Light from the driftwood lamp downstairs floods the little maple from underneath, its leaves red like your fingers on a flashlight face. Its turning head half?fills their bedroom window. In bed Jill turns to him pale and chill as ice. "Hold me," she says. "Hold me, hold me, hold me," so often it frightens him. Women are crazy, they contain this ancient craziness, he is holding wind in his arms. He feels she wants to be fucked, any way, without pleasure, but to pin her down. He would like to do this for her but he cannot pierce the fright, the disgust between them. She is a mermaid gesturing beneath the skin of the water. He is floating rigid to keep himself from sinking in terror. The book he has read aloud torments him with a vision of bottomless squalor, of dead generations, of buried tortures and lost reasons. Rising, working, there is no reason any more, no reason for anything, no reason why not, nothing to breathe but a sour gas bottled in empty churches, nothing to rise by; he lives in a tight well whose dank sides squeeze and paralyze him, no, it is Jill tight against him, trying to get warm, though the night is hot. He asks her, "Can you sleep?"

 

"No. Everything is crashing."

 

"Let's try. It's late. Shall I get another blanket?"

 

"Don't leave me for even a second. I'll fall through."

 

"I'll turn my back, then you can hug me."

 

Downstairs, Skeeter flicks the light off. Outside, the little maple vanishes like a blown?out flame. Within himself, Rabbit completes his motion into darkness, into the rhythmic brown of the sofa. Then terror returns and squeezes him shut like an eyelid.

 

 

 

Her voice sounds tired and wary, answering. "Brewer Fealty, Mrs. Fosnacht. May I help you?"

 

"Peggy? Hi, it's Harry Angstrom."

 

"So it is." A new sarcastic note. "I don't believe it!" Overexpressive. Too many men.

 

"Hey, remember you said about Nelson and Billy going fish-ing this Sunday and inviting me for Saturday dinner?"

 

"Yes, Harry, I do remember."

 

"Is it too late? For me to accept?"

 

"Not at all. What's brought this about?"

 

"Nothing special. just thought it might be nice."

 

"It will be nice. I'll see you Saturday."

 

"Tomorrow," he clarifies. He would have talked on, it was his lunch hour, but she cuts the conversation short. Press of work. Don't count your chickens.

 

After work as he walks home from the bus stop on Weiser, two men accost him, at the corner where Emberly Avenue becomes a Drive, beside a red?white?and?blue mailbox. "Mr. Angstrom?"

 

"Sure."

 

"Might we talk to you a minute? We're two of your neigh-bors." The man speaking is between forty and fifty, plump, in a gray suit that has stretched to fit him, with those narrow lapels of five years ago. His face is soft but pained. A hard little hook nose at odds with the puffy patches below his eyes. His chin is two damp knobs set side by side, between them a dimple where the whiskers hide from the razor. He has that yellow Brewer tint and an agile sly white?collar air. An accountant, a schoolteacher. "My name is Mahlon Showalter. I live on the other side of Vista Crescent, the house, you probably noticed, with the new addition in back we added on last summer."

 

"Oh, yeah." He recalls distant hammering but had not noticed; he really only looks at Penn Villas enough to see that it isn't Mt. judge: that is, it is nowhere.

 

"I'm in computers, the hardware end," Showalter says. "Here's my card." As Rabbit glances at the company name on it Showalter says, "We're going to revolutionize business in this town, file that name in your memory. This here is Eddie Brumbach, he lives around the further crescent, Marigold, up from you."

 

Eddie presents no card. He is black?haired, shorter and younger than Harry. He stands the way guys in the Army used to, all buttoned in, shoulders tucked back, an itch for a fight between their shoulder blades. Only in part because of his brush cut, his head looks flattened on top, like the heads on Rabbit's television set. When he shakes hands, it reminds him of somebody else. Who? One side of Brumbach's face has had a piece of jawbone removed, leaving a dent and an L?shaped red scar. Gray eyes like dulled tool tips. He says with ominous simplicity, "Yessir."

 

Showalter says, "Eddie works in the assembly shop over at Fessler Steel."

 

"You guys must have quit work early today," Rabbit says.

 

Eddie tells him, "I'm on night shift this month."

