Rabbit At Rest

III. MI

BY MID-JUNE the weeds have taken over: burdock and chicory stand three feet tall along the stony dry shoulders of Route 111, and the struggling little yew hedge meant to dress up the base of the Springer Motors display window has crabgrass and purslane spreading through the rotting bark mulch, which hasn't been renewed for a couple of years. It's one of the things Harry keeps making a mental note to do: call the landscaping service and renew the mulch and replace the dead yews, about a third of them, they look like hell, like missing teeth. Across the four-lane highway, its traffic thicker and faster than ever though the state still holds to the fifty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit, the takeout restaurant called the Chuck Wagon has been replaced by a Pizza Hut, one of the six or so around Brewer now. What do people see in it? All those gummy wedges of dough and cheese, that when you try to eat them pull long strings out in front of your face. But, on Saturdays when in the weekend mood Benny runs over and brings back an order for whoever wants it, Harry allows himself a pepperoni with peppers and onions but no anchovies, please. Like little snails stuck in the mud.

Today is not Saturday, it is Monday, the day after Father's Day. Nobody sent Harry a card. He and Janice have visited Nelson twice, for family therapy at this gloomy big rehab center in North Philly, full of banisters and bulletin boards and a damp mimeograph smell that reminds him of the basement Sunday school he went to, and both times it was like a quarrel around the kitchen table only with a referee, a lean pale colored woman with fancy spectacles and one of these sweet churchgoing smiles Harry associates with the better type of Philadelphia black. They go over the old stuff -the baby's death, the mess in the Sixties with Janice moving out and Jill and Skeeter moving in, the crazy way Nelson got himself married to this Kent State secretary an inch taller and a year older than he, a Catholic furthermore, and the kind of crazy way the young couple moved into the old Springer house and the older couple moved out and in fact lives half the year in Florida, all so the kid can run wild with the car agency; Harry explains how from his point of view Nelson's been spoiled rotten by his mother because of her guilt complex and that's why the kid feels entitled to live in never-never land with all these fags and druggies and let his wife and children go around in rags. When he talks, the mocha-colored therapist's smile gets even more pious and patient and then she turns to one of the others, Nelson or Janice or Pru, and asks them how they feel about what they've just heard, as if what he's saying isn't a description of facts but a set of noises to be rolled into some general mishmash. All this "talking through" and "processing" therapists like to do cheapens the world's facts; it reduces decisions that were the best people could do at the time to dream moves, to reflexes that have been "processed" in a million previous cases like so much shredded wheat. He feels anticipated and discounted in advance, whatever he says, and increasingly aggravated, and winds up telling Janice and Pru to go next time without him.

Benny comes over to where Harry stands at the window looking out and asks, "Whajja do for Father's Day?"

Harry is pleased to have an answer. "Nelson's wife brought our grandchildren over in the afternoon and I did a cookout for everybody on the outdoor grill." It sounds ideally American but had its shaky underside. Their grill, for one thing, is a metal sphere that Consumer Reports said years ago was a classic but that Harry never has quite the patience for, you must wait until the briquettes are gray and ashy, but he's afraid of waiting too long, so there was a lot of staring at the raw hamburger patties not cooking, with Janice annoying him by offering to cook them in the kitchen, since the children were being eaten alive by mosquitoes. For another, the grandchildren brought him cute grandfather's cards, all right, both by this new artist Gary Larson that everybody else thinks is so funny, but this uniformity – they were even signed by the same red pen, Judy's with quite a girlish flourish to the "y" and Roy's a bunch of aimless but intense pre-literate stabs – suggested a lack of planning, a quick stop at the drugstore on the way over from the Flying Eagle. Pru and the kids arrived with their hair wet from the pool. She brought a bowl of salad she had made at home.

"Sounds terrific," Benny says, in his husky small voice.

"Yeah," Harry agrees, explaining, as if his image of Pru with her wet long hair holding this big wooden bowl of lettuce and sliced radishes on her hip was visible to them both, "we've arranged a temporary membership for Nelson's wife over at the country club, and they'd been swimming over there most of the day."

"Nice," Benny says. "She seems a nice gal, Teresa. Never came over here to the lot much, but I hate to see a family like that having a hard time."

"They're managing," Harry says, and changes the subject. "D'jou watch any of the Open?" Somebody really should go out and pick up all the wrappers that blow over from the Pizza Hut and get caught in the struggling little yew hedge. But he doesn't like to bend over, and doesn't quite feel he can order Benny to do it.

"Naa, I can't get turned on by games," the pudgy young sales representative says, more aggressively than the question requires. "Even baseball, a game or two, I'm bored. You know, what's in it for me? So what?, if you follow me."

There used to be a stately old maple tree across Route 111 that the Pizza Hut cut down to expand its red-roofed facility. The roof is shaped like a hat, with two slants. He ought to be grateful, Harry thinks, to have a lively business along this struggling little strip. "Well," he tells Benny, not wanting to argue, "with the Phils in last place you aren't missing much. The worst record in baseball, and now they've traded away two of their old all-stars. Bedrosian and Samuel. There's no such thing as loyalty any more."

Benny continues to explain himself, unnecessarily. "Me, I'd rather do something myself f on a nice Sunday, not sit there like a couch potato, you know what I mean? Get outdoors with my little girl at the neighbor's pool, or go take the family for a walk up the mountain, if it's not too hot, you know."

These people who keep saying "you know": as if if they don't keep nailing your attention to their words it'll drift off. "That's the way I used to be," Harry tells him, relaxing as the disturbing image of Pru holding the great bowl on her hip recedes, and feeling philosophical and pleasurably melancholic the way he usually does gazing out this big window. Above his head the big blue paper banner spelling ArnAUATOYoT with the sun shining through it is beginning to come unstuck from the glass. "Always doing some sport as a kid, and up until recently out on the golf course, flogging the stupid ball."

"You could still do that," Benny says, with that Italian huskiness, faintly breathless. "In fact, I bet your doc advises it. That's what mine advises, exercise. You know, for my weight."

"I probably should do something," Harry agrees, "to keep the circulation going. But, I don't know, golf suddenly seemed stupid. I realized I'd never get any better at it, at this point. And the guys I had my old foursome with have pretty well moved away. It's all these blond beefy yuppie types up at the club, and they all ride carts. They're in such a fucking hurry to get back to making money they ride around in carts, wearing the grass off the course. I used to like to walk and carry. You'd strengthen your legs. That's where the power of a golf swing is, believe it or not. In the legs. I was mostly arms. I knew the right thing to do, I could see it in the other guys and the pros on TV, but I couldn't make myself do it."

The length and inward quality of this speech make Benny uneasy. "You ought to be getting some exercise," he says. "Especially with your history."

Rabbit doesn't know if he means his recent medical history, or his ancient history of high-school athletics. The framed blowups of his old basketball photos have come out of Nelson's office and back onto the walls, rose-colored though they are, above the performance board. That was something he did carry through on, unlike the rotting bark mulch. ANGSTROM HITS FOR 42. "When Schmidt quit, that got to me," he tells Benny, even though the guy keeps saying he is no sports nut. Maybe he enjoys bullying him with it, boring him. He wonders how much Benny was in on Nelson's shenanigans, but didn't have the heart or energy to fire him when he came back to run the lot. Get through the day, and the cars sell themselves. Especially the Carnry and Corolla. Who could ask for anything more?

"All he had to do," he explains to Benny, "to earn another half million was stay on the roster until August fifteenth. And he began the season like a ball of fire, two home runs the first two games, coming off that rotator-cuff surgery. But, like Schmidt himself said, it got to the point where he'd tell his body to do something and it wouldn't do it. He knew what he had to do and couldn't do it, and he faced the fact and you got to give him credit. In this day and age, he put honor over money."

"Eight errors," Elvira Ollenbach calls in her deep voice from over in her booth, on the wall toward Paraguay, where she has been filling out the bill of sale and NV-1 for an ivory Corolla LE she sold yesterday to one of these broads that come in and ask to deal with her. They have jobs, money, even the young ones that used to be home making babies. If you look, more and more, you see women driving the buses, the delivery trucks. It's getting as bad as Russia; next thing we'll have women coalminers. Maybe we already do. The only difference between the two old superpowers is they sell their trees to Japan in different directions. "An error each in the last two games against the Giants," Elvira inexorably recites. "And hitting.203, just two hits his last forty-one at bats." Her head is full, between her pretty little jug ears, with figures. Her father was a sports addict, she has explained, and to communicate with him she followed all this stuff and now can't break the habit.

"Yeah," Rabbit says, he feels weakly, taking some steps toward her desk. "But still, it took a lot of style. Just a week ago, did you see, there was this interview in some Philadelphia paper where he said how great he felt and he was only in a slump like any overeager kid? Then he was man enough to change his mind. When all he had to do was hang around to collect a million and a half total. I like the way he went out," Rabbit says, "quick, and on his own nickel."

Elvira, not looking up from her paperwork, her pendulous gold earrings bobbing as she writes, says, "They would have cut him by August, the way he was going. He spared himself the humiliation."

"Exactly," Harry says, still weakly, torn between a desire to strike an alliance with this female and an itch to conquer her, to put her in her place. Not that she and Benny have been difficult to deal with. Docile, rather, as if anxious that they not be swept out of the lot along with Lyle and Nelson. It was easiest for Harry to accept them as innocents and not rock the agency worse than it was being rocked. Both of them have connections in Brewer and move Toyotas, and if the conversations during idle time "down" time, young people called it now – weren't as satisfying, as clarifying, as those he used to have with Charlie Stavros, perhaps the times were less easy to clarify. Reagan left everybody in a daze, and now the Communists were acting confused too. "How about those elections in Poland?" he says. "Voting the Party out – who ever would have thought we'd live to see the day? And Gorby telling all the world the contractors who put up those sand castles in Armenia were crooks? And in China, what's amazing isn't the crackdown but that the kids were allowed to run the show for a month and nobody knew what to do about it! It's like nobody's in charge of the other side any more. I miss it," he says. "The cold war. It gave you a reason to get up in the morning."

He says these things to be provocative, to get a rise out of Benny or Elvira, but his words drift away like the speech of old people on the porches when he was a boy. Not for the first time since returning to the lot does he feel he is not really there, but is a ghost being humored. His words are just noises. In Nelson's old office, and the office next to it where Mildred used to be, the accountant Janice has hired on Charlie's advice is going through the books, a task so extensive he has brought a full-time assistant. These two youngish men, who dress in gray suits of which they hang up the jackets when arriving, putting them on again when they depart, feel like the real management of the firm.

"Elvira," he says, always enjoying pronouncing her name, "did you see this morning in the paper where four men were charged with a felony for chaining themselves to a car in front of an abortion clinic? And with contributing to the delinquency of a minor since they had a seventeen-year-old boy along?" He knows where she stands: pro-choice. All these independent bimbos are. He takes a kind of pro-life tilt to gall her but his heart isn't really in it and she knows it. She leaves her desk and comes striding toward him, thrillingly thin, holding the completed NV-1s, her wide jawed little head balanced with its pulled-back shiny-brown hair on her slender neck, her dangling big gold earrings shaped like Brazil nuts. He retreats a step and the three of them stand together at the window, Harry between them and a head taller.

"Wouldn't you know," she says, "it would be all men. Why do they care so much? Why are they so passionate about what some women they don't even know do with their bodies?"

"They think it's murder," Harry says. "They think the fetus is a little separate person from the morning after on."

His way ofputting it feeds into her snort of disgust. "Tccha, they don't know what they think," she says. "If men could get knocked up this wouldn't even be a debate. Would it, Benny?"

She is bringing him in to dilute whatever Harry is trying to do to her with this provocative topic. Benny says carefully, huskily, "My church says abortion is a sin."

"And you believe them, until you want to do it, right? Tell us about you and Maria – you use birth control? Seventy per cent of young married Catholics do, you know that?"

A strange aspect of his encounter with Pru, Harry remembers, had been the condom she had produced, out of the pocket of her shorty bathrobe. Either she always kept one there or had foreseen fucking him before coming into the room. He wasn't used to them, not since the Army, but went along with it without a protest, it was her show. The thing had been a squeeze, he had been afraid he couldn't keep up his own pressure against it, and his pubic hair, where he had some left after the angioplasty, the way they shaved him, got caught at the base in the unrolling, a little practical fussing there, she helped in the dim light, it maybe had made him slower to come, not a bad thing, as she came twice, under him once and then astraddle, rain whipping at the window behind the drawn shade, her hips so big and broad in his hands he didn't feel fat himself, her tits atwitter as she jiggled in pursuit of the second orgasm, he near to fainting with worry over joggling his defective heart. A certain matter-of-fact shamelessness about Pru reduced a bit the poetry of his first sight of her naked and pale like that street of blossoming trees. She did it all but was blunt about it and faintly wooden, as if the dressmaker's dummy in the dark behind him had grown limbs and a head with swinging carrot-colored hair. To keep his prick up he kept telling himself, This is the first time I've ever fucked a left-handed woman.

Benny is blushing. He's not used to talking this way with a woman. "Maybe so," he admits. "If it's not a mortal sin, you don't have to confess it unless you want to."

"That saves the priest a lot of embarrassment," Elvira tells him. "Suppose no matter what you two use Maria kept getting knocked up, what would you do? You don't want that precious little girl of yours to feel crowded, you can give her the best the way things are. What's more important, quality of life for the family you already have, or a little knot of protein the size of a termite?"

Benny has a kind of squeaking girlish voice that excitement can bring out. "Lay off, Ellie. Don't make me think about it. You're offending my religion. I wouldn't mind a couple more kids, what the hell. I'm young."

Harry tries to help him out. "Who's to say what's the quality of life?" he asks Elvira. "Maybe the extra kid is the one that's going to invent the phonograph."

"Not out of the ghetto he isn't. He's the kid that mugs you for crack money sixteen years later."

"You don't have to get racist about it," Harry says, having been mugged in a sense by a white kid, his own son.

"It's the opposite of racist, it's realistic," Elvira tells him. "It's the poor black teenage mother whose right to abortion these crazy fundamentalist jerks are trying to take away."

"Yeah," he responds, "it's the poor black teenage mother who wants to have the baby, because she never had a doll to play with and she loves the idea of sticking the taxpayer with another welfare bill. Up yours, Whitey – that's what the birth statistics are saying."

"Now who's sounding racist?"

"Realistic, you mean."

Relaxed in the aftermath of love, and grateful to be still alive, he had asked Pru how queer she thought Nelson was, with all this palling around with Lyle and Slim. Her breath, in the watery light from the window, was made visible by fine jets of inhaled cigarette smoke as she thoughtfully answered, only a little taken aback by the question, "No, Nelson likes girls. He's a mamma's boy but he takes after you that way. They just look bigger to him than to you." Coming into the room less than an hour later, Janice had sniffed the cigarette smoke but he had pretended to be too sleepy to discuss it. Pru took the second butt away with the condom but the first one, drowned over on the windowsill, was by next morning so saturated and flattened it could have been there for ages, a historical relic of Nelson and Melanie. Rabbit sighs and says, "You're right, Elvira. People should have a choice. Even if they make bad ones." From the room he was in with Pru his mind moves to the one he had shared with Ruth, one flight up on Summer Street, and the last time he saw it: she told him she was pregnant and called him Mr. Death and he begged her to have the baby. Have it, have it you say: how? Will you marry me? She mocked him, but pleaded too, and in the end, yes, to be realistic, probably did have the abortion. If you can't work it out, I'm dead to you; I'm dead to you and this baby of yours is dead too. That nurse with the round face and sweet disposition in St. Joseph's had nothing to do with him, just like Ruth told him the last time he saw her, in her farmhouse ten years ago. He had had one daughter and she died; God didn't trust him with another. He says aloud, "Schmidt did what Rose is too dumb to: quit, when you've had it. Take your medicine, don't prolong the agony with all these lawyers."

Benny and Elvira look at him, alanned by how his mind has wandered. But he enjoys his sensation, of internal roaming. When he first came to the lot as Chief Sales Rep, after Fred Springer had died, he was afraid he couldn't fill the space. But now as an older man, with his head so full of memories, he fills it without even trying.

Through the plate glass he sees a couple in their thirties, maybe early forties, everybody looks young to him now, out on the lot among the cars, stooping to peek into the interiors and at the factory sticker on the windows. The woman is plump and white and in a halter top showing her lardy arms, and the man darker, much darker – Hispanics come in all these shades – and skinny, in a grape-colored tank top cut off at the midriff: Their ducking heads move cautiously, as if afraid of an Indian ambush out in the prairie of glittering car roofs, a pioneer couple in their way, at least in this part of the world where the races don't much mix.

Benny asks Elvira, "You want 'em, or do I?"

She says, "You do. If the woman needs a little extra, bring her in and I'll chat her up. But don't aim it all at her, just because she's white. They're both going to be miffed if you snub the man."

"Whaddeya think I am, a bigot?" Benny says mock-comically, but his demeanor is sad and determined as he walks out of the air-conditioning into the June humidity and heat.

"You shouldn't ride him about his religion," Harry tells Elvira.

"I don't. I just think that damn Pope he's got ought to be put in jail for what he does to women."

Peggy Fosnacht, Rabbit remembers, before she had a breast cut off and then upped and died, had been wild with anger toward the Pope. Anger is what gives you cancer, he has read somewhere. If you've been around long enough, he reflects, you've heard it all, the news and the commentary both, churned like the garbage in a Disposall that doesn't drain, the media every night trying to whip you up into a frenzy so you'll run out and buy all the depressing stuff they advertise, laxatives and denture adhesive cream, Fixodent and Sominex and Tylenol and hemorrhoid medicine and mouthwash against morning mouth. Why does the evening news assume the people who watch it are in such decrepit plugged-up shape? It's enough to make you switch the channel. The commercials revolt him, all that friendly jawing among these folksy crackerbarrel types about rectal itching and burning, and the one of the young/old beautiful woman in soft focus stretching so luxuriously in her white bathrobe because she's just taken a shit and all those people in the Ex-Lax ad saying "Good morning" one after the other so you can't help picturing the world filling up with our smiling American excrement, we'll have to pay poor third-world countries to dump it pretty soon, like toxic waste. "Why pick on the Pope?" Harry asks. "Bush is just as bad, anti-choice."

"Yes, but he'll change when the women start voting Republicans out. There's no way to vote the Pope out."

"Do you ever get the feeling," he asks her, "now that Bush is in, that we're kind of on the sidelines, that we're sort of like a big Canada, and what we do doesn't much matter to anybody else? Maybe that's the way it ought to be. It's a kind of relief, I guess, not to be the big cheese."

Elvira has decided to be amused. She fiddles with one of her Brazil-nut earrings and looks up at him slantwise. "You matter to everybody, Harry, if that's what you're hinting at."

This is the most daughterly thing she has ever said to him. He feels himself blush. "I wasn't thinking of me, I was thinking of the country. You know who I blame? The old Ayatollah, for calling us the Great Satan. It's like he put the evil eye on us and we shrank. Seriously. He really stuck it to us, somehow."

"Don't live in a dream world, Harry. We still need you down here."

She goes out to the lot, where a quartet of female teenagers have showed up, all in jackets of stone-washed denim. Who knows, even teenagers these days have money enough for a Toyota. Maybe it's an all-girl rock band, shopping for a van to tour in. Harry wanders in to the office where the visiting accountants are nesting, day after day, in piles of paper. The one in charge has a rubbery tired face with dark rings under his eyes, and the assistant seems to be a kind of moron, a simpleton at speaking anyway, with not enough back to his head. As if to make up for any deficiency he always wears a clean white shirt with a tight necktie, pinned to his chest with a tieclip.

"Ah," the one in charge says, "just the guy we need. Does the name Angus Barfield mean anything to you?" The rings under his eyes are so deep and deeply bruised they go all the way around his sockets; he looks like a raccoon. Though his face shows a lot of wear, his hair is black as shoe polish, and lies as flat on his head as if painted in place. These accountants have to be tidy, all those numbers they write down, thousands and millions, and never a five that could be confused with a three or a seven with a one. As he cocks a ringed eye at Harry waiting for an answer, his rubbery mouth slides around in a restless wise-guy motion.

"No," Harry says, "and yet, wait. There's a faint bell. Barfield."

"A good guy for you to know," the accountant says, with a sly grimace and twist of his lips. "From December to April, he was buying a Toyota a month." He checks a paper under his shirtsleeved forearm. He has very long black hairs on his wrists. "A Corolla four-door, a Tercel five-speed hatchback, a Canny wagon, a deluxe two-passenger 4-Runner, and in April he really went fancy and took on a Supra Turbo with a sport roof, to the tune of twenty-five seven. Totals up to just under seventy-five K. All in the same name and the same address on Willow Street."

"Where's Willow?"

"That's one of the side streets up above Locust, you know. The area's gotten kind of trendy."

"Locust," Harry repeats, struggling to recall. He has heard the odd name "Angus" before, from Nelson's lips. Going off to a party in north Brewer.

"Single white male. Excellent credit ratings. Not much of a haggler, paid list price every time. The only trouble with him as a customer," the accountant says, "is according to city records he's been dead for six months. Died before Christmas." He purses his lips into a little bunch under one nostril and lifts his eyebrows so high his nostrils dilate in sympathy.

"I got it," Harry says, with a jarring pounce of his heart. "That's Slim. Angus Barfield was the real name of a guy everybody called Slim. He was a, a gay I guess, about my son's age. Had a good job in downtown Brewer – administered one of those HUD jobtraining programs for high-school dropouts. He was a trained psychologist, I think Nelson once told me."

The moronic assistant, who has been listening with the staring effort of a head that can only hold one thing at a time, giggles: the humor of insanity spills over onto psychologists. The other twists up the lower part of his face in a new way, as if demonstrating knots. "Bank loan officers love government employees," he says. "They're sure and steady, see?"

Since the man seems to expect it, Harry nods, and the accountant dramatically slaps the tidy chaos of papers spread out on the desk. "December to April, Brewer Trust extended five car loans to this Angus Barfield, made over to Springer Motors."

"How could they, to the same guy? Common sense -"

"Since computers, my friend, common sense has gone out the window. It's joined your Aunt Matilda's ostrich-feather hat. The auto-loan department of a bank is just tiddledywinks; the computer checked his credit and liked it and the loan was approved. The checks were cashed but never showed up in the company credits. We think your pal Lyle opened a dummy somewhere." The man stabs a stack of bank statements with a finger; it has black hairs between the knuckles and bends back so far Rabbit winces and looks away. This rubbery guy is one of those born teachers Rabbit has instinctively avoided all his life. "Let me put it like this. A computer is like a Frenchman. It seems real smart until you know the language. Once you know the language, you realize it's dumb as hell. Quick, sure. But quick ain't the same as smart."

"But," Harry gropes to say, "but for Lyle and Nelson, Lyle especially, to use poor Slims name in a scam like this when he had just died, when he was just about buried – would they have actually been so hard-hearted?"

The accountant slumps a little under the weight of such naiveté. "These were hungry boys. The dead have no feelings, that I've heard about. The guy's credit hadn't been pulled from the computer, and between these loans from Brewer Trust and the diddled inventory with Mid-Atlantic Toyota, some two hundred grand was skimmed from this operation, that we can verify so far. That's a lot of Toll House cookies."

The assistant giggles again. Rabbit, hearing the sum, goes cold with the premonition that this debt will swallow him. Here amid all these papers arrayed on the desk where he himself used to work, keeping a roll of Life Savers in the lefthand middle drawer, a fatal hole is being hatched. He taps his jacket pocket for the reassuring lump of the Nitrostat bottle. He'll take one as soon as he gets away. The night he and Pru fucked, both of them weary and half crazy with their fates, the old bed creaking beneath them had seemed another kind of nest, an interwoven residue of family fortunes, Ma Springer's musty old-lady scent released from the mattress by this sudden bouncing where for years she had slept alone, an essence of old mothballed blankets stored in attic cedar chests among plushbound family albums and broken cane-seated rockers and veiled hats in round hat-boxes, an essence arising not only from the abused bed but from the old sewing apparatus stored here and Fred's forgotten neckties in the closet and the dust balls beneath the venerable four-poster. All those family traces descended to this, this coupling by thunder and lightning. It was now as if it had never been. He and Pru are severely polite with each other, and Janice, ever more the working girl, has ceased to create many occasions when the households mingle. The Father's Day cookout was an exception, and the children were tired and cranky and bug-bitten by the time the grilled hamburgers were finally ready to be consumed.

Harry laughs, as idiotically as the assistant accountant. "Poor Slim," he says, trying to harmonize with the head accountant's slanginess. "Some pal Lyle turned out to be, buying him all those wheels he didn't need."

On July Fourth, for Judy's sake, he marches in a Mt. Judge parade. Her Girl Scout troop is in it and the troop leader's husband, Clarence Eifert, is on the organizing committee. They needed a man tall enough to be Uncle Sam and Judy told Mrs. Eifert that her grandfather was wonderfully tall. Actually, six three isn't tall by today's standards, you'd be a dwarf in the NBA at that height, but several members of the committee, a generation older than Mr. Eifert, remembered Rabbit Angstrom from his highschool glory days and became enthusiastic, even though Harry lives now in Penn Park on the other side of Brewer. He was a Mt. Judge boy and something of a hero once. He has become more corpulent than our national symbol should be but he has the right fair skin and pale blue eyes and a good soldierly bearing. He served during Korea. He did his bit.

The bell-bottom trousers with their broad red stripes have to be left unbuttoned at the stomach, but since they are held up by tricolor suspenders, and a pale-blue vest patterned in stars comes down over the belt area, it doesn't much matter. Harry and Janice fuss a good deal at the costume in the week before the Fourth. They actually go buy a formal shirt with French cuffs and a wing collar to go with the floppy red cravat, and decide that somehow his suede Hush Puppies go better with the red-striped trousers, look more like boots, than the formal black shoes he keeps for weddings and funerals. The swallowtail coat, of a wool darker blue than the vest, with three unbuttonable brass buttons on both sides, fits well enough, but the fuzzy flared top hat with its hatband of big silver stars perches on his high head unsteadily, a touch tight with the white nylon wig, so it feels like it might totter and fall off.

Janice bites the tip of her tongue thoughtfully. "Do you need the wig? Your hair's so pale anyway."

"But it's cut too short for Uncle Sam. I would have let it grow out if I'd known."

"Well," she says, "why wouldn't Uncle Sam have a modern haircut? He's not dead, is he?"

He tests the hat without the wig and says, "It does feel better, actually."

"And frankly, Harry, the wig on you is somehow alarming. It makes you look like a very big red-faced woman."

"Look, I'm doing this for our granddaughter, there's no need to get insulting."

"It's not insulting, it's interesting. I never saw your female side before. I bet you would have made a nicer woman than either your mother or Mim. They should have been men, both of them."

Mom was mean to Janice from the moment he first brought her home from Kroll's, and Mim once stole Charlie Stavros from her, or so Janice interpreted it. "I'm getting hot and itchy in this outfit," Harry says. "Let's try the goatee."

The goatee in place, Janice says, "Oh, yes. It slims your face right down. I wonder why you never grew a beard." There is this subtle past tense that keeps creeping into her remarks about him. "Mr. Lister is growing a beard now, and it makes him look a lot less doleful. He has these sagging jowls."

"I don't want to hear about that creep." He adds, "When I talk, the stickum doesn't feel like enough."

"It must be, it's gone through a lot of other parades."

"That's its problem, you dope. Is there any way to renew the stickum?"

"Just don't move your chin too much. I could call up Doris Eberhardt; when she was married to Kaufmann they were big into amateur theatricals."

"Don't get that pushy bitch on my case. Maybe somebody at the parade will have some spare stickum."

But the mustering of the parade is a confused and scattered business, held on the grounds of the old Mt. Judge High School, now the junior high school and slated to be torn down because of the asbestos in it everywhere and the insurance rates on the wooden floors. When Harry went there, they all just breathed the asbestos and took their chances on the floors catching fire. There are marching bands and antique cars and 4-H floats and veterans in their old uniforms all milling around on the asphalt of the parking lot and the brown grass of the baseball outfield, with the only organizing principle provided by men and women in green T-shirts stencilled MT. JUDGE INDEPENDENCE DAY COMMITTEE and those plastic truck-driver caps with a bill in front and a panel of mesh at the back. Looking to be told where to go, Rabbit wanders in this area where long ago he had roamed with wet-combed duck-tailed hair and a corduroy shirt tight across his back, the sleeves folded back and, out of basketball season, a cigarette pack squaring the shirt pocket. He expects to come across his old girlfriend, Mary Ann, as she had been then, in saddle shoes and white socks and a short pleated cheerleader's skirt, her calves straight and smooth and round-muscled between the skirt and the socks, and her face, with the dimple in one cheek and the touch of acne on her forehead, springing into joyful recognition at the sight of him. Instead, strange people with puzzled Eighties faces keep asking directions, because he is dressed as Uncle Sam and should know. He has to keep telling them he doesn't know anything.

The old high school, built in the Twenties of orange brick, had a tall windowless wall at the back, across from a board-and-tarpaper equipment shed long since torn down, and this black and gravelly area has profound associations for him, a power in its mute bricks and secluding space, for it was here after school and until twilight called you home that the more questing and footloose of the town's children tended to gather, girls as well as boys, hanging out, shooting baskets at the hoop attached to the blank brickwork (flat on the wall like those in the gym in Oriole), necking against the torn-tarpaper boards of the equipment shed, talking (the girls held by the boys' braced arms as in a row of soft cages), teasing, passing secrets, feeling their way, avoiding going home, so that the gritty leftover space here behind the school was charged with a solemn excitement, the questing energy of adolescents. Now in this area, repaved and cleaned up, the shed and backboards gone, Rabbit comes upon Judy's Girl Scout troop, some of them in uniform and some posed in costume on a flatbed truck, a float illustrating Liberty, the tallest and prettiest girl in a white bedsheet and spiked crown holding a big bronze book and gilded torch, and others grouped around her cardboard pedestal with their faces painted red and brown and black and yellow to represent the races of mankind, the faces painted because there aren't any Indian or Negro or Asian little girls in Mt. Judge, at least any that have joined the Girl Scouts.

Judy is one of those in badged and braided khaki uniform around the truck, and she is so amazed to see her grandfather in his towering costume that she takes his hand, as if to tie him to the earth, to reality. He has difficulty bending his head to see her, for fear that his top hat might fall off. As if addressing the distant backstop of the baseball diamond, he asks her, "How does the goatee look? The little beard, Judy."

"Fine, Grandpa. You scared me at first. I didn't know who you were."

"It feels to me like it might fall off any second."

"It doesn't look that way. I love the big stripy pants. Doesn't the vest squeeze your tummy?"

"That's the least of my problems. Judy, listen. Think you could do me a favor? It just occurred to me, they make a Scotch tape now that's sticky on both sides. If I gave you a couple dollars think you could run over to the little store across Central and get me some?" Always, under names and managements that shift with the years, there has been a store across from the school to sell its students bubble gum and candy and cap-guns and caps and tablets and cigarettes and skin magazines and whatever else young people thought they had to have. With difficulty, keeping his head stiffly upright, he digs through the layers of his costume to his wallet in a pouchy side pocket of the striped pants and, holding it up to his face, digs out two one-dollar bills. Just in case, he adds another. Things these days always cost more than he expects.

"Suppose it's not open because of the holiday!"

"It'll be open. It was always open."

"Suppose the parade starts; I got to be on the truck!"

"No it won't, the parade can't start without me. Come on, Judy. Think of all I've done for you. Think of how I saved you on the boat that time. Who got me into this damn parade in the first place? You did!"

He doesn't dare look down, lest his hat come off, but he can hear from her voice she is near tears. Her hair makes a reddish blur in the bottom of his vision. "O.K., I'll try, but…"

"Remember," he says, and as his chin stiffens in admonishment. he feels his goatee loosen, "sticky on both sides. Scotch makes it. Run, honey!" His heart is racing; he gropes through his clothes to make sure he remembered to bring the little bottle of nitroglycerin. He finds its life-giving nugget deep in the pouchy pocket. When he brings his fingers to his face, to tamp down the goatee, he sees they are trembling. If his goatee doesn't stick, he won't be Uncle Sam, and the entire parade will flounder; it will jam up here on the school grounds forever. He walks around with little steps, ignoring everybody, trying to quiet his heart. This is aggravating.

When Judy at last comes back, panting, she tells him, "They were dumb. They mostly sell only food now. Junky things like Cheez Doodles. The only Scotch tape they have is sticky on one side only. I got some anyway. Was that O.K.?"

Drum rolls sound on the parking lot, scattered at first, a few kids impatiently clowning around, and then in unison, gathering mass, an implacable momentum. The motors of antique cars and trucks bearing floats are starting up, filling the holiday air with blue exhaust. "O.K.," Harry says, unable to look down at his granddaughter lest his hat fall off, pocketing the tape and the change from three dollars, pressed upon him from below. Estranged from his costumed body, he feels on stilts, his feet impossibly small.

"I'm sorry, Grandpa. I did the best I could." Judy's little light voice, out of sight beneath him, wobbles and crackles with tears, like water sloshing in sun.

"You did great," he tells her.

A frantic stocky woman in a green committee T-shirt and truck-driver hat comes and hustles him away, to the head of the parade, past floats and drum-and-bugle corps, Model A Fords and civic leaders in neckties and a white limousine. A Mt. Judge patrol car with its blue light twirling and its siren silent will be the spearhead, then Harry at a distance. As if he doesn't know the route: as a child he used to participate in parades, in the crowd of town kids riding bicycles with red, white, and blue crépe paper threaded through the spokes. Down Central to Market a block short of 422, through the heart of the little slanting diagonal downtown, then left and uphill along Potter Avenue, through blocks of brick semidetached houses up on their terraced lawns behind the retaining walls, then downhill past Kegerise Alley as they used to call it, Kegerise Street it is now, with its small former hosiery factories and machine shops renamed Lynnex and Data Development and Business Logistical Systems, up to Jackson, the high end, a block from his old house, and on down to Joseph and past the big Baptist church, and sharp right on Myrtle past the post office and the gaunt old Oddfellows' Hall to end at the reviewing stand set up in front of the Borough Hall, in the little park that was full in the Sixties of kids smoking pot and playing guitars but now on a normal day holds just a few old retired persons and homeless drifters with million-dollar tans. The green-chested woman, along with a marshal with a big cardboard badge, a squinty stooped jeweller called Himmelreich – Rabbit was in school a few grades behind his father, whom everybody said was Jewish – makes sure he delays enough to let a distance build between him and the lead car, so Uncle Sam doesn't look too associated with the police. Immediately next in the parade is the white limousine carrying the Mt. Judge burgess and what borough councilmen aren't off in the Poconos or at the Jersey Shore. From further behind come the sounds of the drum-and-bugle corps and some bagpipers hired from Chester County and the scratchy pop tunes playing on the floats to help illustrate Liberty and the Spirit of 1776 and ONE WORLD/UN MUNDO and Head, Heart, Hands, and Health, and at the tail end a local rock singer doing ecstatic imitations of Presley and Orbison and Lennon while a megawatt electric fan loudly blows on all the amplifying equipment stacked on his flatbed truck. But up front, at the head of the parade, it is oddly silent, hushed. What a precarious weird feeling it is for Harry at last to put his suede-booted feet on the yellow double line of the town's main street and start walking! He feels giddy, ridiculous, enormous. Behind him there is the white limousine purring along in low gear, so he cannot stop walking, and far ahead, so far ahead it twinkles out of sight around corners and bends in the route, the police car; but immediately ahead there is nothing but the eerie emptiness of normally busy Central Street under a dazed July sky blue above the telephone wires. He is the traffic, his solitary upright body. The stilled street has its lunar details, its pockmarks, its scars, its ancient metal lids. The tremor in his heart and hands becomes an exalted sacrificial feeling as he takes those few steps into the asphalt void, rimmed at this end of the route with only a few spectators, a few bare bodies in shorts and sneakers and tinted shirts along the curb.

