Rabbit Is Rich

IV

THE HOSTAGES have been taken. Nelson has been working at Springer Motors for five weeks. Teresa is seven months pregnant and big as a house, a house within a house as she slops around Mom-mom's in those maternity slacks with Spandex in front and some old shirts of Dad's he let her have. When she walks down the upstairs hall from the bathroom she blocks out all the light, and when she tries to help in the kitchen she drops a dish. Because there are five of them now they have had to dip into the good china Mom-mom keeps in the breakfront and the dish Pru dropped was a good one. Though Mom-mom doesn't say much you can see by the way her throat gets mottled it's a deal for her, the kind of thing that is a big deal for old ladies, going on about those dishes that she and Fred bought fifty years ago together at Kroll's when the trolley cars ran all up and down Weiser every seven minutes and Brewer was a hot shit kind of place.

What Nelson can't stand about Pru, she farts. And lying on her back in bed because she can't sleep on her stomach, she snores. A light but raspy little rhythmic noise he can't ignore, lying there in the front room with the streetlights eating away at the windowshades and the cars roaring by on the street below. He misses his quiet old room at the back of the house. He wonders if Pru has what they call a deviated septum. Until he married her, he didn't notice that her nostrils aren't exactly the same size: one is more narrow than the other, as if her thin pointy hooked nose with its freckles had been given a sideways tweak when it was still soft back there in Akron. And then she keeps wanting to go to bed early at just the hour after dinner when the traffic outside picks up and he is dying to go out, over to the Laid-Back for a brew or two or even just down to the Superette on Route 422 to check out some new faces after the claustrophobia ofhanging around the lot all day trying to deal around Dad and then coming home and having to deal around him some more, his big head grazing the ceiling and his silly lazy voice laying down the law on everything, if you listen, putting Nelson down, looking at him so nervously, with that sad-eyed little laugh, Did 1 say that?, when he thinks he's said something funny. The trouble with Dad is he's lived in a harem too long, Mom and Mom-mom doing everything for him. Any other man around except Charlie who was dying in front of your eyes and those goons he plays golf with, he gets nasty. Nobody except Nelson in the world seems to realize how nasty Harry C. Angstrom is and the pressure of it sometimes makes Nelson want to scream, his father comes into the room all big and fuzzy and sly when he's a killer, a body-count of two to his credit and his own son next if he can figure out how to do it without looking bad. Dad doesn't like to look bad anymore, that was one thing about him in the old days you could admire, that he didn't care that much how he looked from the outside, what the neighbors thought when he took Skeeter in for instance, he had this crazy dim faith in himself left over from basketball or growing up as everybody's pet or whatever so he could say Fuck You to people now and then. That spark is gone, leaving a big dead man on Nelson's chest. He tries to explain it to Pru and she listens but she doesn't understand.

At Kent she was slender and erect and quick in her way of walking, her terrific long carrotty hair up in a sleek twist when it wasn't let flat down her back looking ironed. Going to meet her up at the new part of Rockwell around five, a student out of water, he would feel enlarged to be taking this working woman a year older than he away from the typewriters and files and cool bright light; the administration offices seemed a piece of the sky of the world's real business that hung above the tunnels of the classes he wormed through every day. Pru had none of that false savvy, she knew none of the names to drop, the fancy dead, and could talk only about what was alive now, movies and records and what was on TV and the scandals day to day at work, who burst into tears and who had been propositioned by one of the deans. One of the other secretaries at work was fucking the man she worked for without much liking him but out of a kind of flip indifference to her own life and body and it thrilled Nelson to think how that could be Pru just as well, there was a tightness to lives in Pennsylvania that loosened out here and let people drift where they would. It thrilled him how casually tough she was, with that who-cares? way of walking beside him, smelling of perfume, and a softer scent attached to her clothes, beneath all those trees they kept bragging about at Kent, that and all those gyms in the Student Center Complex and having the biggest campus bus system in the world, all that bullshit heaped on to try to make people forget the only claim to fame Kent State would ever have, which was May 4, 1970, when the Guardsmen fired from Blanket Hill. As far as Nelson was concerned they could have shot all those jerks. When in '77 there was all that fuss about Tent City Nelson stayed in his dorm. He didn't know Pru then. At one of the bars along Water Street she would get into the third White Russian and tell him horror stories of her own growing up, beatings and rages and unexplained long absences on her father's part and then the tangled doings of her sisters as they matured sexually and began to kick the house down. His tales seemed pale in comparison. Pru made him feel better about being himself. With so many of the students he knew, including Melanie, he felt mocked, outsmarted by them at some game he didn't want to play, but with Pru Lubell, this secretary, he did not feel mocked. They agreed about things, basic things. They knew that at bottom the world was brutal, no father protected you, you were left alone in a way not appreciated by these kids horsing around on jock teams or playing at being radicals or doing the rah-rah thing or their own thing or whatever. That Nelson saw it was all bullshit gave him for Pru a certain seriousness. Across the plywood booth tables of the workingman's-type bar in north Akron they used to go to in her car – she had a car of her own, a salt-rotted old Plymouth Valiant, its front fender flapping like a flag, and this was another thing he liked about her, her being willing to drive such an ugly old clunker, and having worked for the money to pay for it – Nelson could tell he looked pretty good. In terms of the society she knew he was a step up. And so was she, in terms of this environment, the local geography. Not only a car but an apartment, small but all her own, with a stove she cooked her own dinners on, and liquor she would pour for him after putting on a record. From their very first date, not counting the times they were messing around with Melanie and her freaky SLDK friends, Pru had taken him back to her apartment house in this town called Stow, assuming without making any big deal of it that fucking was what they were both after. She came with firm quick thrusts that clipped him tight and secure into his own coming. He had fucked other girls before but hadn't been sure if they had come. With Pru he was sure. She would cry out and even flip a little, like a fish that flashes to the surface of a gloomy lake. And afterwards cooking him up something to eat she would walk around naked, her hair hanging down her back to about the sixth bump on her spine, even though there were a lot of windows across the apartment courtyard she could be seen from. Who cares? She liked being looked at, actually, in the dancing spots they went to some nights, and in private let him look at her from every angle, her big smooth body like that of a doll whose arms and legs and head stayed where you set them. His intense gratitude for all this, where another might have casually accepted, added to his value in her eyes until he was locked in, too precious to let go of, ever.

Now she sits all day watching the afternoon soaps with Mommom and sometimes Mom, Search for Tomorrow on Channel 10 and then Days of Our Lives on 3 and back to 10 for As the World Turns and over to 6 for One Life to Live and then 10 again for The Guiding Light, Nelson knows the routine from all those days before they let him work at the lot. Now Pru farts because of some way the baby is displacing her insides and drops things and says she thinks his father is perfectly nice.

He has told her about Becky. He told her about Jill. Pru's response is, "But that was long ago."

"Not to me. It is to him. He's forgotten, the silly shit, just to look at him you can see he's forgotten. He's forgotten everything he ever did to us. The stuff he did to Mom, incredible, and I don't know the half of it probably. He's so smug and satisfied, is what gets me. If I could just once make him see himself for the shit he is, I maybe could let it go."

"What good would it do, Nelson? I mean, your father's not perfect, but who is? At least he stays home nights, which is more than mine ever did."

"He's gutless, that's why he stays home. Don't you think he wouldn't like to be out chasing pussy every night? just the way he used to look at Melanie. It isn't any great love of Mom that holds him back, I tell you that. It's the lot. Mom has the whip hand now, no thanks to herself."

"Why, honey. I think from what I've seen your parents are quite fond of each other. Couples that have stayed together that long, they must have something."

To dip his mind into this possibility disgusts Nelson. The wallpaper, its tangled pattern of things moving in and out of things, 'looks evil. As a child he was afraid of this front room where now they sleep, across the hall from the mumble of Mom-mom's television. Cars passing on Joseph Street, underneath the bare maple limbs, wheel sharp-edged panels around the walls, bright shapes rapidly altering like in those computer games that are everywhere now. When a car brakes at the comer, a patch of red shudders across the wallpaper and a pale framed print of a goateed farmer with a wooden bucket at some stone well: this fading print has always hung here. The farmer too had seemed evil to the child's eyes, a leering devil. Now Nelson can see the figure as merely foolish, sentimental. Still, the taint of malevolence remains, caught somewhere in the transparency of the glass. The red shudders, and winks away; a motor guns, and tires dig out. Go: the fury of this unseen car, escaping, becoming a mere buzz in the distance, gratifies Nelson vicariously.

He and Pru are lying in the old swaybacked bed he used to share with Melanie. He thinks of Melanie, unpregnant, free, having a ball at Kent, riding the campus buses, taking courses in Oriental religion. Pru is dead sleepy, lying there in an old shirt of Dad's buttoned at the breasts and unbuttoned over her belly. He had offered her some shirts of. his, now that he has this job he has had to buy shirts, and she said they were too small and pinched. The room is hot. The furnace is directly under it and heat rises, there's nothing they can do about it, here it is the middle of November and they still sleep under a sheet. He is wide awake and will be for hours, agitated by his day. Those friends of Billy's are after him to buy some more convertibles and though the Olds Delta 88 Royale did sell for $3600 to that doctor Dad says and says Manny backs him up on this that by the time you figure in the deductible on the insurance and the carrying costs there really wasn't any profit.

And now the Mercury is in the shop though the insurance man wanted to declare it totalled, he said that would be simplest with a virtual antique like this, parts at a premium and the front end screwed up like somebody had done it deliberately; Manny estimates that the repair costs are going to come in four to five hundred above the settlement check, they can't give you more than car book value, and when he asked Manny if some of the mechanics couldn't do it in their spare time he said, looking so solemn, his brow all furrowed and the black pores in his nose jumping out at you, Kid, there is no spare time, these men come in here for their bread and butter, implying he didn't, a rich man's son. Not that Dad backs him up in any of this, he takes the attitude the kid's being taught a lesson, and enjoys it. The only lesson Nelson's being taught is that everybody is out for their own little pile of dollars and nobody can look up to have any vision. He'll show them when he sells that Mercury for forty-five hundred or so, he knows a lot of guys at the Laid-Back money like that is nothing to. This Iranian thing is going to scare gas prices even higher but it'll blow over, they won't dare keep them long, the hostages. Dad keeps telling him how it costs three to five dollars a day every day to carry a car in inventory but he can't see why, if it's just sitting there on a lot you already own, the company even pays rent to itself, he's discovered, to gyp the government.

Pru beside him starts to snore, her head propped up on two pillows, her belly shiny like one of those puffballs you find in the woods attached to a rotten stump. Downstairs Mom and Dad are laughing about something, they've been high as kites lately, worse than kids, going out a lot more with that crummy crowd of theirs, at least kids have the excuse there isn't much else to do. He thinks of those hostages in Tehran and it's like a pill caught in his throat, one of those big dry vitamins Melanie was always pushing on him, when it won't go down or come up. Take a single big black helicopter in there on a moonless night, commandos with blackened faces, a little piano wire around the throats of those freaky radical Arabs, uuglh, arg, you'd have to whisper, women and children first, and lift them all away. Drop a little tactical A-bomb on a minaret as a calling card. Or else a tunnel or some sort of boring machine like James Bond would have. That fantastic scene in Moonraker when he's dumped from the plane without a parachute and freefalls into one of the bad guys and steals his, can't be much worse than hang gliding. By the moonlight Pru's belly-button is casting a tiny shadow, it's been popped like inside out, he never knew a pregnant woman naked before, he had no idea it was that bad. Like a cannonball, that hit from behind and stuck.

Once in a while they get out. They have friends. Billy Fosnacht has gone back to Tufts but the crowd at the Laid-Back still gathers, guys and these scumbags from around Brewer still hanging around, with jobs in the new electronics plants or some government boondoggle or what's left of the downtown stores; you go into Kroll's these days, where Mom met Dad in prehistoric days, you go in through that forest where Weiser Square used to be and it's like the deserted deck of a battleship just after the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor, a few scared salesladies standing around cut off at the waist by the On Sale tables. Mom used to work at the salted nut and candy section but they don't have one anymore, probably figured out after thirty years and six people died of worms it wasn't sanitary. But if there hadn't been a nut counter Nelson wouldn't exist, or would exist as somebody else, which doesn't make sense. He and Pru don't know all their friends' first names, they have first names like Cayce and Pam and Jason and Scott and Dody and Lyle and Derek and Slim, and if you show up at the Laid-Back enough you get asked along to some of their parties. They live in places like those new condos with stained roughplanking walls and steep-pitched roofs like a row of ski lodges thrown up on the side of Mt. Pemaquid out near the Flying Eagle, or like those city mansions of brick and slate with lots of ironwork and chimneys that the old mill money built along the north end of Youngquist or out beyond the car yards and now are broken up into apartments, where they haven't been made into nursing homes or office buildings for cutesy outfits like handcraftedleather shops and do-it-yourself framers and young architects specializing in solar panels and energy saving and young lawyers with fluffy hair and bandit mustaches along with their business suits, that charge their young clients a flat fee of three hundred dollars whether it's for a divorce or beating a possession rap. In these neighborhoods health-food stores have sprung up, and little long restaurants in half-basements serving vegetarian or macrobiotic or Israeli cuisine, and bookstores with names like Karma Paperbacks, and little shops heavy on macramé and batik and Mexican wedding shirts and Indian silk and those drifter hats that make everybody look like the part of his head with the brain in it has been cut off. Old machine shops with cinder-block sides now sell pieces of unpainted furniture you put together yourselves, for these apartments where everybody shares.

The apartment Slim shares with Jason and Pam is on the third floor of a tall old house on the high side of Locust, blocks beyond the high school, in the direction of Maiden Springs. A big bay of three four-paned windows overlooks the deadened heart of the city: where once the neon outlines of a boot, a peanut, a top hat, and a great sunflower formed a garland of advertisement above Weiser Square now only the Brewer Trust's beacons trained on its own granite façade mark the center of the downtown: four great pillars like four white fingers stuck in a rich black pie, the dark patch made by the planted trees of the so-called shopping mall. From this downtown the standard sodium-yellow lamps of the city streets spread outward, a rectilinear web receding down toward the curving river and on into suburbs whose glow flattens to a horizon swallowed by hills that merge with the clouds of night. Slims front bay windows have in their upper panes the stained-glass transom lights, those simplified flowers of pieces of purple and amber and milky green, that are along with pretzels Brewer's pride. But the old floors of parqueted oak have been covered wall-to-wall with cheap shag carpeting speckled like pimento, and hasty plasterboard partitions have divided up the generous original rooms. The high ceilings have been lowered, to save heat, and reconstituted in soft white panels of something like pegboard. Nelson sits on the floor, his head tipped back, a can of beer cold between his ankles; he has shared two joints with Pru and the little holes in the ceiling are trying to tell him something, an area of them seems sharp and vivid and aggressive, like the blackheads on Manny's nose the other day, and then this look fades and another area takes it up, as if a jellyfish of intensity is moving transparently across the ceiling. Behind him on the wall is a large grimacing poster of The Nastase. Slim belongs to a tennis club out next to the Hemmigtown Mall and loves Ilie Nastase. Nastase is beaded with sweat, his legs thick as posts. Hairy, knotty posts. The stereo is playing Donna Summer, something about a telephone, very loud. Out in the center of the room between Nelson and some potted ferns and broad-leaved plants like Mommom used to have in that side room off the living room (he remembers sitting with his father looking at them some day when an awful thing had happened, a thing enormous and hollow under them while the leaves of the plants drank the sunlight as these bigger plants too must do when the sun comes slanting in the tall bay windows) there is a space and in this space Slim is dancing like a snake on a string with another skinny boy with a short haircut called Lyle. Lyle has a narrow skull with hollows at the back and wears tight jeans and some long-sleeved shirt like a soccer shirt with a broad green stripe down the middle. Slim is queer and though Nelson isn't supposed to mind that he does. He also minds that there are a couple of slick blacks making it at the party and that one little white girl with that grayish kind of sharp-chinned Polack face from the south side of Brewer took off her shirt while dancing even though she has no tits to speak of and now sits in the kitchen with still bare tits getting herself sick on Southern Comfort and Pepsi. At these parties someone is always in the bathroom being sick or giving themselves a hit or a snort and Nelson minds this too. He doesn't mind any of it very much, he's just tired of being young. There's so much wasted energy to it. He sees on the ceiling that the jellyfish intensity flitting across the holes is energy such as flows through the binary bits of computers but he can't take it any further than that. At Kent he was curious about computer science but in just the introductory course Math 10061 in Merrill Hall the math got to be too much for him, all those Jewish kids and Koreans with faces flat as platters just breezing along like it' was plain as day, what a function was, it didn't seem to be anything you could actually point to, just the general idea somehow of the equation, another jellyfish, but how to extract it out? It beat him. So he figured he might as well come home and share the wealth. His father was holding him on his lap that day, the sensation of a big warm sad-smelling body all around and under his has stayed with him along with a memory of a beam of sunlight eating into the crescent edge of a furry leaf in that iron table of green plants, it must have been around when Becky died. Mom-mom can't last forever and when she kicks the bucket that leaves him and Mom in charge of the lot, with Dad up front like one of those life-size cardboard cutouts you used to see in car showrooms before cardboard became too expensive. Those blacks mooching around so superior, that decided cool way they have of saying hello, daring you to outstare them, not taking responsibility for anything though, makes him itch with anger, though the joints should be working him around toward mellow by now. Maybe another beer. Then he remembers the beer between his knees, it's cold and heavy because it's full and fresh from Slims fridge, and takes a sip. Nelson studies his hand carefully because it feels holding the can as though he has a mitten on.

Why doesn't Dad just die? People that age get diseases. Then he and Mom. He knows he can manage Mom.

He's not that young, he's turned twenty-three, and what makes him feel foolish among these people, he's married. Nobody else here looks married. There is sure nobody else pregnant, that it shows. It makes him feel put on display, as a guy who didn't know better. To be fair to her Pru didn't want to come out, she was willing to sit over there like one of these green plants basking in the light of the television set, watching The Love Boat and then Fantasy Island with poor old Mom-mom, she's been fading lately, Dad and Mom used to sit home with her but now like tonight they're out somewhere with that Flying Eagle crowd, incredible how irresponsible grownups so-called get when they think they're ahead of the game, Mom has told him all about their crazy gold, maybe he should have offered to stay home, him and Pru with Mom-mom, she's the one with all the cards after all, but by that time Pru had gotten herself dolled up thinking she owed Nelson a little social life because he was working so hard and always housebound with her -families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle. Then once Pru got here and got a buzz on, the madwoman of Akron took over, she decided to play to the hilt the token pregnant woman, throwing her weight around, dancing in shoes she really shouldn't even be walking in, thick-soled wedgy platforms held on. by thin green plastic strapping like that gimp the playground supervisors at the Mt. Judge Rec Field used to have you braid lanyards for a whistle out of, there was even he remembers a way of weaving called butterflies, you could make a keyholder this way as if kids ever had keys to hold. Maybe she's doing it out of spite. But he has undergone an abandonment of his own and enjoys watching her from a distance of his own, through the -smoke. She has flash, Pru, flash and glitter in this electric-green beltless dress she bought herself at a new shop over on Locust where the old retired people are being forced out by gentrification, the middle class returning to the cities. Sleeves wide as wings lift when she whirls and that cannonball of a stomach sticks out tugging up her dress in front to show more of the orange elastic stockings the doctor told her to wear to save her young veins. Her shiny platforms can barely shuffle on the shag carpeting but she leaves them on, showing she can do it, more spite at him; her body as if skewered through a spot between her shoulder blades writhes to the music while her arms lift shimmery green and her fantastic long hair snaps in a circle, again and again.

Nelson cannot dance, which is to say he will not, for all dancing is now is standing in place and letting the devil of the music enter you, which takes more faith than he's got. He doesn't want to appear a fool. Now Dad, Dad would do it if he were here, just like when Jill was there he gave himself to Skeeter and never looked back even when all the worst had happened, such a fool he really believes there is a God he is the apple of the eye of. The dots on the ceiling don't let Nelson take this glimpse higher than this and he returns his eyes to Pru, painfully bright in the dazzle dress, its flow like a jewel turned liquid, her face asleep in the music above her belly, which is solid and not hers alone but also his, so he is dancing too. He hates for a second that in himself which cannot do it; just as he could not join in the flickering mind play of computer science and college generally and could not be the floating easy athlete his father had been. The dark second passes, dissolved by the certainty that some day he will have his revenge on them all.

Pru's partner for some of the dancing has been one of the sassy Brewer blacks, the bigger one, in bib overalls and cowboy boots, and then Slim comes out of a twirl over by the potted plants with Lyle and swings into orbit with Pru, who keeps at it whether or not anybody is there, up and down, little flips of her hands, and a head toss. Her face does look asleep. That hooked nose of hers sharp in profile. People keep touching her belly, as if for luck: in spinning and snapping their fingers their loose fingers trail across the sacred bulge where something that belongs to him too is lodged. But how to fend off their touches, how to protect her and keep her clean? She is too big, he would look like a fool, she likes the dirt, she came out of it. Once she drove him past her old home in Akron, she never took him in, what a sad row, houses with wooden porches with old refrigerators on them. Melame would have been better, her brother played polo. At least Pru should take off her shoes. He sees himself rising up to tell her but in truth feels too stoned to move, obliged to sit here and mellow between the fluffy worms of the carpet and the worm holes of the ceiling. The music has gas bubbles in it, popping in the speakers, and Donna Summer's zombie voice slides in and out of itself, doubling, taking all parts. Stuck on you, stuck like glue. The fairy that Slim stopped dancing with offers Pru a toke and she sucks the wet tip of the joint and holds it down deep without losing a beat of the music, belly and feet keeping that twitch. Nelson sees that to an Akron slum kid like this Brewer is a city of hicks and she's showing them all something.

A girl he noticed before, she came here with some big redfaced clod who actually wore a coat and tie to this brawl, comes and sits on the floor beside Nelson under Ilie Nastase and takes the beer from between his ankles to sip from it. Her smiling pale round face looks a little lost here but willing to please. "Where do you live?" she asks, as if picking up with him a conversation begun with someone else.

"In Mt. Judge?" He thinks that's the answer.

"In an apartment?"

"With my parents and my grandmother."

"Why is that?" Her face shines amiably with sweat. She has been drinking too. But there is a calm about her he is grateful for. Her legs stretch out beside his in white pants that look radiant where that jellyfish of strangeness moves across them.

"It's cheaper." He softens this. "We thought no point in looking for a place until the baby comes."

"You have a wife?"

"There she is." He gestures toward Pru.

The girl drinks her in. "She's terrific."

"You could say that."

"What does that tone of voice mean?"

"It means she's bugging the shit out of me."

"Should she be bouncing like that? I mean, the baby."

"Well, they say exercise. Where do you live?"

"Not far. On Youngquist. Our apartment isn't near as grand as this, we're on the first floor back, overlooking a little yard where all the cats come. They say our building might be going condo."

"That good or bad?"

"Good if you have the money, bad if you don't I guess. We just started working in town and my – my man wants to go to college when we get our stake."

"Tell him, Forget it. I've been to college and it's absolute horse poop." She has a pleasant puffy look to her upper lip and he's sorry to see, from the way she holds her mouth, that he's left her nothing to say. "What do you work at?" he asks her.

"I'm a nurses' aide in an old people's home. I doubt if you know it, Sunnyside out toward the old fairgrounds."

"Isn't it depressing?"

"People say that but I don't mind it. They talk to me, that's mostly what people want, company."

"You and this man aren't married?"

"Not yet. He wants to get further along in life. I think it's good. We might want to change our minds."

"Smart. That chick in green out there got herself knocked up and I had no choice." Not much answer to this either. Yet the girl doesn't show boredom, like so many people do with him. At the lot he watches Jake and Rudy prattle away and he envies how they do it without feeling idiotic. This strange face hangs opposite his calmly, mildly attentive, the eyes a blue paler than you almost ever see and her skin milky and her nose slightly tipped up and her gingery hair loosely bundled to the back. Her ears are exposed and pierced but unadorned. In his stoned condition the squarish white folds of these ears seem very vivid. "You say you just moved to town," Nelson says. "Where'd you move from?"

"Near Galilee. Know where that is?"

"More or less. When I was a kid we went down there to the drag race strip a couple times."

"You can hear the engines from our place, on a quiet night. My room is on the side and I used to always hear them."

"Where we live there's always traffic going by. My room used to be out in back but now it's up front." Dear little ears, small like his, though nothing else about her is small, especially. Her thighs really fill those bright white pants. "What does your father do, he a farmer?"

"My father's dead."

"Oh. Sorry."

"No, it was hard, but he was getting along. He was a farmer, you're right, and he had the school bus contract for the township."

