"O.K.," Rabbit says. "When do I knock off?"
"Harry, this hurts me like hell. You learned the skill and now the bottom's dropping out. Maybe one of the Brewer dailies can take you on, maybe something in Philly or up in Allentown, though what with papers dropping out or doubling up all over the state there's something of a glut in the trade right now."
"I'll survive. What did Kurt Schrack do?"
"Who he?"
"You know. The Schockelschtuhl guy."
"Christ, him. That was back in B.C. As I remember he bought a farm north of here and raises chickens. If he's not dead by now."
"Right. Die I guess would be the convenient thing. From the management point of view."
"Don't talk like that, Harry, it hurts me too much. Give me credit for some feelings. You're a young buck, for Chrissake, you got the best years still ahead of you. You want some fatherly advice? Get the hell out of the county. Leave the mess behind you. Forget that slob you married, no offense."
"No offense. About Janice, you can't blame her, I wasn't that great myself. But I can't go anywhere, I got this kid."
"Kid, schmid. You can't live your life that way. You got to reason outwards from Number One. To you, you're Number One, not the kid."
"That's not how it feels, exactly," Rabbit begins, then sees from the sudden gleaming globe of Pajasek's head bent to study the smirched slips on his desk that the man doesn't really want to talk, he wants Harry to go. So Rabbit asks, "So when do I go?"
Pajasek says, "You'll get two months' pay plus the benefits you've accumulated, but the new press is coming in this weekend, faster than we thought. Everything moves faster nowadays."
"Except me," Rabbit says, and goes. His father, in the bright racket of the shop, swivels away from his machine and gives him the thumbs down sign questioningly. Rabbit nods, thumbs down. As they walk down Pine Street together after work, feeling ghostly in the raw outdoor air after their day's immersion in fluorescence, Pop says, "I've seen the handwriting on the wall all along, whole new philosophy operating at the top now at Verity, one of the partner's sons came back from business school somewhere full of beans and crap. I said to Pajasek, `Why keep me on, I have less than a year before retirement?' and he says, `That's the reason.' I said to him, `Why not let me go and give my place to Harry?' and he says, `Same reason.' He's running scared himself, of course. The whole economy's scared. Nixon's getting himself set to be the new Hoover, these moratorium doves'll be begging for LBJ to come back before Tricky Dick's got done giving their bank accounts a squeeze!"
Pop talks more than ever now, as if to keep Harry's mind cluttered; he clings to him like sanity. It has been a dreadful three days. All Sunday, on no sleep, he drove back and forth in Peggy's borrowed Fury through Brewer between Mt. Judge and Penn Villas, through the municipal headache of the Columbus Day parade. The monochrome idyll of early morning, Skeeter dwindling to a brown dot in brown fields, became a four-color nightmare of martial music, throbbing exhaustion, bare-thighed girls twirling bolts of lightning, iridescent drummers pounding a tattoo on the taut hollow of Harry's stomach, cars stalled in the sidestreets, Knights of Columbus floats, marching veterans, American flags. Between entanglements with this monster celebration, he scavenged in warm ashes and trucked useless stained and soaked furniture, including a charred guitar, to the garage at the back of the Jackson Road place. He found no wallet near the sofa, and no black bag in the closet. Jill's bureau had been along the wall of which only charred 2 by 4s remained, yet he prodded the ashes for a scrap of the six hundred dollars. Back on Jackson Road, insurance investigators were waiting for him, and the sheriff of Furnace Township, a little apple-cheeked old man, in suspenders and a soft felt hat, who was mostly interested in establishing that his failure to be present at the fire could in no way be held against him. He was quite deaf, and every time someone in the room spoke he would twirl around and alertly croak, "Let's put that on the record too! I want everything out in the open, everything on the record!"
Worst of all, Harry had to talk to Jill's mother on the telephone. The police had broken the news to her and her tone fluctuated between a polite curiosity about how Jill came to be living in this house and a grieved outrage seeking its ceiling, a bird cramped in a cage of partial comprehension.
