Rabbit Is Rich

III

A NEW SHOP has opened on Weiser Street in one of those scruffy blocks between the bridge and the mall, opposite the enduring old variety store that sells out-of-town newspapers, warm unshelled peanuts, and dirty magazines for queers as well as straights. From the look of it the new store too might be peddling smut, for its showcase front window is thoroughly masked by long thin blond Venetian blinds, and the lettering on its windows is strikingly discreet. Gold letters rimmed in black and very small simply say FISCAL ALTERNATIVES and below that, smaller yet, Old Coins, Silver and Gold Bought and Sold. Harry passes the place by car every day, and one day, there being two empty metered spaces he can slide into without holding up traffic, he parks and goes in. The next day, after some business at his bank, the Brewer Trust two blocks away, he comes out of Fiscal Alternatives with thirty Krugerrands purchased for $377.14 each, including commission and sales tax, coming to $11,314.20. These figures had been run off inside by a girl with platinum hair; her long scarlet fingernails didn't seem to hamper her touch on the hand computer. She was the only person visible, at her long glass-topped desk, with beige sides and swivel chair to match. But there were voices and monitoring presences in other rooms, back rooms into which she vanished and from which she emerged with his gold. The coins came in cunning plastic cylinders of fifteen each, with round bluetinted lids that suggested dollhouse toilet seats; indeed, bits of what seemed toilet paper were stuffed into the hole of this lid to make the fit tight and to conceal even a glimmer of the sacred metal. So heavy, the cylinders threaten to tear the pockets off his coat as Harry hops up Ma Springer's front steps to face his family. Inside the front door, Pru sits knitting on the gray sofa and Ma Springer has taken over the Barcalounger to keep her legs up while some quick-upped high yellow from Philly is giving her the six-o'clock news. Mayor Frank Rizzo has once again denied charges of police brutality, he says, in a rapid dry voice that pulls the rug out from every word. Used to be Philadelphia was a distant place where no one dared visit, but television has pulled it closer, put its muggy murders and politics right next door. "Where's Janice?" Harry asks.

Ma Springer says, "Shh."

Pru says, ` Janice took Nelson over to the club, to fill in with some ladies' doubles, and then I think they were going to go shopping for a suit."

"I thought he bought a new suit this summer."

"That was a business suit. They think he needs a three-piece suit for the wedding."

"Jesus, the wedding. How're you liking your sessions with what's-his-name?"

"I don't mind them. Nelson hates them."

"He says that just to get his grandmother going," Ma Springer calls, twisting to push her voice around the headrest. "I think they're really doing him good." Neither woman notices the hang of his coat, though it feels like a bull's balls tugging at his pockets. It's Janice he wants. He goes upstairs and snuggles the two dense, immaculate cylinders into the back of his bedside table, in the drawer where he keeps a spare pair of reading glasses and the rubber tip on a plastic handle he is supposed to massage his gums with to keep out of the hands of the periodontist and the pink wax earplugs he stuffs in sometimes when he has the jitters and can't tune out the house noise. In this same drawer he used to keep condoms, in that interval between when Janice decided the Pill was bad for her and when she went and had her tubes burned, but that was a long while ago and he threw them all away, the whole tidy tin box of them, after an indication, the lid not quite closed, perhaps he imagined it, that Nelson or somebody had been into the box and filched a couple. From about that time on he began to feel crowded, living with the kid. As long as Nelson was socked into baseball statistics or that guitar or even the rock records that threaded their sound through all the fibers of the house, his occupation of the room down the hall was no more uncomfortable than the persistence of Rabbit's own childhood in an annex of his brain; but when the stuff with hormones and girls and cars and beers began, Harry wanted out of fatherhood. Two glimpses mark the limits of his comfort in this matter of men descending from men. When he was about twelve or thirteen he walked into his parents' bedroom in the half-house on Jackson Road not expecting his father to be there, and the old man was standing in front of his bureau in just socks and an undershirt, innocently fishing in a drawer for his undershorts, that boxer style that always looked sad and dreary to Harry anyway, and here was his father's bare behind, such white buttocks, limp and hairless, mute and helpless flesh that squeezed out shit once a day and otherwise hung there in the world like linen that hadn't been ironed; and then when Nelson was about the same age, a year older he must have been for they were living in this house already and they moved when the kid was thirteen, Harry had wandered into the bathroom not realizing Nelson would be stepping out of the shower and had seen the child frontally: he had pubic hair and, though his body was still slim and pint-sized, a man-sized prick, heavy and oval, unlike Rabbit's circumcised and perhaps because of this looking brutal, and big. Big. This was years before the condoms were stolen. The drawer rattles, stuck, and Harry tries to ease it in, hearing that Janice and Nelson have come into the house, making the downstairs resound with news of tennis and clothing stores and of the outer world. Harry wants to save his news for Janice. To knock her out with it. The drawer suddenly eases shut and he smiles, anticipating her astonished reception of his precious, lustrous, lead-heavy secret.

As with many anticipated joys it does not come exactly as envisioned. By the time they climb the stairs together it is. later than it should be, and they feel unsettled and high. Dinner had to be early because Nelson and Pru were going over to Soupy, as they both call Campbell, for their third session of counseling. They returned around nine-thirty with Nelson in such a rage they had to break out the dinner wine again while with a beer can in hand he did an imitation of the young minister urging the church's way into the intimate space between these two. "He keeps talking about the church being the be-riide of Ke-riist. I kept wanting to ask him, Whose little bride are you?"

"Nelson," Janice said, glancing toward the kitchen, where her mother was making herself Ovaltine.

"I mean, it's obscene," Nelson insisted. "What does He do, fuck the church up the ass?"

Pru laughed, Harry noticed. Did Nelson do that to her? It was about the last thing left a little out of the ordinary for these kids, blowing all over the magazines these days, giving head they call it, there was that movie Shampoo where Julie Christie who you associate with costume dramas all decked out in bonnets announced right on the screen she wanted to blow Warren Beatty, actually said it, and it wasn't even an X, it was a simple R, with all these teen-age dating couples sitting there holding hands as sweetly as if it was a return of Showboat with Kathryn Grayson and Howard Keel, the girls laughing along with the boys. Pru's long-boned mute body does not declare what it does, nor her pale lips, that in repose have a dry, pursed look, an expression maybe you learn in secretarial school. Great in bed, Nelson had said.

"I'm sorry, Mom, but he really pisses me off. He gets me to say these things I don't believe and then he grins and acts jolly like it's all some kind of crappy joke. Mom-mom, how can you and those other old ladies stand him?"

Bessie had come in from the kitchen, her mug of Ovaltine steaming as she stared it steady and her hair pinned tight up against her skull with a net over it all, for bed. "Oh," she said, "he's higher than some, and lower than others. At least he doesn't choke us on all the incense like the one that became a Greek Orthodox priest finally. And he did a good job of getting the diehards to accept the new form. My tongue still sticks at some of the responses."

Pru offered, "Soupy seemed quite proud that the new service doesn't have `obey."'

"People never did obey, I guess they might as well leave it out," Ma said.

Janice seemed detennined to have a go at Nelson herself. "Really you shouldn't put up such resistance, Nelson. The man is leaning over backwards to give us a church service, and I think from the way he acts he sincerely likes you. He really does have a feel for young people."

"Does he ever," Nelson said, soft enough for Ma Springer not to hear, then mimicking loudly, "Dear Mater and Pater were aincient. It's such a whunder I got here at all. In case you whunder why I have this toadstool look."

"You shouldn't mind people's physical appearance," Janice said.

"Oh but Mater, one simply does." For some while they went on in this way, it was as good as television, Nelson imitating Soupy's mellow voice, Janice pleading for reason and charity, Ma Springer drifting in some world of her own where the Episcopal Church has presided since Creation; but Harry felt above them all, a golden man waiting to take his wife upstairs and show her their treasure. When the joking died, and a rerun of M*A*S*H came on that Nelson wanted to see, the young couple looked tired and harried suddenly, sitting there on the sofa, being beaten into one. Already each took an accustomed place, Pru over on the end with the little cherry side table for her créme de menthe and her knitting, and Nelson on the middle cushion with his feet in their button-soled Adidas up on the reproduction cobbler's bench. Now that he didn't go to the lot he didn't bother to shave every day, and the whiskers came in as reddish bristle on his chin and upper lip but his cheeks were still downy. To hell with this scruffy kid. Rabbit has decided to live for himself, selfishly at last.

When Janice comes back from the bathroom naked and damp inside her terrycloth robe, he has locked their bedroom door and arranged himself in his underpants on the bed. He calls in a husky and insinuating voice, "Hey. Janice. Look. I bought us something today."

Her dark eyes are glazed from all that drinking and parenting downstairs; she took the shower to help clear her head. Slowly her eyes focus on his face, which must show an intensity of pleasure that puzzles her.

He tugs open the sticky drawer and is himself startled to see the two tinted cylinders sliding toward him, still upright, still there. He would have thought something so dense with preciousness would broadcast signals bringing burglars like dogs to a bitch in heat. He lifts one roll out and places it in Janice's hand; her arm dips with the unexpected weight, and her robe, untied, falls open. Her thin brown used body is more alluring in this lapsed sheath of rough bright cloth than a girl's; he wants to reach in, to where the shadows keep the damp fresh.

"What is it, Harry?" she asks, her eyes widening.

"Open it," he tells her, and when she fumbles too long at the transparent tape holding on the toilet-seat-shaped little lid he pries it off for her with his big fingernails. He removes the wad of tissue paper and spills out upon the quilted bedspread the fifteen Krugerrands. Their color is redder than gold in his mind had been. "Gold," he whispers, holding up close to her face, paired in his palm, two coins, showing the two sides, the profile of some old Boer on one and a kind of antelope on the other. "Each of these is worth about three hundred sixty dollars," he tells her. "Don't tell your mother or Nelson or anybody."

She does seem bewitched, taking one into her fingers. Her nails scratch his palm as she lifts the coin off. Her brown eyes pick up flecks of yellow. "Is it all right?" Janice asks. "Where on earth did you get them?"

"A new place on Weiser across from the peanut store that sells precious metals, buys and sells. It was simple. All you got to do is produce a certified check within twenty-four hours after they quote you a price. They guarantee to buy them back at the going rate any time, so all you lose is their six per cent commission and the sales tax, which at the rate gold is going up I'll have made back by next week. Here. I bought two stacks. Look." He takes the other thrillingly hefty cylinder from the drawer and undoes the lid and spills those fifteen antelopes slippingly upon the bedspread, thus doubling the riches displayed. The spread is a lightweight Pennsylvania Dutch quilt, small rectangular patches sewed together by patient biddies, graded from pale to dark to form a kind of dimensional effect, of four large boxes having a lighter and darker side. He lies down upon its illusion and places a Krugerrand each in the sockets of his eyes. Through the chill red pressure of the gold he hears Janice say, "My God. I thought only the government could have gold. Don't you need a license or anything?"

"Just the bucks. Just the fucking bucks, Wonder Woman." Blind, he feels amid the pure strangeness of the gold his prick firming up and stretching the fabric of his jockey shorts.

"Harry. How much did you spend?"

He wills her to lift down the elastic of his underpants and suck, suck until she gags. When she fails to read his mind and do this, he removes the coins and gazes up at her, a dead man reborn and staring. No coffin dark greets his open eyes, just his wife's out-of-focus face, framed in dark hair damp and stringy from the shower and fringy across the forehead so that Mamie Eisenhower comes to mind. "Eleven thousand five hundred more or less," he answers. "Honey, it was just sitting in the savings account drawing a lousy six per cent. At only six per cent these days you're losing money, inflation's running about twelve. The beauty of gold is, it loves bad news. As the dollar sinks, gold goes up. All the Arabs are turning their dollars into gold. Webb Murkett told me all about it, the day you wouldn't come to the club."

She is still examining the coin, stroking its subtle relief, when he wants her attention to turn to him. He hasn't had a hard-on just blossom in his pants since he can't remember when. Lorry Bingaman days. "It's pretty," Janice admits. "Should you be supporting the South Africans though?"

"Why not, they're making jobs for the blacks, mining the stuff. The advantage of the Krugerrand, the girl at this fiscal alternatives place explained, is it weighs one troy ounce exactly and is easier to deal with. You can buy Mexican pesos if you want, or there's a little Canadian maple leaf, though there she said it's so fine the gold dust comes off on your hands. Also I liked the look of that deer on the back. Don't you?"

"I do. It's exciting," Janice confesses, at last looking at him, where he lies tumescent amid scattered gold. "Where are you going to keep them?" she asks. Her tongue sneaks forward in thought, and rests on her lower lip. He loves her when she tries to think.

"In your great big cunt," he says, and pulls her down by the lapels of her rough robe. Out of deference to those around them in the house – Ma Springer just a wall's thickness away, her television a dim rumble, the Korean War turned into a joke – Janice tries to suppress her cries as he strips the terrycloth from her willing body and the coins on the bedspread come in contact with her skin. The cords of her throat tighten; her face darkens as she strains in the grip of indignation and glee. His underwear off, the overhead light still on, his prick up like a jutting piece of pink wreckage, he calms her into lying motionless and places a Krugerrand on each nipple, one on her navel, and a number on her pussy, enough to mask the hair with a triangle of unsteady coins overlapping like snake scales. If she laughs and her belly moves the whole construction will collapse. Kneeling at her hips, Harry holds a Krugerrand by the edge as if to insert it in a slot. "No!" Janice protests, loud enough to twitch Ma Springer awake through the wall, loud enough to jar loose the coins so some do spill between her legs. He hushes her mouth with his and then moves his mouth south, across the desert, oasis to oasis, until he comes to the ferny jungle, which his wife lays open to him with a humoring toss of her thighs. A kind of interest compounds as, seeing red, spilled gold pressing on his forehead, he hunts with his tongue for her clitoris. He finds what he thinks is the right rhythm but doesn't feel it take; he thinks the bright overhead light might be distracting her and risks losing his hard-on in hopping from the bed to switch it off over by the door. Turning then in the half-dark he sees she has turned also, gotten up onto her knees and elbows, a four-legged moonchild of his, her soft cleft ass held high to him in the gloom as her face peeks around one shoulder. He fucks her in this position gently, groaning in the effort of keeping his jism in, letting his thoughts fly far. The pennant race, the recent hike in the factory base price of Corollas. He fondles her underside's defenseless slack flesh, his own belly massive and bearing down. Her back looks so breakable and brave and narrow – the long dent of its spine, the cross-bar of pallor left by her bathing-suit bra. Behind him his bare feet release a faraway sad odor. Coins jingle, slithering in toward their knees, into the depressions their interlocked weights make in the mattress. He taps her ass and asks, "Want to turn over?"

"Uh-huh." As an afterthought: "Want me to sit on you first?"

"Uh-huh." As an afterthought: "Don't make me come."

Harry's skin is bitten as by ice when he lies on his back. The coins: worse than toast crumbs. So wet he feels almost nothing, Janice straddles him, vast and globular in the patchy light that filters from the streetlight through the big copper beech. She picks up a stray coin and places it glinting in her eye, as a monocle. Lording it over him, holding him captive, she grinds her wet halves around him; self to self, bivalve and tuber, this is what it comes to. "Don't come," she says, alarmed enough so that her mock-monocle drops to his tense abdomen with a thud. "Better get underneath," he grunts. Her body then seems thin and black, silhouetted by the scattered circles, reflecting according to their tilt. Gods bedded among stars, he gasps in her ear, then she in his.

After this payoff, regaining their breaths, they can count in the semi-dark only twenty-nine Krugerrands on the rumpled bedspread, its landscape of ridged green patches. He turns on the overhead light. It hurts their eyes. By its harshness their naked skins seem also rumpled. Panic encrusts Harry's drained body; he does not rest until, naked on his knees on the rug, a late strand of spunk looping from his reddened glans, he finds, caught in the crack between the mattress and the bed side-rail, the precious thirtieth.

He stands with Charlie gazing out at the bleak September light. The tree over beyond the Chuck Wagon parking lot has gone thin and yellow at its top; above its stripped twigs the sky holds some diagonal cirrus, bands of fat in bacon, promising rain tomorrow. "Poor old Carter," Harry says. "D'ya see where he nearly killed himself running up some mountain in Maryland?"

"He's pushing," Charlie says. "Kennedy's on his tail." Charlie has returned from his two weeks' vacation with a kiss of Florida tan undermined by a weak heart and the days intervening. He did not come from Florida directly. Simultaneously with his return Monday a card sent from Ohio arrived at Springer Motors, saying in his sharply slanted book-keeper's hand,

Hi Gang -

Detoured on way back from Fla. thru Gt. Smokies. Southern belles, mile after mile. Now near Akron, exploded radial capital of the world. Fuel economy a no-no out here, big fins amp; V-8s still reign.

Miss you all lots.Chas.

The joke especially for Harry was on the other side: a picture of a big flat-roofed building like a quarter of a pie, identified as KENT STATE STUDENT COMPLEX, embracing the largest open-stack library in northeastern Ohio.

"Sort of pushing yourself these days, aren't you?" Harry asks him. "How was Melanie all that while?"

"Who says I was with Melanie?"

"You did. With that card. Jesus, Charlie, a young kid like that grinding your balls could kill you."

"What a way to go, huh champ? You know as well as I do it's not the chicks that grind your balls, it's these middle-aged broads time is running out on."

Rabbit remembers his bout with Janice amid their gold, yet still remains jealous. "Whajja do in Florida with her?"

"We moved around. Sarasota, Venice, St. Pete's. I couldn't talk her out of the Atlantic side so we drove over from Naples on 75, old Alligator Alley, and did the shmeer – Coral Gables, Ocean Boulevard, up to Boca and West Palm. We were going to take in Cape Canaveral but ran out of time. The bimbo didn't even bring a bathing suit, the one we bought her was one of these new ones with the sides wide open. Great figure. Don't know why you didn't appreciate her."

"I couldn't appreciate her, it was Nelson brought her into the house. It'd be like screwing your own daughter."

Charlie has a toothpick left over from lunch downtown, a persimmon-colored one, and he dents his lower lip with it as he gazes out the tired window. "There's worse things," he offers bleakly. "How's Nelson and the bride-to-be?"

"Pru." Harry sees that Charlie is set to guard the details of his trip, to make him pull them out one by one. Miles of Southern belles. Fuck this guy. Rabbit has secrets too. But, thinking this, he can picture only a farm, its buildings set down low in a hollow.

"Melanie had a lot to say about Pru."

"Like what?"

"Like she thinks she's weird. Her impression is that shy as she seems she's a tough kid up from a really rocky upbringing and isn't too steady on her feet, emotionally speaking."

"Yeah well, some might say a girl who gets her kicks screwing an old crow like you is pretty weird herself."

Charlie looks away from the window straight up into his eyes, his own eyes behind their tinted spectacles looking watery. "You shouldn't say things like that to me, Harry. Both of us getting on, two guys just hanging in there ought to be nice to each other."

Harry wonders from this if Charlie knows how threatened his position is, Nelson on his tail.

Charlie continues, "Ask me whatever you want about Melanie. Like I said, she's a good kid. Solid, emotionally. The trouble with you, champ, is you have screwing on the brain. My biggest kick was showing this young woman something of the world she hadn't seen before. She ate it up – the cypresses, that tower with the chimes. She said she'd still take California though. Florida's too flat. She said if this Christmas I could get my ass out to Carmel she'd be happy to show me around. Meet her mother and whoever else is around. Nothing heavy."

"How much – how much future you think you two have?"

"Harry, I don't have much future with anybody." His voice is whispery, barely audible. Harry would like to take it and wirebrush it clean.

"You never know," he reassures the smaller man.

"You know," Stavros insists. "You know when your time is running out. If life offers you something, take it."

"O.K., O.K. I will. I do. What'd your poor old Manna mou do, while you were bombing around with Bimbo in the Everglades?"

"Well," he says, "funny thing there. A female cousin of mine, five or so years younger, I guess has been running around pretty bad, and her husband kicked her out this summer, and kept the kids. They lived in Norristown. So Gloria's been living in an apartment by herself out on Youngquist a couple blocks away and was happy to babysit for the old lady while I was off and says she'll do it again any time. So I have some freedom now I didn't used to have." Everywhere, it seems to Harry, families are breaking up and different pieces coming together like survivors in one great big lifeboat, while he and Janice keep sitting over there in Ma Springer's shadow, behind the times.

"Nothing like freedom," he tells his friend. "Don't abuse it now. You asked about Nelson. The wedding's this Saturday. Immediate family only. Sorry."

"Wow. Poor little Nellie. Signed, sealed, and delivered."

Harry hurries by this. "From what Janice and Bessie let drop the mother will probably show up. The father's too sore."

"You should see Akron," Charlie tells him. "I'd be sore too if I had to live there."

"Isn't there a golf course out there where Nicklaus holds a tournament every year?"

"What I saw wasn't any golf course."

Charlie has come back from his experiences tenderized, nostalgic it seems for his life even as he lives it. So aged and philosophical he seems, Harry dares ask him, "What'd Melanie think of me, did she say?"

A very fat couple are prowling the lot, looking at the little cars, testing by their bodies, sitting down on air beside the driver's doors, which models might be big enough for them. Charlie watches this couple move among the glittering roofs and hoods a minute before answering. "She thought you were neat, except the women pushed you around. She thought about you and her balling but got the impression you and Janice were very solid."

"You disillusion her?"

"Couldn't. The kid was right."

"Yeah how about ten years ago?"

"That was just cement."

