"Dollars? For ten miles?"
"Twelve. And I got to go back twelve now."
Rabbit goes to the driver's side to pay, while the others run into the house. The man leans out and asks, "Know what you're doing?"
"Not exactly."
"They'll knife you in the back every time."
"Who? "
The driver leans closer; by street-lamplight Rabbit sees a wide sad face, sallow, a whale's lipless mouth clamped in a melancholy set, a horseshoe-shaped scar on the meat of his nose. His answer is distinct: "Jigaboos."
Embarrassed for him, Rabbit turns away and sees – Nelson is right – a crowd of children. They are standing across the Crescent, some with bicycles, watching this odd car unload. This crowd phenomenon on the bleak terrain of Penn Villas alarms him: as if growths were to fester on the surface of the moon.
The incident emboldens Skeeter. His skin has dared the sun again. Rabbit comes home from work to find him and Nelson shooting baskets in the driveway. Nelson bounces the ball to his father and Rabbit's one-handed set from twenty feet out swishes. Pretty. "Hey," Skeeter crows, so all the homes in Penn Villas can -hear, "where'd you get that funky old style of shooting a basketball? You were tryin' to be comical, right?"
"Went in," Nelson tells him loyally.
"Shit, boy, a one-armed dwarf could have blocked it. T'get that shot off you need a screen two men thick, right? You gotta jump and shoot, jump and shoot." He demonstrates; his shot misses but looks right: the ball held high, a back-leaning ascent into the air, a soft release that would arch over any defender. Rabbit tries it, but finds his body heavy, the effort of lifting jarring. The ball flies badly. Says Skeeter, "You got a white man's lead gut, but I adore those hands." They scrimmage one on one; Skeeter is quick and slick, slithering by for the layup on the give-and-go to Nelson again and again. Rabbit cannot stop him, his breath begins to ache in his chest, but there are moments when the ball and his muscles and the air overhead and the bodies competing with his all feel taut and unified and defiant of gravity. Then the October chill bites into his sweat and he goes into the house. Jill has been sleeping upstairs. She sleeps more and more lately, a dazed evading sleep that he finds insulting. When she comes downstairs, in that boring white dress, brushing back sticky hair from her cheeks, he asks roughly, "Dja do anything about the car?"
"Sweet, what would I do?"
"You could call your mother."
"I can't. She and Stepdaddy would make a thing. They'd come for me."
"Maybe that's a good idea."
"Stepdaddy's a creep." She moves past him, not focusing, into the kitchen. She looks into the refrigerator. "You didn't shop."
"That's your job."
"Without a car?"
"Christ, you can walk up to the Acme in five minutes."
"People would see Skeeter."
"They see him anyway. He's outside horsing around with Nelson. And evidently you've been letting him drive all around Pennsylvania." His anger recharges itself lead gut. "Goddammit, how can you just run an expensive car like that into the ground and just let it sit? There's people in the world could live for ten years on what that car cost."
"Don't, Harry. I'm weak."
"O.K. I'm sorry." He tugs her into his arms. She rocks sadly against him, rubbing her nose on his shirt. But her body when dazed has an absence, an unconnectedness, that feels disagreeable against his skin. He itches to sneeze.
Jill is murmuring, "I think you miss your wife."
"That bitch. Never."
"She's like anybody else, caught in this society. She wants to be alive while she is alive."
"Don't you?"
"Sometimes. But I know it's not enough. It's how they get you. Let me go now. You don't like holding me, I can feel it. I just remembered, some frozen chicken livers behind the ice cream. But they take forever to thaw."
Six-o'clock news. The pale face caught behind the screen, unaware that his head, by some imperfection in reception at 26 Vista Crescent, is flattened, and his chin rubbery and long, sternly says, "Chicago. Two thousand five hundred Illinois National Guardsmen remained on active duty today in the wake of a day of riots staged by members of the extremist faction of the Students for a Democratic Society. Windows were smashed, cars overturned, policemen assaulted by the young militants whose slogan is" – sad, stern pause; the bleached face lifts toward the camera, the chin stretches, the head flattens like an anvil – "Bring the War Home." Film cuts of white-helmeted policemen flailing at nests of arms and legs, of long-haired girls being dragged, of sudden bearded faces shaking fists that want to rocket out through the television screen; then back to clips of policemen swinging clubs, which seems balletlike and soothing to Rabbit. Skeeter, too, likes it. "Right on!" he cries. "Hit that honky snob again!" In the commercial break he turns and explains to Nelson, "It's beautiful, right?"
Nelson asks, "Why? Aren't they protesting the war?"
"Sure as a hen has balls they are. What those crackers protesting is they gotta wait twenty years to get their daddy's share of the -pie. They want it now."
"What would they do with it?"
"Do, boy? They'd eat it, that's what they'd do."
The commercial – an enlarged view of a young woman's mouth – is over. "Meanwhile, within the courtroom, the trial of the Chicago Eight continued on its turbulent course. Presiding Judge Julius J. Hoffman, no relation to Defendant Abbie Hoffman, several times rebuked Defendant Bobby Seale, whose outbursts contained such epithets as" – again, the upward look, the flattened head, the disappointed emphasis – "pig, fascist, and racist." A courtroom sketch of Seale is flashed.
Nelson asks, "Skeeter, do you like him?"
"I do not much cotton," Skeeter says, "to establishment niggers."
Rabbit has to laugh. "That's ridiculous. He's as full of hate as you are."
Skeeter switches off the set. His tone is a preacher's, ladylike. "I am by no means full of hate. I am full of love, which is a dynamic force. Hate is a paralyzing force. Hate freezes. Love strikes and liberates. Right? Jesus liberated the money-changers from the temple. The new Jesus will liberate the new money-changers. The old Jesus brought a sword, right? The new Jesus will also bring a sword. He will be a living flame of love. Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains. As to Robert Seale, any black man who has John Kennel Badbreath and Leonard Birdbrain giving him fund-raising cocktail parties is one house nigger in my book. He has gotten into the power bag, he has gotten into the publicity bag, he has debased the coinage of his soul and is thereupon as they say irrelevant. We black men came here without names, we are the future's organic seeds, seeds have no names, right?"
"Right," Rabbit says, a habit he has acquired.
Jill's chicken livers have burned edges and icy centers.
Eleven-o'clock news. A gauzy-bearded boy, his face pressed so hard against the camera the focus cannot be maintained, screams, "Off the pigs! All power to the people!"
An unseen interviewer mellifluously asks him, "How would you describe the goals of your organization?"
"Destruction of existing repressive structures. Social control of the means of production."
"Could you tell our viewing audience what you mean by `means of production'?"
The camera is being jostled; the living room, darkened otherwise, flickers. "Factories. Wall Street. Technology. All that. A tiny clique of capitalists is forcing pollution down our throats, and the SST and the genocide in Vietnam and in the ghettos. All that."
"I see. Your aim, then, by smashing windows, is to curb a runaway technology and create the basis for a new humanism."
The boy looks off-screen blearily, as the camera struggles to refocus him. "You being funny? You'll be the first up against the wall, you -" And the blip showed that the interview had been taped.
Rabbit says, "Tell me about technology."