"Still, that's too bad."

"I have a wonderful mother though."

"What's wonderful about her?"

In his stupidity he keeps sounding combative. But she doesn't seem to mind. "Oh. She's just very understanding. And can be very funny. I have these two brothers -"

"You do?"

"Yes, and she's never tried to make me feel I should back down or anything because I'm a girl."

"Well why would she?" He feels jealous.

"Some mothers would. They think girls should be quiet and smart. Mine says women get more out of life. With men, it's if you don't win every time, you're nothing."

"Some momma. She has it all figured."

"And she's fatter than I am and I love her for that."

You're not fat, you're just nice, he wants to tell her. Instead he says, "Finish up the beer. I'll get us another."

"No thanks – what's your name?"

"Nelson." He should ask her hers but the words stick.

"Nelson. No thanks, I just wanted a sip. I should go see what Jamie's doing. He's in the kitchen with some girl -"

"Who's showing her tits."

"That's right."

"My theory on that is, those that got real tits to show don't." He glances down. The vertical ribs of her russet knit sweater are pushed slightly apart as they pass over the soft ample shelf there. Below that the white cloth of her slacks, taut in wrinkles where belly meets thighs in a triangle, has a radiance that manifests the diagonal run of the threads, the way the cloth was woven and cut. Below that her feet are bare, with a pinkness along the outer edge of each big toe fresh from the pressure of her discarded shoes.

The girl has been made to blush by this survey of her body. "What do you do since college, Nelson?"

"I just veg out. No, actually, I sell cars. Not your ordinary tacky cars but special old convertibles, that nobody makes anymore. Their value is going to go up and up, it has to."

"Sounds exciting."

"It is. Jesus, the other day in the middle of town I saw this white Thunderbird parked, with red leather seats, the guy still had the top down though it's getting pretty cold, and I nearly flipped. It looked like a yacht. When they turned out those things there wasn't all this penny-pinching."

"Jamie and I just bought a Corolla. It's in his name but I'm the one that uses it, there isn't any bus that goes out to the fairgrounds anymore and Jamie has a job he can walk to, in this place that makes bug-killers, you know, those electric grids with a purple light that people put outdoors by their pools or barbecues."

"Sounds groovy. Must be a slack season for him though."

"You'd think so but it's not, they're busy making them for next year, and they ship all over the South."

"Huh." Maybe they've had enough of this conversation. He doesn't want to hear any more about Jamie's bug-killers.

But the girl keeps going, she's relaxed with him now, and so young everything is new to her. Nelson guesses she's three or four years younger than he is. Pru is over a year older, and that irritates him right now, along with her defiant dancing and her pregnancy and all these blacks and queers she's not afraid of. "So I really should put in my half," she is explaining, "even though he makes twice what I do. His parents and my mother loaned us the down payment equally though I know she couldn't afford it. Next year if I can get a part-time job somewhere I want to begin nurse's training. Those RNs make a fortune doing just what I'm doing now, except they're allowed to give injections."

"Jesus, you want to spend your whole life around sick people?"

"I like taking care of things. On the farm until my father died there were always chickens and animals. I used to shear my own sheep even."

"Huh." Nelson has always been allergic to animals.

"Do you dance, Nelson?" she asks him.

"No. I sit and drink beer and feel sorry for myself." Pru is bouncing around now with a Puerto Rican or something. Manny has a couple of them working for him in the shop now. He doesn't know what disease they get as kids, but their cheeks have worse than pocks – like little hollow cuts all over.

"Jamie won't dance either."

"Ask one of the fairies. Or just go do it by yourself, somebody'll pick you up."

"I love to dance. Why do you feel sorry for yourself?"

"Oh… my father's a prick." He doesn't know why this popped out of his mouth. Something about the goody-goody way in which the girl speaks of her own parents. But in thinking of his father, what strikes Nelson about the large bland face that appears to his inner eye is a mournful helplessness. His father's face bloats like an out-of-focus close-up in some war movie in the scramble of battle before floating away. Big and white and vague as on that day when he held him on his lap, when the world was too much for the two of them.

"You shouldn't say that," the girl says, and stands. Luminous long legs. Her thighs make a kind of lap even when she stands. Her pink-rimmed bare feet sunk in the shag rug so close nearly kill him, they are so sexy. What did she say that for? Making him feel guilty and scolded. Her own father is dead. She makes him feel he's killed his. She can go fuck. She goes and dances, standing shy along the wall for a minute and then moving in, loosening. He doesn't want to watch and get envious; he heaves himself up, to get another beer and steal another look at the girl in the kitchen. Sad, tits by themselves, on a woman sitting up. Little half-filled purses. This Jamie's face and hands are broad and scraped-looking and he has loosened his tie to let his bull neck breathe. Another girl is reading his palm; they are all sitting around a little porcelain kitchen table, with spots worn black where place settings were, which reminds Nelson of something. What? A poster in here is of Marlon Brando in the black-leather get-up of The Wild One. Another shows Alice Cooper with his green eyelids and long fingernails. The refrigerator with its cool shelves of yogurt in paper cups and beer in sharply lettered sixpacks seems an island of decent order amid all this. Nelson is reminded of the lot, its rows of new Toyotas, and his stomach sinks. Sometimes at the lot, standing in the showroom with no customers in sight, he feels return to him from childhood that old fear of being in the wrong place, of life being run by rules nobody would share with him. He returns to the big front room with its fake ceiling and thinks that Pru looks ridiculously older than the other dancers: a little frizzy-haired girl called Dody Weinstein interning in teen fashions at Kroll's and Slim and this Lyle in the soccer shirt back together again and Pam their hostess in a big floppy muu-muu her body is having fits within, while the wan lights of Brewer fall away beyond the bay window, and the girl without a name waits in her white pants to be picked up while she stands to one side shivering from side to side in time to the music. One night in a lifetime, one life in a night. She looks a little self-conscious but happy to be here, out of the sticks. The black bubbles in the speakers pop faster and faster, and his wife with her cannonball gut is about to fall flat on her face. He goes to Pru and pulls her by her wrist away. Her spic thug of a partner dead-pan writhes to the girl in white pants and picks her up. Babe it's gotta be tonight, babe it's gotta be tonight. Nelson is squeezing Pru's wrist to hurt. She is unsteady, pulled out of the music, and this further angers him, his wife getting tipsy. Defective equipment breaking down on purpose just to show him up. Her brittle imbalance makes him want to smash her completely.

"You're hurting me," she says. Her voice arrives, tiny and dry, from a little box suspended in air behind his ear. As she tries to pull her wrist away her bangles pinch his fingers, and this is infuriating.

He wants to get her somewhere out of this. He pulls her across a hallway looking for a wall to prop her up against. He finds one, in a small side room; the light-switch plate beside her shoulder has been painted like an open-mouthed face with an off-on tongue. He puts his own face up against Pru's and hisses, "Listen. You shape up for Chrissake. You're going to hurt yourself if you don't shape up. And the baby. What're you tryin' to do, shake him loose? Now you calm down."

"I am calm. You're the one that's not calm, Nelson." Their eyes are so close her eyes threaten to swallow his with their blurred green. "And who says it's going to be a him?" Pru gives him her lopsided smirk. Her lips are painted vampire red in the new style and it's not becoming, it emphasizes her hatchet face, her dead calm bloodless look. That blank defiance of the poor: you can't scare them enough.

He pleads, "You shouldn't be drinking and smoking pot at all, you'll cause genetic damage. You know that."

She forms her words in response slowly. "Nelson. You don't give a shit about genetic damage."

"You silly bitch. I do. Of course I do. It's my kid. Or is it? You Akron kids'll fuck anybody."

They are in a strange room. Flamingos surround them. Whoever lives in this side room with its view of the brick wall across two narrow sideyards has collected flamingos as a kind of joke. A glossy pink stuffed satin one drapes its ridiculous long black legs over the back of the sofabed, and hollow plastic ones with stick legs are propped along the walls on shelves. There are flamingos worked into ashtrays and coffee mugs and there are little 3-D tableaux of the painted pink birds with lakes and palms and sunsets, souvenirs of Florida. For one souvenir a trio of them were gathered in knickers and Scots caps on a felt putting green. Some of the bigger ones wear on their hollow drooping beaks those limp candylike sunglasses you can get in five and dimes. There are hundreds, other gays must give them to him, it has to be Slim who lives in here, that sofabed wouldn't be enough for Jason and Pam.

"It is," Pru promises. "You know it is."

"I don't know. You're acting awfully whorey tonight."

"I didn't want to come, remember? You're the one always wants to go out."

He begins to cry: something about Pru's face, that toughness out of Akron closed against him, her belly bumping his, that big doll-like body he used to love so much, that she might just as easily have entrusted to another, its clefts, its tufts, and might just as easily take from him now, he is nothing to her. All their tender times, picking her up on the hill and walking under the trees, and the bars along Water Street, and his going ahead and letting her out there in Colorado make such a sucker of him while he stewed in Diamond County, nothing. He is nothing to her like he was nothing to Jill, a brat, a bug to be humored, and look what happened. Love feels riddled through all his body like rot, down clear to his knees spongy as punk. "You'll do damage to yourself," he sobs; tears add their glitter to the green of her dress at the shoulder, yet his own crumpled face hangs as clear in the back of his brain as a face on a TV screen.

"You're strange," Pru tells him, her voice breathier now, a whispery rag stuffed in his ear.

"Let's get out of this creepy place."

"That girl you were talking to, what did she say?"

"Nothing. Her boyfriend makes bug-killers."

"You talked together a long time."

"She wanted to dance."

"I could see you pointing and looking at me. You're ashamed of my being pregnant."

"I'm not. I'm proud."

"The fuck you are, Nelson. You're embarrassed."

"Don't be so hard. Come on, let's split."

"See, you are embarrassed. That's all this baby is to you, an embarrassment."

"Please come. What're you trying to do, make me get down on my knees?"

"Listen, Nelson. I was having a perfectly good time dancing and you come out and pull this big macho act. My wrist still hurts. Maybe you broke it."

He tries to lift her wrist to kiss it but she stiffly resists: at times she seems to him, body and soul, a board, flat, with that same abrasive grain. And then the fear comes upon him that this flatness is her, that she is not withholding depths within but there are no depths, this is what there is. She gets on a track sometimes and it seems she can't stop. His pulling at her wrist again, only to kiss it but she doesn't want to see that, has made her altogether mad, her face all pink and pointy and rigid. "You know what you are?" She tells him, "You're a little Napoleon. You're a twerp, Nelson."

"Hey don't."

The space around her vampire lips is tight and her voice is a dead level engine that won't stop. "I didn't really know you. I've been watching how you act with your family and you're very spoiled. You're spoiled and you're a bully, Nelson."

"Shut up." He mustn't cry again. "I was never spoiled, just the opposite. You don't know what my family did to me."

"I've heard about it a thousand times and to me it never sounded like any big deal. You expect your mother and poor old grandmother to take care of you no matter what you do. You're horrid about your father when all he wants is to love you, to have a halfway normal son."

"He didn't want me to work at the lot."

"He didn't think you were ready and you weren't. You aren't. You aren't ready to be a father either but that's my mistake."

"Oh, even you make mistakes." The green she is wearing is a hateful color, shimmery electric arsenic like a big fat black hooker would wear to get attention on the street. He turns his eyes away and sees over on a bureau top some bendable toy flamingos have been arranged in a copulating position, one on top of the other's back, and another pair in what he supposes is a blow job, but the droopy beaks spoil the effect.

"I make plenty," Pru is going on, "why wouldn't I, nobody has ever taught me anything. But I'll tell you one thing Nelson Angstrom I'm going to have this baby no matter what you do. You can go to Hell."

"I can, huh?"

"Yes." She has to weaken it. Her very belly seems to soften against his, nestling. "I don't want you to but you can. I can't stop you and you can't stop me, we're two people even if we did get married. You never wanted to marry me and I shouldn't have let you, it turns out."

"I did though, I did," he says, fearful that confessing this will make his face crumple again.

"Then stop being a bully. You bullied me to come here and now you're bullying me to go. I like these people. They have better senses of humor than the people in Ohio."

"Let's stay then." There are things other than flamingos in the room -hideous things, he sees. A plaster cast of Elvis Presley with votive candles in red cups at its base. An aquarium without fish in it but full of Barbie dolls and polyplike plastic things he thinks are called French ticklers. Tacked-up postcards of women in tinsel triangles somersaulting, mooning, holding giant breasts in their silvergloved hands, postcards from Germany printed on those tiny ridges that hold two views, one coy and one obscene, depending on how you move your head. The room all over has the distinctness and variousness of vomit that still holds whole green peas and orange carrot dice from the dinner of an hour ago. He can't stop looking.

As he moves from one horror to the next Pru slips away, giving his hand a squeeze that may be apologetic for all they've said. What have they said? In the kitchen the girl with bare tits has put on a T-shirt saying ERA, Jamie has taken off his coat and his necktie. Nelson feels very tall, so tall he can't hear what he himself is saying, but it doesn't matter, and they all laugh. In a dark bedroom off the kitchen someone is watching the eleven-thirty special report from Iran, time slips by in that rapid spasmodic skid of party time. When Pru returns to him asking to go she is dead pale, a ghost with the lipstick on her face like movie blood and worn in the center where her lips meet. Things are being dyed blue by something in his head and her teeth look crooked as she tells him almost inaudibly that she has taken off her shoes like he wanted her to and now she can't find them. She plops down on a kitchen chair and stretches her orange legs out so her belly thrusts up like a prick and laughs with all those around her. What pigs. Nelson in searching for her shoes finds instead in the side room of horrible tinsel and flamingos the girl in white pants asleep on the sofabed. With her face slack she looks even younger than before. Her hand curls beside her snub nose pale palm up. The calm and mildly freckled bulge of her forehead sleeps without a crease. Only her hair holds that deep force of a woman, unbundled from its pins and many-colored in the caves and ridges of its tangle. He wants to cover her up but sees no blanket, just the French ticklers and Barbie dolls brilliant in their aquarium. A sliver of milky bare skin peeps where her russet knit sweater has ridden up from the waist of her slacks. Nelson looks down and wonders, Why can't a woman just be your friend, even with the sex? Why do you have to keep dealing with all this ego, giving back hurt just to defend yourself? Gazing down at that milky bit of skin, he forgets what he came in here to find. He needs to urinate, he realizes.

And in the bathroom after his bladder has emptied in those unsteady dribbles that mean it's been allowed to get too full he becomes fascinated by a big slick book sitting on the hamper, belonging to Slim most likely, an album printed of photographs and posters from the Nazi days in Germany, beautiful blond boys in rows singing and a handsome fat man in a white uniform loaded with medals and Hitler looking young and lean and gallant, gazing toward some Alps. Having this here is some kind of swish thing like those tinselled cards showing women as so ugly and there seems no protection against all the ugliness that is in the world, no protection for that girl asleep or for him. Pru has found her horrible green platform shoes and in the kitchen is sitting in a straight chair while that Puerto Rican she picked up with like little knife cuts all over his face kneels at her feet doing up the little buckles on the straps like gimp. When she stands she acts rocky, what have they been giving her? She lets herself be slipped into that velvet jacket she used to wear in fall and spring at Kent, red so with the bright green dress she looks like Christmas six weeks early, all wrapped up. Jason is dancing in that front room where now Jamie and the girl with ERA across her pathetic tits are trying it out too, so they say their goodbyes to Pam and Slim, Pam giving Pru a kiss on the cheek woman to woman as if whispering the code word in her ear and Slim putting his hands together in front of his chest and bowing Buddha-style. That slanty look to his eyes, Nelson wonders if it's natural or comes with doing perverted things. The jellyfish of intensity crawls across Slims lips. Last little waves and smiles and the door closes on the party noise.

The door to the apartment is an old-fashioned heavy one of yellow oak. He and Pru on this third-floor landing are sealed into something like silence. Rain is tapping on the black skylight of chicken-wire glass above their heads.

"Still think I'm a twerp?" he asks.

"Nelson, why don't you grow up?"

The solid wooden banister on the right does a dizzying double loop down the two flights to the first floor. Looking down, Nelson can see the tops of two plastic garbage cans set in the basement far below. Impatiently Pru passes him on the left, fed up with him and anxious to be out in the air, and afterwards he remembers her broad hip bumping into his and his anger at what seemed her willful clumsiness, but not if he gives her a bit of hip back, a little vengeful shove. On the left of the stairwell there is no banister, and the plaster wall here is marred by ragged nail holes where the renovators stripped away what must have been panelling. So when Pru in those wedgy platforms turns her ankle, there is nothing for her to hold on to; she gives a little grunt but her pale face is impassive as in the old days of hang gliding, at the moment of launch. Nelson grabs for her velvet jacket but she is flying beyond his reach, her legs no longer under her; he sees her face skid past these nail holes as she twists toward the wall, clawing for support there, where there is none. She topples then twisting sideways, headfirst, the metal-edged treads ripping at her belly. It is all so fast yet his brain has time to process a number of sensations – the touch of her velvet humming in his fingertips, the scolding bump her hip gave him, his indignation at her clunky shoes and the people who stripped the staircase of its banister, all precisely layered in his mind. Distinctly he sees the patch of darker orange reinforcing at the crotch of her tights like the center of a flagrant green flower as her dress is flung wide with her legs by first impact. Her arms keep trying to brace her slithering body and one arm ends at an angle when she stops, about halfway down the steep flight, a shoe torn loose on a string of gimp, her head hidden beneath the splayed mass of her beautiful hair and all her long form still.

Fallt's Bubbli nunner!

In soft sweeps the rain patters on the skylight. Music leaks through the walls from the party. The noise of her fall must have been huge, for the yellow oak door pops open at once and people thunder all around, but the only sound Nelson heard was a squeak Pru gave when she first hit like one of those plastic floating bath toys suddenly accidentally stepped on.

Soupy is in fine form at the hospital, kidding the nurses and staff and moving through this white world in his black clothes like a happy germ, an exception to all the rules. He comes forward as if to embrace Ma Springer but at the last second holds back and gives her instead a somewhat jaunty swat on the shoulder. To Janice and Harry he gives his mischievous small-toothed grin; to Nelson he turns a graver, but still bright-eyed, face. "She looks just dandy, except for the cast on her arm. Even there she was fortunate. It's the left arm."

"She's left-handed," Nelson tells him. The boy is grouchy and stoops with lack of sleep. He was with her at the hospital from one to three and now at nine-thirty is back again. He called the house around one-fifteen and nobody answered and that has been added to his twenty years of grievances. Mom-mom had been in the house but had been too old and dopey to hear the phone through her dreams and his parents had been out with the Murketts and Harrisons at the new strip joint along Route 422 beyond the Four Seasons toward Pottstown and then had gone back to the Murketts' for a nightcap. So the family didn't hear the news until Nelson, who had crawled into his empty bed at three-thirty, awoke at nine. On the ride over to the hospital in his mother's Mustang he claimed he hadn't fallen asleep until the birds began to chirp.

"What birds?" Harry said. "They've all gone south."

"Dad, don't bug me, there are these black sort of birds right outside the window."

"Starlings," Janice offered, peacemaking.

"They don't chirp, they scrawk," Harry insisted. "Scrawk, scrawk."

"Doesn't it stay dark late now?" Ma Springer interposed. It's aging her, this constant tension between her son-in-law and her grandson.

Nelson sitting there all red-eyed and snuffly and stinking of last night's vapors did annoy Harry, short of sleep and hungover himself. He fought down the impulse to say Scrawk again. At the hospital, he asks Soupy, "How'd you get here so soon?" genuinely admiring. Snicker all you want, the guy is magical somehow.

"The lady herself," the clergyman gaily announces, doing a little side-step that knocks a magazine to the floor from a low table where too many are stacked. Woman's Day. Field and Stream. A hospital of course wouldn't get Consumer Reports. A killing article in there a while ago about medical costs and the fantastic mark-up on things like aspirin and cold pills. Soupy stoops to retrieve the magazine and comes up slightly breathless. He tells them, "Evidently, after they calmed the dear girl down and set her arm and reassured her that the fetus appeared unaffected she still felt such concern that she woke up at seven a.m. and knew Nelson would be asleep and didn't know who to call. So she thought of me." Soupy beams. "I of course was still wrapped in the arms of Morpheus but got my act together and told her I'd rush over between Holy Communion and the ten o'clock service and, behold, here I am. Ecce homo. She wanted to pray with me to keep the baby, she'd been praying constantly, and at least to this point in time as they used to say it seems to have worked!" His black eyes click from one to another face, up and down and across. "The doctor who received her went off duty at eight but the nurse in attendance solemnly swore to me that for all of the mother's bruises that little heartbeat in there is just as strong as ever, and no signs of vaginal bleeding or anything nasty like that. That Mother Nature, she is one tough old turkey." He has chosen Ma Springer to tell this to. "Now I must run, or the hungry sheep will look up and be not fed. Visiting hours here don't really begin until one p.m., but I'm sure the authorities wouldn't object if you took a quick peek. Tell them I gave you my blessing." And his hand reflexively lifts, as if to give them a blessing. But instead he lays the hand on the sleeve of Ma Springer's glistening fur coat. "If you can't make the service," he entreats, "do come for the meeting afterwards. It's the meeting to advise the vestry on the new tracker organ, and a lot of pennypinchers are coming out of the woods. They put a dollar a week into the plate all year, and their vote is as good as mine or thine." He flies away, scattering the V-for-peace sign down the hall.

Boy, these boys do love misery, Harry thinks. Well, it's a turf nobody else wants. St. Joseph's Hospital is in the tatty northcentral part of Brewer where the old Y.M.C.A. was before they tore it down for yet another drive-in bank and where the old wooden railroad bridge has been rebuilt in concrete that started to crack immediately. They used to talk about burying the tracks along through here in a tunnel but then the trains pretty much stopped running and that solved that. Janice had had Rebecca June here when the nurses were all nuns, they may still be nuns but now there's no way of telling. The receptionist for this floor wears a salmon-colored pants suit. Her swollen bottom and slumping shoulders lead the way. Half-open doors reveal people lying emaciated under white sheets staring at the white ceiling, ghosts already. Pru is in a four-bed room and two women in gauzy hospital johnnies scatter back into their beds, ambushed by early visitors. In the fourth bed an ancient black woman sleeps. Pru herself is all but asleep. She still wears flecks of last night's mascara but the rest of her looks virginal, especially the fresh white cast from elbow to wrist. Nelson kisses her lightly on the lips and then, sitting in the one bedside chair while his elders stand, sockets his face in the space on the bed edge next to the curve of Pru's hip. What a baby, Harry thinks.

"Nelson was wonderful," Pru is telling them. "So caring." Her voice is more musical and throaty than Harry has ever heard it.

He wonders if just lying down does that to a woman: changes the angle of her voice box.

"Yeah, he felt sick about it," Harry says. "We didn't hear the story till this morning."

Nelson lifts his head. "They were at a strip joint, can you imagine?"

"Jesus," Harry says to Janice. "Who's in charge here? What does he want us to do, sit around the house all the time aging gracefully?"

Ma Springer says, "Now we can only stay a minute, I want to get to church. It wouldn't look right I think just to go to the meeting like Reverend Campbell said."

"Go to that meeting, Ma," Harry points out, "they'll hit you up for a fortune. Tracker organs don't grow on trees."

Janice says to Pru, "You poor sweetie. How bad is the arm?"

"Oh, I wasn't paying that much attention to what the doctor said." Her voice floats, she must be full of tranquilizers. "There's a bone on the outside, with a funny name -"

"Femur," Harry suggests. Something about all this has jazzed him up, made him feel nerved-up and defiant. Those strippers last night, some of them young enough to be his daughter. The Gold Cherry, the place was called.

Nelson lifts his head again from burrowing in Pru's side. "That's in the thigh, Dad. She means the humerus."

"Ha ha," Harry says.

Pru seems to moan. "Ulna," she supplies. "He said it was just a simple fracture."

"How long's it gonna be on?" Harry asks.

"He said six weeks if I do what he says."

"Off by Christmas," Harry says. Christmas is a big thing in his mind this year, for beyond it, and the mop-up of New Year's, they're going to take their trip, they have the hotel, the plane reservations, they were discussing it all last night again, after the excitement of the strippers.

"You poor sweetie," Janice repeats.

Pru begins to sing, without music. But the words come out as if sung. "Oh my God, I don't mind, I'm glad for it, I deserve to be punished somehow. I honestly believe" – she keeps looking straight at Janice, with an authority they haven't seen from her before – "it's God telling me this is the price He asks for my not losing the baby. I'm glad to pay it, I'd be glad if every bone in my body was broken, I really wouldn't care. Oh my God, when I felt my feet weren't under me and I knew there wasn't anything for me to do but fall down those horrible stairs, the thoughts that ran through my head! You must know."

