Babe shifts gears, lays out six chords like six black lead slugs slapping into the tray, and plays, "There's a Small Hotel." With a wishing well.
With this Jill, then, Rabbit enters the street. On his right, toward the mountain, Weiser stretches sallow under blue street lights. The Pinnacle Hotel makes a tattered blur, the back of the Sunflower Beer clock shows yellow neon petals; otherwise the great street is dim. He can remember when Weiser with its five movie marquees and its medley ofneon outlines appeared as gaudy as a carnival midway. People would stroll, children between them. Now the downtown looks deserted, sucked dry by suburban shopping centers and haunted by rapists. LOCAL HOODS ASSAULT ELDERLY, last week's Vat had headlined. In the original version of the head LOCAL had been BLACK.
They turn left, toward the Running Horse Bridge. River moisture cools his brow. He decides he will not be sick. Never, even as an infant, could stand it; some guys, Ronnie Harrison for one, liked it, throw up after a few beers or before a big game, joke about the corn between their teeth, but Rabbit needed to keep it down, even at the cost of a bellyache. He still carries from sitting in Jimbo's the sense of the world being inside him; he will keep it down. The city night air. The ginger of tar and concrete baked all day, truck traffic lifted from it like a lid. Infrequent headlights stroke this girl, catching her white legs and thin dress as she hangs on the curb hesitant.
She asks, "Where's your car?"
"I don't have any."
"That's impossible."
"My wife took it when she left me."
"You didn't have two?"
"No." This is really a rich kid.
"I have a car," she says.
"Where is it?"
"I don't know."
"How can you not know?"
"I used to leave it on the street up near Babe's place off of Plum, I didn't know it was somebody's garage entrance, and one morning they had taken it away."
"And you didn't go after it?"
"I didn't have the money for any fine. And I'm scared of the police, they might check me out. The staties must have a bulletin on me."
"Wouldn't the simplest thing for you be to go back to Connecticut?"
"Oh, please," she says.
"What didn't you like about it?"
"It was all ego. Sick ego."
"Something pretty egotistical about running away, too. What'd that do to your mother?"
The girl makes no answer, but crosses the street, from Jimbo's to the beginning of the bridge. Rabbit has to follow. "What kind of car was it?"
"A white Porsche." Wow."
"My father gave it to me for my sixteenth birthday."
"My father-in-law runs the Toyota agency in town."
They keep arriving at this place, where a certain symmetry snips their exchanges short. Having crossed the bridge, they stand on a little pond of sidewalk squares where in this age of cars few feet tread. The bridge was poured in the Thirties – sidewalks, broad balustrades, and lamp plinths – of reddish rough concrete; above them an original light standard, iron fluted and floral toward the top, looms stately but unlit at the entrance to the bridge, illumined since recently with cold bars of violet on tall aluminum stems rooted in the center of the walkway. Her white dress is unearthly in this light. A man's name is embedded in a bronze plaque, illegible. Jill asks impatiently, "Well, how shall we do?"
He assumes she means transportation. He is too shaky still, too full of smoke and Stinger, to look beyond that. The way to the center of Brewer, where taxis prowl and doze, feels blocked. In the gloom beyond Jimbo's neon nimbus, brown shadows, local hoods, giggle in doorways, watching. Rabbit says, "Let's walk across the bridge and hope for a bus. The last one comes around eleven, maybe on Saturdays it's later. Anyway, if none comes at all, it's not too far to walk to my place. My kid does it all the time."
"I love walking," she says. She touchingly adds, "I'm strong. You mustn't baby me."
The balustrade was poured in an X-pattern echoing rail fences; these Xs click past his legs not rapidly enough. The gritty breadth he keeps touching runs tepid. Flecks as if of rock salt had been mixed into it. Not done that way anymore, not done this color, reddish, the warmth of flesh, her hair also, cut cedar color, lifting as she hurries to keep up.
"What's the rush?"
"Shhh. Dontcha hear 'em?"
Cars thrust by, rolling balls of light before them. An anvil-drop below, to the black floor of the river: white shards, boat shapes. Behind them, pattering feet, the press of pursuit. Rabbit dares stop and peek backwards. Two brown figures are chasing them. Their shadows shorten and multiply and lengthen and simplify again as they fly beneath the successive mauve angles, in and out of strips of light; one man is brandishing something white in his hand. It glitters. Harry's heart jams; he wants to make water. The West Brewer end of the bridge is forever away. LOCAL MAN STABBED DEFENDING OUT-OF-STATE GIRL. Body Tossed From Historic Bridge. He squeezes her arm and tries to make her run. Her skin is smooth and narrow yet tepid like the balustrade. She snaps, "Cut it out," and pulls away. He turns and finds, unexpectedly, what he had forgotten was there, courage; his body fits into the hardshell blindness of meeting a threat, rigid, only his eyes soft spots, himself a sufficient shield. Kill.
The Negroes halt under the near purple moon and back a step, frightened. They are young, their bodies liquid. He is bigger than they. The white flash in the hand of one is not a knife but a pocketbook of pearls. The bearer shambles forward with it. His eyewhites and the pearls look lavender in the light. "This yours, lady?"
"Oh. Yes."
"Babe sent us after."
"Oh. Thank you. Thank her."
"We scare somebody?"
"Not me. Him."
"Yeah."
"Dude scared us too."
"Sorry about that," Rabbit volunteers. "Spooky bridge."
"O.K."
"O.K." Their mauve eyeballs roll; their purple hands flip as their legs in the stitched skin of Levis seek the rhythm of leaving. They giggle together; and also at this moment two giant trailer trucks pass on the bridge, headed in opposite directions: their rectangles thunderously overlap and, having clapped the air between them, hurtle each on its way, corrosive and rumbling. The bridge trembles. The Negro boys have disappeared. Rabbit walks on with Jill.
The pot and brandy and fear in him enhance the avenue he knows too well. No bus comes. Her dress flutters in the corner of his eye as he tries, his skin stretched and his senses shuffling and circling like a cloud of gnats, to make talk. "Your home was in Connecticut."
"A place called Stonington."
"Near New York?"
"Near enough. Daddy used to go down Mondays and come back Fridays. He loved to sail. He said about Stonington it was the only town in the state that faces the open sea, everything else is on the Sound."
"And he died, you said. My mother – she has Parkinson's Disease."
"Look, do you like to talk this much? Why don't we just walk? I've never been in West Brewer before. It's nice."
"What's nice about it?"
"Everything. It doesn't have a past like the city does. So it's not so disappointed. Look at that, Burger Bliss. Isn't it beautiful, all goldy and plasticky with that purple fire inside?"
"That's where I ate tonight."
"How was the food?"
"Awful. Maybe I taste everything too much, I should start smoking again. My kid loves the place."
"How old did you say he was?"
"Twelve. Thirteen this October. He's small for his age."
"You shouldn't tell him that."