Harry loves the way he ticks this off, Janice's seducer; he loves this savvy Greek, dainty of heart beneath his coat of summer checks. The couple have wearied of trying on cars for size and get into their old car, a '77 Pontiac Grand Prix with cream hardtop, and drive away. Harry asks suddenly, "How do you feel about it? Think we can live with Nelson over here?"

Charlie shrugs, a minimal brittle motion. "Can he live with me? He wants to be a cut above Jake and Rudy, and there aren't that many cuts in an outfit like this."

"I've told them, Charlie, if you go I go."

"You can't go, Chief. You're family. Me, I'm old times. I can go."

"You know this business cold, that's what counts with me."

"Ah, this isn't selling. It's like supermarkets now: it's shelfstacking, and ringing it out at the register. When it was all used, we used to try to fit a car to every customer. Now it's take it or leave it. With this seller's market there's no room to improvise. Your boy had the right idea: go with convertibles, antiques, something with a little amusement value. I can't take these Jap bugs seriously. This new thing called the Tercel we're supposed to start pushing next month, have you seen the stars? One point five liter engine, twenty-inch tires. It's like those little cars they used to have on merry-go-rounds for the kids who were too scared to ride the horses."

"Forty-three m.p.g. on the highway, that's the star people care about, the way the world's winding."

Charlie says, "You don't see too many bugs down in Florida. The old folks are still driving the big old hogs, the Continentals, the Toronados, they paint 'em white and float around. Of course the roads, there isn't a hill in the state and never any frost. I've been thinking about the Sun Belt. Go down there and thumb my nose at the heating-oil bills. Then they get you on the air-conditioning. You can't escape."

Harry says, "Sodium wafers, that's the answer. Electricity straight from sunlight. It's about five years off; that's what Consumer Reports was saying. Then we can tell those Arabs to take their fucking oil and grease their camels with it."

Charlie says, "Traffic fatalities are up. You want to know why they're up? Two reasons. One, the kids are pretty much off drugs now and back into alcohol. Two, everybody's gone to compacts and they crumple like paper bags."

He chuckles and twirls the flavored toothpick against his lower lip as the two men gaze out the window at the river of dirty tin. An old low-slung station wagon pulls into the lot but it has no wooden rack on top; though Harry's heart skips, it is not his daughter. The station wagon noses around and heads out into 111 again, just casing. Burglaries are up. Harry asks Charlie, "Melanie really thought about" – he balks at "balling," it is not his generation's word -"going to bed with me?"

"That's what the lady said. But you know these kids, they come right out with everything we used to keep to ourselves. Doesn't mean there's more of it. Probably less as a matter of fact. By the time they're twenty-five they're burnt out."

"I was never attracted to her, to tell you the truth. Now this new girl of Nelson's -"

"I don't want to hear about it," Charlie says, pivoting to go back to his desk. "They're about to get married, for Chrissake."

Running. Harry has continued the running he began up in the Poconos, as a way of getting his body back from those sodden years when he never thought about it, just ate and did what he wanted, restaurant lunches downtown in Brewer plus the Rotary every Thursday, it begins to pack on. The town he runs through is dark, full of slanty alleys and sidewalks cracked and tipped from underneath, whole cement slabs lifted up by roots like crypt lids in a horror movie, the dead reach up, they catch at his heels. He keeps moving, pacing himself, overriding the protest of his lungs and fashioning of his stiff muscles and tired blood a kind of machine that goes where the brain directs, uphill past the wideeaved almost Chinese-looking house where the butch women hammer, their front windows never lit, must watch a lot of television or else snuggle into whatever it is they do early or else saving electricity, women won't get paid the same as men until ERA passes, at least having a nest of them moving into the neighborhood not like blacks or Puerto Ricans, they don't breed.

Norway maples shade these streets. Not much taller than when he was a boy. Grab a low branch and hoist yourself up into a hornets' nest. Split the seeds and stick them to your nose to make yourself a rhinoceros. Panting, he cuts through their shadow. A slim pain cuts through his high left side. Hold on, heart. Old Fred Springer popped off in a blaze of red, anyway Rabbit has always imagined the last thing you'd see in a heart attack would be a bright flash of red. Amazing, how dark these American houses are, at nine o'clock at night. A kind of ghost town, nobody else on the sidewalk, all the chickens in their coop, only a brownish bit of glow showing through a window crack here and there, night light in a child's room. His mind strides on into a bottomless sorrow, thinking of children. Little Nellie in his room newly moved into Vista Crescent, his teddies stacked in a row beside him, his eyes like theirs unable to close, scared of dying while asleep, thinking of baby Becky who did fall through, who did die. A volume of water still stood in the tub many hours later, dust on the unstirring gray surface, just a little rubber stopper to lift and God in all His strength did nothing. Dry leaves scrape and break underfoot, the sound of fall, excitement in the air. The Pope is coming, and the wedding is Saturday. Janice asks him why is his heart so hard toward Nelson. Because Nelson has swallowed up the boy that was and substituted one more pushy man in the world, hairy wrists, big prick. Not enough room in the world. People came north from the sun belt in Egypt and lived in heated houses and now the heat is being used up, just the oil for the showroom and offices and garage has doubled since '74 when he first saw the Springer Motors books and will double in the next year or two again and when you try to cut it down to where the President says, the men in the garage complain, they have to work with their bare hands, working on a concrete slab they can wear thick socks and heavy soles, he thought at one point he should get them all that kind of golf glove that leaves the fingertips bare but it would have been hard to find ones for the right hand, guys under thirty now just will not work without comfort and all the perks, a whole new ethic, soft, socialism, heat tends to rise in a big space like that and hang up there amid the crossbraces, if they built it now they'd put in twenty inches of insulation. If the Pope is so crazy about babies why doesn't he try to keep them warm?

He is running along Potter Avenue now, still uphill, saving the downhill for the homeward leg, along the gutter where the water from the ice plant used to run, an edge of green slime, life tries to get a grip anywhere, on earth that is, not on the moon, that's another thing he doesn't like about the thought of climbing through the stars. Once clowning on the way to school along the gutter that now is dry he slipped on the slime and fell in, got his knickers soaked, those corduroy knickers they used to make you wear, swish swish, and the long socks, incredible how far back he goes now, he can remember girls in first grade still wearing highbutton shoes: Margaret Schoelkopf, she was so full of life her nose would start to bleed for no reason. When he fell in the gutter of ice-plant water his knickers were so wet he had to run home crying and change, he hated being late for school. Or for anywhere, it was something Mom drummed into him, she didn't so much care where he went but he had to be home on time, and for most of his life this sensation would overtake him, anywhere, in the locker room, on a 16A bus, in the middle of a fuck, that he was late for somewhere and he was in terrible dark trouble, a kind of tunnel would open in his mind with Mom at the end of it with a switch. Do you want a switching Hassy? she would ask him as if asking if he wanted dessert, the switches came off the base of the little pear tree in the narrow back yard on Jackson Road; angry yellowjackets would hover over the fallen rotting fruit. Lately he no longer ever feels he is late for somewhere, a strange sort of peace at his time of life: a thrown ball at the top of its arc is for a second still. His gold is rising in value, ten dollars an ounce or so in the papers every day, ten times thirty is three hundred smackers without his lifting a finger, you think how Pop slaved. Janice putting that monocle on was a surprise, the only trouble with her in bed is she still doesn't like to blow, something mean about her mouth and always was, Melanie had those funny saucy stubborn cherry lips, a wonder Charlie didn't pop his aorta in some motel down there in the sands, how lovely it is when a woman forgets herself and opens her mouth to laugh or exclaim so wide you see the whole round cavern the ribbed pink roof and the tongue like a rug in a hall and the butterfly-shaped blackness in the back that goes down into the throat, Pru did that the other day in the kitchen at something Ma Springer said, her smile usually wider on one side than the other and a bit cautious like she might get burned, but all the girls coming up now blew, it was part of the culture, taken for granted, fuck-and-suck movies they call them, right out in the open, you take your date, ADULT FILMS NEW EACH FRIDAY in the old Baghdad on upper Weiser where in Rabbit's day they used to go see Ronald Reagan being co-pilot against the Japs. Lucky Nelson, in a way. Still he can't envy him. A worn-out world to find his way in. Funny about mouths, they must do so much, and don't tell what went into them, even a minute later. One thing he does hate is seeing bits of food, rice or cereal or whatever, hanging in the little hairs of a face during a meal. Poor Mom in those last years.

His knees are jarring. His big gut jounces. Each night he tries to extend his run among the silent dark houses, through the cones of the streetlights, under the ice-cold lopsided moon, that the other night driving home in the Corona he happened to see through the tinted upper part of the windshield and for a second thought, My God, it is green. Tonight he pushes himself as far as Kegerise Street, a kind of alley that turns downhill again, past black-sided small factories bearing mysterious new names like Lynnex and Data Development and an old stone farmhouse that all the years he was growing up had boarded windows and a yard full of tumbledown weeds milkweed and thistle and a fence of broken slats but now was all fixed up with a little neat sign outside saying Albrecht Stamm Homestead and inside all sorts of authentic hand-made furniture and quaint kitchen equipment to show what a farmhouse was like around 1825 and in cases in the hall photographs of the early buildings of Mt. Judge before the turn of the century but not anything of the fields when the area of the town was in large part Stamm's farm, they didn't have cameras that far back or if they did didn't point them at empty fields. Old man Springer had been on the board of the Mt. Judge Historical Society and helped raise the funds for the restoration, after he died Janice and Bessie thought Harry might be elected to take his place on the board but it didn't happen, his checkered past haunting him. Even though a young hippie couple lives upstairs and leads the visitors through, to Harry the old Stamm place is full of ghosts, those old farmers lived weird lives, locking their crazy sisters in the attic and strangling the pregnant hired girl in a fit of demon rum and hiding the body in the potato bin so that fifty years later the skeleton comes to light. Next door the Sunshine Athletic Association used to be, that Harry as a boy had thought was full of athletes, so he hoped he could some day belong, but when twenty years ago he did get inside it smelled of cigar butts and beer gone flat in the bottom of the glass. Then through the Sixties it fell into dilapidation and disrepute, the guys who drank and played cards in there getting older and fewer and more morose. So when the building came up for sale the Historical Society bought it and tore it down and made where it was into a parking lot for the visitors who came by to the Stamm Homestead on their way to Lancaster to look at the Amish or on their way to Philadelphia to look at the Liberty Bell. You wouldn't think people could find it tucked away on what used to be Kegerise Alley but an amazing number do, white-haired most of them. History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.

Now he is really rolling, the alley slants down past the body shop and a chicken house turned into a little leather-working plant, these ex-hippies are everywhere, trying to hang on, they missed the boat but had their fun, he has pushed through the first wave of fatigue, when you think you can't drag your body another stride, your thighs pure pain. Then second wind comes and you break free into a state where your body does it by itself, a machine being ridden, your brain like the astronaut in the tip of the rocket, your thoughts just flying. If only Nelson would get married and go away and come back rich twenty years from now. Why can't these kids get out on their own instead of crawling back? Too crowded out there. The Pope, Jesus, you have to hope he isn't shot, just like America to have some nut take a shot to get his name in the papers, that Squeaky Fromme who used to lay the old cowboys for the Manson ranch, all the ass that Manson had you'd think it would have made him nicer since it's being sexually frustrated that causes war, he read somewhere. He knows how the Pope feels about contraception though, he could never stand rubbers, even when they gave them to you free in the Army, this month's Consumer Reports has an article on them, page after page, all this testing, some people apparently prefer bright-colored ones with ribs and little nubbins to give the woman an added tickle inside, did the staffers on the magazine all ask the secretaries to screw or what, some people even liked ones made out of sheep intestine, the very thought of it makes him crawl down there, with names like Horizon Nuda and Klingtie Naturalamb, Harry couldn't read to the end of the article, he was so turned off. He wonders about his daughter, what she uses, country methods they used to kid about in school, squat on a cornstalk, she looked pretty virginal in that one glimpse of her and who wouldn't be, surrounded by rubes? Ruth would set her straight, what pigs men are. And that barking dog would be a discouragement too.

There is a longer way home, down Jackson to Joseph and over, but tonight he takes the shortcut, diagonally across the lawn of the big stone Baptist church, he likes the turf under his feet for a minute, the church facade so dark, to the concrete steps that take you down onto Myrtle, and on past the red, white, and blue post office trucks parked in a row at the back platform, the American flag hanging limp and bright over the fake gable out front, used to be you shouldn't fly the flag at night but now all the towns do it with a spotlight, waste of electricity, soaking up the last dribble of energy flying the flag. Myrtle leads into Joseph from the other end. They will be sitting around waiting for him, watching the boob tube or going on about the wedding, getting silly about it now that it's so close and Soupy has declared all systems go, they've invited Charlie Stavros after all and Grace Stuhl and a batch of other biddies and a few friends from the Flying Eagle and it turns out Pru or Teresa as they call her in the announcement they want to send out has an aunt and uncle in Binghamton, New York, who will come down even if the father is some sorehead who wants to strangle his daughter and put her in the potato bin. In he will come and Janice will make her usual crack about him killing himself with a heart attack, it's true he does get very red in his white face, he can see in the mirror in the foyer, with his blue eyes, Santa Claus without the whiskers, and has to bend over the back of a chair gasping for a while to get his breath, but that's part of the fun, giving her a scare, poor mutt what would she do without him, have to give up the Flying Eagle and everything, go back to selling nuts in Kroll's. In he will come and there Pru will be sitting on the sofa right next to Nelson like the police officer who takes the criminal from one jail to another on the train without letting the handcuffs show, the one thing Harry is fearful of now that Pru is in the family is stinking up the room with his sweat. Tothero had it that time in the Sunshine, an old man's sour sad body smell, and getting out of bed in the morning sometimes Harry surprises it on himself, this faraway odor like a corpse just beginning to sweeten. Middle age is a wonderful country, all the things you thought would never happen are happening. When he was fifteen, forty-six would have seemed the end of the rainbow, he'd never get there, if a meaning of life was to show up you'd think it would have by now.

Yet at moments it seems it has, there are just no words for it, it is not something you dig for but sits on the top of the table like an unopened dewy beer can. Not only is the Pope coming but the Dalai Lama they bounced out of Tibet twenty years ago is going around the U.S.A. talking to divinity schools and appearing on TV talk shows, Harry has always been curious about what it would feel like to be the Dalai Lama. A ball at the top of its arc, a leaf on the skin of a pond. A water strider in a way is what the mind is like, those dimples at the end of their legs where they don't break the skin of the water quite. When Harry was little God used to spread in the dark above his bed like that and then when the bed became strange and the girl in the next aisle grew armpit hair He entered into the blood and muscle and nerve as an odd command and now He had withdrawn, giving Harry the respect due from one well-off gentleman to another, but for a calling card left in the pit of the stomach, a bit of lead true as a plumb bob pulling Harry down toward all those leaden dead in the hollow earth below.

The front lights of Ma Springer's big shadowy stucco house blaze, they are all excited by the wedding, Pru now has a constant blush and Janice hasn't played tennis for days and Bessie evidently gets up in the middle of the night and goes downstairs to watch on the bigger TV the old Hollywood comedies, men in big-brimmed hats and little mustaches, women with shoulders broader than their hips swapping wisecracks in newspaper offices and deluxe hotel suites, Ma must have seen these movies first when she had all black hair and the Brewer downtown was a great white way. Harry jogs in place to let a car pass, one of those crazy Mazdas with the Wankel engine like a squirrel wheel, Manny says they'll never get the seal tight enough, crosses from curb to curb under the streetlight, notices Janice's Mustang isn't parked out front, sprints down the brick walk and up the porch steps, and at last on the porch, under the number 89, stops running. His momentum is such that the world for a second or two streams on, seeming to fling all its trees and housetops outward against starspangled space.

In bed Janice says, "Harry."

"What?" After you run your muscles have a whole new pulled, sheathed feel and sleep comes easy.

"I have a little confession to make."

"You're screwing Stavros again."

"Don't be so rude. No, did you notice the Mustang wasn't left out front as usual?"

"I did. I thought, `How nice."'

"It was Nelson who put it out back, in the alley. We really ought to clean out that space in the garage some day, all these old bicycles nobody uses. Melanie's Fuji is still in there."

"O.K., good. Good for Nelson. Hey, are you going to talk all night, or what? I'm beat."

"He put it there because he didn't want you to see the front fender."

"Oh no. That son of a bitch. That little son of a bitch."

"It wasn't his fault exactly, this other man just kept coming, though I guess the Stop sign was on Nelson's street."

"Oh Christ."

"Luckily both hit their brakes, so it really was just the smallest possible bump."

"The other guy hurt?"

"Well, he said something about whiplash, but then that's what people are trained to say now, until they can talk to their lawyer."

"And the fender is mashed?"

"Well, it's tipped in. The headlight doesn't focus the same place the other does. But it's fine in the daytime. It's really hardly more than a scratch."

"Five hundred bucks' worth. At least. The masked fenderbender strikes again."

"He really was terrified to tell you. He made me promise I wouldn't, so you can't say anything to him."

"I can't? Then why are you telling me? How can I go to sleep now? My head's pounding. It's like he has it in a vise."

"Because I didn't want you noticing by yourself and making a scene. Please, Harry. Just until after the wedding. He's really very embarrassed about it."

"The fuck he is, he loves it. He has my head in a vise and he just keeps turning the screw. That he'd do it to your car, after you've been knocking yourself out for him, that's really gratitude."

"Harry, he's about to get married, he's in a state."

"Well, shit, now I'm in a state. Where're some clothes? I got to go outside and see the damage. That flashlight in the kitchen, did it ever get new batteries?"

"I'm sorry I told you. Nelson was right. He said you wouldn't be able to handle it."

"Oh did he say that? Our own Mr. Cool."

"So just settle down. I'll take care of the insurance forms and everything."

"And who do you think pays for the increase in our insurance rates?"

"We do," she says. "The two of us."

St. John's Episcopal Church in Mt. Judge is a small church that never had to enlarge, built in 1912 in the traditional low-sided steep-roofed style, of a dark gray stone hauled from the north of the county, whereas the Lutheran church was built of local red sandstone, and the Reformed, next to the fire station, of brick. Ivy has been encouraged to grow around St. John's pointed windows. Inside, it is dark, with knobby walnut pews and dados and, on the walls between stained-glass windows of Jesus in violet robes making various gestures, marble plaques in memory of the dead gentry who contributed heavily here, in the days when Mt. Judge was a fashionable suburb. WHITELAW. STOVER. LEGGETT. English names in a German county, gone to give tone to the realms of the departed after thirty years as wardens and vestrymen. Old man Springer had done his bit but the spaces between the windows were used up by then.

Though the wedding is small and the bride an Ohio workingman's daughter, yet in the eyes of passersby the gathering would make a bright brave flurry before the church's rust-red doors, on the verge of four o'clock this September the twenty-second. A person or persons driving past this Saturday afternoon on the way to the MinitMart or the hardware store would have a pang of wanting to be among the guests. The organist with his red robe over his arm is ducking into the side door. He has a goatee. A little grubby guy in green coveralls like a troll is waiting for Harry to show up so he can get paid for the flowers, Ma said it was only decent to decorate the altar at least, Fred would have died to see Nellie married in St. John's with a bare altar. Two bouquets of white mums and baby's breath come to $38.50, Rabbit pays him with two twenties, it was a bad sign when the banks started paying out in twenties instead of tens, and yet the two-dollar bill still isn't catching on. People are superstitious. This wasn't supposed to be a big wedding but in fact it's costing plenty. They've had to take three rooms over at the Four Seasons Motel on Route 422: one for the mother of the bride, Mrs. Lubell, a small scared soul who looks like she thinks they'll all stick forks into her if she drops her little smile for a second; and another for Melanie, who came across the Commonwealth with Mrs. Lubell from Akron in a bus, and for Pru, who has been displaced from her room – Melanie's old room and before that the sewing dummy's – by the arrival from Nevada of Mim, whom Bessie and Janice didn't want in the house at all but Harry insisted, she's his only sister and the only aunt Nelson has got; and the third room for this couple from Binghamton, Pru's aunt and uncle, who were driving down today but hadn't checked in by three-thirty, when the shuttle service Harry has been running in the Corona picked up the two girls and the mother to bring them to the church. His head is pounding. This mother bothers him, her smile has been on her face so long it's as dry as a pressed flower, she doesn't seem to belong to his generation at all, she's like an old newspaper somebody has used as a drawer liner and then in cleaning house you lift out and try to read; Pru's looks must have all come from the father's side. At the motel the woman kept worrying that the messages they were leaving at the front desk for her tardy brother and sister-in-law weren't clear enough, and began to cry, so her smile got damp and ruined. A case of Mumm's second-best champagne waits back in the Joseph Street kitchen for the little get-together afterwards that nobody would call a reception; Janice and her mother decided they should have the sandwiches catered by a grandson of Grace Stuhl's who would bring along this girlfriend in a serving uniform. And then they ordered a cake from some wop over on Eleventh Street who was charging one hundred and eighty-five American dollars for a cake, a cake – Harry couldn't believe it. Every time Nelson turns around, it costs his father a bundle.

Harry stands for a minute in the tall ribbed space of the empty church, reading the plaques, hearing Soupy's giggle greet the three dolled-up women off in a side room, one of those out-of-sight chambers churches have where the choir puts itself into robes and the deacons count the collection plates and the communion wine is stored where the acolytes won't drink it and the whole strange show is made ready. Billy Fosnacht was supposed to be best man but he's up at Tufts so a friend of theirs from the Laid-Back called Slim is standing around with a carnation in his lapel waiting to usher. Uncomfortable from the way this young man's slanted eyes brush across him, Rabbit goes outside to stand by the church doors, whose rust-red paint in the September sun gives back heat so as to remind him of standing in his fresh tan uniform on a winter day in Texas at the side of the barracks away from the wind, that incessant wind that used to pour from that great thin sky across the treeless land like the whine of homesickness through this soldier who had never before been away from Pennsylvania.