Meaning Janice must know what it's like to lose a baby. Janice kind of yelps and falls on the bedridden girl so hard Harry winces, and plucks at her back to pull her off. Feeling the rock of plaster against her breasts, Janice arches her spine under his hands; through the cloth her skin feels taut as a drum, and hot. But Pru shows no pain, smiling her crooked careful smile and keeping her eyelids with their traces of last night's blue closed serenely, accepting the older woman's weight upon her. The hand not captured in a cast Pru sneaks around to pat Janice's back; her fingers come close to Harry's own. Pat, they go, pat pat. He thinks of Cindy Murkett's round fingers and marvels how much more childish and grublike they look than these, bony though young and reddened at the knuckles: his mother's hands had that tough scrubbed look. Janice can't stop sobbing, Pru can't stop patting, the two other women patients awake in the room can't stop glancing over. Moments this complicated rub Harry the wrong way. He feels rebuked, since the official family version is that the baby's dying at Janice's hands was all his fault. Yet now the truth seems declared that he was just a bystander. Nelson, pushed to one side by his mother's assault of grief, sits up and stares, poor frazzled kid. These damn women so intent on communing should leave us out of it entirely. At last Janice rights herself, having snuffled so hard her upper lip is wet with snot.

Harry hands her his handkerchief.

"I'm so happy," she says with a big runny sniff, "for Pru."

"Come on, shape up," he mutters, taking back the handkerchief.

Ma Springer soothes the waters with, "It does seem a miracle, all the way down those stairs and nothing worse. Up that high in those old Brewer houses the stairs were just for the servants."

"I didn't go all the way down," Pru says. "That's how I broke my arm, stopping myself. I don't remember any pain."

"Yeah," Harry offers. "Nelson said you were feeling no pain."

"Oh no, no." Her hair spread out across the pillow by Janice's embrace makes her look like she is falling through white space, singing. "I'd hardly had anything, the doctors all say you shouldn't, it was those terrible tall platforms they're making us all wear. Isn't that the dumbest style? I'm going to burn them up, absolutely, as soon as I get back."

"When will that be now?" Ma asks, shifting her black purse to the other hand. She has been dressed for church since before Nelson woke up and the fuss began. She's a slave to that church, God knows what she gets out of it.

"Up to a week, he said," Pru says. "To keep me quiet and, you know, to make sure. The baby. I woke up this morning with what I thought were contractions and they scared me so I called Soupy. He was wonderful."

"Yes, well," Ma says.

Harry hates the way they all keep calling it the baby. More like a piglet or a wobbly big frog at this stage, as he pictures it. What if she had lost it, wouldn't it have lived? They keep five-month preemies alive now and pretty soon you'll have life in a test tube start to finish. "We gotta get Ma to church," he announces. "Nelson, you want to wake up and come or stay here and sleep?" The boy's head had gone back down onto the hospital mattress again. He used to fall asleep at the kitchen table that way.

"Harry," Janice says. "Don't be so rough on everybody."

"He thinks we're all silly about the baby," Pru says dreamily, dimly teasing.

"No, hey: I think it's great about the baby." He bends over to kiss her goodbye for now and wants to whisper in her ear about all the babies he has had, dead and alive, visible and invisible. Instead he tells her, straightening, "Keep cool. We'll be back after this when we can stay longer."

"Don't not play golf," she says.

"Golf's shot. They don't like you to walk on the greens after a certain point."

Nelson is asking her, "What do you want me to do, go or stay?"

"Go, Nelson, for heaven's sake. Let me get some sleep."

"You know, I'm sorry last night if I said anything. I was skunked. When they told me last night they didn't think you'd lose the baby I was so relieved I cried. Honest." He would cry again but his face clouds with embarrassed awareness that the others have listened. That's why we love disaster, Harry sees, it puts us back in touch with guilt and sends us crawling back to God. Without a sense of being in the wrong we're no better than animals. Suppose the baby had aborted at the very moment he was watching that olive chick with the rolling tongue tug down her tinsel underpants to her knees and peek at the audience from behind her shoulder while tickling her asshole with that ostrich feather: he'd feel terrible.

Pru waves her husband's quavery words and all their worried faces away. "I'm fine. I love all of you so much." Her hair streams outward as she waits to sink into sleep, into more wild prayer, into the dreaming fluids of her own bruised belly. Her stumpy wing of snow-white plaster lifts a few inches from her chest in farewell. They leave her to the company of ex-nuns and shuffle back through the hospital corridors, their footsteps clamorous amid their silent determination to save their quarrels for the car.

"A week!" Harry says, as soon as they're rolling in the Mustang. "Does anybody have any idea how much a week in a hospital costs these days?"

"Dad, how can you keep thinking about money all the time?"

"Somebody has to. A week is a thousand dollars minimum. Minimum."

"You have Blue Cross."

"Not for daughter-in-laws I don't. Not for you either, once you're over nineteen."

"Well I don't know," Nelson says, "but I don't like her being in a ward with all those other women barfing and moaning all night. One of 'em was even black, did you notice?"

"How did you get so prejudiced? Not from me. Anyway that's not a ward, that's what you call a semi-private," Harry says.

"I want my wife to have a private room," Nelson says.

"Is that a fact? You want, you want. And who's going to foot the bill, big shot? Not you."

Ma Springer says, "I know when I had my diverticulitis, Fred wouldn't hear of anything but a private room for me. And it was a corner room at that. A wonderful view of the arboretum, the magnolias just in bloom."

Janice asks, "How about at the lot, isn't he under the group insurance there?"

Harry tells her, "Maternity benefits don't start till you've worked for Springer Motors nine months."

"A broken arm isn't what I'd call maternity," Nelson says.

"Yeah but if it weren't for her maternity she'd be out walking around with it."

"Maybe Mildred could look into it," Janice suggests.

"O.K.," he concedes, with ill grace. "I don't know what our exact policy is."

Nelson should let it go at that. Instead he says, leaning forward from the back seat so his voice presses on Harry's ear, "Without Mildred and Charlie there isn't much you do know exactly. I mean -"

"I know what you mean and I know a lot more about the car business than you ever will at the rate you're going, if you don't stop futzing around with these old Detroit hotrods that lose us a bundle and start focusing on the line we carry."

"I wouldn't mind if they were Datsuns or Hondas, but frankly Dad, Toyotas -"

"The Toyota franchise is what old Fred Springer landed and Toyotas are what we sell. Bessie, why doncha slap the kid around a little? I can't reach him."

His mother-in-law's voice comes from the back seat after a pause. "I was wondering if I should go to church after all. I know his heart's set on a big drive for the organ and there aren't too many that enthusiastic. If I show up I might get made a committee head and I'm too old for that."

"Didn't Teresa seem sweet?" Janice asks aloud. "It seemed like she'd grown up overnight."

"Yeah," Harry says, "and if she'd fallen down all two flights she'd be older than we are."

"Jesus, Dad," Nelson says. "Who do you like?"

"I like everybody," Harry says. "I just don't like getting boxed in."

The way from St. Joseph's to Mt. Judge is to keep going straight over the railroad tracks and then continue right on Locust past Brewer High and on through Cityview Park and then left past the shopping mall as usual. On a Sunday morning the people out in cars are mostly the older American type, the women with hair tinted blue or pink like the feathers of those Easter chicks before they outlawed it and the men gripping the steering wheel with two hands like the thing might start to buck and bray: with nolead up to a dollar thirteen at some city stations thanks to the old Ayatollah they have to try to squeeze value out of every drop. Actually, people's philosophy seems to be they'll burn it while it's here and when it's fourth down and twenty-seven Carter can punt. The four features at the mall cinema are BREAKING AWAY STARTING OVER RUNNING and "10." He'd like to see "10," he knows from the ads this Swedish-looking girl has her hair in corn rows like a black chick out of Zaire. One world: everybody fucks everybody. When he thinks of all the fucking there's been in the world and all the fucking there's going to be, and none ofit for him, here he sits in this stuffy car dying, his heart just sinks. He'll never fuck anybody again in his lifetime except poor Janice Springer, he sees this possibility ahead of him straight and grim as the known road. His stomach, sour from last night's fun, binds as it used to when he was running to school late. He says suddenly to Nelson, "How the hell could you let her fall, why didn't you keep ahold of her? What were you doing out so late anyway? When your mother was pregnant with you we never went anywhere."

"Together at least," the boy says. "You went a lot of places by yourself the way I heard it."

"Not when she was pregnant with you, we sat there night after night with the boob tube, 1 Love Lucy and all that family comedy, didn't we Bessie? And we weren't snorting any dope, either."

"You don't snort dope, you smoke it. Coke is what you snort."

Ma Springer responds slowly to his question. "Oh I don't know how you and Janice managed exactly," she says wearily, in a voice that is looking out the window. "The young people are different now."

"I'll say they are. You fire somebody to give 'em a job and they knock the product."

"It's an O.K. product if all you want is to get from here to there," Nelson begins.

Harry interrupts furiously, thinking of poor Pru lying there with a snivelling baby burying his head in her side instead of a husband, of Melanie slaving away at the Crépe House for all those creeps from the banks that lunch downtown, of his own sweet hopeful daughter stuck with that big red-faced Jamie, of poor little Cindy having to put on a grin at being fucked from behind so old Webb can have his kicks with his SX-70, of Mim going down on all those wop thugs out there all those years, of Mom plunging her old arms in gray suds and crying the kitchen blues until Parkinson's at last took mercy and got her upstairs for a rest, of all the women put upon and wasted in the world as far as he can see so little punks like this can come along. "Let me tell you something about Toyotas," he calls back at Nelson. "They're put together by little yellow guys in white smocks that work in one plant cradle to grave and go crazy if there's a fleck of dust in the fuel injector system and those jalopies Detroit puts out are slapped together by jigaboos wearing headphones pumping music into their ears and so zonked on drugs they don't know a slothead screw from a lug nut and furthermore are taught by the NAACP -to hate the company. Half the cars come through the Ford assembly line are deliberately sabotaged, I forget where I read all this, it wasn't Consumer Reports."

"Dad, you're so prejudiced. What would Skeeter say?"

Skeeter. In quite another voice Harry says, "Skeeter was killed in Philly last April, did I tell ya?"

"You keep telling me."

"I'm not blaming the blacks on the assembly line, I'm just saying it sure makes for lousy cars."

Nelson is on the attack, frazzled and feeling rotten, poor kid. "And who are you to criticize me and Pru for going out to see some friends when you were off with yours seeing those ridiculous exotic dancers? How could you stand it, Mom?"

Janice says, "It wasn't as bad as I'd thought. They keep it within bounds. It really wasn't any worse than it used to be at the old fairgrounds."

"Don't answer him," Harry tells her. "Who's he to criticize?"

"The funny thing," Janice goes on, "is how Cindy and Thelma and I could agree which girl was the best and the men had picked some girl entirely different. We all liked this tall Oriental who was very graceful and artistic and they liked, Mother, the men liked some little chinless blonde who couldn't even dance."

"She had that look about her," Harry explains. "I mean, she meant it."

"And then that tubby dark one that turned you on. With the feather."

"Olive-complected. She was nice too. The feather I could have done without."

"Mom-mom doesn't want to hear all this disgusting stuff," Nelson says from the back seat.

"Mom-mom doesn't mind," Harry tells him. "Nothing fazes Bessie Springer. Mom-mom loves life."

"Oh I don't know," the old lady says with a sigh. "We didn't have such things when we might have been up to it. Fred I remember used to bring home the Playboy sometimes, but to me it seemed more pathetic than not, these eighteen-year-old girls that are really just children except for their bodies."

"Well who isn't?" Harry asks.

"Speak for yourself, Dad," Nelson says.

"No now, I meant," Ma insists, "you wonder what their parents raised them for, seeing them all naked just the way they were born. And what the parents must think." She sighs. "It's a different world."

Janice says, "I guess at this same place Monday nights they have ladies' night with male strippers. And they say really the young men become frightened, Doris Kaufinann was telling me, the women grab for them and try to get up on the stage after them. The women over forty they say are the worst."

"That's so sick," Nelson says.

"Watch your mouth," Harry tells him. "Your mother's over forty."

"Dad."

"Well I wouldn't behave like that," she says, "but I can see how some might. I suppose a lot of it depends on how satisfying the husband you have is."

"Mo-om," the boy protests.

They have swung around the mountain and turned up Central and by the electric clock in the dry cleaner's window it is three of ten. Harry calls back, "Looks like we'll make it, Bessie!"

The town hall has its flag at half-mast because of the hostages. At the church the people in holiday clothes are still filing in, beneath the canopy of bells calling with their iron tongues, beneath the wind-torn gray clouds of this November sky with its scattered silver. Letting Ma out of the Mustang, Harry says, "Now don't pledge the lot away, just for Soupy's organ."

Nelson asks, "How will you get home, Mom-mom?"

"Oh, I guess I can get a ride with Grace Stuhl's grandson, he generally comes for her. Otherwise it won't kill me to walk."

"Oh Mother," Janice says. "You could never walk it. Call us at the house when the meeting's over if you haven't a ride. We'll be home." The club is down to minimal staff now; they serve only packaged sandwiches and half the tennis court nets are down and already they have relocated the pins to temporary greens. A sadness in all this plucks at Rabbit. Driving home with just Janice and Nelson he remembers the way they used to be, just the three of them, living together, younger. The kid and Janice still have it between them. He's lost it. He says aloud, "So you don't like Toyotas."

"It's not a question of like, Dad, there isn't that much about 'em to like or dislike. I was talking to some girl at the party last night who'd just bought a Corolla, and all we could talk about was the old American cars, how great they were. It's like Volvos, they don't have it anymore either, it's not something anybody can control. It's like, you know, time of life."

The boy is trying to be conversational and patch things up; Harry keeps quiet, thinking, Time of life, the crazy way you're going, zigzagging around and all those drugs, you'll be lucky to get to my time of life.

"Mazdas," Nelson says. "That's what I'd want to have an agency in. That rotary engine is so much more efficient than the four-cycle piston, you could run this country on half the gas, once they get the seal perfected."

"Go over and ask Abe Chafetz for a job then. I heard he was going broke, the Mazdas have so many bugs. Manny says they'll never get the seal right."

Janice says, placating, "I think the Toyota ads on television are very clever and glamorous."

"Oh the ads have charisma," Nelson says. "The ads are terrific. It's the cars I'm talking about."

"Don't you love," Harry asks, "that new one with Scrooge, the way he cackles and goes off into the distance?" He cackles, and Janice and Nelson laugh, and for the last block home, down Joseph Street beneath the bare maples, their three heads entertain common happy memories, of Toyota commercials, of men and women leaping, average men and women, their clothes lifted in cascading slow-motion folds like angels' robes, like some intimate violence of chemical mating or hummingbird wing magnified and laid bare in its process, leaping and falling, grinning and then in freeze-frame hanging there, defying gravity.

"We got to get out of here," Harry says hoarsely to Janice in their bedroom some days later, on the eve of Pru's return from her week of grace in the hospital. It is night; the copper beech, stripped of its leaves and clamorous pods, admits more streetlight into their room than in summer. One or two of the panes in the window on the side nearer the street, the side where Rabbit sleeps, hold imperfections, patches of waviness or elongated bubbles, scarcely visible to the eye of day but which at night hurl onto the far wall, with its mothlike shadows of medallion pattern, dramatic amplifications, the tint of each pane also heightened in the enlargement, so that an effect of stained glass haunts the area above Janice's jumbled mahogany dresser descended from the Koemers, beside the fourpanelled door that locks out the world. Ten years of habitancy, in the minutes or hours between when the bedside lamps are extinguished and sleep is achieved, have borne these luminous rectangles into Harry's brain as precious entities, diffuse jewels pressed from the air, presences whose company he will miss if he leaves this room. He must leave it. Intermixed with the abstract patterns the imperfect panes project are the unquiet shadows of the beech branches as they shudder and sway in the cold outside.

"Where would we go?" Janice asks.

"We'd buy a house like everybody else," he says, speaking in a low hoarse voice as if Ma Springer might overhear this breath of treachery through the wall and the mumble and soft roar of her television set as a crisis in her program is reached, then a commercial bursts forth, and another crisis begins to build. "On the other side of Brewer, closer to the lot. That drive through the middle of town every day is driving me crazy. Wastes gas, too."

"Not Penn Villas," she says. "You'll never get me back into Penn Villas."

"Me neither. What about Penn Park though? With all those nice divorce lawyers and dermatologists? I've always kind of dreamed, ever since we used to play them in basketball, of living over there somewhere. Some house with at least stone facing on the front, and maybe a sunken living room, so we can entertain the Murketts in decent style. It's awkward having anybody back here, Ma goes upstairs after dinner but the place is so damn gloomy, and now we're going to be stuck with Nelson and his crew."

"He was saying, they plan to get an apartment when things work out."

"Things aren't going to work out, with his attitude. You know that. The ride is free here and with him around we wouldn't feel so rotten leaving your mother. This is our chance." His hand has crept well up into her nightie; in his wish to have his vision shared he grips her breasts, familiar handfuls, a bit limp like balloons deflating with her age; but still thanks to all that tennis and swimming and old Fred Springer's stingy lean genes her body is holding up better than most. Her nipples stiffen, and his prick with no great attention paid to it is hardening on the sly. "Or maybe," he pursues, his voice still hoarse, "one of those mock-Tudor jobbies that look like piecrust and have those steep pitched roofs like witches' houses. Jesus, wouldn't Pop be proud, seeing me in one of those?"

"Could we afford it," Janice asks, "with the mortgage rates up around thirteen per cent now?"

He shifts his hand down the silvery slick undulations of her belly to the patch of her hair, that seems to bristle at his touch. He ought to eat her sometime. Bed her down on her back with her legs hanging over the side and just kneel and chew her cunt until she came. He used to when they were courting in that apartment of the other girl's with its view of the old gray gas tanks by the river, kneel and just graze in her ferny meadow for hours, nose, eyelids rubbing up against the wonder of it. Any woman, they deserve to be eaten once in a while, they don't come so your mouth is full like with an oyster, how do whores stand it, cock after cock, cuts down on VD, but having to swallow, must amount to pints in the course of a week. Ruth hated it that time, but some cunts now if you read the sex tapes in Ouí lap it up, one said it tasted to her like champagne. Maybe it wouldn't be the living room that would be sunken, it could be the den, just somewhere where there's a carpeted step down or two, so you know you're in a modern home. "That's the beauty of inflation," he says seductively to Janice. "The more you owe, the better you do. Ask Webb. You pay off in shrunken dollars, and the interest Uncle Sam picks up as an income tax deduction. Even after buying the Krugerrands and paying the September taxes we have too much money in the bank, money in the bank is for dummies now. Sock it into the down payment for a house, we'd be letting the bank worry about the dollar going down and have the house appreciating ten, twenty per cent a year at the same time." Her cunt is moistening, its lips growing loose.

"It seems hard on Mother," Janice says in that weak voice she gets, lovemaking. "She'll be leaving us this place some day and I know she expects we'd stay in it with her till then."

"She'll live for another twenty years," Harry says, sinking his middle finger in. "In twenty years you'll be well over sixty."

"And wouldn't it seem strange to Nelson?"

"Why? It's what he wants, me out of the way. I depress the kid."

"Harry, I'm not so sure it's you that's doing it. I think he's just scared."

"What's he got to be scared of?"

"The same thing you were scared of at his age. Life."

Life. Too much of it, and not enough. The fear that it will end some day, and the fear that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday. "Well he shouldn't have come home if that's the way he was going to feel," Harry says. He's losing his erection.

"He didn't know," Janice says. He can feel, his finger still in her, that her mind too is drifting away from their flesh, into sad realms of family. "He didn't know you'd be so hard on him. Why are you?"

Fucking kid not thirteen years old and tried to take Jill from him, back in Penn Villas after Janice had gone. "He's hard on me," Harry says. He has ceased to whisper. Ma Springer's television set, when he listens, is still on – a rumbling, woofing, surging noise less like human voices than a noise Nature would make in the trees or along the ocean shore. She has become a fan of the ABC eleven-thirty special report on the hostages and every morning tells them the latest version of nothing happening. Khomeini and Carter both trapped by a pack of kids who need a shave and don't know shit, they talk about old men sending young men off to war, if you could get the idiotic kids out of the world it might settle down to being a sensible place. "He gets a disgruntled look on his face every time I open my mouth to talk. Everything I try to tell him at the lot he goes and does the opposite. Some guy comes in to buy this Mercury that was the other one of the convertibles the kid wrecked that time and offers a snowmobile on the trade-in. I thought it was a joke until the other day I go in and the Mercury's gone and this little yellow Kawasaki snowmobile is sitting up in the front row with the new Tercels. I hit the roof and Nelson tells me to stop being so uptight, he allowed the guy four hundred on it and it'll give us more publicity than twice that in ads, the crazy lot that took a snowmobile on trade-in."

Janice makes a soft noise that were she less tired would be laughter. "That's the kind of thing Daddy used to do."

"And then behind my back he's taken on about ten grand's worth of old convertibles that get about ten miles to the gallon nobody'll want and this caper with Pru is running up a fucking fortune. There's no benefits covering her."

"Shh. Mother can hear."

"I want her to hear, she's the one giving the kid all his high and mighty ideas. Last night, you hear them cooking up how he's going to have his own car for him and Pru, when that old Newport of hers just sits in the garage six days out of seven?" A muffled sound of chanting comes through the papered wall, Iranians outside the Embassy demonstrating for the benefit of the TV cameras. Rabbit's throat constricts with frustration. "I got to get out, honey."

"Tell me about the house," Janice says, taking his hand in hers and returning it to her pussy. "How many rooms would it have?"

He begins to massage, dragging his fingers along the crease on one side, then the other, of the triangle, and then bisecting with a thoughtful stroke, looking for the fulcrum, the nub, of it. Cindy's hair had looked darker than Janice's, less curly, alive maybe with needles of light like the fur of Ma Springer's old coat. "We wouldn't need a lot of bedrooms," he tells Janice, `just a big one for us, with a big mirror you can see from the bed -"

"A mirror! Where'd you get the idea of a mirror?"

"Everybody has mirrors now. You watch yourself making love in them."

"Oh, Harry. I couldn't."

"I think you could. And then at least another bedroom, in case your mother has to come live with us, or we have guests, but not next to ours, with at least a bathroom between so we don't hear her television, and downstairs a kitchen with all new equipment including a Cuisinart -"

"I'm scared of them. Doris Kaufinann says for the first three weeks she had hers everything came out mush. One night it was pink mush and the next night green mush was the only difference."

"You'll learn," he croons, drawing circles on her front, circles that widen to graze her breasts and beaver and then diminish to feather into her navel like the asshole of that olive bitch along 422, "there are instruction books, and a refrigerator with an automatic ice-maker, and one of those wall ovens that's at the height of your face so you don't have to bend over, and I don't know about all this microwave, I was reading somewhere how they fry your brains even if you're in the next room…" Moist, she is so moist her cunt startles him, touching it, like a slug underneath a leaf in the garden. His prick undergoes such a bulbous throb it hurts. "… and this big sunken living room with lights along the side where we can give parties."

"Who would we give these parties for?" Her voice is sinking into the pillow like the dust of a mummy's face, so weak.

"Oh…" His hand continues to glide, around and around, carrying the touch of wetness up to her nipples and adorning first one then the other with it like tinsel on the tips of a Christmas tree. "… everybody. Dons Kaufinann and all those other tennis Lesbians at the Flying Eagle, Cindy Murkett and her trusty sidekick Buddy Inglefinger, all the nice girls who work their pretty asses off for a better America down at the Gold Cherry, all the great macho guys in the service and parts department of Springer Motors -"

Janice giggles, and simultaneously the front door downstairs slams. After visiting Pru, Nelson has been going to that bar that used to be the Phoenix and bumming around with that creepy crowd that kills time there. It oppresses Harry, this freedom: if the kid has been excused from evening floor duty to visit Pru for the week then he has no business going out getting stewed on the time. If the kid was so shook up when she took her tumble he ought to be doing something better than this out of gratitude or penance or whatever. His footsteps below sound drunken, one plunked down on top of the other, bump, bump, across the living room between the sofa and the Barcalounger and past the foot of the stairs, making the china in the sideboard tingle, on into the kitchen for one more beer. Harry's breath comes quick and short, thinking of that surly puzzled face sucking the foam out of one more can: drinking and eating up the world, and out of sheer spite at that. He feels the boy's mother at his side listening to the footsteps and puts her hand on his prick; in expert reflex her fingers pump the loose skin of the sides. Simultaneous with Nelson's footsteps below as he treads back into the living room toward the Barcalounger, Harry thrusts as hard as if into the olive chick's ass into the socket Janice's wifely hand makes and speeds up his hypnotic tracing of rapid smooth circles upon the concave expectancy of her belly, assuring her hoarsely, of the house he wants, "You'll love it. You'll love it."

