“And how’s Jill?”
“Dead asleep. I looked in and said her name and she didn’t move. Dad–”
“Spit it out.”
“He gives her things.” The thought is too deep in him to get out easily; his eyes sink in after it, and his father feels him digging, shy, afraid, lacking the right words, not wanting to offend his father.
Harry prompts, “Things.”
The boy rushes into it. “She never laughs any more, or takes any interest in anything, just sits around and sleeps. Have you looked at her skin, Dad? She’s gotten so pale.”
“She’s naturally fair.”
“Yeah, I know, but it’s more than that, she looks sick. She doesn’t eat hardly anything and throws up sometimes anyway. Dad, don’t let him keep doing it to her, whatever it is. Stop him.”
“How can I?”
“You can kick him out.”
“Jill’s said she’ll go with him.”
“She won’t. She hates him too.”
“Don’t you like Skeeter?”
“Not really. I know I should. I know you do.”
“I do?” Surprised, he promises Nelson, “I’ll talk to him. But you know, people aren’t property, I can’t control what they want to do together. We can’t live Jill’s life for her.”
“We could, if you wanted to. If you cared at all.” This is as close as Nelson has come to defiance; Rabbit’s instinct is to be gentle with this sprouting, to ignore it.
He points out simply, “She’s too old to adopt. And you’re too young to marry.”
The child frowns down into the book, silent.
“Now tell me something.”
“O.K.” Nelson’s face tenses, prepared to close; he expects to be asked about Jill and sex and himself. Rabbit is glad to disappoint him, to give him a little space here.
“Two men stopped me on the way home and said kids had been looking in our windows. Have you heard anything about this?”
“Sure.”
“Sure what?”
“Sure they do.”
“Who?”
“All of them. Frankhauser, and that slob Jimmy Brumbach, Evelyn Morris and those friends of hers from Penn Park, Mark Showalter and I guess his sister Marilyn though she’s awful little –”
“When the hell do they do this?”
“Different times. When they come home from school and I’m at soccer practice, before you get home, they hang around. I guess sometimes they come back after dark.”
“They see anything?”
“I guess sometimes.”
“They talk to you about it? Do they tease you?”
“I guess. Sometimes.”
“You poor kid. What do you tell ’em?”
“I tell ’em to fuck off.”
“Hey. Watch your language.”
“That’s what I tell ’em. You asked.”
“And do you have to fight?”
“Not much. Just sometimes when they call me something.”
“What?”
“Something. Never mind, Dad.”
“Tell me what they call you.”
“Nigger Nellie.”
“Huh. Nice kids.”
“They’re just kids, Dad. They don’t mean anything. Jill says ignore them, they’re ignorant.”
“And do they kid you about Jill?”
The boy turns his face away altogether. His hair covers his neck, yet even from the back he would not be mistaken for a girl: the angles in the shoulders, the lack of brushing in the hair. The choked voice is manly: “I don’t want to talk about it anymore; Dad.”
“O.K. Thanks. Hey. I’m sorry. I’m sorry you have to live in the mess we all make.”
The choked voice exclaims, “Gee I wish Mom would come back! I know it can’t happen, but I wish it.” Nelson thumps the back of the kitchen chair and then rests his forehead where his fist struck; Rabbit ruffles his hair, helplessly, on his way past, to the refrigerator to get a beer.
* * *
The nights close in earlier now. After the six-o’clock news there is darkness. Rabbit says to Skeeter, “I met another veteran from Vietnam today.”
“Shit, the world’s filling up with Nam veterans so fast there won’t be nobody else soon, right? Never forget, got into a lighthouse up near Tuy Hoa, white walls all over, everybody been there one time or another and done their drawings. Well, what blew my mind, absolutely, was somebody, Charlie or the unfriendlies, Arvin never been near this place till we handed it to ’em, somebody on that other side had done a whole wall’s worth of Uncle Ho himself, Uncle Ho being buggered, Uncle Ho shitting skulls, Uncle Ho doing this and that, it was downright disrespectful, right? And I says to myself, those poor dinks being screwed the same as us, we is all in the grip of crazy old men thinkin’ they can still make history happen. History isn’t going to happen any more, Chuck.”