Standing there thus for a breath of air, in this pocket of peace, he is trapped in the position of a greeter, as the guests suddenly begin to arrive. Ma Springer's stately dark-blue Chrysler pulls up, grinding its tires on the curb, and the three old ladies within claw at the door handles for release. Grace Stuhl has a translucent wart off center on her chin but she hasn't forgotten how to dimple. "I bet but for Bessie I'm the only one here went to your wedding too," she tells Harry on the church porch.

"Not sure I was there myself," he says. "How did I act?"

"Very dignified. Such a tall husband for Janice, we all said."

"And he's kept his looks," adds Amy Gehringer, the squattest of these three biddies. Her face is enlivened with rouge and a flaking substance the color of Russian salad dressing. She pokes him in the stomach, hard. "Even added to them some," the old lady wisecracks.

"I'm trying to take it off," he says, as if he owes her something. "I go jogging most every night. Don't I, Bessie?"

"Oh it frightens me," Bessie says. "After what happened to Fred. And you know there wasn't an ounce extra on him."

"Take it easy, Harry," Webb Murkett says, coming up behind with Cindy. "They say you can injure the walls of your intestines, jogging. The blood all rushes to the lungs."

"Hey Webb," Harry says, flustered. "You know my motherin-law."

"My pleasure," he says, introducing himself and Cindy all around. She is wearing a black silk dress that makes her look like a young widow. Would that she were, Jesus. Her hair has been fluffed up by a blow-dryer so it doesn't have that little-headed wet-otter look that he loves. The top of her dress is held together with a pin shaped like a bumblebee at the lowest point of a plunging V-shaped scoop.

And Bessie's friends are staring at gallant Webb with such enchantment Harry reminds them, "Go right in, there's a guy there leading people to their seats."

"I want to go right up front," Amy Gehringer says, "so I can get a good look at this young minister Bessie raves so about."

"'Fraid this screwed up golf for today," Harry apologizes to Webb.

"Oh," Cindy says, "Webb got his eighteen in already, he was over there by eight-thirty."

"Who'd you get to take my place?" Harry asks, jealous and unable to trust his eyes not to rest on Cindy's tan décolletage. The tops of tits are almost the best part, nipples can be repulsive. Just above the bumblebee a white spot that even her bikini bra hides from the sun shows. The little cross is up higher, just under the sexy hollow between her collarbones. What a package.

"The young assistant pro went around with us," Webb confides. "A seventy-three, Harry. A seventy-three, with a ball into the pond on the fifteenth, he hits it so far."

Harry is hurt but he has to greet the Fosnachts, who are pushing behind. Janice didn't want to invite them, especially after they decided not to invite the Harrisons, to keep it all small. But since Nelson wanted Billy as best man Harry thought they had no choice, and also even though Peggy has let herself slide there is that aura about a woman who's once upon a time taken off all her clothes for you however poorly it turned out. What the hell, it's a wedding, so he bends down and kisses Peggy to one side of the big wet hungry mouth he remembers. She is startled, her face broader than he remembers. Her eyes swim up at him in the wake of the kiss, but since one of them is a walleye he never knows which to search for expression.

Ollie's handshake is limp, sinewy, and mean: a mean-spirited little loser, with ears that stick out and hair like dirty straw. Harry crunches his knuckles together a little, squeezing. "How's the music racket, Ollie? Still tootling?" Ollie is one of these reedy types, common around Brewer, who can pick out a tune on anything but never manage to make it pay. He works in a music store, Chords 'n' Records, renamed Fidelity Audio, on Weiser Street near the old Baghdad, where the adult movies show now.

Peggy, her voice defensive from the kiss, says, "He sits in on synthesizer sometimes with a group of Billy's friends."

"Keep at it, Ollie, you'll be the Elton John of the Eighties. Seriously, how've you both been? Jan and I keep saying, we got to have you two over." Over Janice's dead body. Funny, just that one innocent forlorn screw, and Janice holds a grudge, where he's forgiving as hell of Charlie, just about his best friend in the world in fact.

And here is Charlie. "Welcome to the merger," Harry kids.

Charlie chuckles, his shrug small and brief. He knows the tide is running against him, with this marriage. Still, he has some reserve within him, some squared-off piece of philosophy that keeps him from panicking.

"You seen the bridesmaid?" Harry asks him. Melanie.

"Not yet."

"The three of 'em went over into Brewer last night and got drunk as skunks, to judge from Nelson. How's that for a way to act on the night before your wedding?"

Charlie's head ticks slowly sideways in obliging disbelief. This elderly gesture is jarred, however, when Mim, dressed in some crinkly pants outfit in chartreuse, with ruffles, grabs him from behind around the chest and won't let go. Charlie's face tenses in fright, and to keep him from guessing who it is Mim presses her face against his back so that Harry fears all her makeup will rub off on Charlie's checks. Mim comes on now any hour of the day or night made up like a showgirl, every tint and curl exactly the way she wants it; but really all the creams and paints in a world of jars won't counterfeit a flexible skin, and rimming your eyes in charcoal may be O.K. for these apple-green babies that go to the disco but at forty it makes a woman look merely haunted, staring, the eyes lassoed. Her teeth are bared as she hangs on, wrestling Charlie from behind like an eleven-year-old with Band-Aids on her knees. "Jesus," Charlie grunts, seeing the hands at his chest with their purple nails long as grasshoppers, but slow to think back through all the women he has known who this might be.

Embarrassed for her, worried for him, Harry begs, "C'mon, Mim."

She won't let go, her long-nosed tamed-up face mussed and distorted as she maintains the pressure of her grip. "Gotcha," she says. "The Greek heartbreaker. Wanted for transporting a minor across state lines and for misrepresenting used cars. Put the handcuffs on him, Harry."

Instead Harry puts his hands on her wrists, encountering bracelets he doesn't want to bend, thousands of dollars' worth of gold on her bones, and pulls them apart, having set his own body into the jostle for leverage, while Charlie, looking grimmer every second, holds himself upright, cupping his fragile heart within. Mim is wiry, always was. Pried loose at last, she touches herself rapidly here and there, putting each hair and ruffle back into place.

"Thought the boogyboo had gotten you, didn't you Charlie?" she jeers.

"Pre-owned," Charlie tells her, pulling his coat sleeves taut to restore his dignity. "Nobody calls them used cars anymore."

"Out west we call them shitboxes."

"Shh," Harry urges. "They can hear you inside. They're about to get started." Still exhilarated by her tussle with Charlie, and amused by the disapproving conscientious man her brother has become, Mim wraps her arms around Harry's neck and hugs him hard. The frills and pleats of her fancy outfit crackle, crushing against his chest. "Once a bratty little sister," she says in his ear, "always a bratty little sister."

Charlie has slipped into the church. Mim's eyelids, shut, shine in the sunlight like smears left by some collision of greased vehicles – often on the highways Harry notices the dark swerves of rubber, the gouges of crippled metal left to mark where something unthinkable had suddenly happened to someone. Though it happened the day's traffic continues. Hold me, Harry, she used to cry out, little Mim in her hood between his knees as their sled hit the cinders spread at the bottom of Jackson Road, and orange sparks flew. Years before, a child had died under a milk truck sledding here and all the children were aware of this: that child's blank face leaned toward them out of each snowstorm. Now Harry sees a glisten in Mim's eyelids as in the backs of the Japanese beetles that used to cluster on the large dull leaves of the Bolgers' grape arbor out back. Also he sees how her ear lobes have been elongated under the pull of jewelry and how her ruffles shudder as she pants, out of breath after her foolery. She is sinking through all her sins and late nights toward being a pathetic hag, he sees, one of those women you didn't believe could ever have been loved, with only Mom's strong bones in her face to save her. He hesitates, before going in. The town falls away from this church like a wide flight of stairs shuffled together of roofs and walls, a kind of wreck wherein many Americans have died.

He hears the side door where the organist hurried in open, and peeks around the corner, thinking it might be Janice needing him. But it is Nelson who steps out, Nelson in his cream-colored threepiece marrying suit with pinched waist and wide lapels, that looks too big for him, perhaps because the flared pants almost cover the heels of his shoes. Three hundred dollars, and when will he ever wear it again?

As always when he sees his son unexpectedly Harry feels shame. His upper lip lifts to call out in recognition, but the boy doesn't look his way, just appears to sniff the air, looking around at the grass and down toward the houses of Mt. Judge and then up the other way at the sky at the edge of the mountain. Run, Harry wants to call out, but nothing comes, just a stronger scent of Mim's perfume at the intake of breath. Softly the child closes the door again behind him, ignorant that he has been seen.

Behind the ajar rust-red portal the church is gathering in silence toward its eternal deed. The world then will be cloven between those few gathered in a Sunday atmosphere and all the sprawling fortunate Saturday remainder, the weekday world going on about its play. From childhood on Rabbit has resented ceremonies. He touches Mim on the arm to take her in, and over the spun glass of her hairdo sees a low-slung dirty old Ford station wagon with the chrome roof rack heightened by rough green boards crawl by on the street. He isn't quick enough to see the passengers, only gets a glimpse of a fat angry face staring from a back window. A fat mannish face yet a woman's.

"What's the matter?" Mim asks.

"I don't know. Nothing."

"You look like you've seen a ghost."

"I'm worrying about the kid. How do you feel about all this?"

"Me. Aunt Mim? It seems all right. The chick will take charge."

"That's good?"

"For a while. You must let go, Harry. The boy's life is his, you live your own."

"That's what I've been telling myself. But it feels like a copout."

They go in. A pathetic little collection of heads juts up far down front. This mysterious slant-eyed Slim, smoothly as if he were a professional usher, escorts Mim down the aisle to the second pew and indicates with a graceful sly gesture where Harry should settle in the first, next to Janice. The space has been waiting. On Janice's other side sits the other mother. Mrs. Lubell's profile is pale; like her daughter she is a redhead but her hair has been rinsed to colorless little curls, and she never could have had Pru's height and nice rangy bearing. She looks, Harry can't help thinking it, like a cleaning lady. She gives over to him her desiccated but oddly perfect smile, a smile such as flickered from the old black-and-white movie screens, coy and certain, a smile like a thread of pure melody, that when she was young must have seemed likely to lift her life far above where it eventually settled. Janice has pulled back her head to whisper with her mother in the booth behind. Mim has wound up in the same pew as Ma Springer and her biddies. Stavros sits with the Murketts in the third pew, he has Cindy's neckline to look down when he gets bored, let him see what country-club tits look like after all those stuffed grape leaves. In willful awkwardness the Fosnachts were seated or seated themselves across the aisle, on what would have been the bride's side if there had been enough to make a side, and are quarrelling in whispers between themselves: much hissed emphasis from Peggy and stoic forward-gazing mutter from Ollie. The organist is doodling through the ups and downs of some fugue to give everybody a chance to cough and recross their legs. The tip of his little ruddy goatee dips about an inch above the keyboard during the quiet parts. The way he slaps and tugs at the stops reminds Harry of the old Linotype he used to operate, the space adjuster and how the lead jumped out hot, all done with computer tapes now. To the left of the altar one of the big wall panels with rounded tops opens, it is a secret door like in a horror movie, and out of it steps Archie Campbell in a black cassock and white surplice and stole. He flashes his What? Me worry? grin, those sudden seedy teeth.

Nelson follows him out, head down, looking at nobody.

Slim slides up the aisle, light as a cat, to stand beside him. He must be a burglar in his spare time. He stands a good five inches taller than Nelson. Both have these short punk haircuts. Nelson's hair makes a whorl in back that Harry knows so well his throat goes dry, something caught in it.

Peggy Fosnacht's last angry whisper dies. The organ has been silent this while. With both plump hands lifted, Soupy bids them all stand. To the music of their rustle Melanie leads in Pru, from another side room, along the altar rail. The secret knowledge shared by all that she is pregnant enriches her beauty. She wears an ankle-length crépey dress that Ma Springer calls oatmeal in color and Janice and Melanie call champagne, with a brown sash they decided to leave off her waist lest they have to tie it too high. It must have been Melanie who wove the little wreath of field flowers, already touched by wilt, that the bride wears as a crown. There is no train or veil save an invisible aura of victory. Pru's face, downcast and purse-upped, is flushed, her carroty hair brushed slick down her back and tucked behind her ears to reveal their crimped soft shell shapes hung with tiny hoops of gold. Harry could halt her with his arm as she paces by but she does not look at him. Melanie gives all the old folks a merry eye; Pru's long redknuckled fingers communicate a tremble to her little bouquet of baby's breath. Now her bearing as she faces the minister is grave with that gorgeous slowed composure of women carrying more than themselves.

Soupy calls them Dearly Beloved. The voice welling up out of this little man is terrific, Harry had noticed it at the house, but here, in the nearly empty church, echoing off the walnut knobs and memorial plaques and high arched rafters, beneath the tall central window of Jesus taking off into the sky with a pack of pastel apostles for a launching pad, the timbre is doubled, enriched by a rounded sorrowful something Rabbit hadn't noticed hitherto, gathering and pressing the straggle of guests into a congregation, subduing any fear that this ceremony might be a farce. Laugh at ministers all you want, they have the words we need to hear, the ones the dead have spoken. The union of husband and wife, he announces in his great considerate organ tones, ís intended by God for their mutual joy, and like layers of a wide concealing dust the syllables descend, prosperity, adversity, procreation, nurture. Soupy bats his eyelids between phrases, is his only flaw. Harry hears a faint groan behind him: Ma Springer standing on her legs too long. Mrs. Lubell over past Janice has removed a grubby-looking handkerchief from her purse and dabs at her face with it. Janice is smiling. There is a dark dent at the corner of her lips. With a little white hat on her head like a flower she looks Polynesian.

Ringingly Soupy addresses the rafters: "If any of you can show just cause why they may not lawfully be married, speak now; or else for ever hold your peace."

Peace. A pew creaks. The couple from Binghamton. Dead Fred Springer. Ruth. Rabbit fights down a crazy impulse to shout out. His throat feels raw.

The minister now speaks to the couple direct. Nelson, from hanging lamely over on the side, his eyes murky in their sockets and the carnation crooked in his lapel, moves closer to the center, toward Pru. He is her height. The back of his neck looks so thin and bare above his collar. That whorl.

Pru has been asked a question. In an exceedingly small voice she says she will.

Now Nelson is being questioned and his father's itch to shout out, to play the disruptive clown, has become something else, a prickling at the bridge of his nose, a pressure in the two small ducts there.

Woman, wife, covenant, love her, comfort her, honor and keep her, sickness, health, forsaking all others as long as you both shall live?

Nelson in a voice midway in size between Soupy's and Pru's says he will.

And the burning in his tear ducts and the rawness scraping at the back of his throat have become irresistible, all the forsaken poor ailing paltry witnesses to this marriage at Harry's back roll forward in hoops of terrible knowing, an impalpable suddenly sensed mass of human sadness concentrated burningly upon the nape of Nelson's neck as he and the girl stand there mute while the rest of them grope and fumble in their thick red new prayer books after the name and number of a psalm announced; Soupy booms angelically above their scattered responses, wife, a fruitful vine, to which Rabbit cannot contribute, the man who fears the Lord, because he is weeping, weeping, washing out the words, the page, which has become as white and blank as the nape of Nelson's poor mute frail neck. Janice looks up at him in jaunty surprise under her white hat and Mrs. Lubell with that wistful cleaninglady smile passes over her grubby handkerchief. He shakes his head No, he is too big, he will overwhelm the cloth with his effluvia; then takes it anyway, and tries to blot this disruptive tide. There is this place the tears have unlocked that is endlessly rich, a spring.

"May you live to see your children's children," Soupy intones in his huge mellow encompassing fairy's voice. "May peace be upon Israel," he adds.

And outside, when it is done, the ring given, the vows taken in the shaky young voices under the towering Easter-colored window of Christ's space shot and the Lord's Prayer mumbled through and the pale couple turned from the requisite kiss (poor Nellie, couldn't he be just another inch taller?) to face as now legally and mystically one the little throng of their blood, their tribe, outside in the sickly afternoon, clouds having come with the breeze that flows toward evening, the ridiculous tears dried in long stains on Harry's face, then Mim comes into his arms again, a sisterly embrace, all sorts of family grief since the days he held her little hand implied, the future has come upon them darkly, his sole seed married, marriage that daily doom which she may never know; lean and crinkly in his arms she is getting to be a spinster, even a hooker can be a spinster, think of all she's had to swallow all these years, his baby sister, crying in imitation of his own tears, out here where the air quickly dries them, and the after-church smiles of the others flicker about them like butterflies born to live a day.

Oh this day, this holiday they have made just for themselves from a mundane Saturday, this last day of summer. What a great waste of gas it seems as they drive in procession to Ma Springer's house through the slanted streets of the town. Harry and Janice in the Corona follow Bessie's blue Chrysler in case the old dame plows into something, with Mim bringing Mrs. Lubell in Janice's Mustang, its headlight still twisted, behind. "What made you cry so much?" Janice asks him. She has taken off her hat and fiddled her bangs even in the rearview mirror.

"I don't know. Everything. The way Nellie looked from the back. The way the backs of kids' heads trust you. I mean they really liked that, this little dumb crowd of us gathered to watch."

He looks sideways at her silence. The tip of her little tongue rests on her lower lip, not wanting to say the wrong thing. She says, "If you're so full of tears you might try being less mean about him and the lot."

"I'm not mean about him and the lot. He doesn't give a fuck about the lot, he just wants to hang around having you and your mother support him and the easiest way to put a face on that is to go through some sort of motions over at the lot. You know how much that caper of his with the convertibles cost the firm? Guess."

"He says you got him so frustrated he went crazy. He says you knew you were doing it, too."

"Forty-five hundred bucks, that was what those shitboxes cost. Plus now all the parts Manny's had to order and the garage time to fix 'em, you can add another grand."

"Nelson said the TR sold right off."

"That was a fluke. They don't make TRs anymore."

"He says Toyotas have had their run at the market, Datsun and Honda are outselling them all over the East."

"See, that's why Charlie and me don't want the kid over at the lot. He's full of negative thinking."

"Has Charlie said he doesn't want Nelson over at the lot?"

"Not in so many words. He's too much of a nice guy."

"I never noticed he was such a nice guy. Nice in that way. I'll ask him over at the house."

"Now don't go lighting into poor Charlie, just because he's moved on to Melanie. I don't know what he's ever said about Nelson."

"Moved on! Harry, it's been ten years. You must stop living in the past. If Charlie wants to make a fool of himself chasing after some twenty-year-old it couldn't matter to me less. Once you've achieved closure with somebody, all you have is good feelings for them."

"What's this achieving closure? You've been looking at too many talk shows."

"It's a phrase people use."

"Those hussies you hang out with over at the club. Doris Kaufinann. Fuck her." It stung him, that she thinks he lives in the past. Why should he be the one to cry at the wedding? Mr. Nice Guy. Mr. Tame Guy. To Hell with them. "Well at least Charlie's avoiding marriage so that makes him less of a fool than Nelson," he says, and switches on the radio to shut off their conversation. The four-thirty news: earthquake in Hawaii, kidnapping of two American businessmen in El Salvador, Soviet tanks patrolling the streets of Kabul in the wake of last Sunday's mysterious change of leadership in Afghanistan. In Mexico, a natural-gas pact with the United States signals possible long-term relief for the energy crisis. In California, ten days of brush fire have destroyed more acres than any such fire since 1970. In Philadelphia, publishing magnate Walter Annenberg has donated fifty thousand dollars to the Catholic Archdiocese to help defray costs of the controversial platform from which Pope John Paul the Second is scheduled to celebrate Mass on October the third. Annenberg, the announcer gravely concludes, is a Jew.

"Why did they tell us that?" Janice asks.

God, she is dumb still. The realization comforts him. He tells her, "To make us alleged Christians feel lousy we've all been such cheapskates about the Pope's platform."

"I must say," Janice says, "it does seem extravagant, to build such a thing you're only going to use once."

"That's life," Harry says, pulling up to the curb along Joseph Street. There are so many cars in front of number 89 he has to park halfway up the block, in front of the house where the butch ladies live. One of them, a hefty youngish woman wearing an Army surplus fatigue jacket, is lugging a big pink roll of foil-backed insulation up onto the front porch.

"My son got married today," Harry calls out to her, on impulse.

His butch neighbor blinks and then calls back, "Good luck to her."

"Him."

"I meant the bride."

"O.K., I'll tell her."

The expression on the woman's face, slit-eyed like a cigar-store Indian, softens a little; she sees Janice getting out of the car on the other side, and calls to her, in a shouting mood now, "Jan, how do you feel about it?"

Janice is so slow to answer Harry answers for her, "She feels great. Why wouldn't she?" What he can't figure out about these butch ladies is not why they don't like him but why he wants them to, why just the distant sound of their hammering has the power to hurt him, to make him feel excluded.