Nelson says to Pru, as they drive together into Brewer in Ma Springer's stately old navy-blue Chrysler, "Now guess what. He's talked Mom into them getting a house. They've looked at about six so far, she told me. They all seem too big to her but Dad says she should learn to think big. I think he's flipping out."

Pru says, quietly, "I wonder how much it has to do with us in moving in." She had wanted them to find an apartment of their own, in the same general neighborhood as Slim and Jason and Pam, and couldn't understand Nelson's need to live with his grandmother.

A defensive fury begins to warm him. "I don't see why, any decent father would be glad to have us around. There's plenty of room, Mom-mom shouldn't live by herself."

"I think maybe it's natural," his wife offers, "in a couple that age, to want your own space."

"What's natural, to leave old ladies to die all alone?"

"Well, we're in the house now."

"Just temporarily."

"That's what I thought at first, Nelson, but now I don't believe you want us to have a place of our own. I'd be too much for you, just the two of us, you and me."

"I hate ticky-tacky apartments and condos."

"It's all right, I'm not complaining. I'm at home there now. I like your grandmother."

"I hate crummy old inner-city blocks getting all revitalized with swish little stores catering to queers and stoned interracial couples. It all reminds me of Kent. I came back here to get away from all that phony stuff. Somebody like Slim acts so counterculture sniffing coke and taking mesc and all that, you know what he does for a living? He's a biller for Diamond County Light and Power, he stuffs envelopes and is going to be Head Stuffer if he keeps at it for ten more years, how's that for Establishment?"

"He doesn't pretend to be a revolutionary, he just likes nice clothes and other boys."

"People ought to be consistent," Nelson says, "it isn't fair to milk the society and then sneer at it at the same time. One of the reasons I liked you better than Melanie was she was so sold on all this radical stuff and I didn't think you were."

"I didn't know," Pru says, even more quietly, "that Melanie and I were competing for you. How much sexual was there between you two this summer?"

Nelson stares ahead, sorry his confiding has led to this. The Christmas lights are up in Brewer already, red and green and shivering tinsel looking dry and wilted above the snowless streets, the display a shadow of the seasonal glory he remembers as a boy, when there was abundant energy and little vandalism. Then each lamppost wore a giant wreath of authentic evergreen cut in the local hills and a lifelike laughing Santa in a white-and-silver sleigh and a line of eight glassy-eyed reindeer coated in what seemed real fur were suspended along cables stretched from the second story of Kroll's to the roof of the cigar-store building that used to be opposite. The downtown windows from below Fourth up to Seventh were immense with painted wooden soldiers and camels and Magi and golden organ pipes intertwined with clouds of spun glass and at night the sidewalks were drenched with shoppers and carols overflowing from the heated stores into air that prickled like a Christmas tree and it was impossible not to believe that somewhere, in the dark beyond the city, baby Jesus was being born. Now, it was pathetic. City budget had been cut way back and half the downtown stores were shells.

Pru insists, "Tell me. I know there was some."

"How do you know?"

"I know."

He decides to attack: let these young wives get the upper hand now they'll absolutely take over. "You don't know anything," he tells her, "the only thing you know is how to hang on to that damn thing inside you, that you're really good at. Boy."

Now she stares ahead, the sling on her arm a white blur in the corner of his vision. His eyes are stung by perforations of festive light in the December darkness. Let her play the martyr all she wants. You try to speak the truth and all you get is grief.

Mom-mom's old car feels silky but sluggish under him: all that metal they used to put in, even the glove compartment is lined with metal. When Pru goes silent like this, a kind of taste builds up in his throat, the taste of injustice. He didn't ask her to conceive this baby, nobody did, and now that he's married her she has the nerve to complain he isn't getting her an apartment of her own, give them one thing they instantly want the next. Women. They are holes, you put one thing in after another and it's never enough, you stuff your entire life in there and they smile that crooked little sad smile and are sorry you couldn't have done better, when all is said and done. He's gotten in plenty deep already and she's not getting him in any deeper. Sometimes when he looks at her from behind he can't believe how big she has grown, hips wide as a barn getting set to hatch not some little pink being but a horny-bided white rhinoceros no more in scale with Nelson than the mottled man in the moon, that's what cunts do to you when Nature takes over: go out of control.

The build-up of the taste in his throat is too great; he has to speak. "Speaking of fucking," he says, "what about us?"

"I don't think we're supposed to this late. Anyway I feel so ugly.,

"Ugly or not, you're mine. You're my old lady."

"I get so sleepy, you can't imagine. But you're right. Let's do something tonight. Let's go home early. If somebody asks us back from the Laid-Back to their place let's not go."

"See if we had an apartment like you're so crazy for we'd have to ask people back. At least at Mom-mom's you're safe from that."

"I do feel safe there," she says, sighing. Meaning what? Meaning he shouldn't be bringing her out at night: he's married now, he works, he's not supposed to have any fun. Nelson dreads work, he wakes every workday morning with a gnawing in his stomach like he's the one with something inside him, that white rhinoceros. Those convertibles staring at him unbought every day and the way Jake and Rudy can't get over his taking that little Kawasaki, as if it's some great joke he's deliberately played on Dad, when he hadn't meant it that way at all, the guy had been so pleading and Nelson was anxious to get the Mercury off the lot, it reminded him every time he saw it of that time Dad had been so scoffing, wouldn't even listen, it wasn't fair, he had had to ram the two cars together to wipe that you've-got-to-be-kidding smirk off his face.

On that showroom floor it's like a stage where he hasn't quite learned the lines yet. Maybe it's the stuff he's been taking, too much coke burns the septum out and now they say pot really does rot your brain cells, the THC gets tucked in the fatty tissue and makes you stupid for months, all these teen-age boys coming through with breasts now because something was suppressed when they were turning on at age thirteen, Nelson has these visions lately though he's standing upright with his eyes open, people with holes where their noses should be because of too much coke, or Pru lying there in the hospital with this pink-eyed baby rhinoceros, maybe it has to do with that cast on her arm, dirty and crumbling at the edges now, the gauze underneath the plaster fraying through. And Dad. He's getting bigger and bigger, never jogs anymore, his skin glows like his pores are absorbing food out of the air.

One of the books Nelson had as a child, with those stiff shiny cartoon covers and a black spine like electrical tape, had a picture in it of a giant, his face all bumpy and green with hairs coming out ofit here and there, and smiling- that made it worse, that the giant was grinning, looking in, with those blubbery lips and separated teeth giants have, looking into some cave where two children, a boy and a girl, brother and sister probably, who were the heroes -of the story are crouching, silhouettes in shadow, you see only the backs of their heads, they are you, looking out, hunted, too scared to move a muscle or breathe a breath as the great bumpy gleeful face fills the sunny mouth of the cave. That's how he sees Dad these days: he Nelson is in a tunnel and his father's face fills the far end where he might get out into the sun. The old man doesn't even know he's doing it, it comes on with that little nibbly sorry smile, a flick of dismissal as he pivots away, disappointed, that's it, he's disappointed his father, he should be something other than he is, and now at the lot all the men, not just Jake and Rudy but Manny and his mechanics all grimy with grease, only the skin around their eyes white, staring, see that too: he is not his father, lacks that height, that tossing off that Harry Angstrom can do. And no witness but Nelson stands in the universe to proclaim that his father is guilty, a cheat and coward and murderer, and when he tries to proclaim it nothing comes out, the world laughs as he stands there with open mouth silent. The giant looks in and smiles and Nelson sinks back deeper into the tunnel. He likes that about the Laid-Back, the tunnel snugness of it, and the smoke and the booze and the joints passed from hand to hand under the tables, and the acceptance, the being all in the smoky tunnel together, rats, losers, who cares, you didn't have to listen to what anybody said because nobody was going to buy a Toyota or insurance policy or anything anyway. Why don't they make a society where people are given what they need and do what they want to do? Dad would say that's fantastic but it's how animals live all the time.

"I still think you fucked Melanie," Pru says, in her dried-up slum cat's flat voice. One track and that's it.

Without braking Nelson swings the big Chrysler around the corner where that shaggy park blocks the way down Weiser Street. Pine Street has been made one way and he has to approach it from around the block so Pru doesn't have too far to walk. "Oh, what if I did?" he says. "You and I weren't married, what does it matter now?"

"It doesn't matter because of you, we all know you'll grab anything you can get you're so greedy, it matters because she was my friend. I trusted her. I trusted you both."

"For Chrissake, don't snivel."

"I'm not snivelling." But he foresees how she will sit there beside him in the booth sulking and not saying anything, not listening to anything but that kicking in her belly, her broken arm making her look even more ridiculous, belly and sling and all, and picturing it that way makes him feel a little sorry for her, until he tells himself it's his way of taking care of her, bringing her along when a lot of guys wouldn't.

"Hey," he says grufy. "Love you."

"Love you, Nelson," she responds, lifting the hand not in a sling from her lap as he lifts one of his from the wheel to give hers a squeeze. Funny, the fatter the middle of her is getting the thinner and drier her hands and face seem.

"We'll leave after two beers," he promises. Maybe the girl in white pants will be there. She sometimes comes in with that big dumb Jamie and Nelson can tell it is she who gets them here; she digs the scene and he doesn't.

The Laid-Back under this new name is such a success that parking along Pine is hard to find; he wants to spare Pru at least a long walk in the cold, though the doctor says exercise is good. He hates the cold. When he was little he had loved December because it had Christmas in it toward the end and he was so excited by all the things there were to get in the world that he never noticed how the dark and cold closed in, tighter and tighter. And now Dad is taking Mom off for this fancy holiday on some island with these putrid other couples, to lie there and bask while Nelson freezes and holds the fort at the lot; it's not fair. The girl doesn't always wear white slacks, the last time he saw her she had on one of that new style of skirt with the big slit down the side. There is a space in front of the long low brick building that used to be the Verity Press, between an old two-tone Fairlane and a bronze Honda station wagon, that looks big enough, just. The trick of tight parking is to swing your back bumper square into the other guy's headlights and don't leave yourself too far out from the curb or you'll be forever jockeying in. And don't be afraid to cut it tight on the left, you always have more room than you think. He pulls so close to the Fairlane Pru speaks up sharply, "Nelson."

He says, "I see him, I see him, shut up and let me concentrate." He intends, with that heavy Chrysler's veloured steering wheel -a ratio on the power steering you could turn a cruise ship with to snap the car into its slot slick as a skater stopping on ice. God, figure skaters' costumes are sexy, the way their little skirts flip up when they skate ass-backwards, and he remembers, straining to see the Honda's rather low little headlights, how that girl's slit skirt fell away to show a whole long load of shining thigh before she arranged herself on the barstool, having given Nelson a brief shy smile of recognition. Mom-mom's ponderous Chrysler slips into reverse and his anticipation of ideal liquid motion is so strong he does not hear the subtle grinding of metal on metal until it has proceeded half the car's length and Pru is yelping, Jesus, like she's having the baby now.

Webb Murkett says gold has gone about as far as it can go for now: the little man in America has caught the fever and when the little man climbs on the bandwagon the smart money gets off. Silver, now that's another story: the Hunt brothers down in Texas are buying up silver futures at the rate of millions a day, and big boys like that must know something. Harry decides to change his gold into silver.

Janice was going to come downtown anyway to do some Christmas shopping, so he meets her at the Crépe House (which she still calls Johnny Frye's) for lunch, and then they can go to the Brewer Trust with the safe-deposit key and take out the thirty Krugerrands Harry bought for $11,314.20 three months before. In the cubicle the bank lets you commune with your safe-deposit box in, he fishes out from behind the insurance policies and U.S. Savings Bonds the two blue-tinted cylinders like dollhouse toilets, and passes them into Janice's hands, one into each, and smiles when her face acknowledges with renewed surprise the heft, the weight of the gold. Solid citizens by this extra degree, then, the two of them walk out between the great granite pillars of the Brewer Trust into the frail December sunlight and cross through the forest, where the fountains are dry and the concrete park benches are spray-painted full of young people's names, and on down the east side of Weiser past two blocks of stores doing scattered Christmas business. Underfed little Puerto Rican women are the only ones scuttling in and out of the cut-rate entranceways, and kids who ought to be in school, and bleary retirees in dirty padded parkas and hunter's hats, with whiskery loose jaws; the mills have used these old guys up and spit them out.

The tinsel of the wreaths hung on the aluminum lampposts tingles, audibly shivering, as Harry passes each post. Gold, gold, his heart sings, feeling the weight balanced in the two deep pockets of his overcoat and swinging in time with his strides. Janice hurries beside him with shorter steps, a tidy dense woman warm in a sheepskin coat that comes down to her boots, clutching several packages whose paper rattles in this same wind that stirs the tinsel. He sees them together in the flecked scarred mirror next to a shoestore entrance: him tall and unbowed and white of face, her short and dark and trotting beside him in boots of oxblood leather zippered tight to her ankles, with high heels, so they thrust from her swinging coat with a smartness of silhouette advertising as clear as his nappy black overcoat and Irish bog hat that he is all set, that they are all set, that their smiles as they walk along can afford to discard the bitter blank glances that flicker toward them on the street, then fall away.

Fiscal Alternatives with its long thin Venetian blinds is in the next block, a block that once had the name of disreputable but with the general sinking of the downtown is now no worse than the next. Inside, the girl with platinum hair and long fingernails smiles in recognition of him, and pulls a plastic chair over from the waiting area for Janice. After a telephone call to some far-off trading floor, she runs some figures through her little computer and tells them, as they sit bulky in their coats at the corner of her desk, that the price of gold per ounce had nearly touched five hundred earlier this morning but now she can offer them no more than $488.75 per coin, which will come to – her fingers dance unhampered by her nails; the gray display slot of the computer staggers forth with its bland magnetic answer – $14,662.50. Harry calculates inwardly that he has made a thousand a month on his gold and asks her how much silver he can buy for that now. The young woman slides out from under her eyelashes a glance as if she is a manicurist deciding whether or not to admit that she does, in the back room, also give massages. At his side Janice has lit a cigarette, and her smoke pours across the desk and pollutes the relationship this metallic temptress and Harry have established.

The girl explains, "We don't deal in silver bullion. We only handle silver in the form of pre-'65 silver dollars, which we sell under melt value."

"Melt value?" Harry asks. He had pictured a tidy ingot that would slip into the safe-deposit box snug as a gun into a holster.

The salesgirl is patient, with something sultry about her dispassion. Some of the silky weightiness of precious metals has rubbed off onto her. "You know, the old-fashioned cartwheel" -she makes an illustrative circle with daggerlike forefinger and thumb – "the U.S. Mint put out until fifteen years ago. Each one contains point seventy-five troy ounces of silver. Silver this noon was going for" – she consults a slip on her desk, next to the vanilla push-dial telephone – "$23.55 a troy ounce, which would make each coin, irrespective of collector value, worth" – the calculator again "$17.66. But there's some wear on some of the coins, so were you and your wife to decide to buy now I could give you a quote under that."

"These are old coins?" Janice asks, that Ma Springer edge in her voice.

"Some are, some aren't," the girl answers coolly. "We buy them by weight from collectors who have sifted through them for collector value."

This isn't what Harry had pictured, but Webb had sworn that silver was where the smart money was. He asks, "How many could we buy with the gold money?"

A flurry of computation follows; $14,662.50 would convert to the magical number of 888. Eight hundred eighty-eight silver dollars priced at $16.50 each, including commission and Pennsylvania sales tax. To Rabbit eight hundred eighty-eight seems like a lot of anything, even matchsticks. He looks at Janice. "Sweetie. Whaddeya think?"

"Harry, I don't know what to think. It's your investment."

"But it's our money."

"You don't want to just keep the gold."

"Webb says silver could double, if they don't return the hostages."

Janice turns to the girl. "I was just wondering, if we found a house we wanted to put a down payment on, how liquid is this silver?"

The blonde speaks to Janice with new respect, at a softer pitch, woman to woman. "It's very liquid. Much more so than collectibles or land. Fiscal Alternatives guarantees to buy back whatever it sells. These coins today, if you brought them in, we'd pay" she consults the papers on her desk again -"thirteen fifty each."

"So we'd be out three dollars times eight hundred eighty-eight," Harry says. His palms have started to sweat, maybe it's the overcoat. Make a little profit in this world and right away the world starts scheming to take it from you. He wishes he had the gold back. It was so pretty, that little delicate deer on the reverse side.

"Oh, but the way silver's been going," the girl says, pausing to scratch at some fleck of imperfection adjacent to the corner of her lips, "you could make that up in a week. I think you're doing the smart thing."

"Yeah, but as you say, suppose the Iran thing gets settled," Harry worries. "Won't the whole bubble burst?"

"Precious metals aren't a bubble. Precious metals are the ultimate security. I myself think what's brought the Arab money into gold was not so much Iran as the occupation of the Great Mosque. When the Saudis are in trouble, then it's really a new ballgame."

A new ballgame, hey. "O.K.," he says, "let's do it. We'll buy the silver."

Platinum-hair seems a bit surprised, for all of her smooth sales talk, and there is a long hassle over the phone locating so many coins. At last some boy she calls Lyle brings in a gray cloth sack like you would carry some leftover mail in; he is swaying with the effort and grunts right out, lifting the sack up onto her desk, but then he has a slender build, with something faggy about him, maybe his short haircut. Funny how that's swung completely around: the squares let their hair grow now and the fags and punks are the ones with butches. Harry wonders what they're doing in the Marines, probably down to their shoulders. This Lyle goes off, after giving Harry a suspicious squint like he's bought not only the massage but the black-leather-and-whip trick too.

At first Harry and Janice think that only the girl with the platinum hair and all but perfect skin may touch the coins. She pushes her papers to one side of her desk and struggles to lift a corner of the bag. Dollars spill out. "Damn." She sucks at a fingernail. "You can help count if you would." They take off their coats and dig in, counting into stacks of ten. Silver is all over the desk, hundreds of Miss Libertys, some thinned by wear, some as chunky as if virgin from the mint. Handling such a palpable luxury of profiles and slogans and eagles makes Janice titter, and Harry knows what she means: playing in the mud. The muchness. The stacks proliferate and are arranged in ranks of ten times ten. The bag at last yields its final coin, with a smidgeon of lint the girl flicks away. Unsmiling, she waves her red-tipped hand across her stacks. "I have three hundred and ninety."

Harry taps his stacks and reports, "Two forty."

Janice says of hers, "Two hundred fifty-eight." She beat him. He is proud of her. She can become a teller if he suddenly dies.

The calculator is consulted: 888. "Exactly right," the girl says, as surprised as they. She performs the paperwork, and gives Harry back two quarters and a ten-dollar pill in change. He wonders if he should hand it back to her, as a tip. The coins fit into three cardboard boxes the size of fat bricks. Harry puts them one on top of another, and when he tries to lift all three Janice and the girl both laugh aloud at the expression on his face.

Y "My God," he says. "What do they weigh?"

The platinum-headed girl fiddles at her computer. "If you take each one to be a troy ounce at least, it comes to seventy-four pounds. There are only twelve ounces troy measure in a pound."

He turns to Janice. "You carry one."

She lifts one and it's his turn to laugh, at the look on her,face, her eyelids stretched wide. "I can't," she says.

"You must," he says. "It's only up to the bank. Come on, I gotta get back to the lot. Whaija play all that tennis for if you don't have any muscles?"

He is proud of that tennis; he is performing for the blonde girl now, acting the role of eccentric Penn Park nob. She suggests, "Maybe Lyle could walk up with you."

Rabbit doesn't want to be seen on the street with that fag. "We can manage." To Janice he says, "Just imagine you're pregnant. Come on. Let's go." To the girl he says, "She'll be back for her packages." He picks up two of the boxes and pushes the door open with his shoulder, forcing Janice to follow. Out in the cold sunlight and shimmering wind of Weiser Street he tries not to grimace, or to return the stares of those who glance wonderingly at the two small boxes clutched so fiercely in his two hands at the level of his fly.

A black man in a blue watch cap, with bloodshot eyes like marbles dropped in orange juice, halts on the pavement and stumbles a step toward Harry. "Hey buddy you wanna hep out a fren' – ' Something about these blacks they really zero in on Rabbit. He pivots to shield the silver with his body, and its swung weight tips him so he has to take a step. In moving off, he doesn't dare look behind him to see if Janice is following. But standing on the curb next to a bent parking meter he hears her breathing and feels her struggle to his side.

"This coat is so heavy too," she pants.

"Let's cross," he says.

"In the middle of the block?"

"Don't argue," he mutters, feeling the puzzled black man at his back. He pushes off the curb, causing a bus halfway down the block to hiss with its brakes. In the middle of the street, where the double white line has wobbled in summer's soft tar, he waits for Janice to catch up. The girl has given her the mail sack to carry the third box of silver in, but rather than sling it over her shoulder Janice carries it cradled in her left arm like a baby. "How're you doing?" he asks her.

"I'll manage. Keep moving, Harry."

They reach the far curb. The peanut store now not only has porno magazines inside but has put an array of them on a rack outside. Young muscular oiled boys pose singly or in pairs under titles such as DRUMMER and SKIN. A Japanese in a three-piece pinstripe suit and gray bowler hat steps smartly out of the door, folding a New York Times and a Wall Street Journal together under his arm. How did the Japanese ever get to Brewer? As the door eases shut, the old circus smell of warm roasted peanuts drifts out to the cold sidewalk. Harry says to Janice. "We could put all three boxes in the bag and I could lug it over my shoulder. You know, like Santa Claus. Ho ho."

A small crowd of pocked dark street kids mixed with shaggy rummies in their winter layered look threatens to collect around them as they confer. Harry tightens his grip on his two boxes. Janice hugs her third and says, "Let's push on this way. The bank's only a block more." Her face is flushed and bitten by the cold, her eyes squinting and watering and her mouth a detennined slot.

"A good block and a half," he corrects.

Past then the Brewer Wallpaper Company with its display rolls stiffening in the dusty windows like shrouds, past Blimline's Sandwiches and Manderbach Wholesale Office Supplies and a narrow place jammed with flat boxes called Hobby Heaven, past the cigar store with its giant rusting Y-B sign and the ornately iron-barred windows of the old Conrad Weiser Oyster House that now promises Live Entertainment in desperate red letters on its dark doors, across Fourth Street when the light at last turns green, past the long glass-block-inlaid facade of the Acme they say is going out of business at the end of the year, past Hollywood Beauty Supplies and Imperial Floor Coverings and Zenith Auto Parts and Accessories with its sweetish baked smell of fresh tires and window of chrome tailpipes they go, man and wife, as the wind intensifies and the sparkling sidewalk squares grow in size.

The squared-off weight in Harry's hands has become a hostile thing, burning his palms, knocking against his crotch. Now when he would almost welcome being robbed he feels that the others on this west side of the street are shying from them, as somehow menacing, distorted into struggling shapes by the force-fields of their dense boxes. He keeps having to wait for Janice to catch up, while his own burden, double hers, pulls at his arms. The tinsel wound around the aluminum lampposts vibrates furiously. He is sweating across his back beneath his expensive overcoat and his shirt collar keeps drying to a clammy cold edge. During these waits he stares up Weiser toward the mauve and brown bulk of Mt. Judge; in his eyes as a child God had reposed on the slopes of that mountain, and now he can imagine how through God's eyes from that vantage he and Janice might look below: two ants trying to make it up the sides of a bathroom basin.

They pass a camera store advertising Agfa film, the Hexerei Boutique with its mannequins flaunting their nippleless boobs through transparent blouses and vests of gold mail, a Rexall's with pastel vibrators among the suggested Christmas gifts in the windows festooned with cotton and angel hair, the Crépe House with its lunching couples, the locally famous cigar store saved as an act of historical preservation, and a new store called PedalEase specializing in male and female footwear for jogging and tennis and even racquetball and squash, that young couples or pairs of young singles do together these days, to judge from the big cardboard blow-ups in the window. The Dacron-clad girl's honey-colored hair lifts like air made liquid as she laughingly strokes a ball on easy feet. Next, at last, the first of the four great granite columns of the Brewer Trust looms. Harry leans his aching back against its Roman breadth while waiting for Janice to catch up. If she's robbed in this gap between them it will cost them a third of $14,652 or nearly $5000 but at this point the risk doesn't seem so real. Some distance away he sees spray-painted on the back of one of the concrete benches in the mall of trees a slogan SKEETER LIVES. If he could go closer he could be sure that's what it says. But he cannot move. Janice arrives beside his shoulder. Red-faced, she looks like her mother. "Let's not stand here," she pants. Even the circumference of the pillar seems a lengthy distance as she leads him around it and pushes ahead of him through the revolving doors.

