Harry hopes the dog is alone, its owner out. There is no car or pick-up truck in the open, but one might be parked in the barn or the newish garage of cement blocks with a roof of corrugated overlapped Fiberglas. Inside the house no light burns that he can see, but then it is near noon, though the day is dull and growing darker. He peers in the door and sees himself reflected with his pale hat in another door, much like this one, with two tall panes of glass, the thickness of a stone wall away. Beyond the old panes a hallway with a tattered striped runner recedes into unlit depths. As his eyes strain to see deeper his nose and ungloved hand sting with the cold. He is about to turn away and return to the warm car when a shape materializes within the house and rushes, puffed up with rage, toward him. The black-haired collie leaps and leaps again against the inner door, frantic, trying to bite the glass, those ugly little front teeth a dog has, inhuman, and the split black lip and lavender gums, unclean. Harry is paralyzed with fascination; he does not see the great shape materialize behind Fritzie until a hand clatters on the inner door latch.
The fat woman's other hand holds the dog by the collar; Harry helps by opening the green outer door himself. Fritzie recognizes his scent and stops barking. And Rabbit recognizes, buried under the wrinkles and fat but with those known eyes blazing out alive, Ruth. So amid a tumult of wagging and the whimpers of that desperate doggy need to reclaim a friend, the two old lovers confront one another. Twenty years ago he had lived with this woman, March to June. He saw her for a minute in Kroll's eight years later, and she had spared him a few bitter words, and now a dozen years have poured across them both, doing their damage. Her hair that used to be a kind of dirty fiery gingery color is flattened now to an, iron gray and pulled back in a bun like the Mennonites wear. She wears wide denim dungarees and a man's red lumberjack shirt beneath a black sweater with unravelled elbows and dog hairs and wood chips caught in the greasy weave. Yet this is Ruth. Her upper lip still pushes out a little, as if with an incipient blister, and her flat blue eyes in their square sockets still gaze at him with a hostility that tickles him. "What do you want?" she asks. Her voice sounds thickened, as by a cold.
"I'm Harry Angstrom."
"I can see that. What do you want here?"
"I was wondering, could we talk a little? There's something I need to ask you."
"No, we can't talk a little. Go away."
But she has released the dog's collar, and Fritzie sniffs at his ankles and his crotch and writhes in her urge to jump up, to impart the scarcely bearable joy locked in her narrow skull, behind her bulging eyes. Her bad eye still looks sore. "Good Fritzie," Harry says. "Down. Down."
Ruth has to laugh, that quick ringing laugh of hers, like change tossed onto a counter. "Rabbit, you're cute. Where'd you learn her name?"
"I heard you all calling her once. A couple times I've been here, up behind those trees, but I couldn't get up my nerve to come any closer. Stupid, huh?"
She laughs again, a touch less ringingly, as if she is truly amused. Though her voice has roughened and her bulk has doubled and there is a down including a few dark hairs along her cheeks and above the comers of her mouth, this is really Ruth, a cloud his life had passed through, solid again. She is still tall, compared to Janice, compared to any of the women of his life but Mim and his mother. She always had a weight about her; she joked the first night when he lifted her that this would put him out of action, a weight that pushed him off, along with something that held him fast, an air of being willing to play, in the little space they had, and though the time they had was short. "So you were scared of us," she says. She bends slightly, to address the dog. "Fritzie, shall we let him in for a minute?" The dog's liking him, a dim spark of dog memory setting her tail wagging, has tipped the balance.
The hall inside smells decidedly of the past, the way these old farm houses do. Apples in the cellar, cinnamon in the cooking, a melding of the old plaster and wallpaper paste, he doesn't know. Muddy boots stand in a corner of the hall, on newspapers spread there, and he notices that Ruth is in stocking feet – thick gray men's work socks, but sexy nonetheless, the silence of her steps, though she is huge. She leads him to the right, into a small front parlor with an oval rug of braided rags on the floor and a folding wooden lawn chair mixed in with the other furniture. The only modem piece is the television set, its overbearing rectangular eye dead for the moment. A small wood fire smolders in a sandstone fireplace. Harry checks his shoes before stepping onto the rag rug, to make sure he is not tracking in dirt. He removes his fancy tittle sheepskin hat.
As if regretting this already, Ruth sits on the very edge of her chair, a cane-bottomed rocker, tipping it forward so her knees nearly touch the floor and her arm can reach down easily to scratch Fritzie's neck and keep her calm. Harry guesses he is supposed to sit opposite, on a cracked black leather settee beneath two depressing sepia studio portraits, a century old at least they must be, in matching carved frames, of a bearded type and his buttoned-up wife, both long turned to dust in their coffins. But before sitting down he sees across the room, by the light of a window whose deep sill teems with potted African violets and those broad-leafed plants people give for Mother's Days, a more contemporary set of photographs, color snapshots that line one shelf of a bookcase holding rows of the paperback mysteries and romances Ruth used to read and apparently still does. That used to hurt him about her in those months, how she would withdraw into one of those trashy thrillers set in England or Los Angeles though he was right there, in the flesh, a living lover. He crosses to the bookcase and sees her, younger but already stout, standing before a comer of this house within the arm of a man older, taller, and stouter than she: this must have been Byer. A big sheepish farmer in awkward Sunday clothes, squinting against the sunlight with an expression like that of the large old portraits, his mouth wistful in its attempt to satisfy the camera. Ruth looks amused, her hair up in a bouffant do and still gingery, amused that for this sheltering man she is a prize. Rabbit feels, for an instant as short and bright as the click of a shutter, jealous of these lives that others led: this stout plain country couple posing by a chipped corner of brown stucco, on earth that from the greening state of the grass suggests March or April. Nature's old tricks. There are other photographs, color prints of combed and smiling adolescents, in those cardboard frames high-school pictures come in. Before he can examine them, Ruth says sharply, "Who said you could look at those? Stop it."
"It's your family."
"You bet it is. Mine and not yours."
But he cannot tear himself away from the images in flashlit color of these children. They gaze not at him but past his right ear, each posed identically by the photographer as he worked his school circuit May after May. A boy and the girl at about the same age – the senior photo – and then in smaller format a younger boy with darker hair, cut longer and parted on the other side of his head from his brother. All have blue eyes. "Two boys and a girl," Harry says. "Who's the oldest?"
"What the hell do you care? God, I'd forgotten what a pushy obnoxious bastard you are. Stuck on yourself from cradle to grave."
"My guess is, the girl is the oldest. When did you have her, and when did you marry this old guy? How can you stand it, by the way, out here in the boondocks?"
"I stand it fine. It's more than anybody else ever offered me."
"I didn't have much to offer anybody in those days."
"But you've done fine since. You're dressed up like a pansy."
"And you're dressed up like a ditchdigger."
"I've been cutting wood."
"You operate one of those chain saws? Jesus, aren't you afraid you'll cut off a finger?"