They call to him. They wave ironically, calling "Yaaaay" at the idea of Uncle Sam, this walking flag, this incorrigible taxer and frisky international mischief-maker. He has nothing to do but wave back, carefully nodding so as not to spill his hat or shake loose his goatee. The crowd as it thickens calls out more and more his name, "Harry," or "Rabbit" – "Hey, Rabbit! Hey, hotshot!" They remember him. He hasn't heard his old nickname so often in many years; nobody in Florida uses it, and his grandchildren would be puzzled to hear it. But suddenly from these curbstones there it is again, alive, affectionate. This crowd seems a strung-out recycled version of the crowd that used to jam the old auditorium-gym Tuesday and Friday nights, basketball nights, in the dead of the winter, making their own summer heat with their bodies, so that out on the floor sweat kept burning your eyes and trickling down from under your hair, behind your ears, down your neck to the hollow between your collar bones. Now the sweat builds under his wool swallowtail coat, on his back and his belly, which indeed is squeezed as Judy said, and under his hat even without the wig; thank God Janice got him out of that, she isn't always a dumb mutt.

His sweat, as with increasing ease and eagerness he waves at the crowd that clusters at the corners and in the shade of the Norway maples and on the sandstone retaining walls and terraced lawns up into the cool shadow of the porches, loosens his goatee, undermines the adhesive. He feels one side of it softly separate from his chin and without breaking stride – Uncle Sam has a bent-kneed, cranky stride not quite Harry's loping own – he digs out the Scotch tape from the pouchy pocket and tears off an inch, with the tab of red plaid paper. It wants to stick to his fingers; after several increasingly angry flicks it flutters away onto the street. Then he pulls off another piece, which he presses onto his own face and the detaching edge of synthetic white beard; the tape holds, though it must make a rectangular gleam on his face. The spectators who see him improvise this repair cheer. He takes to doffing his tall heavy hat, with a cautious bow to either side, and this stirs more applause and friendly salutation.

The crowd he sees from behind his wave, his smile, his adhesive gleam amazes him. The people of Mt. Judge are dressed for summer, with a bareness that since Harry's childhood has crept up from children into the old. White-haired women sit in their aluminum lawn chairs down by the curb dressed like fat babies in checks and frills, their shapeless veined legs cheerfully protruding. Middle-aged men have squeezed their keglike thighs into bicycle shorts meant for boys. Young mothers have come from their back-yard aboveground swimming pools in bikinis and high-sided slips of spandex that leave half their asses and boobs exposed. On their cocked hips they hold heat-flushed babies in nothing but diapers and rubber pants. There seem so many young – babies, tots, a bubbling up of generation on generation since the town brought him forth. Then it was full of the old: as he walked to school of a morning, severe and scolding women would come out of their houses shaking brooms and wearing thick dark stockings and housedresses with buttons all down the front. Now a cheerful innocent froth of flesh lines Jackson Road. Bare knees are bunched like grapes, and barrels of naked brown shoulders hulk in the dappled curbside shade. There are American flags on gilded sticks, and balloons, balloons in all colors, even metallic balloons shaped like hearts and pillows, held in hands and tied to bushes, to the handles of strollers containing yet more babies. A spirit of indulgence, a conspiring to be amused, surrounds and upholds his parade as he leads it down the stunning emptiness at the center of the familiar slanting streets.

Harry puts some Scotch tape on the other side of his goatee and out of the same pocket fishes his pill vial and pops a Nitrostat. The uphill section of the route tested him, and now turning downhill jars his heels and knees. When he draws too close to the cop car up ahead, carbon monoxide washes into his lungs. Mingled music from behind pushes him on: the gaps of "American Patrol" are filled with strains of "Yesterday." He concentrates on the painted yellow line, besmirched here and there by skid marks, dotted for stretches where passing is permitted but mostly double like the inflexible old trolley tracks, long buried or torn up for scrap. Cameras click at him. Voices call his several names. They know him, but he sees no face he knows, not one, not even Pru's wry red-haired heart-shape or Roy's black-eyed stare or Janice's brown little stubborn nut of a face. They said they would be at the corner of Joseph and Myrtle, but here near the Borough Hall the crowd is thickest, the summer-cooked bodies four and five deep, and his loved ones have been swallowed up.

The whole town he knew has been swallowed up, by the decades, but another has taken its place, younger, more naked, less fearful, better. And it still loves him, as it did when he would score forty-two points for them in a single home game. He is a legend, a walking cloud. Inside him a droplet of explosive has opened his veins like flower petals uncurling in the sun. His eyes are burning with sweat or something allergic, his head aches under the pressure cooker of the tall top hat. The greenhouse effect, he thinks. The hole in the ozone. When the ice in Antarctica goes, we'll all be drowned. Scanning the human melt for the glint of a familiar face, Harry sees instead a beer can being brazenly passed back and forth, the flash of a myopic child's earnest spectacles, a silver hoop earring in the lobe of a Hispanic-looking girl. Along the march he noticed a few black faces in the crowd, as cheerful and upholding as the rest, and some Orientals – an adopted Vietnamese orphan, a chunky Filipino wife. From far back in the still-unwinding parade the bagpipers keen a Highland killing song and the rock impersonator whimpers "… imagine all the people" and, closer to the front, on a scratchy tape through crackling speakers, Kate Smith belts out, dead as she is, dragged into the grave by sheer gangrenous weight, "God Bless America" -… to the oceans, white with foam." Harry's eyes burn and the impression giddily – as if he has been lifted up to survey all human history – grows upon him, making his heart thump worse and worse, that all in all this is the happiest fucking country the world has ever seen.

It was the sort of foolish revelation he might have once shared with Thelma, in the soft-speaking unembarrassment that follows making love. Thelma was suddenly dead. Dead of kidney failure, thrombocytopenia, and endocarditis, toward the end of July, as the cool dawn of another hot blue-gray day broke on the ornamental roof-level brickwork opposite St. Joseph's Hospital in Brewer. Poor Thelma, her body had just been plain worn out by her long struggle. Ronnie tried to keep her at home to the end, but that last week she was too much to handle. Hallucinations, raving, sarcastic anger. Quite a lot of anger, at Ron of all people, who had been so devoted a husband, after being such a scapegrace in his young unmarried days. She was only fifty-five -a year younger than Harry, two years older than Janice. She died the same week the DC-10 bringing people from Denver to Philadelphia by way of Chicago crashed in Sioux City, Iowa, trying to land at two hundred miles an hour, running on no controls but the thrust of the two remaining engines, cartwheeling on the runway, breaking up in a giant fireball, and yet well over a hundred surviving, some of them dangling upside down from the seat belts in a section of fuselage, some of them walking away and getting lost in the cornfields next to the runway. It seemed to Rabbit the first piece of news that summer that wasn't a twentieth anniversary of something – of Woodstock, the Manson murders, Chappaquidick, the moon landing. The TV news has been full of resurrected footage.

The funeral service is in a sort of no-brand-name church about a mile beyond Arrowdale. Looking for it, Harry and Janice got lost and wound up at the mall in Maiden Springs, where a six-theater cineplex advertised on its crammed display board HONEY I SHRUNK BATMAN GHOSTBUST II KARATE KID III DEAD POETS GREAT BALLS. The lazy girl in the booth didn't know where the church might be, nor did the pimply usher inside, in the big empty scarlet lobby smelling of buttered popcorn and melting M amp;Ms. Harry was angry with himself all those times he sneaked out to Arrowdale to visit Thelma, now he can't find her goddamn church. When finally, hot, embarrassed, and furious at each other's incompetence, the Angstroms arrive, the church is just a plain raw building, a warehouse with windows and a stump of an, anodized aluminum steeple, set in a treeless acre of red soil sown skimpily with grass and crisscrossed by car ruts. Inside, the walls are cinder-block, and the light through the tall clear windows bald and merciless. Folding chairs do instead of pews, and childish felt banners hang from the metal beams overhead, showing crosses, trumpets, crowns of thorns mixed in with Biblical verse numbers – Mark 15:32, Rev. 1:10, John 19:2. The minister wears a brown suit and necktie and shirt with an ordinary collar, and looks rather mussed, and breathless, like the plump young manager of an appliance store who sometimes has to help out in handling the heavy cartons. His voice is amplified by a tiny stalk of a microphone almost invisible at the oak lectern. He talks of Thelma as a model housewife, mother, churchgoer, sufferer. The description describes no one, it is like a dress with no one in it. The minister senses this, for he goes on to mention her "special" sense of humor, her particular way of regarding things which enabled her to bear herself so courageously throughout her long struggle with her physical affliction. During a pastoral visit to Thelma in her last tragic week in the hospital, the minister had ventured to speculate with her on the eternal mystery of why the Lord visits afflictions upon some and not upon others, and cures some and lets many remain uncured. Even in the divine Gospel, let us remind ourselves, this is so, for what of the many lepers and souls possessed who did not happen to be placed in Jesus' path, or were not aggressive enough to press themselves forward in the vast crowds that flocked to Him on the Plain and on the Mount, at Capernaum and at Galilee? And what was Thelma's reply? She said, there in that hospital bed of pain and suffering, that she guessed she deserved it as much as the next. This woman was truly humble, truly uncomplaining. On an earlier, less stressful occasion, the minister recalls with a quickening of his voice that indicates an anecdote is coming, he was visiting her in her immaculate home, and she had explained her physical affliction to him as a minor misunderstanding, as a matter of some tiny wires in her system being crossed. Then she had suggested, with that gentle humorous expression that all of us here who loved her remember – and yet in all grievous seriousness as well – that perhaps God was responsible only for what we ourselves could experience and see, and not responsible for anything at the microscopic level.

He looks up, uncertain of the effect this reminiscence has made, and the little congregation of mourners, perhaps hearing Thelma's voice in the odd remark and thus enabled to conjure up the something schoolteacherish and sardonic and strict in her living manner, or perhaps sensing the minister's need to be rescued from the spectre of unjustifiable suffering, politely titters. With relief, the brown-suited man, like a talk-show host wrapping up, rolls on to the rote assurances, the psalm about green pastures, the verses from Ecclesiastes about a time for everything, the hymn that says now the day is over.

Harry sits there beside snuffly Janice in her policeman's outfit thinking of the wanton naked Thelma he knew, how little she had to do with the woman the minister described; but maybe the minister's Thelma was as real as Harry's. Women are actresses, tuning their part to each little audience. Her part with him was to adore him, to place her body at his service as if disposing of it. Her body was ill and sallow and held death within it like a silky black box. There was a faint insult, a kind of dismissal, in her attitude of helpless captivity to the awkward need to love. He could not love her as she did him, there was a satisfying self-punishment in his relative distraction, an irony she relished. Yet however often he left her she never wanted him to leave. The glazed ghost of her leans up against him when he stands for the blessing, stands close to his chest with sour-milk breath silently begging him not to go. Janice snuffles again but Harry keeps his own grief for Thelma tight against his heart, knowing Janice doesn't want to see it.

Outside, in the embarrassing sunlight, Webb Murkett, his face smilingly creased more deeply than ever, a cigarette still dangling from his long upper lip like a camel's, goes from group to group introducing his new wife, a shy girl in her twenties, younger than Nelson, younger than Annabelle, a fluffy small blonde dressed in dark ruffles and shaped like a seal, like a teenaged swimming champ, with no pronounced indentations. Webb does like them zaftig. Harry feels sorry for her, dragged up to this religious warehouse to bury the wife of an old golf partner of her husband's. Cindy, Webb's last wife, whom Harry adored not so many years ago, is also here, alone, looking dumpy and irritated and unsteady on black heels skimpy as sandals, as she takes a pose on the thickly grassed ruts of red earth that do for a church parking lot. While Janice sticks with Webb and his bride, Harry gallantly goes over to Cindy standing there like a lump, squinting in the hot hazed sun.

"Hi," he says, wondering how she could let herself go so badly. She has taken on the standard Diamond County female build bosom like a shelf and ass like you're carrying your own bench around with you. Her dear little precise-featured face, in the old days enigmatic in its boyish pertness, with its snub nose and wideapart eyes, is framed by fat and underlined by chins; she has no neck, like those Russian dolls that nest one inside the other. Her hair that used to be cut short has been teased and permed into that big-headed look young women favor now. It adds to her bulk.

"Harry. How are you?" Her voice has a funereal caution and she extends a soft hand, wide as a bear's paw, for him to shake; he takes it in his but also under cover of the sad occasion bends down and plants a kiss on her damp and ample cheek. Her look of irritated lumpiness slightly eases. "Isn't it awful about Thel?" she asks.

"Yeah," he agrees. "But it was coming a long time. She saw it coming." He figures it's all right to suggest he knew the dead woman's mind; Cindy was there in the Caribbean the night they swapped. He had wanted Cindy and wound up with Thelma. Now both are beyond desiring.

"You know, don't you?" Cindy says. "I mean, you sense when the time is near if you're sick like that. You sense everything." Rabbit remembers a little cross in the hollow of her throat you could see when she wore a bathing suit, and how, like a lot of people of her generation, she was into spookiness -astrology, premonitions – though not as bad as Buddy Inglefinger's girlfriend Valerie, a real old-style hippie, six feet tall and dripping beads.

"Maybe women more than men," he says to Cindy tactfully. He lurches a bit deeper into frankness. "I've had some physical problems lately and they give me the feeling I've walked through my entire life in a daze."

This is too deep for her, too confessional. There was always in his relations with Cindy a wall, just behind her bright butterscotch-brown eyes, a barrier where the signals stopped. Silly Cindy, Thelma called her.

"Somebody told me," he tells her, "you're with a boutique over in that new mall near Oriole."

"I'm thinking of quitting, actually. Whatever I earn is taken off Webb's alimony so why should I bother? You can see how welfare mothers get that way."

"Well," he says, "a job gets you out in the world. Meet people." Meet a guy, get married again, is his unspoken thought. But who would want to hitch up with such a slab of beef? She'd sink any Sunfish you'd try to sail with her now.

"I'm thinking of maybe becoming a physical therapist. Another girl at the boutique is learning to do holistic massage."

"Sounds nice," Harry says. "Which holes?"

This is crude enough that she dares begin, "You and Thelma -" But she stops and looks at the ground.

"Yeah?" That old barrier keeps him from encouraging her. She is not the audience for which he wants to play the part of Thelma's bereft lover.

"You'll miss her, I know," Cindy says weakly.

He feigns innocence. "Frankly, Janice and I haven't been seeing that much of the Harrisons lately – Ronnie's resigned from the club, too much money he says, and I've hardly had a chance this summer to get over there myself. It's not the same, the old gang is gone. A lot of young twerps. They hit the ball a mile and win all the weekend sweeps. My daughter-in-law uses the pool, with the kids."

"I hear you're back at the lot."

"Yeah," he says, in case she knows anyway, "Nelson screwed up. I'm just holding the fort."

He wonders if he is saying too much, but she is looking past him. "I must go, Harry. I can't stand another second of watching Webb cavort with that simpering ridiculous baby doll of his. He's over sixty!"

The lucky stiff. He made it to sixty. In the little silence that her indignant remark imposes on the air, an airplane goes over, dragging its high dull roar behind it. With a smile not fully friendly he tells her, "You've all kept him young." A woman you've endured such a gnawing of desire for, you can't help bearing a little grudge against, when the ache is gone.

A number of people are making their escapes and Harry thinks he should go over and say a word to Ronnie. His old nemesis is standing in a loose group with his three sons and their women. Alex, the computer whiz, has a close haircut and a nerdy nearsighted look. Georgie has a would-be actor's long pampered hair and the coat and tie he put on for his mother's funeral look like a costume. Ron junior has the pleasantest face – Thelma's smile and the muscle and tan of an outdoor worker. Shaking their hands, Harry startles them by knowing their names. When you're sexually involved with a woman, some of the magic spills down into her children, that she also spread her legs for.

"How's Nelson doing?" Ron junior asks him, from the look on his face not trying to be nasty. It must have been this boy, around Brewer as he is, who told Thelma about Nelson's habit.

Harry answers him man to man. "Good, Ron. He went through the detox treatment for a month and now he's living with about twenty other, what do they say, substance abusers, at what they call a `concept house,' a halfway house in North Philly. He's got a volunteer job working with inner-city kids at a playground."

"That's great, Mr. Angstrom. Nelson's a great guy, basically."

"I don't go visit him any more, I couldn't stand this family therapy they try to give you, but his mother and Pru swear he loves it, working with these tough black kids."

Georgie, the prettiest boy and Thelma's favorite, has been overhearing and volunteers, "The only trouble with Nelson, he's too sensitive. He lets things get to him. In show business you learn to let it slide off your back. You know, fuck'em. Otherwise you'd kill yourself." He pats the back of his hairdo.

Alex, the oldest, adds in his nerdy prim way, "Well I tell you, the drugs out in California were getting to me, that's why I was happy when this job in Fairfax came through. I mean, everybody does it. All weekend they do it, on the beaches, on the thruways; everybody's stoned. How can you raise a family? Or save any money?"

Her boys are men now, with flecks of gray hair and little wise wrinkles around their mouths, with wives and small children, Thelma's grandchildren, looking to their fathers for shelter in the weedy tangle of the world. Her boys look more mature in Harry's eyes than Ronnie, in whom he must always see the obnoxious brat from Wenrich Alley, and the loud-mouthed locker-room showoff of high-school days. People he once loved slide from him but Ronnie is always there, like the smelly underside of his own body, like the jockey underpants that get dirty every day.

Ronnie is playing the grieving widower to a T; he looks like he's been through a washer, his eyelashes poking white from his tear-reddened lids, his kinky brass-colored hair reduced to gray wisps above his droopy ears. Rabbit tries to overcome his old aversion, their old rivalry, by giving the other man's hand an expressive squeeze and saying, "Really sorry."

But the old hostile devil lights up in Harrison's face, once meaty and now drawn and hollowed-out and stringy. With a glance at his sons and a small over-there jab of his head, he takes Harry's arm in a grip purposely too hard and leads him out of earshot, a few steps away on the rutted dried mud. He says to him, in the hurried confidential voice of men together in an athletic huddle, "You think I don't know you were banging Thel for years?"

"I – I've never much thought about what you know or don't know, Ronnie."

"You son of a bitch. That night we swapped down in the islands was just the beginning, wasn't it? You kept seeing her up here."

"Ron, I thought you said you knew. You should have asked Thelma if you were curious."

"I didn't want to hassle her. She was fighting to live and I loved her. Toward the end, we talked about it."

"So you did hassle her?"

"She wanted to clear the slate. You son of a bitch. The Old Master. You're the coldest most selfish bastard I ever met."

"Why? What makes me so bad? Maybe she wanted me. Maybe the favors were mutual." Over Ronnie's shoulder, Harry sees mourners waiting to say goodbye, hesitant, conscious of the heat of this hurried conversation. Harrison has become pink in the face and perhaps Rabbit has too. He says, "Ronnie, people are watching. This isn't the time."

"There won't be another time. I don't ever want to see you again as long as I live. You disgust me."

"Yeah, and you disgust me. You always have, Ron. You got a prick where your head ought to be. Who can blame her, if Thel gave herself a little vacation from eating your shit now and then?"

Ronnie's face is quite pink and his eyes are watering; he has never let go of Harry's forearm, as if this hold is his last warm contact with his dead wife. His voice lowers into a new intensity; Harry has to bend his head to hear. "I don't give a fuck you banged her, what kills me is you did it without giving a shit. She was crazy for you and you just lapped it up. You narcissistic cocksucker. She wasted herself on you. She went against everything she wanted to believe in and you didn't even appreciate it, you didn't love her and she knew it, she told me herself. She told me in the hospital asking my forgiveness." Ronnie takes breath to go on, but tears block his throat.

Rabbit's own throat aches, thinking of Thelma and Ronnie at the last, her betraying her lover when her body had no more love left in it. "Ronnie," he whispers. "I did appreciate her. I did. She was a fantastic lay."

"You cocksucker" is all Ronnie can get out, repetitively, and then they both turn to face the mourners waiting to pay their respects and climb into their cars and salvage what is left of this hot hazy Saturday, with lawns to mow and gardens to weed all across Diamond County. Janice and Webb are among those staring. They must guess what the conversation has been about; in fact, most of those here must guess, even the three sons. Though he had always been discreet on his visits to Arrowdale, hiding his Toyota in her garage and never getting caught in bed with her by a sick child returning early from school or a repairman letting himself in an unlocked door, these things have a way of getting out into the air. Like a tire, it needs only a pinhole of a leak. People sense it. Word has got around, or it will now. Well, fuck 'em, like Georgie said. Fuck 'em all, including Webb's child bride, who from the shape of her might be pregnant. That Webb, what a character.

A nice thing happens. Ronnie and Harry, Harrison and Angstrom, with a precision as if practiced, execute a crisscross. They smile, despite their pink eyelids and raw throats, at the little watching crowd and neatly cross paths as they move toward their kin, Harry toward Janice in her navy-blue suit with white trim and wide shoulders, and Ronnie back to his sons and the center of his sad occasion. Once teammates, always teammates. Rabbit, remembering how Ronnie once screwed Ruth a whole weekend in Atlantic City and then bragged to him about it, can't feel sorry for him at all.

I Love What You Do for Me, Toyota. That is the new paper banner the company has sent down to hang in the big display window. At times, standing at the window, when a cloud dense with moisture darkens the atmosphere or an occluding truck pulls up past the yew hedge for some business at the service doors, Harry catches a sudden reflection of himself and is startled by how big he is, by how much space he is taking up on the planet. Stepping out on the empty roadway as Uncle Sam last month he had felt so eerily tall, as if his head were a giant balloon floating above the marching music. Though his inner sense of himself is of an innocuous passive spirit, a steady small voice, that doesn't want to do any harm, get trapped anywhere, or ever die, there is this other self seen from outside, a six-foot-three ex-athlete weighing two-thirty at the least, an apparition wearing a sleek gray summer suit shining all over as if waxed and a big head whose fluffy shadowy hair was trimmed at Shear Joy Hair Styling (unisex, fifteen bucks minimum) to rest exactly on the ears, a fearsome bulk with eyes that see and hands that grab and teeth that bite, a body eating enough at one meal to feed three Ethiopians for a day, a shameless consumer of gasoline, electricity, newspapers, hydrocarbons, carbohydrates. A boss, in a shiny suit. His recent heart troubles have become, like his painfully and expensively crowned back teeth, part of his respectability's full-blown equipage.

Harry needs a good self-image today, for the lot is going to be visited at eleven by a representative of the Toyota Corporation, a Mr. Natsume Shimada, hitherto manifested only as a careful signature, each letter individually formed, on creamy stiff stationery from the American Toyota Motor Sales headquarters in Torrance, California. Word of the financial irregularities anatomized by the two accountants Janice hired under Charlie's direction has filtered upward, higher and higher, as letters from Mid-Atlantic Toyota in Glen Burnie, Maryland, were succeeded by mail from the Toyota Motor Credit Corporation's offices in Baltimore and then by courteous but implacable communications from Torrance itself, signed with what seems an old-fashioned stub-tipped fountain pen by Mr. Shimada, in sky-blue ink.

"Nervous?" Elvira asks, sidling up beside him in a slim seersucker suit. For the hot weather she had her hair cut short behind, exposing sexy dark down at the back of her neck. Did Nelson used to boff her? If Pru wasn't putting out, he had to buff somebody. Unless coke whores were enough, or the kid was secretly gay. Insofar as he can bear to contemplate his son's sex life, Elvira seems a little too classy, too neuter to go along with it. But maybe Harry is underestimating the amount of energy in the world: he tends to do that, now that his own is sagging.

"Not too," he answers. "How do I look?"

"Very imposing. I like the new suit."

"It's kind of a gray metallic. They developed the fabric while doing the moon shots."

Benny is doing a dance of door-opening and hood-popping out on the lot with a couple so young they keep looking at each other for confirmation, both talking at once and then falling silent simultaneously, paralyzed by their wish not to be tricked out of a single dollar. August sales are on and Toyota is offering thousanddollar rebates. In the old days you sold only at their list price, no haggling, take it or leave it, a quality product. Their old purity has been corrupted by American methods. Toyota has stooped to the scramble. "You know," he tells Elvira, "in all the years the lot has been selling these cars I don't recall it ever being visited by an actual Japanese. I thought they all stayed over there in Toyota City enjoying the tea ceremony."

"And the geisha girls," Elvira says slyly. "Like Mr. Uno."

Harry smiles at the topical allusion. This girl – woman – keeps up. "Yeah, he wasn't Numero Uno very long, was he?"

Her earrings today are like temple bells, little curved lids of dull silver wired together in trembling oblongs the size of butterfly cocoons. They shiver with a touch of indignation when she tells him, "It's really Nelson and Lyle should be facing Mr. Shimada."

He shrugs. "What can you do? The lawyer got Lyle on the phone finally and the guy just laughed at him. Said he was taking oxygen just to get out of bed and go to the toilet and could die any time. Furthermore he said the disease had spread to his brain and he had no idea what the lawyer was talking about. And he'd had to sell his computer and didn't keep any of the disks. In other words he told the lawyer to – to go jump in the lake." Suppressing "fuck himself" like that was maybe a way of courting Elvira, he doesn't know. Late in the game as it is, you keep trying. He likes her being so thin -she makes Pru and even Janice look thick and there is something cool and quiet about her he finds comforting, like a television screen when you can't hear the words, just see the flicker. "I had to laugh," he says, of Lyle's last communications. "Dying has its advantages."

She asks at his side, "Won't Nelson be home in a week or so?"

"That's the schedule," Harry says. "Summer flies by, doesn't it? You notice it in the evening now. It's still warm but gets dark earlier and earlier. It's a thing you forget from year to year, that latesummer darkness. The cicadas. That smell of baked-out lawns. Except this summer's been so damn rainy – in my little garden, God, the weeds won't stop growing, and the lettuce and broccoli are so leggy they're falling over. And the pea vines have spread like Virginia creeper, up over the fence and into the neighbor's yard."

"At least it hasn't been so terribly hot like it was the summer before," Elvira says, "when everybody kept talking about the greenhouse effect. Maybe there is no greenhouse effect."

"Oh, there is," Rabbit tells her, with a conviction he didn't know he had. Across Route 111, above the red hat-shaped roof of the Pizza Hut, a flock of starlings, already migrating south, speckle the telephone wires like a bar of musical notation. "I won't live to see it," he says, "but you will, and my grandchildren. New York, Philly, their docks will be underwater, once Antarctica starts melting. All of the Jersey Shore." Ronnie Harrison and Ruth: what a shit, that guy.

"How is he doing, have you heard much? Nelson."

"He's dropped us a couple of cards of the Liberty Bell. He sounded cheerful. In a way, the kid's been always looking for more structure than we could ever give him, and I guess a rehab program is big on structure. He talks to Pru on the phone, but they don't encourage too much outside contact at this point."

"What does Pru think about everything?" Does Harry imagine it, an edge of heightened interest here, as if the sound on the TV set clicked back in?

"Hard to know what Pru thinks," he says. "I have the impression she was about ready to pack it in, the marriage, before he sent himself off. She and Janice and the kids have been up at the Poconos."

"That makes it lonely for you," Elvira Ollenbach says.

Could this be a feeler? Is he supposed to have her come on over? Have a couple daiquiris in the den, stroke the dark nape of her neck, see if her pussy matches up, up in that slanty spare bedroom where all the old Playboys were stashed in the closet when they moved in – the thought of that wiry young female body seeking to slake its appetites on his affects him like the thought of an avalanche. It would make a wreck of his routine. "At my age I don't mind it," he says. "I can watch the TV shows I want. National Geographic, Disney, World of Nature. When Janice is there she makes us watch all these family situation shows with everybody clowning around in the living room. This Roseanne, I asked her what the hell she sees in it, she told me, `I like her. She's fat and messy and mean, like most of the women in America.' I watch less and less. I try to have just one beer and go to bed early."

The young woman silently offers to move away, back to her cubicle in the direction of Paraguay. But he likes her near him, and abruptly asks, "You know who I'm sick of hearing about?"

"Who?"

"Pete Rose. 'Djou read in the Standard the other day how he's been in hot water before, in 1980 when he and a lot of the other Phils were caught taking amphetamines and the club traded away Randy Leach, the only player who admitted to it, and the rest of 'em just brazened it through?"

"I glanced at it. It was a Brewer doctor supplying the prescriptions."

"That's right, our own little burg. So that's why he thinks he can bluff it through now. Nobody else has to pay for what they do, everybody else gets away with everything. Ollie North, drug dealers, what with the jails being full and everybody such a bleeding heart anyway. Break the law, burn the flag, who the fuck cares?"

"Don't get yourself upset, Harry," she says, in her maternal, retreating mode. "The world is full of cheaters."

"Yeah, we should know."

She makes no response at all, having turned her back. Maybe she had been balling Nelson after all.

"I always thought he was an ugly ballplayer, anyway," he feels compelled to say, concerning Rose. "If you have to do it all with hustle and grit, you shouldn't be out there."

Out there, in the dog-days outdoors whose muggy alternation of light and shadow flickeringly gives him back his own ominous reflection, Harry notices that the refurbished yew hedge – he had a lawn service replace the dead bushes and renew the bark mulch – has collected a number of waxpaper pizza wrappers and Styrofoam coffee cups that have blown in from Route 111. He can't have their Japanese visitor see a mess like that. He goes outside, and the hot polluted air, bouncing off the asphalt, takes his breath away. The left side of his ribs gives a squeeze. He puts a Nitrostat to melt beneath his tongue before he begins to stoop. The more wastepaper he gathers, the more it seems there is candy wrappers, cigarette-pack cellophane, advertising fliers and whole pages of newspaper wrinkled by rain and browned by the sun, big soft-drink cups with the plastic lid still on and the straw still in and the dirty water from melted ice still sloshing around. There is no end of crud in the world. He should have brought out a garbage bag, he has both hands full and can feel his face getting red as he tries to hold yet one more piece of crumpled sticky cardboard in his fanned fingers. A limousine cracklingly pulls into the lot while Harry is still picking up the trash, and he has to run inside to cram it all into the wastebasket in his office. Puffing, his heart thudding, his metallic-gray suit coat pulling at the buttons, he rushes back across the showroom to greet Mr. Shimada at the entrance, shaking his hand with a hand unwashed of street grit, dried sugar, and still-sticky pizza topping.

Mr. Shimada is an impeccable compact man of about five six, carrying an amazingly thin oxblood-red briefcase and wearing a smoke-blue suit with an almost invisible pinstripe, tailored to display a dapper breadth of his gold-linked French cuffs and high white collar, on a shirt with a pale-blue body. He looks dense, like a beanbag filled to the corners with buckshot, and in good physical trim, though stocky, with a burnish of California tan on his not unfriendly face. "Is very nice meeting you," he says. "Area most nice." He speaks English easily, but with enough of an accent to cost Harry a second's response time answering him.

"Well, not around here exactly," he answers, instantly thinking that this is tactless, for why would Toyota want to locate its franchise in an ugly area? "I mean, the farm country is what we're famous for, barns with hex signs and all that." He wonders if he should explain "hex sign" and decides it's not worth it. "Would you like to look around the facility? At the setup?" In case "facility" didn't register. Talking to foreigners really makes you think about the language.

Mr. Shimada slowly, stiffly turns his head and shoulders together, one way and then the other, to take in the showroom. "I see," he smiles. "Also in Torrance I study many photos and froor pran. Oh! Rovely rady!"

Elvira has left her desk and sashays toward their visitor, sucking in her cheeks to make herself look more glamorous. "Miss Olshima, I mean Mr. Shimada" -Harry had been practicing the name, telling himself it was like Ramada with shit at the beginning, only to botch it in the crunch – "this is Miss Ollenbach, one of our best sales reps. Representatives."

Mr. Shimada first gives her an instinctive little hands-at-the-sides bow. When they shake hands, it's like both of them are trying to knock each other out with their smiles, they hold them so long. "Is good idea, to have both sexes serring," he says to Harry. "More and more common thing."

"I don't know why it took us all so long to think of it," Harry admits.

"Good idea take time," the other man says, curbing his smile a little, letting an admonitory sternness tug downward his rather full yet flat lips. Harry remembers from his boyhood in World War II how very cruel the Japanese were to their prisoners on Bataan. The first thing you heard about them, after Pearl Harbor, was that they were ridiculously small, manning tiny submarines and planes called Zeros, and then, as those early Pacific defeats rolled in, that they were fanatic in the service of their Emperor, robot-monkeys that had to be torched out of their caves with flame-throwers. What a long way we've come since then. Harry feels one of his surges of benevolence, of approval of a world that isn't asking for it. Mr. Shimada seems to be asking Elvira if she prays.

"Play tennis, you mean?" she asks back. "Yes, as a matter of fact. Whenever I can. How did you know?"

His flat face breaks into twinkling creases and, quick as a monkey, he taps her wrist, where a band of relative pallor shows on her sunbrowned skin. "Sweatband," he says, proudly.

"That's clever," Elvira says. "You must play, too, in California. Everybody does."

"All free time. Revel five, hoping revel four."

"That's fabulous," she comes back, but a sideways upward glance at Harry asks how much longer she has to be a geisha girl.

"Good fetch, no backhand," Mr. Shimada tells her, demonstrating.

"Turn your back to the net, and take the racket back low," Elvira tells him, also demonstrating. "Hit the ball out front, don't let it play you."

"Talk just as pro," Mr. Shimada tells her, beaming.

No doubt about it, Elvira is impressive. You can see how rangy and quick she would be on the court. Harry is beginning to relax. When the phantom tennis lesson is over, he takes their guest on a quick tour through the office space and through the shelved tunnel of the parts department, where Roddy, the Assistant Parts Manager, a viciously pretty youth with long lank hair he keeps flicking back from his face, his face and hands filmed with gray grease, gives them a dirty white-eyed look. Harry doesn't introduce them, for fear of besmirching Mr. Shimada with a touch of grease. He leads him to the brass-barred door of the rackety, cavernous garage, where Manny, the Service Manager Harry had inherited from Fred Springer fifteen years ago, has been replaced by Arnold, a plump young man with an advanced degree from voke school, where he was taught to wear washable coveralls that give him the figure of a Kewpie doll, or a snowman. Mr. Shimada hesitates at the verge of the echoing garage -men's curses cut through the hammering of metal on metal – and takes a step backward, asking, "Emproyee moraru good?"

This must be "morale." Harry thinks of the mechanics, their insatiable gripes and constant coffee breaks and demands for ever more costly fringe benefits, and their frequent hungover absences on Monday and suspiciously early departures on Friday, and says, "Very good. They clear twenty-two dollars an hour, with bonuses and benefits. The first job I ever took, when I was fifteen, I got thirty-five cents an hour."

Mr. Shimada is not interested. "Brack emproyees, are any? I see none."

"Yeah, well. We'd like to hire more, but it's hard to find qualified ones. We had a man a couple years ago, had good hands and got along with everybody, but we had to let him go finally because he kept showing up late or not showing up at all. When we called him on it, he said he was on Afro-American time." Harry is ashamed to tell him what the man's nickname had been – Blackie. At least we don't still sell Black Sambo dolls with nigger lips like they do in Tokyo, he saw on 60 Minutes this summer.

