Rabbit calls over to Brumbach, "I'm not riding you, am I?"
Showalter tugs harder, so Harry has to bend his ear to the man's little beak and soft unhappy mouth. "He's not that stable. He feels very threatened. It wasn't my idea to get after you, I said to him, The man has his rights of privacy."
Rabbit tries to play the game, whispers. "How many more in the neighborhood feel like him?"
"More than you'd think. I was surprised myself. These are reasonable good people, but they have blind spots. I believe if they didn't have children, if this wasn't a children's neighborhood, it'd be more live and let live."
But Rabbit worries they are being rude to Brumbach. He calls over, "Hey, Eddie. I tell you what."
Brumbach is not pleased to be called in; he had wanted Showalter to settle. Rabbit sees the structure: one man is the negotiator, the other is the muscle. Brumbach barks, "What?"
"I'll keep my kid from looking in your windows, and you keep yours from looking in mine."
"We had a name over there for guys like you. Wiseass. Sometimes just by mistake they got fragged."
"I'll tell you what else," Rabbit says. "As a bonus, I'll try to remember to draw the curtains."
"You better do fucking more than pull the fucking curtains," Brumbach tells him, "you better fucking barricade the place."
Out of nowhere a mail truck, red, white, and blue, with a canted windshield like a display case, squeaks to a stop at the curb; hurriedly, not looking at any of them, a small man in gray unlocks the mailbox front and scoops a torrent, hundreds it seems, of letters into a gray sack, locks it shut, and drives away.
Rabbit goes close to Brumbach. "Tell me what you want. You want me to move out of the neighborhood."
"Just move the black out."
"It's him and the girl together you don't like; suppose he stays and the girl goes?"
"The black goes."
"He goes when he stops being my guest. Have a nice supper."
"You've been warned."
Rabbit asks Showalter, "You hear that threat?"
Showalter smiles, he wipes his brow, he is less depressed. He has done what he could. "I told you," he says, "not to ride him. We came to you in all politeness. I want to repeat, it's the circumstances of what's going on, not the color of anybody's skin. There's a house vacant abutting me and I told the realtor, I said as plain as I say to you, `Any colored family, with a husband in the house, can get up the equity to buy it at the going market price, let them have it by all means. By all means.' "
"It's nice to meet a liberal," Rabbit says, and shakes his hand. "My wife keeps telling me I'm a conservative."
And, because he likes him, because he likes anybody who fought in Vietnam where he himself should have been fighting, had he not been too old, too old and fat and cowardly, he offers to shake Brumbach's hand too.
The cocky little man keeps his arms stiff at his sides. Instead he turns his head, so the ruined jaw shows. The scar is not just a red L, Rabbit sees it is an ampersand, complicated by faint lines where skin was sewn and overlapped to repair a hole that would always be, that would always repel eyes. Rabbit makes himself look at it. Brumbach's voice is less explosive, almost regretful, sad in its steadiness. "I earned this face," he says. "I got it over there so I could have a decent life here. I'm not asking for sympathy, a lot of my buddies made out worse. I'm just letting you know, after what I seen and done, no wiseass is crowding me in my own neighborhood."
Inside the house, it is too quiet. The television isn't going. Nelson is doing homework at the kitchen table. No, he is reading one of Skeeter's books. He has not gotten very far. Rabbit asks, "Where are they?"
"Sleeping. Upstairs."
"Together?"
"I think Jill's on your bed, Skeeter's in mine. He says the sofa stinks. He was awake when I got back from school."
"How did he seem?"
Though the question touches a new vein, Nelson answers promptly. For all the shadows between them, they have lately grown toward each other, father and son. "Jumpy," he answers, into the book. "Said he was getting bad vibes lately and hadn't slept at all last night. I think he had taken some pills or something. He didn't seem to see me, looking over my head, kind of, and kept calling me Chuck instead of Babychuck."
"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. Ifyou 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 girclass="underline" 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."