Christmas carols are pealing within the great vaulted interior. The high groined ceiling is painted blue here in every season, with evenly spaced stars of gold. When Harry sets his two boxes down on one of the shelves where you write checks, his relieved body seems to rise toward this false sky. The teller, a lady in an orchid pants suit, smiles to be readmitting them to their safe-deposit box so soon. Their box is a four by four – narrower, they discover, than the boxes of silver dollars three rows abreast. Hearts still laboring, their hands still hurting, Harry and Janice are slow to grasp the disparity, once the frosted glass door has sealed them into the cubicle. Harry several times measures the width of one paper lid against the breadth of tin before concluding, "We need a bigger box." Janice is delegated to go back out into the bank and -request one. Her father had been a good friend of the manager. When she returns, it is with the news that there has been a run lately on safe-deposit boxes, that the best the bank could do was put the Angstroms on a list. The manager that Daddy knew has retired. The present one seemed to Janice very young, though he wasn't exactly rude.

Harry laughs. "Well we can't sell 'em back to Blondie down there, it'd cost us a fortune. Could we dump everything back in the bag and stuff it in?"

Crowded together in the cubicle, he and Janice keep bumping into each other, and he scents rising from her for the first time a doubt that he has led them well in this new inflated world; or perhaps the doubt he scents arises from him. But there can be no turning back. They transfer silver dollars from the boxes to the bag. When the silver clinks loudly, Janice winces and says, "Shh."

"Why? Who'll hear?"

"The people out there. The tellers."

"What do they care?"

"I care," Janice says. "It's stifling in here." She takes off her sheepskin coat and in the absence of a hook to hang it on drops it folded to the floor. He takes off his black overcoat and drops it on top. Sweat of exertion has made her hair springier; her bangs have curled back to reveal that high glossy forehead that is so much her, now and twenty years ago, that he kisses it, tasting salt. He wonders if people have ever screwed in these cubicles and imagines that a vault would be a nice place, one of those primped-up young tellers and a lecherous old mortgage officer, put the time-lock on to dawn and ball away. Janice feeds stacks of coins into the coarse gray pouch furtively, suppressing the clink. "This is so embarrassing," she says, "suppose one of those ladies comes in," as if the silver is naked flesh; and not for the first time in twenty-three years he feels a furtive rush of loving her, caught with him as she is in the tight places life affords. He takes one of the silver dollars and slips it down the neck of her linen blouse into her bra. As he foresaw, she squeals at the chill and tries to suppress the squeal. He loves her more, seeing her unbutton her blouse a button and frowningly dig into her bra for the coin; old as he is it still excites him to watch women fiddle with their underwear. Make our own coat hook in here.

After a while she announces, "It simply will not go in." Stuff and adjust as they will, hardly half of the bagged coins can be made to fit. Their insurance policies and Savings Bonds, Nelson's birth certificate and the never-discarded mortgage papers for the house in Penn Villas that burned down – all the scraps of paper preserved as evidence of their passage through an economy and a certain legal time – are lifted out and reshufed to no avail. The thick cloth of the bag, the tendency of loose coins to bunch in a clump, the long slender shape of the gray tin box frustrate them as side by side they tug and push, surgeons at a hopeless case. The eight hundred eighty-eight coins keep escaping the mouth of the sack and falling onto the floor and rolling into corners. When they have pressed the absolute maximum into the box, so its tin sides bulge, they are still left with three hundred silver dollars, which Harry distributes among the pockets of his overcoat.

When they emerge from the cubicle, the friendly teller in her orchid outfit offers to take the loaded box off his hands. "Pretty heavy," he warns her. "Better let me do it." Her eyebrows arch; she backs off and leads him into the vault. They go through a great door, its terraced edges gleaming, into a space walled with small burnished rectangles and floored in waxy white. Not a good place to fuck, he was wrong about that. She lets him slide his long box into the empty rectangle. R.I.P. Harry is in a sweat, bent over with effort. He straightens up and apologizes, "Sorry we loaded it up with so much crap."

"Oh no," the orchid lady says. "A lot of people nowadays… all this burglary."

"What happens if the burglars get in here?" he jokes.

This is not funny. "Oh… they can't."

Outside the bank, the afternoon has progressed, and shadows from the buildings darken the glitter of tinsel. Janice taps one of his pockets playfully, to hear him jingle. "What are you going to do with all these?"

"Give 'em away to the poor. That bitch down the street, that's the last time I buy anything from her." Cold cakes his face as his sweat dries. Several guys he knows from Rotary come out of the Crépe House looking punchy on lunch and he gives them 'the high sign, while striding on. God knows what's happening over on the lot without him, the kid may be accepting roller skates for trade-in.

"You could use the safe at the lot," Janice suggests. "They could go into one of these." She hands him one of the empty cardboard boxes.

"Nelson will steal 'em," he says. "He knows the combination now too."

"Harry. What a thing to say."

"You know how much that scrape he gave your mother's Chrysler is going to cost? Eight hundred fucking bucks minimum. He must have been out of his head. You could see poor Pru was humiliated, I wonder how long she'll let things cook before she gets smart and asks for a divorce. That'll cost us, too." His overcoat, so weighted, drags his shoulders down. He feels, as if the sidewalk now is a downslanted plane, the whole year dropping away under him, loss after loss. His silver is scattered, tinsel. His box will break, the janitor will sweep up the coins. It's all dirt anyway. The great sad lie told to children that is Christmas stains Weiser end to end, and through the murk he glimpses the truth that to be rich is to be robbed, to be rich is to be poor.

Janice recalls him to reality, saying, "Harry, please. Stop looking so tragic. Pru loves Nelson, and he loves her. They won't get a divorce."

"I wasn't thinking about that. I was thinking about how silver's going to go down."

"Oh, what do we care if it does? Everything's just a gamble anyway."

Bless that dope, still trying. The daughter of old Fred Springer, local high roller. Rolled himself into a satin-lined coffin. In the old days they used to bury the silver and put the corpses in slots in the wall.

"I'll walk down to the car with you," Janice says, worriedwifely. "I have to get my packages back from that bitch as you call her. How much did you want to go to bed with her by the way?" Trying to find a topic he'll enjoy.

"Hardly at all," he confesses. "It's terrifying in fact, how little. Did you get a look at her fingernails? Sccr-ratch."

The week between the holidays is a low one for car sales: people feel strapped after Christmas, and with winter coming, ice and salt on the road and fenderbenders likely, they are inclined to stick with the heap they have. Ride it out to spring is the motto. At least the snowmobile's been moved around to the back where nobody can see it, instead of its sitting there like some kind of cousin of those new little front-wheel-drive Tercels. Where do they get their names? Sounds like an Edsel. Even Toyota, it has too many o's, makes people think of "toy." Datsun and Honda, you don't know where they're coming from. Datsun could be German from the sound of it, data, rat-tat-tat, rising sun. The Chuck Wagon across Route 111 isn't doing much of a business either, now that it's too cold to eat outdoors or in the car, unless you leave the motor running, people die doing that every winter, trying to screw. The build-up is terrific though of hoagie wrappers and milkshake cartons blowing around in the lot, with the dust. Different kind of dust in December, grayer and grittier than summer dust, maybe the colder air, less lift in it, like cold air holds less water, that's why the insides of the storm windows now when you wake up in the morning have all that dew. Think of all the problems. Rust. Dry rot. Engines that don't start in the morning unless you take off the distributor cap and wipe the wires. Without condensation the world might last forever. On the moon, for example, there's no problem. Or on Mars either it turns out. New Year's, Buddy Inglefinger is throwing the blast this year, guess he was afraid of dropping out of sight with the old gang, getting the wind up about the trip to the islands they're taking without inviting him. Wonder who his hostess is going to be, that flat-chested sourpuss with straight black hair running some kind of crazy shop in Brewer or that girl before her, with the rash on the inside of her thighs and even between her breasts you could see in a bathing suit, what was her name? Ginger. Georgene. He and Janice just want to make an appearance to be polite, you get to a certain age you know nothing much is going to happen at parties, and leave right after midnight. Then six more days and, powie, the islands. Just the six of them. Little Cindy down there in all that sand. He needs a rest, things are getting him down. Sell less than a car a day in this business not counting Sundays and you're in trouble. All this tin getting dusty and rusty, the chrome developing pimples. Metal corrodes. Silver dropped two dollars an ounce the minute he bought it from that bitch.

Nelson, who has been in the shop with Manny fussing over the repairs to the Chrysler, the kid wanting a break on the full $18.50 customer rate and Manny explaining over and over like to a moron how if you shave the rate for agency employees it shows up in the books and affects everybody's end-of-the-month incentive bonus, comes over and stands by his father at the window.

Harry can't get used to the kid in a suit, it makes him seem even shorter somehow, like one of those midget emcees in a tuxedo, and with his hair shaped longer now and fluffed up by Pru's blowdrier after every shower Nellie seems a little mean-eyed dude Harry never knew. Janice used to say when the boy was little how he had Harry's ears with that crimp in the fold at the tip like one of the old-fashioned train conductors had taken his punch, but the tips of Nelson's are neatly covered by soft shingles of hair and Harry hasn't bothered to study his own since at about the age of forty he came out of that adolescent who-am-I vanity trip. He just shaves as quick as he can now and gets away from the mirror. Ruth had sweetly small tightly folded ears, he remembers. Janice's get so tan on top an arch of tiny dark spots comes out. Her father's lobes got long as a Chinaman's before he died. Nelson has a hotlooking pimple almost due to pop in the crease above his nostril, Harry notices in the light flooding through the showroom window. The slant of sun makes all the dust on the plate glass look thick as gold leaf this time of year, the arc of each day is so low. The kid is trying to be friendly. Come on. Unbend.

Harry asks him, "You stay up to watch the 76ers finish?"

"Naa."

"That Gervin for San Antonio was something, wasn't he? I heard on the radio this morning he finished with forty-six points."

"Basketball is all goons, if you ask me."

"It's changed a lot since my day," Rabbit admits. "The refs used to call travelling once in a while at least; now, Christ, they eat up half the floor going in for a lay-up."

"I like hockey," Nelson says.

"I know you do. When you have the damn Flyers on there's nowhere in the house you can go to get away from the yelling. All those apes in the crowd go for is to see a fight break out and someone's teeth get knocked out. Blood on the ice, that's the drawing card." This isn't going right; he tries another topic. "What do you think about those Russkis in Afghanistan? They sure gave themselves a Christmas Present."

"It's stupid," Nelson says. "I mean, Carter's getting all upset. It's no worse than what we did in Vietnam, it's not even as bad because at least it's right next door and they've had a puppet government there for years."

"Puppet governments are O.K., huh?"

"Well everybody has 'em. All of South America is our puppet governments."

"I bet that'd be news to the spics."

"At least the Russians, Dad, do it when they're going to do it. We try to do it and then everything gets all bogged down in politics. We can't do anything anymore."

"Well not with young people talking like you we can't," Harry says to his son. "How would you feel about going over and fighting in Afghanistan?"

The boy chuckles. "Dad, I'm a married man. And way past draft age besides."

Can this be? Harry doesn't feel too old to fight, and he's going to be forty-seven in February. He's always been sort of sorry they didn't send him to Korea when they had him in the Army, though at the time he was happy enough to hunker down in Texas. They had a funny straight-on way of looking at the world out there: money, booze, and broads, and that was it. Down to the bones. What is it Mim likes to say? God didn't go west, He died on the trail. To Nelson he says, "You mean you got married to stay out of the next war?"

"There won't be any next war, Carter will make a lot of noise but wind up letting them have it, just like he's letting Iran have the hostages. Actually, Billy Fosnacht was saying the only way we'll get the hostages back is if Russia invades Iran. Then they'd give us the hostages and sell us the oil because they need our wheat."

"Billy Fosnacht – that jerk around again?"

"Just for vacation."

"No offense, Nelson, but how can you stand that pill?"

"He's my friend. But I know why you can't stand him."

"Why can't I?" Harry asks, his heart rising to what has become a confrontation.

Turning full toward his father beside the gold-dusted pane, the boy's face seems to shrink with hate, hate and fear of being hit for what he is saying. "Because Billy was there the night you were screwing his mother while Skeeter was burning up Jill in the house we should have been in, protecting her."

That night. Ten years ago, and still cooking in the kid's head, alive like a maggot affecting his growth. "That still bugs you, doesn't it?" Rabbit says mildly.

The boy doesn't hear, his eyes lost in those sockets sunk as if thumbs had gripped too deep in clay, trying to pick up a lump. "You let Jill die."

"I didn't, and Skeeter didn't. We don't know who burnt the house down but it wasn't us. It was the neighbors, their idea of a Welcome Wagon. You got to let it go, kid. Your mother and me have let it go."

"I know you have." The sound of Mildred Kroust's electric typewriter rattles muffled in the distance, a couple in maroon parkas is stalking around in the lot checking the price stickers taped inside the windows, the boy stares as if stunned by the sound of his father's voice trying to reach him.

"The past is the past," Harry goes on, "you got to live in the present. Jill was headed that way no matter what the rest of us did. The first time I saw her, she had the kiss of death on her face."

"I know that's what you want to think."

"It's the only way to think. When you're my age you'll see it. At my age if you carried all the misery you've seen on your back you'd never get up in the morning." A flicker of something, a split second when he feels the boy actually listening, encourages Harry to urge his voice deeper, more warmly. "Once that baby of yours shows up," he tells the boy, "you'll have your hands full. You'll have a better perspective."

"You want to know something?" Nelson asks in a rapid dead voice, looking through him with lifted eyes the slant light has stolen color from.

"What?" Rabbit's heart skips.

"When Pru fell down those stairs. I'm not sure if I gave her a push or not. I can't remember."

Harry laughs, scared. "Of course you didn't push her. Why would you push her?"

"Because I'm as crazy as you."

"We're not crazy, either of us. Just frustrated, sometimes."

"Really?" This seems information the kid is grateful for.

"Sure. Anyway, everybody survived. When is he due? He or she." Fear rolls off this kid so thick Harry doesn't want to keep talking to him. The way his eyes looked transparent that instant, all the brown lifted out.

Nelson lowers his eyes, surly again. "They think about three more weeks."

"That's great. We'll be back in plenty of time. Look, Nelson. Maybe I haven't done everything right in my life. I know I haven't. But I haven't committed the greatest sin. I haven't laid down and died."

"Who says that's the greatest sin?"

"Everybody says it. The church, the government. It's against Nature, to give up, you've got to keep moving. That's the thing about you. You're not moving. You don't want to be here, selling old man Springer's jalopies. You want to be out there, learning something." He gestures toward the west, beyond West Brewer. "How to hang glide, or run a computer, or whatever."

He has talked too much and closed up the space that opened in Nelson's resistance for a second. Nelson accuses: "You don't want me here."

"I want you where you're happy and that's not here. Now I didn't want to say anything but I've been going over the figures with Mildred and they're not that hot. Since you came here and Charlie left, gross sales are down about eleven per cent over last year, this same period, November-December."

The boy's eyes water. "I try, Dad. I try to be friendly and semiaggressive and all that when the people come in."

"I know you do, Nelson. I know you do."

"I can't go out and drag 'em in out of the cold."

"You're right. Forget what I said. The thing about Charlie was, he had connections. I've lived in this county all my life except those two years in the Army and I don't have that kind of connections."

"I know a lot of people my age," Nelson protests.

"Yeah," Harry says, "you know the kind of people who sell you their used-up convertibles for a fancy price. But Charlie knows the kind of people who actually come in and buy a car. He expects 'em to; he's not surprised, they're not surprised. Maybe it's being Greek, I don't know. No matter what they say about you and me, kid, we're not Greek."

This joking doesn't help; the boy has been wounded, deeper than Harry wanted. "I don't think it's me," Nelson says. "It's the economy."

The traffic on Route 111 is picking up; people are heading home in the gloom. Harry too can go; Nelson is on the floor till eight. Climb into the Corona and turn on the four-speaker radio and hear how silver is doing. Hi ho, Silver. Harry says, in a voice that sounds sage in his own ears, almost like Webb Murkett's, "Yeah, well, that has its wrinkles. This oil thing is hurting the Japanese worse than it is us, and what hurts them should be doing us good. The yen is down, these cars cost less in real dollars than they did last year, and it ought to be reflected in our sales." That look on Cindy's face in the photograph, Harry can't get it out of his mind: an anxious startled kind of joy, as if she was floating away in a balloon and had just felt the earth lurch free. "Numbers," he tells Nelson in stern conclusion. "Numbers don't lie, and they don't forgive."

New Year's Day was when Harry and Janice had decided to go to Ma Springer with their news, which they had been keeping to themselves for nearly a week. Dread of how the old lady might react had prompted the postponement, plus a groping after ceremony, a wish to show respect for the sacred bonds of family by announcing the break on a significant day, the first of a new decade. Yet now that the day is here, they feel hungover and depleted from having stayed at Buddy Inglefinger's until three in the morning. Their tardy departure had been further prolonged by an uproarious commotion over cars in the driveway – a car that wouldn't start, belonging to Thelma Harrison's Maryland cousin, who was visiting. There was a lot of boozy shouting and fallingdown helpfulness in the headlights as jump cables were found and Ronnie's Volvo was jockeyed nose to nose with the cousin's Nova, everybody poking their flashlight in to make sure Ronnie was connecting positive to positive and not going to blow out the batteries. Harry has seen jump cables actually melt in circumstances like this. Some woman he hardly knew had a mouth big enough to put the head of a flashlight in it, so her cheeks glowed like a lampshade. Buddy and his new girl, a frantic skinny sixfooter with frizzed-out hair and three children from a broken marriage, had made some kind of punch of pineapple juice and rum and brandy, and the taste of pineapple still at noon keeps returning. On top of Harry's headache Nelson and Pru, who stayed home with Mom-mom last night watching on television straight from Times Square Guy Lombardo's brother now that Guy Lombardo is dead, are hogging the living room watching the Cotton Bowl Festival Parade from Texas, so he and Janice have to take Ma Springer into the kitchen to get some privacy. A deadly staleness flavors the new decade. As they sit down at the kitchen table for their interview, it seems to him that they have already done this, and are sitting down to a rerun.

Janice, her eyes ringed by weariness, turns to him in his daze and says, "Harry, you begin."

"Me?"

"My goodness, what can this be?" Ma asks, pretending to be cross but pleased by the formality, the two of them touching her elbows and steering her in here. "You're acting like Janice is pregnant but I know she had her tubes tied."

"Cauterized," Janice says softly, pained.

Harry begins. "Bessie, you know we've been looking at houses."

Playfulness snaps out of the old lady's face as if pulled by a rubber band. The skin at the corners of her set lips is crossed and recrossed, Harry suddenly sees, by fine dry wrinkles. In his mind his mother-in-law has stayed as when he first met her, packed into her skin; but unnoticed by him Bessie's hide has loosened and cracked like putty in a cellar window, has developed the complexity of paper crumpled and then smoothed again. He tastes pineapple. A small black spot of nausea appears and grows as if rapidly approaching down the great parched space of her severe, expectant silence.

"Now," he must go on, swallowing, "we think we've found one we like. A little stone two-story over in Penn Park. The realtor thinks it might have been a gardener's cottage that somebody sold off when the estates were broken up and then was enlarged to fit a better kitchen in. It's on a little turnaround off Franklin Drive behind the bigger houses; the privacy is great."

"It's only twenty minutes away, Mother."

Harry can't stop studying, in the cold kitchen light, the old woman's skin. The dark life of veins underneath that gave her her flushed swarthy look that Janice inherited has been overlaid with a kind of dust of fine gray threads, wrinkles etched on the lightstruck flat of the cheek nearest him like rows and rows of indecipherable writing scratched on a far clay cliff. He feels himself towering, giddy, and all of his poor ashamed words strike across a great distance, a terrible widening as Ma listens motionless to her doom. "Virtually next door," he says to her, "and with three bedrooms upstairs, I mean there's a little room that the kids who lived there had used as a kind of clubhouse, two bedrooms though absolutely, and we'd be happy to put you up any time if it came to that, for as long as needs be." He feels he is blundering: already he has the old lady living with them again, her TV set muttering on the other side of the wall.

Janice breaks in: "Really, Mother, it makes much more sense for Harry and me at this point of our lives."

"But I had to talk her into it, Ma; it was my idea. When you and Fred very kindly took us in after we got back together I never thought of it as for forever. I thought of it as more of a stop-gap thing, until we got our feet back under us."

What he had liked about it, he sees now, was that it would have made it easy for him to leave Janice: just walk out under the streetlights and leave her with her parents. But he hadn't left her, and now cannot. She is his fortune.

She is trying to soften her mother's silence. "Also as an investment, Mother. Every couple we know owns their own house, even this bachelor we were with last night, and a lot of the men earn less than Harry. Property's the only place to put money ifyou have any, what with inflation and all."

Ma Springer at last does speak, in a voice that keeps rising in spite of herself. "You'll have this place when I'm gone, if you could just wait. Why can't you wait a little yet?"

"Mother, that's ghoulish when you talk like that. We don't want to wait for your house; Harry and I want our house now." Janice lights a cigarette, and has to press her elbow onto the tabletop to hold the match steady.

Harry assures the old lady, "Bessie, you're going to live forever." But having seen what's happening to her skin he knows this isn't true.

Wide-eyed suddenly, she asks, "What's going to happen to this house then?"

Rabbit nearly laughs, the old lady's expression is so childlike, taken with the pitch of her voice. "It'll be fine," he tells her. "When they built places like this they built 'em to last. Not like the shacks they slap up now."

"Fred always wanted Janice to have this house," Ma Springer states, staring with eyes narrowed again at a place just between Harry's and Janice's heads. "For her security."

Janice laughs now. "Mother, I have plenty of security. We told you about the gold and silver."

"Playing with money like that is a good way to lose it," Ma says. "I don't want to leave this house to be auctioned off to some Brewer Jew. They're heading out this way, you know, now that the blacks and Puerto Ricans are trickling into the north side of town."

"Come on, Bessie," Harry says, "what do you care? Like I said, you got a lot of life ahead of you, but when you're gone, you're gone. Let go, you got to let some things go for other people to worry about. The Bible tells you that, it says it on every page. Let -go; the Lord knows best."

Janice from her twitchy manner thinks he is saying too much. "Mother, we might come back to the house -"

"When the old crow is dead. Why didn't you and Harry tell me my presence was such a burden? I tried to stay in my room as much as I could. I went into the kitchen only when it looked like nobody else was going to make the meal -"

"Mother, stop it. You've been lovely. We both love you."

"Grace Stuhl would have taken me in, many's the times she offered. Though her house isn't half the size of this and has all those front steps." She sniffs, so loudly it seems a cry for help.

Nelson shouts in from the living room, "Mom-mom, when's lunch?"

Janice says urgently, "See, Mother. You're forgetting Nelson. He'll be here, with his family."

The old lady sniffs again, less tragically, and replies with pinched lips and a level red-rimmed gaze, "He may be or he may not be. The young can't be depended on."

Harry tells her, "You're right about that all right. They won't fight and they won't learn, just sit on their asses and get stoned."

Nelson comes into the kitchen holding a newspaper, today's Brewer Standard. He looks cheerful for once, on his good night's sleep. He has folded the paper to a quiz on Seventies trivia and asks them all, "How many of these people can you identify? Renée Richards, Stephen Weed, Megan Marshack, Marjoe Gortner, Greta Rideout, Spider Sabich, D. B. Cooper. I got six out of seven, Pru got only four."

"Renée Richards was Patty Hearst's boyfriend," Rabbit begins.

Nelson sees the state his grandmother's face is in and asks, "What's happening here?"

Janice says, "We'll explain later, sweetie."

Harry tells him, "Your mother and I have found a house we're going to move to."

Nelson stares from one to the other of his parents and it seems he might scream, the way he goes white around the gills. But instead he pronounces quietly, "What a copout. What a fucking pair of copout artists. Well screw you both. Mom, Dad. Screw you."

And he returns to the living room where the rumble of drums and trombones merges with the mumble of unheard words as he and Pru confer within the tunnel of their young marriage. The kid had felt frightened. He felt left. Things are getting too big for him. Rabbit knows the feeling. For all that is wrong between them there are moments when his heart and Nelson's might be opposite ends of a single short steel bar, he knows so exactly what the kid is feeling. Still, just because people are frightened of being alone doesn't mean he has to sit still and be everybody's big fat patsy like Mim said.

