coward. You don't care about right or wrong; you worship nothing except your own worst instincts."

 

They reach the tee, a platform of turf beside a hunchbacked fruit tree offering fists of taut ivory?colored buds. "Let me go first," Rabbit says. " 'Til you calm down." His heart is hushed, held in mid?beat, by anger. He doesn't care about anything except getting out of this tangle. He wants it to rain. In avoiding looking at Eccles he looks at the ball, which sits high on the tee and already seems free of the ground. Very simply he brings the clubhead around his shoulder into it. The sound has a hollowness, a singleness he hasn't heard before. His arms force his head up and his ball is hung way out, lunarly pale against the beautiful black blue of storm clouds, his grandfather's color stretched dense across the north. It recedes along a line straight as a ruler?edge. Stricken; sphere, star, speck. It hesitates, and Rabbit thinks it will die, but he's fooled, for the ball makes its hesitation the ground of a final leap: with a kind of visible sob takes a last bite of space before vanishing in falling. "That's it!" he cries and, turning to Eccles with a grin of aggrandizement, repeats, "That's it."