“What is going to happen?” Nelson asks.
“A bad mess,” Skeeter answers, “then, most probably, Me.”
Nelson’s eyes seek his father’s, as they do now when Skeeter’s craziness shows. “Dad, shouldn’t we wake up Jill?”
Harry is into his second beer and his first joint; his stockinged feet are up on the cobbler’s bench. “Why? Let her sleep. Don’t be so uptight.”
“No suh,” Skeeter says, “the boy has a good plan there, where is that fucking little Jill? I do feel horny.”
Nelson asks, “What’s horny?”
“Horny is what I feel,” Skeeter answers. “Babychuck, go drag down that no-good cunt. Tell her the menfolk needs their vittles.”
“Dad–”
“Come on, Nellie, quit nagging. Do what he asks. Don’t you have any homework? Do it upstairs, this is a grown-up evening.”
When Nelson is gone, Rabbit can breathe. “Skeeter, one thing I don’t understand, how do you feel about the Cong? I mean are they right, or wrong, or what?”
“Man by man, or should I say gook by gook, they are very beautiful, truly. So brave they must be tripping, and a lot of them no older than little Nellie, right? As a bunch, I never could dig what they was all about, except that we was white or black as the case may be, and they was yellow, and had got there first, right? Otherwise I can’t say they made a great deal of sense, since the people they most liked to castrate and string up and bury in ditches alive and make that kind of scene with was yellow like them, right? So I would consider them one more facet of the confusion of false prophecy by which you may recognize My coming in this the fullness of time. However. However, I confess that politics being part of this boring power thing do not much turn me on. Things human turn me on, right? You too, right, Chuck? Here she is.”
Jill has drifted in. Her skin looks tight on her face.
Rabbit asks her, “Hungry? Make yourself a peanut-butter sandwich. That’s what we had to do.”
“I’m not hungry.”
Trying to be Skeeter, Rabbit goads her. “Christ, you should be. You’re skinny as a stick. What the hell kind of piece of ass are you, there’s nothing there anymore? Why you think we keep you here?”
She ignores him and speaks to Skeeter. “I’m in need,” she tells him.
“Shee-yut, girl, we’re all in need, right? The whole world’s in need, isn’t that what we done agreed on, Chuck? The whole benighted world is in need of Me. And Me, I’m in need of something else. Bring your cunt over here, white girl.”
Now she does look toward Rabbit. He cannot help her. She has always been out of his class. She sits down on the sofa beside Skeeter and asks him gently, “What? If I do it, will you do it?”
“Might. Tell you what, Jill honey. Let’s do it for the man.”
“What man?”
“The man. That man. Victor Charlie over there. He wants it. What you think he’s keepin’ us here for? To breed, that’s what for. Hey. Friend Harry?”
“I’m listening.”
“You like being a nigger, don’t ya?”
“I do.”
“
You want to be a good nigger, right?”
“Right.” The sad rustling on the ceiling, of Nelson in his room, feels far distant. Don’t come down. Stay up there. The smoke mixes with his veins and his lungs are a branching tree.
“O.K.,” Skeeter says. “Now here’s how. You is a big black man sittin’ right there. You is chained to that chair. And I, I is white as snow. Be-hold.” And Skeeter, with that electric scuttling suddenness, stands, and pulls off his shirt. In the room’s deep dusk his upper half disappears. Then he scrabbles at himself at belt-level and his lower half disappears. Only his glasses remain, silver circles. His voice, disembodied, is the darkness. Slowly his head, a round cloud, tells against the blue light from the streetlamp at the end of the Crescent. “And this little girl here,” he calls, “is black as coal. An ebony virgin torn from the valley of the river Niger, right? Stand up, honey, show us your teeth. Turn clean around.” The black shadows of his hands glide into the white blur Jill is, and guide it upward, as a potter guides a lump of clay upward on the humming wheel, into a vase. She keeps rising, smoke from the vase. Her dress is being lifted over her head. “Turn around, honey, show us your rump.” A soft slap gilds the darkness, the whiteness revolves. Rabbit’s eyes, enlarged, can sift out shades of light and dark, can begin to model the bodies six feet from him, across the cobbler’s bench. He can see the dark crack between Jill’s buttocks, the faint dent her hip muscle makes, the shadowy mane between her starved hipbones. Her belly looks long. Where her breasts should be, black spiders are fighting: he sorts these out as Skeeter’s hands. Skeeter is whispering to Jill, murmuring, while his hands flutter like bats against the moon. He hears her say, in a voice sifted through her hair, a sentence with the word “satisfy” in it.