Somehow, this Slim person, driving a canary-yellow Le Car with its name printed a foot high on the side, has made it from the church with bride, groom, and Melanie ahead of Harry and Janice; and Ollie and Peggy too, in their cinnamon-brown ' 73 Dodge Dart with a Fiberglas-patched fender; and even Soupy has beat their time, because his snappy little black Opel Manta with vanity plate ST JOHN is also parked by the curb this side of the maple that Ma Springer has been seeing from her front bedroom for over thirty years. These guests already crowd the living room, while this flustered little fat girl in a stab at a waitress uniform tries to carry around those hors d'oeuvres that are costing a fortune, muddled things that look like cheese melted on Taco Chips with a sprig ofparsley added; Harry dodges through, elbows lifted out of old basketball habit in case somebody tries to put a move on him, to get the champagne in the kitchen. Bottles of Mumm's at twelve dollars apiece even at case price fill the whole second shelf of the fridge, stacked 69-style, foil heads by heavy hollow butts, beautiful. CHAMPAGNE PROVIDED AT SHOTGUN WEDDING, he thinks. Angstrom Foots Bill. Grace Stuhl's grandson turns out to be a big beefy kid, can't weigh less than two hundred fifty, with a bushy pirate's beard, and he has teeny weenies flying in a pan on the stove and something wrapped in bacon in the oven. Also a beer he took from the fridge open on the counter. The noise in the living room keeps growing, and the front door keeps opening, Stavros and the Murketts following Mim and Ma's brood in, and all the fools come gabbling when the first cork pops. Boy, it's like coming, it can't stop, the plastic hollow-stemmed champagne glasses Janice found at the Acme are on the round Chinese tray on the counter behind Grace Stuhl's grandson's beer, too far away for Harry to reach without some of the tawny foam spilling onto the linoleum. The glasses as he fills them remind him of the gold coins, precious down through the ages, and a latch inside him lifts to let his sorrow out. What the hell, we're all going down the chute together. Back in the living room, in front of the breakfront, Ma Springer proposes a nervous little toast she's worked up, ending with the Pennsylvania Dutch, "Dir seid nur eins: halt es selle weg."

"What does that mean, Mom-mom?" Nelson asks, afraid something's being put over on him, such a child beside the blushing full-grown woman he's crazily gone and married.

"I was going to say," Bessie says irritably. "You are now one: keep it that way."

Everybody cheers, and drinks, if they haven't already.

Grace Stuhl glides a step forward, into the circle of space cleared by the breakfront, maybe she was a great dancer fifty years ago, a certain type of old lady keeps her ankles and her feet small, and she is one. "Or as they always used to say," she proposes, "Bussie waiirt ows, kocha dut net. Kissing wears out, cooking don't."

The cheers are louder. Harry pops another bottle and settles on getting drunk. Those melted Taco Chips aren't so bad, if you can get them to your mouth before they break in your fingers, and the little fat girlfriend has an amazing bosom. All this ass, at least there's no shortage of that, it just keeps arriving. It seems an age since he lay awake disturbed by the entrance into this house of Pru Lubell, now Teresa Angstrom. Harry finds himself standing next to her mother. He asks her, "Have you ever been to this part of the world before?"

"Just passing through from time to time," she says, in a wisp of a voice he has to bend over to hear, as at a deathbed. How softly Pru had spoken her vows at the ceremony! "My people are from Chicago, originally."

"Well, your daughter does you proud," he tells her. "We love her already." He sounds to himself, saying this, like an impersonator; life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.

"Teresa tries to do the right thing," her mother says. "But it's never been easy for her."

"It hasn't?"

"She takes after her father's people. You know, always going to extremes."

"Really?"

"Oh yes. Stubborn. You daren't go against them."

Her eyes widen. He feels with this woman as if he and she have been set to making a paper chain together, with inadequate glue, and the links keep coming unstuck. It is not easy to hear in this room. Soupy and that Slim are giggling now together.

"I'm sorry your husband can't be here," Harry says.

"You wouldn't be if you knew him," Mrs. Lubell replies serenely, and waggles her plastic glass as if to indicate how empty it is.

"Lemme get you some more." Rabbit realizes with a shock that she is his proper date: old as she seems this woman is about his age and instead of naked in dreamland with stacked chicks like Cindy Murkett and Grace Stuhl's grandson's girlfriend he should be in mental bed with the likes of Mrs. Lubell. He retreats into the kitchen to look after the champagne supply and finds Nelson and Melanie busy at the bottles. The countertop is strewn with those little wire cages each cork comes trapped in.

"Dad, there may not be enough," Nelson whines.

These two. "Why don't you kids switch to milk?" he suggests, taking a bottle from the boy. Heavy and green and cold, like money. The label engraved. His own poor dead dad never drank such bubbly in his life. Seventy years of beer and rusty water. To Melanie he says, "That expensive bike of yours is still in the garage."

"Oh I know," she says, innocently staring. "If I took it back to Kent someone would steal it." Her bulging brown eyes show no awareness that he has been curt, feeling betrayed by her.

He tells her, "You ought to go out and say hello to Charlie."

"Oh, we've said hello." Did she leave the motel room he was paying for to go shack up with Charlie? Harry can't follow it all. As if to make things right Melanie says, "I'll tell Pru she can use the bike if she wants. It's wonderful exercise for those muscles."

What muscles? Back in the living room, nobody has been kind enough to take his place beside the mother of the bride. As he refills her readily proffered glass he says to her, "Thanks for the handkerchief. Back in the church."

"It must be hard," she says, looking up at him more cozily now, "when there's only one."

There's not only one, he wants to tell her, drunker than he intended. There's a dead little sister lying buried in the hill above us, and a long-legged girl roaming the farmland south of Galilee. Who does she remind him of, Mrs. Lubell, when she flirts her head like that, looking up? Thelma Harrison, beside the pool. The Harrisons maybe should have been invited, but then you get into things like Buddy Inglefinger's feelings being hurt. And Ronnie would have been gross. The organist with the goatee (who invited him?) has joined Soupy and Slim now and something in the gaiety there leads the minister to remember his duty to others. He comes and joins Harry and the mother, a Christian act.

"Well," Harry blurts to him. "What's done is done, huh?"

Becky a skeleton by now, strange to think. The nightie they buried her in turned to cobwebs. Her little toenails and fingernails bits of confetti scattered on the satin.

Reverend Campbell's many small tobacco-darkened teeth display themselves in a complacent smile. "The bride looked lovely," he tells Mrs. Lubell.

"She gets her height from her father's people," she says. "And her straight hair. Mine just curls naturally, where Frank's sticks up all over his head, he can never get it to lay down. Teresa's isn't quite that stubborn, since she's a girl."

"Just lovely," Soupy says, his smile getting a glaze.

Harry asks the man, "How does that Opel of yours do for mileage?"

He takes out his pipe to address the question. "Up and down on these hills isn't exactly optimum, is it? I'd say twenty-five, twenty-six at best. I do a lot of stopping and starting and with nothing but short trips the carbon builds up."

Harry tells him, "You know the Japanese make these cars even though Buick sells 'em. I heard they may not be importing any after the 1980 model. That's going to put a squeeze on parts."

Soupy is amused, his twinkling eyes tell Mrs. Lubell. Toward Harry he slides these eyes with mock severity and asks, "Are you trying to sell me a Toyota?"

Mom getting to be a skeleton too, come to think of it. Those big bones in the earth like dinosaur bones.

"Well," Harry says, "we have a new little front-wheel drive called the Tercel, don't know where they get these names from but never mind, it gets over forty m.p.g. on the highway and is plenty of car for a single man."

Waiting for the Resurrection. Suppose it never comes?

"But suppose I get married," the small man protests, "and have an enormous brood!"

"And indeed you should," Mrs. Lubell unexpectedly pipes up. "The priests are leaving the church in droves because they've got the itch. All this sex, in the movies, books, everywhere, even on the television if you stay up late enough, no wonder they can't resist. Be grateful you don't have that conflict."

"I have often thought," Soupy tells her in a muted return of his great marrying voice, "I might have made an excellent priest. I adore structure."

Rabbit says, `Just now in the car we heard that Annenberg down in Philadelphia gave the Catholics fifty thousand so they could put up this platform for the Pope without all this squawking from the civil liberties people."

Soupy sniffs. "Do you know how much publicity that fifty thousand is going to get him? It's a bargain."

Slim and the organist seem to be discussing clothes, fingering each other's shirts. If he has to talk to the organist Harry can ask why he didn't play "Here Comes the Bride."

Mrs. Lubell says, "They wanted the Pope to come to Cleveland but I guess he had to draw the line somewhere."

"I hear he's going to some farm way out in nowhere," Harry says.

Soupy touches the mother of the bride on the wrist and tips his head so as to show to Harry the beginnings of his bald spot. "Mr. Annenberg is our former ambassador to the Court of St. James in England. The story goes that when presenting his credentials to the Queen she held out her hand to be kissed and he shook it instead and said, `How're ya doin', Queen?"'

His growl is good. Mrs. Lubell laughs outright, a titter jumps from her to her shame, for she quickly covers her mouth with her knuckles. Soupy loves it, giving her back a deep laugh as from a barrel-chested old fart. If that's the way they're going to carry on Rabbit figures he can leave them to it, and using Soupy as a pick makes his move away. He scouts over the gathered heads looking for an opening. It's always slightly dark in the living room, no matter how many lights are on or what the time of day; the trees and the porch cut down the sun. He'd like a house some day with lots of light, splashing in across smart square surfaces. Why bury yourself alive?

Ma Springer has Charlie locked in a one-on-one over by the breakfront, her face puffy and purplish like a grape with the force of the unheard words she is urging into his ear; he politely bows his tidy head, once broad like a ram's but now whittled to an old goat's, nodding almost greedily, like a chicken pecking up grains of corn. Up front, silhouetted against the picture window, the Murketts are holding forth with the Fosnachts, old Ollie no doubt letting these new folks know what a clever musical fellow he is and Peggy gushing, backing him up, holding within herself the knowledge of what a shiftless rat he amounts to domestically. The Murketts belong to the new circle in Harry's life and the Fosnachts to the old and he hates to see them overlap; even if Peggy was a pretty good lay that time he doesn't want those dismal old highschool tagalongs creeping into his country-club set, yet he can see flattery is doing it, flattery and champagne, Ollie ogling Cindy (don't you wish) and Peggy making cow-eyed moos all over Murkett, she'll flop for anybody, Ollie must be very unsatisfying, one of those very thin reedy pricks probably. Harry wonders if he'd better not go over there and break it up, but foresees a wall of razzing he feels too delicate to push through, after all those tears in church, and remembering Becky and Pop and Mom and even old Fred who aren't here. Mim is on the sofa with Grace Stuhl and that other old biddy Amy, and Christ if they aren't having a quiet little ball, the two of them recalling Mim as a child to herself, the Diamond County accent and manner of expressing things making her laugh every minute, and she reminding them, all painted and done up in flowerpot foil, of the floozies they sit and watch all day and night on television, the old souls don't even know they are floozies, these celebrity women playing Beat the Clock or Hollywood Squares or giving Merv or Mike or Phil the wink sitting in those talk show soft chairs with their knees sticking up naked, they all got there on their backs, nobody cares anymore, the times have caught up with Mim and put her on the gray sofa with the church folk. Nelson and Melanie and Grace Stuhl's lout of a grandson are still in the kitchen and the girlfriend, after going around with the teeny weenies under her tits in a tricky little warmer with a ketchup dip, seems to have given up and joined them; they have in there the little portable Sony Janice sometimes watches the Carol Burnett reruns on as she makes supper, and from the sound of it – cheers, band music – these useless drunken kids have turned on the Penn State-Nebraska game. Meanwhile there's Pru in her champagne-colored wedding dress, the little wreath off her head now, standing alone over by the three-way lamp examining that heavy green glass bauble of Ma Springer's, with the teardrop of air sealed inside, turning it over and over under the wan light with her long pink hands, where a wedding ring now gleams. Laughter explodes from the Fosnacht-Murkett group, which Janice has joined. Webb pushes past Harry toward the kitchen, his fingers full of plastic glasses. "How about that crazy Rose?" he says, going by, to say something.

Pete Rose has been hitting over.600 lately and only needs four more hits to be the first player ever to get two hundred hits in ten major league seasons. But it doesn't mean that much, the Phillies are twelve and a half games out. "What a showboat," Rabbit says, what they used to say about him, nearly thirty years ago.

Perhaps in her conspicuous pregnancy Pru is shy of pushing through the crowd to join the others of her generation in the kitchen. Harry goes to her side and stoops down to kiss her demure warm cheek before she is aware; champagne makes it easy. "Aren't you supposed to kiss the bride?" he asks her.

She turns her head and gives him that smile that hesitates and then suddenly spreads, one corner tucked awry. Her eyes have taken green from contemplating the glass, that strange glossy egg Harry has more than once thought would be good to pound into Janice's skull. "Of course," she says. Held against her belly the bauble throws from its central teardrop a pale blade of light. He senses that she had been aware of his approaching in the side of her vision but had held still like a deer in danger. Among these strange people, her fate sealed by a ceremony, of course she is afraid. Rabbit tries to comfort his daughter-in-law: "I bet you're beat. Don't you get sleepy as hell? As I remember it Janice did."

"You feel clumsy," Pru allows, and with both hands replaces the green glass orb on the round table that is like a wooden leaf all around the stem of the standing lamp. Abruptly she asks, "Do you think I'll make Nelson happy?"

"Oh sure. The kid and I had a good long talk about it once. He thinks the world of you."

"He doesn't feel trapped?"

"Well, frankly, that's what I was curious about, 'cause in his position I might. But honest to God, Teresa, it doesn't seem to bother him. From little on up he's always had this sense of fairness and in this case he seems to feel fair is fair. Listen. Don't you worry yourself. The only thing bothering Nelson these days is his old man."

"He thinks the world of you," she says, her voice very small, in case this echo is too impudent.

Harry snorts; he loves it when women sass him, and any sign of life from this one is gratefully received. "It'll all work out," he promises, though Teresa's aura of fright remains intense and threatens to spread to him. When the girl dares a full smile you see her teeth needed braces and didn't get them. The taste of champagne keeps reminding him ofpoor Pop. Beer and rusty water and canned mushroom soup.

"Try to have some fun," he tells Pru, and cuts across the jammed room, around the boisterous Murkett-Fosnacht-Janice crowd, to the sofa where Mim sits between the two old ladies. "Are you being a bad influence on my little sister?" he asks Amy Gehringer.

While Grace Stuhl laughs at this Amy struggles to get to her feet. "Don't get up on my account," Rabbit tells her. "I just came over to see if I could get any of you anything."

"What I need," Amy grunts, still floundering, so he pulls her up, "I must get for myself."

"What's that?" he asks.

She looks at him a little glassily, like Melame when he told her to drink milk. "A call of nature," Amy answers, "you could say."

Grace Stuhl holds up a hand that when he takes it, to pull her up, feels like a set ofwom stones in a sack of the finest driest paper, strangely warm. "I better say goodbye to Becky," she says.

"She's over there talking the ear off Charlie Stavros," Harry tells her.

"Yes, and probably saying too much by now." She seems to know the subject; or does he imagine that? He drops down onto the sofa beside Mim wearily.

"So," she says.

"Next I gotta marry you off" he says.

"I've been asked, actually, now and then."

"And whajja say?"

"At my age it seemed like too much trouble."

"Your health good?"

"I make it good. No more smoking, notice?"

"How about those crazy hours you keep, staying up to watch Ol' Blue Eyes? I knew he was called Ol' Blue Eyes, by the way. I just didn't know which 01' Blue Eyes, I thought a new one might have come along." When he had called her long-distance to invite her to the wedding she said she had a date with a very dear friend to see 01' Blue Eyes and he had asked, Who's Ol' Blue Eyes? She said Sinatra, ya dummy, where've you been all your life? and he answered, You know where I've been, right here and she said, Yeah, it shows. God, he loves Mim; in the end there's nothing to understand you like your own blood.

Mim says, "You sleep it off during the day. Anyway I'm out of the fast lane now, I'm a businesswoman." She gestures toward the other side of the room. "What's Bessie trying to do, keep me from talking to Charlie? She's been at him an hour."

"I don't know what's going on."

"You never did. We all love you for it."

"Drop dead. Hey how do you like the new Janice?"

"What's new about her?"

"Don't you see it? More confident. More of a woman, somehow."

"Hard as a nut, Harry, and always will be. You were always feeling sorry for her. It was a wasted effort."

"I miss Pop," he suddenly says.

"You're getting more and more like him. Especially from the side."

"He never got a gut like mine."

"He didn't have the teeth for all those munchies you like."

"You notice how this Pru looks like him a little? And Mom's big red hands. I mean, she seems more of an Angstrom than Nelson."

"You guys like tough ladies. She's pulled off a trick I didn't think could be pulled off anymore."

He nods, imagining through her eyes his father's toothless profile closing in upon his own. "She's running scared."

"And how about you?" Mim asks. "What're you doing these days, to feed the inner man?"

"I play golf."

"And still fuck Janice?"

"Sometimes."

"You two. Mother and I didn't give it six months, the way she trapped you."

"Maybe I trapped myself. And what's up with you? How does money work, out in Vegas? You really own a beauty parlor, or you just a front for the big guys?"

"I own thirty-five per cent. That's what I got for being a front for the big guys."

He nods again. "Sounds familiar."

"You fucking anybody else? You can tell me, I'll be on that plane tomorrow. How about the broad bottom over there with the Chinesey eyes?"

He shakes his head. "Nope. Not since Jill. That shook me up."

"O.K., but ten years, that's not normal, Harry. You're letting them turn you into a patsy."

"Remember," he asks, "how we used to go sledding on Jackson Road? I often think about it."

"That happened maybe once or twice, it never snows around here, for Cry-eye. Come out to Lake Tahoe; now there's snow. We'll go over to Alta or Taos; you should see me ski. Come on out by yourself, we'll fix you up with somebody really nice. Blonde, brunette, redhead, you name it. Good clean small-town girl too; nothing crude."

"Mim," he says, blushing, "you're the limit," and thinks of telling her how much he loves her, but there is a commotion at the front door.

Slim and the organist are leaving together and they encounter there a dowdy couple who have been ringing the disconnected doorbell for some time. From the look of them they are selling encyclopaedias, except that people don't do that in pairs, or going door-to-door for the Jehovah's Witnesses, except that instead of The Watchtower they are holding on to a big silver-wrapped wedding present. This is the couple from Binghamton. They took the wrong turn off the Northeast Extension and found themselves lost in West Philadelphia. The woman sheds tears of relief and exhaustion once inside the foyer. "Blocks and blocks of blacks," the man says, telling their story, still staggered by the wonder of it.

"Oh," Pru cries from across the room, "Uncle Rob!" and throws herself into his arms, home at last.

Ma Springer has made the Poconos place available to the young couple for a honeymoon in these golden last weeks of warm weather – the birches beginning to turn, the floats and canoes pulled in from the lake. All ofit wasted on the kid, they'll be lucky if he doesn't bum the cottage down frying his brain and his genes with pot. But it's not Harry's funeral. Now that Nelson is married it's like a door has been shut in his mind, a debt has been finally paid, and his thoughts are turning again to that farm south of here where another child of his may be walking, walking and waiting for her life to begin.

One evening when nothing she likes is on television Ma calls a little conference in the living room, easing her legs wrapped around with flesh-colored bandages (a new thing her doctor has prescribed; when Harry tries to visualize an entire creature made out of the flesh the bandage manufacturers are matching, it would make the Hulk look healthy) up on the hassock and letting the man of the house have the Barcalounger. Janice sits on the sofa with a post-dinner nip of some white creamy poison fermented from coconut milk the kids have brought into the house, looking girlish beside her mother, with her legs tucked up under her. Nice taut legs. She's kept those and he has to take his hat off to her, tiddly half the time or not. What more can you ask of a wife in a way than that she stick around and see with you what happens next?

Ma Springer announces, "We must settle now what to do with Nelson."

"Send him back to college," Harry says. "She had an apartment out there, they can both move into one."

"He doesn't want to go," Janice tells them, not for the first time.

"And why the hell not?" Harry asks, the question still exciting to him, though he knows he's beaten.

"Oh Harry," Janice says wearily, "nobody knows. You didn't go to college, why should he?"

"That's the reason. Look at me. I don't want him to live my life. I'm living it and that's enough."

"Darling, I said that from his point of view, not to argue with you. Of course Mother and I would have preferred he had graduated from Kent and not got so involved with this secretary. But that's not the way it is."

"He can't go back to college with a wife as if nothing happened," Bessie states. "They knew her out there as one of the employees and I think he'd be embarrassed. He needs a job."

"Great," Harry says, enjoying being perverse, letting the women do the constructive thinking. "Maybe his father-in-law can get him a job out in Akron."

"You saw the mother," Ma Springer says. "There's no help there."

"Uncle Rob was a real swinger, though. What does he do up in the shoe factory? Punch the holes for the laces?"

Janice imitates her mother's flat, decided rhythm. "Harry. Nelson must come to work at the lot."

"Oh Christ. Why? Why? This is a huge country. It has old factories, new factories, farms, stores, why can't the lazy brat get a job at one of them? All those summers he was back from Kent he never got a job. He hasn't had a job since that paper route when he was fourteen and needed to buy Beatles records."

Janice says, "Going up to the Poconos a month every summer meant he couldn't get anything too serious, he used to complain about it. Besides, he did do some things. He babysat for a time there, and he helped that high-school teacher who was building his own home, with the solar panels and the cellar full of rocks that stored heat."

"Why doesn't he go into something like that? That's where the future is, not selling cars. Cars have had it. The party's over. It's going to be all public transportation twenty years from now. Ten years from now, even. Why doesn't he take a night course and learn how to program a computer? If you look at the want ads, that's all there is, computer programmers and electronic engineers. Remember when Nelson rigged up all those hi-fi components and even had speakers hooked up on the sunporch? He could do all that, what happened?"