"Toyota strive to be fair-practices emproyer," says Mr. Shimada. "Wants to be good citizen of your pruraristic society. In prant in Georgetown, Kentucky, many bracks work. Not just assembry line, executive positions."

"We'll work on it," Rabbit promises him. "This is a kind of conservative area, but it's coming along."

"Very pretty area."

"Right."

Back in the showroom, Harry feels obliged to explain, "My son picked these colors for the walls and woodwork. My son Nelson. I would have gone for something a little less, uh, choice, but he's been the effective manager here, while I've been spending half the year in Florida. My wife loves the sun down there. She plays tennis, by the way. Loves the game."

Mr. Shimada beams. His lips seem flattened as if by pressing up against glass, and his eyeglasses, their squarish gold rims, seem set exceptionally tight against his eyes. "We know Nelson Angstrom," he says. He has trouble with the many consonants of the last name, making it "Ank-a-stom." "A most famous man at Toyota company."

A constriction in Harry's chest and a watery looseness below his belt tell him that they have arrived, after many courtesies, at the point of the visit. "Want to come into my office and sit?"

"With preasure."

"Anything one of the girls could get you? Coffee? Tea? Not like your tea, of course. Just a bag of Lipton's -"

"Is fine without." Rather unceremoniously, he enters Harry's office and sits on the vinyl customer's chair, with padded chrome arms, facing the desk. He sets his wonderfully thin briefcase on his lap and lightly folds his hands upon it, showing two dazzling breadths of white cuff. He waits for Harry to seat himself behind the desk and then begins what seems to be a prepared speech. "Arways," he says, "we in Japan admire America. As boy during Occupation, rooked way up to big GI soldiers, their happy easygo ways. Enemy soldiers, but not bad men. Powerful men. Our Emperor's advisers have red him down unfortunate ways, so General MacArthur, he seemed to us as Emperor had been, distant and first-rate. We worked hard to do what he suggest rebuild burned cities, learn democratic ways. Japanese very humble at first in regard to America. You know Toyota story. At first, very modest, then bigger, we produce a better product for the rittle man's money, yes? You ask for it, we got it, yes?"

"Good slogan," Harry tells him. "I like it better than some of the recent ones've been coming down."

But Mr. Shimada does not expect to be even slightly interrupted. His burnished, manicured hands firmly flatten on the thin oxblood briefcase and he inclines his upper body forward to make his voice clear. "Nevertheress, these years of postwar, Japanese, man and woman, have great respect for United States. Rike big brother. But in recent times big brother act rike rittle brother, always cry and comprain. Want many favors in trade, saying Japanese unfair competition. Why unfair? Make something, cheaper even with duty and transportation costs, people rike, people buy. American way in old times. But in new times America make nothing, just do mergers, do acquisitions, rower taxes, raise national debt. Nothing comes out, all goes in – foreign goods, foreign capital. America take everything, give nothing. Rike big brack hole."

Mr. Shimada is proud of this up-to-date analogy and of his unanswerable command of English. He smiles to himself and opens, with a double snap as startling as a gunshot, his briefcase. From it he takes a single sheet of stiff creamy paper, sparsely decorated with typed figures. "According to figures here, between November '88 and May '89 Springer Motors fail to report sale of nine Toyota vehicles totarring one hundred thirty-seven thousand four hundred at factory price. This sum accumurating interest come to as of this date one hundred forty-five thousand eight hundred." With one of his reflexive, half-suppressed bows, he hands the paper across the desk.

Harry covers it with his big hand and says, "Yeah, well, but it's accountants we hired reported all this to you. It's not as if Springer Motors as a company is trying to cheat anybody. It's a screwy – an unusual – situation that developed and that's being corrected. My son had a drug problem and hired a bad egg as chief accountant and together they ripped us all off. The Brewer Trust, too, in another scam – they had a dead mutual friend buying cars, would you believe it? But listen: my wife and I – technically she's the owner here – we have every intention of paying Mid-Atlantic Toyota back every penny we owe. And I'd like to see, sometime, how you're computing that interest."

Mr. Shimada leans back a bit and makes his briefest speech. "How soon?"

Harry takes a plunge. "End of August." Three weeks away. They might have to take out a bank loan, and Brewer Trust is already on their case. Well, let Janice's accountants work it out if they're so smart.

Mr. Shimada blinks, behind those lenses embedded in his flat face, and seems to nod in concord. "End of August. Interest computed at twelve per cent monthly compounded as in standard TMCC loan." He snaps shut his briefcase and balances it on its edge beside his chair. He gazes obliquely at the framed photographs on Harry's desk: Janice, when she still had bangs, in a spangly long dress three or four years ago, about to go off to the Valhalla Village New Year's Eve party, a flashlit color print Fern Drechsel took with a Nikkomat Bernie had just given her for a Hanukkah present and that came out surprisingly well, Janice's face in anticipation of the party looking younger than her years, a bit overexposed and out of focus and starry-eyed; Nelson's highschool graduation picture, in a blazer and necktie but his hair down to his shoulders, long as a girl's; and, left over from Nelson's tenure at this desk, a framed black-and-white posed school photo of Harry in his basketball uniform, holding the ball above his shining right shoulder as if to get off a shot, his hair crewcut, his eyes sleepy, his tank top stencilled MJ.

Mr. Shimada's less upright posture in the chair indicates a new, less formal level of discourse. "Young people now most interesting," he decides to say. "Not scared of starving as through most human history. Not scared of atom bomb as until recently. But scared of something – not happy. In Japan, too. Brue jeans, rock music not make happiness enough. In former times, in Japan, very simple things make men happy. Moonright on fish pond at certain moment. Cricket singing in bamboo grove. Very small things bring very great feering. Japan a rittle ireand country, must make do with very near nothing. Not rike endless China, not rike U.S. No oiru wells, no great spaces. We have only our people, their disciprine. Riving now five years in Carifornia, it disappoints me, the rack of disciprine in people of America. Many good qualities, of course. Good tennis, good hearts. Roads of fun. I have many most dear American friends. Always they aporogize to me for Japanese internment camps in Frankrin Roosevelt days. Always I say to them, surprised, `Was war!' In war, people need disciprine. Not just in war. Peace a kind of war also. We fight now not Americans and British but Nissan, Honda, Ford. Toyota agency must be a prace of disciprine, a prace of order."

Harry feels he must interrupt, he doesn't like the trend of this monologue. "We think this agency is. Sales have been up eight per cent this summer, bucking the national trend. I'm always saying to people, `Toyota's been good to us, and we've been good to Toyota."'

"No more, sorry," Mr. Shimada says simply, and resumes: "In United States, is fascinating for me, struggle between order and freedom. Everybody mention freedom, all papers terevision anchor people everybody. Much rove and talk of freedom. Skateboarders want freedom to use beach boardwalks and knock down poor old people. Brack men with radios want freedom to selfexpress with super jumbo noise. Men want freedom to have guns and shoot others on freeways in random sport. In Carifornia, dog shit much surprise me. Everywhere, dog shit, dogs must have important freedom to shit everywhere. Dog freedom more important than crean grass and cement pavement. In U.S., Toyota company hope to make ireands of order in ocean of freedom. Hope to strike proper barance between needs of outer world and needs of inner being, between what in Japan we call giri and ninjó." He leans forward and, with a flash of wide white cuff, taps the page of figures on Harry's desk. "Too much disorder. Too much dog shit. Pay by end of August, no prosecution for criminal activities. But no more Toyota franchise at Singer Motors."

"Springer," Harry says automatically. "Listen," he pleads. "No one feels worse about my son's falling apart than I do."

Now it is Mr. Shimada who interrupts; his own speech, with whatever beautiful shadows in Japanese it was forming in his mind, has whipped him up. "Not just son," he says. "Who is father and mother of such son? Where are they? In Frorida, enjoying sunshine and tennis, while young boy prays games with autos. Nelson Ank-a-stom too much a boy still to be managing Toyota agency. He roses face for Toyota company." This statement tugs his flat lips far down, in a pop-eyed scowl.

Hopelessly Harry argues, "You want the sales staff young, to attract the young customers. Nelson'll be thirty-three in a couple months." He thinks it would be a waste of breath, and maybe offensive, to explain to Mr. Shimada that at that same age Jesus Christ was old enough to be crucified and redeem mankind. He makes a final plea: "You'll lose all the good will. For thirty years the people of Brewer have known where to come to buy Toyotas. Out here right on Route One One One."

"No more," Mr. Shimada states. "Too much dog shit, Mr. Ank-strom." His third try and he almost has it. You got to hand it to them. "Toyota does not enjoy bad games prayed with its ploduct." He picks up his slim briefcase and stands. "You keep invoice. Many more papers to arrive. Most preasant if regretful visit, and good talk on topics of general interest. Perhaps you would be kind to discuss with rimo driver best way to find Route Four Two Two. Mr. Krauss has agency there."

"You're going to see Rudy? He used to work here. I taught him all he knows."

Mr. Shimada has stiffened, in that faintly striped smoky-blue suit. "Good teacher not always good parent."

"If Rudy's going to be the only Toyota in town, he ought to get rid of Mazda. That Wankel engine never really worked out. Too much like a squirrel cage."

Harry feels lightheaded, now that the ax has fallen. Anticipation is the worst; letting go has its pleasant side. "Good luck with Lexus, by the way," he says. "People don't think luxury when they think Toyota, but things can change."

"Things change," says Mr. Shimada. "Is world's sad secret." Out in the showroom, he asks, "Rovely rady?" Elvira with her clicking brisk walk traverses the showroom floor, her earrings doing a dance along the points of her jaw. Their visitor asks, "Could prease have business card, in case of future reference?" She digs one out of her suit pocket, and Mr. Shimada accepts it, studies it seriously, bows with his hands at his side, and then, to strike a jocular American note, imitates a tennis backhand.

"You've got it," she tells him. "Take it back low."

He bows again and, turning to Harry, beams so broadly his eyeglass frames are lifted by the creasing of his face. "Good ruck with many probrems. Perhaps before too rate should buy Rexus at dealer price." This is, it would seem, a little Japanese joke.

Harry gives the manicured hand a gritty squeeze. "Don't think I can afford even a Corolla now," he says and, in a reflex of good will really, manages a little bow of his own. He accompanies his visitor outdoors to the limousine, whose black driver is leaning against the fender eating a slice of pizza, and a cloud pulls back from the sun; a colorless merciless dog-day brilliance makes Harry wince; all joking falls away and he abruptly feels fragile and ill with loss. He cannot imagine the lot without the tall blue TOYOTA sign, the glinting still lake of well-made cars in slightly bitter Oriental colors. Poor Janice, she'll be knocked for a loop. She'll feel she's let her father down.

But she doesn't react too strongly; she is more interested these days in her real-estate courses. Janice has completed one pair of ten-week courses and is into another. She has long phone conversations with her classmates about the next quiz or the fascinating personality of their teacher, Mr. Lister with his exciting new beard. "I'm sure Nelson has some plan," she says. "And if he doesn't, we'll all sit down and negotiate one."

"Negotiate! Two hundred thousand disappearing dollars! And you don't have Toyotas to sell any more."

"Were they really so great, Harry? Nelson hated them. Why can't we get an American franchise – isn't Detroit making a big comeback?"

"Not so big they can afford Nelson Angstrom."

She pretends he's joking, saying, "Aren't you awful?" Then she looks at his face, is startled and saddened by what she sees there, and crosses their kitchen to reach up and touch his face. "Harry," she says. "You are taking it hard. Don't. Daddy used to say, `For every up there's a down, and for every down there's an up.' Nelson will be home in a week and we can't do a thing really until then." Outside the kitchen window screen, where moths keep bumping, the early-August evening has that blended tint peculiar to the season, of light being withdrawn while summer's warmth remains. As the days grow shorter, a dryness of dead grass and chirring insects has crept in even through this summer of heavy rains, of more thunderstorms and flash floods in Diamond County than Harry can ever remember. Out in their yard, he notices now a few brown leaves shed by the weeping cherry, and the flower stalks of the violet hosta dying back. In his mood of isolation and lassitude he is drawing closer to the earth, the familiar mother with his infancy still in her skirts, in the shadows beneath the bushes.

"Shit," he says, a word charged for him with magic since the night three months ago when Pru used it to announce her despairing decision to sleep with him, once. "What kind of plans can Nelson have? He'll be lucky to stay out of jail."

"You can't go to jail for stealing from your own family. He had a medical problem, he was sick the same way you were sick only it was addiction instead of angina. You're both getting better."

He hears in the things she says, more and more, other voices, opinions and a wisdom gathered away from him. "Who have you been talking to?" he says. "You sound like that know-it-all Doris Kaufmann."

"Eberhardt. I haven't talked to Doris for weeks and weeks. But some of the women taking the real-estate program, we go out afterwards to this little place on Pine Street that's not too rough, at least until later, and one of them, Francie Alvarez, says you got to think of any addiction as a medical condition just like they caught the flu, or otherwise you'd go crazy, blaming the addicts around you as if they can help it."

"So what makes you think Nelson's cure will take? Just because it cost us six grand, that doesn't mean a thing to the kid. He just went in to let things blow over. You told me yourself he told you once he loves coke more than anything in the world. More than you, more than me, more than his own kids."

"Well, sometimes in life you have to give up things you love."

Charlie. Is that who she's thinking of, to make her voice sound so sincere, so sadly wise and wisely firm? Her eyes for this moment in dying August light have a darkness that invites him in, to share a wisdom her woman's life has taught her. Her fingers touch his cheek again, a touch like a fly that when you're trying to fall asleep keeps settling on your face, the ticklish thin skin here and there. It's annoying; he tries to shake her off with a snap of his head. She pulls her hand back but still stares so solemnly. "It's you I worry about, more than Nelson. Is the angina coming back? The breathlessness?"

"A twinge now and then," he admits. "Nothing a pill doesn't fix. It's just something I'm going to have to live with."

"I wonder if you shouldn't have had the bypass."

"The balloon was bad enough. Sometimes I feel like they left it inside me."

"Harry, at least you should do more exercise. You go from the lot to the TV in the den to bed. You never play golf any more."

"Well, it's no fun with the old gang gone. The kids out there at the Flying Eagle don't want an old man in their foursome. In Florida I'll pick it up again."

"That's something else we ought to talk about. What's the point of my getting the salesperson's license if we go right down to Florida for six months? I can never build up any local presence."

"Local presence, you've got lots of it. You're Fred Springer's daughter and Harry Angstrom's wife. And now you're a famous coke addict's mother."

"I mean professionally. It's a phrase Mr. Lister uses. It means the people know you're always there, not off in Florida like some person who doesn't take her job seriously."

"So," he says. "Florida was good enough to stash me in when I was manager at Springer Motors, to get me out of Nelson's way, but now you think you're a working girl we can just forget it, Florida."

"Well," Janice allows, "I was thinking, one possibility, to help with the company's debts, might be to sell the condo."

"Sell it? Over my dead body," he says, not so much meaning it as enjoying the sound of his voice, indignant like one of those perpetually outraged fathers on a TV sitcom, or like silver-haired Steve Martin in the movie Parenthood, which they saw the other night because one of Janice's real-estate buddies thought it was so funny. "My blood's got too thin to go through a Northern winter."

In response Janice looks as if she is about to cry, her darkbrown eyes warm and glassy-looking just like little Roy's before he lets loose with one of his howls. "Harry, don't confuse me," she begs. "I can't even take the license exam until October, I can't believe you'd immediately make me go down to Florida where the license is no good just so you can play golf with some people older and worse than you. Who beat you anyway, and take twenty dollars every time."

"Well what am 1 supposed to do around here while you run around showing off? The lot's finished, kaput, or whatever the Japanese word is, finito, and even if it's not, if the kid's half-way straightened out you'll want him back there and he can't stand me around, we crowd each other, we get on each other's nerves."

"Maybe you won't now. Maybe Nelson will just have to put up with you and you with him."

Harry humbly tells her, "I'd be willing." Father and son, together against the world, rebuilding the lot up from scratch: the vision excites him, for the moment. Shooting the bull with Benny and Elvira while Nelson skitters around out there in the lake of rooftops, selling used cars like hotcakes. Springer Motors back to what it used to be before Fred got the Toyota franchise. So they owe a few hundred thousand – the government owes trillions and nobody cares.

She sees hope in his face and touches his cheek a third time. At night now, Harry, having to arise at least once and sometimes, if there's been more than one beer with television, twice, has learned to touch his way across the bedroom in the pitch dark, touching the glass top of the bedside table and then with an outreached arm after a few blind steps the slick varnished edge of the high bureau and from there to the knob of the bathroom door. Each touch, it occurs to him every night, leaves a little deposit of sweat and oil from the skin of his fingertips; eventually it will darken the varnished bureau edge as the hems of his golf-pants pockets have been rendered grimy by his reaching in and out for tees and ball markers, round after round, over the years; and that accumulated deposit of his groping touch, he sometimes thinks when the safety of the bathroom and its luminescent light switch has been attained, will still be there, a shadow on the varnish, a microscopic cloud of his body oils, when he is gone.

"Don't push me, honey," Janice says, in a rare tone of direct appeal that makes his hard old heart accelerate with revived husbandly feeling. "This horrible thing with Nelson really has been a stress, though I may not always show it. I'm his mother, I'm humiliated, I don't know what's going to happen, exactly. Everything's in flux."

His chest feels full; his left ribs cage a twinge. His vision of working side by side with Nelson has fled, a pipe dream. He tries to make Janice, so frighteningly, unusually somber and frontal, smile with a tired joke. "I'm too old for flux," he tells her.

Nelson is scheduled to return from rehab the same day that the second U.S. Congressman in two weeks, a white Republican this time, is killed in a plane crash. One in Ethiopia, one in Louisiana; one a former Black Panther, and this one a former sheriff. You don't think of being a politician as being such a hazardous profession; but it makes you fly. Pru drives to get her husband at the halfway house in North Philadelphia while Janice babysits. Soon after they arrive, Janice comes home to Penn Park. "I thought they should be alone with each other, the four of them," she explains to Harry.

"How did he seem?"

She thoughtfully touches her upper lip with the tip of her tongue. "He seemed… serious. Very focused and calm. Not at all jittery like he was. I don't know how much Pru told him about Toyota withdrawing the franchise and the hundred forty-five thousand you promised we'd pay so soon. I didn't want to fling it at him right off the bat."

"What did you say, then?"

"I said he looked wonderful – he looks a little heavy, actually – and told him you and I were very proud of him for sticking it out."

"Huh. Did he ask about me? My health?"

"Not exactly, Harry – but he knows we'd have said something if anything more was wrong with you. He seemed mostly interested in the children. It was really very touching – he took them both off with him into the room where Mother used to have all the plants, what we called the sun parlor, and apologized for having been a bad father to them and explained about the drugs and how he had been to a place where they taught him how to never take drugs again."

"Did he apologize to you for having been a bad son? To Pru for being a crappy husband?"

"I have no idea what he and Pru said to each other – they had hours in the car together, the traffic around Philadelphia is getting worse and worse, what with all the work on the Expressway. All the roads and bridges are falling apart at once."

"He didn't ask about me at all?"

"He did, of course he did, honey. You and I are supposed to go over there for dinner tomorrow night."

"Oh. So I can admire the drugless wonder. Great."

"You mustn't talk like that. He needs all of our support. Returning to your milieu is the hardest part of recovery."

"Milieu, huh? So that's what we are."

"That's what they call it. He's going to have to stay away from that druggy young people's crowd that meets at the Laid-Back. So his immediate family must work very hard to fill in the gap."

"Oh my God, don't sound so fucking goody-goody," he says. Resentment churns within him. He resents Nelson's getting all this attention for being a prodigal son. He resents Janice's learning new words and pushing outward into new fields, away from him. He resents the fact that the world is so full of debt and nobody has to pay – not Mexico or Brazil, not the sleazy S and L banks, not Nelson. Rabbit never had much use for old-fashioned ethics but their dissolution eats at him.

The night and the next day pass, in bed and at the lot. He tells Benny and Elvira that Nelson is back and he looked fat to his mother but didn't announce any plans. Elvira has received a call from Rudy Krauss asking if she wanted to come over to Route 422 and sell for him. A Mr. Shimada spoke very highly of her. Also she hears that Jake is leaving the Volvo-Olds in Oriole and heading up a Lexus agency toward Pottstown. For now though she would rather hang loose here and see what Nelson has in mind. Benny's been asking around at other agencies and isn't too worried. "What happens happens, you know what I mean? As long as I got my health and my family – those are my priorities." Harry has asked them not to tell anyone in Service yet about Mr. Shimada's surprise attack. He feels increasingly detached; as he walks the plastic-tiled display floor, his head seems to float above it as dizzily high as his top-hatted head above the pitted, striped asphalt that day of the parade. He is growing. He drives home, catches the beginning of Brokaw on 10 (he may have a kind of hare lip, but at least he doesn't say "aboot") before Janice insists he get back in the Celica with her and drive across Brewer to Mt. Judge for the zillionth time in his life.

Nelson has shaved his mustache and taken off his earring. His face has a playground tan and he does look plump. His upper lip, exposed again, seems long and pufy and bulging outward, like Ma Springer's used to. That's who it turns out he resembles; she had a tight stuffed-skin sausage look that Harry can see now developing in Nelson. The boy moves with a certain old-lady stiffness, as if the rehab has squeezed the drugs and the jitters out of him but also his natural nervous quickness. For the first time, he seems to his father middle-aged, and his thinning hair and patches of exposed scalp part of him and not just a condition that will heal. He reminds Harry of a minister, a slightly sleek and portly representative of some no-name sect like that lamebrain who buried Thelma. A certain acquired formality extends to his clothes: though the evening is seasonably humid and warm, he wears a striped necktie with a white shirt, making Harry feel falsely youthful in his soft-collared polo shirt with the Flying Eagle emblem.

Nelson met his parents at the door and after embracing his mother attempted to do the same with his father, awkwardly wrapping both arms around the much taller man and pulling him down to rub scratchy cheeks. Harry was taken by surprise and not pleased: the embrace felt showy and queer and forced, the kind of thing these TV evangelists tell you to do to one another, before they run off screen and get their secretaries to lay them. He and Nelson have hardly touched since the boy's age hit double digits. Some kind of reconciliation or amends was no doubt intended but to Harry it felt like a rite his son has learned elsewhere and that has nothing to do with being an Angstrom.

Pru in her turn seems bewildered by suddenly having a minister for a husband; when Harry bends down expecting the soft warn push of her lips on his, he gets instead her dry cheek, averted with a fearful quickness. He is hurt but can't believe he has done anything wrong. Since their episode that wild and windy night, the silence from her side has indicated a wish to pretend it never happened, and with his silence he has indicated that he is willing. He hasn't the strength any more, the excess vitality, for an affair – its danger, its demand performances, the secrecy added like a filigree to your normal life, your gnawing preoccupation with it and with the constant threat of its being discovered and ended. He can't bear to think of Nelson's knowing, whereas Ronnie's knowing he didn't much mind. He even enjoyed it, like a sharp elbow given under the basket. Thelma and he had been two of a kind, each able to gauge the risks and benefits, able to construct together a stolen space in which they could feel free for an hour, free of everything but each other. Within your own generation – the same songs, the same wars, the same attitudes toward those wars, the same rules and radio shows in the air – you can gauge the possibilities and impossibilities. With a person of another generation, you are treading water, playing with fire. So he doesn't like to feel even this small alteration in Pru's temperature, this coolness like a rebuke.

The children eat with them, Judy and Harry on one side of the Springers' mahogany dining-room table, set as if for a holiday, Janice and Roy on the other, Pru and Nelson at the heads. Nelson offers grace; he makes them all hold hands and shut their eyes and after they're ready to scream with embarrassment pronounces the words, "Peace. Health. Sanity. Love."

"Amen," says Pru, sounding scared.

Judy can't stop staring up at Harry, to see what he makes of it. "Nice," he tells his son. "That something you learned at the detox place?"

"Not detox, Dad, rehab."

"Whatever it was, it was full of religion?"

"You got to admit you're powerless and dependent on a higher power, that's the first principle of AA and NA."

"As I remember it, you didn't use to go much for any higherpower stuff."

"I didn't, and still don't, in the form that orthodox religion presents it in. All you have to believe in is a power greater than ourselves – God as we understand Him."

Everything sounds so definite and pat, Harry has to fight the temptation to argue. "No, great," he says. "Anything that gets you through the night, as Sinatra says." Mim had quoted that to him once. In this Springer house tonight Harry feels a huge and regretful distance from Mim and Mom and Pop and all that sunken God-fearing Jackson Road Thirties-Forties world.

"You used to believe a lot of that stuff," Nelson tells him.

"I did. I do," Rabbit says, annoying the kid, he knows, with his amiability. But he has to add, "Hallelujah. When they stuck that catheter into my heart, I saw the light."

Nelson announces, "They tell you at the center that there'll be people who mock you for going straight, but they don't say one of them will be your own father."

"I'm not mocking anything. Jesus. Have all the peace and love and sanity you want. I'm all for it. We're all all for it. Right, Roy?"

The little boy stares angrily at being suddenly singled out. His loose wet lower lip begins to tremble; he turns his face toward his mother's side. Pru tells Harry, in a soft directed voice in which he does sense a certain mist of acknowledgment, of rain splashing at a screened window, "Roy's been very upset, readjusting to Nelson's coming back."

"I know how he feels," Harry says. "We'd all gotten used to his not being around."

Nelson looks toward Janice in protest and appeal and she says, "Nelson, tell us about the counselling work you did," in the fake tone of one who has already heard about it.

As Nelson speaks, he sits with a curious tranquillized stillness; Harry is used to the kid, from little on up, being full of nervous elusive twitches, that yet had something friendly and hopeful about them. "Mostly," he says, "you just listen, and let them work it out through their own verbalization. You don't have to say much, just show you're willing to wait, and listen. The most hardened street kids eventually open up. Once in a while you have to remind them you've been there yourself, so their war stones don't impress you. A lot have been dealers, and when they start bragging how much money they made all you have to do is ask, `Where is it now?' They don't have it," Nelson tells the listening table, his own staring children. "They blew it."

"Speaking of blowing it -" Harry begins.

Nelson overrides him with his steady-voiced sermon. "You try to get them to see themselves that they are addicts, that they weren't outsmarting anybody. The realization has to come from them, from within, it's not something they can accept imposed on them by you. Your job is to listen; it's your silence, mostly, that leads them past their own internal traps. You start talking, they start resisting. It takes patience, and faith. Faith that the process will work. And it does. It invariably does. It's thrilling to see it happen, again and again. People want to be helped. They know things are wrong."

Harry still wants to speak but Janice intercedes by telling him, loudly for their audience at the table, "One of Nelson's ideas about the lot is to make it a treatment center. Brewer doesn't have anything like the facilities it needs to cope with the problem. The drug problem."

"That's the absolutely dumbest idea I've ever heard," Harry says promptly. "Where's the money in it? You're dealing with people who have no money, they've blown it all for drugs."

Nelson is goaded into sounding a bit more like his old self. He whines, "There's grant money, Dad. Federal money. State. Even do-nothing Bush admits we got to do something."

"You've got twenty employees you've fucked up over there at the lot, and most of'em have families. What happens to the mechanics in Service? What about your sales reps – poor little Elvira?"

"They can get other jobs. It's not the end of the world. People don't stick with jobs the way your scared generation did."

"Yeah, scared – with your generation on the loose we got reason to be scared. How would you ever turn that cement-block shed over there into a hospital?"

"It wouldn't be a hospital -"

"You're already one hundred fifty thousand in the hole to Toyota Inc. and two weeks to pay it off in. Not to mention the seventy-five grand you owe Brewer Trust."

"Those purchases in Slims name, the cars never left the lot, so there's really no -"

"Not to mention the used you sold for cash you put in your own pocket."

"Harry," Janice says, gesturing toward their audience of listening children. "This isn't the place."

"There is no place where I can get a handle on what this lousy kid has done! Over two hundred thousand fucking shekels – where's it going to come from?" Sparks of pain flicker beneath the muscles of his chest, he feels a dizziness in which the faces at the table float as in a sickening soup. Bad sensations have been worsening lately; it's been over three months since that angioplasty opened his LAD. Dr. Breit warned that restenosis often sets in after three months.

Janice is saying, "But he's learned so much, Harry. He's so much wiser. It's as if we sent him to graduate school with the money."

"School, all this school! What's so great about school all of a sudden? School's just another rip-off. All it teaches you is how to rip off dopes that haven't been to school yet!"

"I don't want to go back to school," Judy pipes up. "Everybody there is stuck-up. Everybody says the fourth grade is hard."

"I don't mean your school, honey." Rabbit can hardly breathe; his chest feels full of bits of Styrofoam that won't dissolve. He must get himself unaggravated.

From the head of the table Nelson radiates calm and solidity. "Dad, I was an addict. I admit it," he says. "I was doing crack, and a run of that gets to be expensive. You're afraid to crash, and need a fresh hit every twenty minutes. If you go all night, you can run through thousands. But that money I stole didn't all go to my habit. Lyle needed big money for some experimental stuff the FDA jerks are sitting on and has to be smuggled in from Europe and Mexico."

"Lyle," Harry says with satisfaction. "How is the old computer whiz?"

"He seems to be holding his own for the time being."

"He'll outlive me," Harry says, as a joke, but the real possibility of it stabs him like an icicle. "So Springer Motors," he goes on, trying to get a handle on it, "went up in coke and pills for a queer." How queer, he wonders, staring at his middle-aged, fattened-up, rehabilitated son, is the kid? Pru's answer to that had never quite satisfied him. If Nelson wasn't queer, how come she let Harry ball her? A lot of pent-up hunger there, her coming twice like that.

Nelson tells him, in that aggravating tranquillized nothingcan-touch-me tone, "You get too excited, Dad, about what really isn't, in this day and age, an awful lot of money. You have this Depression thing about the dollar. There's nothing holy about the dollar, it's just a unit of measurement."

"Oh. Thanks for explaining that. What a relief."

"As to Toyota, it's no big loss. The company's been stale for years, in my opinion. Look at their TV ads for the Lexus compared with Nissan's for the Infiniti: there's no comparison. Infiniti's are fantastic, there's no car in them, just birds and trees, they're selling a concept. Toyota's selling another load of tin. Don't be so fixated about Toyota. Springer Motors is still there," Nelson states. "The company still has assets. Mom and I are working it out, how to deploy them."

"Good luck," Harry says, rolling up his napkin and reinserting it in its ring, a child's ring of some clear substance filled with tiny needles of varied color. "In our thirty-three years of marriage your mother hasn't been able to deploy the ingredients of a decent meal on the table, but maybe she'll learn. Maybe Mr. Lister'll teach her how to deploy. Pru, that was a lovely meal. Excuse the conversation. You really have a way with fish. Loved those little spicy like peas on top." As he shakes out a Nitrostat from the small bottle he carries everywhere, he sees his hands trembling in a new way not just a tremor, but jumping, as if with thoughts all their own, that they aren't sharing with him.

"Capers," Pru says softly.

"Harry, Nelson is coming back to the lot tomorrow," Janice says.

"Great. That's another relief."

"I wanted to say, Dad, thanks for filling in. The summer stat sheets look pretty good, considering."

"Considering? We pulled off a miracle over there. That Elvira is dynamite. As I guess you know. This Jap that gave us the ax wants to hire her for Rudy over on 422. The inventory is being shifted to his lot." He turns to Janice and says, "I can't believe you're putting this loser back in charge."

Janice says, in the calm tone everybody at the table is acquiring, as if to humor a madman, "He's not a loser. He's your son and he's a new person. We can't deny him a chance."

In a voice more wifely than Janice's, Pru adds, "He really has changed, Harry."

"A day at a time," Nelson recites, "with the help of a higher power. Once you accept that help, Dad, it's amazing how nothing gets you down. All these years, I think I've been seriously depressed; everything seemed too much. Now I just put it all in God's hands, roll over, and go to sleep. You have to keep up the program, of course. There're local meetings, and I drive down to Philly once a week to see my therapist and check on some of my old kids. I love counselling." He turns to his mother and smiles. "I love it, and it loves me."

Harry asks him, "These druggy kids you deal with, they all black?"

"Not all. After a while you don't even see that any more. White or black, they have the same basic problem. Low selfesteem."

Such knowingness, such induced calm and steadiness and virtue: it makes Rabbit feel claustrophobic. He turns to his granddaughter, looking for an opening, a glint, a ray of undoctored light. He asks her, "What do you make of all this, Judy?"

The child's face wears a glaze of perfection – perfect straight teeth, perfectly spaced lashes, narrow gleams in her green eyes and along the strands of her hair. Nature is trying to come up with another winner. "I like having Daddy back," she says, "and not so crazy. He's more responsible." Again, he feels that words are being recited, learned at a rehearsal he wasn't invited to attend. But how can he wish anything for this child but the father she needs?

Out on the curb, he asks Janice to drive the Celica, though it means adjusting the seat and the mirrors. Heading back around the mountain, he asks her, "You really don't want me back at the lot?" He looks down at his hands. Their jumping has subsided but is still fascinating.

"I think for now, Harry. Let's give Nelson the space. He's trying so hard."

"He's full of AA bullshit."

"It's not bullshit if you need it to live a normal life."

"He doesn't look like himself."

"He will as you get used to him."

"He reminds me of your mother. She was always laying down the law."

"Everybody knows he looks just like you. Only not as tall, and he has my eyes."

The park, its shadowy walks, its decrepit tennis courts, its memorial tank that will never fire another shot. You can't see these things so clearly when you're driving. They go by like museum exhibits whose labels have all peeled off. He tries to climb out of his trapped and angry mood. "Sorry if I sounded ugly at dinner, in front of the grandchildren."

"We were prepared for much worse," she says serenely.

"I didn't mean to bring up the money or any of that stuff at all. But somebody has to. You're in real trouble."

"I know," Janice says, letting the streetlights of upper Weiser wash over her -her stubborn blunt-nosed profile, her little hands tight on the steering wheel, the diamond-and-sapphire ring she inherited from her mother. "But you have to have faith. You've taught me that."

"I have?" He is pleasantly surprised, to think that in thirty-three years he has taught her anything. "Faith in what?"

"In us. In life," she says. "Another reason I think you should stay away from the lot now, you've been looking tired. Have you been losing weight?"

"A couple pounds. Isn't that good? Isn't that what the hell I'm supposed to be doing?"

"It depends on how you do it," Janice says, so annoyingly full of new information, new presumption. She reaches over and gives his inner upper thigh, right where they inserted the catheter and he could have bled to death, a squeeze. "We'll be fine," she lies.

Now August, muggy and oppressive in its middle weeks, is bringing summer to a sparkling distillation, a final clarity. The fairways at the Flying Eagle, usually burnt-out and as hard as the cartpaths this time of year, with all the rain they've had are still green, but for the rough of reddish-brown buckgrass, and an occasional spindly maple sapling beginning to show yellow. It's the young trees that turn first – more tender, more attuned. More fearful.

