He says, "I don't know what I've been doing."
"I would say so. Mom talked to me for an hour. The way she is now, that's a lot of talking."
"What d'ya think of Mom now? Now that you have all this perspective."
"She was a great woman. With nowhere to put it."
"Well, is where you put it any better?"
"It involves less make-believe."
"I don't know, you look pretty fantastic to me."
"Thanks."
"What'd she say? Mom."
"Nothing you don't know, except Janice calls her a lot."
"I knew that. She's called a couple times since Sunday, I can't stand it to talk to her."
"Why not?"
"She's too wild. She doesn't make any sense. She says she's getting a divorce but never starts it, she says she'll sue me for burning her house and I tell her I only burned my half. Then she says she'll come get Nelson but never comes, I wish the hell she would."
"What does it mean to you, her being wild like this?"
"I think she's losing her buttons. Probably drinking like a fish."
Mim turns her profile to blunt the cigarette in the saucer serving as an ashtray. "It means she wants back in." Mim knows things, Rabbit realizes proudly. Wherever you go in some directions, Mim has been there. The direction where she hasn't been is the one that has Nelson in it, and the nice hot slap of the slug being made beside your left hand. But these are old directions, people aren't going that way any more. Mim repeats, "She wants you back."
"People keep telling me that," Rabbit says, "but I don't see much evidence. She can find me if she wants to."
Mim crosses her pants legs, aligns the stripes, and lights another cigarette. "She's trapped. Her love for this guy is the biggest thing she has, it's the first step out she's taken since she drowned that baby. Let's face it, Harry. You kids back here in the sticks still believe in ghosts. Before you screw you got to square it with old Jack Frost, or whatever you call him. To square skipping out with herself she has to make it a big deal. So. Remember as kids those candy jars down at Spottsie's you reached inside of to grab the candy and then you couldn't get your fist out? If Janice lets go to pull her hand out she'll have no candy. She wants it out, but she wants the candy too; no, that's not exactly it, she wants the idea of what she's made out of the candy in her own mind. So. Somebody has to break the jar for her."
"I don't want her back still in love with this greaseball."
"That's how you have to take her."
"The son of a bitch, he even has the nerve, sitting there in these snappy suits, he must make three times what I do just cheating people, he has the fucking nerve to be a dove. One night we all sat in this restaurant with him and me arguing across the table about Vietnam and them playing touch-ass side by side. You'd like him, actually, he's your type. A gangster."
Patiently Mim is sizing him up: one more potential customer at the bar. "Since when," she asks, "did you become such a war lover? As I remember you, you were damn glad to wriggle out of that Korean thing."
"It's not all war I love," he protests, "it's this war. Because nobody else does. Nobody else understands it."
"Explain it to me, Harry."
"It's a, it's a kind of head fake. To keep the other guy off balance. The world the way it is, you got to do something like that once in a while, to keep your options, to keep a little space around you." He is using his arms to show her his crucial concept of space. "Otherwise, he gets so he can read your every move and you're dead."
Mim asks, "You're sure there is this other guy?"
"Sure I'm sure." The other guy is the doctor who shakes your hand so hard it hurts. I know best. Madness begins in that pinch.
"You don't think there might just be a lot of little guys trying to get a little more space than the system they're under lets them have?"
"Sure there are these little guys, billions of 'em" – billions, millions, too much of everything – "but then also there's this big guy trying to put them all into a big black bag. He's crazy, so so must we be. A little."
She nods like a type of doctor herself. "That fits," she says. "Be crazy to keep free. The life you been leading lately sounds crazy enough to last you a while."
"What did I do wrong? I was a fucking Good Samaritan. I took in these orphans. Black, white, I said Hop aboard. Irregardless of color or creed, Hop aboard. Free eats. I was the fucking Statue of Liberty."
"And it got you a burned-down house."
"O.K. That's other people. That's their problem, not mine. I did what felt right." He wants to tell her everything, he wants his tongue to keep pace with this love he feels for this his sister; he wants to like her, though he feels a forbidding denseness in her, of too many conclusions reached when he wasn't there. He tells her, "I learned some things."
"Anything worth knowing?"
"I learned I'd rather fuck than be blown."
Mim removes a crumb, as of tobacco but the cigarette is filtered, from her lower lip. "Sounds healthy," she says. "Rather unAmerican, though."
"And we used to read books. Aloud to each other."
"Books about what?"
"I don't know. Slaves. History, sort of."
Mim in her stripey clown costume laughs. "You went back to school," she says. "That's sweet." She used to get better marks than he did, even after she began with boys: A's and B's against his B's and C's. Mom at the time told him girls had to be smarter, just to pull even. Mim asks, "So what'd you learn from these books?"
"I learned" – he gazes at a corner of a room, wanting to get this right: he sees a cobweb above the sideboard, gesturing in some ceiling wind he cannot feel -"this country isn't perfect." Even as he says this he realizes he doesn't believe it, any more than he believes at heart that he will die. He is tired of explaining himself. "Speaking of sweet," he says, "how is your life?"
"Ca va. That's French for, It goes. Va bene."
"Somebody keeping you, or is it a new one every night?"
She looks at him and considers. A glitter of reflexive anger snipes at her mask of eye makeup. Then she exhales and relaxes, seeming to conclude, Well he's my brother. "Neither. I'm a career girl, Harry. I perform a service. I can't describe it to you, the way it is out there. They're not bad people. They have rules. They're not very interesting rules, nothing like Stick your hand in the fire and make it up to Heaven. They're more like, Ride the exercise bicycle the morning after. The men believe in flat stomach muscles and sweating things out. They don't want to carry too much fluid. You could say they're puritans. Gangsters are puritans. They're narrow and hard because off the straight path you don't live. Another rule they have is, Pay for what you get because anything free has a rattlesnake under it. They're survival rules, rules for living in the desert. That's what it is, a desert. Look out for it, Harry. It's coming East."
"It's here. You ought to see the middle of Brewer; it's all parking lots."
"But the things that grow here you can eat, and the sun is still some kind of friend. Out there, we hate it. We live underground. All the hotels are underground with a couple of the windows painted blue. We like it best at night, about three in the morning, when the big money comes to the crap table. Beautiful faces, Harry. Hard and blank as chips. Thousands flow back and forth without any expression. You know what I'm struck by back here, looking at the faces? How soft they are. God they're soft. You look so soft to me, Harry. You're soft still standing and Pop's soft curling under. If we don't get Janice propped back under you you're going to curl under too. Come to think of it, Janice is not soft. She's hard as a nut. That's what I never liked about her. I bet I'd like her now. I should go see her."
"Sure. Do. You can swap stories. Maybe you could get her a job on the West Coast. She's pretty old but does great things with her tongue."
"That's quite a hang-up you have there."
"I just said, nobody's perfect. How about you? You have some specialty, or just take what comes?"