"I made you," he says. "I made you and the sun and the stars." Squeezing her in his arms it seems that he did. She is tepid and solid in his embrace, not friendly, not not. The filmy smell of soap lifts into his nostrils while dampness touches his jaw. She has washed her hair. Clean, she is clean, a big clean woman; he puts his nose against her skull to drink in the demure sharp scent. He thinks of her naked in the shower, her hair hanging oozy with lather, her neck bowed to the whipping water. "I made you bloom," he says.
"Oh you're a wonder," she answers, and pushes away from his chest. As he hangs up his suits tidily, Ruth asks, "You give your wife the car?"
"There was nobody there. I snuck in and out. I left the key inside."
"And nobody caught you?"
"As a matter of fact somebody did. The Episcopal minister gave me a ride back into Brewer."
"Say; you are religious, aren't you?"
"I didn't ask him."
"What did he say?"
"Nothing much."
"What was he like?"
"Kind of creepy. Giggled a lot."
"Maybe just you make him giggle."
"I'm supposed to play golf with him on Tuesday."
"You're kidding."
"No, really. I told him I don't know how."
She laughs, on and on, in that prolonged way women use when they're excited by you and ashamed of it. "Oh my Rabbit," she exclaims in a fond final breath. "You just grab what comes, don't you?"
"He got hold of me," he insists, knowing his attempts to explain will amuse her, for shapeless reasons. "I didn't do anything."
"You poor soul," she says. "You're just irresistible."
With keen secret relief, he at last takes off his dirty clothes and changes into clean underwear, fresh socks, and suntans. He left his razor at home but Ruth has a little curved female one for armpits that he uses. He chooses a wool sports shirt, for these afternoons in spring cool off sharply, and puts his suede shoes back on. He forgot to steal any other shoes. "Let's go for that walk," he announces, dressed.
"I'm reading," Ruth says from a chair. The book is open to near the end. She reads books nicely, without cracking their backs, though they cost only 35¢. She has combed her hair and put it back in a roll at the nape of her neck.
"Come on. Get out in the weather." He goes over and tries to tug the mystery from her hand. The title is The Deaths at Oxford. Now what should she care about deaths at Oxford? When she has him here, wonderful Harry Angstrom.
"Wait," she pleads, and turns a page, and reads some sentences as the book is pulled slowly up, her eyes shuttling, and then suddenly lets him take it. "God, you're a bully."
He marks her place with a burnt match and looks at her bare feet. "Do you have sneakers or anything? You can't wear heels."
"No. Hey I'm sleepy."
"We'll go to bed early."
Her eyeballs turn on him at this, her lips pursed a little. There is this vulgarity in her, that just couldn't let that just go by.
"Come on," he says. "Put on flat shoes and we'll get your hair
"I'll have to wear heels, they're all I have." As she bows her head to pinch them on, the white line of her parting makes him smile, it's so straight. Like a little birthday girl's parting.
They approach the mountain through the city park. The trash baskets and movable metal benches have not been set out yet. On the concrete—and—plank benches fluffy old men sun like greater pigeons, dressed in patches of gray multiple as feathers. The trees in small leaf dust the half—bare ground with shadow. Sticks and strings protect the newly seeded margins of the unraked gravel walks. The breeze, flowing steadily down the slope from the empty bandshell, is cool out of the sun. The wool shirt was right. Pigeons with mechanical heads waddle away from their shoetips and resettle, chuffling, behind them. A derelict stretches an arm along the back of a bench to dry, and out of a gouged face daintily sneezes like a cat. A few toughs, fourteen or younger, smoke and jab near the locked equipment shed of a play pavilion on whose yellow boards someone has painted in red TEX & JOSIE, RITA & JAY. Where would they get red paint? He takes Ruth's hand. The ornamental pool in front of the bandshell is drained and scum—stained; they move along a path parallel to the curve of its cold lip, which echoes back the bandshell's silence. A World War II tank, made a monument, points its empty guns at far—off clay tennis courts. The nets are not up, the lines unlimed.
Trees darken; pavilions slide downhill. They walk through the upper region of the park, which delinquents haunt at night, scattering condoms and candy—bar wrappers. The beginning of the steps is almost hidden in an overgrowth of great bushes tinted dull amber with the first buds. Long ago, when hiking was customary entertainment, the city built stairs up the Brewer side of the mountain. They are made of six—foot tarred logs with dirt filled in flat behind them. Iron pipes have since been driven, to hold these tough round risers in place, and fine blue gravel scattered over the packed dirt they dam. The footing is difficult for Ruth; Rabbit watches her body struggle to propel her weight on the digging points of her heels. They catch and buckle. Her backside lurches, her arms swim for balance.