Ronnie Harrison still swings like a blacksmith: short backswing, ugly truncated follow-through, sometimes a grunt in the middle. No longer needed at the lot, needing a partner if he was going to take up golf again, Rabbit remembered Thelma's saying how they had had to resign from the club because of her medical bills. Over the phone, Ronnie had seemed surprised – Harry had surprised himself, dialling the familiar digits trained into his fingers by the dead affair – but had accepted, surprisingly. They were making peace, perhaps, over Thelma's body. Or reviving a friendship – not a friendship, an involvement – that had existed since they were little boys in knickers and hightop sneakers scampering through the pebbly alleys of Mt. Judge. When Harry thinks back through all those years, to Ronnie's pugnacious thick-upped dulleyed face as it loomed on the elementary-school playground, to Ronnie crowingly playing with his big pale cucumber of a prick (circumcised, and sort of flat on its upper side) in the locker room, and then to Ronnie on the rise and on the make in his bachelor years around Brewer, one of the guys it turned out who had gone with Ruth before Rabbit did, Ronnie in those years full of smartass talk and dirty stories, a slimy operator, and then to Ronnie married to Thelma and working for Schuylkill Mutual, a kind of a sad sack really, plugging along doggedly, delivering his pitch, talking about "your loved ones" and when you're "out of the picture," slowly becoming the wanly smiling bald man in the photo on Thelma's dresser whom Harry could feel looking up his ass, so once to Thelma's amusement he got out of bed and put the photo flat on the bureau top, so afterwards she always turned it away before he arrived of an afternoon, and then to Ronnie as a widower, with the face of a bleached prune, pulled-looking wrinkles down from his eyes, an old guy's thin skin showing pink at the cheekbones, Harry feels that Ronnie has always been with him, a presence he couldn't avoid, an aspect of himself he didn't want to face but now does. That clublike cock, those slimy jokes, the blue eyes looking up his ass, what the hell, we're all just human, bodies with brains at one end and the rest just plumbing.

Their first round, playing as a twosome, they have a good enough time that they schedule another, and then a third. Ronnie has his old clients but he's no longer out there generating new business among the young husbands, he can take an afternoon off with a little notice. Their games are rusty and erratic, and the match usually comes down to the last hole or two. Will Harry's fine big free swing deliver the ball into the fairway or into the woods? Will Ronnie look up and skull an easy chip across the green into the sand trap, or will he keep his head down, his hands ahead, and get the ball close, to save a par? The two men don't talk much, lest the bad blood between them surface; the sight of the other messing up is so hilariously welcome as to suggest affection. They never mention Thelma.

On the seventeenth, a long par-four with a creek about one hundred ninety yards out, Ronnie plays up short with a four-iron. "That's a chickenshit way to play it," Harry tells him, and goes with a driver. Concentrating on keeping his flying right elbow close to his body, he catches the ball sweet, clearing the creek by thirty yards. Ronnie, compensating, tries too hard on his next shot: needing to take a three-wood, he roundhouses a big banana ball into the pine woods on the Mt. Pemaquid side of the fairway. Thus relieved of pressure, Rabbit thinks Easy does it on his six-iron and clicks off a beauty that falls into the heart of the green as if straight down a drainpipe. His par leaves him one up, so he can't lose, and only has to tie to win. Expansively he says to Ronnie as they ride the cart to the eighteenth tee, "How about that Voyager Two? To my mind that's more of an achievement than putting a man on the moon. In the Standard yesterday I was reading where some scientist says it's like sinking a putt from New York to Los Angeles."

Ronnie grunts, sunk in a losing golfer's self-loathing.

"Clouds on Neptune," Rabbit says, "and volcanos on Triton. What do you think it means?"

One of his Jewish partners down in Florida might have come up with some angle on the facts, but up here in Dutch country Ronnie gives him a dull suspicious look. "Why would it mean anything? Your honor."

Rabbit feels rubbed the wrong way. You try to be nice to this guy and he snubs you. He is an ugly prick and always was. You offer him the outer solar system to think about and he brushes it aside. He crushes it in his coarse brain. Harry feels a fine excessiveness in that spindly machine's feeble but true transmissions across billions of miles, a grace of sorts that chimes with the excessive beauty of this crystalline late-summer day. He needs to praise. Ronnie must know some such need, or he and Thelma wouldn't have attended that warehouse of a no-name church. "Those three rings nobody ever saw before," Harry insists, "just like drawn with a pencil," echoing Bernie Drechsel's awe at the thinness of flamingo legs.

But Ronnie has moved off, over by the ball washer, pretending not to hear. He has a bum knee from an old football injury and begins to limp toward the end of a round. He takes a series of vicious practice swings, anxious to begin the hole and avenge his previous poor showing. Disappointed, distracted by thoughts of brave Voyager, Rabbit lets his right elbow float at the top of the backswing and cuts weakly across the ball, slicing it, on a curve as uncanny as if plotted by computer, into the bunker in the buckgrass to the right of the fairway. The eighteenth is a par-five that flirts with the creek coming back but should be an easy par; in his golfing prime he more than once birdied it. Yet he has to come out of the bunker sideways with a wedge and then hits his three-iron not his best club but he needs the distance – fat, trying too hard just like Ronnie on the last hole, and winds up in the creek, his yellow Pinnacle finally found under a patch of watercress. The drop consumes another stroke and he's so anxious to nail his nine-iron right to the pin he pulls it, so he lies five on the deep fringe to the left of the green. Ronnie has been poking along, hitting ugly low shots with his blacksmith swing but staying out of trouble, on in four; so Rabbit's only hope is to chip in. It's a grassy lie and he fluffs it, like the worst kind of moronic golfing coward he forgets to hit down and through, and the ball moves maybe two feet, onto the froghair short of the green in six, and Ronnie has a sure two putts for a six and a crappy, crappy win. If there's one thing Harry hates, it's losing to a bogey. He picks up his Pinnacle and with a sweeping heave throws the ball into the pine woods. Something in his chest didn't like the big motion but it is bliss of sorts to see the tormenting orb disappear in a distant swish and thud. The match ends tied.

"So, no blood," Ronnie says, having rolled his twelve-footer to within a gimme.

"Good match," Harry grunts, deciding against shaking hands. The shame of his collapse clings to him. Who says the universe isn't soaked in disgrace?

As they transfer balls and tees and sweaty gloves to the pocket of their bags, Ronnie, now that it's his turn to feel expansive, volunteers, "Didja see last night on Peter Jennings, the last thing, they showed the photographs of the rings and the moon moving away and then a composite they had made of the various shots of Neptune projected onto a ball and twirled, so the whole planet was there, like a toy? Incredible," Ronnie admits, "what they can do with computer graphics."

The image faintly sickens Harry, of Voyager taking those last shots of Neptune and then sailing off into the void, forever. How can you believe how much void there is?

The golf bags in the rack here by the pro shop throw long shafts of shadow. These days are drawing in. Harry is thirsty, and looks forward to a beer on the club patio, at one ofthe outdoor tables, under a big green-and-white umbrella, beside the swimming pool with its cannonballing kids and budding bimbos, while the red sun sinks behind the high horizon of Mt. Pemaquid. Before they head up for the beets, the two men look directly at each other, by mistake. On an unfortunate impulse, Rabbit asks, "Do you miss her?"

Ronnie gives him an angled squint. His eyelids look sore under his white eyelashes. "Do you?"

Ambushed, Rabbit can barely pretend he does. He used Thelma, and then she was used up. "Sure," he says.

Ronnie clears his ropy throat and checks that the zipper on his bag is up and then shoulders the bag to take to his car. "Sure you do," he says. "Try to sound sincere. You never gave a fuck. No. Excuse me. A fuck is exactly what you gave."

Harry hangs between impossible alternatives – to tell him how much he enjoyed going to bed with Thelma (Ronnie's smiling photo watching) or to claim that he didn't. He answers merely, "Thelma was a lovely woman."

"For me," Ronnie tells him, dropping his pugnacious manner and putting on his long widower's face, "it's like the bottom of the world has dropped out. Without Thel, I'm just going through the motions." His voice gets all froggy, disgustingly. When Harry invites him up on the patio for the beers, he says, "No, I better be getting back. Ron junior and his newest significant other are having me over for dinner." When Harry tries to set a date for the next game, he says, "Thanks, old bunny, but you're the member here. You're the one with the rich wife. You know the Flying Eagle rules – you can't keep having the same guest. Anyway, Labor Day's coming. I better start getting back on the ball, or Schuylkill'll think I'm the one who died."

He drives his slate-gray Celica home to Penn Park. Janice's Camry is not in the driveway and he thinks the phone ringing inside might be her. She's almost never here any more – off at her classes, or over in Mt. Judge babysitting, or at the lot consulting with Nelson, or in Brewer with her lawyer and those accountants Charlie told her to hire. He works the key in the lock – maddening, the scratchy way the key doesn't fit in the lock instantly, it reminds him of something from way back, something unpleasant that hollows his stomach, but what? – and shoves the door open with his shoulder and reaches the hall phone just as it's giving what he knows will be its dying ring. "Hello." He can hardly get the word out.

"Dad? What's the matter?"

"Nothing. Why?"

"You sound so winded."

"I just came in. I thought you were your mother."

"Mom's been here. I'm still at the lot, she suggested I call you. I've got this great idea."

"I've heard it. You want to open a drug treatment center."

"Maybe some day down the road. But for now I think we should work on the lot as what it is. It looks great, by the way, with all those little Toyotas in those funny colors of theirs gone. People are still coming in to buy used, they think we must be having a bargain sale, and a couple of companies are interested in the location – Hyundai for instance has this big new place over past Hayesville but the location is up behind a cloverleaf and nobody can figure out how to get to it, there's too much landscaping, they'd love to have a spot right on 111 – but what I'm calling about was this idea I got last night, I ran it past Mom, she said to talk to you."

"O.K., O.K., you're good to include me," Harry says.

"Last night I was out on the river, you know over where they have all these little river cottages with colored lights and porches and steps going down into the water?"

"I don't know, actually, I've never been there, but go on."

"Well, Pru and I were over there last night with Jason and Pam, you may have heard me mention them."

"Vaguely." All these pauses for confirmation, they are wearing Harry down. Why can't the kid just spit it out? Is his father such an ogre?

"Anyway this guy they know has one of these cottages, it was neat, the colored lights and music on the radios and up and down the river all these boats, people water skiing and all -"

"Sounds terrific. I hope. Jason and Pam don't belong to that old Lyle-Slim crowd."

"They knew 'em, but they're straight, Dad. They're even thinking of having a baby."

"If you're going to keep coke licked, you got to stay away from the old coke crowd."

"Like I said, they're real straight arrow. One of their best friends is Ron Harrison, Jr., the carpenter."

What is that supposed to mean? Does Nelson know about him and Thelma? "O.K., O.K.," Harry says.

"So we were sitting there on the porch and this fantastic thing goes by – a motorcycle on the water. They have different names for them – wet bikes, surf jets, jet skis -"

"Yeah, I've seen ' em in Florida, out on the ocean. They look unsafe."

"Dad, this was the best I ever saw – it went like a rocket. Just buzzed along. Jason said it's called a Yamaha Waverunner and it operates on a new principle, I don't know, it compresses water somehow and then shoots it out the back, and he said the only guy who sells 'em, a dinky little back-yard shop up toward Shoemakersville, can't keep 'em in stock, and anyway he's not that interested, he's a retired farmer who just does it as a hobby. So I called Yamaha's sales office in New York this morning and talked to a guy. It wouldn't be just Waverunners we'd sell, of course, we'd carry the motorcycles, and their snowmobiles and trailers, and they make generators a lot of small companies use and these three- and four-wheelers, ATVs, that farmers have now to get around their places, a lot more efficient than electric golf carts -'

"Nelson. Wait. Don't talk so fast. What about Manny and the boys over in Service?"

"It isn't Manny any more, Dad. It's Arnold."

"I meant to say Arnold. The guy who looks like a pig in pajamas mincing around. I know who Arnold is. I don't care who he is, he or she for that matter, who heads the fucking service division, they're used to cars, big things with four wheels that run on gasoline instead of compressed water."

"They can adjust. People can adjust, if you're under a certain age. Anyway, Mom and I have already trimmed Service. We let go three mechanics, and are running some ads for inspection packages. We want to pep up the used end, for a while it'll be only used just like Grandpa Springer started out, he used to tell me how he kept the Toyotas out in back out of sight, people had this distrust of Japanese products. In a way it's better already, the people without much to spend aren't scared off by the new car showroom and the yen exchange rate and all. So -?"

"So?"

"What do you think of the Yamaha idea?"

"O.K., now remember. You asked. And I appreciate your asking. I'm touched by that, I realize you don't have to ask me anything, you and your mother have the lot locked up. But in answer to your question, I think it's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Jet skis are a fad. Next year it'll be jet roller skates. The profit on a toy like a motorcycle or a snowmobile is maybe a tenth that on a solid family car – can you sell ten times as many? Don't forget, there's a Depression coming."

"Who says?"

"I say; everybody says! Everybody says Bush is just like Hoover. You're too young to remember Hoover."

"That was an inflated stock market. The market if anything is undersold now. Why would we have a Depression?"

"Because we don't have any discipline! We're drowning in debt! We don't even own our own country any more! My image of this is you were sitting there on the porch of that shack with all these colored lights stoned on something or other and this thing buzzes by and you think, `Wow! Salvation!' You're almost thirtythree and you're still into toys and fads. You came back from that detox place stuffed full of good intentions and now you're getting rocks in the brain again."

There is a pause. The old Nelson would have combatted him with some childish defensive whining. But the voice on the other end of the line at last says, with a touch of the ministerial gravity and automated calm Rabbit had noticed at dinner the other week, "What you don't realize about a consumer society, Dad, is it's all fads in a way. People don't buy things because they need 'em. You actually need very little. You buy something because it's beyond what you need, it's something that will enhance your life, not just keep it plugging along."

"It sounds to me like you did too much mystic meditation at that detox place."

"You say detox just to bug me. It was a treatment center, and then a halfway house for rehab. The detox part of it just takes a couple days. It's getting the relational poison out of your system that takes longer."

"Is that what I am to you? Relational poison?" Being snubbed by Ronnie Harrison won't stop rankling, underneath this conversation. Just because you boffed a man's dead wife, he shouldn't get bitter about it. He's known Ronnie all his life.

Again, Nelson is silent. Then: "Maybe, but not only. I keep trying to love you, but you don't really want it. You're afraid of it, it would tie you down. You've been scared all your life of being tied down."

Rabbit cannot speak; he is letting a Nitrostat dissolve under his tongue. It burns like a little pellet of red candy, and induces a floating dilated feeling that adds inches to his sensation of height. The kid will make him cry if he thinks about it. He says, "Let's cut the psychology and get down to earth. What the hell do you and your mother intend to do about that hundred fifty thousand dollars Toyota has to have by the end of the month or else it will prosecute?"

"Oh," the boy says airily, "didn't Mom tell you? That's been settled. They've been paid. We took out a loan."

"A loan? Who would trust you?"

"Brewer Trust. A second mortgage on the lot property, it's worth at least half a million. A hundred forty-five, and they consolidated it with the seventy-five for Slims five cars, which will be coming back to us pretty much as a credit on the rolling inventory we were maintaining with Mid-Atlantic Motors. As soon as they took our inventory over to Rudy's lot, don't forget, they started owing us."

"And you're somehow going to pay back Brewer Trust selling water scooters?"

"You don't have to pay a loan back, they don't want you to pay it back; they just want you to keep up the installments. Meanwhile, the value of the dollar goes down and you get to taxdeduct all the interest. We were underfinanced, in fact, before."

"Thank God you're back in the saddle. How does your mother like the Yamaha connection?"

"She likes it. She's not like you; she's open, and willing to be creative. Dad, there's something I think we should try to process sometime. Why do you resent it so, me and Mom getting out into the world and trying to learn new things?"

"I don't resent it. I respect it."

"You hate it. You act jealous and envious. I say this in love, Dad. You feel stuck, and you want everybody to be stuck with you."

He tries giving back the kid a little of his own medicine, some therapeutic silence. His Nitrostat rings that little bell in the seat of his pants, and his dilated blood vessels lift weight from the world around him, making it seem delicate and distant, like Neptune's rings. "It wasn't me," he says at last, "who ran Springer Motors into the ground. But do what you want. You're the Springer, not me."

He can hear a voice in the background, a female voice, and then that seashell sound of a telephone mouthpiece with a hand placed over it. When Nelson's voice returns, it has changed tint, as if dipped in something, by what has passed between him and Elvira. Love juices have flowed. Maybe the kid is normal after all. "Elvira has something she wants to ask you. What do you think of the Pete Rose settlement?"

"Tell her I think it was the best both sides could do. And I think he should get into the Hall of Fame anyway, on the strength of his numbers. But tell her Schmidt is my idea of a classy ballplayer. Tell her I miss her."

Hanging up, Harry pictures the showroom, the late-afternoon light on the dust on the display windows, tall to the sky now with all the banners down, and the fun going on, amazingly, without him.

The thready lawn behind their little limestone house at 14Vz Franklin Drive has the dry kiss of autumn on it: brown patches and the first few fallen leaves, cast off by the weeping cherry, his neighbor's black walnut, the sweet cherry that leans close to the house so he can watch the squirrels scrabble along its branches, and the willow above the empty cement fish pond with the bluepainted bottom and rim of real seashells. These trees still seem green and growing but their brown leaves are accumulating in the grass. Even the hemlock toward the neighboring house of thin yellow bricks, and the rhododendrons along the palisade fence separating the Angstroms' yard from the property of the big mockTudor house of clinker bricks, and the shaggy Austrian pines whose cast-off needles clutter the cement pond, though all evergreen, are tinged by summer's end, dusty and sweetly dried-out like the smell that used to come from the old cedar hope chest where Mom kept spare blankets and their good embroidered linen tablecloth for Thanksgiving and Christmas and the two old crazy quilts she had inherited from the Renningers. It was family legend that these quilts were fabulously valuable but when, in some family crunch when Harry was in his early teens, they tried to sell them, the best offer they could get was sixty dollars apiece. After much talk around the porcelain kitchen table, they took the offer, and now authentic old quilts like that bring thousands if in good condition. When he thinks about those old days and the amounts of money they considered important it's as if they were being cheated, getting by on slave wages, eating bread that cost eleven cents a loaf. They were living in a financial dungeon, back there on Jackson Road, and the fact that everybody else was in it too only makes it sadder. Just thinking about those old days lately depresses him; it makes him face life's constant depreciation. Lying awake at night, afraid he will never fall asleep or will fall asleep forever, he feels a stifling uselessness in things, a kind of atomic decay whereby the precious glowing present turns, with each tick of the clock, into the leaden slag of history.

The forsythia and beauty bush both have been getting out of hand during this wet summer and Harry, on this cloudy cool Thursday before the Labor Day weekend, has been trying to prune them back into shape for the winter. With the forsythia, you take out the oldest stem from the base, making the bush younger and thinner and more girlish suddenly, and then cut back the most flagrant skyward shoots and the down-drooping branches on their way to reroot in among the day lilies. It doesn't do to be tenderhearted; the harder you cut back now, the more crammed with glad yellow blossoms the stubby branches become in the spring. The beauty bush poses a tougher challenge, an even tighter tangle. Any attempt to follow the tallest stems down to their origin gets lost in the net of interwoven branchlets, and the bottom thicket of small trunks is so dense as to repel a clipper or pruning saw; there is not a knife's-width of space. The bush in this season of neglect has grown so tall he really should go to the garage for the aluminum stepladder. But Rabbit is reluctant to face the garage's grimy tumble of cast-aside tires and stiff hoses and broken flowerpots and rusted tools inherited from the previous owners, who failed to clean out the garage the same way they left a stack of Playboys in an upstairs closet. In ten years he and Janice have added their own stuff to the garage, so that gradually there wasn't space for one car let alone two in it; it has become a cave of deferred decisions and sentimentally cherished junk so packed that if he tries to extract the ladder several old paint cans and a lawn sprinkler bereft of its washers will come clattering down. So he stretches and reaches into the beauty bush until his chest begins to ache, with the sensation of an inflexible patch stitched to the inner side of his skin. His nitroglycerin pills got left in the sweat-rimmed pocket of his plaid golf slacks last night when he went to bed early, alone, having fed himself a beer and some Corn Chips after that match with Ronnie ended so sourly.

To placate the pain, he switches to weeding the day lilies and the violet hosta. Wherever a gap pennits light to activate the sandy soil, chickweed and crabgrass grow, and purslane with its hollow red stems covers the earth in busy round-leaved zigzags. Weeds too have their styles, their own personalities that talk back to the gardener in the daze of the task. Chickweed is a good weed, soft on the hands unlike thistles and burdock, and pulls easily; it knows when the jig is up and comes willingly, where wild cucumber keeps breaking off at one of its many joints, and grass and red sorrel and poison ivy spread underground, like creeping diseases that cannot be cured. Weeds don't know they're weeds. Safe next to the trunk of the weeping cherry a stalk of blue lettuce has grown eight feet tall, taller than he. Those days he spent ages ago being Mrs. Smith's gardener among her rhododendrons, the one time he ever felt rooted in a job. Fine strong young man, she had called him at the end, gripping him with her claws.

A block and a half away, the traffic on Penn Boulevard murmurs and hisses, its purr marred by the occasional sudden heave and grind of a great truck shifting gears, or by an angry horn, or the wop-wop-wopping bleat of an ambulance rushing some poor devil to the hospital. You see them now and then, driving down a side street, these scenes: some withered old lady being carried in a stretcher down her porch stairs in a slow-motion sled ride, her hair unpinned, her mouth without its dentures, her eyes staring skyward as if to disown her body; or some red-faced goner being loaded into the double metal doors while his abandoned mate in her bathrobe snivels on the curb and the paramedics close around his body like white vultures feeding. Rabbit has noticed a certain frozen peacefulness in such terminal street tableaux. A certain dignity in the doomed one, his or her moment come round at last; a finality that isolates the ensemble like a spotlit créche. You would think people would take it worse than they do. They don't scream, they don't accuse God. We curl into ourselves, he supposes. We become numb bundles of used-up nerves. Earthworms on the hook.

From far across the river, a siren wails in the heart of Brewer. Above, in a sky gathering its fishscales for a rainy tomorrow, a small airplane rasps as it coasts into the airport beyond the old fairgrounds. What Harry instantly loved about this house was its hiddenness: not so far from all this traffic, it is yet not easy to find, on its macadamized dead end, tucked with its fractional number among the more conspicuous homes of the Penn Park rich. He always resented these snobs and now is safe among them. Pulling into his dead-end driveway, working out back in his garden, watching TV in his den with its wavery lozenge-paned windows, Rabbit feels safe as in a burrow, where the hungry forces at loose in the world would never think to find him.

Janice pulls in in the pearl-gray Camry wagon. She is fresh from the afternoon class at the Penn State extension on Pine Street: "Real Estate Mathematics -Fundamentals and Applications." In a student outfit of sandals and wheat-colored sundress, with a looseknit white cardigan thrown over her shoulders, her forehead free of those Mamie Eisenhower bangs, she looks snappy, and brushed glossy, and younger than her age. Everything she wears these days has shoulders; even her cardigan has shoulders. She walks to him over what seems a great distance in the little quarter-acre yard, their property expanded by what has become a mutual strangeness. Unusually, she presents her face to be kissed. Her nose feels cold, like a healthy puppy's. "How was class?" he dutifully asks.

"Poor Mr. Lister seems so sad and preoccupied lately," she says. "His beard has come in all full of gray. We think his wife is leaving. him. She came to class once and acted very snooty, we all thought."

"You all are getting to be a mean crowd. Aren't these classes about over? Labor Day's coming."

"Poor Harry, do you feel I've deserted you this summer? What are you going to do with all this mess you've pruned away? The beauty bush looks absolutely ravaged."

He admits, "I was getting tired and making bad decisions. That's why I stopped."

"Good thing," she says. "There wouldn't have been anything left but stumps. We'd have to call it the ugliness bush."

"Listen, you, I don't see you out here helping. Ever."

"The outdoors is your responsibility, the indoors is mine – isn't that how we do it?"

"I don't know how we do anything any more, you're never here. In answer to your question, I'd planned to stack what I cut over behind the fish pond to dry out and then burn it next spring when we're back from Florida."

"You're planning ahead right into 1990; I'm impressed. That year is still very unreal to me. Won't the yard look ugly all winter then, though?"

"It won't look ugly, it'll look natural, and we won't be here to see it anyway."

Her tongue touches the upper lip of her mouth, which has opened in thought. But she says nothing, just "I guess we won't, if we do things as normal."

"If? "

She doesn't seem to hear, gazing at the fence-high heap of pruned branches.

He says, "If you're so in charge of the indoors, what are we having for dinner?"

"Damn," she says. "I meant to stop by at the farm stand there at the end of the bridge and pick up some sweet corn, but then I had so much else on my mind I sailed right by. I thought we'd have the corn with what's left of Tuesday's meatloaf and those dinner rolls in the breadbox before they get moldy. There was a wonderful tip in the Standard about how to freshen stale bread in the microwave, I forget what exactly, something to do with water. There must be a frozen veg in the freezer part we can have instead of sweet corn."

"Or else we could sprinkle salt and sugar on ice cubes," he says. "One thing I know's in the fridge is ice cubes."

"Harry, it's been on my mind to go shopping, but the IGA is so far out of the way and the prices at the Turkey Hill are ridiculous, and the convenience store over on Penn Boulevard has those surly kids behind the counter who I think punch extra figures into the cash register."

"You're a shrewd shopper, all right," Harry tells her. The mackerel sky is forming a solid gray shelf in the southwest; they move together toward the house, away from the shadow of coming dark.

Janice says, "So." Saying "so" is something she's picked up recently, from her fellow-students or her teachers, as the word for beginning to strike a deal. "You haven't asked me how I did on my last quiz. We got them back."

"How did you do?"

"Beautifully, really. Mr. Lister gave me a B minus but said it would have been a B plus if I could organize my thoughts better and clean up my spelling. I know it's `i' before `e' sometimes and the other way around some other times, but when?"

He loves her when she talks to him like this, as if he has all the answers. He leans the long-handled clippers in the garage against the wall behind a dented metal trash can and hangs the pruning saw on its nail. Shadowy in her sundress, she moves ahead of him up the back stairs and the kitchen light comes on. Inside the kitchen, she rummages, with that baffled frowning expression of hers, biting her tongue tip, in the refrigerator for edible fragments. He goes and touches her waist in the wheat-colored dress, lightly cups her buttocks as she bends over looking. Tenderly, he complains, "You didn't come home until late last night."

"You were asleep, poor thing. I didn't want to risk waking you so I slept in the guest room."

"Yeah, I get so groggy, suddenly. I keep wanting to finish that book on the American Revolution but it knocks me out every time."

"I shouldn't have given it to you for Christmas. I thought you'd enjoy it."

"I did. I do. Yesterday was a hard day. First Ronnie tied me on the last hole when I had the bastard all but beaten, and then he snubbed my invitation to play again. And then Nelson called all jazzed up with some crazy scheme about water scooters and Yamaha."

"I'm sure Ronnie has his reasons," Janice says. "I'm surprised he played with you at all. How do you feel about Brussels sprouts?"

"I don't mind them."

"To me, they always taste spoiled; but they're all we have. I promise to get to the IGA tomorrow and stock up for the long weekend."

"We going to have Nelson and his tribe over?"

"I thought we might all meet at the club. We've hardly used it this summer."

"He sounded hyper on the phone – do you think he's back on the stuff already?"

"Harry, Nelson is very straight now. That place really has given him religion. But I agree, Yamaha isn't the answer. We must raise some capital and put ourselves on a solvent basis before we start courting another franchise. I've been talking to some of the other women getting their licenses -"

"You discuss our personal financial problems?"

"Not ours as such, just as a case study. It's all purely hypothetical. In real-estate class we always have a lot of case studies. And they all thought it was grotesque to be carrying a mortgage amounting to over twenty-five hundred a month on the lot when we have so much other property."

Rabbit doesn't like the trend here. He points out, "But this place is already mortgaged. What do we pay? Seven hundred a month."

"I know that, silly. Don't forget, this is my business now." She has stripped the Brussels sprouts of their waxpaper box and put them in the plastic safe dish and put it in the microwave and punches out the time – three blips, a peep, and then a rising hum. "We bought this place ten years ago," she tells him, "for seventyeight thousand and put fifteen down and have about ten or fifteen more in equity by now, it doesn't accumulate very fast in the first half of payback, there's a geometric curve they tell you about, so let's say there's still fifty outstanding; in any case, housing prices have gone way up in this area since 1980, it's been flattening out but hasn't started to go down yet, though it might this winter, you'd begin by asking two twenty, two thirty let's say, with the Penn Park location, and the seclusion, the fact that it has real limestone walls and not just facing, it has what they call historic value; we certainly wouldn't settle for less than two hundred, which minus the fifty would give us one fifty, which would wipe out two-thirds of what we owe Brewer Trust!"

Rabbit has rarely heard this long an utterance from Janice, and it takes him a few seconds to understand what she has been saying. "You'd sell this place?"

"Well, Harry, it is very extravagant to keep it just for the summer essentially, especially when there's all that extra room over at Mother's."

"I love this place," he tells her. "It's the only place I've ever lived where I felt at home, at least since Jackson Road. This place has class. It's us."

"Honey, I've loved it too, but we must be practical, that's what you've always been telling me. We don't need to own four properties, plus the lot."

"Why not sell the condo, then?"

"I thought of that, but we'd be lucky to get out of it what we paid for it. In Florida, places are like cars – people like them brand new. The new malls and everything are to the east."

"What about the Poconos place?"

"There's not enough money there either. It's an unheated shack. We need two hundred thousand, honey."

"We didn't roll up that debt to Toyota – Nelson did it, Nelson and his faggy boyfriends."

"Well, you can say that, but he can't pay it back, and he was acting as part of the company."

"What about the lot? Why can't you sell the lot? That much frontage on Route 111 is worth a fortune; it's the real downtown, now that people are scared to go into the old downtown because of the spics."

A look of pain crosses Janice's face, rippling her exposed forehead; for once, he realizes, he is thinking slower than she is. "Never," she says curtly. "The lot is our number-one asset. We need it as a base for Nelson's future, Nelson's and your grandchildren's. That's what Daddy would want. I remember when he bought it after the war, it had been a country gas station, with a cornfield next to it, that had closed during the war when there were no cars, and he took Mother and me down to look at it, and I found this dump out back, out in that brambly part you call Paraguay, all these old auto parts and green and brown soda bottles that I thought were so valuable, it was like I had discovered buried treasure I thought, and I got my school dress all dirty so that Mother would have been mad if Daddy hadn't laughed and told her it looked like I had a taste for the car business. Springer Motors won't sell out as long as I'm alive and well, Harry. Anyway," she goes on, trying to strike a lighter note, "I don't know anything about industrial real estate. The beauty of selling this place is I can do it myself and get the salesperson's half of the broker's commission. I can't believe we can't get two for it; half of six per cent of two hundred thousand is six thousand dollars -all mine!"

He is still playing catch-up. "You'd sell it – I mean, you personally?"

"Of course, you big lunk, for a real-estate broker. It would be my entrée, as they call it. How could Pearson and Schrack, for instance, or Sunflower Realty, not take me on as a rep if I could bring in a listing like that right off the bat?"

"Wait a minute. We'd live in Florida most of the time -"

"Some of the time, honey. I don't know how much I could get away at first, I need to establish myself. Isn't Florida, honestly, a little boring? So flat, and everybody we know so old."

"And the rest of the time we'd live in Ma's old house? Where would Nelson and Pru go?"

"They'd be there, obviously. Harry, you seem a little slow. Have you been taking too many pills? Just the way we and Nelson used to live with Mother and Daddy. That wasn't so bad, was it? In fact, it was nice. Nelson and Pru would have built-in babysitters, and I wouldn't have to do all this housekeeping by myself."

"What housekeeping?"

"You don't notice it, men never do, but there's an awful lot of simple drudgery to keeping two separate establishments going. You know how you always worry about one place being robbed while we're in the other. This way, we'd have one room at Mother's, I mean Nelson's – I'm sure they'd give us our old room back – and we'd never have to worry!"

Those bands of constriction, with their edges pricked out in pain, have materialized across Harry's chest. His words come out with difficulty. "How do Nelson and Pru feel about us moving in?"

"I haven't asked yet. I thought I might this evening, after I ran it by you. I really don't see how they can say no; it's my house, legally. So: what do you think?" Her eyes, which he is used to as murky and careful, often blurred by sherry or Campari, shine at the thought of her first sale.

He isn't sure. There was a time, when he was younger, when the thought of any change, even a disaster, gladdened his heart with the possibility of a shake-up, of his world made new. But at present he is aware mostly of a fluttering, binding physical resistance within him to the idea of being uprooted. "I hate it, offhand," he tells her. "I don't want to go back to living as somebody's tenant. We did that for ten years and finally got out of it. People don't live all bunched up, all the generations, any more."

"But they do, honey – that's one of the trends in living, now that homes have become so expensive and the world so crowded."

"Suppose they have more children."

"They won't."

"How do you know?"

"I just do. Pru and I have discussed it."

"Does Pru ever feel crowded, I wonder, by her mother-in-law?"

"I wouldn't know why. We both want the same thing – a happy and healthy Nelson."

Rabbit shrugs. Let her stew in her own juice, the cocky little mutt. Going off to school and thinking she's learned everybody's business. "You go over after supper and see how they like your crazy plan. I'm dead set against it, if my vote counts. Sell off the lot and tell the kid to get an honest job, is my advice."

Janice stops watching the microwave tick down its numbers and comes close to him, unexpectedly, touching his face again with that ghostly searching gesture, tucking her body against his to remind him sexually of her smallness, her smallness fitting his bigness, when they first met and still now. He smells her brushedback salt-and-pepper hair and sees the blood-tinged whites of her dark eyes. "Of course your vote counts, it counts more than anybody's, honey." When did Janice start calling him honey? When they moved to Florida and got in with those Southerners and Jews. The Jewish couples down there had this at-rest quality, matched like pairs of old shoes, the men accepting their life as the only one they were going to get, and pleased enough. It must be a great religion, Rabbit thinks, once you get past the circumcision.

He and Janice let the house issue rest as a silent sore spot between them while they eat. He helps her clear and they add their plates to those already stacked in the dishwasher, waiting to be run through. With just the two of them, and Janice out of the house so much, it takes days for a sufficient load to build up on the racks. She telephones Nelson to see if they're going to be in and puts her white cardigan back on and gets back into the Camry and drives off to Mt. Judge. Wonder Woman. Rabbit catches the tail end of Jennings, a bunch of twitchy old black-and-white clips about World War II beginning with the invasion of Poland fifty years ago tomorrow, tanks versus cavalry, Hitler shrieking, Chamberlain looking worried; then he goes out into the dusk and the mosquitoes to stack the already wilting brush more neatly in the corner behind the cement pond with its fading blue bottom and widening crack. He gets back into the house in time for the last ten minutes of Wheel of Fortune. That Vanna! Can she strut! Can she clap her hands when the wheel turns! Can she turn those big letters around! She makes you proud to be a two-legged mammal.

By the end of the Cosby summer rerun, one of those with too much Theo in it, Harry is feeling sleepy, depressed by the idea of Janice selling the house but soothed by the thought that she'll never do it. She's too scatterbrained, she and the kid will just drift along deeper and deeper into debt like the rest of the world; the bank will play ball as long as the lot has value. The Phillies are out in San Diego and in sixth place anyway. He turns the TV sound way down and by the comforting shudder of the silenced imagery stretches out his feet on the Turkish hassock they brought from Ma Springer's house when they moved and slumps down deeper into the silvery-pink wing chair he and Janice bought at Schaechner's ten years ago. His shoulders ache from all that pruning. He thinks of his history book but it's upstairs by the bed. There is a soft ticking at the lozenge-pane windows: rain, as on that evening at the beginning of summer, when he'd just come out of the hospital, the narrow room with the headless sewing dummy, another world, a dream world. The phone wakes him when it rings. He looks at the thermostat clock as he goes to the hall phone. 9:20. Janice has been over there a long time. He hopes it isn't one of those coke dealers that still now and then call, about money they are owed or a new shipment of fresh "material" that has come in. You wonder how these dealers get so rich, they seem so disorganized and hit-or-miss. He was having a dream in the wing chair, some intense struggle already fading and unintelligible, with an unseen antagonist, but in a vivid domed space, like an old-time railroad terminal only the ceiling was lower and paler, a chapel of some kind, a tight space that clings to his mind, making his hand look ancient and strange – the back swollen and bumpy, the fingers withered – as it reaches for the receiver on the wall.