"What happened is, he grew up," Janice says, finishing off the coconut liqueur, tilting her head back so far her throat shows the pale rings that when her head is held normally are wrinkles. Her tongue probes the bottom of the glass. With Nelson and Pru pan of the household, Janice drinks more freely; they sit around getting silly and waiting up for Johnny Carson or Saturday Night Live, her smoking has gotten back up to over a pack a day in spite of Harry's nagging to get her to quit. Now in this discussion she's acting as if he is some natural disturbance they must let boringly run its course.

He is getting madder. "I offered to take him on in Service, there's the department they can always use an extra man, Manny'd have him trained as a full-fledged mechanic in no time. You know what mechanics pull down an hour now? Seven bucks, and it costs me over eight to pay 'em that what with all this fringe stuff. And once they can work faster than the flat rate they get bonuses. Our top men take home over fifteen thousand a year and a couple of them aren't much older than Nelson."

"Nelson doesn't want," Janice says, "to be a grease monkey any more than you do."

"Happiest days of my life," he lies, "were spent working with my hands."

"It isn't easy," Ma Springer decides to tell them, "being old, and a widow. In everything I do, after I pray about it, I try to ask myself, `Now what would Fred want?' And I know with absolute certainty in this instance he would want little Nellie to come work on the lot if that's what the boy desired. A lot of these young men now wouldn't want such a job, they don't have the thick skins a salesman has to have, and it's not so glamorous, unless you began by following the hind end of a horse around all day the way the people of my generation did."

Rabbit bristles, impatient. "Bessie, every generation has its problems, we all start behind the eight ball. Face the facts. How much you gonna pay Nelson? How much salary, how much commission? You know what a dealer's profit margin is. Three per cent, three lousy little per cent, and that's being cut down to nothing by a lot of new overhead you can't pass on the customer with these fixed prices Toyota has. Oil going up takes everything up with it; in the five years I've been in charge heating costs have doubled, electricity is way up, delivery costs are up, plus all these social security hikes and unemployment to pay so the bums in this country won't have to give up their yacht or whatever, half the young people in the country go to work just enough to collect unemployment, and now the interest on the inventory is going out of sight. It's just like the Weimar thing, people's saving are being washed right down the tube, everybody agrees there's a recession coming to curl your hair. The economy is shot, Ma, we can't hack it, we don't have the discipline the Japs and Germans do, and on top of this you want me to hire a piece of dead weight who happens to be my son."

"In answer to your question," Ma says, grunting a little as she shifts the sorer leg on the hassock, "the minimum wage is going to be three-ten an hour so if he works forty hours a week you'll have to give him a hundred twenty-five a week, and then the bonuses you'd have to figure on the usual formula, isn't it now something like twenty per cent of the gross profit on the sale, and then going to twenty-five over a certain minimum? I know it used to be a flat five per cent of the net amount of the sale, but Fred said you couldn't do that with foreign cars for some reason."

"Bessie, with all respect, and I love you, but you are crazy. You pay Nelson five hundred a month to start with and set commissions on top of that he's going to be taking home a thousand a month for bringing in the company only twenty-five hundred. To pay Nelson that amount it should mean he sells, depending on the proportion of new to used, between seven to ten cars a month for an agency that doesn't move twenty-five a month overall!"

"Well, maybe with Nelson there you'll move more," Ma says.

"Dreamer," Harry says to her. "Detroit's getting tooled up finally to turn out subcompacts a dime a dozen, and there's going to be stiffer import taxes any day now. Twenty-five a month is optimum, honest to God."

"The people that remember Fred will like to see Nelson there," she insists.

Janice says, "Nelson says the mark-up on the new Toyotas is at least a thousand dollars."

"That's a loaded model, with all the extras. The people who buy Toyotas aren't into extras. Basic Corollas are what we sell mostly, four to one. And even on the bigger models the carrying costs amount to a couple hundred per unit with money going to Hell the way it is."

She is obstinate and dumb. "A thousand a car," she says, "means he has to sell only five a month, the way you figure it."

"What about Jake and Rudy! " he cries. "How could the kid sell even five without cutting into Jake and Rudy? Listen, if you two want to know who your loyal employees are, it's Jake and Rudy. They work all the shit hours you ask 'em to, on the floor nights and weekends, they moonlight to make up for all the low hours you tell 'em to stay away, Rudy runs a little bike repair shop out of his garage, in this day and age, everybody else begging for handouts, they're still taking a seventy-five base and a one-fifty draw. You can't turn guys like that out in the cold."

"I wasn't thinking so much of Jake and Rudy," Ma Springer says, with a frown resting one ankle on top of the other. "How much now does Charlie make?"

"Oh no you don't. We've been through this. Charlie goes, I go."

"Just for my information."

"Well, Charlie pulls down around three-fifty a week – rounds out to over twenty thousand a year with the bonuses."

"Well, then," Ma Springer pronounces, easing the ankle back to where it was, "you'd actually save money, taking Nelson on instead. He has this interest in the used cars, and that's Charlie's department, hasn't it been?"

"Bessie, I can't believe this. Janice, talk to her about Charlie."

"We've talked, Harry. You're making too much of it. Mother has talked to me and I thought it might do Charlie good to make a change. She also talked to Charlie and he agreed."

Harry is disbelieving. "When did you talk to Charlie?"

"At the reception," Ma Springer admits. "I saw you looking over at us."

"Well my God, whajja say?"

This is some old lady, Rabbit thinks, sneakers, Ace bandages, cotton dress up over her knees, puffy throat, funny silver-browed eyeglasses, and all. Once in a while, in the winters since old Fred cashed in, she has visited the lot wearing the mink coat he gave her for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, and there was a glitter on that fur like needles of steel, like a signal crackling out of mission control. She says, "I asked him how his health was."

"The way we worry about Charlie's health you'd think he was in a wheelchair."

"Janice has told me, even ten years ago he was taking nitroglycerine. For a man only in his thirties then, that's not good."

"Well what did he say, how his health was?"

"Fair," Ma Springer answers, giving it the local two syllables, Fai-ir. "Janice herself claims you complain he doesn't do his share anymore, just sits huddled at the desk playing with paperwork he should leave for Mildred to do."

"Did I say all that?" He looks at Janice, his betrayer. He has always thought of her darkness as a Springer trait but of course old man Springer was fair, thin-skinned pink; it is her mother's blood, the Koerners', that has determined her coloring.

She flicks her cigarette at the ashtray impatiently. "More than once," she says.

"Well I didn't mean your mother should go fire the guy."

"Fire was never used as a word," Ma Springer says. "Fred would never have fired Charlie, unless his personal life got all out of hand."

"You got to go pretty far to get out of hand these days," Harry says, resenting that this is the case. He had tried to have fun too early.

Ma Springer rolls her weight uncomfortably on the sofa. "Well I must say, this chasing that girl out to Ohio -"

"He took her to Florida, too," Harry says, so quickly both women stare at him with their button-black eyes. It's true, it galls him more than it should, since he could never warm to Melanie himself and had nowhere to take her anyhow.

. "We talked about Florida," Ma Springer says. "I asked him if now that winter's coming he mightn't be better off down there. Amy Gehringer's son-in-law, that used to work in an asbestos plant in New Jersey until they got that big scare, has retired down there on the compensation, and he's under fifty. She says he tells her there are a lot of young people coming down there now, to get away from the oil crisis, it's not just the old people like in all the jokes, and of course there are jobs to be had there too. Charlie's clever. Fred recognized that from the start."

"He has this mother, Ma. An old Greek lady who can't speak English and who's never been out of Brewer hardly."

"Well maybe it's time she was. You know people think we old people are such sticks in the mud but Grace Stuhl's sister, older than she is, mind you, and buried two husbands right in the county, went out to visit her son in Phoenix and loved it so she's bought her own little condominium and even, Grace was telling me, her burial plot, that's how much she pulled up her roots."

"Charlie's not like you, Harry," Janice explains. "He's not scared of change."

He could take that green glass egg and in one stride be at the sofa and pound it down into her dense skull. Instead he ignores her, saying to Ma, "I still haven't heard exactly what you said to Charlie, and he said to you."

"Oh, we reminisced. We talked about the old days with Fred and we agreed that Fred would want Nellie to have a place at the lot. He was always one for family, Fred, even when family let him down."

That must mean him, Rabbit thinks. Letting that shifty little wheeler-dealer down is about the last thing on his conscience.

"Charlie understands family," Janice interposes, in that smooth matronly voice she can do now, imitating her mother. "All the time I was, you know, seeing him, he was absolutely ready to stand aside and have me go back."

Bragging about her affair to her own mother. The world is falling apart fast.

"And so," Ma Springer sighs – she is wearying of this, her legs hurt and aren't improving, old people need their privacy – "we tried to come to an understanding of what Fred would want and came up with this idea of a leave for Charlie, for six months with half pay, and then at the end we'd see how Nellie was working out. In the meantime if the offer of another job comes Charlie's way he's to be free to take it, and then we'll settle at that point with two months' pay as a bonus, plus whatever his Christmas bonus would be for all of 1979. This wasn't just worked out at the party, I was over there today while you were playing golf."

He had been carrying an 83 into the last hole and then hooked into the creek and took an 8. It seems he'll never break 90 there, unless he does it in his sleep. Webb Murkett's relaxed swing is getting on his nerves. "Sneaky," he says. "I thought you didn't trust yourself to drive the Chrysler in Brewer traffic anymore."

"Janice drove me over."

"Aha." He asks his wife, "How did Charlie like seeing you there on this mission of mercy?"

"He was sweet. This has all been between him and Mother. But he knows Nelson is our son. Which is more than you seem to."

"No, no, I know he is, that's the trouble," Harry tells her. To old lady Springer he says, "So you're paying Charlie thousands to hand Nelson a job he probably can't do. Where's the savings for the firm in that? And you're going to lose sales without Charlie, I don't have half the contacts around town he does. Not just Greeks, either. Being single he's been in a lot of bars, that's where you win people's trust around here."

"Well, it may be." Ma Springer gets herself to her feet and stamps each one softly on the carpet, testing if either is asleep. "It may all be a mistake, but in this life you can't always be afraid of mistakes. I never liked that about Charlie, that he was unwilling to get married. It bothered Fred too, I know. Now I must get myself upstairs and see my Angels. Though it's not been the same since Farrah left."

"Don't I get a vote?" Harry asks, almost yelling, strapped as he feels into the Barcalounger. "I vote against it. I don't want to be bothered with Nelson over there."

"Well," Ma says, and in her long pause he has time to appreciate how big she is, how broad from certain angles, like a tree trunk seen suddenly in terms of all the toothpicks it would make, all those meals and days gone into this bulk, the stiff heavy seesaw of her hips, the speckled suet of her arms, "as I understand Fred's will, he left the lot to me and Janice, and I think we're of a mind."

"Two against three, Harry, in any case," Janice says, with a winning smile.

"Oh screw you," he says. "Screw Springer Motors. I suppose if I don't play dead doggie you two'll vote to can me too."

They don't deny it. While Ma's steps labor up the staircase, Janice, beginning to wear that smudged look she gets when the day's intake catches up with her, gets to her feet and tells him confidentially, "Mother thought you'd take it worse than you did. Want anything from the kitchen? This CocoRibe is really addictive."

October first falls on a Monday. Autumn is starting to show its underside: out of low clouds like a row of torn mattresses a gray rain is knocking the leaves one by one off the trees. That lonely old maple behind the Chuck Wagon across Route 111 is bare now down to its lower branches, which hang on like a monk's fringe. Not a day for customers: Harry and Charlie gaze together through the plate-glass windows where the posters now say COMING, ALL NEW COROLLAS • New 1.8-liter engine • New aerodynamic styling

Aluminum wheels on SR5 models • Removable sunrooflmoonroof • Best selling car in the world! Another paper banner proclaims THE COROLLA TERCEL • First Front-Wheel Drive Toyota • Toyota's Lowest Price amp; Highest Mileage • 33 Est. MPG • 43 EPA Estimated Highway MPG. "Well," Harry says, after clearing his throat, "the Phillies went out with a bang." By shutting out the Montreal Expos on the last day of the season, 2-0, they enabled Pittsburgh to win the championship of the National League East.

"I was rooting for the Expos," Charlie says.

"Yeah, you hate to see Pittsburgh win again. They're so fucking jivey. All that Family crap."

Stavros shrugs. "Well, a team of blacks like that, you need a slogan. They all grew up on television commercials, the box was the only mother they had. That's the tragedy of blacks these days."

It relieves Harry, to hear Charlie talk. He came in half expecting to find him crushed. "At least the Eagles screwed the Steelers," he says. "That felt good."

"They were lucky. That fumble going into the end zone. Bradshaw you can expect to throw some interceptions, but you don't expect Franco Harris to fumble going into the end zone."

Harry laughs aloud, in remembered delight. "How about that barefoot rookie kicker the Eagles got? Wasn't that beautiful?"

Charlie says, "Kicking isn't football."

"A forty-eight-yard field goal barefoot! That guy must have a big toe like a rock."

"For my money they can ship all these old soccer players back to Argentina. The contact in the line, that's football. The Pit. That's where the Steelers will get you in the end. I'm not worried about the Steelers."

Harry sniffs anger here and changes the subject, looking out at the weather. Drops on the glass enlarge and then abruptly dart down, dodgingly, leaving trails. The way he wept. Ever since earliest childhood, his consciousness dawning by the radiators in the old half-house on Jackson Road, it has been exciting for Harry to stand near a window during a rain, his face inches from the glass and dry, where a few inches away everything is wet. "Wonder if it's going to rain on the Pope." The Pope is flying into Boston that afternoon.

"Never. He'll just wave his arms and the sky'll be full of bluebirds. Bluebirds and horseshit."

Though no Catholic, Harry feels this is a bit rude; no doubt about it, Charlie is prickly this morning. "Ja see those crowds on television? The Irish went wild. One crowd was over a million, they said."

"Micks are dumb," Charlie says, and starts to turn away. "I gotta get hot on some NV-1s."

Harry can't let him go. He says, "And they gave the old Canal back last night."

"Yeah. I get sick of the news. This country is sad, everybody can push us around."

"You were the guy wanted to get out of Vietnam."

"That was sad too."

"Hey."

"Yeah?"

"I hear you had a talk with Ma Springer."

"The last of along series. She's not so sad. She's tough."

"Any thoughts about where you're going to be going?" Nelson and Pru are due back from the Poconos Friday.

"Nowhere, for a while. See a few movies. Hit a few bars."

"How about Florida, you're always talking about Florida."

"Come on. I can't ask the old lady to move down there. What would she do, play shuffleboard?"

"I thought you said you had a cousin taking care of her now."

"Gloria. I don't know, something's cooking there. She and her husband may be getting back together. He doesn't like scrambling his own eggs in the morning."

"Oh. Sorry." Harry pauses. "Sorry about everything."

Charlie shrugs. "What can you do?"

This is what he wants to hear; relief bathes him like a kind of light. When you feel better, you see better; he sees all the papers, wrappers and take-out cup lids that have blown across the highway from the Chuck Wagon, lying in the bushes just outside the window, getting soaked. He says, "I could quit myself."

"That's crazy, champ. What would you do? Me, I can sell anywhere, that's no worry. Already I've had some feelers. News travels fast in this business. It's a hustling business."

"I told her, `Ma, Charlie's the heart of Springer Motors. Half the clients come in because of him. More than half."'

"I appreciate your putting in a word. But you know, there comes a time."

"I guess." But not for Harry Angstrom. Never, never.

"How about Jan? What'd she have to say about giving me the gate?"

A tough question. "Not much, that I heard. You know she can't stand up to the old lady; never could."

"Ifyou want to know what I think cooked my goose, it was that trip with Melanie. That cooled it with both the Springer girls."

"You think Janice still cares that much?"

"You don't stop caring, champ. You still care about that little girl whose underpants you saw in kindergarten. Once you care, you always care. That's how stupid we are."

A rock in space, is the image these words bring to Rabbit's mind. He is interested in space, and scans the paper every day for more word on these titanic quasars on the edge of everything, and in the Sunday section studies the new up-close photos of Jupiter, expecting to spot a clue that all those scientists have missed; God might have a few words to say yet. In the vacuum of the heart love falls forever. Janice jealous of Charlie, we get these ideas and can't let go, it's been twenty years since he slept with Ruth but when ever in some store downtown or along Weiser he sees from behind a woman with gingery hair bundled up carelessly with a few loops flying loose, his heart bumps up. And Nelson, he was young at the time but you're never too young to fall, he loved Jill and come to think of it Pru has some of the hippie style, long hair flat down the back and that numb look daring you to hurt her, though Jill of course was of a better class, she was no Akron steamfitter's daughter. Harry says to Charlie, "Well at least now you can run out to Ohio from time to time."

Charlie says, "There's nothing out there for me. Melanie's more like a daughter. She's smart, you know. You ought to hear her go on about transcendental meditation and this crazy Russian philosopher. She wants to go on and get a Ph.D. if she can worm the money out of her father. He's out there on the West Coast fucking Indian maidens."

Coast to coast, Rabbit thinks, we're one big funhouse. It's done with mirrors. "Still," he tells Charlie, "I wish I had some of your freedom."

"You got freedom you don't even use. How come you and Jan keep living in that shabby old barn with her mother? It's not doing Jan any good, it's keeping her childish."

Shabby? Harry had never thought of the Springer place as shabby: old-fashioned maybe but with big rooms full of the latest and best goods, just the way he saw it the first time, when he began to take Janice out, the summer they were both working at Kroll's. Everything looked new and smelled so clean, and in the side room off the living room a long wrought-iron table held a host of tropical plants, a jungle of their own that seemed the height of luxury. Now the table stands there hollow and you can see where it's stained the hardwood floor with rusty drippings. And he thinks of the gray sofa and the wallpaper and watercolors that haven't changed since the days he used to pick Jan up for a night of heavy petting in the back of the old Nash he bought in the Army and maybe it is shabby. Ma doesn't have the energy she did and what she does with all her money nobody knows. Not buy new furniture. And now that it's fall the copper beech outside their bedroom window is dropping its nuts, the little triangular seedpods explode and with all the rustling and crackling it's not so easy to sleep. That room has never been ideal. "Childish, huh?"

"Speaking of which," Charlie says, "remember those two kids who came in at the beginning of the summer, the girl that turned you on? The boy came back Saturday, while you were out on the golf course, I can't think of his name."

"Nunemacher."

"Right. He bought that orange Corolla liftback with standard transmission out on the lot. No trade-in, and these new models coming in, I quoted him two hundred off the list. I thought you'd want me to be nice to him."

"Right. Was the girl with him?"

"Not that I could see."

"And he didn't trade in that Country Squire?"

"You know these farmers, they like to keep junk in their yards. Probably hitch it up to a band saw."

"My God," Harry says. "Jamie bought the orange Corolla."

"Well come on, it's not that much of a miracle. I asked him why he waited so long and he said he thought if he waited to fall the '79s would be down in price a little. And the dollar would be worth less. The yen too as it turns out."

"When's he taking delivery?"

"He said around noon tomorrow. That's one of the NV-1s I gotta do."

"Shit. That's when I have Rotary."

"The girl wasn't with him, what do you care? You talk about me; she was younger than Melanie. That girl might have been as young as sixteen, seventeen."

"Nineteen is what she'd be," Rabbit says. "But you're right. I don't care." Rain all around them leads his heart upward by threads; he as well as Charlie has his options.

Tuesday after Rotary with the drinks still working in him Harry goes back to the lot and sees the orange Corolla gone and can hardly focus with happiness, God has kissed him out of space. Around four-thirty, with Rudy on the floor and Charlie over in Allenville trying to wrap up a used-car package with a dealer there to clear the books a little before Nelson takes over, he eases out of his office and down the corridor and out through the shop where Manny's men are still whacking metal but their voices getting louder as the bliss of quitting time approaches and out the back door, taking care not to dirty his shirt cuffs on the crash bar, and out into air. Paraguay. On this nether portion of the asphalt the Mercury with its mashed-in left side and fender and grille still waits upon a decision. It turns out Charlie was able to unload the repaired Royale for thirty-six hundred to a young doctor from Royersford, he wasn't even a regular doctor but one of these homeopathic or holistic doctors as they call it now who looks at your measles and tells you to eat carrots or just hum at a certain pitch for three hours a day, he must be doing all right because he snapped up that old Olds, said a guy he admired at college had driven one like it and he'd always wanted one just that color, evidently – that purply-red nail-polish color. Harry squeezes himself into his Corona the color of tired tomato soup and slides out of the lot softly and heads down 111 the way away from Brewer, toward Galilee. Springer Motors well behind him, he turns on the radio and that heavy electrified disco beat threatens to pop the stereo speakers. Tinny sounds, wiffling sounds, sounds like a kazoo being played over the telephone come at him from the four corners of the vinyl-upholstered interior, setting that hopeful center inside his ribs to jingling. He thinks back to the Rotary luncheon and Eddie Pastorelli of Pastorelli Realty with his barrel chest and stiff little bow legs now, that used to do the 440 in less than fifty seconds, giving them a slide show on the proposed planned development of the upper blocks of Weiser, which were mostly parking lots and bars these days, and little businesses like vacuum-cleaner repair and pet supplies that hadn't had the capital to move out to the malls, Eddie trying to tell them that some big glass boxes and a corkscrew-ramped concrete parking garage are going to bring the shoppers back in spite of all the spic kids roaming around with transistors glued to their ears and knives up their wrists. Harry has to laugh, he remembers Eddie when he was a second-string guard for Hemmigtown High, a meaner greaseball never stayed out of reform school. Donna Summer comes on singing, Dim all the lights sweet darling… When you see pictures of her she's much less black than you imagine, a thin-cheeked yellow staring out at you like what are you going to do about it. The thing about those Rotarians, if you knew them as kids you can't stop seeing the kid in them, dressed up in fat and baldness and money like a cardboard tuxedo in a play for high-school assembly. How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old? That's the joke Rabbit always enjoys at Rotary. With a few martinis inside him Eddie can be funny as hell, when he told that joke about the five men in the airplane the tip of his nose bent down like it was on a little string and his laugh came out as an old woman's wheeze. Knapsack! hee hee hee. Rabbit must try to remember and try it out on the gang at the Flying Eagle. Five men: a hippie, a priest, a policeman, and Henry Kissinger, the smartest man in the world. But who was the fifth? Donna Summer says to turn her brown body white, at least that's what he thinks she's said, you can't be sure with all this disco wowowow, some doped-up sound engineer wiggling the knobs to give that sound, the words don't matter, it's that beat pushed between your ribs like a knife, making the soul jingle.