He tells her, "Take off your shoes."
"And kill my feet? You're a thoughtful bastard."
"Well then, let's go back down."
"No, no," she says. "We must be halfway."
"We're nowhere near half up. Take off your shoes. These blue stones are stopping; it'll just be mashed—down dirt."
"With chunks of glass in it."
But further on she does take off her shoes. Bare of stockings, her white feet lift lightly under his eyes; the yellow skin of her heels flickers. Under the swell of calf her ankles are thin. In a fond gesture he takes off his shoes and socks, to share whatever pain there is. The dirt is trod smooth, but embedded pebbles stab his skin with the force of his weight. Also the ground is cold. "Ouch," he says. "Owitch."
"Come on, soldier," she says, "be brave."
They learn to walk on the grass at the ends of the logs. Tree branches overhang part of the way, making it an upward tunnel. At other spots the air is clear behind them, and they can look over the rooftops of Brewer into the twentieth story of the courthouse, the city's one skyscraper. Concrete eagles stand in relief, wings flared, between its top windows. Two middle—aged couples in plaid scarves, bird—watchers, pass them on the way down; as soon as this couple has descended out of sight behind the gnarled arm of an oak, Rabbit hops up to Ruth's step and kisses her, hugs her hot bulk, tastes the salt in the sweat on her face, which is unresponsive. She thinks this is a silly time; her one—eyed woman's mind is intent on getting up the hill. But the thought of her city girl's paper—pale feet bare on the stones for his sake makes his heart, pumping with exertion, swell, and he clings to her broad body. An airplane goes over, rapidly rattling the air.
"My queen," he says, "my good horse."
"Your what?"
"Horse."
Near the top, the mountain rises sheer in a cliff, and here modem men have built concrete stairs with an iron railing that in a Z of three flights reach the macadam parking lot of the Pinnacle Hotel. Ruth and Rabbit put their shoes back on and, climbing the stairs, watch the city slowly flatten under them.
Rails guard the cliff edge. He grips one white beam, warmed by the sun that now is sinking away from the zenith, and looks straight down, into the exploding heads of trees. A frightening view, remembered from boyhood, when he used to wonder ifyou jumped would you die or be cushioned on those green heads as on the clouds of a dream? In the lower part of his vision the stonewalled cliff rises to his feet foreshortened to the narrowness of a knife; in the upper part the hillside slopes down, faint paths revealed and random clearings and the steps they have climbed.
Ruth's gaze, her lids half—closed as if she were reading a book, rests on the city.
O.K. He brought them up here. To see what? The city stretches from dollhouse rows at the base of the park through a broad blurred belly of flowerpot red patched with tar roofs and twinkling cars and ends as a rose tint in the mist that hangs above the distant river. Gas tanks glimmer in this smoke. Suburbs lie like scarves in it. But the city is huge in the middle view, and he opens his lips as if to force the lips of his soul to receive the taste of the truth about it, as if truth were a secret in such low solution that only immensity can give us a sensible taste. Air dries his mouth.
His day has been bothered by God: Ruth mocking, Eccles blinking – why did they teach you such things if no one believed them? It seems plain, standing here, that if there is this floor there is a ceiling, that the true space in which we live is upward space. Someone is dying. In this great stretch of brick someone is dying. The thought comes from nowhere: simple percentages. Someone in some house along these streets, if not this minute then the next, dies; and in that suddenly stone chest the heart of this flat prostrate rose seems to him to be. He moves his eyes to find the spot; perhaps he can see the cancer—blackened soul of an old man mount through the blue like a monkey on a string. He strains his ears to hear the pang of release as this ruddy illusion at his feet gives up this reality. Silence blasts him. Chains of cars creep without noise; a dot comes out of a door. What is he doing here, standing on air? Why isn't he home? He becomes frightened and begs Ruth, "Put your arm around me."
She carelessly obliges, taking a step and swinging her haunch against his. He clasps her tighter and feels better. Brewer at their feet seems to warm in the sloping sunlight: its vast red cloth seems to lift from the valley in which it is sunk concavely, to fill like a breast with a breath, Brewer the mother of a hundred thousand, shelter of love, ingenious and luminous artifact. So it is in a return of security that he asks, voicing like a loved child a teasing doubt, "Were you really a hooer?"
To his surprise she turns hard under his arm and twists away and stands beside the railing menacingly. Her eyes narrow; her chin changes shape. In his nervousness he notices three Boy Scouts staring at them across the asphalt. She asks, "Are you really a rat?"