"Harry." He has never heard Janice's voice sound like this, so stony, so dead.

"Hi. Where are you? I was getting afraid you'd had an accident."

"Harry, I -" Something grabs her throat and will not let her speak.

"Yeah?"

Now she is speaking through tears, staggering over gulps, suppressed sobs, lumps in her throat. "I described my idea to Nelson and Pru, and we all agreed we shouldn't rush into it, we should discuss it thoroughly, he seemed more receptive than she, maybe because he understands the financial problems -"

"Yeah, yeah. Hey, it doesn't sound so bad so far. She's used to considering the house as hers, no woman likes to share a kitchen."

"After she'd put the children to bed, she came down with this look on her face and said there was something then that Nelson and I should know, if we were all going to live together."

"Yeah?" His own voice is still casual but he is no longer sleepy; he can see what is coming like a tiny dot in the distance that becomes a rocket ship in a space movie.

Janice's voice firms up, goes dead and level and lower, as if others might be listening outside the door. She would be in their old bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bed, Judy asleep beyond one wall and Roy behind the wall opposite. "She said you and she slept together that night you stayed here your first night out of the hospital."

The spaceship is upon him, with all its rivets and blinking lights. "She said that?"

"Yes she did. She said she doesn't know how it happened, except there'd always been this little attraction between you two and that night everything seemed so desperate."

A little attraction. He supposes that was fair, though tough. It had felt like more than that from his side. It had felt like he was seeing himself reflected, mirrored in a rangy young long-haired left-handed woman.

"Well? Is she telling the truth?"

"Well, honey, what can I say, I guess in a way -"

A big sob: he can picture Janice's face exactly, twisted and helpless and ugly, old age collapsing in upon her.

"- but at the time," Rabbit goes on, "it seemed sort of natural, and we haven't done anything since, not even said a word. We've been pretending it didn't happen."

"Oh, Harry. How could you? Your own daughter-in-law. Nelson's wife."

He feels she is beginning to work from a script, saying standard things, and into the vault of his shocked and shamed consciousness there is admitted a whiff of boredom.

"This is the worst thing you've ever done, ever, ever," Janice tells him. "The absolute worst. That time you ran away, and then Peggy, my best friend, and that poor hippie girl, and Thelma don't think for one moment I didn't know about Thelma – but now you've done something truly unforgivable."

"Really?" The word comes out with an unintended hopeful lilt.

"I will never forgive you. Never," Janice says, returning to a dead-level tone.

"Don't say that," he begs. "It was just a crazy moment that didn't hurt anybody. Whajou put me and her in the same house at night for? Whajou think I was, dead already?"

"I had to go to class, there was a quiz, I wouldn't have gone ordinarily, I felt so guilty. That's a laugh. I felt guilty. I see now why they have gun laws. If I had a gun, I'd shoot you. I'd shoot you both."

"What else did Pru say?" Answering, he figures, will bring her down a bit from this height of murderous rage.

Janice answers, "She didn't say much of anything. Just the flat facts and then folded her hands in her lap and kept giving me and Nelson that defiant stare of hers. She didn't seem repentant, just tough, and obviously not wanting me to come live in the house. That's why she told."

He feels himself being drawn into alignment with Janice, against the others, with a couple's shared vision, squinting this way at Pru. He feels relieved, beginning already to be forgiven, and faintly disappointed.

"She is tough," he agrees, soothingly. "Pru. Whaddeya expect, from an Akron steamfitter's daughter?" He decides against telling Janice, now at least, how in making their love Pru had come twice, and he had faintly felt used, expertly.

His reprieve is only just beginning. It will take weeks and months and years of whittling at it. With her new business sense Janice won't give anything away cheap. "We want you over here, Harry," she says.

"Me? Why? It's late," he says. "I'm bushed from all those bushes."

"Don't think you're out of this and can be cute. This is a hideous thing. None of us will ever be the same."

"We never are," he dares say.

"Think of how Nelson feels."

This hurts. He hadn't wanted to think about it.

She tells him, "Nelson is being very calm and using all that good psychological work they did at the treatment center. He says this will need a lot of processing and we must begin right now. If we don't start right in we'll all harden in our positions."

Rabbit tries to conspire again, to elicit another wifely description. "Yeah -how did the kid take it?"

But she only says, "I think he's in shock. He himself said he hasn't begun to get in touch with his real feelings."

Harry says, "He can't be on too high a horse after all the stunts he's been pulling all these years. Coke whores all over Brewer, and if you ask me that Elvira over at the lot is more than just a token skirt. When she's around he sounds like he's been given a shot of joy juice."

But Janice doesn't relent. "You have hurt Nelson incredibly much," she says. "Anything he does from now on you can't blame him. I mean, Harry, what you've done is the kind of perverted thing that makes the newspapers. It was monstrous."

"Honey -"

"Quit it with the 'honey."'

"What's this `perverted'? We aren't at all blood-related. It was just like a normal one-night stand. She was hard-up and I was at death's door. It was her way of playing nurse."

More sobbing, he never knows what will trigger it. "Harry, you can't make jokes."

"Those weren't jokes." But he feels chastised, dry-mouthed, spanked.

"You get right over here and help undo some of the damage you've done for once in your life." And she hangs up, having sounded comically like her mother in the juicy way she pronounced "for once."

A life knows few revelations; these must be followed when they come. Rabbit sees clearly what to do. His acts take on a decisive haste. He goes upstairs and packs. The brown canvas suit bag. The big yellow rigid Tourister with the dent in one corner where an airline handler slung it. Jockey shorts, T-shirts, socks, polo shirts in their pastel tints, dress shirts in their plastic envelopes, golf slacks, Bermuda shorts. A few ties though he has never liked ties. All his clothes are summer clothes these days; the wool suits and sweaters wait in mothproof bags for fall days, October into November, that will not come this year, for him. He takes four lightweight sports coats and two suits, one a putty-colored and the other the shiny gray like armor. In case there's a wedding or a funeral. A raincoat, a couple of sweaters. A pair of black laced shoes tucks into two pockets of his folding suit bag and blue-and-white Nikes into the sides of the suitcase. He should start jogging again. His toothbrush and shaving stuff. His pills, buckets of them. What else? Oh yes. He grabs The First Salute from his bedside table and tucks it in, he'll finish it if it kills him. He leaves a light burning in the upstairs hall to discourage burglars, and the carriage lamp beside the front door numbered 14 1/2. He loads the car in two trips, feeling the weight of the suitcases in his chest. He looks around the bare hall. He goes into the den, his feet silent on the Antron wall-to-wall carpeting, and looks out the lozenge panes at the glowing night-time silhouette of the weeping cherry. He plumps the pillow and straightens the arm guards on the wing chair he fell asleep in, not long ago but on the far side of a gulf: The he who fell asleep was somebody else, a pathetic somebody. At the front door again, he feels a night breeze on his face, hears the muffled rush of traffic over on Penn Boulevard. He sets the latch and softly slams the door. Janice has her key. He thinks of her over there in the Springers' big stucco house that always reminded him of an abandoned enormous ice-cream stand. Forgive me.

Rabbit gets into the Celica. Take a Ride in the Great Indoors: one of the new slogans they'd been trying to push. You can have too many slogans, they begin to cancel out. The engine starts up; reverse gear carries him smoothly backwards. 1 Love When You Set Me Free, Toyota. The digital clock says 10:07. Traffic on Penn Boulevard is starting to thin, the diners and gas stations are beginning to darken. He turns right at the blinking red light and then right again at the Brewer bypass along the Running Horse River. The road lifts above the trees at a point near the elephant-gray gas tanks and the bypassed old city shows a certain grandeur. Its twentystory courthouse built in the beginning of the Depression is still the tallest building, the concrete eagles with flared wings at each corner lit by spotlights, and the sweeping shadow of Mt. Judge, crowned by the star-spatter of the Pinnacle Hotel, hangs behind everything like an unmoving tidal wave. The streetlamps show Brewer's brick tint like matches cupped in ruddy hands. Then, quite quickly, the city and all it holds are snatched from view. Groves of weed trees half-hide the empty factories along the river, and one might be anywhere in the United States on a four-lane divided highway.

He and Janice have done this Southward drive so often he knows the options: he can get off at 222 and proceed directly but pokily toward Lancaster through a string of stoplight-ridden Brewer suburbs, or he can stay on 422 a few miles to 176 and head directly south and then cut west to Lancaster and York. The first time he tried this trip, thirty years ago last spring come to think of it, he made the mistake of heading south too soon, toward Wilmington and a vision ofbarefoot du Pont women. But the East slants west, and the trick is to bear west until 83, which didn't exist in those days, and then drive south right into the maw of that two-headed monster, Baltimore-Washington. Monstrous, she said. Well, in a way, you could say, being alive is monstrous. Those crazy molecules. All by themselves? Never.

He turns on the radio, searching among the jabber of rock music and talk shows for the sweet old tunes, the tunes he grew up on. It used to be easier to search with the old dial you twisted, instead of these jumpy digitized scan buttons: you could feel your way. The scan comes suddenly upon the silky voices of Dinah Shore and Buddy Clark entwined in the duet of "Baby, It's Cold Outside." Thrilling, it turns his spine to ice water, when, after all that melodious banter it's hard to understand every word of, they halt, and harmonize on the chorus line. Coooold, out, side. Then this same station of oldies, fading under the underpasses, crackling when the road curves too close to power lines, offers up a hit he's totally forgotten, how could he have? – the high-school dances, the dolled-up couples shuffling to the languid waltz beat, the paper streamers drooping from the basketball nets, the rusty heater warmth of the dash-lit interior of Pop's Plymouth, the living warm furtive scent, like the flavor of a food so strong you must choke it down at first, rising from between Mary Ann's thighs. Vaya con Dios, my darling. The damp triangle of underpants, the garter belts girls wore then. The dewy smooth freshness of their bodies, all of them, sweatily wheeling beneath the crépe paper, the colored lights. Vaya con Dios, my love. Oh my. It hurts. The emotion packed into these phrases buried in some d j.'s dusty racks of 78s like the cotton wadding in bullets, like those seeds that come to life after a thousand years in some pyramid. Though the stars recycle themselves and remake all the heavy atoms Creation needs, Harry will never be that person again, that boy with that girl, his fingertips grazing the soft insides of her thighs, a few atoms rubbing off; a few molecules.

Then, "Mule Train," by Frankie Laine, not one of the great Laines but great enough, and "It's Magic," by Doris Day. Those pauses back then: It's ma- gic. They knew how to hurt you, back then when there were two eight-team baseball leagues and you could remember all the players. People then were not exactly softer, they were harder in fact, but they were easier to hurt, though in fewer places.

He has to leave 176 for 23 through Amish country, it's the one really local stretch of road, but there shouldn't be any buggies out this late to slow him down. Rabbit wants to see once more a place in Morgantown, a hardware store with two pumps outside, where a thickset farmer in two shirts and hairy nostrils had advised him to know where he was going before he went there. Well, now he does. He has learned the road and figured out the destination. But what had been a country hardware store was now a slick little realestate office. Where the gas pumps had been, fresh black asphalt showed under the moonlight the stark yellow stripes of diagonal parking spaces.

No, it isn't moonlight, he sees; it is the sulfurous illumination that afflicts busy paved places all night. Though the hour is near eleven, a traffic of giant trucks heaves and snorts and groans through the sleepy stone town; the realtor's big window is full of Polaroid snapshots of property for sale, and Route 23, once a narrow road on the ridge between two farm valleys as dark at night as manure, now blazes with the signs that are everywhere. PIZZA HUT. BURGER KING. Rent a Movie. Turkey Hill MINIt MARKET. Quilt World. Shady Maple SMORGASBORD. Village Herb Shop. Country Knives. Real estate makes him think of Janice and his heart dips at the picture of her waiting with Nelson and Pru for him to show up over at the Springers' and panicking by now, probably imagining he's had a car accident, and coming back with her key to the deserted house, all fluttery and hotbreathed the way she gets. Maybe he should have left a note like she did him that time. Harry dear-1 must go off a few days to think. But she said never forgive him, shoot you both, she upped the stakes, let her stew in her own juice, thinks she's so smart suddenly, going back to school. Nelson the same way. Damned if they're going to get him sitting in on some family-therapy session run by his own son whose big redheaded wife he's boffed. Only really good thing he's done all year, as he looks back on it. Damned if he'll face the kid, give him the satisfaction, all white in the gills from this new grievance. Rabbit doesn't want to get counselled.

The eleven-o'clock news comes on the radio. Jim Bakker, on trial in Charlotte, North Carolina, on twenty-four counts of fraud in connection with his scandal-ridden PTL television ministry, collapsed today in court and is being held for up to sixty days for psychiatric evaluation at the Federal Correctional Institute. Dr. Basil Jackson, a psychiatrist who has been treating Bakker for nine months, said that the once-charismatic evangelist has been hallucinating: leaving the courtroom Wednesday after former PTL executive Steve Nelson collapsed on the witness stand, Bakker saw the people outside as animals intent upon attacking and injuring him. Bakker's wife, Tammy, said from her luxurious home in Orlando, Florida, that Bakker over the phone had seemed to be experiencing a terrible emotional trauma and that she prayed with him and they agreed that they would trust in the Lord. In Los Angeles, Jessica Hahn, the former PTL secretary whose sexual encounter with Bakker in 1980 led to his downfall, told reporters, quote, I'm not a doctor but I do know about Jim Bakker. I believe Jim Bakker is a master manipulator. I think this is a sympathy stunt just like it is every time Tammy gets on TV and starts crying and saying how abused they are, end quote. In Washington, the Energy Department is searching for mysteriously missing amounts of tritium, the heavy-hydrogen isotope necessary to the making of hydrogen bombs. Also in Washington, Science magazine reports that the new bomb detector, called a TNA for thermal neutron analysis, installed today at JFK Airport in New York City, is set to detect two point five pounds of plastic explosives and would not have detected the bomb, thought to contain only one pound of Semtex explosive, which brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. In Toronto, movie superstar Marlon Brando told reporters that he has made his last movie. "It's horrible," he said of the motion picture, entitled The Freshman. "It's going to be a flop, but after this, I'm retiring. You can't imagine how happy I am." In Bonn, West Germany, Chancellor Helmut Kohl telephoned the new Polish Prime Minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, in a plea for better relations between their two countries. It was fifty years ago tomorrow, indeed almost right to this minute when allowances are made for time zones, that Germany under Adolf Hitler invaded Poland, precipitating World War II, in which an estimated fifty million persons were to perish. Like, wow! In sports, the Phillies are losing in San Diego and Pittsburgh is idle. As to the weather, it could be better, and it could be worse. Mezzo, mezzo. I didn't say messy, but look out for thundershowers, you Lancaster County night owls. Oh yes, Brando also called his new and terminal movie a "stinker." No sweat, for a fellow who began his career in a torn undershirt.

Rabbit smiles in the whispering, onrushing cave of the car; this guy must think nobody is listening, gagging it up like this. Lonely in those radio studios, surrounded by paper coffee cups and perforated acoustic tiles. Hard to know the effect you're making. Hard to believe God is always listening, never gets bored. The dashboard lights of the Celica glow beneath his line of vision like the lights of a city about to be bombed.

The superhighway crosses the Susquehanna and at York catches 83. As Harry drives south, the station fades behind him, toward the end of Louis Prima's "Just a Gigolo," that fantastic chorus where the chorus keeps chanting "Just a gigolo" in a kind of affectionate mockery of that wheezy wonderful voice: it makes your scalp prickle with joy. Rabbit fumbles with the scan button but can't find another oldies station, just talk shows, drunks calling in, the host sounding punchy himself, his mouth running on automatic pilot, abortion, nuclear waste, unemployment among young black males, CIA complicity in the AIDS epidemic, Boesky, Milken, Bush and North, Nonega, you can't tell me thatRabbit switches the radio off, hating the sound of the human voice. Vermin. We are noisy vermin, crowding even the air. Better the murmur of the tires, the green road signs looming in the lights and parabolically enlarging and then whisked out of sight like magicians' handkerchieves. It's getting close to midnight, but before he stops he wants to be out of the state. Even that botched time ages ago he got as far as West Virginia. To get out of Pennsylvania you have to climb a nameless mountain, beyond Hungerford. Signs and lights diminish. The lonely highway climbs. High lakes gleam under what is, now, in a gap between clouds, true moonlight. He descends into Maryland. There is a different feeling: groomed center strips, advertisements for Park and Ride for commuters. Civilization. Out of the sticks. His eyelids feel sandy, his heart fluttery and sated. He pulls off 83 into a Best Western well north of Baltimore, pleased to think that nobody in the world, nobody but the stocky indifferent Asian-American desk clerk, knows his location. Where oh where is the missing tritium?

He likes motel rooms – the long clammy slot of hired space, the two double beds, the television set with its invitation to buy an R-rated movie, the shag carpet, the framed prints of big birds, the sanitized towels, the hush of anonymity, the closeted echo of old sex. He sleeps well, as if he has slipped off his body with its troubles and left it lying on the other double bed. In his dream he is back at the lot, with a young woman who seems to be in charge. She wears a white cap and dangly earrings but when he leans close and tries to explain himself to her, to convey his indispensable usefulness to the enterprise, contrary to what she may have heard from Janice, she makes a wry mouth and her face melts under his eyes in a kind of visual scream.

For breakfast, he succumbs to the temptation and has two fried eggs, though the yolks are terrible for your arteries, with bacon on the side. Rabbit likes the very American moment of packing up his car in sleepy unspeaking companionship with the other motel guests, elderly couples, cranky families, as they drift from the breakfast room across the parking lot with its long milky morning shadows. On the road again, with the radio again. The same news as the night before, amplified by the final baseball scores (Phils lost, five to one) and the news from Asia, where it is already afternoon for the busy Japanese currency speculators, the restive Chinese students, the doll-like Filipino hookers, the unhappily victorious Vietnamese, the up-and-coming although riotous Koreans, the tottering Burmese socialists, the warring Cambodian factions including the mindless Khmer Rouge minions of the most atrocious national leader since Hitler and Stalin, the infamous Pol Pot. Like, wow! Wake up, songbirds! The d.j., not last night's but just as crazy and alone with himself, plays some rockabilly song Rabbit likes, about getting down, "make a little love, get down tonight." It occurs to Harry he didn't even jerk off last night, though motel rooms usually excite him. Boy, is he showing his age.

As Baltimore nears, the condominiums multiply, thicken, entire hills and valleys loaded with them, pastel gingerbread staircases containing invisible people. 83 ends seamlessly at 695 and with all the commuters in their neckties he drones around the Beltway, jostling for his space in the world as if he still deserves it. Then he takes up 95, which will be his home all the way to Florida. There are two ways around Washington, he and Janice have tried them both, the boringly expert travellers down in the condo like the Silbersteins say 495 passing to the north and west is actually quicker, but he likes the little glimpse of the monuments you get by staying east on 95 and crossing the Potomac on a broad bridge into Alexandria. The frozen far heart, ice-cream white, of the grand old republic.

After all that megalopolis, Virginia feels bucolically vacant. The fields look bigger than those in Pennsylvania, the hills gentler and more open, with meadows and horses, a gracious mist in the air, once in a while a pillared manse on a pale-green rise like something embroidered on a sampler by a slaveowner's spinster daughter. A military tinge: Fort Belvoir Engineer Proving Ground, Quantico Marine Corps Base. Harry thinks of his Army time and it comes back as a lyric tan, a translucent shimmer of aligned faceless men, the curious peace of having no decisions to make, of being told entirely what to do. War is a relief in many ways. Without the Cold War, what's the point of being an American? Still, we held them off. We creamed those oafs. Hitler, Stalin, and now Gorby. History will remember that, if not thank us. There is very little thanks in history. Dog eat dog. It becomes hard now to find stations on the radio that are not country music or religion. "Pray for difficult marriages," one preacher says, his grainy molasses-brown voice digging so deep into himself you can picture his shut eyes, the sweat on his temples, "pray for Christian husbands under stress, for Christian wives worried about their men; pray for all hostages, for prisoners in prison, for victims of the ghetto, for all those with AIDS." Rabbit switches the station and resolves to call home when he stops for lunch.

How many rivers there are! After the Potomac, the Accotink, the Pohick, the Occoquan, the Rappahannock, the Pamunkey, the Ni, the Po, the Matta, the South Anna. The bridges thus marked are mere moments of the highway. Unseen towns are named: Massaponax, Ladysmith, Cedar Forks. North of Richmond, shacks in a thickening scatter mark the beginning of the true South, of rural blacks. Harry pulls into a Howard Johnson's on the Richmond outskirts. His ears ring, the ankle of his accelerator foot aches, his neck is stiff; the heat has gone up several notches since the motel parking lot this morning. Inside the air-conditioned restaurant, salesmen with briefcases are at all the pay phones. He eats too much lunch, consuming the last French fry that came with his tasteless hamburger, mopping up salt with it in his fingers like his grandson Roy does, and then ordering apple pie to see if it's any different in Virginia. It's sweeter and gluier; it lacks that cinnamon they sprinkle on in Pennsylvania. A phone is available after he pays the check and with three dollars' worth of quarters ready he dials not the gray limestone house on Franklin Drive but the house where he used to live, the Springer house in Mt. Judge.

A little girl answers. The operator breaks in and Rabbit inserts three n-linutes' worth of quarters. He says, "Hi, Judy. It's Grandpa."

"Hi, Grandpa," she says, very calmly. Perhaps nothing of last night's revelation has filtered down to her yet. Or perhaps children this young are so innocent of what adulthood involves that nothing surprises them.

"How's it going?" he asks.

"O.K."

"You looking forward to school starting next week?"

"Kind of. Summer gets kind of boring."

"How's Roy? Is he bored by summer too?"

"He's so stupid he doesn't know what boring is. He's been put down for his nap now but is still bawling. Mommy's flipping out." Since Harry seems stuck for a response, she volunteers, "Daddy's not here, he's over at the lot."

"That's O.K., I'd just as soon talk to your mommy actually. Could you get her for me? Judy," he impulsively adds, before the child can leave the phone.

"Yeah?"

"You study hard, now. Don't you worry about those kids who think they're so much. You're a very lovely girl and everything will come to you if you wait. Don't force it. Don't force growing up. Everything will be fine."

This is too much to try to cram into her. She is only nine. Ten more years before she can go west like Mim and break out. "I know," Judy says, with a sigh, and perhaps she does. After a rattle of thereceiver on wood and voices in the background and footsteps hastily enlarging, Pru arrives at the telephone, breathless.

"Harry! "

"Hi there, Teresa. How's it going?" This seductive nonchalant tone, all wrong, but it just came out.

"Not so good," she says. "Where on earth are you?"

"Far away, where everybody wants me. Hey. Whajou tell for?"

"Oh Harry, I had to." She starts to cry. "I couldn't let Nelson not know, he's trying to be so straight. It's pathetic. He's been confessing all this dreadful stuff to me, I can't tell you or anybody the half of it, and at night we pray together, pray aloud kneeling by the bed, he's just so desperate to lick the drugs and be a decent father and husband, just be normal."

"He is, huh? Well, great. Still, you didn't need to turn us in, it only happened once, and there wasn't any follow-up, in fact I thought you'd totally forgotten about it."

"How could you think I'd forgotten? You must think I'm a real slut."

"Well, no, but, you know, you've been having a lot on your mind. For me, it was almost like I'd dreamed it." He means this as a compliment.

But Pru's voice hardens. "Well, it meant a little more to me than that." Women: you never know which side they want to dance on. "It was a terrible betrayal of my husband," she pronounces solemnly.

"Well," Rabbit says, "he hasn't been all that great a husband, as far as I can see. Hey, is Judy listening to all this?"

"I'm on the upstairs phone. I asked her to hang up downstairs."

"And did she? Judy!" Harry shouts. "I see you there!"

There is a fumbling soft rattle and a new clarity in the connection. Pru says, "Shit."

Rabbit reassures her. "I forget exactly what we said but I doubt if she understood much."

"She understands more than she lets on. Girls do."

"Well, anyway," he says. "Did he confess to affairs with men as well as women? Nelson."

"I can't possibly answer that question," she says, in a flat dry voice forever closed to him. Another woman's voice, warmer, courteous, faintly lazy, probably black, breaks in, saying, "Sir, yore three minutes are u-up. Please deposit a dollar ten saints if you wish continuation."

"Maybe I'm done," he says, to both women.

Pru shouts, over their imperilled connection, "Harry, where are you?"

"On the road!" he shouts back. He still has a little stack of change in front of him and inserts four quarters and a dime. As they gong away, he sings a snatch of a song he just heard on the radio, Willie Nelson's signature: "On the road again…"

This makes Pru sob; it's as bad as talking to Janice. "Oh don't," she cries. "Don't tease us all, we can't help it we're all tied down back here."

Pity touches him, with the memory of her beauty naked like blossoms that night in the narrow musty room as the rain intensified. She is stuck back there, she is saying, with the living. "I'm tied down too," he tells her. "I'm tied to my carcass."

"What shall I tell Janice?"

"Tell her I'm on the way to the condo. Tell her she can come join me whenever she wants. I just didn't like the squeeze you all put on me last night. I get claustrophobic in my old age."

"I never should have slept with you, it's just at the time…"

"It was," he says. "It was a great idea at the time. Tell me how'd you think I did, looking back on it? For an old guy."

She hesitates, then says, "That's it, that's the trouble. I don't see you as an old guy, Harry. I never did."

O.K., he has won this from her. This woman-to-man voice. Who could ask for anything more? Let her go. He says, "Don't you fret, Pru. You're a great dish. Tell Nelson to loosen up. Just because he got over crack he doesn't have to turn into Billy Graham." Or Jim Bakker. Harry hangs up, and the telephone startles him by returning, with a pang and clatter, the dime and four quarters. That operator with the Southern voice must have been listening and taken a shine to him.

As the afternoon wears on toward Fayetteville, North Carolina, where there is a Comfort Inn he and Janice have stayed at in years past, he hears an amazing thing on the car radio. They interrupt a string of Forties swing classics to announce that Bartlett Giamatti, Commissioner of Baseball and former president of Yale University, died of a heart attack on the island of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, late this afternoon. Pete Rose strikes back, Rabbit thinks. Professor Giamatti, who was only fifty-one years of age, retired after lunch in his summer home in Edgartown, and at three o'clock was found by his wife and son in full cardiac arrest. Only fifty-one, Rabbit thinks. Police took Giamatti to the Martha's Vineyard Hospital where he was worked upon for an hour and a half, the emergency team several times succeeded in restoring the electric mechanism of the heartbeat, but Giamatti was at last pronounced dead. That little electric twitch: without it we're so much rotting meat. One of the first things he ought to do in Florida is make an appointment with Dr. Morris, to keep himself out of the hands of that hawk-faced Australian, Dr. Olman. Dying to sink hú knife into me. Giamatti had been an English instructor at Yale, the news says, and became the youngest president in the history of the university, and in eleven years reversed that institution's trend into red ink and academic mediocrity. As president of the National League, he had aroused some players' ire by tampering with the strike zone and the balk rule. As commissioner, his brief tenure was dominated by the painful Rose affair, whose settlement a week ago left Giamatti in an apparently strong position. He was a heavy man and a heavy smoker. At least I'm no smoker. And now, a tune our listeners never get tired of requesting, "In the Mood."

Fayetteville used to be a hot town, with all the soldiers from Fort Bragg, Rabbit remembers from a segment of 60 Minutes he once watched. The downtown had some blocks of triple-X movies and sleazy hotels the city fathers finally in despair tore down entirely and made into a park. After a dinner of deep-fried shrimp, with onion rings and white bread fried on one side, a Southern delicacy he guesses, at the Comfort Inn – one of those restaurants with a salad bar big as a little cafeteria, so you wonder as you sit there waiting for the waitress if you're missing the boat – Harry cruises in the slate-gray Celica, his private Batmobile, toward the center of wicked Fayetteville. He can find for a hot spot only a shadowy broad street of blacks loitering in doorways here and there, waiting for some message, some event from beyond. No hookers in hotpants or spandex exercise tights, just a big red-bearded white man in studded black leather who keeps revving his motorcycle, twisting the throttle and producing a tremendous noise. The blacks don't blink. They keep waiting. Even at evening the shadowy air is hot, they move through it languidly like sick fish, their hands flapping at the wrists in that angled black way.

Back in his long room with its watery scent of cement from underneath the rug, with walls painted altogether yellow, moldings and pipes and air-conditioning vents and light-switch plates rollered and sprayed yellow, Rabbit thinks of adding $5.50 to his bill to watch something called Horny Housewives but instead watches, free, bits of Perfect Strangers (it makes him uneasy, two guys living together, even if one of them is a comical Russian) and pre-season football between the Seahawks and 49ers. The trouble with these softcore porn movies on hotel circuits, in case some four-year-old with lawyers for parents happens to hit the right buttons they show tits and ass and even some pubic hair but no real cunt and no pricks, no pricks hard or soft at all. It's very frustrating. It turns out pricks are what we care about, you have to see them. Maybe we're all queer, and all his life he's been in love with Ronnie Harrison. Nice, today, the way Pru burst out with that Shit again and then Don't tease. That level woman-to-man voice, as if he had his arms about her, her voice relaxing into their basic relation, cock to cunt, doing Nelson in. In bed at last in the dark he jerks off, picturing himself with a pair of coffee-colored hookers from old Fayetteville, to show himself he's still alive.

The morning radio news is dull. Giamatti's death, warmed over. Baseball mourns. Economy shows moderate growth. Bombardments in Beirut between Christians and Muslims worse than ever. Ex-HUD aide says files were shredded. Supreme Court ruling against organized prayer before football games is rousing indignation all over the Southland. In Montgomery, Mayor Emory Folmar marched to the fifty-yard line and led a prayer there. His remarks over the public-address system linked football and prayer as American tradition. In Sylacauga, Alabama, local ministers rose in the bleachers and led the crowd of three thousand in the Lord's Prayer. In Pensacola, Florida, preachers equipped with bullhorns led spectactors in prayer. Fanatics, Rabbit tells himself. Southerners are as scary as the Amish.

From here on down to the Florida line Route 95 is like a long green tunnel between tall pines. Little shacks peek through. A sign offers Pecan Rolls 3 for $ 2.00. Bigger signs in Hispanic colors, orange and yellow on black, lime green, splashy and loud, miles and miles of them, begin to advertise something called South of the Border. Bear Up a Leetle Longer. You Never Sausage a Place! With a big basketball curving right off the billboard, Have a Ball. When you finally get there, after all these miles of pine tunnel, it's a junky amusement park just across the South Carolina border: a village of souvenir shops, a kind of a space needle wearing a sombrero. Tacos, tacky. South Carolina is a wild state. The first to secede. The pines get taller, with a tragic feeling. FIREWORKS are offered everywhere for sale. The land gets hillier. Trucks loaded with great tree trunks rumble unstoppably by on the downslope and labor to nearly a standstill on the up. Rabbit is nervously aware now of his Pennsylvania plates being Northern. Swerve out of line a bit and they'll throw him in the Pee Dee River. The Lynches River. The Pocatoligo River. Animals on this highway are hit so hard they don't squash, they explode, impossible to know what they were. Possums. Porcupines. Some dear old Southern lady's darling pet pussycat. Reduced to fur stains amid the crescent fragments of exploded truck tires. Just think, he lay down for lunch and that was it.

Janice must have got the message from Pru, she may be already at the condo waiting, flying down from Philly and renting a car at the airport, better enjoy his freedom while he has it. He has come upon a black gospel station, an elastic fat voice shouting, "He'll be there, but you got to call him names." Endlessly repeated, with unexpected rhythmic variations. "Roll that stone away, do you know the story?" A commercial interrupts at last and, would you believe, it's for Toyotas. Those Japs don't miss a trick, you have to hand it to them. Selling right in the slave quarters. Your pruraristic society. Harry's neck hurts from holding his head in one position so long. He's beginning to feel bloated on radio, on travel. God's country. He could have made it smaller and still made the same point.

He'll be there. Funny, about Harry and religion. When God hadn't a friend in the world, back there in the Sixties, he couldn't let go of Him, and now when the preachers are all praying through bullhorns he can't get it up for Him. He is like a friend you've had so long you've forgotten what you liked about Him. You'd think after that heart scare, but in a way the closer you get the less you think about it, like you're in His hand already. Like you're out on the court instead of on the bench swallowing down butterflies and trying to remember the plays.

Perry Como comes on and sings "Because." Rabbit's scalp prickles at the end, the skin of his eyes stings. Because – you – are miiiine! Como the best, probably: Crosby had something sly-Irish about him, clowning around with Lamour and Hope, and Sinatra – if there's one way in which Rabbit Angstrom has been out of step with mankind, it's Sinatra. He doesn't like his singing. He didn't like it when bobbysoxers were jumping out of their underpants for this skinny hollow-cheeked guy up on the stage at the Paramount, and he didn't like it when he mellowed into this Las Vegas fat cat making all these moony albums you're supposed to screw to all across the nation: oceans of jism. White with foam. His singing has always sounded flat to Rabbit, like he's grinding it out. Now, to Mim, Sinatra is a god, but that's more a matter of lifestyle, turning night into day and pally with gangsters and Presidents and that square gangster way of carrying your shoulders (Charlie Stavros has it) and Chairman of the Board and Sammy Davis, Jr., and Dean Martin before they dried out finally, if in fact they did, both men have terrible health problems he read somewhere, in one of those ridiculous scandal sheets Janice brings home from the Minit Market. Sometimes Harry envies Mim the glamorous dangerous life he guesses she's lived, he's glad for her, she always had that edge, wanting speed even if it killed her, even if it flipped her off the handlebars of his old Elgin. But the fast lane too gets to be a rut. He doesn't regret the life he led, though Brewer isn't New York New York or Chicago my kind of town the way Sinatra grinds it out. What he enjoyed most, it turns out in retrospect, and he didn't know it at the time, was standing around in the showroom, behind the dusty big window with the banners, bouncing on the balls of his feet to keep up his leg muscles, waiting for a customer, shooting the bull with Charlie or whoever, earning his paycheck, filling his slot in the big picture, doing his bit, getting a little recognition. That's all we want from each other, recognition. Your assigned place in the rat race. In the Army, too, you had it: your number, your bunk, your assigned duties, your place in line, your pass for Saturday night, four beers and fuck a whore in a ranch house. Honey, you didn't pay to be no two-timer. There's more to being a human being than having your own way. Fact is, it has come to Rabbit this late in life, you don't have a way apart from what other people tell you. Your mother first, and poor Pop, then the Lutheran minister, that tough old heinie Fritz Kruppenbach, you had to respect him though, he said what he believed, and then all those schoolteachers, Marty Tothero and the rest, trying to give you an angle to work from, and now all these talk-show hosts. Your life derives, and has to give. Maybe if your mother was in the fast lane like Annabelle's you are naturally leery of the opposite sex. We haven't set these kids terrific examples.