Janice and her mother are holding hands, tears blurring both faces. When Janice cries, her face loses shape, dissolves to the ugly child she was. Her mother is saying, moaning as if to herself, "Oh I knew you were looking but I guess I didn't believe you'd actually go ahead and buy one when you have this free. Isn't there any adjustment we could make here so you could change your minds or at least let me get adjusted first? I'm too old, is the thing, too old to take on responsibility. The boy means well in his way but he's all ferhuddled for now, and the girl, I don't know. She wants to do it all but I'm not sure she can. To be honest, I've been dreading the baby, I've been trying to remember how it was with you and Nelson, and for the life of me I can't. I remember the milk didn't come the way they thought it should, and the doctor was so ride to you about it Fred had to step in and have a word."

Janice is nodding, nodding, tears making the side of her nose shine, the cords on her throat jumping out with every sob. "Maybe we could wait, though we said we'd pass papers, if you feel that way at least wait until the baby comes."

There is a rhythm the two of them are rocking to, hands clasped on the table, heads touching. "Do what you must, for your own happiness," Ma Springer is saying, "the ones left behind will manage. It can't do worse than kill me, and that might be a blessing."

She is turning Janice into a mess: face blubbery and melting, the pockets beneath her eyes liverish with guilt, Janice is leaning hard into her mother, giving in on the house, begging for forgiveness, "Mother we thought, Harry was certain, you'd feel less alone, with -"

"With a worry like Nelson in the house?"

Tough old turkey. Harry better step in before Janice gives it all away. His throat hardens. "Listen, Bessie. You asked for him, you got him."

Free! Macadam falls away beneath the wheels, a tawny old fort can be glimpsed as they lift off the runway beneath the rounded riveted edge of one great wing, the gas tanks of South Philadelphia are reduced to a set of white checkers. The wheels thump, retracted, and cruel photons glitter on the aluminum motionless beside the window. The swift ascent of the plane makes their blood weighty; Janice's hand sweats in his. She had wanted him to have the window seat, so she wouldn't have to look. There is marsh below, withered tan and blue with saltwater. Harry marvels at the industrial buildings beyond the Delaware: flat gravel roofs vast as parking lots and parking lots all inlaid with glittering automobile roofs like bathroom floors tiled with jewels. And in junkyards of cars the effect is almost as brilliant. The NO SMOKING sign goes off. Behind the Angstroms the voices of the Murketts and the Harrisons begin to chatter. They all had a drink at an airport bar, though the hour was eleven in the morning. Harry has flown before, but to Texas with the Army and dealers' conferences in Cleveland and Albany: never aloft on vacation like this, due east into the sun.

How quickly, how silently, the 747 eats up the toy miles below! Sun glare travels with the plane across lakes and rivers in a second's glinting. The winter has been eerily mild thus far, to spite the Ayatollah; on golf courses the greens show as living discs and ovals amid the white beans of the traps and on the fairways he can spot moving specks, men playing. Composition tennis courts are dominoes from this height, drive-in movies have the shape of a fan, baseball diamonds seem a species of tattered money. Cars move very slowly and with an odd perfection, as if the roads hold tracks. The houses of the Camden area scatter, relenting to disclose a plowed field or an estate with its prickly mansion and its eye of a swimming pool tucked into mist-colored woods; and then within another minute, still climbing, Harry is above the dark carpet of the Jersey Pines, scored with yellow roads and patches of scraping but much of it still unmarred, veins of paler unleafed trees following the slope of land and flow of water among the darker evergreens, the tints of competition on earth made clear to the eye so hugely lifted. Janice lets go of his hand and gives signs of having swallowed her terror.

"What do you see?" she asks.

"The Shore."

It is true, in another silent stride the engines had inched them to the edge of the ocean of trees and placed underneath them a sandy strip, separated from the mainland by a band of flashing water and filled to a precarious fullness with linear summer cities, etched there by builders who could not see, as Harry can, how easily the great shining shoulder of the ocean could shrug and immerse and erase all traces of men. Where the sea impinges on the white sand a frill of surf slowly waves, a lacy snake pinned in place. Then this flight heads over the Atlantic at an altitude from which no whitecaps can be detected in the bluish hemisphere below, and immensity becomes nothingness. The plane, its earnest droning without and its party mutter and tinkle within, becomes all of the world there is.

An enamelled stewardess brings them lunch, sealed on a tray of blond plastic. Though her makeup is thickly applied Harry thinks he detects beneath it, as she bends close with a smile to ask what beverage he would prefer, shadowy traces of a hectic night. They fuck on every layover, he has read in Club or Oui, a separate boyfriend in every city, twenty or thirty men, these women the fabulous horny sailors of our time. Ever since the airport he has been amazed by other people: the carpeted corridors seemed thronged with freaks, people in crazy sizes and clothes, girls with dead-white complexions and giant eyeglasses and hair frizzed out to fill a bushel basket, black men swaggering along in long fur coats and hip-hugging velvet suits, a tall pale boy in a turban and a down vest, a dwarf in a plaid tam-o'-shanter, a woman so obese she couldn't sit in the molded plastic chairs of the waiting areas and had to stand propping herself on a three-legged aluminum cane. Life outside Brewer was gaudy, wild. Everyone was a clown in costume. Rabbit and his five companions were in costume too, flimsy summer clothes under winter overcoats. Cindy Murkett is wearing high-heeled slides on naked ankles; Thelma Harrison pads along in woolly socks and tennis sneakers. They all keep laughing among themselves, in that betraying Diamond County way. Harry doesn't mind getting a little high, but he doesn't want to sacrifice awareness of the colors around him, of the revelation that outside Brewer there is a planet without ruts worn into it. In such moments of adventure he is impatient with his body, that its five windows aren't enough, he can't get the world all in. Joy makes his heart pound. God, having shrunk in Harry's middle years to the size of a raisin lost under the car seat, is suddenly great again, everywhere like a radiant wind. Free: the dead and the living alike have been left five miles below in the haze that has annulled the earth like breath on a mirror.

Harry turns from the little double-paned airplane window of some tinted soft substance that has been scratched again and again horizontally as by a hail of meteorites. Janice is leafing through the airline magazine. He asks her, "How do you think they'll do?"

"Your mother and Nelson and Pru, who else?"

She flips a glossy page. Her mother is in that set of the lips, as if they have just pronounced a mournful truth and will not take it back. "I expect better than when we're there."

"They say anything to you about the house?"

Harry and Janice passed papers two days ago, a Tuesday. The day before, Monday the seventh, they had sold their silver back to Fiscal Alternatives. The metal, its value driven up by panic buying in the wake of Afghanistan by heavy holders of petrodollars, stood at $36.70 that day, making each of the silver dollars, bought for $16.50 including sales tax, worth $23.37, according to the calculations of the platinum-haired young woman. Janice, who had not worked all these years off and on at her father's lot for nothing, slid the hand computer toward herself and after some punching politely pointed out that if silver stood at $36.70 a troy ounce, then seventy-five per cent of that would give a melt value of $27.52. Well, the young woman pointed out, you couldn't expect Fiscal Alternatives to sell at less than melt value and not buy back for less too. She was less soignée than formerly; the tiny imperfection at one comer of her lips had bloomed into something that needed to be covered with a little circular BandAid. But after a phone call to some office deeper than hers, hidden by more than a sheet of thin Venetian blinds, she conceded that they could go to $24 even. Times 888 came to $21,312, or a profit in less than a month of $6,660. Harry wanted to keep eight of the handsome old cartwheels as souvenirs and this reduced the check to $21,120, a more magical number anyway. From the Brewer Trust safe-deposit box and the safe at Springer Motors they retrieved their cumbersome riches, taking care this time to minimize portage by double-parking the Corona on Weiser Street. The next day, while silver was dropping to $31.75 an ounce, they signed, at this same Brewer Trust, a twenty-year mortgage for $62,400 at 13'h per cent, 1 %z per cent below the current prime rate, with a one-point fee of $624 and a three-year renegotiation proviso. The little stone house, once a gardener's cottage, in Penn Park cost $78,000. Janice wanted to put down $25,000, but Harry pointed out to her that in inflationary times debt is a good thing to have, that mortgage interest is taxdeductible, and that six-month $10,000-minimum money market certificates are paying close to 12 per cent these days. So they opted for the 20 per cent minimum of equity, or $15,600, which the bank, considering the excellent credit standing in the community of Mr. Angstrom and his family, was pleased to allow. Stepping out between the monumental pillars into the winter daylight blinking, Janice and Harry owned a house, and the day after tomorrow would fly into summer. For years nothing happens; then everything happens. Water boils, the cactus blooms, cancer declares itself.

Janice replies, "Mother seems resigned. She told me a long story about how her parents, who were better regarded, you know, in the county than the Springers, offered to have her and Daddy come stay with them while he was still studying accountancy and he said, No, if he couldn't put a roof over a wife he shouldn't have taken a wife."

"She should tell that story to Nelson."

"I wouldn't push at Nelson too hard these days. Something's working at him from inside."

"I don't push at him, he's pushing me. He's pushed me right out of the house."

"It may be our going off has frightened him. Made it more real, that he has these responsibilities."

"About time the kid woke up. What do you think poor Pru makes of all this?"

Janice sighs, a sound lost in the giant whispering that upholds them. Little dull nozzles above their heads hiss oxygen. Harry wants to hear that Pru hates Nelson, that she is sorry she has married him, that the father has made the son look sick. "Oh, I don't think she knows what to make," Janice says. "We have these talks sometimes and she knows Nelson is unhappy but still has this faith in him. The fact of it is Teresa was so anxious to get away from her own people in Ohio she can't afford to be too picky about the people she's gotten in with."

"She still keeps putting away that créme de menthe."

"She's a little heedless but that's how you are at that age. You think whatever happens, you can manage; the Devil won't touch you."

He nudges her elbow with his comfortingly, to show he remembers. The Devil touched her twenty years ago. The guilt they share rests in their laps like these safety belts, holding them fast, chafing only when they try to move.

"Hey you two lovebirds." Ronnie Harrison's loud shallow voice breaks upon them from above; he is looking down with his boozy breath from the backs of their seats. "Deal us in, you can neck at home." For the rest of the flight's three droning hours they party with the other four, swapping seats, standing in the aisle, moving around in the 747's wide body as if it were Webb Murkett's long living room. They stoke themselves with drinks and reminisce about times they have already shared as if, were silence and forgetfulness once to enter, the bubble of this venture together would pop and all six would go tumbling into the void that surrounds and upholds the shuddering skin of the plane. Cindy seems, in this confusion, amiable but remote, a younger sister, or another passenger swept up into their holiday mood. She perches forward on the edge of her reclined window seat to catch each gust of jocularity; it is hard to believe that her outer form, clothed in a prim black suit with a floppy white cravat that reminds Harry of George Washington, has secret places, of folds and fur and moist membranes, where a diaphragm can go, and that entry into these places is the purpose of his trip and his certain destination.

The plane drops; his stomach clenches; the pilot's omnipotent Texas voice comes on and tells them to return to their seats and prepare for arrival. Harry asks Janice now that she's loose on booze if she wouldn't like the window seat but she says No, she doesn't dare to look until they land. Through his patch of scratched Plexiglas he sees a milky turquoise sea mottled with purple-green shadows cast from underneath, islands beneath the surface. A single sailboat. Then a ragged arm of rocky land in a sleeve of white beach. Small houses with red corrugated roofs rise toward him. The wheels of the plane groan and unwind down and lock in place. They are skimming a swamp. He thinks to pray but his thoughts scatter; Janice is grinding the bones of his fingers together. A house with a wind sock, an unmanned bulldozer, branchless trees that are palms flash by; there is a thud, a small swerve, a loud hiss, and a roar straining backwards, a screaming straining. It stops, they slow, they are on the ground, and a low pink air terminal is wheeled into view as the 747 taxis close. The passengers move, suddenly sweating, clutching their winter coats and groping for sunglasses, toward the exits. At the head of the silver stairs down to the macadam, the tropical air, so warm, moist, and forgiving, composed all of tiny little circles, strikes Rabbit's face as if gusted from an atomizer; but Ronnie Harrison ruins the moment by exclaiming distinctly, behind his ear, "Oh boy. That's better than a blow job." And, worse even than Ronnie's smearing his voice across so precious a moment of first encounter with a new world, the women laugh, having been meant to overhear. Janice laughs, the dumb mutt. And the stewardess, her enamel gone dewy in the warmth by the door where she poses saying goodbye, goodbye, promiscuously smiles.

Cindy's laugh skips girlishly above the others and is quickly followed by her drawled word, "Ronnie." Rabbit is excited amid his disgust, remembering those Polaroids tucked in a drawer.

As the days of the vacation pass, Cindy turns the same mahogany brown she wears in the summer, by the pool at the Flying Eagle, and comes up dripping from the beryl Caribbean in the same bikini of black strings, only with salt-glisten on her skin. Thelma Harrison burns badly the first day, and has some pain connected with that quiet ailment of hers. She spends the whole second day in their bungalow, while Ronnie bounces in and out of the water and supervises the fetching of drinks from the bar built on the sand entirely of straw. Old black ladies move up and down the beach offering beads and shells and sunclothes for sale, and on the morning of the third day Thelma buys from one of them a wide-brimmed straw hat and a pink ankle-length wrapper with long sleeves, and thus entirely covered, with sun block on her face and a towel across the tops of her feet, she sits reading in the shade of the sea-grape trees. Her face in the shade of her hat seems sallow and thin and mischievous, when she glances toward Harry as he lies in the sun. Next to her, he tans least easily, but he is determined to keep up with the crowd. The ache of a sunburn reminds him nostalgically of the muscle aches after athletic exertion. In the sea, he doggy-paddles, secretly afraid of sharks.

The men spend each morning on the golf course that adjoins the resort, riding in canopied carts down sere fairways laid out between brambly jungles from which there is no recovery; indeed, in looking for lost balls there is a danger of stepping into a deep hole. The substance of the island is coral, pitted with caves. At night, there is entertainment, set in a rigid weekly cycle. They arrived on a Thursday, the evening of the crab races, and on the next night witnessed a limbo dance, and on the next, a Saturday, themselves danced to a steel band. Every night there is music to dance to, beside the Olympic-length pool under stars that seem closer down here, and that hang in the sky with a certain menace, fragments of a frozen explosion. Some of the constellations are strange; Webb Murkett, who knows stars from his years in the Navy – he enlisted in '45, when he was eighteen, and crossed the Pacific on an aircraft carrier as the war was ending – points out the Southern Cross, and a ghostly blur in the sky he says is another galaxy altogether; and they can all see that the Big Dipper stands on its handle here in a way never seen in southeastern Pennsylvania.

Oh, that little Cindy, browner at every dinnertime, just begging for love. You can see it in her teeth, they are getting so white, and the way she picks an oleander blossom from the bush outside their bungalow every night to wear in her hair all fluffy from swimming so much, and the swarthiness of her toes that makes the nails look pale as petals also. She wears on her dark skin white dresses that shine from far across the swimming pool – lit from underneath at night as if it has swallowed the moon – when she is coming back from the ladies' room beyond the bamboo bar. She claims she is getting fatter, too: those piña coladas and banana Daiquiris and rum punches, all those calories, shameless. Yet she never turns a drink down, none of them do; from the Bloody Marys that fortify the golfers for their morning on the course to the last round of Stingers after midnight, they keep a gentle collective buzz on. Janice wonders, "Harry, what's the final tab going to look like? You keep signing for everybody."

He tells her, "Relax. Might as well spend it as have it eaten up by inflation. Did you hear Webb saying that the dollar now is worth exactly half what it was ten years ago in 1970? So these are fifty-cent dollars; relax." The expense in his mind is part of a worthy campaign, to sleep with Cindy before their seven days are over. He feels it coming, coming upon all of them, the walls between them are wearing thin, he knows exactly when Webb will clear his throat or how he will light his cigarette, eye-glance and easy silence are hour by hour eroding constraint, under sun and under stars they stretch out their six bodies on the folding chaises, with vinyl strapping, that are everywhere. Their hands touch passing drinks and matches and suntan lotion, they barge in and out of one another's bungalows; indeed Rabbit has seen Thelma Harrison bare-assed by accident returning their Solarcaine one afternoon. She had been lying on the bed letting her burned skin breathe and hustled into the bathroom at the sound of his voice at the door, but not quick enough. He saw the crease between her cheeks, the whole lean sallow length of her fleeing, and handed the Solarcaine to Ronnie, himself naked, without comment or apology, they were half-naked with each other all the day long, but for Thelma huddled under the sea-grape: Janice rubbing Coppertone into the criss-crossing creases of Webb's red neck, Ronnie's heavy cock bulging the front of his obscene little European-style trunks, sweet Cindy untying a black string to give her back an even tan and showing the full nippled silhouette of one boob when she reached up for her Planter's Punch from the tray of them the boy had brought. These blacks down here are silkier than American blacks, blacker, their bodies moving to a gentler beat. Toward four o'clock, the shadows of the sea-grape coming forward like knobby fingers onto the sand, the men's faces baked red despite the canopies on the golf carts, they move their act from the beach (the rustling of palm trees gets on Harry's nerves; at night he keeps thinking it's raining, and it never is) to the shaded area beside the Olympic pool, where young island men in white steward's jackets circle among them taking drink orders and the hard white pellet of the sun slowly lowers toward the horizon of the sea, which it meets promptly at six, in a perfunctory splash of purples and pinks. Stupefied, aching with pleasure, Harry stares at the way, when Cindy rolls her body into a new position on the chaise, the straps have bitten laterally into her delicious fat, like tire treads in mud. Thelma sits among them swaddled and watchful, Webb drones on, Ronnie is making some new friends at the bamboo bar. It's the salesman in him, he has to keep trying his pitch. His voice balloons above the rippling as a single fair child, waterlogged and bored, dives and paddles away the time to dinner. Janice, much as he loves her now and then, down here is a piece of static, getting between Harry and what signals Cindy may be sending; luckily Webb keeps her entertained, talking to her as one member of the lesser Brewer gentry to another, about that tireless subject of money. "You think fourteen per cent is catastrophic, in Israel they live with a hundred eleven per cent, a color television set costs eighteen hundred dollars. In Argentina it's a hundred fifty per cent per year, believe me I kid you not. In Tokyo a pound of steak costs twenty dollars and in Saudi Arabia a pack of cigarettes goes for a fin. Five dollars a pack. You may think we're hurting but the U.S. consumer still gets the best deal to be had in any industrialized nation." Janice hangs on his words and bums his cigarettes. Her hair since summer has grown long enough to pull back in a little stubby ponytail; she sits by his feet, dabbling her legs in the pool. The hair on Webb's long skinny legs spirals around like the stripes on a barber pole, and his face with its wise creases has tanned the color of lightly varnished pine. It occurs to Harry that she used to listen to her father bullshit this way, and likes it.

By Sunday night they are bored with the routine around the resort and hire a taxi to take them across the island to the casino. In the dark they pass through villages where black children are invisible until their eye-whites gleam beside the road. A herd of goats trotting with dragging rope halters materializes in the headlights of the taxi. Shuttered cabins up on cinder blocks reveal by an open door that they are taverns, with bottle-crammed shelves and a sheaf of standing customers. An old stone church flings candlelight from its pointed windows, which have no glass, and the moan of one phrase of a hymn, that is swiftly left behind. The taxi, a '69 Pontiac with a lot of voodoo dolls on the dashboard, drives ruthlessly, on the wrong side of the road, for this was an English colony. The truncated cone-shapes of abandoned sugar mills against the sky full of stars remember the past, all those dead slaves, while Janice and Thelma and Cindy chatter in the surging dark about people left behind in Brewer, about Buddy Inglefinger's newest awful girlfriend with all that height and all those children, Buddy's such a victim-type, and about impossible Peggy Fosnacht, whom rumor has reported to be very hurt that she and Ollie weren't asked along on this trip to the Caribbean, even though everybody knows they could never afford it.

The casino is attached to another beach resort, grander than theirs. Boardwalks extend out over the illuminated coral shelf. There are worlds within worlds, Harry thinks. Creatures like broken bags of noodles wave upward from within the goldengreen slipslop. He has come out here to clear his head. He got hooked on blackjack and in an attempt to recoup his losses by doubling and redoubling his bets cashed three hundred in Traveller's Checks and, while his friends marvelled, lost it all. Well, that's less than half the profit on the sale of one Tercel, less than three per cent of what Nelson's pranks have cost. Still, Harry's head throbs and he feels shaky and humiliated. The black dealer didn't even glance up when, cleaned out, he pushed away 'from the garish felt of the table. He walks along the boards toward the black horizon, as the tropical air soothes his hot face with microscopic circular kisses. He imagines he could walk to South America, that has Paraguay in it; he thinks fondly of that area of tall weeds behind the asphalt of the lot, and of that farm he has always approached as a spy, through the hedgerow that grew up over the tumbled sandstone wall. The grass in the orchard will be flattened and bleached by winter now, smoke rising from the lonely house below. Another world.

Cindy is beside him suddenly, breathing in rhythm with the slipslop of the sea. He fears their moment has come, when he is far from ready; but she says in a dry commiserating voice, "Webb says you should always set a limit for yourself before you sit down, so you won't get carried away."

"I wasn't carried away," Harry tells her. "I had a theory." Perhaps she figures that his losses have earned a compensation and she is it. Her brown arms are set off by a crocheted white shawl; with the flower behind her ear she looks flirty. What would it be like, to press his own high heavy face down into those apple-hard roundnesses of hers, cheeks and brow and nose-tip, and her alert little life-giving slits, long-upped mouth and dark eyes glimmering with mischief like a child's? Shpslop. Will their faces fit? Her eyes glance upward toward his and he gazes away, at the tropical moon lying on its side at an angle you never see in Pennsylvania. As if accidentally, while gazing out to sea, he brushes his fingertips against her arm. An electric warmth seems to linger from her Sunday in the sun. Kelp slaps the pilings of the catwalk, a wave collapses its way along the beach, his moment to pounce is here. Something too firm in the protuberances of her face holds him off, though she is lightly smiling, and tips her face up, as if to make it easier for him to slip his mouth beneath her nose.

But footsteps rumble toward them and Webb and Janice, almost running, their hands in the confused mingled lights of moon and subaqueous spots and blazing casino beyond seeming linked, then released, come up to this angle of the boardwalk and announce excitedly that Ronnie Harrison is burning up the crap table inside. "Come and see, Harry," Janice says. "He's at least eight hundred ahead."

"That Ronnie," Cindy says, in a tone of girlish dry reproach, and the casino lights glow through her long skirt as she hurries toward these lights, her legs silhouetted beneath her dark wide ass.

They get back to their own resort after two. Ronnie stayed too long at the crap table and wound up only a few bucks better than even. He and Janice fall asleep on the long ride back, while Thelma sits tensely in Rabbit's lap and Webb and Cindy sit up front with the driver, Webb asking questions about the island that the man answers in a reluctant, bubbling language that is barely English. At the gate to their resort a uniformed guard lets them in. Everything down here is guarded, theft is rampant, thieves and even murderers pour outward from the island's dark heart to feed on its rim of rich visitors. Guest bungalows are approached along paths of green-painted concrete laid down on the sand, under muttering palm trees, between bushes of papery flowers that attract hummingbirds in the morning. While the men confer as to what hour tomorrow's golf should be postponed to, the three women whisper at a little distance, at the point in the concrete walk where the paths to their separate bungalows diverge. Janice, Cindy, and Thelma are tittering and sending glances this way, glances flickering birdlike in the moon-glazed warm night. Cindy's shawl glimmers like a splotch of foam on surging water. But in the end, making the hushed grove of palms ring with cries of "'Night. 'Night," each wife walks to her own bungalow with her husband. Rabbit fucks Janice out of general irritation and falls asleep hoping that morning will be indefinitely postponed.

But it comes on schedule, in the form of bars of sunlight the window louvers cast on to the floor of hexagonal tiles, while the little yellow birds they have that song about down here follow the passage of clinking breakfast trays along the concrete paths. It is not so bad, once he stands up. The body was evolved for adversity. As has become his custom he takes a short, cautious swim off the deserted beach, where last night's plastic glasses are still propped in the sand. It is the one moment of the day or night when Harry is by himself, not counting the old couples, with the wives needing an arm to make their way down across the sand, who also like an early swim. The sea between soft breakers seems the color of a honeydew melon, that pale a green. Floating on his back he can see, on the roads along the scraggly steep hills that flank the bay, those to whom this island is no vacation, blacks in scraps of bright cloth, strolling to work, some of the women toting bundles and even buckets on their heads. They really do that. Their voices carry on fresh morning air, along with the slap and swoosh and fizz of warm saltwater sliding and receding at his feet. The white sand is spongy, and full of holes where crabs breathe. He has never seen sand this white, minced coral fine as sugar. The early sun sits lightly on his sensitive shoulders. This is it, health. Then the girl with the breakfast tray comes to their door – their bungalow number is 9 – and Janice in her terrycloth bathrobe opens the louvered door and calls "Harry" out across the beach where an old black rummy in khaki pants is already sweeping up seaweed and plastic glasses, and the party, the hunt, is on again.

