He looks at her anxiously. "You know it's square. I didn't want to, Mom made me. The stores were disgusting, all full of materialism."
"What stores did she go to?" Rabbit asked. "How the hell did she pay for all this junk?"
"She opened charge accounts everywhere, Dad. She bought herself some clothes too, a really neat thing that looks like pajamas only it's O.K. to wear to parties if you're a woman, and stuff like that. And I got a suit, kind of grayey-green with checks, really cool, that we can pick up in a week when they make the alterations. Doesn't it feel funny when they measure you?"
"Do you remember, who was the name on the accounts? Me or Springer?"
Jill for a joke has put on one of his new shirts and tied her hair in a tail behind with one of his wide new neckties. To show herself off she twirls. Nelson, entranced, can scarcely speak. At her merry.
"The name on her driver's license, Dad. Isn't that the right one?"
"And the address here? All those bills are going to come here?"
"Whatever's on the driver's license, Dad. Don't go heavy on me, I told her I just wanted blue jeans. And a Che Guevara sweatshirt, only there aren't any in Brewer."
Jill laughs. "Nelson, you'll be the best-dressed radical at West Brewer Junior High. Harry, these neckties are silk!"
"So it's war with that bitch."
"Dad, don't. It wasn't my fault."
"I know that. Forget it. You needed the clothes, you're growing."
"And Mom really looked neat in some of the dresses."
He goes to the window, rather than continue to be heavy on the kid. He sees his own car, the faithful Falcon, slowly pull out. He sees for a second the shadow of Janice's head, the way she sits at the wheel hunched over, you'd think she'd be more relaxed with cars, having grown up with them. She had been waiting, for what? For him to come out? Or was she just looking at the house, maybe to spot Jill? Or homesick. By a tug of tension in one cheek he recognizes himself as smiling, seeing that the flag decal is still on the back window, she hasn't let Stavros scrape it off.
"We've been raped, we've been raped!"
– BACKGROUND VOICE ABOARD SOYUZ 5
ONE DAY in September Rabbit comes home from work to find another man in the house. The man is a Negro. "What the hell," Rabbit says, standing in the front hall beside the three chime tubes.
"Hell, man, it's revolution, right?" the young black says, not rising from the mossy brown armchair. His glasses flash two silver circles; his goatee is a smudge in shadow. He has let his hair grow out so much, into such a big ball, that Rabbit didn't recognize him at first.
Jill rises, quick as smoke, from the chair with the silver threads. "You remember Skeeter?"
"How could I forget him?" He goes forward a step, his hand lifted ready to be shaken, the palm tingling with fear; but since Skeeter makes no move to rise, he lets it drop back to his side, unsullied.
Skeeter studies the dropped white hand, exhaling smoke from a cigarette. It is a real cigarette, tobacco. "I like it," Skeeter says. "I like your hostility, Chuck. As we used to say in Nam, it is my meat."
"Skeeter and I were just talking," Jill says; her voice has changed, it is more afraid, more adult. "Don't I have any rights?"
Rabbit speaks to Skeeter. "I thought you were in jail or something."
"He is out on bail," Jill says, too hastily.
"Let him speak for himself."
Wearily Skeeter corrects her. "To be precise, I am way out on bail. I have jumped the blessed thing. I am, as they would say, desired by the local swine. I have become one hot item, right?"
"It would have been two years," Jill says. "Two years for nothing, for not hurting anybody, not stealing anything, for nothing, Harry."
"Did Babe jump bail too?"
"Babe is a lady," Skeeter goes on in this tone of weary mincing precision. "She makes friends easy, right? I have no friends. I am known far and wide for my lack of sympathetic qualities." His voice changes, becomes falsetto, cringing. "Ali is one baad niggeh." He has many voices, Rabbit remembers, and none of them exactly his.
Rabbit tells him, "They'll catch you sooner or later. Jumping bail makes it much worse. Maybe you would have gotten off with a suspended sentence."
"I have one of those. Officialdom gets bored with handing them out, right?"
"How about your being a Vietnam veteran?"
"How about it? I am also black and unemployed and surly, right? I seek to undermine the state, and Of Massah State, he cottons on."
Rabbit contemplates the set of shadows in the old armchair, trying to feel his way. The chair has been with them ever since their marriage, it comes from the Springers' attic. This nightmare must pass. He says, "You talk a cool game, but I think you panicked, boy."
"Don't boy me."
Rabbit is startled; he had meant it neutrally, one outlaw to another. He tries to amend: "You're just hurting yourself. Go turn yourself in, say you never meant to jump."
Skeeter stretches luxuriously in the chair, yawns, inhales and exhales. "It dawns upon me," he says, "that you have a white gentleman's concept of the police and their exemplary works. There is nothing, let me repeat no thing, that gives them more pleasurable sensations than pulling the wings off of witless poor black men. First the fingernails, then the wings. Truly, they are constituted for that very sacred purpose. To keep me off your back and under your smelly feet, right?"
"This isn't the South," Rabbit says.
"Hee-yah! Friend Chuck, have you ever considered conning for po-litical office, there can't be a county clerk left who believes the sweet things you do. The news is, the South is everywhere. We are fifty miles from the Mason-Dixon line where we sit, but way up in Detroit they are shooting nigger boys like catfish in a barrel. The news is, the cotton is in. Lynching season is on. In these Benighted States, everybody's done become a cracker." A brown hand delicately gestures from the shadows, then droops. "Forgive me, Chuck. This is just too simple for me to explain. Read the papers."
"I do. You're crazy."
Jill horns in. "The System is rotten, Harry. The laws are written to protect a tiny elite."
"Like people who own boats in Stonington," he says.
"Score one," Skeeter calls, "right?"
Jill flares. "What of it, I ran away from it, I reject it, I shit on it, Harry, where you're still loving it, you're eating it, you're eating my shit. My father's. Everybody's. Don't you see how you're used?"
"So now you want to use me. For him."
She freezes, white. Her lips thin to nothing. "Yes."
"You're crazy. I'd be risking jail too."
"Harry, just a few nights, until he can hustle up a stake. He has family in Memphis, he'll go there. Skeeter, right?"
"Right, sugar. Oh so right."