The pine trees have gaps now. Marshy stretches open the sky up, there are cabins on stilts, trees with shaggy balls on them, colored wash hanging on lines. Homely hand-lettered signs. Dad's Real Southern Cookin'. Bi-Lo. A long bridge over Lake Marion, this enormous body ofwater in the middle of nowhere. Highways branch off to the capital, Columbia, where he's never been, though he and Janice did once detour over to Charleston and back on Route 17. Another time, they diverted to Savannah and spent the night in a made-over plantation house with high domed ceilings and louvers on the windows. They did do some fun things, he and Jan. The thing about a wife, though, and he supposes a husband for that matter, is that almost anybody would do, inside broad limits. Yet you're supposed to adore them till death do you part. Till the end of time. Ashepoo River. Wasn't that a comic strip, years ago?

He gets off the highway at a vast rest stop, an oasis in this wilderness – gas pumps, a restaurant, a little department store selling groceries, beer, fireworks, suntan lotion. At the counter a couple of young black men, glittery black in the heat, arms bare up to the shoulder, a mean little Malcolm X goatee on one of them. They have a menace down here, their color shouts, they are a race, they are everywhere. But the elderly white waitress has no trouble with these two black boys. The three chat and smile in the same dragged accent, making a little breeze with their mouths. Nice to see it. For this, the Civil War.

To test if he can still use his own voice, Rabbit asks the fat white man one empty stool away from him at the counter, a man who has made for himself at the salad bar a mountain of lettuce and red beets and coleslaw and cottage cheese and kidney beans and chickpeas, "About how many more hours is it to the Florida line?" He lets his Pennsylvania accent drag a little extra, hoping to pass.

"Four," the man answers with a smile. "I just came from there. Where you headin' for in Florida?"

"Way the other end. Deleon. My wife and I have a condo there, I'm driving down alone, she'll be following later."

The man keeps smiling, smiling and chewing. "I know Deleon. Nice old town."

Rabbit has never noticed much that is old about it. "From our balcony we used to have a look at the sea but they built it up."

"Lot of building on the Gulf side now, the Atlantic side pretty well full. Began my day in Sarasota."

"Really? That's a long way to come."

"That's why I'm makin' such a pig of myself. Hadn't eaten more than a candy bar since five o'clock this morning. After a while you got to stop, you begin to see things."

"What sort of things?"

"This stretch I just came over, lot of patchy ground fog, it gets to you. just coffee gets to your stomach." This man has a truly nice way of smiling and chewing and talking all at once. His mouth is wide but lipless, like a Muppet's. He has set his truck driver's cap, with a bill and a mesh panel in the back, beside his plate; his good head of gray hair, slightly wavy like a rich man's, is permanently dented by the edge of the cap.

"You drivin' one of those big trucks? I don't know how you guys do it. How far you goin'?"

All the salad on the plate has vanished and the smile has broadened. "Boston."

"Boston! All that way?" Rabbit has never been to Boston, to him it is the end of the world, tucked up in under Maine. People living that far north are as fantastic to him as Eskimos.

"Today, tomorrow, whatever you call it, I expect to have this rig in Boston Sunday afternoon, twenty-four hours from now."

"But when do you sleep?"

"Oh, you pull over and get an hour here, an hour there."

"That's amazing."

"Been doin' it for fifteen years. I had retired, but came back to it. Couldn't stand it around the house. Nothin' on TV that was any good. How about you?"

"Me?" On the lam. A bad LAD. He realizes what the question means, and answers, "Retired, I guess."

"More power to ya, fella. I couldn't take it," the truck driver says. "Retirement taxed my brain." The elderly waitress so friendly with the two young blacks brings the hungry man an oval platter heavy with fried steak soaking in a pink mix of oil and blood, and three vegetables in little round side dishes, and a separate plate of golden-brown corn pone.

Harry somewhat reluctantly – he has made a friend – pushes away from the counter. "Well, more power to you," he says.

And now this fat pale miracle man, who will be in Boston faster than a speeding bullet, who like Thomas Alva Edison only needs a catnap now and then, has his wide Muppet mouth too full to speak, and merely smiles and nods, and loses a snaky droplet of steak juice down the far side of his egg-shaped little chin. Nobody's perfect. We're only human. Look at Jim Bakker. Look at Bart Giamatti.

In his Celica Harry crosses the Tuglifinny River. The Salkehatchie. The Little Combahee. The Coosawatchie. The Turtle. Kickapoo, he thinks – not Ashepoo. Kickapoo joy juice in Li'1 Abner. Between spates of black music that has that peculiar exciting new sound of boards being slapped on the floor, he hears commercials for the Upchurch Music Company ("an instrument that brings musical pleasure to generations to come") and a deodorizer called Tiny Cat. Why would a deodorizer be called Tiny Cat? He crosses the Savannah and leaves South Carolina and its fireworks at last. Because he is punchy from miles of miles, he turns off at the city exit and drives into the downtown and parks by a grand old courthouse and buys a hot pastrami sandwich at a little sandwich joint on the main street there. He sits eating it, trying not to have any of the juice spill out of the waxpaper and spot his pants, like that sickening driblet from the mouth of the guy back at the lunch place hours ago. This piece of Savannah, a block from the river, seems a set of outdoor rooms, walled in by row houses with high steps and curtains of dusty trees; a huge heat still rests on the day though the shadows are deepening, thickening on the soft old façades, sadder and rosier than those in Brewer. A group of pigeons gathers around his bench, curious to see if he will spare any of the bun or Bar-B-Q potato chips. A young bum with long yellow hair like George Custer and that brown face you get from being homeless gives him a glittering wild eye from a bench behind a tree, in the next room as it were. A tall obelisk rises in commemoration of something, no doubt the glorious dead. Little chattering brown birds heave in and out of the trees as they try to decide whether the day is over. He better push on. He neatly packages his wastepaper and milk carton in the bag the sandwich came in and leaves it in a public trash basket, his gift to Savannah, the trace he will leave, like the cloud of finger-moisture on the edge of the bureau back home. The pigeons chuff and chortle off in indignant disappointment. The bum has silently come up behind him and asks him in no particular accent, the limp snarl of the drugged, if he has a cigarette. "Nope," Rabbit tells him. "Haven't smoked in thirty years." He remembers the moment when on a sudden resolve he canned a half-pack of Philip Moms, the nice old tobacco-brown pack, in somebody's open barrel in an alley in Mt. Judge. Left that trace too.

Rabbit moves toward his car with a racing heart, as the bum follows and mumbles behind him about spare change. He fiddles with the key and gets in and slams the door. The Celica, thank God, isn't too overheated after all its miles to start promptly; George Custer, locked outside, blinks and turns, pretending not to notice. Harry drives cautiously through the outdoor rooms, around the tall monument, and gets lost on the way out of Savannah. He is caught in endless black neighborhoods, gently collapsing houses built of wood clapboard that last saw fresh paint in the days of Martin Luther King. They talk about assassination conspiracies but that was one that Harry could believe in. He can believe in it but he can't remember the name of the man they put in jail for it. A three-name name. Escaped once, but they caught him. James Earl something. So much for history. Panicking, he stops at a grocery store, the kind with a troughed wooden floor with shiny-headed nails that used to be in Mt. Judge when he was a boy, except that everybody in here is black; a lanky man the color of a dried bean pod, much amused, tells him how to get back to the superhighway, gesturing with long hands that flap loosely on his wrists.

Back on 95, Rabbit pushes through Georgia. As darkness comes on, it begins to rain, and with his old eyes, that can't sort out the lights too well at night any more, the rain is oppressive. He even turns off the radio, he feels so battered by pellets of experience. His body from being in one position so long feels as if somebody's been pounding it with sandbags. He better pull in. He finds a Ramada Inn beyond Brunswick. He eats a fried-catfish special that doesn't sit too well on top of the pastrami, especially the candied yams and the pecan pie; but why be in Georgia if you can't have pecan pie? The walk back to his room past the other motel doors, on cement sheltered by the continuous balcony overhead, is quietly blissful. In out of the rain. Sense enough. They can't catch me. But his snug moment of happiness reminds him of all those exposed unhappy loved ones back in Diamond County. Guilt gouges at his heart like a thumb in a semi-sensitive eye.

Halfway through The Golden Girls, it seems suddenly tedious, all that elderly sexiness, and the tough-mouthed old grandmother, people ought to know when to give up. He watches instead on the educational channel a Living Planet segment about life at the polar extremes. He's seen it before, but it's still surprising, how David Attenborough turns over those rocks in this most desolate place in Antarctica and there are lichens underneath, and all through the sunless abysmal winter these male penguins shuffling around in continuous blizzards with eggs on the tops of their webbed feet. Life, it's incredible, it's wearing the world out. A teno'clock news on the same channel tells the same old stuff he's been hearing on the radio all day. Poor Giamatti. A female baby panda born in the National Zoo in Washington. Reagan thought AIDS was as mild as measles until Rock Hudson died, reveals his former physician Brigadier General John Hutton. Another tattletale: Navy Commander David R. Wilson claims in this month's U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings magazine that the U.S.S. Vincennes was known among other ships in the Persian Gulf for her aggressive and imprudent actions for at least a month before the Vincennes gunned down an Iranian civil airliner containing over two hundred seventy men, women, and children. Poor devils, Iranians or not. Little children, women in shawls, end over end, hitting the dark hard water. New head of Japan in Washington, provisional government in Panama, mobs of East Germans in Hungary waiting to cross the border into the free world. Poor devils, they don't know the free world is wearing out.

Rabbit makes himself ready for bed, sleeping in the day's underwear, and tries to think about where he is, and who. This is the last night when he is nowhere. Tomorrow, life will find him again. Janice on the phone, the Golds next door. He feels less light than he thought he would, escaping Brewer. You are still you. The U.S. is still the U.S., held together by credit cards and Indian names. Harry becomes dead weight on the twin bed. Lost in the net of thread-lines on the map, he sleeps as in his mother's womb, another temporary haven.

Morning. The rain is just a memory of puddles on the sunstruck asphalt. Sunday. He goes for the French toast and link sausages, figuring tomorrow morning he'll be back to stale oat bran. Janice never cleans out the cupboards when they leave. Efficient, in a way, if you don't mind feeding ants and roaches. He keeps tasting maple syrup and eggs he didn't quite like. French toast is never as good as what Mom would cook up before sending him off to Sunday school: the flat baked golden triangles of bread, the syrup from the can shaped and painted like a log cabin, its spout the chimney. Putting his suitcase in the trunk, he is struck, not for the first time, by how the Celica's taillights are tipped, giving it, from the back, a slant-eyed look.

Within an hour he crosses the St. Marys River and a highway sign says WELCOME TO FLORIDA and the radio commercials are for Blue Cross, denture fixatives, pulmonary clinics. The roadside becomes sandy and the traffic thickens, takes on glitter. Jacksonville suddenly looms, an Oz of blue-green skyscrapers, a city of dreams at the end of the pine-tree tunnel, gleaming glass boxes heaped around the tallest, the Baptist Hospital. You rise up onto bridges over the St. Johns River far below, and Jacksonville shines from a number of angles like a jewel being turned in your hand, and you pay a toll, and must stay alert not to wind up heading toward Green Cove Springs or Tallahassee. Route 95 is now just one among many superhighways. The cars get wide and fat, the trucks carry rolls of fresh sod instead of skinned pine trunks. All around him, floating like misplaced boats, are big white campers and vans, Winnebagos and Starcrafts, Pathfinders and Dolphins, homes on wheels, the husband at the helm, his elbow out the window, the wife at home behind him, making the bed. From all of the states these caravans come to Florida, wearing even Colorado's green mountain profile and Maine's gesturing red lobster. He notices a new kind of Florida license plate, a kind of misty tricolor memorial to the Challenger, among the many still with the green Florida-shaped stain in the middle like something spilled on a necktie. And wasn't that the disgrace of the decade, sending that poor New Hampshire schoolteacher and that frizzy-haired Jewish girl, not to mention the men, one of them black and another Oriental, all like some Hollywood cross-section of America, up to be blown into bits on television a minute later? Now the probers think they were probably conscious, falling toward the water, conscious for two or three minutes. Harry descends deeper into Florida, glad to be back among the palms and white roofs and tropical thinness, the clouds blue on gray on white on blue, as if the great skymaker is working here with lighter materials.

You take 95 parallel to the East Coast to 4, and then skim diagonally over through all that Disney World that poor little Judy wanted to go to, next time they come they must schedule it in. Where some of the self-appointed travel experts at the condo (he always did think Ed Silberstein a know-it-all, even before his son tried to put the make on Pru) advise staying on 4 all the way to 75 and saving in minutes what you lose in miles, or at least taking 17 to Port Charlotte, he likes to move south on 27, right through the hot flat belly of the state, through Haines City and Lake Wales, into the emptiness west of the Seminole reservation and Lake Okeechobee, and then over to Deleon on Route 80.

In Florida, there is no trouble finding Golden Oldies stations on the car radio. We're all oldies down here. The music of your life, some of the announcers like to call it, and it keeps tumbling in, Patti Page begging "Never let me gooooo, I love you soooooo," and then doing so perkily that Latin-American bit with "Aye yi yi" and the caballeros, and finishing "I've waited all my life, to give you all my love, my heart belongs to you," and then Tony Bennett or one of those other mooing Italians with "Be My Love," speaking of all my love, and then Gogi Grant and "The Wayward Wind," he hasn't thought of Gogi Grant for ages, it's a rare song that doesn't light up some of his memory cells, while the landscape outside the car windows beyond the whoosh of the airconditioner gets more and more honkytonk - Flea World, Active Adult Living and car after car goes by with an orange Garfield stuck to the back window with paws that are suction cups. "Why you ramble, no one knows," Nat "King" Cole singing "Rambling Rose," ending so gently, "Why I want you, no one knows," you can just about see that wise slow smile, and then "Tzena, Tzena," he hasn't heard that for years either, the music doesn't come ethnic any more, and "Oh, My Papa," speaking of ethnic, and Kay Starr really getting her back into "Wheel of Fortune," all those hiccups, hard-driving, "Puleazzze let it be now," and "A-Tisket, A-Tasket," that really goes back, he was walking to grade school then with Lottie Bingaman, in love with Margaret Schoelkopf, and Presley's "Love Me Tender," knock him all you want, before he got fat and druggy and spooked in the end he had a real voice, a beautiful voice, not like foghorn Sinatra, and then Ray Charles, now there's another real voice, "I Can't Stop Loving You," "dreaming of yesterdayssss," the way it trails off like that, that funny blind man's waggle of the head, and Connie Francis, "Where the Boys Are," a voice to freeze your scalp all right, but whose life are these songs? That was beachparty era, he was all married and separated and reconciled and working at Verity Press by then, no more parties for him. Ronnie Harrison and Ruth fucking all weekend at the Jersey Shore: that still rankles.

The station fades out and in trying to find another he passes through a broadcast church service, evangelical, a man shouting "Jesus knows! Jesus looks into your heart! Jesus sees the death in your heart!" and Harry passes on, coming upon, too late for all of the sobbing, Johnny Ray's "Cry," "If your sweetheart sends a letter of goodbye," that was around the time he had to go into the Army and part from Mary Ann, he didn't know it would be for good, they argued about Johnny Ray, Rabbit insisting the guy had to be a fruit to sing that way, and then down in Texas he realized the song was for him, his sweetheart sent a letter. Next number, Dean Martin comes on loafing through "That's Amore": by now Harry had come back and taken up with Janice, the quiet girl behind the nuts counter at Kroll's, her little tight body, the challenge of her puzzled dark eyes, he remembers because he would joke, "That's amore," after they would fuck in the room Linda Hammacher would let them use, with its view of the dove-gray gas tanks by the river. "Only the Lonely," the late Roy Orbison warbles. "There goes my baby, there goes my heart," in that amazing voice that goes higher and higher till you think it must break like crystal, as in a way it did; Rabbit supposed his being dead is what makes this one a Golden Oldie.

The songs roll on, broken every half-hour by summaries of the news. A bombing in Colombia has injured eighty-four, the Colombian woes are increased by a drop in coffee prices, President Bush's upcoming speech on the nation's drug problems rouses Washington speculation, can he do a Reagan? Also in Washington, officials are still hopeful that the newborn baby panda, fighting for its life in an incubator, will survive. Locally, manatees continue active in the Caloosahatchee Basin, and the Dolphins were beaten yesterday in Miami by the Philadelphia Eagles, twenty to ten. Rabbit likes hearing this score, but the old songs, all that syrup about love, love, the sweetness, the cuteness, the doggies in the window and Mommy kissing Santa Claus and the naughty lady of Shady Lane, the background strings and pizzicato bridges and rising brass crescendos meant to thrill the pants off you, wear him down: he resents being made to realize, this late, that the songs of his life were as moronic as the rock the brainless kids now feed on, or the Sixties and Seventies stuff that Nelson gobbled up – all of it designed for empty heads and overheated hormones, an ocean white with foam, and listening to it now is like trying to eat a double banana split the way he used to. It's all disposable, cooked up to turn a quick profit. They lead us down the garden path, the music manufacturers, then turn around and lead the next generation down with a slightly different flavor of glop.

Rabbit feels betrayed. He was reared in a world where war was not strange but change was: the world stood still so you could grow up in it. He knows when the bottom fell out. When they closed down Kroll's, Kroll's that had stood in the center of Brewer all those years, bigger than a church, older than the courthouse, right at the head of Weiser Square there, with every Christmas those otherworldly displays of circling trains and nodding dolls and twinkling stars in the corner windows as if God Himself put them there to light up this darkest time of the year. As a little kid he couldn't tell what God did from what people did; it all came from above somehow. He can remember standing as a child in the cold with his mother gazing into this world of tinselled toys as real as any other, the air biting at his cheeks, the sound of the Salvation Army bells begging, the smell of the hot soft pretzels sold on Weiser Square those years, the feeling around him of adult hurrying -bundled-up bodies pushing into Kroll's where you could buy the best of everything from drapes to beds, toys to pots, china to silver. When he worked there back in Shipping you saw the turnover, the hiring and firing, the discontinued lines, the abrupt changes of fashion, the panicky gamble of all this merchandising, but still he believed in the place as a whole, its power, its good faith. So when the system just upped one summer and decided to close Kroll's down, just because shoppers had stopped coming in because the downtown had become frightening to white people, Rabbit realized the world was not solid and benign, it was a shabby set of temporary arrangements rigged up for the time being, all for the sake of the money. You just passed through, and they milked you for what you were worth, mostly when you were young and gullible. If Kroll's could go, the courthouse could go, the banks could go. When the money stopped, they could close down God Himself.

For miles in the vicinity of Disney World and beyond, lesser amusement and theme parks hold out their cups for the tourist overflow. Waxworks. Wet 'n' Wild, a water slide. Sea World. Circus World, not the one that's redux down in Sarasota. What a dumb word, as dumb as faux, you see it everywhere suddenly, faux fur, faux jewelry. False is what they mean. A museum of old dolls and toys. Old, old, they sell things as antiques now that aren't even as old as he is, another racket. On Route 27, going due south, you enter slightly rolling dry pale farm country, bleached by heat, with pale cattle in wide parched fields and orange groves with their dark dense irrigated green, and giant tanks holding water, shaped like giant mushrooms, like spaceships come from beyond. At the side of the road little wobbly hand-painted signs offer BOILED PEANUTS, tiny Mexican girls manning the stands, and there is, in faint echo of the giant theme parks to the north, a touching dusty amusement park, spindly structures put together for a minute's giddy sensation, idle, waiting for the evening's little customers.

The sun is high now and the morning's tattered gray clouds have melted away and the heat is serious, crushing, frightening when he steps out of the Celica at a Texaco to use the facilities because there is no escape from it, like snow at the South Pole, it even drifts into the men's room, as humid a heat as in the Pennsylvania summer but more searing, more wrathful. The road is wide but has lights and roads coming from the bleached farmland; the small cities drift by, Lake Wales, Frostproof, Avon Park, Sebring, and he wonders about the lives led there, away from the coasts, away from the condos and the fishing charters, by people who wake up and go to work just like those in Brewer, only everything flattened by the sun: how did they get here, so near the edge of the world, on this sand spit that a little rise in sea level because of Antarctica melting because of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would wash away? A column of thick smoke appears on his left, toward the Seminole reservation, thick and poisonous, a disaster, an atomic bomb, war has been declared while he's been drowning in musical memories; he expects to run into a forest fire, but nothing happens, the column of smoke slowly recedes on his left, he'll never know what it was. A dump most likely. Harry's whole body feels cramped because of long sitting and he takes a Nitrostat because of the cute little rush it gives you, the inner loosening, the tickle.

The land gets less and less settled and more scraggy. The towns take on funny names like Lake Placid and Venus and Old Venus and Palmdale; just beyond Palmdale, after you cross the Fisheating Creek, at Harrisburg no less, the state capital up there but a nothing down here, you bear right on 29, a narrow road so straight and flat you can see for miles, trucks coming at you through a shimmer that cuts off their wheels, rednecks in pickups pushing in the rearview mirror to pass, hardly any signs, a feeling all around of swamp, so remote from civilization the radio station fades, its last song of your life before it finally fades is somebody called Connie Boswell, way before Rabbit's time, singing "Say It Isn't So" with a rueful little lisp, quietly as if she's just talking it to you, "You've found somebody newww," the band behind her soft and tinny like those that used to play in hotel lobbies with lots of potted palms, a Twenties feeling, they lived hard, no worry about smoking and drinking and cholesterol, just do it, "Ssay it isn't sso," he could almost cry, she sounds so sincere, so truly wounded. What ís Janice's game, anyway? He'll find out soon enough.

You think 29 will never end, between its ditches of swamp water, its stiff gray vegetation, but it finally comes into 80, at La Belle, streaming west just south of the Caloosahatchee, and then you're almost home, there are signs to the Southwest Florida Regional Airport and planes roaring low overhead, he could shoot them down through his windshield if he were the Vincennes. For nostalgia's sake, to get back into it, the Florida thing, he pushes on past Interstate 75 to Route 41. Starvin' Marvin. Universal Prosthetics. Superteller. STARLITE MOTEL. That time he and Janice wound up in a motel like they were an illicit couple when in fact they'd been married for thirteen years. Unlucky number but they survived it. Thirty-three years married this year. Thirtyfour since they first fucked. Back in Kroll's he never realized she'd come into money eventually. She just seemed a pathetic little mutt behind the nuts counter, "Jan" stitched to her brown smock, something insecure and sexy about her, a secure independent woman like Elvira probably isn't so much into sex, Jan was, she was amazed when he went down on her like he used to for Mary Ann in the car, only now on a bed. Mom didn't take to Jan; standing in the kitchen with soapy hands she would say Fred Springer was a con artist with his used cars. Now Springer Motors is kaput, finito. Down the tubes just like Kroll's. Nothing is sacred.

Harry comes to his turning off 41. The plumes of pampas grass, the flowering shrubs along the curving streets look different this time of year, more florid. He has never been down here at this time of year before. It seems emptier, fewer cars in the driveways, more curtains drawn, the sidewalks looking less walked-on than ever, the traffic thinner even though this is rush hour, with that late-afternoon pall in the air, like tarnish on silver. He doesn't see a single squashed armadillo on Pindo Palm Boulevard. The guard at the security gate of Valhalla Village, a lean bespectacled black Harry hasn't seen before, doesn't know him, but finds his name on the list of tenants and waves him through without a smile, all efficiency, probably college-educated, over-qualified.

The code on the inner entrance door of Building B doesn't work. So many numbers in his life, he may be getting it wrong. But after the third time it fails to click him in, he figures it's not him, the code has been changed. And so, limping from a stiffness in his right leg from pushing on the accelerator for over three days, Harry has to hobble over across the carpeted traffic island and the asphalt, in the dazing heat, through the rush of half-forgotten tropical aromas, hibiscus, bougainvillea, dry palm thatch, crunchy broad-bladed St. Augustine grass, to the management office in Building C to get it, the new code.

They say they sent the notice to his summer address up north; he tells them, "My wife must have torn it up or lost it or something." His voice talking to people again sounds odd and croaky, coming from several feet outside himself, like the to-one-side echo or chorus that sometimes startles you on the car stereo system. He feels awkward and vulnerable out of the car: a sea snail without its shell. On his way by, he looks into Club Nineteen and is surprised to see nobody at the tables, inside or out, though a couple of foursomes are waiting on the first tee, in the lengthening shadows. You don't play, he guesses, in the middle of the day this time of year.

The elevator has a different color inspection card in the slip-in frame, the peach-colored corridor smells of a different air freshener, with a faint nostalgic tang of lemonade. The door of 413 opens easily, his two keys scratch into their wiggly slots and turn, there are no cobwebs to brush against his face, no big brown hairy spiders scuttling away on the carpet. He imagines all sorts of spooky things lately. The condo is like it always was, as absolutely still as a reconstruction of itself- the see-through shelves, the birds and flowers Janice made of small white shells, the big green glass egg that used to sit in Ma Springer's living room, the blond square sofa, the fake-bamboo desk, the green-gray dead television screen. Nobody bothered to disturb or rob the place: kind of a snub. He carries his two bags into the bedroom and opens the sliding door onto the balcony. The sound of his footsteps makes deep dents in the silence of the place. An electric charge of reproach hangs in the stagnant air. The condo hadn't expected him, he is early. Having arrived at it after such a distance makes everything appear magnified, like the pitted head of a pin under a microscope. The whole apartment-its furniture, its aqua cabinets and Formica countertop, its angles of fitted door frame and baseboard – seems to Rabbit a tight structure carefully hammered together to hold a brimming amount of fear.

A white telephone sits waiting to ring. He picks it up. There is no buzz. God on the line. Disconnected for the season. Today is Sunday, tomorrow is Labor Day. The old familiar riddle: how do you telephone the phone company without a telephone?

But the phone, once it is connected, still doesn't ring. The days go by empty. The Golds next door are back in Framingham. Bernie and Fern Drechsel are up north bouncing between their two daughters' houses, one in Westchester County and the other still in Queens, and their son's lovely home in Princeton and a cottage he has in Manahawkin. The Silbersteins have a place in North Carolina they go to from April to November. Once when Harry asked Ed why they didn't go back to Toledo, Ed looked at him with that smartass squint and asked, "You ever been to Toledo?" The Valhalla dining room is spooky – empty tables and an echoing click of silver on china and Bingo only once a week. The golf course has noisy foursomes on it early in the morning, waking Harry up with the moon still bright in the sky – younger men, local Deleon business types who buy cut-rate off-season memberships – and then the fairways from ten to about four bake in the mid-nineties heat, deserted but for the stray dog cutting diagonally across or the cats scratching in the sand traps. When Harry one morning gets up his nerve for a round by himself, planning to take a cart, he discovers the pro shop has lost his golf shoes. The kid at the counter – the pro and assistant pro are both still up north at country clubs that don't close down until late October says he's sure they're somewhere, it's just that this time of year there's a different system.

The only other person in the fourth-floor corridor who seems to be here is the crazy woman in 402, Mrs. Zabritski, a widow with wild white hair, pinned up by two old tortoise-shell combs that just add to the confusion. The Golds have told him she survived one of the concentration camps when a girl. She looks at Harry as if he's crazy too, to be here.

He explains to her one day, since they meet at the elevator and she looks at him funny, "I had this sudden impulse to come down early this year. My wife's just starting up in the real-estate business and I got bored hanging around the house."

Mrs. Zabritski's little neckless head is screwed around at an angle on her shoulder, as if she's bracing an invisible telephone against her ear. She stares up at him furiously, her lips baring her long false teeth in a taut oval that reminds him of that Batman logo you saw everywhere this summer. Her eyes have veiny reds to them, stuck hot and round in their skeletal sockets, that wasting-away look Lyle had. "It's hell," the tiny old lady seems to pronounce, her lips moving stiffly, trying to keep her teeth in.

"It's what? What is?"

"This weather," she says. "Your wife -" She halts, her lips working.

"My wife what?" Rabbit tries to curb his tendency to shout, since hearing doesn't seem to be one of her problems, regardless of that pained way her head is cocked.

"Is a cute little thing," she finishes, but looks angry saying it. Her hair sticks up in wisps as if it was moussed and abandoned.

"She'll be down soon," he almost shouts, embarrassed as much by his secrets, his hopeful lies, as by her dwarfish warped craziness. This is the kind of woman he's ended up with, after Mary Ann and then Janice and Ruth's silky-sack heaviness and Peggy Fosnacht's splayed eyes and Jill's adolescent breasts and stoned compliance and Thelma with her black casket and Pru glowing dimly in the dark like a tough street in blossom, not to mention that tired whore in Texas with the gritty sugar in her voice and that other paid lay in his life, a girl he once in a great while remembers, at a Verity Press outing in the Brewer Polish-American Club, she was skinny and had a cold and kept her bra and sweater on, there in this room off to the side, where she was waiting on a mattress like a kind of prisoner, young, her belly and thighs sweaty from the cold she had but pure and pale, a few baby-blue veins where the skin molded around the pelvic bones, her pussy an oldfashioned natural dark ferny triangle, flourishing, not shaved at the sides to suit a bathing suit the way you see in the skin magazines. You paid the guy who stood outside the door, ten dollars for ten minutes, he hadn't shaved very recently, Rabbit assumed he was her brother, or maybe her father. He assumed the girl was Polish because of the name of the club, she might have been eighteen, Mrs. Zabritski would have been that age after getting out of the concentration camp, smooth-skinned, lithe, a young survivor. What time does to people; her face is broken into furrows that crisscross each other like a checkerboard of skin.

"She should wait," Mrs. Zabritski says.

"I'll tell her you said so," he says loudly, fighting the magnetism sucking at him out of the unspoken fact that she is a woman and he is a man and both are alone and crazy, a few doors apart in this corridor like a long peach-colored chute glinting with silver lines in the embossed wallpaper. All his life seems to have been a journey into the bodies of women, why should his journey end now? Say she was eighteen when the war ended, he was twelve, she is only six years older. Sixty-two. Not so bad, can still work up some juice. Beu Gold is older, and sexy.

He tries to watch TV but it makes him restless. The last of the summer reruns are mixed in with previews of new shows that don't look that much different: families, laugh tracks, zany dropins, those three-sided living-room sets with the stairs coming down in the background like in Cosby, and front doors on the right through which the comical good-natured grandparents appear, bearing presents and presenting problems. The door is on the right in Cosby and on the left in Roseanne. That fat husband's going to have his cardiovascular problems too. TV families and your own are hard to tell apart, except yours isn't interrupted every six minutes by commercials and theirs don't get bogged down into nothingness, a state where nothing happens, no skit, no zany visitors, no outburst on the laugh track, nothing at all but boredom and a lost feeling, especially when you get up in the morning and the moon is still shining and men are making noisy bets on the first tee.

At first he thinks Janice has tried so hard to reach him those four days before the phone got connected on Thursday that she's lost faith in their old number. Then he begins to accept her silence as a definite statement. I'll never forgive you. O.K., he'll be damned if he'll call her. Dumb mutt. Rich bitch. Working girl yet. Thinks she's so fucking hot running everybody's lives with those accountants and lawyers Charlie put her on to, he's known her so drunk she couldn't get herself to the bathroom to pee. The few times Harry has weakened, impulsively, usually around four or five when he can't stand the sound of the golf games beginning up again and it's still hours to dinner, the telephone in the little limestone house in Penn Park rings and rings without an answer. He hangs up in a way relieved. Nothingness has a purity. Like running. He showed her he still had some kick in his legs and now she's showing him she can still be stubborn. Her silence frightens him. He fights off images of some accident she might have, slipping in the bathtub or driving the Camry off the road, having had too much to drink over at Nelson's or at some Vietnamese restaurant with Charlie, without him knowing. Police frogmen finding her drowned in the back seat like that girl from Wilkes-Barre twenty years ago. But no, he'd be notified, if anything were to happen, somebody would call him, Nelson or Charlie or Benny at the lot, if there still is a lot. Each day down here, events in Pennsylvania seem more remote. His whole life seems, as he rotates through the empty condo rooms, each with its view across the parallel fairways to a wilderness of Spanish-tile roofs, to have been unreal, or no realer than the lives on TV shows, and now it's too late to make it real, to be serious, to reach down into the earth's iron core and fetch up a real life for himself.

The local air down here this time of year is full of violence, as if the natives are on good behavior during the winter season. Hurricane alarms (Gabrielle packs punch), head-on car crashes, masked holdups at Publix. The day after Labor Day, lightning kills a young football player leaving the field after practice; the story says Florida has more deaths by lightning than any other state. In Cape Coral, a Hispanic police officer is charged with beating his cocker spaniel to death with a crowbar. Sea turtles are dying by the thousands in shrimp nets. A killer called Petit whose own mother says he looks like Charles Manson is pronounced mentally fit to stand trial. That Deion Sanders is still making the front page of the Fort Myers News-Press: one day he knocks in four runs and a homer playing baseball for the Yankees, the next he signs for millions to play football for the Atlanta Falcons, and the very next he's being sued by the auxiliary cop he hit last Christmas at that shopping mall, and on Sunday he bobbles a punt return for the Falcons but runs it back for a touchdown anyway, the only man in human history to hit a home run and score a touchdown in pro ball the same week.

Deion has right stuff

Enjoy it while he can. He calls himself Prime Time and is always on the TV news wearing sunglasses and gold chains. Rabbit watches that big kid Becker beat Lendl in the U.S. Tennis Open final and gets depressed, Lendl seemed old and tired and stringy, though he's only twenty-eight.

He talks to nobody, except for Mrs. Zabritski when she catches him in the hall, and the teenage Florida-cracker salesclerks when he buys his food and razor blades and toilet paper, and the people who feel obliged to make chitchat, the other retirees, in the Valhalla dining room; they always ask about Janice so it gets to be embarrassing and he more and more just heats up something frozen and stays in the condo, ransacking the cable channels for something worthy to kill time with. In his solitude, his heart becomes his companion. He listens to it, tries to decipher its messages. It has different rhythms at different times of the day, a thorrumph thorrumph sluggish slightly underwater beat in the morning, and toward evening, when the organism gets tired and excited at once, a more skittish thudding, with the accent on the first beat and grace notes added, little trips and pauses now and then. It twinges when he gets up out of bed and then again when he lies down and whenever he thinks too hard about his situation, having set himself adrift like this. He could have gone over that night and faced the music but how much music is a man supposed to face? So he and Pru did fuck, once. What are we put here in the first place for? These women complain about men seeing nothing but tits and ass when they look at them but what are we supposed to see? We've been programmed to tits and ass. Except guys like Slim and Lyle, the tits got left out of their program. One thing he knows is if he had to give parts of his life back the last thing he'd give back is the fucking, even that sniffly girl in the PolishAmerican Club, she hardly said two words, and wiped her nose with a handkerchief while he was on top of her, but nevertheless she showed him something, a flourishing bush, and took him in, where it mattered. A lot of this other stuff you're supposed to be grateful for isn't where it matters. When he gets up from the deep wicker chair indignantly – he can't stand Cheers now that Shelley Long is gone, that guy with the Cro-Magnon brow he never did like – and goes into the kitchen to refill his bowl of Keystone Corn Chips, which not all of the stores down here carry but you can get over at the Winn Dixie on Pindo Palm Boulevard, Harry's heart confides to him a dainty little gallop, the kind of lacy riff the old swing drummers used to do, hitting the rims as well as the skins and ending with a tingling pop off the high hat, the music of his life. When this happens he gets an excited, hurried, full feeling in his chest. It doesn't hurt, it's just there, muffled inside that mess inside himself he doesn't like to think about, just like he never cared for rare roast beef, as it used to come on the take-out subs from the Chuck Wagon across Route 111 before it became the Pizza Hut. Any sudden motion now, he feels a surge of circulation, a tilt of surprise in the head that makes one leg feel shorter than the other for a second. And the pains, maybe he imagines it, but the contractions of the bands across his ribs, the feeling of something having been sewn there from the inside, seems to cut deeper, more burningly, as though the thread the patch was sewn with is growing thicker, and red hot. When he turns off the light at night, he doesn't like feeling his head sink back onto a single pillow, his head seems sunk in a hole then, it's not that he can't breathe exactly, he just feels more comfortable, less full, if he has his head up on the two pillows and lies facing the ceiling. He can turn on his side but his old way of sleeping, flat on his stomach with his feet pointing down over the edge, has become impossible; there is a nest of purple slithering half-dead thoughts he cannot bear to put his face in. There is a whole host of goblins, it turns out, that Janice's warm little tightly knit body, even snoring and farting as it sometimes did, protected him from. In her absence he sleeps with his heart, listening to it race and skip when his rest is disturbed, when kids who have climbed the fence yell on the empty moonlit golf course, when a siren bleats somewhere in downtown Deleon, when a big jet from the north heads in especially low to the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, churning the air. He awakes in lavender light and then lets his heart's slowing beat drag him back under.