Houses of sandstone. A billboard pointing to a natural cave. He wonders who goes there anymore, natural caves a thing of the past, like waterfalls. Men in straw hats. Women with not even their ankles showing. Natural wonders. That smartass young female announcer – he hasn't heard her for a while, he thought maybe the station had fired her, too sassy or got pregnant -comes on and says that the Pope has addressed the UN and is stopping in Harlem on his way to Yankee Stadium. Harry saw the cocky little guy on television last night, getting soaked in Boston in his white robes, you had to admire his English, about his seventh language, and who was the deadpan guy standing there holding the umbrella over him? Some Vatican bigwig, but Pru didn't seem to know any more than he did, what's the good of being raised a Catholic? In Europe, gold rose today to a new high of four hundred forty-four dollars an ounce while the dollar slipped to new lows. The station fades and returns as the road twists among the hilly fields. Harry calculates, up eighty dollars in less than three weeks, thirty times eighty is two thousand four hundred, when you're rich you get richer, just like Pop used to say. In some of the fields the corn stands tall, others are stubble. He glides through the ugly string town of Galilee, on the lookout for the orange Corolla. No need to ask at the post office this time. The vegetable stand is closed for the season. The pond has some geese on it, he doesn't remember those, migrating already, the green little turds they leave all over the fairways, maybe that was the reason that doctor… He turns off the radio. BLANKENBILLER. MUTH. BYER. He parks on the same widened spot of red dirt road shoulder. His heart is pounding, his hands feel swollen and numb, resting on the steering wheel. He turns off the ignition, digging himself in deeper. It's not as if he's doing anything illegal. When he gets out of the car, the pigsty whiff isn't in the air, the wind is from the other direction, and there is no insect hum. They have died, millions. Across the silence cuts the far-off whine and snarl of a chain saw. The new national anthem. Oho say can you saw… The woods are a half-mile off and can't be part of the Byer farm. He begins to trespass. The hedgerow that has swallowed the stone wall is less leafy, he is less hidden. A cool small wind slips through the tangled black gum and wild cherry and licks his hands. Poison ivy leaves have turned, a Mercurochrome red, some of them half-dyed as if dipped. As he ventures down through the old orchard, a step at a time, he treads on fallen apples lying thick in the grass grown to hay. Mustn't turn an ankle, lie up here and rot as well. Poor trees, putting out all this wormy fruit for nothing. Perhaps not nothing from their point of view, when men didn't exist they were doing the same. Strange thought. Harry looks down upon the farmhouse now, the green door, the birdbath on its pale blue pillar. Smoke is rising from the chimney; the nostalgic smell of burning wood comes to him. So close, he gets behind a dying apple tree with a convenient fork at the height of his head. Ants are active in the velvety light brown rot inside the trunk, touching noses, telling the news, hurrying on. The tree trunk is split open like an unbuttoned overcoat but still carries life up through its rough skin to the small round leaves that tremble where the twigs are young and smooth. Space feels to drop away not only in front of him but on all sides, even through the solid earth, and he wonders what he is doing here in his good beige suit, his backside exposed to any farmer with a shotgun who might be walking along in the field behind him and his face posed in this fork like a tin can up for target practice were anybody to look up from the buildings below, he who has an office with his name on the door and CHIEF SALES REPRESENTATIVE on his business cards and who a few hours back was entertaining other men in suits with the expense and complications of his son's wedding, the organist going off with this Slim and the couple tuming up so late he thought they were Jehovah's Witnesses; and for some seconds of panic cannot answer himself why, except that out here, in the air, nameless, he feels purely alive. Then he remembers: he hopes to glimpse his daughter. And what if he were to gather all his nerve and go down and knock at the green door in its deep socket of wall and she were to answer? She would be in jeans this time ofyear, and a sweatshirt or sweater. Her hair would be less loose and damp than in its summer do, maybe pulled back and held by a rubber band. Her eyes, widely spaced, would be pale blue little mirrors.

Hi. You don't remember me -

Sure 1 do. You're the car dealer. I'm more than that, 1 think.

Like what?

Is your mother's name by any chance Ruth Byer? Well… yes.

And has she ever talked to you about your father?

My father's dead. He used to run the school buses for the township.

That wasn't your father. I'm your father.

And that broad pale face in which he saw his own would stare at him furious, disbelieving, fearful. And if he did at last make her believe, she would be angry at him for taking from her the life she had lived and substituting for it one she could never live now. He sees that these fields where his seed may have taken hold hold nothing of harvest for him but, if he seizes it, the space at his back to escape in. Yet he stands, in his tired summer suit – time to have it cleaned and stored in the big plastic clothes bag until next April – transfixed by the motionlessness of the scene below, but for the rising smoke. His heart races in steady alarm at his having strayed so far off track. You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited; some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.

His idling heart jumps at a rustle close behind him in the orchard. He has lifted his arms and flamed the first words of his self-explanation before he sees that the other presence is not a person but a dog, an old-looking collie with one red eye and its coat loaded with burrs. Rabbit is uncomfortable with dogs anyway and knows collies to be especially nervous and prone to attack, Lassie to the contrary. This dog is blacker than Lassie. It stands the length of along putt away, head cocked, the hair behind its ears electric, set to bark.

"Hi," Harry says, his voice a hoarse shade above a whisper, lest it carry down to the house.

The collie cocks its narrow head at a sharper tilt, as if to favor the sore eye, and the long white hair around its throat like a bib riffles where the breeze flattens it.

"You a good doggie?" Harry asks. He envisions the distance to the car, sees himself running, the dog at his legs in two seconds, the tearing of cloth, the pointed yellowish canines, the way dogs lift that black split upper lip to bare the little front teeth in hate; he feels his ankle pinned as if between two grinding cogwheels, his fall, his arms up in a futile attempt to save his face.

But the dog makes a decision in its narrow skull. Its dropped tail cautiously wags, and it lopes forward with that horrible silent lightness of four-footed animals through the orchard grass. It sniffs at Harry's knees and then leans against his legs, allowing its neck to be scratched as Harry keeps up a whispered patter. "Nice boy, good girl, where'd you get all these burrs, baaad burrs." Don't let them smell your terror. You sure know you're out in the country when you meet dogs running around without collars just like bears.

Distantly, a car door slams. The sound echoes off the barn wall so that at first he looks in the wrong spot. Then he sees through the fork of the apple tree, about a six-iron away allowing for the slope, the orange Corolla in the big bare spot between the house and the garage, which has the yellow shell of the school bus behind it.

So a wild hope is confirmed, but most of his mind stays with the opaque bundle of muscle and teeth at his knees, how to keep it from barking, how to keep it from biting. Tiny brains, change in a second, a collie belonging to old Mrs. Zug down Jackson Road lived in a barrel, snapped one time when nobody expected it, Harry still has the faint white scar on two middle fingers, pulling them loose felt like skinning a carrot, he can still feel it.

The dog too hears the car door slam and, flattening its ears, rockets down through the orchard. Around the Corolla it sets up a barking that is frantic but remote, delayed by echo and space. Harry seizes the moment to scurry back to a tree farther away. From there he sees the car's driver step out, lanky Jamie, no longer wearing dirty dungarees but pinkish bell-bottoms and a red turtleneck shirt. The collie jumps up and down, greeting, apologizing for barking at the unfamiliar car. The boy's drawl drifts up through the orchard, doing singsong dog talk, the words indistinct. Rabbit drops his eyes a moment to the earth, where two yellowjackets are burrowing into a rotten apple. When he looks again, a girl, his girl, her round white face unmistakable, her hair shorter than in June, steps out of the Corolla's passenger side and hunkers down to the dog, mingling herself with its flurry. She turns her face away from a thrust of the dog's muzzle and stares upwards at the exact spot from which Harry, frozen, watches. He sees when she stands that she is dressed trimly, in dark brown skirt and russet sweater, a little plaid jacket squaring up her shoulders so she looks sharp, collegiate, a city girl. Still there is that certain languor of her legs as she takes a stride or two toward the house. Her voice lifts in calling. Both their young faces have turned to the house, so Rabbit takes the opportunity to retreat to yet a farther tree, slimmer than the one previous. But he is close to the tangled hedgerow now and perhaps against this invisible in his light brown suit, camouflaged among pieces of sky.

Down below, echoing off the stucco and cinder-block walls, the cries of greeting and pleasure have a melancholy, drifting sound. From out of the house, following a thin slam of its door, a fat elderly woman has emerged, moving under the burden of her own weight so cautiously that the collie, herding, nudges her forward, encircling her legs. This might be the woman he glimpsed in the old station wagon when it went by the church on the day of the wedding, but it cannot be Ruth, for her hair, that had been a kind of soft and various wiry fire, is an iron cap of gray fitted to her head, and her body is enormous, so big her clothes from this distance seem wide as a sail. In pants and shirt this person advances plodding to admire the new car. There is no exchange of kisses, but from the way they all rotate and slide one past another these three are well acquainted. Their voices drift to Harry unintelligibly.

The boy demonstrates the liftback. The girl taps the old woman, as ifto say, Go on; she is being teased. Then they fish from the car's interior two tall brown paper bags, groceries, and the collie dog, bored with these proceedings, lifts its head and points its nose in the direction where Harry, his heart thunderous, is holding as still as the man concealed in the tangled lines of those puzzle drawings that used to be in Sunday papers.

The dog begins to bark and races up into the orchard toward him; Harry has no choice but to turn and run. Perhaps he makes it through the hedgerow before the people look up and see him. They call out for the dog – "Fritzie! Fritzie!" – in two female voices. Twigs scratch his hands; the loose stones of the old wall nearly trip him, and scuff one shoe. Now he flies. The red earth marred by tractor treads skims underfoot. Yet the dog, he sees glancing behind, will overtake him before he can reach the car; already the creature, its hair and ears swept flat by its speed, has broken through the hedgerow and is streaming along beside the corn stubble. Oh Christ. Rabbit stops, wraps his arms around his face, and waits. The house is out of sight below the rise of land; he is all alone with this. He hears the dog's claws rattle past him in momentum and a bark dies to a growl in its throat. He feels his legs being nosed through his trousers, then leaned on. The dog doesn't want to bring him down but to gather him in, to herd him also.

"Nice Fritzie," Harry says. "Good Fritzie. Let's go to my car. Let's trot along." Foot by careful foot he consumes the little distance to the shoulder of the road, the dog bumping and sniffing him all the way. The cries from the house, invisible, persist raggedly; the collie's tail, uncertainly wagging, pats Harry's calves while the long skull inquires upward with its sick red eye. Harry pulls his hands up to the level of his lapels. Dirty yellow drooly teeth would skin his fingers like a carrot grater. He tells Fritzie, "You're a beautiful girl, a wonderful girl," and eases around the back of the Corona. The chain saw is still zipping along. He opens the driver's door and slides in. Slams it. The collie stands on the overgrown banking of red earth looking puzzled, her shepherding come to an end. Harry finds the car key in his pocket, the engine starts. His heart is still pounding. He leans over toward the passenger's window and scrabbles his fingers on the glass. "Hey Fritzie!" he shouts and keeps up the scrabbling until the dog starts to bark again. Bark. Bark bark bark. Laughing, Rabbit pops the clutch and digs out, the thing inside his chest feeling fragile and iridescent like a big soap bubble. Let it pop. He hasn't felt so close to breaking out of his rut since Nelson smashed those convertibles.

Webb Murkett is handy about the house; he has a cellar full of expensive power tools and subscribes to magazines with titles like Fine Woodworking and Homecraft. In every corner of the garrison colonial he and Cindy have shared for the seven years of their marriage there are hand-made refinements of rounded, stained, and varnished wood – shelves, cabinets, built-in lazy susans with as many compartments as a seashell – expressing the patience and homelovingness of the house's master. There is a way of working with rotten wood, and making it as solid as marble, and like marble swirled and many-shaded; this art is on display in the base of several lamps and in a small bowl holding an untouched spiral of cigarettes on the butler's-tray table, which Webb has also fashioned, down to its gleaming copper hinges shaped like butterflies. Some of these objects must have come from the homes of Webb's previous marriages, and Harry wonders what these phantom women have kept, that so much remains. Webb's previous marriages are represented in his great long sunken living room only by color photographs, in ensemble frames of unusual proportion that Webb himself has cut and grooved and cemented together of Lucite, of children too old to be his and Cindy's, caught in a moment of sunshine on the flagstone stoop of another suburban house, or in a sailboat against the blue of a lake that the Kodak chemicals are permitting to fade to yellow, or at a moment of marriage or graduation – for some of these children were now adult, older than Nelson, and infants of a third generation stare out unsmiling, propped on a pillow or held in firm young arms, from among the many smiles of these family groups. Harry has several times in Webb's house slyly searched these photos for the sight of a former wife; but though there are women beheaded or sliced to a splinter by the edge of a frame or another picture, and here and there an unidentifiable mature hand and forearm intrudes behind a set of children's heads, no face seems preserved of the vanished mistresses of all this fleeting family happiness.

When Webb and Cindy entertain, built-in speakers bathe the downstairs rooms in a continuous sweetness of string music and spineless arrangements, of old show tunes or mollified rock classics, voiceless and seamless and with nagging dental associations for Harry. Behind a mahogany bar that Webb salvaged from the tavern of a farmer's hotel being demolished in Brewer and then transported with its brass rail to a corner of his living room, he has constructed a kind of altar to booze, two high doors with rounded tops that meet in a point and shelves that come forward on a lazy-tongs principle with not only the basic whisky, gin, and vodka but exotic drinks like rum and tequila and sake and all the extras you could want from bitters to powdered Old-fashioned mix in little envelopes. And the bar has its own small refrigerator, built in. Much as he admires Webb, Harry thinks when he gets his own dream house he will do without the piped music and such elaborate housing for the liquor.

The bathroom, though, enchants him, with its little enamelled dishes of rosebud-shaped soap, its furry blue toilet seat cover, and its dazzling mirror rimmed with naked light bulbs like actors have in their dressing rooms. Everything in here that doesn't shine is tinted and scented. The toilet paper, very dulcet, is printed with old comic strips, each piece a panel. Poor Popeye, eating shit instead of spinach. And the towels have W and M and L for Lucinda intertwined in such a crusty big monogram he hates to think what it would do to Cindy's sweet underparts if she forgot and rubbed herself hard. But Harry wonders if this downstairs bathroom is ever used by the Murketts and their rather pasty-looking little kids or is set up primarily for guests. Certain mysterious artifacts in it – a big sort of sugar bowl, white, with a knobbed lid painted with two women dressed in filmy gowns sitting on clouds or a sofa that fades into nothing, and their feet in pink ballerina shoes and their ankles crossed and the toes of one woman touching the other's and one bare arm of each interwined above the knob, yet when the lid is lifted utterly empty, so empty you feel nothing has ever been put inside; and a pink plastic hand on a stick, meant maybe for a comic backscratcher; and an egg-shaped jar a third full of lavender crystalline salts; and a kind of tiny milkman's carrier of what he takes to be bath oils; and a flexible plastic cylinder holding a pastel rainbow of powder puffs like a stack of pancakes – all seem put there, on the set of open shelves hung on two black dowels between the bathtub and the toilet, for exhibit more than use. To think of little Cindy though, pouring that oil into her bath and then just soaking there, playing with herself with the backscratcher, her nipples poking through the blanket of soapsuds. Harry feels sexy. In the mirror that makes things too vivid his eyes stare with a pallor almost white, like the little frost-flowers that appear on the skin of a car in the morning, and his lips look bluish. He is drunk. He has had two tequila fizzes before dinner, as much Gallo Chablis as he could grab during the meal, and a brandy and a half afterwards. In the middle of the second brandy the need to urinate came upon him like yet another pressure of happiness, added to his health and prosperity and the privilege of being there sitting across a coffee table from Cindy watching her body rotate within the strange coarse cloth of the exotic Arab-looking thing she is wearing, her wrists and her feet, bare but for sandals, as exciting in this outfit as the insides of her thighs in a bikini. Besides himself and Janice the Murketts have invited the Harrisons and for a new thrill the moronic Fosnachts, whom they just met at Nelson's wedding two weeks ago. Harry doesn't suppose the Murketts know he and Peggy had a fling years back when Ollie had done one of his copouts, but maybe they do, people know more than you ever think they do, and it turns out it doesn't much matter. Look at what you read every week in People magazine, and you still keep watching television, the actors all dope addicts and adulterers. He has an urge to peek into the medicine cabinet framed by the rim of showbiz bulbs and waits until a gale of laughter from the drunken bunch in the living room arises to drown out any possible click of him opening the mirror-door. Click. The cabinet has more in it than he would have supposed: thick milk-glass jars of skin cream and flesh-tint squeeze bottles of lotion and brown tubes of suntan lotion, Parepectolin for diarrhea, Debrox for ear wax control, menthol Chloraseptic, that mouthwash called cépacol, several kinds of aspirin, both Bayer and Anacin, and Tylenol that doesn't make your stomach bum, and a large chalky bottle of liquid Maalox. He wonders which of the Murketts needs Maalox, they both always look so relaxed and at peace. The pink poison ivy goo would be downstairs handy for the kids, and the Band-Aids, but how about the little flat yellow box of Preparation H for hemorrhoids? Carter of course has hemorrhoids, that grim over-motivated type who wants to do everything on schedule ready or not, pushing, pushing, but old Webb Murkett with that gravelly voice and easy swing, like the swing you see crooners use at celebrity tournaments, unwrapping one of those little wax bullets and poking it up his own asshole? You have to go into a squat and the place is not easy to find, Rabbit remembers from his own experience, years ago, when he was sitting all day at the Linotype on that hard steel bench, under tension, the matrices rattling down in response to the touch of his fingertips, every slip a ruined slug, everybody around him unhappy, the kid still small, his own life closed in to a size his soul had not yet shrunk to fit. And what of these amber pill bottles with Lucinda R. Murkett typed in pale blue script face on the prescription labels? White pills, lethally small. He should have brought his reading glasses. Harry is tempted to lift one of these containers off its shelf in hopes of deciphering what illness might have ever found its way into that plump and supple and delectable body, but a superstitious fear of fingerprints restrains him. Medicine cabinets are tragic, he sees by this hard light, and closes the door so gently no one will hear the click. He returns to the living room.

They are discussing the Pope's visit, loudly. "Did you see," Peggy Fosnacht is shouting, "what he said in Chicago yesterday about sex!" The years since Harry knew her have freed her to stop wearing dark glasses to hide her walleye and to be sloppy in her person and opinions both; she's become the kind of woman who looks permanently out of press, as a protest of sorts. "He said everything outside marriage was wrong. Not just if you're married, but before you're married too. What does that man know? He doesn't know anything about life, life as she is lived."

Webb Murkett offers in a soft voice, trying to calm his guest down, "I liked what Earl Butz said some years ago. `He no play-a the game, he no make-a the rules.' " Webb is wearing a maroon turtleneck under a coarse yarny gray sweater that has something to do, Rabbit thinks, with Scandinavian fishermen. The way the neck is cut. Harry and Ronnie came in suits; Ollie was with-it enough to know you don't wear suits out even on a Saturday night anymore. He came in tight faded jeans and an embroidered shirt that made him look like a cowboy too runty to be on the range.

"No play-a the game!" Peggy Fosnacht yells. "See if you're a pregnant slum mother and can't get an abortion legally ifyou think it's such a game."

Rabbit says to her, "Webb's agreeing with you," but she doesn't hear him, babbling on headlong, face flushed by wine and the exciting class of company, her hairdo coming uncurled like taffy softening in the sun.

"Did any of you watch except me – I can't stop watching, I get so furious – the performance he put on in Philly where he said absolutely No to women priests? And he kept smiling, what really got my goat, he kept smiling while spouting all this sexist crap about only men in the priesthood and how it was the conviction of the church and God's decision and all that, so solly. He's so smooth about it, I think is what gets to me, at least somebody like Nixon or Hitler had the decency to be frantic."

"He is one smooth old Polack," Ollie says, uneasy at this outburst by his wife. He is into cool, you can see. Music, dope. Just on the fringes, but enough to give you the pitch.

"He sure can kiss those nigger babies," Ronnie Harrison comes in with, maybe trying to help. It's fascinating to Rabbit how long those strands of hair are Ronnie is combing over his bald spot these days, if you pulled one the other way it would go below his ear. In this day and age why fight it? There's a bald look, go for it. Blank and pink and curved, like an ass. Everybody loves an ass. Those wax bullets in the yellow box – could they have been for Cindy? Sore there from, but would Webb? Harry has read somewhere that male homosexuals have a lot of trouble with hemorrhoids. Amazing the things they try to put up – fists, light bulbs. He squirms on his cushion.

