"Where are you going?" he asks.
"Huh? Nowhere." Rabbit is distracted by the man's suit; it only feigns black. It is really blue, a sober but elegant, lightweight, midnight blue. While his little vest or bib or whatever is black as a stove. The effort of keeping the cigarette between his lips twists Eccles' laugh into a snort. He slaps the breasts of his coat. "Do you have a match by any chance?"
"Gee I'm sorry, no. I quit smoking."
"You're a better man than I am." He pauses and thinks, then looks at Harry with startled, arched eyebrows. The distention makes his gray eyes seem round and as pale as glass. "Can I give you a lift?"
"No. Hell. Don't bother."
"I'd like to talk to you."
"No; you don't really want to, do you?"
"I do, yes. Very much."
"Yeah. O.K." Rabbit picks up his clothes and walks around the front of the Buick and gets in. The interior has that sweet tangy plastic new—car smell; he takes a deep breath of it and it cools his fear. "This is about Janice?"
Eccles nods, staring out the rear window as he backs away from the curb. His upper lip overhangs his lower; there are scoops of weary violet below his eyes. Sunday would be his heavy day.
"How is she? What did she do?"
"She seems much saner today. She and her father came to church this morning." They drive down the street. Eccles adds nothing, just gazes through the windshield, blinking. He pokes the lighter in on the dashboard.
"I thought she'd be with them," Rabbit says. He is getting slightly annoyed at the way the minister isn't bawling him out or something; he doesn't seem to know his job.
The lighter pops. Eccles puts it to his cigarette, inhales, and seems to come back into focus. "Evidently," he says, "when you didn't come back in half an hour she called your parents and had your father bring your boy over to your apartment. Your father, I gather, was very reassuring and told her you had probably been sidetracked somewhere. She remembered you had been late getting home because of some street game and thought you might have gone back to it. I believe your father even walked around town looking for the game."
"Where was old man Springer?"
"She didn't call them. She didn't call them until two o'clock that morning, when I suppose the poor thing had given up all hope." "Poor thing" is one word on his lips, worn smooth.
Harry asks, "Not until two?" Pity grips him; his hands tighten on the bundle, as if comforting Janice.
"Around then. By then she was in such a state, alcoholic and otherwise, that her mother called me."
"Why you?"
"I don't know. People do." Eccles laughs. "They're supposed to; it's comforting. To me at least. I always thought Mrs. Springer hated me. She hadn't been to church in months." As he turns to face Rabbit, to follow up this joke, a little quizzical pang lifts his eyebrows and forces his broad mouth open.
"This was around two in the morning?"
"Between two and three."
"Gee, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to get you out of bed."
The minister shakes his head irritably. "That's not a consideration"
"Well I feel terrible about this."
"Do you? That's hopeful. Uh, what, exactly, is your plan?"
"I don't really have a plan. I'm sort of playing it by ear."
Eccles' laughter surprises him; it occurs to Rabbit that the minister is an expert on affairs like this – broken homes, fleeing husbands – and that "playing it by ear" has struck a fresh note. He feels flattered. Eccles has this knack.
"Your mother has an interesting viewpoint," the minister says. "She thinks it's all an illusion your wife and I have, that you've deserted. She says you're much too good a boy to do anything of the sort."
"You've been busy on this, haven't you?"
"This, and a death yesterday."
"Gee, I'm sorry."
They have been driving idly, at low speed, through the familiar streets; once they passed the ice plant, and at another point rounded a corner from which you can see across the valley to the next ridge of hills. "Say, if you really want to give me a lift," Rabbit says, "you could drive over into Brewer."
"You don't want me to take you to your wife?"
"No. Good grief. I mean I don't think it would do any good, do you?"
For a long time it seems that the other man didn't hear him; his tidy, tired profile stares through the windshield as the big car hums forward steadily. Harry has taken the breath to repeat himself when Eccles says, "Not if you don't want good to come of it."
The matter seems ended this simply. They drive down Potter Avenue toward the highway. The sunny streets have just children on them, some of them still in their Sunday—school clothes. Little girls wear pastel organdy dresses that stick straight out from their waists. Their ribbons match their socks.
Eccles asks, "What did she do that made you leave?"
"She asked me to buy her a pack of cigarettes."
Eccles doesn't laugh as he had hoped; he seems to dismiss the remark as impudence, a little over the line. But it was the truth. "It's the truth. It just felt like the whole business was fetching and hauling, all the time trying to hold this mess together she was making all the time. I don't know, it seemed like I was glued in with a lot of busted toys and empty glasses and the television going and meals late or never and no way of getting out. Then all of a sudden it hit me how easy it was to get out, just walk out, and by damn it was easy."
"For less than two days, it's been."
"It's been not only easy. It's been strange, too." Rather than try to describe the strangeness, he asks, "What's Janice going to do, do you think?"
"She doesn't know. Your wife seems almost paralyzed; she doesn't want anyone to do anything."
"Poor kid. She's such a mutt."
"Why are you here?"
" 'Cause you caught me."
"I mean why were you in front of your home?"
"I came back to get clean clothes."
"Do clean clothes mean so much to you? Why cling to that decency if trampling on the others is so easy?"
Rabbit feels now the danger of talking; his words are coming back to him, little hooks and snares are being fashioned. "Also I was leaving her the car."
"Why? Don't you need it, to explore your freedom in?"
"I just thought she should have it. Her father sold it to us cheap. Anyway it didn't do me any good."
"No?" Eccles stubs his cigarette out in the car ashtray and goes to his coat pocket for another. They are rounding the mountain, at the highest stretch of road, where the hill rises too steeply on one side and falls too steeply on the other to give space to a house or gasoline station. The river darkly shines down below. "Now if 1 were to leave my wife," he says, "I'd get into a car and drive a thousand miles." It almost seems like advice, coming calmly from above the white collar.
"That's what I did!" Rabbit cries, delighted by how much they have in common. "I drove as far as West Virginia. Then I thought the hell with it and came back." He must try to stop swearing; he wonders why he's doing it. To keep them apart, maybe; he feels a dangerous tug drawing him toward this man.
"Should I ask why?"
"Oh I don't know. A combination of things. It seemed safer to be in a place I know."
"You didn't come back to protect your wife?"
Rabbit is wordless at the idea.
Eccles continues, "You speak of this feeling of muddle. What do you think it's like for other young couples? In what way do you think you're exceptional?"
"You don't think there's any answer to that but there is. I once did something right. I played first—rate basketball. I really did. And after you're first—rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second—rate. And that little thing Janice and I had going, boy, it was really second—rate."