He asks, "You're gonna stay at your parents'?"
Janice looks up past the jacket to him, seeking his face. "I can't stand it, really. Mother nags so. You can see she's been primed not to say anything to me, but it keeps coming out, she keeps using the phrase `public opinion.' As if she's a Gallup poll. And Daddy. For the first time, he seems pathetic to me. Somebody is opening a Datsun agency in one of the shopping centers and he feels really personally threatened. I thought," Janice says, her dark eyes resting on his face lightly, ready to fly if what she sees there displeases her, "I might get an apartment somewhere. Maybe in Peggy's building. So Nelson could walk to school in West Brewer again. I'd have Nelson, of course." Her eyes dart away.
Rabbit says, "So the car is sort of a swap."
"More of a peace offering."
He makes the peace sign, then transfers it to his head, as horns. She is too dumb to get it. He tells her, "The kid is pretty miserable, maybe you ought to take him. Assuming you're through with Whatsisname."
"We're through."
"Why? "
Her tongue flicks between her lips, a mannerism that once struck him as falsely sensual but seems inoffensive now, like licking a pencil. "Oh," Janice says. "We'd done all we could together. He was beginning to get jittery. Your sweet sister didn't help, either."
"Yeah. I guess we did a number on him." The "we" – him, her, Mim, Mom; ties of blood, of time and guilt, family ties. He does not ask her for more description. He has never understood exactly about women, why they have to menstruate for instance, or why they feel hot some times and not others, and how close the tip of your prick comes to their womb or whether the womb is a hollow place without a baby in it or what, and instinct disposes him to consign Stavros to that same large area of feminine mystery. He doesn't want to bring back any lovelight into her eyes, that are nice and quick and hard on him, the prey.
Perhaps she had prepared to tell him more, how great her love was and how pure it will remain, for she frowns as if checked by his silence. She says, "You must help me with Nelson. All he'll talk to me about is this terrible mini-bike your sister bought him."
He gestures at the burned green shell. "My clothes weren't the only thing went up in that."
"The girl. Were she and Nelson close?"
"She was sort of a sister. He keeps losing sisters."
"Poor baby boy."
Janice turns and they look together at where they lived. Some agency, the bank or the police or the insurance company, has put up a loose fence of posts and wire around it, but children have freely approached, picking the insides clean, smashing the windows, storm windows and all, in the half that still stands. Some person has taken the trouble to bring a spray can of yellow paint and has hugely written NIGGER on the side. Also the word KILL. The two words don't go together, so it is hard to tell which side the spray can had been on. Maybe there had been two spray cans. Demanding equal time. On the broad stretch of aluminum clapboards below the windows, where in spring daffodils come up and in summer phlox goes wild, yellow letters spell in half-script, Pig Power = Clean Power. Also there is a peace sign and a swastika, apparently from the same can. And other people, borrowing charred sticks from the rubble, have come along and tried to edit and add to these slogans and symbols, making Pig into Black and Clean into Cong. It all adds up no better than the cluster of commercials TV stations squeeze into the chinks between programs. A clown with a red spray can has scrawled between two windows TRICK OR TREAT.
Janice asks, "Where was she sleeping?"
"Upstairs. Where we did."
"Did you love her?" For this her eyes leave his face and contemplate the trampled lawn. He remembers that this camel coat has a detachable hood for winter, that snaps on.
He confesses to her, "Not like I should have. She was sort of out of my class." Saying this makes him feel guilty, he imagines how hurt Jill would be hearing it, so to right himself he accuses Janice: "If you'd stayed in there, she'd still be alive somewhere."
Her eyes lift quickly. "No you don't. Don't try to pin that rap on me, Harry Angstrom. Whatever happened in there was your trip." Her trip drowns babies; his burns girls. They were made for each other. She offers to bring the truth into neutral. "Peggy says the Negro was doping her, that's what Billy says Nelson told him."
"She wanted it, he said. The Negro."
"Strange he got away."
"Underground Railroad."
"Did you help him? Did you see him after the fire?"
"Slightly. Who says I did?"
"Nelson."
"How did he know?"
"He guessed."
"I drove him south into the county and let him off in a cornfield."
"I hope he's not ever going to come back. I'd call the police, I mean, I would if-" Janice lets the thought die, premature.
Rabbit feels heightened and frozen by this giant need for tact; he and she seem to be slowly revolving, afraid of jarring one another away. "He promised he won't." Only in glory.
Relieved, Janice gestures toward the half-burned house. "It's worth a lot of money," she says. "The insurance company wants to settle for eleven thousand. Some man talked to Daddy and offered nineteen-five as is. I guess the lot is worth eight or nine by itself, this is becoming such a fashionable area."
"I thought Brewer was dying."
"Only in the middle."
"I tell you what. Let's sell the bastard."
"Let's."
They shake hands. He twirls the car keys in front of her face. "Lemme drive you back to your parents'."
"Do we have to go there?"
"You could come to my place and visit Mom. She'd love to see you. She can hardly talk now."
"Let's save that," Janice says. "Couldn't we just drive around?"
"Drive around? I'm not sure I still know how to drive."
"Peggy says you drove her Chrysler."
"Gee. A person doesn't have many secrets in this county."
As they drive east on Weiser toward the city, she asks, "Can your mother manage the afternoon alone?"
"Sure. She's managed a lot of them."
"I'm beginning to like your mother, she's quite nice to me, over the phone, when I can understand what she's saying."
"She's mellowing. Dying I guess does that to you." They cross the bridge and drive up Weiser in the heart of Brewer, past the Wallpaper Boutique, the roasted peanut newsstand, the expanded funeral home, the great stores with the facades where the pale shadow of the neon sign for the last owner underlies the hopeful bright sign the new owners have put up, the new trash disposal cans with tops like flying saucers, the blank marquees of the deserted movie palaces. They pass Pine Street and the Phoenix Bar. He announces, "I ought to be out scouting printshops for a job, maybe move to another city. Baltimore might be a good idea."
Janice says, "You look better since you stopped work. Your color is better. Wouldn't you be happier in an outdoor job?"
"They don't pay. Only morons work outdoors anymore."
"I would keep working at Daddy's. I think I should."
"What does that have to do with me? You're going to get an apartment, remember?"
She doesn't answer again. Weiser is climbing too close to the mountain, to Mt. Judge and their old homes. He turns left on Summer Street. Brick three-stories with fanlights; optometrists' and chiropractors' signs. A limestone church with a round window. He announces, "We could buy a farm."
She makes the connection. "Because Ruth did."
"That's right, I'd forgotten," he lies, "this was her street." Once he ran along this street toward the end and never got there. He ran out of steam after a few blocks and turned around. "Remember Reverend Eccles?" he asks Janice. "I saw him this summer. The Sixties did a number on him, too."
Janice says, "And speaking of Ruth, how did you enjoy Peggy?"