"I think he's very sexy," Thelma Harrison states. Everything she says sounds like a schoolteacher, enunciated. He looks at her through the enhancing lens of liquor: thin lips and that unhealthy yellowy color. Harry can hardly ever look at her without seeing Ronnie's prick, flat like a board on the upper side it's so thick. "He is a beautiful man," Thelma insists. Her eyes are half-shut. She's had a glass or two too many herself. Her throat rises absolutely straight, like a person trying not to hiccup. He has to look down the front ofher dress, velvet that mousy blue of old movie seats, the way she's holding herself. Nothing much there. That little stocky guy in white with all those gold buttons and different funny hats, to see him as sexy you'd have to be a nun. Ronnie is stocky like that, actually. She likes thick men. He looks down the front of her dress again. Maybe more there than you'd think.

Janice is saying, she has known Peggy for ages and is trying to save her from herself, "What I liked today, I don't know if you were watching, Peggy, was when he came out on the balcony of that cathedral in Washington, before he went to the White House, to this crowd that was shouting, `We want the Pope, we want the Pope,' and he came out on the balcony waving and shouted, `John Paul Two, he wants you!' Actually."

"Actually" because the men had laughed, it was news to them. Three of them had been out on the Flying Eagle course today, summer had made one last loop back to Diamond County, bringing out fat buds on the magnolias by the sixth tee. Their fourth had been the young assistant pro, the same kid who had shot a 73 the day Nelson got married. He hits a long ball, Webb was right, but Harry doesn't like his swing: too wristy. Give him a few years around his waist he'll be hooking everything. Buddy Inglefinger had been dropped, lately; his golf was a drag and the wives didn't like his tarty girlfriends. But Ollie Fosnacht is no substitute. The only thing he plays is the synthesizer, and his sloppy wife won't stop blabbering.

"I'd like to find it amusing," Peggy says, hoisting her voice above the laughter, "but to me the issues he's trampling on are too damn serious."

Cindy Murkett unexpectedly speaks. "He's been a priest in a Communist country; he's used to taking a stand. What is it that offends you, Peggy, if you're not a Catholic and don't have to listen?"

A hush has surrounded her words because they all except the Fosnachts know that she was Catholic until she married Webb. Peggy senses this now but like a white sad heifer having charged in one direction cannot turn herself around. "You're Catholic?" she bluntly asks.

Cindy tips her chin up, not used to this kind of spotlight, the baby of their group. "I was raised as one," she says.

"So was my daughter-in-law, it turns out," Harry volunteers. He is amused by the idea of his having a daughter-in-law at all, a new branch of his wealth. And he hopes to be distracting. He hates to see women fight, he'd be happy to get these two off the spot. Cindy comes up from that swimming pool like a wet dream, and Peggy was kind enough to lay him when he was down.

But no one is distracted. "When I married a divorced man," Cindy explains levelly to the other woman, "I couldn't take communion anymore. But I still go to Mass sometimes. I still believe." Her voice softens saying this, for she is the hostess, younger though she is.

"And do you use birth control?" Peggy asks.

Back to nowhere, Fosnachts. Harry is just as pleased; he liked his little crowd the way it was.

Cindy hesitates. She can go all girlish and slide and giggle away from the question, or she can sit still and get dignified. With just the smallest of dignified smiles she says, "I'm not sure that's any of your business."

"Nor the Pope's either, that's my point!" Peggy sounds triumphant, but even she must be feeling the battle slipping away. She will not be invited here again.

Webb, always the gentleman, perches on the arm of the easy chair in which cumbersome Peggy has set herself up as anti-Pope and leans down a deft inch to say to his guest alone, "I think Cindy's point, as I understand it, is that John Paul is addressing the doctrinal issues for his fellow Catholics while bringing good will to every American."

"He can keep his good will along with the doctrine as far as -I'm concerned," Peggy says, trying to shut up but unable. Rabbit remembers how her nipples had felt like gumdrops and how sad her having gotten good at screwing since Ollie left her had seemed to him at the time, ten years ago.

Cindy attacks a little now, "But he sees the trouble the church has got into since Vatican Two. The priests -"

"The church is in trouble because it's a monument to a lie, run by a bunch of antiquated chauvinists who don't know anything. I'm sorry," Peggy says, "I'm talking too much."

"Well, this is America," Harry says, coming to her rescue, somewhat, "Let's all sock it to each other. Today I said goodbye to the only friend I've ever had, Charlie Stavros."

Janice says, "Oh, Harry," but nobody else takes him up on it. The men were supposed to say they were his friends.

Webb Murkett tilts his head, his eyebrows working toward Ronnie and Ollie. "Did either ofyou see in the paper today where Nixon finally bought a house in Manhattan? Right next to David Rockefeller. I'm no great admirer of tricky Dick's, but I must say the way he's been excluded from apartment houses in a great city is a disgrace to the Constitution."

"If he'd been a spade," Ronnie begins, "every civil rights -"

"Well how would you like," Peggy Fosnacht has to say, "a lot of secret service men checking your handbag every time you came back from the store?"

The chair Peggy sits in is squared-off ponderous modern with a pale fabric thick as plywood; it matches another chair and a long sofa set around that kind of table with no overhang to the top they call a Parsons table, which is put together in alternating blocks of light and dark wood with a curly knotty grain such as they make golf club heads of. The entire deep space of the room, which Webb added on when he and Cindy acquired this house in the pace-setting development of Brewer Heights, gently brims with appointments chosen all to harmonize. Its tawny wallpaper has vertical threads of texture in it like the vertical folds of the slightly darker pull drapes, and reproductions of Wyeth watercolors lit by spots on track lighting overhead echo with scratchy strokes the same tints, and the same lighting reveals little sparkles, like mica on a beach, in the overlapping arcs of the rough-plastered ceiling. When Harry moves his head these sparkles in the ceiling change location, wave upon wave of hidden silver. He announces, "I heard a kind of funny story at Rotary the other day involving Kissinger. Webb, I don't think you were there. There were these five guys in an airplane that was about to crash – a priest, a hippie, a policeman, somebody else, and Henry Kissinger. And only four parachutes."

Ronnie says, "And at the end the hippie turns to the priest and says, `Don't worry, Father. The Smartest Man in the World just jumped out with my knapsack.' We've all heard it. Speaking of which, Thel and I were wondering if you'd seen this." He hands him a newspaper clipping, from an Ann Landers column printed in the Brewer Standard, the respectable paper, not the Vat. The second paragraph is marked in tidy ballpoint. "Read it aloud," Ronnie demands.

He doesn't like being given orders by sweaty skinheads like Harrison when he's come out for a pleasant low-key time with the Murketts, but all eyes are on him and at least it gets them off the Pope. He explains, more to the Fosnachts than the others, since the Murketts seem to be in on the joke already, "It's a letter to Ann Landers from somebody… The first paragraph tells about a news story about some guy whose pet python bit him in the stomach and wouldn't let go, and when the paramedics came he yelled at them to get out of his apartment if they're going to hurt his snake." There is a little laughter at that and the Fosnachts, puzzled, try to join in. The next paragraph goes:

The other news story was about a Washington,

D.C., physician who beat a Canadian goose to death with his putter on the 16th green of a country club.

(The goose honked just as he was about to sink one.) The reason for printing those letters was to demonstrate that truth is stranger than fiction.

Having read this aloud, he explains to the Fosnachts, "The reason they're razzing me with this is last summer I heard about the same incident on the radio and when I tried to tell them about it at the club they wouldn't listen, nobody believed me. Now here's proof it happened."

"You chump, that's not the point," Ronnie Harrison says.

"The point is, Harry," Thelma says, "it's so different. You said he was from Baltimore and this says he was from Washington. You said the ball hit the goose accidentally and the doctor put him out of his misery."

Webb says, "Remember – `A merry killing, or murder most foul?' That really broke me up."

"You didn't show it at the time," Harry says, pleased however.

"According to Ann Landers, then, it was murder most foul," Thelma says.

"Who cares?" Ronnie says, getting ugly. This clipping was clearly her idea. Her touch on the ballpoint too.

Janice has been listening with that glazed dark look she gets when deep enough into the booze. She and Webb have been trying some new imported Irish liqueur called Greensleeves. "Well not if the goose honked," she says.

Ollie Fosnacht says, "I can't believe a goose honking would make that much difference on a putt."

All the golfers there assure him it would.

"Shit," he says, "in music, you do your best work at two in the morning, stoned half out of your mind and a lot of drunks acting up besides."

His mention of music reminds them all that in the background Webb's hidden speakers are incessantly performing; a Hawaiian melody at the moment, with Vibra-Harp.

I "Maybe it wasn't a goose," Harry says. "Maybe it was a very little caddy with feathers."

"That's music," Ronnie sneers, of Ollie's observation. "Hey Webb, how come there isn't any beer in this place?"

"There's beer, there's beer. Miller Lite and Heineken's. What can I get everybody?"

Webb acts a little jumpy, and Rabbit worries that the party is in danger of flattening out. He misses, whom he never thought he would, Buddy Inglefinger, and tries to say the kind of thing Buddy would if he were here. "Speaking of dead geese," he says, "I noticed in the paper the other day where some anthropologist or something says about a fourth of the animal species on earth right now will be extinct by the year 2000."

"Oh don't," Peggy Fosnacht protests loudly, shaking herself ostentatiously, so the fat on her upper arms jiggles. She is wearing a short-sleeved dress, out of season. "Don't mention the year 2000, just the thought of it gives me the creeps."

Nobody asks her why.

Rabbit at last says, "Why? You'll still be alive."

"No I won't," she says flatly, wanting to make an argument even of that.

The heated flush the papal argument roused in Cindy still warms her throat and upper chest, that with its tiny gold cross sits half-exposed by the unbuttoned two top buttons or stringlatches of the Arab-style robe, her tapering forearms looking childishly fragile within its wide sleeves, her feet bare but for the thinnest golden sandals below the embroidered hem. In the commotion as Webb takes drink orders and Janice wobbles up to go to the john, Harry goes over and sits on a straight chair beside their young hostess. "Hey," he says, "I think the Pope's pretty great. He really knows how to use TV."

Cindy says, with a sharp quick shake of her face as if stung, "I don't like a lot of what he says either, but he's got to draw the line somewhere. That's his job."

"He's running scared," Rabbit offers. "Like everybody else."

She looks at him, her eyes a bit Chinesey like Mim said, the fatty pouches of her lower lids giving her a kind of squint, as if she's been beaten or is suffering from ragweed, so she twinkles even as she's being serious, her pupils large in this shadowy center of the room away from the track lighting. "Oh, I can't think of him that way, though you're probably right. I've still too much parochial school in me." The ring of brown around her pupils is smooth chocolate, without flecks or fire. "Webb's so gentle, he never pushes me. After Betsey was born, and we agreed he's been father enough, Webb, I couldn't make myself use a diaphragm, it seemed so evil, and he didn't want me on the Pill, what he'd read about it, so he offered to get himself fixed, you know, like the men are paid to do in India, what do they call it, a vasectomy. Rather than have him do that and do God knows what to his psyche, I went impulsively one day and got myself fitted for the diaphragm, I still don't know if I'm putting it in right when I do it, but poor Webb. You know he had five other children by his other wives, and they're both after his money constantly. Neither has married though they're living with men, that's what I would call immoral, to keep bleeding him that way."

This is more than Harry had bargained for. He tries to confess back at her. ` "Janice had her tubes cauterized the other year, and I must say, it's great not to have to worry about it, whenever you want it, night or day, no creams or crap or anything. Still, sometimes she starts crying, for no reason. At being sterile at fortythree."

"Well of course, Harry. I would too." Cindy's lips are long and in their lipstick lie together with a wised-up closeness of fit, a downward tug at the end of sentences, he has never noticed before tonight.

"But you're a baby," he tells her.

Cindy gives him a wise slanting look and almost toughly says, "I'm getting there, Harry. I'll be thirty this April."

Twenty-nine, she must have been twenty-two when Webb started fucking her, what a sly goat, he pictures her body all brown with its little silken slopes and rolls of slight excess inside the rough loose garment, shadowy spaces you could put your hand in, for the body to breathe in that desert heat, it goes with the gold threads on her feet and the bangles around her wrists, still small and round as a child's, veinless. The vehemence of his lust dries his mouth. He stands to go after his brandy but loses his balance so his knee knocks against Peggy Fosnacht's ponderous square chair. She is not in it, she is standing at the top of the two steps that lead upward out of the living room, with the out-of-date dull plaid coat she came in draped around her shoulders. She looks down at them like one placed above and beyond, driven away.

Ollie, though, is seated around the Parsons table waiting for Webb to bring the beer and oblivious of his wife's withdrawal. Ronnie Harrison, so drunk his lips are wet and the long hair he brushes across his bald spot stands up in a loop, asks Ollie, "How goes the music racket these days? I hear the guitar craze is over now there's no more revolution."

"They're into flutes now, it's weird. Not just the girls, but guys too, who want to play jazz. A lot of spades. A spade came in the other day wanted to buy a platinum flute for his daughter's eighteenth birthday, he said he read about some Frenchman who had one. I said, `Man, you're crazy. I can't begin to guess what a flute like that would cost.' He said, `I don't give a flying fuck, man,' and showed me this roll of bills, there must have been an inch of hundred-dollar bills in it. At least those on top were hundreds."

Any more feeling-out with Cindy would be too much for now; Harry sits down heavily on the sofa and joins the male conversation. "Like those gold-headed putters a few years ago. Boy I bet they've gone up in value."

Like Peggy, he is ignored. Harrison is boring in. These insurance salesmen: they have that way of putting down their heads and just boring in until it's either scream or say, sure, you'll take out another fifty thousand of renewable life.

Ronnie says to Ollie, "How about electric stuff? You see this guy on television even has an electric violin. That stuff must cost."

"An arm and a leg," Ollie says, looking up gratefully as Webb sets a Heineken's on a light square of the table in front of him. "Just the amplifiers take you into the thousands," he says, pleased to be talking, pleased to sound rich. Poor sap, when most of his business is selling thirteen-year-old dumplings records to make them wet their pants. What did Nelson used to call it? Lollipop music. Nelson used to be serious about the guitar, that one he saved from the fire and then the one they got him with a big pearl plate on the face, but the chords stopped coming from his room after school when he got his driver's license.

Ronnie has tilted his head to bore in at a different angle. "You know I'm in client service at Schuylkill Mutual and my boss told me the other day, 'Ron, you cost this company eight thousand seven hundred last year.' That's not salary, that's benefits. Retirement, health insurance, participation options. How do you handle that in your operation? If you don't have employerfinanced insurance and retirement in this day and age, you're in the soup. People expect it and without it they won't perform."

Ollie says, "Well, I'm my own employer in a way. Me and my partners -"

"How about Keogh? You gotta have Keogh."

"We try to keep it simple. When we started out -"

"You gotta be kidding, Ollie. You're just robbing yourself. Schuylkill Mutual offers a terrific deal on Keogh, and we could plug you in, in fact we advise plugging you in, on the corporate end so not a nickel comes out of your personal pocket, it comes out of the corporate pocket and there's that much less for Uncle to tax. These poor saps carrying their own premiums with no company input are living in the dark ages. There's nothing shady about rigging it this way, we're just using the laws the government has put there. They want people to take advantage, it all works to up the gross national product. You know what I mean by Keogh, don't you? You're looking kind of blank."

"It's something like social security."

"A thousand times better. Social security's just a rip-off to benefit the freeloaders now; you'll never see a penny of what you put in. In the Keogh plan, up to seventy-five hundred goes untaxed, every year; you just set it aside, with our help. Our usual suggestion is, depending on circumstances – how many dependents you got? -"

"Two, if you count the wife. My son Billy's out of college and up in Massachusetts studying specialized dentistry."

Ronnie whistles. "Boy, you were smart. Limiting yourself to one offspring. I saddled myself with three and only these last few years am I feeling out of the woods. The older boy, Alex, has taken to electronics but the middle boy, Georgie, needed special schools from the start. Dyslexia. I'd never heard of it, but I'll tell you I've heard of it now. Couldn't make any goddam sense at all out of anything written, and you'd never know it from his conversation. He could outtalk me at this job, that's for certain, but he can't see it. He wants to be an artist, Jesus. There's no money there, Ollie, you know that better than I do. But even with just the one kid, you don't want him to starve if you were suddenly out of the picture, or the good woman either. Any man in this day and age carrying less than a hundred, a hundred fifty thousand dollars straight life just isn't being realistic. A decent funeral alone costs four, five grand."

"Yeah, well

"Lemme get back to the Keogh a minute. We generally recommend a forty-sixty split, take the forty per cent of seventy-five hundred in straight life premiums, which generally comes to close to the hundred thou, assuming you pass the exam that is. You smoke?"

"Off and on."

"Uh-oh. Well, lemme give you the name of a doctor who gives an exam everybody can live with."

Ollie says, "I think my wife wants to go."

"You're kidding, Foster."

"Fosnacht."

"You're kidding. This is Saturday night, man. You got a gig or something?"

"No, my wife – she needs to go to some anti-nuclear meeting tomorrow morning at some Universalist church."

"No wonder she's down on the Pope then. I hear the Vatican and Three-Mile Island are hand-in-glove, just ask friend Harry here. Ollie, here's my card. Could I have one of yours please?"

"Uh -"

"That's O.K. I know where you are. Up there next to the fuck movies. I'll come by. No bullshit, you really owe it to yourself to listen to some of these opportunities. People keep saying the economy is shot but it isn't shot at all from where I sit, it's booming. People are begging for shelters."

Harry says, "Come on, Ron. Ollie wants to go."

"Well, I don't exactly but Peggy -"

"Go. Go in peace, man." Ronnie stands and makes a hamhanded blessing gesture. "Gott pless Ameri-ca," he pronounces in a thick slow foreign accent, loud, so that Peggy, who has been conferring with the Murketts, patching things up, turns her back. She too went to high school with Ronnie and knows him for the obnoxious jerk he is.

"Jesus, Ronnie," Rabbit says to him when the Fosnachts have gone. "What a snow job."

"Ahh," Ronnie says. "I wanted to see how much garbage he could eat."

"I've never been that crazy about him either," Harry confesses. "He treats old Peggy like dirt."

Janice, who has been consulting with Thelma Harrison about something, God knows what, their lousy children, overhears this and turns and tells Ronnie, "Harry screwed her years ago, that's why he minds Ollie." Nothing like a little booze to freshen up old sore points.

Ronnie laughs to attract attention and slaps Harry's knee. "You screwed that big pig, funny eyes and all?"

Rabbit pictures that heavy glass egg with the interior teardrop of air back in Ma Springer's living room, its smooth heft in his hand, and imagines himself making the pivot from pounding it into Janice's stubborn dumb face to finishing up with a onehanded stuff straight down into Harrison's pink brainpan. "It seemed a good idea at the time," he has to admit, uncrossing his legs and stretching them in preparation for an extended night. The Fosnachts' leaving is felt as a relief throughout the room. Cindy is tittering to Webb, clings briefly to his coarse gray sweater in her rough loose Arab thing, like a loving pair advertising vacations abroad. "Janice had run off at the time with this disgusting Greek smoothie Charlie Stavros," Harry explains to anybody who will listen.

"O.K. O.K.," Ronnie says, "you don't need to tell us. We've all heard the story, it's ancient history."

"What isn't so ancient, you twerpy skinhead, is I had to kiss Charlie goodbye today because Janice and her mother got him canned from Springer Motors."

"Harry likes to say that," Janice said, "but it was as much Charlie's idea as anybody's."

Ronnie is not so potted he misses the point. He tips his head and looks at Janice with a gaze that from Harry's angle is mostly furry white eyelashes. "You got your old boyfriend fired?" he asks her.

Harry amplifies, "All so my shiftless son who won't even finish college with only one year to go can take over this job he's no more qualified for than, than -"

"Than Harry was," Janice finishes for him – in the old days she would never have been quick with sass like that – and giggles. Harry has to laugh too, even before Ronnie does. His cock isn't the only thick thing about Harrison.

"This is what I like," Webb Murkett says in his gravelly voice above them. "Old friends." He and Cindy side by side stand presiding above their circle as the hour settles toward midnight. "What can I get anybody? More beer? How about a light highball? Scotch? Irish? A CC and seven?" Cindy's tits jut out in that caftan or burnoose or whatever like the angle of a tent. Desert silence. Crescent moon. Put the camel to bed. "We-ell," Webb exhales with such pleasure he must be feeling that Greensleeves, "and what did we think of the Fosnachts?"

"They won't do," Thelma says. Harry is startled to hear her speak, she has been so silent. If you close your eyes and pretend you're blind, Thelma has the nicest voice. He feels melancholy and mellow, now that the invasion from the pathetic world beyond the Flying Eagle has been repelled.

"Ollie's been a sap from Day One," he says, "but she didn't used to be such a blabbermouth. Did she, Janice?"

Janice is cautious, defending her old friend. "She always had a tendency," she says. "Peggy never thought of herself as attractive, and that was a problem."

"You did, huh?" Harry accuses.

She stares at him, having not followed, her face moistened as by a fine spray.

"Of course she did," Webb gallantly intervenes, "Jan is mighty attractive, at least to this old party," and goes around behind her chair and puts his hands on her shoulders, close to her neck so that her shoulders hunch.

Cindy says, "She was a lot pleasanter just chatting with me and Webb at the door. She said she sometimes just gets carried away."