He plays golf badly today; when he is tired he tends to overswing, and to flip his hands instead ofletting the arms ride through. Keep the wrist-cock, don't waste it up at the top. Don't sway onto your toes, imagine your nose pressed against a pane of glass. Think railroad tracks. Follow through. These tips are small help today; it seems a long morning's slog between hungry wings of coral jungle, up to greens as bumpy as quilts, though he supposes it's a miracle of sorts to have greens at all under this sun. He hates Webb Murkett, who is sinking everything inside of twenty feet today. Why should this stringy old bullshitter hog that fantastic little cunt and take the Nassau besides? Harry misses Buddy Inglefinger, to feel superior to. Ronnie's sparse scalp and naked high forehead look like a peeling pink egg when he stoops to his shot. Swings like an ape, all the hair off his head gone into his arms, how can Thelma stand him? Women, they'll put up with anything for the sake of a big prick evidently. Harry can't stop thinking of that three hundred dollars he blew last night, that his father would have slaved six weeks for. Poor Pop, he didn't live to see money get unreal.

But things look up in the afternoon, after a couple of piña coladas and a crabmeat-salad sandwich. They all decide to rent three Sunfishes, and they pair up so that he and Cindy go out together. He has never sailed, so she stands up to her tits in the water fussing with the rudder while he sits high and dry holding the ropes that pull this striped three-cornered sail, that doesn't look to him firmly attached enough, flapping this way and that while one aluminum pipe rubs against another. The whole thing feels shaky: They have you wear a kind of black rubber pad around your middle and in hers Cindy looks pretty cute with that short otter haircut, butch, like one of those female cops on TV or a frogwoman. He has never before noticed how dark and thick her eyebrows are; they knit toward each other and almost touch until the rudder catch clicks in finally. Then she gives a grunt and up she jumps, flat on her front so her tits squeeze out sideways, the untanned parts of them white as Maalox, her legs kicking in the water to bring her ass all black and shiny aboard, she is too much woman for this little boat, it is tilting like crazy. He pulls her by the arm and the aluminum pole at the bottom of the sail swings and hits him on the back of the head. Hard. He is stunned. She has grabbed the rope from him while still holding on to the rudder handle and keeps shouting, "The centerboard, the centerboard," until he figures out what she means. This splintery long wood fin under his leg should go in that slot. He gets it out from under him and shoves it in. Instead of congratulating him, Cindy says, "Shit." The little Fiberglas shell is parallel to the beach, where an arc of bathers has gathered to watch, and each wave is slopping them closer in. Then the wind catches the sail and flattens it taut, so the aluminum mast creaks, and they slowly bob out over the breaking waves toward the point of land on the right where the bay ends.

Once you get going you don't feel how fast you're moving, the water having no landmarks. Harry is toward the front, crouching way over in case the boom swings at his head again. Sitting yoga-style in her stout rubber gasket, the center strip of her bikini barely covering her opened-up crotch, Cindy tends the tiller and for the first time smiles. "Harry, you don't have to keep holding on to the top of the centerboard, it doesn't have to be pulled until we hit the beach." The beach, the palms, the bungalows have been reduced to the size of a postcard.

"Should we be this far out?"

She smiles again. "We're not far out." The sailing gear tugs at her hands, the boat tips. The water out here is no longer the pale green of a honeydew melon but a green like bile, black in the troughs.

"We're not," he repeats.

"Look over there." A sail scarcely bigger than the flash of a wave. "That's Webb and Thelma. They're much further out than we are."

"Are you sure that's them?"

Cindy takes pity. "We'll come about when we're closer to those rocks. You know what come about means, Harry?"

"Not exactly."

"We'll change direction. The boom will swing, so watch your head."

"Do you think there are any sharks?" Still, he tells himself, there is an intimacy to it, just the two of them, the same spray hitting his skin and hers, the wind and water sounds that drown out all others, the curve of her shoulder shining like metal in the light of that hard white sun that makes the sun he grew up under seem orange and bloated in memory.

"Did you see Jaws II?" she asks back.

"D'you ever get the feeling everything these days is sequels?" he asks in turn. "Like people are running out of ideas." He feels so full of fatigue and long-held lust as to be careless of his life, amid this tugging violence of elements. Even the sun-sparkle on the water feels cruel, a malevolence straight from Heaven, like those photons beating on the wings of the airplane flying down.

"Coming about," Cindy says. "Hard alee."

He crouches, and the boom misses. He sees another sail out here with them, Ronnie and Janice, headed for the horizon. She seems to be at the back, steering. When did she learn? Some summer camp. You have to be rich from the start to get the full benefits. Cindy says, "Now Harry, you take over. It's simple. That little strip of cloth at the top of the mast is called a telltale. It tells what direction the wind is coming from. Also, look at the waves. You want to keep the sail at an angle to the wind. What you don't want is to see the front edge of the sail flapping. That's called luffing. It means you're headed directly into the wind, and then you must head off. You push the tiller away from you, away from the sail. You'll feel it, I promise. The tension between the tiller and the line – it's like a scissors, sort of. It's fun. Come on, Harry, nothing can happen. Change places with me." They manage the maneuver, while the boat swings like a hammock beneath their bulks. A little cloud covers the sun, dyeing the water dark, then releasing it back into sunshine with a pang. Harry takes hold of the tiller and gropes until the wind takes hold with him. Then, as she says, it's fun: the sail and tiller tugging, the invisible sea breeze pushing, the distances not nearly so great and hopeless once you have control. "You're doing fine," Cindy tells him, and from the way she sits with legs crossed facing ahead he can see the underside of all five toes of one bare foot, the thin blue skin here wrinkled, the littlest dear toe bent into the toe next to it as if trying to hide. She trusts him. She loves him. Now that he has the hang of it he dares to heel, pulling the mainsheet tighter and tighter, so the waves spank and his palm burns. The land is leaping closer, they are almost safe when, in adjusting his aim toward the spot on the beach where Janice and Ronnie have already dragged their Sunfish up, he lets out the sail a touch and the wind catches it full from behind; the prow goes under abruptly in a furious surging film; heavily the whole shell slews around and tips; he and Cindy have no choice but to slide off together, entangled with line. A veined translucence closes over his head. Air he thinks wildly and comes up in sudden shade, the boat looming on edge above them. Cindy is beside him in the water. Gasping, wanting to apologize, he clings briefly to her. She feels like a shark, slimy and abrasive. Their two foam-rubber belts bump underwater. Each hair in her eyebrows gleams in the strange light here, amid shadowed waves and the silence of stilled wind, only a gentle slipslap against the hollow hull. With a grimace she pushes him off, takes a deep breath, and disappears beneath the boat. He tries to follow but his belt roughly buoys him back. He hears her grunting and splashing on the other side of the upright keel, first pulling at, then standing on the centerboard until the Sunfish comes upright, great pearls of water exploding from it as the striped sail sweeps past the sun. Harry heaves himself on and deftly she takes the boat in to shore.

The episode is inglorious, but they all laugh about it on the beach, and in his self-forgiving mind their underwater embrace has rapidly dried to something tender and promising. The slither of two skins, her legs fluttering between his. The few black hairs where her eyebrows almost meet. The hairs of her crotch she boldly displayed sitting yoga-style. It all adds up.

Lunch at the resort is served by the pool or brought by tray to the beach, but dinner is a formal affair within a vast pavilion whose rafters drip feathery fronds yards long and at whose rear, beside the doors leading into the kitchen, a great open barbecue pit sends flames roaring high, so that shadows twitch against the background design of thatch and carved masks, and highlights spark in the sweating black faces of the assistant chefs. The head chef is a scrawny Belgian always seen sitting at the bar between meals, looking sick, or else conferring in accents of grievance with one of the prim educated native women who run the front desk. Monday night is the barbecue buffet, with a calypso singer during the meal and dancing to electrified marimbas afterward; but all six of the holidayers from Diamond County agree they are exhausted from the night at the casino and will go to bed early. Harry after nearly drowning in Cindy's arms fell asleep on the beach and then went inside for a nap. While he was sleeping, a sudden sharp tropical rainstorm drummed for ten minutes on his tin roof. When he awoke, the rain had passed, and the sun was setting in a band of orange at the mouth of the bay, and his pals had been yukking it up in the bar ever since the shower an hour ago. Something is cooking. They seem, the three women, very soft-faced by the light of the candle set on the table in a little red netted hurricane lamp, amid papery flowers that will be wilted before the meal is over. They keep touching one another, their sisterhood strengthened and excited down here. Cindy is wearing a yellow hibiscus in her hair tonight, and that Arab thing, unbuttoned halfway down. She more than once reaches past Webb's drink and stringy brown hands as they pose on the tablecloth to touch Janice on a wrist, remembering "that fresh colored boy behind the bar today, I told him I was down here with my husband and he shrugged like it made no difference whatsoever!" Webb looks sage, letting the currents pass around him, and Ronnie sleepy and puffy but still full of beans, in that grim play-maker way of his. Harry and Ronnie were on the Mt. Judge basketball varsity together and more than once Rabbit had to suppress a sensation that though he was the star the coach, Marty Tothero, liked Ronnie better, because he never quit trying and was more "physical" around the backboards. The world runs on push. Rabbit's feeling about things has been that if it doesn't happen by itself it's not worth making happen. Still, that Cindy. A man could kill for a piece of that. Pump it in, and die like a male spider. The calypso singer comes to their table and sings a long dirty song about the Big Bamboo. Harry doesn't understand all the allusions but the wives titter after every verse. The singer smiles and the song smiles but his bloody eyes glitter like those of a lizard frozen on the wall and his skull when bent over the guitar shows gray wool. An old act. A dying art. Harry doesn't know if they are supposed to tip him or just applaud. They applaud and quick as a lizard's tongue his hand flickers out to take the bill that Webb, leaning back, has offered. The old singer moves on to the next table and begins that one about Back to back, and Belly to belly. Cindy giggles, touches Janice on the forearm, and says, "I bet all the people back in Brewer will think we've swapped down here."

"Maybe we should then," Ronnie says, unable to suppress a belch of fatigue.

Janice, in that throaty mature woman's voice cigarettes and age have given her but that Harry is always surprised to hear she has, asks Webb, who sits beside her, gently, "How do you feel about that sort of thing, Webb?"

The old fox knows he has the treasure to barter and takes his time, pulling himself up in his chair to release an edge of coat he's sitting on, a kind ofdark blue captain's jacket with spoked brass buttons, and takes his pack of Marlboro Lights from his side pocket. Rabbit's heart races so hard he stares down at the table, where the bloody bones, ribs and vertebrae, of their barbecue wait to be cleared away. Webb drawls, "Well, after two marriages that I'd guess you'd have to say were not fully successful, and some of the things I've seen and done before, after, and between, I must admit a little sharing among friends doesn't seem to me so bad, ifit's done with affection and respect. Respect is the key term here. Every party involved, and I mean every party, has to be willing, and it should be clearly understood that whatever happens will go no further than that particular occasion. Secret affairs, that's what does a marriage in. When people get romantic."

Nothing romantic about him, the king of the Polaroid pricks. Harry's face feels hot. Maybe it's the spices in the barbecue settling, or the length of Webb's sermon, or a blush of gratitude to the Murketts, for arranging all this. He imagines his face between Cindy's thighs, tries to picture that black pussy like a curved snug mass of eyebrow hairs, flattened and warmed to fragrance from being in underpants and framed by the white margins the bikini bottom had to cover to be decent. He will follow her slit down with his tongue, her legs parting with that same weightless slither he felt under water today, down and in, and around the comer next to his nose will be that whole great sweet ass he has a thousand times watched jiggle as she dried herself from swimming in the pool at the Flying Eagle, under the nappy green shadow of Mt. Pemaquid. And her tits, the fall of them forward when she obediently bends over. Something is happening in his pants, like the stamen of one of these floppy flowers on the tablecloth jerking with shadow as the candle-flame flickers.

"Down the way," the singer sings at yet another table, "where the nights are gay, and the sun shines daily on the moun-tain-top." Black hands come and smoothly clear away the dark bones and distribute dessert menus. There is a walnut cake they offer here that Harry especially likes, though there's nothing especially Caribbean about it, it's probably flown in from Fort Lauderdale.

Thelma, who is wearing a sort of filmy top you can see her cocoa-colored bra through, is gazing into middle distance like a schoolteacher talking above the heads of her class and saying, "… simple female curiosity. It's something you hardly ever see discussed in all these articles on female sexuality, but I think it's what's behind these male strippers rather than any real desire on the part of the women to go to bed with the boys. They're just curious about the penises, what they look like. They do look a lot different from each other, I guess."

"That how you feel?" Harry asks Janice. "Curious?"

She lowers her eyes to the guttering hurricane lamp. She murmurs, "Of course."

"Oh I'm not," Cindy says, "not the shape. I don't think I am. I really am not."

"You're very young," Thelma says.

"I'm thirty," she protests. "Isn't that supposed to be my sexual prime?"

As if rejoining her in the water, Harry tries to take her side. "They're ugly as hell. Most of the pricks I've seen are."

"You don't see them erect," Thelma lightly points out.

"Thank God for that," he says, appalled, as he sometimes is, by this coarse crowd he's in – by human coarseness in general.

"And yet he loves his own," Janice says, keeping that light and cool and as it were scientific tone that has descended upon them, in the hushed dining pavilion. The singer has ceased. People at other tables are leaving, moving to the smaller tables at the edge of the dance floor by the pool.

"I don't love it," he protests in a whisper. "I'm stuck with it."

"It's you," Cindy quietly tells him.

"Not just the pricks," Thelma clarifies, "it has to be the whole man who turns you on. The way he carries himself. His voice, the way he laughs. But it all refers to that, I guess."

Pricks. Can it be? They let the delicate subject rest, as dessert and coffee come. Revitalized by food and their talk, they decide after all to sit with Stingers and watch the dancing a while, under the stars that on this night seem to Harry jewels of a clock that moves with maddening slowness, measuring out the minutes until he sinks himself in Cindy as if a star were to fall and sizzle into this Olympic-sized pool. Once, on some far lost summer field of childhood, someone, his mother it must have been though he cannot hear her voice, told him that if you stare up at the night sky while you count to one hundred you are bound to see a shooting star, they are in fact so common. But though he now leans back from the Stinger and the glass table and the consolatory, conspiratory murmur of his friends until his neck begins to ache, all the stars above him hang unbudging in their sockets. Webb Murkett's gravelly voice growls, "Well, kiddies. As the oldest person here, I claim the privilege of announcing that I'm tired and want to go to bed." And as Harry turns his face from the heavens there it is, in a comer of his vision, vivid and brief as a scratched match, a falling star, doused in the ocean of ink. The women rise and gather their skirts about them; the marimbas, after a consultation of fluttering, fading notes, break into "Send in the Clowns." This plaintive pealing is lost behind them as they move along the pool, and past the front desk where the haggard, alcoholic resort manager is trying to get through long-distance to New York, and across the hotel's traffic circle with its curbs of whitewashed coral, down into the shadowy realm of concrete paths between bushes of sleeping flowers. The palms above them grow noisy as the music fades. The shoosh of surf draws nearer. At the moonlit point where the paths diverge into three, goodnights are nervously exchanged but no one moves; then a woman's hand reaches out softly and takes the wrist of a man not her husband. The others follow suit, with no person looking at another, a downcast and wordless tugging serving to separate the partners out and to draw them down the respective paths to each woman's bungalow. Harry hears Cindy giggle, at a distance, for it is not her hand with such gentle determination pulling him along, but Thelma's.

She has felt him pull back, and tightens her grip, silently. On the beach, he sees, a group has brought down a hurricane lamp, with their drinks; the lamp and their cigarettes glow red in the shadows, while the sea beyond stretches pale as milk beyond the black silhouette of a big sailboat anchored in the bay, under the half-moon tilted onto its back. Thelma lets go of his arm to fish in her sequinned purse for the bungalow key. "You can have Cindy tomorrow night," she whispers. "We discussed it."

"O.K., great," he says lamely, he hopes not insultingly. He is figuring, this means that Cindy wanted that pig Harrison, and Janice got Webb. He had been figuring Janice would have to take Ronnie, and felt song for her, except from the look of him he'd fall asleep soon, and Webb and Thelma would go together, both of them yellowy stringy types. Thelma closes the bungalow door behind them and switches on a straw globe light above the bed. He asks her, "Well, are tonight's men the first choice for you ladies or're you just getting the second choice out of the way?"

"Don't be so competitive, Harry. This is meant to be a loving sharing sort of thing, you heard Webb. One thing we absolutely agreed on, we're not going to carry any of it back to Brewer. This is all the monkey business there's going to be, even if it kills us." She stands there in the center of her straw rug rather defiantly, a thin-faced sallow woman he scarcely knows. Not only her nose is pink in the wake of her sunburn but patches below her eyes as well: a kind of butterfly is on her face. Harry supposes he should kiss her, but his forward step is balked by her continuing firmly, "l'll tell you one thing though, Harry Angstrom. You're my first choice."

"I am?"

"Of course. I adore you. Adore you."

"Me?"

"Haven't you ever sensed it?"

Rather than admit he hasn't, he hangs there foolishly.

"Shit," Thelma says. "Janice did. Why else do you think we weren't invited to Nelson's wedding?" She turns her back, and starts undoing her earring before the mirror, that just like the one in his and Janice's bungalow is framed in woven strips of bamboo. The batik hanging in here is of a tropical sunset with a palm in the foreground instead of the black-mammy fruit-seller he and Janice have, but the batik manufacturer is the same. The suitcases are the Harrisons', and the clothes hanging on the painted pipe that does for a closet. Thelma asks, "You mind using Ronnie's toothbrush? I'll be a while in there, you better take the bathroom first."

In the bathroom Harry sees that Ronnie uses shaving cream, Gillette Foamy, out of a pressure can, the kind that's eating up the ozone so our children will fry. And that new kind of razor with the narrow single-edge blade that snaps in and out with a click on the television commercials. Harry can't see the point, it's just more waste, he still uses a rusty old two-edge safety razor he bought for $1.99 about seven years ago, and lathers himself with an old imitation badger-bristle on whatever bar of soap is handy. He shaved before dinner after his nap so no need now. Also the Harrisons use chlorophyll Crest in one of those giant tubes that always buckles and springs a leak when he and Janice try to save a couple pennies and buy one. He wonders whatever happened to Ipana and what was it Consumer Reports had to say about toothpastes a few issues back, probably came out in favor of baking soda, that's what he and Mim used to have to use, some theory Mom had about the artificial flavoring in toothpaste contributing to tartar. The trouble with consumerism is, the guy next door always seems to be doing better at it than you are. Just the Harrisons' bathroom supplies make him envious. Plain as she is, Thelma carries a hefty medicine kit, and beauty aids, plus a sun block called Eclipse, and Solarcaine. Vaseline, too, for some reason. Tampax, in a bigger box than Janice ever buys. And a lot of painkiller, aspirin in several shapes and Darvon and more pills in little prescription bottles than he would have expected. People are always a little sicker than you know. Harry debates whether he should take his leak sitting down to spare Thelma the sound of its gross splashing and rejects the idea, since she's the one wants to fuck him. It streams noisily into the bowl it seems forever, embarrassingly, all those drinks at dinner. Then he sits down on the seat anyway, to let out a little air. Too much shellfish. He imagines he can smell yesterday's crabmeat and when he stands he tests with a finger down there to see if he stinks. He decides he does. Better use a washcloth. He debates which washcloth is Ronnie's, the blue or the brown. He settles on the brown and scrubs all his undercarriage, everything that counts. Getting ready for the ball. He erases his scent by giving the cloth a good rinsing no matter whose it is.

When he steps back into the room Thehna is down to her underwear, cocoa bra and black panties. He didn't expect this, nor to be so stirred by it. Breasts are strange: some look bigger in clothes than they are and some look smaller. Thehna's are the second kind; her bra is smartly filled. Her whole body, into her forties, has kept that trim neutral serviceability nurses and gradeschool teachers surprise you with, beneath their straight faces. She laughs, and holds out her arms like a fan dancer. "Here I am. You look shocked. You're such a sweet prude, Harry – that's one of the things I adore. I'll be out in five minutes. Try not to fall asleep."

Clever of her. What with the sleep debt they're all running down here and the constant booze and the trauma in the water today – his head went under and a bottomless bile-green volume sucked at his legs – he was weary. He begins to undress and doesn't know where to stop. There are a lot of details a husband and wife work out over the years that with a strange woman pop up all over again. Would Thelma like to find him naked in the bed? Or on it? For him to be less naked than she when she comes out of the bathroom would be rude. At the same time, with this strawshaded light swaying above the bed on so bright, he doesn't want her to think seeing him lying there on display that he thinks he's a Playgirl centerfold. He knows he could lose thirty pounds and still have a gut. In his underpants he crosses to the bambootrimmed bureau in the room and switches on the lamp there whose cheap wooden base is encrusted with baby seashells glued on. He takes off his underpants. The elastic waistband has lost its snap, the only brand of this type to buy is jockey, but those cutrate stores in Brewer don't like to carry it, quality is being driven out everywhere. He switches off the light over the bed and in shadow stretches himself out, all of him, on top of the bedspread, as he is, as he was, as he will be before the undertakers dress him for the last time, not even a wedding ring to relieve his nakedness; when he and Janice got married men weren't expected to wear wedding rings. He closes his eyes to rest them for a second in the red blankness there, beneath his lids. He has to get through this, maybe all she wants to do is talk, and then somehow be really rested for tomorrow night. Getting there… That slither underwater…

Thelma with what breaks upon him like the clatter of an earthquake has come out of the bathroom. She is holding her underclothes in front of her, and with her back to him she sorts the underpants into the dirty pile the Harrisons keep beside the bureau, behind the straw wastebasket, and the bra, clean enough, back into the drawer, folded. This is the second time in this trip, he thinks drowsily, that he has seen her ass. Her body as she turns eclipses the bureau lamp and the front of her gathers shadow to itself, she advances timidly, as if wading into water. Her breasts sway forward as she bends to turn the light he switched off back on. She sits down on the edge of the bed.

His prick is still sleepy. She takes it into her hand. "You're not circumcised."

"No, they somehow weren't doing it at the hospital that day. Or maybe my mother had a theory, I don't know. I never asked. Sorry."

"It's lovely. Like a little bonnet." Sitting on the edge of the bed, more supple naked than he remembers her seeming with clothes on, Thelma bends and takes his prick in her mouth. Her body in the lamplight is a pale patchwork of faint tan and peeling pink and the natural yellowy tint of her skin. Her belly puckers into flat folds like stacked newspapers and the back of her hand as it holds the base of his prick with two fingers shows a dim lightning of blue veins. But her breath is warm and wet and the way that in lamplight individual white hairs snake as if singed through the mass of dull brown makes him want to reach out and stroke her head, or touch the rhythmic hollow in her jaw. He fears, though, interrupting the sensations she is giving him. She lifts a hand quickly to tuck back a piece of her hair, as if to let him better see.

He murmurs, "Beautiful." He is growing thick and long but still she forces her lips each time down to her fingers as they encircle him at his base. To give herself ease she spreads her legs; between her legs, one of them lying aslant across the bed edge, he sees emerging from a pubic bush more delicate and reddish than he would have dreamed a short white string. Unlike Janice's or Cindy's as he imagined it, Thelma's pussy is not opaque; it is a fuzz transparent upon the bruise-colored labia that with their tongue of white string look so lacking and defenseless Harry could cry. She too is near tears, perhaps from the effort of not gagging. She backs off and stares at the staring eye of his glans, swollen free of his foreskin. She pulls up the bonnet again and says crooningly, teasingly, "Such a serious little face." She kisses it lightly, once, twice, flicking her tongue, then bobs again, until it seems she must come up for air. "God," she sighs. "I've wanted to do that for so long. Come. Come, Harry. Come in my mouth. Come in my mouth and all over my face." Her voice sounds husky and mad saying this and all through her words Thelma does not stop gazing at the little slit of his where a single cloudy tear has now appeared. She licks it off.

"Have you really," he asks timidly, "liked me for a while?"