"She was staying with me, yes, since before Labor Day," Rabbit told her, over the downstairs phone, in the dark living room, smelling of furniture polish and Mom's medicine. "Before that she had been bumming around in Brewer with a crowd of Negroes who hung out at a restaurant they've closed down since. I thought she'd be better off with me than with them."
"But the police said there was a Negro."
"Yeah. He was a friend of hers. He kind of came and went." Each time he was made to tell this story, he reduced the part Skeeter played, beginning with having to lie about driving him south that morning, until the young black man has become in his backwards vision little more substantial than a shadow behind a chair. "The cops say he might have set the fire but I'm sure he didn't."
"How are you sure?"
"I just am. Look, Mrs. -"
"Aldridge." And this, of all things, her second husband's name, set her to crying.
He fought through her sobbing. "Look, it's hard to talk now, I'm dead beat, my kid's in the next room, if we could talk face to face, I could maybe explain -"
The outrage tested a wing. "Explain! Can you explain her back to life?"
"No, I guess not."
The politeness returned. "My husband and I are flying to Philadelphia tomorrow morning and renting a car. Perhaps we should meet."
"Yeah. I'd have to take off from work, except for the lunch hour."
"We'll meet at the West Brewer police station," the distant voice said with surprising firmness, a sudden pinch of authority. "At noon."
Rabbit had never been there before. The West Brewer Borough Hall was a brick building with white trim, set diagonally on a plot of grass and flower beds adjacent to the tall madhouse, itself really an addition to the original madhouse, a granite mansion built a century ago by one of Brewer's iron barons. All this land had belonged to that estate. Behind the borough hall stretched a long cement-block shed with a corrugated roof, some doors were open and Rabbit saw trucks, a steamroller, the spidery black machine that tars roads, the giant arm that lifts a man in a basket to trim branches away from electric wires. These appliances of a town's housekeeping seemed to him part of a lost world of blameless activity; he would never be allowed to crawl back into that world. Inside the town hall, there were wickets where people could pay their utilities bills, paneled doors labelled in flaking gold Burgess and Assessor and Clerk. Gold arrows pointed downstairs to the Police Department. Rabbit saw too late that he could have entered this half-basement from the side, saving himself the curious gaze of ten town employees. The cop behind the greentopped counter looked familiar, but it took a minute for the sidebums to register. The collegiate type. Harry was led down a hall past mysterious rooms; one brimmed with radio equipment, another with filing cabinets, a third gave on a cement stairway leading still further down. The dungeon. Jail. Rabbit wanted to run down into this hole and hide but was led into a fourth room, with a dead green table and metal folding chairs. The brokennosed chief was in here and a woman who, though hollow with exhaustion and slow-spoken with pills, was Connecticut. She had more edge, more salt to her manner, than Pennsylvania women. Her hair was not so much gray as grayed; her suit was black. Jill's pensive thin face must have come from her father, for her mother had quite another kind, a roundish eager face with pushy lips that when she was happy must be greedy. Rabbit flicked away the impression of a peppy little dog: wideset brown eyes, a touch of jowl, a collar of pearls at her throat. Nifty tits, Jill had said, but her mother's cupped and braced bosom struck Rabbit in this moment of sexless and sorrowing encounter as a militant prow, part of a uniform's padding. He regretted that he had not enough praised Jill here, her boyish chest with its shallow faint shadows, where she had felt to herself shy and meager and yet had been soft enough in his mouth and hands, quite soft enough, and abundant, as grace is abundant, that we do not measure, but take as a presence, that abounds. In his mist, he heard the chief grunt introductions: Mr. and Mrs. Aldridge. Rabbit remembered in Jill's song the tax lawyer from Westerly, but the man remained blank for him; he had eyes only for the woman, for this wrong-way reincarnation of Jill. She had Jill's composure, less fragilely; even her despairing way of standing with her hands heavy at her sides, at a loss, was Jill's. Rabbit wondered, Has she come from identifying the remains? What was left but blackened bones? Teeth. A bracelet. A flesh colored swatch of hair. "Hey," he said to her, "I'm sick about this."