Ronnie says, "Harry and Janice I guess see a lot of 'em. I'll have a brew as long as you're up, Webb."

"We don't at all. Nelson's best friend is their obnoxious son Billy, is how they got to the wedding. Webb, could you make that two?"

Thelma asks Harry, her voice softly pitched for him alone, "How is Nelson? Have you heard from him in his married state?"

"A postcard. Janice has talked to them on the phone a couple times. She thinks they're bored."

Janice interrupts, "I don't think, Harry. He told me they're bored."

Ronnie offers, "If you've done all your fucking before marriage, I guess a honeymoon can be a drag. Thanks, Webb."

Janice says, "He said it's been chilly in the cabin."

"Too lazy no doubt to carry the wood in from the stack outside," Harry says. "Yeah, thanks." The pffft of opening a can isn't near as satisfying since they put that safety tab on to keep idiots from choking themselves.

"Harry, he told us they've been having a fire in the wood stove all day long."

"Burning it all up so somebody else can chop. He's his mamma's boy."

Thelma, tired perhaps of the tone the Angstroms keep setting, lifts her voice and bends her face far back, exposing a startling length of sallow throat. "Speaking of the cold, Webb. Are you and Cindy going away at all this winter?" They usually go to an island in the Caribbean. The Harrisons once went with them, years ago. Harry and Janice have never been.

Webb has been circling behind Thelma getting a highball for someone. "We've talked about it," he tells Thelma. Through the haze of beer laid over brandy there seems an enchanting conspiracy between her bent-back throat and Webb's arched and lowered voice. Old friends, Harry thinks. Fit like pieces of a puzzle. Webb bends down and reaches over her shoulder to put a tall weak Scotch-and-soda on a dark square in front of her. "I'd like to go," he is going on, "where they have a golf course. You can get a pretty fair deal, if you shop around for a package."

"Let's all go," Harry announces. "The kid's taking over the lot Monday, let's get the hell out of here."

"Harry," Janice says, "he's not taking over the lot, you're being irrational about this. Webb and Ronnie are shocked, to hear you talk about your son this way."

"They're not shocked. Their kids are eating 'em alive too. I want to go to the Caribbean and play golf this winter. Let's bust out. Let's ask Buddy Inglefinger to be the fourth. I hate the winter around here – there's no snow, you can't ice-skate, it's just boring and raw, month after month. When I was a kid, there was snow all the time, what ever happened to it?"

"We had a ton of snow in '78," Webb observes.

"Harry, maybe it's time to go home," Janice tells him. Her mouth has turned to a slot, her forehead under her bangs is shiny.

"I don't want to go home. I want to go to the Caribbean. But first I want to go to the bathroom. Bathroom, home, Caribbean, in that order." He wonders if a wife like that ever dies of natural causes. Never, those dark wiry types, look at her mother, still running the show. Buried poor old Fred and never looked back.

Cindy says, "Harry, the downstairs john is plugged, Webb just noticed. Somebody must have used too much toilet paper."

"Peggy Gring, that's who," Harry says, standing and wondering why the wall-to-wall carpeting has a curve to it, like the deck of a ship falling away on all sides. "First she attacks the Pope, then she abuses the plumbing."

"Use the one in our bedroom," Webb says to him. "At the head of the stairs, turn left, past the two closet doors with the slats."

"… wiping away her tears…," Rabbit hears Thelma Harrison saying dryly as he leaves. Up the two carpeted steps, his head floating far above his feet. Then down a hall and up stairs in different-colored carpeting, a dirty lime, more wear, older part of the house. Someone else's upstairs always has that hush. Tired nights, a couple talking softly to themselves. The voices below him fade. Turn left, Webb had said. Slatted doors. He stops and peeks in. Female clothes, strips of many colors, fragrant of Cindy. Get her down there in that sand, who can say, talking to him about her diaphragm already. He fords the bathroom. Every light in it is lit. What a waste of energy. Going down with all her lights blazing, the great ship America. This bathroom is smaller than the one downstairs, and of a deeper tint, wall tiles and wallpaper and shag carpeting and towels and tinted porcelain all brown, with touches of tangerine. He undoes his fly and in a stream of blissful relief fills one of this room's bright bowls with gold. His bubbles multiply like coins. He and Janice took their Krugerrands from the bedside table drawer and together went downtown and into the Brewer Trust with them and nestled them in their little cylinders like bluetinted dollhouse toilets into their stout long safe-deposit box and in celebration had drinks with their lunch at the Crépe House before he went back to the lot. Because he was never circumcised he tends to retain a drop or two, and pats his tip with a piece of lemon-yellow toilet paper, plain, the comic strips were to amuse guests. Who was Thelma saying would wipe away her tears? The shocking flash of long white throat, muscular, the swallowing muscles developed, she must have something, to hold Harrison. Maybe she meant Peggy using toilet paper to wipe away her tears had clogged the toilet. Cindy's eyes had had a glisten, too shy to like arguing like that with poor Peggy, telling him instead about her diaphragm, Jesus, inviting him to think about it, her sweet red dark deep, could she mean it? Getting there, Harry: her voice more wised-up and throaty than he ever noticed before, her eyes pouchy, sexy when women's lower lids are like that, up a little like eggcups, his daughter's lids he noticed that day did that. All around in here are surfaces that have seen Cindy stark naked. Harry looks at his face in this less dazzling mirror, fluorescent tubes on either side, and his lips look less blue, he is sobering up for the drive home. Oh but blue still the spaces in his eyes, encircling the little black dot through which the world flows, a blue with white and gray mixed in from the frost of his ancestors, those beefy blonds in horned helmets pounding to a pulp with clubs the hairy mammoth and the slant-eyed Finns amid snows so pure and widespread their whiteness would have made eyes less pale hurt. Eyes and hair and skin, the dead live in us though their brains are dust and their eyesockets of bone empty. His pupils enlarge as he leans closer to the mirror, making a shadow, seeking to see if there truly is a soul. That's what he used to think ophthalmologists were looking at when they pressed that little hot periscope of a flashlight tight against your eye. What they saw, they never told him. He sees nothing but black, out of focus, because his eyes are aging.

He washes his hands. The faucet is one of those single-handed Lavomaster mixers with a knob on the end of the handle like a clown's nose or big pimple, he can never remember which way is hot and which cold, what was wrong with the old two faucets that said H and C? The basin, though, is good, with a wide lip of several ledges to hold soap without its riding off, these little ridges most basins have now don't hold anything, dinky cheap pseudomarble, he supposes if you're in the roofing industry you know plumbing suppliers who can still provide the good stuff, even though there's not much market for it. The curved lavender bar he has right in his hands must have lost its lettering making lather for Cindy's suntanned skin, suds in her crotch, her hair must be jet black there, her eyebrows are: you should look at a woman's eyebrows not the hair on her head for the color of her pussy. This bathroom has not been so cleaned up for guests as the downstairs one, Popular Mechanics on the straw hamper next to the toilet, the towels slung crooked on the plastic towel holders and a touch of damp to them, the Murketts showering just a few hours ago for this party. Harry considers opening this bathroom cabinet as he did the other one but thinking of fingerprints notices the chrome rim and refrains. Nor does he dry his hands, for fear of touching the towel Webb used. He has seen that long yellow body in the Flying Eagle locker room. The man has moles all across his back and shoulders that probably aren't contagious but still.

He can't return downstairs with wet hands. That shit Harrison would make some crack. Ya still got scum on your hands, ya jerkoff. Rabbit stands a moment in the hall, listening to the noise of the party rise, a wordless clatter of voices happy without him, the women's the most distinct, a kind of throbbing in it like the melody you sometimes hear in a ragged engine idling, a song so distinct you expect to hear words. The hall is carpeted here not in lime but in a hushed plum, and he moves to follow its color to the threshold of the Murketts' bedroom. Here it happens. It hollows out Harry's stomach, makes him faintly sick, to think what a lucky stiff Webb is. The bed is low in modern style, a kind of tray with sides of reddish wood, and the covers had been pulled up hastily rather than made. Had it just happened? Just before the showers before the party that left the towels in the bathroom damp? In mid-air above the low bed he imagines in afterimage her damp and perfect toes, those sucky little dabtoes whose print he has often spied on the Flying Eagle flagstones, here lifted high to lay her cunt open, their baby dots mingling with the moles on Webb's back. It hurts, it isn't fair for Webb to be so lucky, not only to have a young wife but no old lady Springer on the other side of the walls. Where do the Murketts put their kids? Harry twists his head to see a closed white door at the far other end of the plum carpet. There. Asleep. He is safe. The carpet absorbs his footsteps as, silent as a ghost, he follows its color into the bedroom. A cavernous space, forbidden. Another shadowy presence jars his heart: a man in blue suit trousers and rumpled white shirt with cuffs folded back and a loosened necktie, looking overweight and dangerous, is watching him. Jesus. It is himself, his own full-length reflection in a large mirror placed between two matching bureaus of wood bleached so that the grain shows through as through powder. The mirror faces the foot of the bed. Hey. These two. It hasn't been just his imagination. They fuck in front of a mirror. Harry rarely sees himself head to toe except when he's buying a suit at Kroll's or that little tailor on Pine Street. Even there you stand close in to the three-way mirrors and there's not this weird surround of space, so he's meeting himself halfway across the room. He looks mussed and criminal, a burglar too overweight for this line of work.

Doubled in the mirror, the calm room holds few traces of the Murketts' living warmth. No little lacy bits of underwear lying around smelling of Cindy-cunt. The curtains are a thick red striped material like a giant clown's pants ballooning, and they have window shades of that room-darkening kind that he keeps asking Janice to get; now that the leaves are letting go the light barrels through the copper beech right into his face at seven in the morning, he's making nearly fifty thousand a year and this is how he has to live, he and Janice will never get themselves organized. The far window here with its shade drawn for a nap must overlook the pool and the stand of woods everybody has up here in this development between the houses, but Harry doesn't want to get himself that deep into the room, already he's betraying hospitality. His hands have dried, he should go down. He is standing near a corner of the bed, its mute plane lower than his knees, the satiny peach bedspread tugged smooth in haste, and he impulsively, remembering the condoms he used to keep in a parallel place, steps to the curly maple bedside table and ever so stealthily pulls out the small drawer. It was open an inch anyway. No diaphragm, that would be in the bathroom. A ballpoint pen, an unlabelled box of pills, some match folders, a few receipts tossed in, a little yellow memo pad with the roofing company logo on it and a diagonally scrawled phone number, a nail clippers, some paper clips and golf tees, and-his thumping heart drowns out the mumble ofthe party beneath his feet. At the back of the drawer are tucked some blackbacked Polaroid instant photos. That SX-70 Webb was bragging about. Harry lifts the little stack out delicately, turns it over, and studies the photos one by one. Shit. He should have brought his reading glasses, they're downstairs in his coat pocket, he must get over pretending he doesn't need them.

The top photo, flashlit in this same room, on this same satiny bedspread, shows Cindy naked, lying legs spread. Her pubic hair is even darker than he imagined, the shape of it from this angle a kind of T, the upright of the T infolded upon a redness as if sore, the underside of her untanned ass making a pale blob on either side. At arm's length he holds the glazed picture closer to the bedside light; his eyes water with the effort to see everything, every crease, every hair. Cindy's face, out of focus beyond her breasts, which droop more to either side than Harry would have hoped, smiles with nervous indulgence at the camera. Her chin is doubled, looking so sharply down. Her feet look enormous. In the next shot, she has turned over, showing a relaxed pair of buttocks, fish-white with an eyelike widening staring from the crack. For the next couple of photos the camera has switched hands, and old Webb, stringy and sheepish, stands as Harry has often seen him after a shower, except without the hard-on, which he is helping with his hand. Not a great hard-on, pointing to ten o'clock, not even ten but more like a little after nine, but then you can't expect a guy over fifty to go for high noon, leave that to the pimply teenagers: when Rabbit was fourteen in soc sci class, a spot of sun, the shadow of Lotty Bingaman's armpit as she raised her hand with a pencil in it, that sweet strain of cloth and zipper against thick blood. Webb has length but not much bulk at the base; still, there he is, game and even with the pot belly and gnarled skinny legs and shit-eating expression somehow debonair, not a hair on his wavy head out of place. The next shots were in the nature of experiments, by natural light, the shades must have all been up, bold to the day: slabby shapes and shelves of flesh interlocked and tipped toward violet by the spectrum of underexposure. Harry deciphers one bulge as Cindy's cheek, and then the puzzle fits, she is blowing him, that purply stalk is his prick rooted in her stretched lips and the fuzzy foreground is Webb's chest hair as he takes the picture. In the next one he has improved the angle and light and the focus is perfect on the row of one eye's black lashes. Beyond the shiny tan tip of her nose, her fingers, boneless and blue-knuckled, with stubby nails, hold the veined thing in its place, her little finger lifted as on a flute. What was Ollie saying about flutes? For the next shot Webb had the idea of using the mirror; he is standing sideways with the camera squarely where his face ought to be and Cindy's own dear face impaled, as she kneels naked, on this ten-o'clock hook of his. Her profile is snub-nosed and her nipples jut out stiff. The old bastard's tricks have turned the little bitch on. But her head seems so small and round and brave, stuck on his prick like a candy apple. Harry wants in the next picture to see come like toothpaste all over her face like in the fuck movies, but Webb has turned her around and is fucking her from behind, his prick vanished in the fish-white curve of her ass and his free hand steadying her with his thumb sunk where her asshole would be; her tits hang down pear-shaped in their weight and her legs next to Webb's appear stocky. She's getting there. She will get fatter. She will turn ugly. She is looking into the mirror and laughing. Perhaps in the difficulty of keeping her balance while Webb's one hand operates the camera, Cindy laughed at that moment a big red laugh like a girl on a poster, with this yellow prick in her from behind. The light in the room must have been dying that day for the flesh of both the Murketts appears golden and the furniture reflected in the mirror is dim in blue shadow as if underwater. This is the last picture; there were eight and a camera like this takes ten. Consumer Reports had a lot to say a while ago about the SX-70 Land Camera but never did explain what the SX stood for. Now Harry knows. His eyes burn.

The party noise below is lessening, perhaps they are listening for a sound from upstairs, wondering what has happened to him. He slips the Polaroids back into the drawer, face down, black backs up, and tries to slide shut the drawer to the exact inch it was open by. The room otherwise is untouched; the mirror will erase his image instantly. The only clue remaining, he has given himself an aching great erection. He can't go downstairs like this: he tries to tear his mind loose from that image of her open mouth laughing at the sight of herself being fucked, who would have thought sweet Cindy could be so dirty? It takes some doing to realize that other boys are like you are, that dirty, and then to realize that girls can go right along with it takes more than one lifetime to assimilate. Rabbit tries to fling away that laugh, out of his mind, but it has no more carry to it than a handkerchief. He tries to displace what he has just seen with his other secrets. His daughter. His gold. His son coming down from the Poconos tomorrow to claim his place at the lot. That does it, the thing is wilting. Holding gloomy Nelson firmly in his mind, Harry goes into the bathroom and turns on the faucet as if washing his hands in case somebody down below is listening while he undoes his belt and tucks himself properly into his underpants. What is killing, he has seen her laugh that same laugh at poolside, at something he or Buddy Inglefinger or even some joker from outside their group altogether has just said. She'd go down on anybody.

As he descends the stairs his head still feels to be floating on a six-foot string attached to his big shoes. The gang in the long living room has realigned itself in a tighter circle about the Parsons table. There seems to be no place for him. Ronnie Harrison looks up. "My God, whatcha been doin', jacking off?"

"I'm not feeling so great," Rabbit says, with dignity.

"Your eyes look red," Janice says. "Have you been crying again?"

They are too excited by the topic among themselves to tease him long. Cindy doesn't even turn around. The nape of her neck is thick and brown, soft and impervious. Treading to them on spongy steps across the endless pale carpeting, he pauses by the fireplace mantel to notice what he had failed to notice before, two Polaroid snaps propped up, one each of the Murketts' little children, the five-year-old boy with an outsize fielder's mitt standing sadly on the bricks of their patio, and the three-year-old girl on this same hazily bright summer afternoon, before the parents took a nap, squinting with an obedient and foolish half-smile up toward some light-source that dazzles her. Betsey is wearing both pieces of a play-muddied little bikini and Webb's shadow, arms lifted to his head as if to scare her with homs, fills one comer of the exposed square of film. These are the missing two shots from that pack of ten.

"Hey, Harry, how about the second week of January?" Ronnie hoots at him.

They have all been discussing a shared trip to the Caribbean, and the women are as excited about it as the men.

It is after one when he and Janice drive home. Brewer Heights is a development of two-acre lots off the highway to Maiden Springs, a good twenty minutes from Mt. Judge. The road sweeps down in stylish curves; the developer left trees, and six hours ago when they drove up this road each house was lit in its bower of unbulldozed woods like displays in the facade of along gray department store. Now the houses, all but the Murketts', are dark. Dead leaves swirl in the headlights, pour from the trees in the fall wind as if from bushel baskets. The seasons catch up to you. The sky gets streaky, the trees begin to be bare. Harry can think of little to say, intent upon steering on these winding streets called drives and boulevards. The stars flickering through the naked swaying treetops of Brewer Heights yield to the lamp-lit straightaway of the Maiden Springs Pike. Janice drags on a cigarette; the glow expands in the side of his vision, and falls away. She clears her throat and says, "I suppose I should have stuck up more for Peggy, she being an old friend and all. But she did talk out of turn, I thought."

"Too much women's lib."

"Too much Ollie maybe. I know she keeps thinking of leaving him."

"Aren't you glad we have all that behind us?"

He says it mischievously, to hear her grapple with whether they did or didn't, but she answers simply, "Yes."

He says nothing. His tongue feels trapped. Even now, Webb is undressing Cindy. Or she him. And kneeling. Harry's tongue seems stuck to the floor of his mouth like those poor kids every winter who insist on touching their tongues to iron railings.

Janice tells him, "Your idea of taking this trip in a bunch sure took hold."

"It'll be fun."

"For you men playing golf. What'll we do all day?"

"Lie in the sun. There'll be things. They'll have tennis courts." This trip is precious to him, he speaks of it gingerly.

Janice drags again. "They keep saying now how sunbathing leads to cancer."

"No faster than smoking."

"Thelma has this condition where she shouldn't be in the sun at all, it could kill her she's told me. I'm surprised she's so keen on going.

"Maybe she won't be in the morning on second thought. I don't see how Harrison can afford it, with that kid of theirs in defective school."

"Can we I wonder? Afford it. On top of the gold."

"Honey, of course. The gold's already gone up more than the trip will cost. We're so pokey, we should have taken up travelling years ago."

"You never wanted to go anywhere, with just me."

"Of course I did. We were running scared. We had the Poconos to go to."

"I was wondering, it might mean leaving Nelson and Pru just at the time."

"Forget it. The way she hung on to Nelson, she'll hang on to this baby till the end of January. Till Valentine's Day."

"It seems mean," she says. "And then leaving Nelson at the lot alone with too much responsibility."

"It's what he wanted, now he's got it. What can happen? Jake and Rudy'll be around. Manny'll run his end."

Her cigarette glows once more, and then with that clumsy scrabbling motion that always annoys him she stubs it out. He hates having the Corona ashtray dirty, it smells for days even after you've emptied it. She sighs. "I wish in a way it was just us going, if we must go."

"We don't know the ropes. Webb does. He's been there before, I think he's been going since long before Cindy, with his other wives."

"You can't mind Webb," she admits. "He's nice. But to tell the truth I could do without the Harrisons."

"I thought you had a soft spot for Ronnie."

"That's you."

"I hate him," Rabbit says.

"You like him, all that vulgarity. He reminds you of basketball days. Anyway it's not just him. Thelma worries me."

"How can she? She's a mouse."

"I think she's very fond of you."

"I never noticed. How can she be?" Stay off Cindy, he'll let it all out. He tries to see those photographs again, hair by hair in his mind's eye, and already they are fading. The way their bodies looked golden at the end, like gods.

Janice says with a sudden surprising stiffness, "Well, I don't know what you think's going to happen down there but we're not going to have any funny stuff. We're too old, Harry."

A pick-up truck with its high beams glaring tailgates him blindingly and then roars around him, kids' voices jeering.

"The drunks are out," he says, to change the subject.

"What were you doing up there in the bathroom so long anyway?" she asks.

He answers primly, "Waiting for something to happen that didn't."

"Oh. Were you sick?"

"Heading toward it, I thought. That brandy. That's why I switched to beer."

Cindy is so much on his mind he cannot understand why Janice fails to mention her, it must be deliberate. All that blowing, Lord. There's birth control. White gobs of it pumping in, being swallowed; those little round teeth and the healthy low baby gums that show when she laughs. Webb on front and him from behind, or the other way around, Harry doesn't care. Ronnie operating the camera. His prick has reawaked, high noon once more in his life, and the steering wheel as they turn into Central Street caresses its swollen tip through the cloth. Janice should appreciate this: if he can get it up to their room intact.

But her mind has wandered far from sex, for as they head down through the cones of limb-raddled light along Wilbur she says aloud, "Poor Nelson. He seemed so young, didn't he, going off with his bride?"

This town they know so well, every curb, every hydrant, where every mailbox is. It gives way before them like a veil, its houses dark, their headlights low. "Yeah," he agrees. "You sometimes wonder," he hears himself go on, "how badly you yourself fucked up a kid like that."

"We did what we could," Janice says, firm again, sounding like her mother. "We're not God."

"Nobody is," Rabbit says, scaring himself.