"Years," she says. "Years. And you never noticed. You shit. Always under Janice's thumb and mooning after silly Cindy. Well you know where Cindy is now. She's being screwed by my husband. He didn't want to, he said he'd rather go to bed with me." She snorts, in some grief of self-disgust, and plunges her mouth down again, and in the pinchy rush of sensation as he feels forced against the opening of her throat he wonders if he should accept her invitation.

"Wait," Harry says. "Shouldn't I do something for you first? If I come, it's all over."

"If you come, then you come again."

"Not at my age. I don't think."

"Your age. Always talking about your age." Thelma rests her face on his belly and gazes up at him, for the first time playful, her eyes at right angles to his disconcertingly. He has never noticed their color before: that indeterminate color called hazel but in the strong light overhead, and brightened by all her deep-throating, given a tawny pallor, an unthinking animal translucence. "I'm too excited to come," she tells him. "Anyway, Harry, I'm having my period and they're really bloody, every other month. I'm scared to find out why. In the months in between, these terrible cramps and hardly any show."

"See a doctor," he suggests.

"I see doctors all the time, they're useless. I'm dying, you know that, don't you?"

"Dying?"

"Well, maybe that's too dramatic a way of putting it. Nobody knows how long it'll take, and a lot of it depends upon me. The one thing I'm absolutely supposed not to do is go out in the sun. I was crazy to come down here, Ronnie tried to talk me out of it."

"Why did you?"

"Guess. I tell you, I'm crazy, Harry. I got to get you out of my system." And it seems she might make that sob of disgusted grief again, but she has reared up her head to look at his prick. All this talk of death has put it half to sleep again.

"This is this lupus?" he asks.

"Mmm," Thelma says. "Look. See the rash?" She pulls back her hair on both sides. "Isn't it pretty? That's from being so stupid in the sun Friday. I just wanted so badly to be like the rest of you, not to be an invalid. It was terrible Saturday. Your joints ache, your insides don't work. Ronnie offered to take me home for a shot of cortisone."

"He's very nice to you."

"He loves me."

His prick has stiffened again and she bends to it. "Thelma." He has not used her name before, this night. "Let me do something to you. I mean, equal rights and all that."

"You're not going down into all that blood."

"Let me suck these sweet things then." Her nipples are not bumply like Janice's but perfect as a baby's thumb-tips. Since it is his treat now he feels free to reach up and switch off the light over the bed. In the dark her rashes disappear and he can see her smile as she arranges herself to be served. She sits cross-legged, like Cindy did on the boat, women the flexible sex, and puts a pillow in her lap for his head. She puts a finger in his mouth and plays with her nipple and his tongue together. There is a tremble running through her like a radio not quite turned off. His hand finds her ass, its warm dents; there is a kind of glassy texture to Thelma's skin where Janice's has a touch of fine, fine sandpaper. His prick, lightly teased by her fingernails, has come back nicely. "Harry." Her voice presses into his ear. "I want to do something for you so you won't forget me, something you've never had with anybody else. I suppose other women have sucked you off?"

He shakes his head yes, which tugs the flesh of her breast.

"How many have you fucked up the ass?"

He lets her nipple slip from his mouth. "None. Never."

"You and Janice?"

"Oh God no. It never occurred to us."

"Harry. You're not fooling me?"

How dear that was, her old-fashioned "fooling." From talking to all those third-graders. "No, honestly. I thought only queers… Do you and Ronnie?"

"All the time. Well, a lot of the time. He loves it."

"And you?"

"It has its charms."

"Doesn't it hurt? I mean, he's big."

"At first. You use Vaseline. I'll get ours."

"Thelma, wait. Am I up to this?"

She laughs a syllable. "You're up." She slides away into the bathroom and while she is gone he stays enormous. She returns and anoints him thoroughly, with an icy expert touch. Harry shudders. Thelma lies down beside him with her back turned, curls forward as if to be shot from a cannon, and reaches behind to guide him. "Gently."

It seems it won't go, but suddenly it does. The medicinal odor of displaced Vaseline reaches his nostrils. The grip is tight at the base but beyond, where a cunt is all velvety suction and caress, there is no sensation: a void, a pure black box, a casket of perfect nothingness. He is in that void, past her tight ring of muscle. He asks, "May I come?"

"Please do." Her voice sounds faint and broken. Her spine and shoulder blades are taut.

It takes only a few thrusts, while he rubs her scalp with one hand and clamps her hip steady with the other. Where will his come go? Nowhere but mix with her shit. With sweet Thelma's sweet shit. They lie wordless and still together until his prick's slow shrivelling withdraws it. "O.K.," he says. "Thank you. That I won't forget."

"Promise?"

"I feel embarrassed. What does it do for you?"

"Makes me feel full of you. Makes me feel fucked up the ass. By lovely Harry Angstrom."

"Thelma," he admits, "I can't believe you're so fond of me. What have I done to deserve it?"

"Just existed. Just shed your light. Haven't you ever noticed, at parties or at the club, how I'm always at your side?"

"Well, not really. There aren't that many sides. I mean, we see you and Ronnie -"

"Janice and Cindy noticed. They knew you were who I'd want."

"Uh – not to, you know, milk this, but what is it about me that turns you on?"

"Oh darling. Everything. Your height and the way you move, as if you're still a skinny twenty-five. The way you never sit down anywhere without making sure there's a way out. Your little provisional smile, like a little boy at some party where the bullies might get him the next minute. Your good humor. You believe in people so – Webb, you hang on his words where nobody else pays 'any attention, and Janice, you're so proud of her it's pathetic. It's not as if she can do anything. Even her tennis, Doris Kaufmann was telling us, really -'

"Well it's nice to see her have fun at something, she's had a kind of dreary life."

"See? You're just terribly generous. You're so grateful to be anywhere, you think that tacky club and that hideous house of Cindy's are heaven. It's wonderful. You're so glad to be alive."

"Well, I mean, considering the alternative

"It kills me. I love you so much for it. And your hands. I've always loved your hands." Having sat up on the edge of the bed, she takes his left hand, lying idle, and kisses the big white moons of each fingernail. "And now your prick, with its little bonnet. Oh Harry I don't care if this kills me, coming down here, tonight is worth it."

That void, inside her. He can't take his mind from what he's discovered, that nothingness seen by his single eye. In the shadows, while humid blue moonlight and the rustle of palms seep through the louvers by the bed, he trusts himself to her as if speaking in prayer, talks to her about himself as he has talked to none other: about Nelson and the grudge he bears the kid and the grudge the boy bears him, and about his daughter, the daughter he thinks he has, grown and ignorant of him. He dares confide to Thelma, because she has let him fuck her up the ass in proof of love, his sense of miracle at being himself, himself instead of somebody else, and his old inkling, now fading in the energy crunch, that there was something that wanted him to find it, that he was here on earth on a kind of assignment.

"How lovely to think that," Thelma says. "It makes you" – the word is hard for her to find – "radiant. And sad." She gives him advice on some points. She thinks he should seek out Ruth and ask her point-blank if that is his daughter, and if so is there anything he can do to help? On the subject of Nelson, she thinks the child's problem may be an extension of Harry's; if he himself did not feel guilty about Jill's death and before that Rebecca's, he would feel less threatened by Nelson and more comfortable and kindly with him. "Remember," she says, "he's just a young man like you once were, looking for his path."

"But he's not like me!" Harry protests, having come at last into a presence where the full horror of this truth, the great falling-off, will be understood. "He's a goddam little Springer, through and through."

Thelma thinks he's more like Harry than he knows. Wanting to learn to hang glide – didn't he recognize himself in that? And the thing with two girls at once. Wasn't he, possibly, a bit jealous of Nelson?

"But I never had the impulse to screw Melanie," he confesses. "Or Pru either, much. They're both out of this world, somehow."

Of course, Thelma says. "You shouldn't want to fuck them. They're your daughters. Or Cindy either. You should want to fuck me. I'm your generation, Harry. I can see you. To those girls you're just an empty heap of years and money."

And, as they drift in talk away from the constellations of his life, she describes her marriage with Ronnie, his insecurities and worries beneath that braggart manner that she knows annoys Harry. "He was never a star like you, he never had that for a moment." She met him fairly well along in her twenties, when she was wondering if she'd die a spinster schoolteacher. Being old as she was, with some experience of men, and with a certain gift for letting go, she was amused by the things he thought of. For their honeymoon breakfast he jerked off into the scrambled eggs and they ate his fried jism with the rest. Ifyou go along with everything on that side of Ronnie, he's wonderfully loyal, and docile, you could say. He has no interest in other women, she knows this for a fact, a curious fact even, given the nature of men. He's been a perfect father. When he was lower down on the totem pole at Schuylkill Mutual, he lost twenty pounds, staying awake nights worrying. Only in these last few years has the weight come back. When the first diagnosis of her lupus came through, he took it worse than she did, in a way. "For a woman past forty, Harry, when you've had children … If some Nazi or somebody came to me and they'd take either me or little Georgie, say – he's the one that's needed most help, so he comes to mind – it wouldn't be a hard choice. For Ronnie I think it might be. To lose me. He thinks what I do for him not every woman would. I suspect he's wrong but there it is." And she admits she likes his cock. But what Harry might not appreciate, being a man, is that a big one like Ronnie's doesn't change size that much when it's hard, just the angle changes. It doesn't go from being a little bonneted sleeping baby to a tall fierce soldier like this. She has worked him up again, idly toying as she talks, while the night outside their louvered window has grown utterly still, the last drunken shout and snatch of music long died, nothing astir but the incessant sighing of the sea and the piping of some high-pitched cricket they have down here. Courteously he offers to fuck her through her blood, and she refuses with an almost virginal fright, so that he wonders if on the excuse of her flow she is not holding this part of herself back from him, aloof from her love and shamelessness, pure for her marriage. She has explained, "When I realized I was falling in love with you, I was so mad at myself, I mean it couldn't contribute to anything. But then I came to see that something must be missing between me and Ronnie, or maybe in any life, so I tried to accept it, and even quietly enjoy it, just watching you. My little hairshirt." He has not kissed her yet on the mouth, but now having guessed at her guilty withholding of herself from being simply fucked he does. Guilt he can relate to. Her lips feel cool and dry, considering. Since she will not admit him to her cunt, as compromise he masturbates her while sitting on her face, glad he thought of washing where he did. Her tongue probes there and her fingers, as cool on top of his as if still filmed with Vaseline, guide his own as they find and then lose and find again the hooded little center that is her. She comes with a smothered cry and arches her back so this darkness at the center of her pale and smooth and unfamiliar form rises hungrily under his eyes, a cloud with a mouth, a fish lunging upwards out of water. Getting her breath, she returns the kindness and with him watches the white liquid lift and collapse in glutinous strings across her hand. She rubs his jism on her face, where it shines like sun lotion. The stillness outside is beginning to brighten, each leaf sharp in the soft air. Drunk on fatigue and selfexposure, he begs her to tell him something that he can do to her that Ronnie has never done. She gets into the bathtub and has him urinate on her. "It's hot!" she exclaims, her sallow skin drummed upon in designs such as men and boys drill in the snow. They reverse the experience, Thelma awkwardly straddling, and having to laugh at her own impotence, looking for the right release in the maze of her womanly insides. Above him as he waits her bush has a masculine jut, but when her stream comes, it dribbles sideways; women cannot aim, he sees. And her claim of heat seems to him exaggerated; it is more like coffee or tea one lets cool too long at the edge of the desk and then must drink in a few gulps, this side of tepid. Having tried together to shower the ammoniac scent of urine off their skins, Thelma and Harry fall asleep among the stripes of dawn now welling through the louvers, they sleep as if not a few more stolen hours but an entire married life of sanctioned intimacy stretches unto death before them.

A savage rattling at the door. "Thelma. Harry. It's us." Thelma puts on a robe to answer the knocking while Rabbit hides beneath the sheet and peeks. Webb and Ronnie stand there in the incandescence of another day. Webb is resplendent in grape-colored alligator shirt and powder-blue plaid golf pants. Ronnie wears last night's dinner clothes and needs to get inside. Thelma shuts the door and hides in the bathroom while Harry dresses in last night's rumpled suit, not bothering to knot the necktie. He still smells of urine, he thinks. He runs to his own bungalow to change into a golf outfit. Black girls, humming, pursued by yellow birds, are carrying tinkling breakfast trays along the cement paths. Janice is in the bathroom, running a tub.

He shouts out, "You O.K.?"

She shouts back, "As O.K. as you are," and doesn't emerge.

On the way out, Harry stuffs an unbuttered croissant and some scalding sips of coffee into his mouth. The papery orange and magenta flowers beside the door hurt his head. Webb and Ronnie are waiting for him where the green cement paths meet. Among the three men, as they push through their golf, there is much banter and good humor, but little eye-contact. When they return from the course around one o'clock, Janice is sitting by the Olympic pool in the same off-white linen suit she wore down in the airplane. Linen wrinkles terribly. "Harry, Mother phoned. We have to go back."

"You're kidding. Why?" He is groggy, and had pictured a long afternoon nap, to be in shape for tonight. Also his foreskin was tender after last night's workout and slightly chafed every time he swung, thinking of Cindy, hoping her vagina would be nonfrictional. His golf, threaded through vivid after-images of Thelma's underside and a ticklish awareness of his two businesslike partners as silently freighted with mental pictures of their own, was mysteriously good, his swing as it were emptied of impurities, until fatigue caught him on the fifteenth hole with three balls sliced along the identical skyey groove into the lost-ball terrain of cactus and coral and scrub growth. "What's happened? The baby?"

"No," Janice says, and by the easy way she cries he knows she's been crying off and on all morning, here in the sun. "It's Nelson. He's run off."

"He has? I better sit down." To the black waiter who comes to their glass table under its ftinged umbrella he says, "Piña colada, Jeff. Better make that two. Janice?" She blearily nods, though there is an empty glass already before her. Harry looks around at the faces of their friends. "Jeff, maybe you should make that six." He has come to know the ropes in this place. The other people sitting around the pool look pale, newly pulled from the airplane.

Cindy has just come out of the pool, her shoulders blue-black, the diaper-shape ofher bikini bottom wetly adhering. She tugs the cloth to cover the pale margin of skin above, below. She is getting fatter, day by day. Better hurry, he tells himself. But it is too late. Her face when she turns, towelling her back with a contortion that nearly pops one tit out of its triangular sling, is solemn. She and Thelma have heard Janice's story already. Thelma is sitting at the table in that ankle-length wrapper, the same dustypink as her nose, that she bought down here along with the wide straw hat. The big brown sunglasses she brought from home, tinted darker at the top, render her expressionless. Harry takes the chair at the table next to her. His knee accidentally touches one of hers; she pulls it away at once.

Janice is telling him, through tears, "He and Pru had a fight Saturday night, he wanted to go into Brewer for a party with that Slim person and Pru said she was too pregnant and couldn't face those stairs again, and he went by himself." She swallows. "And he didn't come back." Her voice is all roughened from swallowing the saltwater of the tears. With scrapings that hurt Harry's head Webb and Ronnie pull chairs to their table in its tight circle of shade: When Jeff brings their round of drinks Janice halts her terrible tale and Ronnie negotiates for lunch menus. He, like his wife, wears sunglasses. Webb wears none, trusting to his bushy brows and the crinkles of his flinty eyes, which gaze at Janice like those of some encouraging old fart of a father.

Her cheeks are drenched with the slime of distress and Harry has to love her for her ugliness. "I told you the kid was a rat," he tells her. He feels vindicated. And relieved, actually.

"He didn't come back," Janice all but cries, looking only at him, not at Webb, with that smeared lost balked expression he remembers so well from their earliest days, before she got cocky. "But Mother didn't want to b-bother us on our vacation and P-Pru thought he just needed to blow off steam and pretended not to be worried. But Sunday after going to church with Mother she called this Slim and Nelson had never showed up!"

"Did he have a car?" Harry asks.

"Your Corona."

"Oh boy."

"I think just scrambled eggs for me," Ronnie tells the waitress who has come. "Loose. You understand? Not too well done."

This time Rabbit deliberately seeks to touch Thelma's knee with his under the table but her knee is not there for him. Like Janice down here she has become a piece of static. The waitress is at his shoulder and he is wondering if he might dare another crabmeat-salad sandwich or should play it safe with a BLT. Janice's face, which the movement of the sun overhead is hoisting out of shadow, goes wide in eyes and mouth as she might shriek. "Harry you can't have lunch, you must get dressed and out of here! I packed for you, everything but the gray suit. The woman at the front desk was on the phone for me nearly an hour, trying to get us back to Philadelphia but it's impossible this time ofyear. There's not even anything to New York. She got us two seats on a little plane to San Juan and a room at the hotel airport so we can get a flight to the mainland first thing in the morning. Atlanta and then Philadelphia."

"Why not just use our regular reservations Thursday? What good's an extra day going to do?"

"I cancelled them. Harry, you didn't talk to Mother. She's wild, I've never heard her like this, you know how she always makes sense. I called back to tell her the plane on Wednesday and she didn't think she could drive the Philadelphia traffic to meet us, she burst into tears and said she was too old."

"Cancelled." It is sinking in. "You mean we can't stay here tonight because of something Nelson has done?"

"Finish your story, Jan," Webb urges. Jan, is it now? Harry suddenly hates people who seem to know; they would keep us blind to the fact that there is nothing to know. We are each of us filled with a perfect blackness.

Janice gulps again, and snufes, calmed by Webb's voice. "There's nothing to finish. He didn't come back Sunday or Monday and none of these friends they have in Brewer had seen him and Mother finally couldn't stand it anymore and called this morning, even though Pru kept telling her not to bother us, it was her husband and she took the responsibility."

"Poor kid. Like you said, she thought she could work miracles." He tells her, "I don't want to leave before tonight."

"Stay here then," Janice says. "I'm going."

Harry looks over at Webb for some kind of help, and gets instead a sage and useless not-my-funeral grimace. He looks at Cindy but she is gazing down into her piña colada, her eyelashes in sharp focus. "I still don't understand the rush," he says. "Nobody's died."

"Not yet," Janice says. "Is that what you need?"

A rope inside his chest twists to make a kink. "Son of a fucking bitch," he says, and stands, bumping his head on the fringed edge of the umbrella. "When'd you say this plane to San Juan is?"

Janice snuffles, guilty now. "Not until three."

"O.K." He sighs. In a way this is a relief. "I'll go change and bring the suitcases. Could one of you guys at least order me a hamburger? Cindy. Thel. See you around." The two ladies let themselves be kissed, Thelma primly on the lips, Cindy on her apple-firm cheek, toasty from the sun.

Throughout their twenty-four-hour trip home Janice keeps crying. The taxi ride past the old sugar mills, through the goat herds and the straggling black towns and the air that seems to be blowing them kisses; the forty-minute hop in a swaying two-engine prop plane to Puerto Rico, over mild green water beneath whose sparkling film lurk buried reefs and schools of sharks; the stopover in San Juan where everybody is a real spic; the long stunned night of porous sleep in a hotel very like that motel on Route 422 where Mrs. Lubell stayed so long ago; and in the morning two seats on a jet to Atlanta and then Philly: through all this Janice is beside him with her cheeks glazed, eyes staring ahead, her eyelashes tipped with tiny balls of dew. It is as if all the grief that swept through him at Nelson's wedding now at last has reached Janice's zone, and he is calm and emptied and as cold as the void suspended beneath the airplane's shuddering flight. He asks her, "Is it just Nelson?"

She shakes her head so violently the fringe of bangs bobs. "Everything," she blurts, so loud he fears the heads just glimpsable in the seats ahead might turn around.

"The swapping?" he pursues softly.

She nods, not so violently, pinching her lower lip in a kind of turtle mouth her mother sometimes makes.

"How was Webb?"

"Nice. He's always been nice to me. He respected Daddy." This sets the tears to flowing again. She takes a deep breath to steady herself. "I felt so sorry for you, having Thelma when you wanted Cindy so much." With that there is no stopping her crying.

He pats her hands, which are loosely fisted together in her lap around a damp Kleenex. "Listen, I'm sure Nelson's all right, wherever he is."

"He" – she seems to be choking, a stewardess glances down as she strides by, this is embarrassing – "hates himself, Harry."

He tries to ponder if this is true. He snickers. "Well he sure screwed me. Last night was my dream date."

Janice sniffs and rubs each nostril with the Kleenex. "Webb says she's not as wonderful as she looks. He talked a lot about his first two wives."

Beneath them, through the scratched oval of Plexiglas, there is the South, irregular fields and dry brown woods, more woods than he would have expected. Once he had dreamed of going south, of resting his harried heart amid all that cotton, and now there it is under him, like the patchwork slope of one big hill they are slowly climbing, fields and woods and cities at the bends and mouths of rivers, streets eating into green, America disgraced and barren, mourning her hostages. They are flying too high for him to spot golf courses. They play all winter down here, swinging easy. The giant motors he is riding whine. He falls asleep. The last thing he sees is Janice staring ahead, wide awake, the bulge of tears compounding the bulge of her cornea. He dreams of Pru, who buts while he is trying to manipulate her limbs, so there is too much water, he begins to panic. He is changing weight and this wakes him up. They are descending. He thinks back to his night with Thelma, and it seems in texture no different from the dream. Only Janice is real, the somehow catastrophic creases in her linen sleeve and the muddy line of her jaw, her head slumped as from a broken neck. She fell asleep, the same magazine open in her lap that she read on the way down. They are descending over Maryland and Delaware, where horses run and the du Ponts are king. Rich women with little birdy breasts and wearing tall black boots in from the hunt. Walking past the butler into long halls past marble tables they flick with their whips. Women he will never fuck. He has risen as high as he can, the possibility of such women is falling from him, falling with so many other possibilities as he descends. No snow dusts the dry earth below, rooftops and fields arid roads where cars are nosing along like windup toys in invisible grooves. Yet from within those cars they are speeding, and feel free. The river flashes its sheet of steel, the plane tilts alarmingly, the air nozzles hissing above him may be the last thing he hears, Janice is awake and bolt upright. Forgive me. Fort Mifflin hulks just under their wheels, their speed is titanic. Please, God. Janice is saying something into his ear but the thump of the wheels drowns it out. They are down, and taxiing. He gives a squeeze to Janice's damp hand, that he didn't realize he was holding. "What did you say?" he asks her.

"That I love you."

"Oh, really? Well, same here. That trip was fun. I feel satisfied."

In the long slow trundle to their gate, she asks him shyly, "Was Thelma better than me?"

He is too grateful to be down to lie. "In ways. How about Webb?"

She nods and nods, as if to spill the last tears from her eyes.

He answers for her, "The bastard was great."

She leans her head against his shoulder. "Why do you think I've been crying?"

Shocked, he admits, "I thought about Nelson."

Janice sniffs once more, so loudly that one man already on his feet, arranging a Russian-style fur cap upon his sunburned bald head, briefly stares. She concedes, "It was, mostly," and she and Harry clasp hands once more, conspirators.

At the end of miles of airport corridor Ma Springer is standing apart from the cluster of other greeters. In the futuristic perspectives of this terminal she looks shrunken and bent, wearing her second-best coat, not the mink but a black cloth trimmed with silver fox, and a little cherry-red brimless hat with folded-back net that might get by in Brewer but appears quaint here, among the cowboys and the slim kids ofindeterminate sex with their cropped hair dyed punk-style in pastel feathers and the black chicks whose hair is frizzed up in structures like three-dimensional Mickey Mouse ears. Hugging her, Rabbit feels how small the old lady, once the terror of his young manhood, has become. Her former look of having been stuffed tight with Koerner pride and potential indignation has fled, leaving her skin collapsed in random folds and bloodless. Deep liverish gouges underscore her eyes, and her wattled throat seems an atrocious wreck of flesh.

She can hardly wait to speak, backing a step away to give her voice room to make its impact. "The baby came last night. A girl, seven pounds and some. I couldn't sleep a wink, after getting her to the hospital and then waiting for the doctor to call." Her voice is shaky with blame. The airport Muzak, a tune being plucked on the strings of many coordinated violins, accompanies her announcement in such triumphant rhythm that Harry and Janice have to suppress smiles, not even daring to step closer in the jostle and shufe, the old lady is so childishly, precariously intent on the message she means to deliver. "And then all the way down on the Turnpike, trucks kept tooting their horns at me, tooting these big foghorns they have. As if there were someplace else I could go; I couldn't drive the Chrysler off the road," Bessie says. "And after Conshohocken, on the Expressway, it's really a wonder I wasn't killed. I never saw so much traffic, though I thought at noon it would be letting up, and you know the signs, they aren't at all clear even if you have good eyes. All the way along the river I kept praying to Fred and I honestly believe it was him that got me here, I couldn't have done it alone."

And, her manner plainly implies, she will never attempt anything like it again; Janice and Harry find her at the terminus of the last great effort of her life. Henceforth, she is in their hands.