 

Showalter has a way of bending, as if dance music is playing far away and he wants to cut in between Rabbit and Eddie. He is say-ing, "We made a decision to talk to you, we appreciate your patience. This is my car here, would you like to sit in it? It's not too comfortable, standing out like this."

 

The car is a Toyota; it reminds Harry of his father?in?law and gets a whole set of uneasy feelings sliding. "I'd just as soon stand," he says, "if it won't take long," and leans on the mailbox to make himself less tall above these men.

 

"It won't take long," Eddie Brumbach promises, hitching his shoulders and coming a crisp step closer.

 

Showalter dips his shoulder again as if to intervene, looks sadder around the eyes, wipes his soft mouth: "Well no, it needn't. We don't mean to be unfriendly, we just have a few questions."

 

"Friendly questions," Rabbit clarifies, anxious to help this man, whose careful slow voice is pure Brewer; who seems, like the city, bland and broad and kind, and for the time being depressed.

 

"Now some of us," Showalter goes on, "were discussing, you know, the neighborhood. Some of the kids have been telling us stories, you know, about what they see in your windows."

 

"They've been looking in my windows?" The mailbox blue is hot; he stops leaning and stands. Though it is October the side-walk has a flinty glare and a translucent irritability rests upon the pastel asphalt rooftops, the spindly young trees, the low houses like puzzles assembled of wood and cement and brick and fake?field-stone siding. He is trying to look through these houses to his own, to protect it.

 

Brumbach bristles, thrusts himself into Rabbit's attention. "They haven't had to look in any windows, they've had what's going on pushed under their noses. And it don't smell good."

 

Showalter intervenes, his voice wheedling like a woman's, but-tering over. "No now, that's putting it too strong. But it's true, I guess, there hasn't been any particular secret. They've been com-ing and going in that little Porsche right along, and I notice now he plays basketball with the boy right out front."

 

"He?"

 

"The black fella you have living with you," Showalter says, smiling as if the snag in their conversation has been discovered, and all will be clear sailing now.

 

"And the white girl," Brumbach adds. "My younger boy came home the other day and said he saw them screwing right on the downstairs rug."

 

"Well," Rabbit says, stalling. He feels absurdly taller than these men, he feels he might float away while trying to make out the details of what the boy had seen, a little framed rectangle hung in his head like a picture too high on the wall. "That's the kind of thing you see, when you look in other people's windows."

 

Brumbach steps neatly in front of Showalter, and Rabbit remembers who his handshake had been reminiscent of the doc-tor giving Mom the new pills. I twist bodies to my will. I am life, I am death. "Listen, brother. We're trying to raise children in this neighborhood."

 

"Me too."

 

"And that's something else. What kind of pervert are you bringing up there? I feel sorry for the boy, it's the fact, I do. But what about the rest of us, who are trying to do the best we can? This is a decent white neighborhood," he says, hitting "decent" weakly but gathering strength for, "that's why we live here instead of across the river over in Brewer where they're letting 'em run wild."

 

"Letting who run wild?"

 

"You know fucking well who, read the papers, these old ladies can't even go outdoors in broad daylight with a pocketbook."

 

Showalter, supple, worried, sidles around and intrudes himself. "White neighborhood isn't exactly the point, we'd welcome a self?respecting black family, I went to school with blacks and I'd work right beside one any day of the week, in fact my company has a recruitment program, the trouble is, their own leaders tell them not to bother, tell them it's a sellout, to learn how to make an honest living." This speech has slid further than he had in-tended; he hauls it back. "If he acts like a man I'll treat him like a man, am I way out of line on that, Eddie?"

 

Brumbach puffs up so his shirt pocket tightens on his cigarette pack; his forearms bend at his sides as if under the pull of their veins. "I fought beside the colored in Vietnam," he says. "No 'problems."

 

"Hey that's funny you're a Viet veteran too, this guy we're kind of talking about -"

 

"No problems," Brumbach goes on, "because we all knew the rules."

 

Showalter's hands glide, flutter, touch his narrow lapels in a double downward caress. "It's the girl and the black together," he says quickly, to touch it and get away.

 

Brumbach says, "Christ those boogs love white............