Harry protests. "I'm not that alone. I have a kid with me."
"Man has to have tail," Buchanan is continuing.
"Play, Babe," a dark voice shouts from a dark booth. Rufe bobs his head and switches on the blue spot. Babe sighs and offers Jill what is left of Skeeter's joint. Jill shakes her head and gets out of the booth to let Babe out. Rabbit thinks the girl is leaving and discovers himself glad when she sits down again, opposite him. He sips his Stinger and she chews the ice from her lemonade while Babe plays again. This time the boys in the poolroom softly keep at their game. The clicking and the liquor and the music mix and make the space inside him very big, big enough to hold blue light and black faces and "Honeysuckle Rose" and stale smoke sweeter than alfalfa and this apparition across the way, whose wrists and forearms are as it were translucent and belonging to another order of creature; she is not yet grown. Her womanliness is attached to her, it floats from her like a little zeppelin he can almost see. And his inside space expands to include beyond Jimbo's the whole world with its arrowing wars and polychrome races, its continents shaped like ceiling stains, its strings of gravitational attraction attaching it to every star, its glory in space as of a blue marble swirled with clouds; everything is warm, wet, still coming to birth but himself and his home, which remains a strange dry place, dry and cold and emptily spinning in the void of Penn Villas like a cast-off space capsule. He doesn't want to go there but he must. He must. "I must go," he says, rising.
"Hey, hey," Buchanan protests. "The night hasn't even got itself turned around to get started yet."
"I ought to be home in case my kid can't stand the kid he's staying with. I promised I'd visit my parents tomorrow, if they didn't keep my mother in the hospital for more tests."
"Babe will be sad, you sneaking out. She took a shine to you."
"Maybe that other guy she took a shine to will be back. My guess is Babe takes a shine pretty easy."
"Don't you get nasty."
"No, I love her, Jesus. Tell her. She plays like a whiz. This has been a terrific change of pace for me." He tries to stand, but the table edge confines him to a crouch. The booth tilts and he rocks slightly, as if he is already in the slowly turning cold house he is heading toward. Jill stands up with him, obedient as a mirror.
"One of these times," Buchanan continues beneath them, "maybe you can get to know Babe better. She is one good egg."
"I don't doubt it." He tells Jill, "Sit down."
"Aren't you going to take me with you? They want you to."
"Gee. I hadn't thought to."
She sits down.
"Friend Harry, you've hurt the little girl's feelings. Nasty must be your middle name."
Jill says, "Far as creeps like this are concerned, I have no feelings. I've decided he's queer anyway."
"Could be," Buchanan says. "It would explain that wife."
"Come on, let me out of the booth. I'd like to take her -'
"Then help yourself, friend. On me."
Babe is playing "Time After Time." Itell myself that I'm.
Harry sags. The table edge is killing his thighs. "O.K., kid. Come along."
"I wouldn't dream of it."
"You'll be bored," he feels in honesty obliged to add.
"You've been had," she tells him.
"Jilly now, be gracious for the gentleman." Buchanan hastily pushes out of the booth, lest the combination tumble, and lets Harry slide out and leans against him confidentially. Geezers. His breath rises bad, from under the waxed needles. "Problem is," he explains, the last explaining he will do tonight, "it don't look that good, her being in here, under age and all. The fuzz now, they aren't absolutely unfriendly, but they hold us pretty tight to the line, what with public opinion the way it is. So it's not that healthy for anybody. She's a poor child needs a daddy, is the simple truth of it."
Rabbit asks her, "How'd he die?"
Jill says, "Heart. Dropped dead in a New York theater lobby. He and my mother were seeing Hair."
"O.K. Let's shove." To Buchanan Rabbit says, "How much for the drinks? Wow. They're just hitting me."
"On us," is the answer, accompanied by a wave of a palm the color of silver polish. "On the black community." He has to wheeze and chuckle. Struggling for solemnity: "This is real big of you, man. You're a big man."
"See you at work Monday."
"Jilly-love, you be a good girl. We'll keep in touch."
"I bet."
Disturbing, to think that Buchanan works. We all work. Day selves and night selves. The belly hungers, the spirit hungers. Mouths munch, cunts swallow. Monstrous. Soul. He used to try to picture it when a child. A parasite like a tapeworm inside. A sprig of mistletoe hung from our bones, living on air. A jellyfish swaying between our lungs and our liver. Black men have more, bigger. Cocks like eels. Night feeders. Their touching underbelly smell on buses, their dread of those clean dry places where Harry must be. He wonders if he will be sick. Poison in those Stingers, on top of moonburgers.
Babe shifts gears, lays out six chords like six black lead slugs slapping into the tray, and plays, "There's a Small Hotel." With a wishing well.
With this Jill, then, Rabbit enters the street. On his right, toward the mountain, Weiser stretches sallow under blue street lights. The Pinnacle Hotel makes a tattered blur, the back of the Sunflower Beer clock shows yellow neon petals; otherwise the great street is dim. He can remember when Weiser with its five movie marquees and its medley ofneon outlines appeared as gaudy as a carnival midway. People would stroll, children between them. Now the downtown looks deserted, sucked dry by suburban shopping centers and haunted by rapists. LOCAL HOODS ASSAULT ELDERLY, last week's Vat had headlined. In the original version of the head LOCAL had been BLACK.
They turn left, toward the Running Horse Bridge. River moisture cools his brow. He decides he will not be sick. Never, even as an infant, could stand it; some guys, Ronnie Harrison for one, liked it, throw up after a few beers or before a big game, joke about the corn between their teeth, but Rabbit needed to keep it down, even at the cost of a bellyache. He still carries from sitting in Jimbo's the sense of the world being inside him; he will keep it down. The city night air. The ginger of tar and concrete baked all day, truck traffic lifted from it like a lid. Infrequent headlights stroke this girl, catching her white legs and thin dress as she hangs on the curb hesitant.
She asks, "Where's your car?"
"I don't have any."
"That's impossible."
"My wife took it when she left me."
"You didn't have two?"
"No." This is really a rich kid.
"I have a car," she says.
"Where is it?"
"I don't know."
"How can you not know?"
"I used to leave it on the street up near Babe's place off of Plum, I didn't know it was somebody's garage entrance, and one morning they had taken it away."
"And you didn't go after it?"
"I didn't have the money for any fine. And I'm scared of the police, they might check me out. The staties must have a bulletin on me."