One beetle-backed fireman chops at the front door. The glass from the three panes shatters and tinkles on the flagstones. Another fireman emerges from the other side of the roof and with his ax picks a hole above the upstairs hall, about where Nelson's door would be. Something invisible sends him staggering back. A violet flame shoots up. A cannonade of water chases him back over the roof ridge.
"They're not doing it right, Dad," Nelson moans. "They're not getting her. I know where she is and they're not getting her, Dad!" And the boy's voice dies in a shuddering wail. When Rabbit reaches toward him he pulls away and hides his face. The back of his head feels soft beneath the hair: an overripe fruit.
Rabbit reassures him, "Skeeter would've gotten her out."
"He wouldn't of, Dad! He wouldn't care. All he cared about was himself. And all you cared about was him. Nobody cared about Jill." He writhes in his father's fumbling grasp.
A policeman is beside them. "You Angstrom?" He is one ofthe new style of cops, collegiate-looking: pointed nose, smooth chin, sideburns cut to a depth Rabbit still thinks of as antisocial.
"Yes."
The cop takes out a notebook. "How many persons were in residence here?"
"Four. Me and the kid -"
"Name?
"Nelson."
"Any middle initial?"
"F for Frederick." The policeman writes slowly and speaks so softly he is hard to hear against the background of crowd munnur and fire crackle and water being hurled. Harry has to ask, "What?"
The cop repeats, "Name of mother?"
"Janice. She's not living here. She lives over in Brewer."
"Address?"
Harry remembers Stavros's address, but gives instead, "Care of Frederick Springer, 89 Joseph Street, Mt. Judge."
"And who is the girl the boy mentioned?"
"Jill Pendleton, of Stonington, Connecticut. Don't know the street address."
Age?"
"Eighteen or nineteen."
"Family relationship?"
"None."
It takes the cop a very long time to write this one word. Something is happening to a corner of the roof the crowd noise is rising, and a ladder is being lowered through an intersection of searchlights.
Rabbit prompts: "The fourth person was a Negro we called Skeeter. S-k-double-e-t-e-r."
"Black male?"
"Yes."
"Last name?"
"I don't know. Could be Farnsworth."
"Spell please."
Rabbit spells it and offers to explain. "He was just here temporarily."
The cop glances up at the burning ranch house and then over at the owner. "What were you doing here, running a commune?"
"No, Jesus; listen. I'm not for any of that. I voted for Hubert Humphrey."
The cop studies the house. "Any chance this black is in there now?"
"Don't think so. He was the one that called me, it sounded as if from a phone booth."
"Did he say he'd set the fire?"
"No, he didn't even say there was a fire, he just said things were bad. He said the word `bad' twice."
"Things were bad," the cop writes, and closes his notepad. "We'll want some further interrogation later." Reflected firelight gleams peach-color off of the badge in his cap. The corner of the house above the bedroom is collapsing; the television aerial, that they twice adjusted and extended to cut down ghosts from their neighbors' sets, tilts in the leap of flame and slowly swings downward like a skeletal tree, still clinging by some wires or brackets to its roots. Water vaults into what had been the bedroom. A lavish cumulus of yellow smoke pours out, golden-gray, rich as icing squeezed from the sugary hands of a pastry cook.
The cop casually allows, "Anybody in there was cooked a halfhour ago."
Two steps away, Nelson is bent over to let vomit spill from his mouth. Rabbit steps to him and the boy allows himself to be touched. He holds him by the shoulders; it feels like trying to hold out of water a heaving fish that wants to go back under, that needs to dive back under or die. His father brings back his hair from his cheeks so it will not be soiled by vomit; with his fist he makes a feminine knot of hair at the back of the boy's hot soft skull. "Nellie, I'm sure she got out. She's far away. She's safe and far away."
The boy shakes his head No and retches again; Harry holds him for minutes, one hand clutching his hair, the other around his chest. He is holding him up from sinking into the earth. If Harry were to let go, he would sink too. He feels precariously heavier on his bones; the earth pulls like Jupiter. Policemen, spectators, watch him struggle with Nelson but do not intervene. Finally a cop, not the interrogating one, does approach and in a calm Dutch voice asks, "Shall we have a car take the boy somewhere? Does he have grandparents in the county?"
"Four of them," Rabbit says. "Maybe he should go to his mother."
"No! "Nelson says, and breaks loose to face them. "You're not getting me to go until we know where Jill is." His face shines with tears but is sane: he waits out the next hour standing by his father's side.
The flames are slowly smothered, the living-room side of the house is saved. The interior of the kitchen side seems a garden where different tints of smoke sprout; formica, vinyl, nylon, linoleum each burn differently, yield their curdling compounds back to earth and air. Firemen wet down the wreckage and search behind the gutted walls. Now the upstairs windows stare with searchlights, now the lower. A skull full of fireflies. Yet still the -crowd waits, held by a pack sense of smell; death is in heat. Intermittently there have been staticky calls over the police radios and one of them has fetched an ambulance; it arrives with a tentative sigh of its siren. Scarlet lights do an offbeat dance on its roof. A strange container, a green rubber bag or sheet, is taken into the house, and brought back by three grim men in slickers. The ambulance receives the shapeless package, is shut with that punky sound only the most expensive automobile doors make, and again, the tentative sigh of a siren just touched -pulls away. The crowd thins after it. The night overflows with the noise of car motors igniting and revving up.
Nelson says, "Dad."
"Yeah."
"That was her, wasn't it?"
"I don't know. Maybe."
"It was somebody."
"I guess."
Nelson rubs his eyes; the gesture leaves swipes of ash, Indian markings. The child seems harshly ancient.
"I need to go to bed," he says.
"Want to go back to the Fosnachts?"
"No." As if in apology he explains, "I hate Billy." Further qualifying, he adds, "Unless you do." Unless you want to go back and fuck Mrs. Fosnacht again.
Rabbit asks him, "Want to see your mother?"
"I can't, Dad. She's in the Poconos."
"She should be back by now."
"I don't want to see her now. Take me to Jackson Road."
There is in Rabbit an engine murmuring Undo, undo, which wants to take them back to this afternoon, beginning with the moment they left the house, and not do what they did, not leave, and have it all unhappen, and Jill and Skeeter still there, in the house still there. Beneath the noise of this engine the inner admission that it did happen is muffled; he sees Nelson through a gauze of shock and dares ask, "Blame me, huh?"
"Sort of."
"You don't think it was just bad luck?" And though the boy hardly bothers to shrug Harry understands his answer: luck and God are both up there and he has not been raised to believe in anything higher than his father's head. Blame stops for him in the human world, it has nowhere else to go.
The firemen of one truck are coiling their hoses. A policeman', the one who asked after Nelson, comes over. "Angstrom? The chief wants to talk to you where the boy can't hear."
"Dad, ask him if that was Jill."
The cop is tired, stolid, plump, the same physical type as – what was his name? – Showalter. Kindly patient Brewerites. He lets out the information, "It was a cadaver."
"Black or white?" Rabbit asks.