Skeeter cackles: forked lightning. “Now,” he sings, and his voice has become golden hoops spinning forward, an auctioneer who is a juggler, “we will have a demon-stray-shun of o-bee-deeyance, from this little coal-black lady, who has been broken in by expert traders working out of Nashville, Tennessee, and who is guaranteed by them ab-so-lutily to give no trouble in the kitchen, hallway, stable or bedroom!” Another soft slap, and the white clay dwindles; Jill is kneeling, while Skeeter still stands. A most delicate slipping silvery sound touches up the silence now; but Rabbit cannot precisely see. He needs to see. The driftwood lamp is behind him. Not turning his head, he gropes and switches it on.
Nice.
What he sees reminds him, in the first flash, of the printing process, an inked plate contiguous at some few points to white paper. As his eyes adjust, he sees Skeeter is not black, he is a gentle brown. These are smooth-skinned children being gently punished, one being made to stand and the other to kneel. Skeeter crouches and reaches down a long hand, fingernails like baby rose petals, to shield Jill’s profile from the glare. Her eyelids remain closed, her mouth remains open, her breasts cast no shadow they are so shallow, she is feminine most in the swell of her backside spread on her propping heels and in the white lily of a hand floating beside his balls as if to receive from the air a baton. An inch or two of Skeeter’s long cock is un-enclosed by her face, a purplish inch bleached to lilac, below his metallic pubic explosion, the shape and texture of his goatee. Keeping his protective crouch, Skeeter turns his face sheepishly toward the light; his eyeglasses glare opaquely and his upper lip lifts in imitation of pain. “Hey man, what’s with that? Cut that light.”
“You’re beautiful,” Rabbit says.
“O.K., strip and get into it, she’s full of holes, right?”
“I’m scared to,” Rabbit confesses: it is true, they seem not only beautiful but in the same vision an interlocked machine that might pull him apart.
Though the slap of light left her numb, this confession pierces Jill’s trance; she turns her head, Skeeter’s penis falling free, a bright string of moisture breaking. She looks at Harry, past him; as he reaches to switch off the light mercifully, she screams. In the corner of his vision, he saw it too: a face. At the window. Eyes like two cigarette burns. The lamp is out, the face is vanished. The window is a faintly blue rectangle in a black room. Rabbit runs to the front door and opens it. The night air bites. October. The lawn looks artificial, lifeless, dry, no-color: a snapshot of grass. Vista Crescent stretches empty but for parked cars. The maple is too slender to hide anyone. A child might have made it across the front of the house along the flowerbeds and be now in the garage. The garage door is up. And, if the child is Nelson, a door from the garage leads into the kitchen. Rabbit decides not to look, not to give chase; he feels that there is no space for him to step into, that the vista before him is a flat, stiff, cold photograph. The only thing that moves is the vapor of his breathing. He closes the door. He hears nothing move in the kitchen. He tells the living room, “Nobody.”
“Bad,” Skeeter says. His prick has quite relaxed, a whip between his legs as he squats. Jill is weeping on the floor; face down, she has curled her naked body into a knot. Her bottom forms the top half of a valentine heart, only white; her flesh-colored hair fans spilled over the sullen green carpet. Rabbit and Skeeter together squat to pick her up. She fights it, she makes herself roll over limply; her hair streams across her face, clouds her mouth, adheres like cobwebs to her chin and throat. A string as of milkweed spittle is on her chin; Rabbit wipes her chin and mouth with his handkerchief and, for weeks afterward, when all is lost, will take out this handkerchief and bury his nose in it, in its scarcely detectable smell of distant ocean.