His dreams are delicious, like forbidden candy – intensely colored overpopulated rearrangements of old situations stored in his brain cells, rooms like the little living room at 26 Vista Crescent, with the fireplace they never used and the lamp with the driftwood base, or the old kitchen at 303 Jackson, with the wooden ice box and the gas stove with its nipples of blue flame and the porcelain table with the worn spots, skewed and new and crowded with people at the wrong ages, Mim with lots of green eye makeup at the age Mom was when they were kids, or Nelson as a tiny child sliding out from under a car in the greasy service section of Springer Motors, looking woebegone and sickly with his smudged face, or Marty Tothero and Ruth and even that nitwit Margaret Kosko, he hasn't thought of her name for thirty years, but there she was in his brain cells, just as clear with her underfed city pallor as she was that night in the booth of the Chinese restaurant, Ruth next to him and Margaret next to Mr. Tothero whose head looks lopsided and gray like that of a dying rhinoceros, the four of them eating now in the Valhalla dining room with its garbled bas-relief of Vikings and sumptuous salad bar where the dishes underneath the plastic sneeze guard are bright and various as jewels, arranged in rainbow order like the crayons in the Crayola boxes that were always among his birthday presents in February, a little stadium of waxy-smelling pointed heads there in the bright February window-light, filtered through icicles and the stunned sense of being a year older. Harry wakes from these dreams reluctantly, as if their miniaturized visions are a substance essential to his nutrition, or a whirring finely fitted machine he needs to reinsert himself into, like poor Thelma and her dialysis machine. He awakes always on his stomach, and only as his head clears and re-creates present time, establishing the felt-gray parallel lines he sees as the dawn behind the curved slats of Venetian blinds and the insistent pressure on his face as the cool Gulf breeze coming in where he left the sliding door ajar, does his solitude begin to gnaw again, and his heart to talk to him. At times it seems a tiny creature, a baby, pleading inside him for attention, for rescue, and at others a sinister intruder, a traitor muttering in code, an alien parasite nothing will expel. The pains, when they come, seem hostile and deliberate, the knives of a strengthening enemy.

He makes an appointment with Dr. Morris. He is able to get one surprisingly soon, the day after next. These doctors are scrambling down here, a glut of them, too many miners at the gold rush, the geriatric immigrants still hanging up north this time of year. The office is in one of those low stucco clinics along Route 41. Soothing music plays constantly in the waiting room, entwining with the surf-sound of traffic outside. The doctor has aged since the last appointment. He is bent-over and shufliy, with arthritic knuckles. His shrivelled jaw looks not quite clean-shaven; his nostrils are packed with black hair. His son, young Tom, pink and sleek in his mid-forties, gives Harry a freckled fat hand in the hall, and is wearing his white clinical smock over kelly-green golf slacks. He is established in an adjacent office, primed to take over the full practice. But for now the old doctor clings to his own patients. Harry tries to describe his complex sensations. Dr. Morris, with an impatient jerk of his arthritic hand, waves him toward the examination room. He has him strip to his jockey undershorts, weighs him, tut-tuts. He seats him on the examination table and listens to his chest through his stethoscope, and taps his naked back with a soothing, knobby touch, and solemnly, silently takes Harry's hands in his. He studies the fingernails, turns them over, studies the palms, grunts. Close up, he gives off an old man's sad leathery, moldy smell.

"Well," Harry asks, "what do you think?"

"How much do you exercise?"

"Not much. Not since I got down here. I do a little gardening up north. Golfbut I've kind of run out of partners."

Dr. Morris ponders him through rimless glasses. His eyes, once a sharp blue, have that colorless sucked look to the irises. His eyebrows are messy tangled tufts of white and reddish-brown, his forehead and cheeks are flecked with small blotches and bumps. His projecting eyebrows lift, like turrets taking aim. "You should walk."

"Walk?"

"Briskly. Several miles a day. What sorts of food are you eating?"

"Oh – stuff you can heat up. TV-dinner kind of thing. My wife is still up north but she doesn't cook that much even when she's here. Now, my daughter-in-law -"

"You ever eat any of this salty junk that comes in bags?"

"Well – once in a great while."

"You should watch your sodium intake. Snack on fresh vegetables if you want to snack. Read the labels. Stay away from salt and animal fats. I think we've been through all this, when you were in the hospital" – he lifts his forearm and checks his record – "nine months ago."

"Yeah, I did for a while, I still do, it's just that day to day, it's easier -"

"To poison yourself. Don't. Don't be lazy about it. And you should lose forty pounds. Without the salt in your diet you'd lose ten in retained water in two weeks. I'll give you a diet list, if you've lost the one I gave you before. You may get dressed."

The doctor has grown smaller, or his desk has grown bigger, since Harry's last visit here. He sits down, dressed, at the desk and begins, "The pains -"

"The pains will moderate with better conditioning. Your heart doesn't like what you're feeding it. Have you been under any special stress lately?"

"Not really. Just the normal flack. A couple family problems, but they seem to be clearing up."

The doctor is writing on his prescription pad. "I want you to have blood tests and an EKG at the Community General. Then I want to consult with Dr. Olman. Depending on how the results look, it may be time for another catheterization."

"Oh Jesus. Not that again."

The messy eyebrows go up again, the prim dry lips pinch in. Not a clever generous Jewish mouth. A crabby Scots economy in the way he thinks and talks, on the verge of impatience, having seen so many hopelessly deteriorating patients in his life. "What didn't you like? Were the hot flashes painful?"

"It just felt funny," Harry tells him, "having that damn thing inside me. It's the idea of it."

"Well, do you prefer the idea of a life-threatening restenosis of your coronary artery? It's been, let's see, nearly six months since you had the angioplasty at" -he reads his records, with difficulty – "St. Joseph's Hospital in Brewer, Pennsylvania."

"They made me watch," Harry tells him. "I could see my own damn heart on TV, full of like Rice Krispies."

A tiny Scots smile, dry as a thistle. "Was that so bad?"

"It was" – he searches for the word – "insulting." In fact when you think about it his whole life from here on in is apt to be insulting. Pacemakers, crutches, wheelchairs. Impotence. Once in the Valhalla locker room a very old tall guy – somebody's guest, he never saw him again – came out of the shower and his muscles were so shrivelled his thighs from the back blended right up into his buttocks so his asshole seemed to flow down into the entire long space between his legs. His ass had lost its cheeks and Harry couldn't stop staring at the fleshly chasm.

Dr. Morris is making, in a deliberate, tremulous hand, notes to add to his folder. Without looking up, he says, "There are a number of investigative instruments now that don't involve a catheter. Scans using IV technetium 99 can identify acutely damaged heart muscle. Then there is echocardiography. We won't rush into anything. Let's see what you can do on your own, with a healthier regimen."

"Great."

"I want to see you in four weeks. Here are slips for the blood tests and EKG, and prescriptions for a diuretic and a relaxant for you at night. Don't forget the diet lists. Walk. Not violently, but vigorously, two or three miles a day."

"O.K.," Rabbit says, beginning to rise from his chair, feeling as light as a boy called into the principal's office and dismissed with a light reprimand.

But Dr. Morris fixes him with those sucked-out old blue eyes and says, "Do you have any sort of a job? According to my last information here, you were in charge of a car agency."

"That's gone. My son's taken over and my wife wants me to stay out of the kid's way. The agency was founded by her father. They'll probably wind up having to sell it off."

"Any hobbies?"

"Well, I read a lot of history. I'm a kind of a buff, you could say."

"You need more than that. A man needs an occupation. He needs something to do. The best thing for a body is a healthy interest in life. Get interested in something outside yourself, and your heart will stop talking to you."

The smell of good advice always makes Rabbit want to run the other way. He resumes rising from the chair and takes Dr. Morris' many slips of paper out into the towering heat. The few other people out on the parking lot seem tinted smoke rising from their shadows, barely cxisting. The radio in the Celica is full of voices yammering about Deion Sanders, about Koch losing the New York Democratic primary to a black, about the SAT scores dropping in Lee County, about President Bush's televised appeal to America's schoolchildren yesterday. "The man's not doing anything!" one caller howls.

Well, Rabbit thinks, doing nothing works for Bush, why not for him? On the car seat next to him Dr. Morris' prescriptions and medical slips and Xeroxed diet sheets lift and scatter in the breeze from the car air-conditioning. On another station he hears that the Phillies beat the Mets last night, two to one. Dickie Thon homered with one out in the ninth, dropping the pre-season pennant favorites five and a half games behind the once-lowly Chicago Cubs. Harry tries to care but has trouble. Ever since Schmidt retired. Get interested is the advice, but in truth you are interested in less and less. It's Nature's way.

But he does begin to walk. He even drives to the Palmetto Palm Mall and buys a pair of walking Nikes, with a bubble of special hi-tech air to cushion each heel. He sets out between nine and ten in the morning, after eating breakfast and digesting the News-Press, and then again between four and five, returning to a nap and then dinner and then television and a page or two of his book and a sound sleep, thanks to the walking. He explores Deleon. First, he walks the curving streets of low stucco houses within a mile of Valhalla Village, with unfenced front yards of tallish tough grass half-hiding bits of dried palm frond, a Florida texture in that, a cozy sere Florida scent. Encountering a UPS man delivering or a barking small dog – a flat-faced Pekinese with its silky long hair done up in ribbons – is like finding life on Mars. Then, growing ever fonder of his Nikes (that bubble in the heel, he thought at first it was just a gimmick but maybe it does add bounce), he makes his way to the downtown and the river, where the town first began, as a fort in the Seminole wars and a shipping point for cattle and cotton.

He discovers, some blocks back from the beachfront and the green glass hotels, old neighborhoods where shadowy big spicy gentle trees, live oaks and gums and an occasional banyan widening out on its crutches, overhang wooden houses once painted white but flaking down to gray bareness, with louvered windows and roofs of corrugated tin. Music rises from within these houses, scratchy radio music, and voices raised in argument or jabbery jubilation, bright fragments of overheard life. The sidewalks are unpaved, small paths such as cats make have been worn diagonally between the trees, in and out of private property, the parched grass growing in patches, packed dirt littered with pods and nuts. It reminds Harry of those neighborhoods he blundered into trying to get out of Savannah, but also of the town of his childhood, Mt. Judge in the days of Depression and distant war, when people still sat on their front porches, and there were vacant lots and oddshaped cornfields, and men back from work in the factories would water their lawns in the evenings, and people not long off the farm kept chickens in back-yard pens, and peddled the eggs for odd pennies. Chickens clucking and pecking and suddenly squawking: he hasn't heard that sound for forty years, and hasn't until now realized what he's been missing. For chicken coops tucked here and there dot this sleepy neighborhood he has discovered.

In the daytime here, under the heavy late-summer sun, there are few people moving, just women getting in and out of cars with pre-school children. The slams of their car doors carry a long way down the dusty straight streets, under the live oaks. At some corners there are grocery stores that also sell beer and wine in the permissive Southern way, and pastel-painted bars with the door open on a dark interior, and video rental places with horror and kung-fu tapes displayed in the window, the boxes' colors being bleached by the sun. One day he passes an old-fashioned variety store, in a clapboarded one-story building, displaying all sorts of innocent things – erector sets, model airplane kits, Chinese-checker boards and marbles – that he hadn't known were still being sold. He almost goes in but doesn't dare. He is too white.

Toward late afternoon, when he takes his second walk of the day, the neighborhood begins to breathe, a quickness takes hold, men and boys return to it, and Rabbit walks more briskly, proclaiming with his stride that he is out for the exercise, just passing through, not spying. These blocks are black, and there are miles of them, a vast stagnant economic marsh left over from Deleon's Southern past, supplying the hotels and condos with labor, with waiters and security guards and chambermaids. To Harry, whose Deleon has been a glitzy community of elderly refugees, these blocks feel like a vast secret, and as the shadows lengthen under the trees, and the chickens cease their day-long clucking, his senses widen to grasp the secret better, as when in whispering knickers he would move through Mt. Judge unseen, no taller than a privet hedge, trying to grasp the unspeakable adult meaning of the lit windows, of the kitchen noises filtering across the yards mysterious and damp as jungles. An unseen child would cry, a dog would bark, and he would tingle with the excitement of simply being himself, at this point of time and space, with worlds to know and forever to live, Harold C. Angstrom, called Hassy in those lost days never to be relived. He prolongs his walks, feeling stronger, more comfortable in this strange city where he is at last beginning to exist as more than a visitor; but as darkness approaches, and the music from the glowing slatted windows intensifies, he begins to feel conspicuous, his whiteness begins to glimmer, and he heads back to the car, which he has taken to parking in a lot or at a meter downtown, as base for his widening explorations.

Coming back one day around six-thirty, just in time for a shower and a look at the news while his TV dinner heats in the oven, he is startled by the telephone's ringing. He has ceased to listen for it as intensely as in that first lonely week. When it does ring, it has been one of those recordings ("Hello there, this is Sandra") selling health insurance or a no-frills burial plan or reduced-fee investment services, going through all the numbers by computer, you wonder how it pays, Harry always hangs up and can't imagine who would listen and sign up for this stuff. But this time the caller is Nelson, his son.

"Dad?"

"Yes," he says, gathering up his disused voice, trying to imagine what you can say to a son whose wife you've boffed. "Nellie," he says, "how the hell is everybody?"

The distant voice is gingerly, shy, also not sure what is appropriate. "We're fine, pretty much."

"You're staying clean?" He didn't mean to take the offensive so sharply; the other voice, fragile in its distance, is stunned into silence for a moment.

"You mean the drugs. Sure. I don't even think about coke, except at NA meetings. Like they say, you give your life over to a higher power. You ought to try it, Dad."

"I'm working on it. Listen, no kidding, I am. I'm proud ofyou, Nelson. Keep taking it a day at a time, that's all anybody can do."

Again, the boy seems momentarily stuck. Maybe this came over as too preachy. Who is he to preach? Shit, he was just trying to share, like you're supposed to. Harry holds his tongue.

"There's been so much going on around here," Nelson tells him, "I really haven't thought about myself that much. A lot of my problem, I think, was idleness. Hanging around the lot all day waiting for some action, for the customers to show up, really preys on your selfconfidence. I mean, you have no control. It was degrading."

"I did it, for fifteen years I did it, every day."

"Yeah, but you have a different sort of temperament. You're more happy-go-lucky."

"Stupid, you mean."

"Hey Dad, I didn't call up to quarrel. This isn't exactly fun for me, I've been putting it off. But I got some things to say."

"O.K., say 'em." This isn't working out. He doesn't want to be this way, he is putting his anger at Janice onto the kid. Her silence has hurt him. He can't stop, adding, "You've sure taken your time saying anything, I've been down here all by myself for two weeks. I saw old Dr. Morris and he thinks I'm so far gone I should stop eating."

"Well," Nelson says back, "if you were so crazy to talk you could have come over that night instead of getting in the car and disappearing. We weren't going to kill you, we just wanted to talk it through, to understand what had happened, really, in terns of family dynamics. Pru's as good as admitted it was a way of getting in touch with her own father."

"With Blubberlips Lubell? Tell her thanks a lot." But he is not displeased to hear Nelson taking a firmer tone with him. You're not a man in this world until you've got on top of your father. In his own case, it was easier, the system had beaten Pop so far down already. "Coming over there that night felt like a set-up," he explains to Nelson.

"Well, Mom didn't think any of us should try to get in touch if that's the kind of cowardly trick you were going to pull. She wasn't too happy you telephoned Pru instead of her, either."

"I kept trying our number but she's never home."

"Well, whatever. She wanted me to let you know a couple things. One, she has an offer on the house, not as much as she'd hoped for, one eighty-five, but the market's pretty flat right now and she thinks we should take it. It would reduce the debt to Brewer Trust to the point where we could manage it."

"Let me get this straight. This is the Penn Park house you're talking about? The little gray stone house I've always loved?"

"What other house could you think? We can't tell the Mt. Judge house -where would we all live?"

"Tell me, Nelson,. I'm just curious. How does it feel to have smoked up your parents' house in crack?"

The boy begins to sound more like himself. He whines, "I keep telling you, I was never that much into crack. The crack just came into it toward the end, it was so much more convenient than freebasing. I'm sorry, Jesus. I went to rehab, I took the vows, I'm trying to make amends like they say. Who are you to still be on my case?"

Who indeed? "O.K.," Rabbit says. "Sorry to mention it. What else did your mother tell you to tell me?"

"Hyundai is interested in the lot, the location is just what they want and don't have. They'd enlarge the building out toward the back like I always wanted to do." Goodbye, Paraguay, Rabbit thinks. "They'd keep the service people on, with a little retraining, and some of the sales force, Elvira might go over to Rudy's on 422. Hyundai's made her a counteroffer. But they don't want me. No way. Word gets around, I guess, among these Oriental companies."

"I guess," Harry says. Too much ninjó not enough giri. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry, Dad. It frees me up. I'm thinking of becoming a social worker."

"A social worker!"

"Sure, why not? Help other people instead of myself for a change. It's a two-year course at the Penn State extension, I could still get in for this October."

"Sure, why not, come to think of it," Rabbit agrees. He is beginning to dislike himself, for being so agreeable, for wanting to worm back into everybody's good graces.

"Me and the lawyers all think if it goes through we should lease to Hyundai rather than sell; if we sell the house in Penn Park we wouldn't need any more capital and should keep the lot as an investment, Mom says it's going to be worth millions by the year 2000."

"Wow," Harry says unenthusiastically. "You and your mom are quite a team. Anything else to hit me with?"

"Well, this maybe isn't any of your business, but Pru thought it was. We're trying to get pregnant."

"We?"

"We want to have a third child. All this has made us realize how much we've been neglecting our marriage and how much really we have invested in making it work. Not only for Judy and Roy, but for ourselves. We love each other, Dad."

Maybe this is supposed to make him feel jealous, and there is a pang, just under the right ventricle. But Rabbit's basic emotion is relief, at being excused from having to keep any kind of candle burning at Pru's shrine. Good luck to her, her and her sweet slum hunger. "Great," he tells the boy. He can't resist adding, "Though I'm not so sure social workers make enough to support three kids." And, getting mad, feeling squeezed, he goes on, "And tell your mother I'm not so sure I want to sign our house away. It's not like the lot, we're co-owners, and she needs my signature on the sales agreement. Ifwe split up, my signature ought to be worth quite a bit, tell her."

"Split up?" The boy sounds frightened. "Who's saying anything about splitting up?"

"Well," Harry says, "we seem split up now. At least I don't see her down here, unless she's under the bed. But don't you worry about it, Nelson. You've been through this before and I felt lousy about it. You get on with your own life. It sounds like you're doing fine. I'm proud of you. Or did I say that?"

"But everything kind of depends on selling the Penn Park house."

"Tell her I'll think about it. Tell Judy and Roy I'll give 'em a call one of these days."

"But, Dad -"

"Nelson, I got this low-cal frozen dinner in the oven and the buzzer went off five minutes ago. Tell your mother to call me sometime if she wants to talk about it. Must run. Terrific to talk to you. Really." He hangs up.

He has been buying low-cal frozen meals, raw vegetables like cabbage and carrots, and no more sodium-laden munchies. He has lost three pounds on the bathroom scale, if he weighs himself naked and right in the morning after taking a crap. At night, to keep himself away from the TV and the breadbox in the kitchen drawer and the beer in the refrigerator, he gets into bed and reads the book Janice gave him for last Christmas. Its author has joined Roy Orbison and Bart Giamatti in that beyond where some celebrities like Elvis and Marilyn expand like balloons and become gods but where most shrivel and shrink into yellowing obituaries not much bigger than Harry's will be in the Brewer Standard. In the News-Press he doesn't expect to get an inch. He read in her obituary that the author had been a niece of Roosevelt's Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr. Harry remembers Morgenthau: the pointy-nosed guy who kept urging him and his schoolmates to buy war stamps with their pennies. It's a small world, and a long life in a way.

He has reached the exciting part of the book, where, after years of frustration and starvation and lousy support from his fellow would-be Americans, Washington has hopes of joining up with a French fleet sailing from the Caribbean to trap Cornwallis and his army at York in the Chesapeake Bay. It seems impossible that it will work. The logistics of it need perfect timing, and the communications take weeks, ships to land and back. Anyway, what's in it for France? Instead of an aggressive ally, they were tied to a depen dent client, unable to establish a strong government and requiring transfusions of men-at-arms and money to keep its war effort alive. The war, like all wars, was proving more expensive for the Bourbons than planned. What was in it for the soldiers? The American troops, for too long orphans of the battle, unkempt, underfed and unpaid while Congress rode in carriages and dined at well-laid tables, would not march without pay. What was in it for Washington? He couldn't even have known he'd get his face on the dollar bill. But he hangs in there, patching, begging, scrambling, his only assets the fatheadedness of the British commanders, all gouty noblemen wishing they were home in their castles, and the fact that, just like in Vietnam, the natives weren't basically friendly. Washington gets his troops across the Hudson while Clinton cowers defensively in New York. DeGrasse gets his fleet heading north because Admiral Rodney cautiously chooses the defense of Barbados over pursuit. But, still, the odds of the troops and the ships arriving at the Chesapeake at the same time and Cornwallis remaining a sitting duck in Yorktown are preposterous. All that transport, all those men trudging and horses galloping along the New World's sandy, woodsy roads, winding through forests, past lonely clearings, among bears and wolves and chipmunks and Indians and passenger pigeons, it makes Harry sleepy to think about. The tangle of it all, the trouble. He reads ten pages a night; his is a slow march.

He does not always gravitate in his health walks to the black section of Deleon; he discovers and explores posh streets he never dreamed were there, long roads parallel to the beach, giving the passerby glimpses of backs of houses that front on the ocean, wooden back stairs and sundecks, three-car garages at the end of driveways surfaced in crushed seashells, plantings of hibiscus and jacaranda, splashing sounds coming from a fenced-in swimming pool, the purr of air-conditioners lost amid the retreating and advancing shush of the surf. Posh, shoosh. Some people have it made; not for them a condo where they steal your view of the Gulf from the balcony. No matter how hard you climb, there are always the rich above you, who got there without effort. Lucky stiffs, holding you down, making you discontent so you buy more of the crap advertised on television.

Occasional breaks in the developed oceanfront property permit a look at the Gulf, its striped sails and scooting jet skis, its parachutes being pulled by powerboats, its far gray stationary freighters. Bicyclers in bathing suits pass him with a whirr; a beefy young mailman in blue-gray shorts and socks to match pushes along one of these pouches on rubber wheels they have now, like baby strollers. We're getting soft. A nation of couch potatoes. The man who brought the mail to Jackson Road, he forgets his name, an iron-haired man with a handsome unhappy face, Mom said his wife had left him, used to carry this scuffed leather pouch, leaning to one side against its pull especially on Fridays when the magazines came to the houses, Life and the Post. Mr. Abendroth. That was his name. Left by his wife: Harry as a boy used to try to imagine what could have been so terribly wrong with him, to earn such a disgrace in life.

His Nikes with the bubbles of air in the heels take him along crushed-shell sidewalks, so white they hurt his eyes when the sun is high. And he walks through an area of marinas cut into coral shell, neat straight streets of water sliced out, full of powerboats tied up obedient and empty, their rub rails tapping the sliced coral, their curved sides seeming to tremble and twitch in the sunlight reflected in bobbling stripes off the calm water as it lightly kicks and laps. Tap. Lap. No Trespassing signs abound, but not so much for him, a respectable-looking white man past middle age. Each boat ties up as much money as a house used to cost and a number of them no doubt are involved in cocaine smuggling, put-putting out in the dead of the night when the moon is down, crime and the sea have always mixed, pirates ever since there have been ships, law ends with the land, man is nothing out there, a few bubbles as he goes down under the mindless waves: that must be why Harry has always been afraid of it, the water. He loves freedom but a grassy field is his idea of enough. People down here are crazy about boats but not him. Give him terra firma. Away from the water he walks miles of plain neighborhoods, glorified cabins put up after the war for people without much capital who yet wanted a piece of the sun Washington won for them or else were born here, this strange thin vacation-land their natural home, their houses shedding paint like a sunbather's clothes, surrounded not by barberry and yew bushes but spiky cactuses fattening in the baking heat, America too hot and dry really for European civilization to take deep root.

But it is the widespread black section that draws him back, he doesn't quite know why, whether because he is exerting his national right to go where he pleases or because this ignored part of Deleon is in some way familiar, he's been there before, before his life got too soft. On the Monday after a pretty good weekend for blacks – a black Miss America got elected, and Randall Cunningham brought the Eagles back from being down to the Redskins twenty to nothing – Rabbit ventures several blocks farther than he has dared walk before and comes upon, beyond an abandoned high school built about when Brewer High was, an ochre-brick edifice with tall gridded windows and a piece of Latin in cement over the main entrance, a recreation field – a wide tan emptiness under the sun, with a baseball diamond and backstop at the far end, a pair of soccer goals set up in the outfield, and, nearer the street, two pitted clay tennis courts with wire nets slack and bent from repeated assaults and, also of pale tamped earth, a basketball court. A backboard and netless hoop lifted up on pipe legs preside at either end. A small pack of black boys are scrimmaging around one basket. Legs, shouts. Puffs of dust rise from their striving, stop-and-starting feet. Some benches have been placed in an unmowed strip of seedy blanched weeds next to the cement sidewalk. The benches are backless so you can sit facing the street or facing the field. Rabbit seats himself on the end of one, facing neither way, so he can watch the basketball while seeming to be doing something else, just resting a second on his way through, not looking at anything, minding his own business.

The kids, six of them, in shorts and tank tops, vary in heights and degrees of looseness, but all have that unhurried look he likes to see, missing shots or making them, passing back out and then crossing over in a screen, dribbling as if to drive in and then stopping dead to pass off in a droll behind-the-back toss, imitating the fancy stuff they see on television, all together making a weave, nobody trying too hard, it's a long life, a long afternoon. Their busy legs are up to their knees in a steady haze of pink dust lifting from the clay, their calves dulled but for where sweat makes dark rivulets, their sneakers solidly coated a rosy earth color. There is a breeze here, stirred up by the empty space stretching to the baseball backstop. Rabbit's watch says four o'clock, school is over, but the brick high school has been abandoned, the real action is elsewhere, at some modern low glassy high school you take a bus to, out on the bulldozed edges of the city. Rabbit is happy to think that the world isn't yet too crowded to have a few of these underused pockets left. Grass, he observes, has crept onto the dirt court, in the middle, where the pounding, pivoting feet rarely come. Shallow semicircular troughs have been worn around the baskets at either end.

Though he is sitting some distance away – a good firm chip shot, or a feathered wedge – the players eye him. They're doing this for themselves, not as a show for some fat old honky walking around where he shouldn't be. Where's his car? Feeling heat from their sidelong glances, not wanting so delicate a relation to turn awkward, Harry sighs ostentatiously and heaves himself up from the bench and walks away the way he came, taking note of the street signs so he can find this peaceful place again. If he comes every day he'll blend in. Blacks don't have this racist thing whites do, about keeping their neighborhoods pure. They can't be too angry these days, with their third Miss America just elected. The funny thing about the final judges' panel, it held two celebrities he feels he knows, has taken into himself, loves, actually: Phylicia Rashad, who for his money is the real star of The Cosby Show, with those legs and that nice loose smile, and Mike Schmidt, who had the grace to pack it in when he could no longer produce. So there is life after death of a sort. Schmidt judges. Skeeter lives. And the weekend before last, a young black girl beat Chrissie Evert in the last U.S. Open match she'll ever play. She packed it in too. There comes a time.

Now the News-Press wears daily banner headlines tracking Hurricane Hugo -Deadly Hugo roars into islands, Hugo rips into Puerto Rico. Tuesday, he walks in the expensive beachfront areas and scans the sky for hurricane signs, for clouds God's finger might write, and reads none. In the hall that evening, happening to be standing with him at the elevators, Mrs. Zabntski turns those veiny protuberant eyes up at him out of her skeletal face and pronounces, "Terrible thing."

"What is?"

"The thing coming," she says, her white hair looking already wind-tossed, lifted out from her skull in all directions.

"Oh, it'll never get here," Harry reassures her. "It's all this media hype. You know, hype, phony hullabaloo. They have to make news out of something, every night."

"Yeah?" Mrs. Zabritski says, coyly. The way her neck twists into her hunched shoulders gives her head a flirtatious tilt she may not mean. But then again she may. Didn't he hear on some TV show that even in the Nazi death camps there were romances? This windowless corridor, with its peach-and-silver wallpaper, is an eerie cryptlike space he is always anxious to get out of. The big vase on the marble half-moon table, with green glaze running into golden, could be holding someone's ashes. Still the elevator refuses to arrive. His female companion clears her throat and volunteers, "Wednesday buffet tomorrow. I like extra much the buffet."

"Me too," he tells her. "Except I can't choose and then I wind up taking too much and then eating it all." What is she suggesting, that they go together? That they have a date? He's stopped telling her that Janice is coming down.

"Do you do the kosher?"

"I don't know. Those scallops wrapped in bacon, are they kosher?"

She stares at him as if he were the crazy one, stares so hard her eyeballs seem in danger of snapping the bloody threads that hold them fast in their sockets. Then she must have decided he was joking, for a careful stiff smile slowly spreads across the lower half of her face, crisscrossed by wrinkles like a quilt sewn of tiny squares of skin. He thinks of that little sniffly slut in the Polish-American Club, her silken skin below the waist, below the sweater, and feels bitter toward Janice, for leaving him at his age at the mercy of women. He eats at his table alone but is so disturbed by Mrs. Zabritski's making a pass at him that he takes two Nitrostats to quell his heart.

After dinner, in bed, on September 1, 1781, the French troops make a dazzling impression upon the citizens of Philadelphia. Ecstatic applause greeted the dazzling spectacle of the French as they passed in review in their bright white uniforms and white plumes. Wearing colored lapels and collars of pink, green, violet or blue identifying their regiments, they were the most brilliantly appointed soldiers in Europe. Joseph Reed, the President of the State of Pennsylvania, entertained the French officers at a ceremonial dinner of which the main feature was an immense ninety pound turtle with soup served in its shell. Talk about cholesterol. Didn't seem to bother them, but, then, how old did those poor devils get to be? Not fifty-six, most of them. The troops are scared to march south for fear of malaria. Rochambeau has talked Washington out of attacking New York, and at this point seems to be the brains of the Revolution. He wants to rendezvous with De Grasse at the head of the Chesapeake. De Grasse has evaded Hood by sailing the back-alley route between the Bahamas and Cuba. It will never work.

Hugo headingfor U.S., the News-Press headline says next morning. For breakfast now, Harry has switched from Frosted Flakes to Nabisco Shredded Wheat 'n' Bran, though he forgets exactly why, something about fiber and the bowels. He does hope he never reaches the point where he has to think all the time about shitting. Ma Springer, toward the end, got to talking about her bowel movements like they were family heirlooms, each one precious. On the evening news half the commercials are for laxatives and the other half for hemorrhoid medicine, as if only assholes watch the news. That walking corpse in the locker room. After breakfast Harry walks along Pindo Palm Boulevard and brings back a bag of groceries from Winn Dixie, passing up the Keystone Corn Chips and going heavy on the low-cal frozen dinners. The day's predicted showers come at noon but seem over by three and in a kind of trance Rabbit drives into downtown Deleon, parks at a two-hour meter, and walks the mile to the playing field he discovered Monday. Today two sets of boys are on the dirt court, each using one basket. One set is energetically playing a two-on-two, but the other consists of three boys at a desultory game of what he used to call Horse. You take a shot, and if it goes in the next guy has to make the same shot, and if he misses he's an H, or an H-O, and when he's a HORSE he's out. Rabbit takes the bench within a chip shot of this group and frankly watches – after all, is it a free country or not?

The three are in their early teens at best, and don't know what to make of this sudden uninvited audience. One of these old ofays after some crack or a black boy's dick? Their languid motions stiffen, they jostle shoulders and pass each other sliding silent messages that make one another giggle. One of them perhaps deliberately lets a pass flip off his hands and bounce Harry's way. He leans off his bench end and stops it left-handed, not his best hand but it remembers. It remembers exactly. That taut pebbled roundness, the smooth seams between, the little circlet for taking the air valve. A big pebbled ball that wants to fly. He flips it back, a bit awkwardly, sitting, but still with a little zing to show he's handled one before. Somewhat satisfied, the trio resume Horse, trying skyhooks, under-the-basket layups, fall-back jumpers, crazy improvised underhanded or sidearm shots that now and then go in, by accident or miracle. One such wild toss rockets off the rim and comes Rabbit's way. This time he stands up with the ball and advances with it toward the boys. He feels himself big, a big shape with the sun behind him. His shadow falls across the face of the nearest boy, who wears an unravelling wool cap of many colors. Another boy has the number 8 on his tank top. "What's the game?" Harry asks them. "You call it Horse?"

"We call it Three," the wool cap answers reluctantly. "Three misses, you out." He reaches for the ball but Rabbit lifts it out of his reach.

"Lemme take a shot, could I?"

The boys' eyes consult, they figure this is the way to get the ball back. "Go 'head," Wool Cap says.

Harry is out on an angle to the left maybe twenty feet and as his knees dip and his right arm goes up he feels the heaviness of the years, all those blankets of time, since he did this last. A bank shot. He has the spot on the backboard in his sights, but the ball doesn't quite have the length and, instead of glancing off and in, jams between the wood and hoop and kicks back into the hands of Number 8.

"Hey man," the third one, the one who looks most Hispanic and most sullen, taunts him, "you're history!"

"I'm rusty," Rabbit admits. "The air down here is different than I'm used to."

"You want to see somebody sink that shot?" Number 8, the tallest, asks him. He stands where Harry stood, and opens his mouth and lets his pink tongue dangle the way Michael Jordan does. He gently paws the air above his forehead so the ball flies from his long loose brown hand. But he misses also, hitting the rim on the right. This breaks some of the ice. Rabbit holds still, waiting to see what they will do with him.

The boy in the hat of concentric circles, a Black Muslim hat, Harry imagines, takes the rebound and now says, "Let me sink that mother," and indeed it does go in, though the boy kind of flings it and, unlike Number 8, will never be a Michael Jordan.

