"No telling."
Nelson asks, "Male or female?"
"Female, sonny."
Nelson begins to cry again, to gag as if food is caught in his throat, and Rabbit asks the policeman if his offer is still good, if a cruiser might take the boy to his grandparents' house in Mt. Judge. The boy is led away. He does not resist; Rabbit thought he might, might insist on staying with his father to the end. But the boy, his hair hanging limp and his tears flowing unchecked, seems relieved to be at last in the arms of order, of laws and limits. He doesn't even wave from the window of the silver-blue West Brewer cruiser as it U-turns in Vista Crescent and heads away from the tangle of hoses and puddles and red reflections. The air tastes sulphuric. Rabbit notices that the little maple was scorched on the side toward the house; its twigs smolder like cigarettes.
As the firemen wind up their apparatus, he and the police chief sit in the front of an unmarked car. Harry's knees are crowded by the radio apparatus on the passenger's side. The chief is a short man but doesn't look so short sitting down, with his barrel chest crossed by a black strap and his white hair crew-cut close to his scalp and his nose which was once broken sideways and has accumulated broken veins in the years since. He says, "We have a death now. That makes it a horse of another color."
"Any theories how the fire started?"
"I'll ask the questions. But yes. It was set. In the garage. I notice a power mower in there. Can of gas to go with it?"
"Yeah. We. filled the can just this afternoon."
"Tell me where you were this evening."
He tells him. The chief talks on his car radio to the West Brewer headquarters. In less than five minutes they call back. But in the total, unapologetic silence the chief keeps during these minutes, a great lump grows in Rabbit, love of the law. The radio sizzles its words like bacon frying: "Mrs. Fosnacht confirms suspect's story. Also a minor boy in dwelling as additional witness."
"Check," the chief says, and clicks off.
"Why would I burn my own house down?" Rabbit asks.
"Most common arsonist is owner," the chief says. He studies Rabbit thoughtfully; his eyes are almost round, as if somebody took a stitch at the comer of each lid. "Maybe the girl was pregnant by you."
"She was on the Pill."
"Tell me about her."
He tries, though it is hard to make it seem as natural as it felt. Why did he permit Skeeter to move in on him? Well, the question was more, Why not? He tries, "Well, when my wife walked out on me, I kind of lost my bearings. It didn't seem to matter, and anyway he would have taken Jill with him, if I'd kicked him out. I got so I didn't mind him."
"Did he terrorize you?"
He tries to make these answers right. Out of respect for the law. "No. He educated us." Harry begins to get mad. "Some law I don't know about against having people live with you?"
"Law against harboring," the chief tells him, neglecting to write on his pad. "Brewer police report a Hubert Johnson out on default on a possession charge."
Rabbit's silence is not what he wants. He makes it clearer what he wants. "You in ignorance over the existence of this indictment and defiance of court?" He makes it even clearer. "Shall I accept your silence as a profession of ignorance?"
"Yes." It is the only opening. "Yes, I knew nothing about Skeeter, not even his last name."
"His present whereabouts, any ideas?"
"No idea. His call came through from it sounded like a phone booth but I couldn't swear to it."
The cop puts his broad hand over the notebook as if across the listening mouth of a telephone receiver. "Off the record. We've been watching this place. He was a little fish, a punk. We hoped he would lead us to something bigger."
"What bigger? Dope?"
"Civil disturbance. The blacks in Brewer are in touch with Philly, Camden, Newark. We know they have guns. We don't want another York here, now do we?" Again, Rabbit's silence is not what he wants. He repeats, "Now do we?"
"No, of course not. I was just thinking. He talked as if he was beyond revolution; he was kind of religious-crazy, not gun
"Any idea why he set this fire?"
"I don't think he did. It isn't his style."
The pencil is back on the notebook. "Never mind about style," the chief says. "I want facts."
"I don't have any more facts than I've told you. Some people in the neighborhood were upset because Skeeter was living with us, two men stopped me on the street yesterday and complained about it, I can give you their names if you want."
The pencil hovers. "They complained. Any specific threats of arson?"
&. Wiseasses get fragged. You better fuckingbarricade the whole place. "Nothing that specific."
The chief makes a notation, it looks like n.c., and turns the notebook page. "The black have sexual relations with the girl?"
"Look, I was off working all day. I'd come back and we'd cook supper and help the kid with his homework and sit around and talk. It was like having two more kids in the house, I don't know what they did every minute. Are you going to arrest me, or what?"
A fatherly type himself, the chief takes a smiling long time answering. Rabbit sees that his nose wasn't broken by accident, somewhere in the alleys of time he had asked for it. His snow-soft hair is cut evenly as a powderpuff, with a pink dent above the ears where the police cap bites. His smile broadens enough to crease his cheek. "Strictly speaking," he says, "this isn't my beat. I'm acting on behalf of my esteemed colleague the sheriff of Furnace Township, who rolled over and went back to sleep. Offhand I'd say we're doing a good enough business in the jails without putting solid citizens like you in there. We'll have some more questions later." He flips the notebook shut and flips the radio on to put out a call, "All cars, Brewer police copy, be on the lookout, Negro, male, height approx five-six, weight approx one-twenty-five, medium dark-skinned, hair Afro, name Skeeter, that is Sally, Katherine, double Easter -" He does not turn his head when Rabbit opens the car door and walks away.
So again in his life the net of law has slipped from him. He knows he is criminal, yet is never caught. Sickness sinks through his body like soot. The firemen wet down the smoking wreckage, the clot of equipment along Vista Crescent breaks up and flows away. The house is left encircled in its disgrace with yellow flashers on trestles warning people off. Rabbit walks around the lawn, so lately a full stage, sodden and pitted by footprints, and surveys the damage.
The burning was worse on the back side: the fixtures of the bedroom bathroom dangle in space from stems of contorted pipe. The wall that took the bed headboard is gone. Patches of nightblue sky show through the roof. He looks in the downstairs windows and sees, by flashing yellow light, as into a hellish fun house, the sofa and the two chairs, salted with fallen plaster, facing each other across the cobbler's bench. The driftwood lamp is still upright. On the shelves giving into the breakfast nook, Skeeter's books squat, soaked and matted. Where the kitchen was, Harry can see out through the garage to an N of charred 2 by 4s. The sky wants to brighten. Birds – birds in Penn Villas, where? there are no trees old enough to hold them – flicker into song. It is cold now, colder than in the heart of the night, when the fire was alive. The sky pales in the east, toward Brewer. Mt. Judge develops an outline in the emulsion of pre-dawn gray. A cloud of birds migrating crosses the suburb southward. The soot is settling on Harry's bones. His eyelids feel like husks. In his weariness he hallucinates; as in the seconds before we sleep, similes seem living organisms. The freshening sky above Mt. Judge is Becky, the child that died, and the sullen sky to the west, the color of a storm sky but flawed by stars, is Nelson, the child that lives. And he, he is the man in the middle.
He walks up to his battered front door, brushes away the glass shards, and sits down on the flagstone porchlet. It is warm, like a hearth. Though none of his neighbors came forward to speak to him, to sparkle on the bright screen of his disaster, the neighborhood presents itself to his gaze unapologetically, naked in the gathering light, the pastel roof shingles moist in patches echoing the pattern of rafters, the back-yard bathing pools and swing sets whitened by dew along with the grass. A half-moon rests cockeyed in the blanched sky like a toy forgotten on a floor. An old man in a noisy green raincoat, a geezer left behind as a watchman, walks over and speaks to him. "This your home, huh?"