Jill’s lips are moving. She is saying, “You promised. You promised.” She is talking to Skeeter. Though Rabbit bends his big face over hers, she has eyes only for the narrow black face beside him. There is no green in her eyes, the black pupils have eclipsed the irises. “It’s such dumb hell,” she says, with a little whimper, as if to mock her own complaint, a Connecticut housewife who knows she exaggerates. “Oh Christ,” she adds in an older voice and shuts her eyes. Rabbit touches her; she is sweating. At his touch, she starts to shiver. He wants to blanket her, to blanket her with his body if there is nothing else, but she will talk only to Skeeter. Rabbit is not there for her, he only thinks he is here.
Skeeter asks down into her, “Who’s your Lord Jesus, Jill honey?”
“You are.”
“I am, right?”
“Right.”
“You love me more’n you love yourself?”
“Much more.”
“What do you see when you look at me, Jill honey?”
“I don’t know.”
“You see a giant lily, right?”
“Right. You promised.”
“Love my cock?”
“Yes.”
“Love my jism, sweet Jill? Love it in your veins?”
“Yes. Please. Shoot me. You promised.”
“I your Savior, right? Right?”
“You promised. You must. Skeeter.”
“O.K. Tell me I’m your Savior.”
“You are. Hurry. You did promise.”
“O.K.” Skeeter explains hurriedly. “I’ll fix her up. You go upstairs, Chuck. I don’t want you to see this.”
“I want to see it.”
“Not this. It’s bad, man. Bad, bad, bad. It’s shit. Stay clean, you in deep enough trouble on account of me without being party to this, right? Split. I’m begging, man.”
Rabbit understands. They are in country. They have taken a hostage. Everywhere out there, there are unfriendlies. He checks the front door, staying down below the three windows echoing the three chime-tones. He sneaks into the kitchen. Nobody is there. He slips the bolt across, in the door that opens from the garage. Sidling to make his shadow narrow, he climbs upstairs. At Nelson’s door he listens for the sound of unconscious breathing. He hears the boy’s breath rasp, touching bottom. In his own bedroom, the streetlamp prints negative spatters of the maple leaves on his wallpaper. He gets into bed in his underwear, in case he must rise and run; as a child, in summer, he would have to sleep in his underwear when the wash hadn’t d
ried on the line. Rabbit listens to the noises downstairs – clicking, clucking kitchen noises, of a pan being put on the stove, of a bit of glass clinking, of footsteps across the linoleum, the sounds that have always made him sleepy, of Mom up, of the world being tended to. His thoughts begin to dissolve, though his heart keeps pounding, waves breaking on Jill’s white valentine, stamped on his retinas like the sun. Offset versus letterpress, offset never has the bite of the other, looks greasy, the wave of the future. She slips into bed beside him; her valentine nestles cool against his belly and silken limp cock. He has been asleep. He asks her, “Is it late?”
Jill speaks very slowly. “Pretty late.”
“How do you feel?”
“Better. For now.”
“We got to get you to a doctor.”
“It won’t help.”
He has a better idea, so obvious he cannot imagine why he has never thought of it before. “We got to get you back to your father.”
“You forget. He’s dead.”
“Your mother, then.”
“The car’s dead.”
“We’ll get it out of hock.”
“It’s too late,” Jill tells him. “It’s too late for you to try to love me.”
He wants to answer, but there is a puzzling heavy truth in this that carries him under, his hand caressing the inward dip of her waist, a warm bird dipping toward its nest.
Sunshine, the old clown. So many maple leaves have fallen that morning light slants in baldly. A headache grazes his skull, his dream (Pajasek and he were in a canoe, paddling upstream, through a dark green country; their destination felt to be a distant mountain striped and folded like a tablecloth. “When can I have my silver bullet?” Rabbit asked him. “You promised.” “Fool,” Pajasek told him. “Stupid.” “You know so much more,” Rabbit answered, nonsensically, and his heart opened in a flood of light) merges with the night before, both unreal. Jill sleeps dewily beside him; at the base of her throat, along her hairline, sweat has collected and glistens. Delicately, not to disturb her, he takes her wrist and turns it so he can see the inside of her freckled arm. They might be bee-stings. There are not too many. He can talk to Janice. Then he remembers that Janice is not here, and that only Nelson is their child. He eases from the bed, amused to discover himself in underwear, like those times when Mom had left his pajamas on the line to dry.