Now or never. Harry asks, "Hey, how about letting me play one game of, whaddeya call it, Three? One quick game and I'll go. I'm just out walking for exercise."

The sullen Hispanic-looking boy says to the others, "Why you lettin' this man butt in? This ain't for my blood," and goes off and sits on the bench. But the other two, figuring perhaps that one white man is the tip of the iceberg and the quickest way around trouble is through it, oblige the interloper and let him play. He goes a quick two misses down – a floating double-pump Number 8 pulls off over the stretched hands of an imaginary crowd of defenders, and a left-handed pop the wool hat establishes and Number 8 matches – but then Rabbit finds a ghost of his old touch and begins to dominate. Take a breath of oxygen, keep your eye on the front of the rim, and it gets easy. The distance between your hands and the hoop gets smaller and smaller. You and it, ten feet off the ground, above it all. He even shows them a stunt he perfected in the gravel alleys of Mt. Judge, the two-handed backwards set, the basket sighted upside, the head bent way back.

Seen upside down, how blue and stony-gray the cloudy sky appears – an abyss, a swallowing, upheaving kind of earth! He sinks the backwards set shot and all three of them laugh. These kids never take two-handed set shots, it's not black style, and by doing nothing else from five steps out Rabbit might have cleaned up. But, since they were good sports to let him in, he lets himself get sloppysilly on a few one-handers, and Number 8 gains back control.

"Here you see a Kareem sky-hook," the boy says, and does sink a hook from about six feet out, on the right.

"When I was a kid," Rabbit tells them, "a guy called Bob Pettit, played for St. Louis, used to specialize in those." Almost on purpose, he misses. "That gives me three. I'm out. Thanks for the game, gentlemen."

They murmur wordlessly, like bees, at this farewell. To the boy sitting on the bench out of protest, he says, "All yours, amigo." Bending down to pick up the furled golf umbrella he brought along in case it rained again, Harry smiles to see that his walking Nikes are coated with a pink-tan dust just like these black boys' sneakers.

He walks back to his car at the meter feeling lightened, purged like those people on the Milk of Magnesia commercials who drift around in fuzzy focus in their bathrobes ecstatic at having become "regular." His bit of basketball has left him feeling cocky. He stops at a joy Food Store on the way back to Valhalla Village and buys a big bag of onion-flavored potato chips and a frozen lasagna to heat up in the oven instead of going down to the buffet and risking running into Mrs. Zabritski. He's beginning to think he owes her something, for keeping him company on the floor, for being another lonely refugee.

In the condo, the phone is silent. The evening news is all Hugo and looting in St. Croix and St. Thomas in the wake of the devastation and a catastrophic health-plan repeal in Washington that gets big play down here because of all the elderly and a report on that French airliner that disappeared on the way from Chad to Paris. The wreckage has been found, scattered over a large area of the Sahara desert. From the wide distribution of the debris it would appear to have been a bomb. Just like that plane over Lockerbie, Rabbit thinks. His cockiness ebbs. Every plane had a bomb ticking away in its belly. We can explode any second.

The rooms and furniture of the condo in these days he's been living here alone have taken on the tension and menace of a living person who is choosing to remain motionless. At night he can feel the rooms breathe and think. They are thinking about him. The blank TV, the blond sofa, the birds made of small white shells, the taut bedspread in the room where Nelson and Pru stayed last New Year's, the aqua kitchen cabinets that seemed too intense once they were painted and still do, the phone that refuses to ring all have a certain power, the ability to outlast him. He is flesh, they are inanimate things. The well-sealed hollow space that greeted his arrival seventeen days ago now does brim with fear, with a nervous expectancy that the babble of the TV, the headlines in the paper, the ticking warmth of the oven and the minutes ticking down on the timer panel, even the soft scuffle and rustle of his body's own movements hold at bay for their duration; but when these small commotions are over the silence comes back, the presence of absence, the unanswerable question that surrounds his rustling upright stalk of warm blood. The lasagna is gluey and like napalm on the tongue but he eats it all, a portion for two, while flipping channels between Jennings and Brokaw looking for the best clips of hurricane damage and wind, wild wet wind screaming through rooms just like this one, knocking out entire glass sliding doors and skimming them around like pie plates. Everything flies loose, the world is crashing, nothing in life can be nailed down. Terrific.

He suddenly needs, as suddenly as the need to urinate comes upon a man taking diuretics, to talk to his grandchildren. He is a grandfather, they can't deny him that. He has to look up Nelson's number in the address book on the fake-bamboo desk, it was changed last winter, he's forgotten it already, your mind at Harry's age lets all sorts of things slip. He finds the book, kept in Janice's half-formed schoolgirl hand, in a variety of slants. He dials, having to hang up once when he thinks he might have dialled an 8 for a 9. Pru answers. Her voice is casual, light, tough. He almost hangs up again.

"Hi," he says. "It's me."

"Harry, you really shouldn't be -"

"I'm not. I don't want to talk to you. I want to talk to my grandchildren. Isn't it about time for Roy's birthday?"

"Next month."

"Just think. He'll be four."

"He is four. He'll be five."

"Time for kindergarten," Harry says. "Incredible. I understand you and little Nellie are working on a third. Terrific."

"Well, we're just seeing what happens."

"No more condoms, huh? What about him and AIDS?"

"Harry, please. This is none of your business. But he was tested, if you must know, and is HIV-negative."

"Terrific. One more thing off my mind. The kid's straight, and the kid's clean. Pru, I think I'm going crazy down here. My dreams – they're like cut-up comic strips."

He can picture her smiling wryly at this, her mouth tugging down on one side, her free hand pushing back from her forehead with two fingers stray strands of carrot-colored hair. Sexy; but what has it got her? A would-be social worker for a husband, living space in another woman's house, and a future of drudging and watching her looks fade away in the mirror. Her voice in his ear is like a periscope glimpse, blurred by salt spray, of the upper world. She is up there, he is down here.

Her tone is changing, sinking toward friendliness. Once you've fucked them, their voices ever hold these warm grainy traces. "Harry, what are you doing down there for amusement?"

"Oh, I walk around a lot, getting to know the town. Nice old town, Deleon. Tell Janice if you ever see her that there's a rich Jewish widow giving me the eye."

"She's right here for dinner, actually. We're celebrating because she sold a house. Not your house, she can't sell that until you agree, but a house for the real-estate company, for Pearson and Schrack. She's showing houses for them weekends, till she gets her license."

"That's fantastic! Put her on and I'll congratulate her."

Pru hesitates. "I'll have to ask her if she wants to talk to you."

His stomach feels hollow suddenly, scared. "You don't have to do that. I called to talk to the kids, honest."

"I'll put Judy on, she's right at my elbow, all excited about the hurricane. You take care of yourself, Harry."

"Sure. You know me. Careful."

"I know you," she says. "A crazy man." She sounded Dutch, the cozy settled way she said that. She's assimilating. One more middle-aged Brewer broad.

There is a clatter and whispering and now Judy has the phone and cries, "Oh Grandpa, we're all so worried about you and the hurricane!"

He says, "Who's all so worried? Not my Judy. Not after she brought me in on that crippled Sunfish. The TV says Hugo is going to hit the Carolinas. That's six hundred miles away. It was sunny here today, mostly. I played a little basketball with some kids not much older than you."

"It rained here. All day."

"And you're having Grandma to dinner tonight," he tells her.

Judy says, "She says she doesn't want to talk to you. What did you do to make her so mad?"

"Oh, I don't know. Maybe I channel-surfed too much. Hey, Judy, know what? On the way down I drove right by Disney World, and I promised myself that the next time you're here we'll all go."

"You don't have to. A lot of the kids at school have been, and they say it gets boring."

"How's school going?"

"I like the teachers and all but I can't stand the other kids. They're all assholes."

"Don't say that. Such language. What's the matter, do they ignore you?"

"I wish they would. They tease me about my freckles. They call me Carrottop." Her little voice breaks.

"Well, then. They like you. They think you're terrific. Just don't wear too much lipstick until you're fifteen. Remember what I told you last time we talked?"

"You said don't force it."

"Right. Don't force it. Let nature do its work. Do what your mommy and daddy tell you. They love you very much."

She wearily sighs, "I know."

"You're the light of their lives. You ever hear that expression before, `the light of their lives'?"

"No."

"Well then, you've learned something. Now go do your thing, honey. Could you put Roy on?"

"He's too dumb to talk."

"No he's not. Put him on. Tell him his grandpa wants to give him some words of wisdom."

The phone clatters down and in the background there is a kind of shredded wheat of family noises – he thinks he even hears Janice's voice, sounding decisive the way Ma Springer's used to. Footsteps approach through the living room he knows so well – the Barcalounger, the picture windows with the drawn curtains, the piecrust-edged knickknack table, though the green glass egg, with the teardrop of emptiness inside, that used to sit on it is now on the shelves here, a few feet from his eyes. Pru's voice says, "Janice says she doesn't want to talk to you, Harry, but here's Roy."

"Hi, Roy," Harry says.

Silence. God on the line again.

"How's it going up there? I hear it rained all day."

More silence.

"Are you being a good boy?"

Silence, but with a touch of breathing in it.

"You know," Harry says, "it may not feel like much to you right now, but these are important years."

"Hi, Grandpa," the child's voice at last pronounces.

"Hi," Harry has to respond, though it puts him back to the beginning. "I miss you down here," he says.

Silence.

"A little birdie comes to the balcony every morning and asks, `Where's Roy? Where's Roy?"'

Silence, which is what this lie deserves. But then the child comes out with the other thing he's perhaps been coached to say: "I love you, Grandpa."

"Well, I love you, Roy. Happy Birthday, by the way, for next month. Five years old! Think of it."

"Happy Birthday," the child's voice repeats, in that oddly deep, manlike way it sometimes has.

Harry finds himself waiting for more but then realizes there is no more. "O.K.," he says, "I guess that does it, Roy. I've loved talking with you. Give everybody my love. Hang up now. You can hang up."

Silence, and then a clumsy soft clatter, and the buzz of a dead line. Strange, Rabbit thinks, hanging up his own receiver, that he had to make the child do it first. Chicken in a suicide pact.

Alone, he is terrified by the prospect of an entire evening in these rooms. It is seven-thirty, plenty of time to still make the buffet, though his mouth feels tender from all that hot lasagna and the bagful of onion potato chips, full of sharp edges and salt. He will just go down and pick a few low-cal items off the buffet table. Talking to his family has exhilarated him; he feels them all safely behind him. Without showering, he puts on a shirt, coat, and tie. Mrs. Zabritski isn't at the elevator. In the half-empty Mead Hall, under the berserk gaze of the Viking warriors in the big ceramic mural, he helps himself generously to, among other items, the scallops wrapped in bacon. The mix of textures, of crisp curved bacon and rubbery yielding scallops, in his sensitive mouth feels so delicious his appetite becomes bottomless. He goes back for more, and more creamed asparagus and potato pancakes, then suddenly is so full his heart feels squeezed. He takes a Nitrostat and skips dessert and coffee, even decal Carefully he treads back across the alien texture of that Florida grass and the carpeted traffic island beneath the warm dome of stars, really a deep basin we are looking down into, he saw that this afternoon when he did the upside-down set shot, we are stuck fast to the Earth like flies on a ceiling. He feels stuffed and dizzy. The air is thick, the Milky Way just barely shows, like the faint line of fair hair up the middle of some women's bellies.

He gets back into the condo in time for the last fifteen minutes of Grouting Pains, the only show on TV where every member of the family is repulsive, if you count Roseanne's good-old-boy husband as not repulsive. Then he flips back and forth between Unsolved Mysteries on Channel 20 and an old Abbott and Costello on 36 that must have been funnier when it came out, the same year he graduated from high school. Costello's yips seem mechanical and aggravating, and Abbott looks old, and cruel when he slaps his fat buddy. People yelled and snapped at one another like animals then. Maybe the Sixties did some good after all. Among the commercials that keep interrupting is that Nissan Infiniti one of crickets and lily ponds, no car at all, just pure snob Nature. The Lexus commercials he's seen are almost as vague – an idyllic road shiny with rain. They're both skirting the issue: can the Japanese establish a luxury image? Or will people with thirty-five thousand to burn prefer to buy European? Thank God, Harry no longer has to care. Jake down toward Pottstown has to care, but not Harry.

He brushes his teeth, taking care to floss and rinse with Peridex. Without Janice here he is becoming staid in his habits, another old-fogey bachelor fussing with his plumbing and nostril hairs. Nostril hairs: he never wants to look like Dr. Morris. His double dinner burns in his stomach but when he sits on the toilet nothing comes out. Phillips' Milk of Magnesia, he should get some. Another of their commercials has a black man talking about MOM and that was unfortunate, his color made the shit too real. In bed, on the march to Yorktown, the allied armies come upon British atrocities around Williamsburg. De Grasse's Swedish aide Karl Gustaf Tomquist, a latter-day Viking, noted in his journal, On a beautiful estate a pregnant woman was found murdered in her bed through several bayonet stabs; the barbarians had opened both of her breasts and written above the bed canopy: "Thou shalt nevergive birth to a rebel. " In another room, was just as horrible a sight -five cut-off heads arranged on a cupboard in place of plaster-cast-figures which lay broken to pieces on the floor. Dumb animals were no less spared. The pastures were in many places covered with dead horses, oxen, and cows. Harry tries to fall asleep through a screen of agitation bred by these images. He has always thought of the Revolution as a kind of gentlemen's war, without any of that Vietnam stuff. He begins to have those slippery half-visions, waking dreams that only upon reflection make no sense. He sees a woman's round stomach, with smooth seams and a shining central fuzz, split open and yield yards and yards of red string, like the inside of a baseball. Then he is lying beside a body, a small man dressed all in black, a body limp and without muscle, a ventriloquist's dummy, wearing sunglasses. He awakes in the dark, too early for the sound of lawnmowers, for the cheep of the dull brown bird in the Norfolk pine, for the chatter of the young businessmen's dawn foursomes. He makes his way to the bathroom amid motionless glossy shapes and slants of dim light – the blue oven-timer numerals, the yellowish guard lights on the golfcourse fence. He urinates sitting down, like a woman, and returns to bed. Always he sleeps on his old side of the bed, as if Janice is still on her side. He dreams now of the portal with the round top, but this time it pushes open easily, on noiseless unresistant hinges, upon a bustling brightness within. It is somehow Ma Spnnger's downstairs, only you step down into it, a kind of basement, brighter than her house ever was, with a many-colored carnival gaudiness, like something in Latin America, like the cruise-ship commercial they keep playing in the middle of the news, and full of welcoming people he hardly knows, or can barely remember: Mrs. Zabritski as a slender young girl, though still with that inviting inquisitive crick in her neck, and wearing a racily short fringed skirt like they wore in the Sixties, and Marty Tothero carrying a mailman's pouch that matches his lopsided face, and Mom and Pop in their prime, looking tall and rangy in their Sunday best, bringing a baby girl home from the hospital wrapped in a pink blanket, just its tiny tipped-up nose and a single tiny closedeyelid eye showing, and a tall soberly staring dark-eyed man with lacquered black hair like an old ad for Kreml, who gives him a manly handshake, while Janice at his side whispers to him that this of course is Roy, Roy all grown up, and as tall as he. Awaking, Rabbit can still feel the pressure on his hand, and a smile of greeting dying on his face.

Hugo aims at SE coast. USAir jet crashes in N. Y. river. Bomb probably caused crash of French DC-10. Lee slows boaters in manatee territory. Harry feeds himself oat bran and digests the News-Press. Chaos reigned on St. Croix, as police and National Guardsmen joined machetearmed mobs on a post-Hugo looting spree. Tourists pleaded with reporters landing on the island to get them off: What fucking crybabies. It occurs to him that his dream might relate to all this Caribbean news, the pre-weekend party they have at resort hotels, to welcome the new arrivals and jolly everybody into a melting pot. He steps out onto his narrow balcony to seize the day. The paper said today would be sunny despite Hugo and so it is. The distant blue-green skyscrapers hurl back blobs of light from the morning sun at his back. The Gulf cannot be seen but he can smell it out there. He tries to remember who all was at the party but can't; dream people don't stick to the ribs. The plane in New York skidded off the end of the runway and two people were killed. Just two. One hundred seventy-one died in the Sahara. A caller in London gave all the credit to Allah. Harry doesn't mind that one as much as the Lockerbie Pan Am bomb. Like everything else on the news, you get bored, disasters get to seem a gimmick, like all those TV timeouts in football.

While other, younger men shout and kid on the golf course behind the curtained sliding doors, Harry makes the bed and sweeps the kitchen floor, and adds his orange juice glass and cereal bowl to the orderly array in the dishwasher waiting to add up to a load's worth. Not quite there yet. When Janice shows up at last he wants the state of the place to give her an object lesson in housekeeping.

At ten, he goes out for his morning walk. He looks at the northeast sky, toward the hurricane that is snubbing Florida, and is struck by the clouds, how intricate they are, tattered, gray on white on blue, with tilted sheets of fishscales and rows of long clouds shaggy underneath but rounded on top as if by action of swiftly running water, like the rhythmic ribs of sand the tide leaves. A glassy wind blows through the sunlight. There is something in the air that makes it slightly difficult to breathe. Lack of ozone? Or too much ozone? It may be his imagination, but the sky seems clean of airplanes. Usually you can see them layered in their slow circling slants, coming in to land at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport. The planes have been chased from the sky. Under the sun a kind of highway of haze in bars recedes to the northeast horizon like the reflections the moon stacks up in a calm ocean.

On an impulse he decides to take the Celica and drive downtown and park at a meter near the First Federal Bank and walk toward the black section. This afternoon, he thinks, he might feel like trying to get in some holes of golf. The pro shop called up a few days ago and said they found his shoes.

At the recreation field beyond the empty ochre high school, a lone tall boy in denim cutoffs is shooting baskets by himself. His tank top is an electric turquoise stencilled with a snarling tiger head – orange-and-white-striped fur, yellow eyes, the tongue and end of the nose an unreal violet. On this boy, though, the outfit has a certain propriety, the dignity of a chosen uniform. Older than the kids yesterday, eighteen at least, he is a deliberate performer, making good serious economical moves, dribbling in, studying the ground, staring at the hoop, sizing up the shot with two hands on the ball, letting go with the left hand underneath only at the last while shooting. He wears ankle-high black sneakers and no socks; his haircut is one of those muffin-shapes on the top of the skull, with a series of X's along the sides and back where the shaved part begins. Sitting on the bench, the opposite end from a small red knapsack the boy has evidently left there, Rabbit watches him a good while, while the sun shines and the glassy wind blows and passing clouds dip the dirt field and the surrounding frame houses in shadow. The houses have the colors of sun-faded wash and seem remote and silent. You don't see people going in and out.

To vary his attitude Harry sometimes tips his white face back as if to sunbathe, coating his vision in red, letting photons burn through his translucent eyelids. One time when he opens his eyes the boy is standing close, darker than a cloud. There is something matte about his blackness, and his high cheekbones and the thinness of his lips hint at Indian blood.

"You want sumpin'?" His voice is light, level, unsmiling. It seems to come out of the tiger's snarling violet mouth.

"No, nothing," Rabbit says. "My sitting here bother you?"

"You after no Scotty?" With the hand not holding the basketball against his hip he makes the smallest, most delicate little motion of cracking a whip. Rabbit darts his eyes at the knapsack and brings them back to the tiger's mouth.

"No, thanks," he says. "Never touch it. How about a little one-on-one, though? Since you seem to be out here alone."

"I heard some cheesecake come here yesterday was foolin' around."

"Just foolin', that's what I do. I'm retired."

"How come you come out here to do your foolin'? Lot of foolin'-around places over there in your end of Deleon." He pronounces it the local way, Dealya-in.

"It's pretty boring over there," Harry tells him. "I like it here, where there isn't so much glitz. D'ya mind?"

The boy, taken a bit off balance, thinks for an answer, and Rabbit's hands dart out and rest on the basketball, a more worn one than the boys yesterday had, and not leather-colored but scuffed red, white, and blue. Its rough-smooth surface feels warm. "Come on," he begs, growling the "on." "Gimme the ball."

Tiger's expression doesn't change, but the ball comes loose. With it, Harry strides onto the packed dirt. He feels precariously tall, as when this summer he stepped out alone onto the macadam street. He put on Bermuda shorts this morning, in case he got to play. Dust and reflected sun caress his bare calves, his chalky old man's calves that never had much hair and now have almost none – actually none, where socks have rubbed for over fifty years.

He goes for a jumper from pretty far out and it lucks in. He and Tiger take shots alternately, careful not to touch and bouncing their passes to each other. "You played once," the tall boy says.

"Long time ago. High school. Never got to college. Different style then than you guys have now. But if you feel like practicing your moves one-on-one, I'm game. Play to twenty-one. Honor system – call fouls on yourself."

There seems a leaden sadness in Tiger's stare, but he nods, and takes the ball bounced to him. He walks with a cocky slump shoulders down, butt out -out to the half-court line scratched in the dirt with the heels of sneakers. From the back, the kid is all bones and tendons, polished by sweat but not too much, the sloped shoulders matte beneath the turquoise straps.

"Wait," Harry says. "I better take a pill first. Don't mind me."

The Nitrostat burns under his tongue, and by the time Tiger has come in and has his layup blocked, and Rabbit has dribbled out and missed a twenty-footer, the pill's little kick has reached his other end. He feels loose and deeply free at first. Tiger has some good herky-jerky moves, and can get a step on the heavier older man whenever he wants, but he wastes a lot of shots. The stopand-pop style doesn't give you quite the time to get in harmony with the target, and there isn't enough height to Tiger's arc. The ball comes off his hands flat and turns the hoop's circle into a slot. And he is giving Harry an inch or two in height; Rabbit lifts a few close-in jumpers over the boy's fingertips – soft, high, in, just like that, air balls only right through the netless hoop, a scabby orange circle bent awry by too many show offs practicing slam-dunks and hanging on imitating Darryl Dawkins – and Tiger begins to press tighter, inviting a turn around the corner and a break for the basket if Harry can find the surge. Tiger's elbows and sharp knees rattle off his body and he has to laugh at the old sensation, the jostle and press. He is aware of his belly being slung up and down by the action and of a watery weariness entering into his knees, but adrenaline and nostalgia overrule. Tiger begins to exploit his opponent's slowness more cruelly, more knifingly, slipping and slashing by, and Rabbit kicks himself up a notch, feeling his breath come harder, through a narrower passage. Still, the sun feels good, springing sweat from his pores like calling so many seeds into life. The nature of this exertion is to mix him with earth and sky: earth, the packed pink-tan glaring dust printed over and over with the fanned bars of his Nikes and the cagelike grid of Tiger's black sneakers, stamped earth in the rim of his vision as he dribbles; and sky, wide white sky when he looks up to follow his shot or the other's. The clouds have gathered in an agitated silvery arena around the blinding sun, a blue bullring. Rabbit accidentally in one twist of upward effort stares straight into the sun and can't for a minute brush away its blinking red moon of an afterimage. His chest feels full, his head dizzy; his pulse rustles in his ears, the soaked space between his shoulder blades holds a jagged pain. Tiger retrieves his own rebound and holds the ball against his hip in his graceful way and gives Harry a deliberate stare. His skin is like a grinding stone of fine black grits. His ears are small and flat to his head and his hair above the row of X's is kinked as tight as nature can make it; sun glints from every circular particle.

"Hey man, you all right?"

"I'm. Fine."

"You puffin' pretty bad."

"You wait. Till you're my age."

"How about coolin' it? No big deal."

This is gracious, Rabbit sees, through the sweat in his eyebrows and the pounding of his blood. He feels as if his tree of veins and arteries is covered with big pink blossoms. No big deal. No big deal you're too out of shape for this. No big deal you aren't good even for a little one-on-one. His sweat is starting to cake on his legs, with the dust. He's afraid he's going to lose the rhythm, the dance, the whatever it is, the momentum, the grace. He asks, "Aren't you. Having fun?" He is enjoying scaring Tiger with his big red face, his heaving cheesecake bulk, his berserk icy blue eyes.

Tiger says, "Sure, man. Medium fun." At last he smiles. Wonderful even teeth, in lavender gums. Even the ghetto kids get orthodontia now.

"Let's keep our bargain. Play to twenty-one. Like we said. Eighteen up, right?"

"Right." Neither player has called a foul.

"Go. Your ball, Tiger." The pain in Harry's back is spreading, like clumsy wings. The young black man whips around him for a quick under-the-basket layup. Harry takes the ball out and stops short a step inside the half-court line and, unguarded, lets fly an old-fashioned two-handed set shot. He knows as it leaves his hands it will drop; a groove in the shape of the day guides it down.

"Man," Tiger says admiringly, "that is pure horseshit," and he tries to imitate it with a long one-hander that rockets straight back off the rim, its arc is too low. Rabbit grabs the rebound but then can't move with it, his body weighs a ton, his feet have lost their connection to his head. Tiger knifes in between him and the basket, leans right in his face with a violet snarl, then eases back a little, so Rabbit feels a gap, a moment's slackness in the other in which to turn the corner; he takes one slam of a dribble, carrying his foe on his side like a bumping sack of coal, and leaps up for the peeper. The hoop fills his circle of vision, it descends to kiss his lips, he can't miss.

Up he goes, way up toward the torn clouds. His torso is ripped by a terrific pain, elbow to elbow. He bursts from within; he feels something immense persistently fumble at him, and falls unconscions to the dirt. Tiger catches the ball on its fall through the basket and feels a body bump against him as if in purposeful foul. Then he sees the big old white man, looking choked and kind of sleepy in the face, collapse soundlessly, like a rag doll being dropped. Tiger stands amazed above the fallen body – the plaid Bermuda shorts, the brand-new walking Nikes, the blue golf shirt with a logo of intertwined V's. Adhesive dust of fine clay clings to one cheek of the unconscious flushed face like a shadow, like half of a clown's mask of paint. Shocked numb, the boy repeats, "Pure horseshit."

The impulse to run ripples through him, draining his head of practical thoughts. He doesn't want to get mixed up with nobody. From the end of the bench he retrieves the knapsack, the kind very small Boy Scouts might use on a one-night camping trip, and, holding it and the basketball close to his chest, walks deliberately away. In the middle of the block, he begins to run, under the high excited sky. An airplane goes over, lowering on a slow diagonal.

Seen from above, his limbs splayed and bent, Harry is as alone on the court as the sun in the sky, in its arena of clouds. Time passes. Then the social net twitches; someone who in the houses bordering the lonely recreation field has been watching through a curtained window calls 911. Minutes later, several of the elderly poor battened down against danger in their partitioned little rooms, with only television for a friend, mistake the approaching sirens for a hurricane alert, and believe that the storm has veered back from South Carolina toward them.

"The infarction looks to be transmural," Dr. Ohnan tells Janice, and clarifies: "Right through the gosh-darn wall." He tries to show her with the skin and flesh of his fist the difference between this and a sub-endocardial infarction that you can live with. "Ma'am, the whole left ventricle is shot," he says. "My guess is there was a complete restenosis since this April's procedure up north." His big face, with its sunburnt hook nose and jutting Australian jaw, assaults and confuses Janice in her sleeplessness and grief. All this activity of the doctor's hands, as if he's trying to turn Harry inside out for her, now that it's too late. "Too late for a bypass now," Dr. Olman almost snorts, and with an effort tames his voice into its acquired Southern softness. "Even if by a miracle, ma'am, he were to pull through this present trauma, where you and I have healthy flexible muscle he'd just have a wad of scar tissue. You can replace arteries and valves but there's no substitute yet for live heart muscle." He exudes controlled anger, like a golfer who has missed three short putts in a row. He is so young, Janice groggily thinks, he blames people for dying. He thinks they do it to make his job more difficult.

After last evening's visit from the Penn Park police (how young they seemed, too, how scared to be bringing their ugly news; the Deleon hospital had called them finally because neither the number of the condo phone nor the number they got for his driver'slicense address from Information would answer, she had been out showing a young couple some properties, one a split-level in Brewer Heights and the other an old sandstone farmhouse over toward Oriole; the police came into her driveway the minute she got home, their twirling blue light licking the limestone walls so all the neighbors must have wondered) and then telephoning to reach Mim, who wasn't answering her phone either, and to get seats for herself and Nelson on some kind of night flight to Florida, with Eastern still mostly out on strike and everything going in or out of Atlanta cancelled or delayed because of the hurricane, and then the drive to South Philly and the airport, the miles of Schuylkill Expressway under repair, and among all the confusing barrels with reflective tape Nelson's taking a turn that wound them up in the dead middle of the city right there by Independence Hall – it seemed to happen in a minute – and then the hours of waiting with nothing to do but soothe Nelson and read newspapers people had abandoned on the plastic chairs and remember Harry all the ways he was from the day she first saw him in the high-school corridors and at the basketball games, out there on the court so glorious and blond, like a boy made of marble, and then the empty condo, so tidy except for the stacks of old newspapers he would never throw out and the junk-food crumbs in the wicker easy chair, but no traces of another woman in the bedroom, just that book she got him for last Christmas with the sailing ship on the jacket, and Nelson right beside her overreacting to everything so she almost wished he had let her come alone – after a while the mother in you dies just like heart muscle she supposes – and a few hours of ragged sleep that ended too early when the boys began to mow the greens and the men began to play, with Nelson actually complaining at breakfast that there weren't any Frosted Flakes, just these bran cereals that taste like horse chow, after all this Janice felt much like her husband did emerging from his long drive on Labor Day weekend, as if her body had been pounded all over with sandbags. In the hall, the newspaper was delivered to the door on this as on every other day:

Hugo clobbers

South Carolina

Dr. Morris, the old one, Harry's doctor, must have heard she is in the hospital; he comes into the waiting room of the intensive cardiac care unit looking himself not so well, spotty and whiskery, in an unpressed brown suit. He takes her hand and looks her right in the eye through his rimless glasses and tells her, "Sometimes it's time," which is fine for him, being near eighty, or at least over seventy-five. "He came in to me some days ago and I didn't like what I heard in his chest. But with an impairment like his a person can live two weeks or twenty years, there's no telling. It can be a matter of attitude. He seemed to have become a wee bit morbid. We agreed he needed something to do, he was too young for retirement."

Tears are in Janice's eyes constantly ever since the blue police lights appeared but this remark and the old man's wise and kind manner freshen them. Dr. Morris paid closer attention to Harry toward the end than she did. In a way since those glimpses of him shining on the basketball court she had slowly ceased to see him, he had become invisible. "Did he mention me?" she asks, wondering if Harry had revealed that they were estranged.

The old doctor's sharp Scots gaze pierces her for a second. "Very fondly," he tells her.

At this hour in the morning, a little after nine o'clock, with dirty breakfast trays still being wheeled along the halls, there is no one else in the ICCU waiting room, and Nelson in his own agitation keeps wandering off, to telephone Pru, to go to the bathroom, to get a cup of coffee and some Frosted Flakes at a cafeteria he's discovered in another wing. The waiting room is tiny, with one window looking toward the parking lot, damp at the edges from the lawn sprinklers last night, and a low table of mostly religious magazines, and a hard black settee and chairs and floor lamps of bent pipes and plastic shades, they don't want you to get too comfortable, they really want the patient all to themselves. While she's in this limbo alone Janice thinks she should pray for Harry's recovery, a miracle, but when she closes her eyes to do it she encounters a blank dead wall. From what Dr. Olman said he would never be alive the way he was and as Dr. Morris said, sometimes it's time. He had come to bloom early and by the time she got to know him at Kroll's he was already drifting downhill, though things did look up when the money from the lot began to be theirs. With him gone, she can sell the Penn Park house. Dear God, dear God, she prays. Do what You think best.

A young black nurse appears at the open door and says so softly, yet with a beautiful half-smile, "He's conscious now," and leads her into the intensive-care unit, which she remembers from last December- the central circular desk like an airport control tower, full of TV sets showing in jumping orange lines each patient's heartbeat, and on three sides the rows of individual narrow bedrooms with glass front walls. When she sees her Harry lying in one of them as white as his sheets with all these tubes and wires going in and out of him, lying behind the wall of glass, an emotion so strong she fears for a second she might vomit hits her from behind, a crashing wave of sorrow and terrified awareness of utter loss like nothing ever in her life except the time she accidentally drowned her own dear baby. She had never meant never to forgive him, she had been intending one of these days to call, but the days slipped by; holding her silence had become a kind of addiction. How could she have hardened her heart so against this man who for better or worse had placed his life beside hers at the altar? It hadn't been Harry really, it had been Pru, what man could resist, she and Pru and Nelson had analyzed it to the point of exhaustion. She was satisfied it wouldn't happen again and she had a life to get on with. Now this. Just when. He called her stupid, it was true she was slower than he was, and slower to come into her own, but he was beginning to respect her, it was hard for him to respect any woman, his mother had done that to him, the hateful woman. Though all four of their parents were alive when they courted at Kroll's she and Harry were orphans really, he more than she even. He saw something in her that would hold him fast for a while. She wants him back, back from this element he is sinking in, she wants it so much she might vomit, his desertions and Pru and Thelma and all whatever else are washed away by the grandeur of his lying there so helpless, so irretrievable.

The nurse slides the door open. Above his baby-blue nose tubes for oxygen his blue eyes are open but he doesn't seem to hear. He sees her, sees his wife here, little and dark-complected and stubborn in her forehead and mouth, blubbering like a waterfall and talking about forgiveness. "I forgive you," she keeps saying while he can't remember for what. He lies there floating in a wonderful element, a bed of happy unfeeling that points of pain now and then poke through. He listens to Janice blubber and marvels at how small she grows, sitting in that padded wheelchair they give you, small like something in a crystal snowball, but finer, fine like a spiderweb, every crease in her face and rumpled gray saleswoman's suit. She forgives him, and he thanks her, or thinks that he thanks her. He believes she takes his hand. His consciousness comes and goes, and he marvels that in its gaps the world is being tended to, just as it was in the centuries before he was born. There is a terrible deep dryness in his throat, but he knows the sensation will pass, the doctors will do something about it. Janice seems one of those bright figures in his dream, the party they were having. He thinks of telling her about Tiger and I won but the impulse passes. He is nicely tired. He closes his eyes. The red cave he thought had only a front entrance and exit turns out to have a back door as well.

His wife's familiar and beloved figure has been replaced by that of Nelson, who is also unhappy. "You didn't talk to her, Dad," the kid complains. "She said you stared at her but didn't talk."

O.K., he thinks, what else am 1 doing wrong? He feels sorry about what he did to the kid but he's doing him a favor now, though Nelson doesn't seem to know it.

"Can't you say anything? Talk to me, Dad!" the kid is yelling, or trying not to yell, his face white in the gills with the strain of it, and some unaskable question tweaking the hairs of one eyebrow, so they grow up against the grain. He wants to put the kid out of his misery. Nelson, he wants to say, you have a sister.

But does he say it? His son's anxious straining expression hasn't changed. What he next says, though, shows he may have understood the word "sister." "We phoned Aunt Mim, Dad, and she'll get here as soon as she can. She has to change planes in Kansas City!"

From his expression and the pitch of his voice, the boy is shouting into a fierce wind blowing from his father's direction. "Don't die, Dad, don't!" he cries, then sits back with that question still on his face, and his dark wet eyes shining like stars of a sort. Harry shouldn't leave the question hanging like that, the boy depends on him.

"Well, Nelson," he says, "all I can tell you is, it isn't so bad." Rabbit thinks he should maybe say more, the kid looks wildly expectant, but enough. Maybe. Enough.