"Next? Pennoak, I think. Nothing happened. They beat us."
"They won? Didn't we beat them?"
"Oh hell no. They were good. They had five good players. What'd we have? Just me, really. We had Harrison, who was O.K., but after that football injury he never had the touch, really."
"Ronnie Harrison?" Ruth asks.
Rabbit is startled. "You know him?" Harrison had been a notorious bedbug.
"I'm not sure," she says, complacently enough.
"Shortish guy with kinky hair. A little bitty limp."
"No, I don't know," she says. "I don't think so." She is pleasingly dexterous with the chopsticks, and keeps one hand lying palm up on her lap. He loves when she ducks her head, that thick simple neck moving forward making the broad tendons on her shoulder jump up, to get her lips around a piece of something. Pinched with just the right pressure between the sticks; funny how plump women have that delicate touch. Margaret shovels it in with her dull bent silver.
"We didn't win," Tothero repeats, and calls, "Waiter." When the boy comes Tothero asks for another round of the same drinks.
"No, not for me, thanks," Rabbit says. "I'm high enough on this as it is."
"You're just a big clean—living kid, aren't you, you," Margaret says. She doesn't even know his name yet. God, he hates her.
"The thing, I started to say, the thing you said that really helped me,"Rabbit says to Tothero, "is that business about almost touching your thumbs on the two—handers. That's the whole secret, really, getting the ball in front of your hands, where you get that nice lifty feeling. Just zwoops off." His hands show how.
"Oh, Harry," Tothero says sadly, "you could shoot when you came to me. All I gave you was the will to win. The will to achievement."
"You know my best night," Rabbit says, "my best night wasn't that forty—pointer that time against Allenville, it was in my junior year, we went down to end of the county real early in the season to play, a funny little hick school, about a hundred in all six grades; what was its name? Bird's Nest? Something like that. You'll remember."
"Bird's Nest," Tothero says. "No."
"It was the only time I think we ever scheduled them. Funny little square gymnasium where the crowd sat up on the stage. Some name that meant something."
"Bird's Nest," Tothero says. He is bothered. He keeps touching his ear.
"Oriole!" Rabbit exclaims, perfect in joy. "Oriole High. This little kind of spread—out town, and it was early in the season, so it was kind of warm still, and going down in the bus you could see the things of corn like wigwams out in the fields. And the school itself kind of smelled of cider; I remember you made some joke about it. You told me to take it easy, we were down there for practice, and we weren't supposed to try, you know, to smother 'em."
"Your memory is better than mine," Tothero says. The waiter comes back and Tothero takes his drink right off the tray, before the boy has a chance to give it to him.
"So," Rabbit says. "We go out there and there are these five farmers clumping up and down, and we get about fifteen points up right away and I just take it easy. And there are just a couple dozen people sitting up on the stage and the game isn't a league game so nothing matters much, and I get this funny feeling I can do anything, just drifting around, passing the ball, and all of a sudden I know, you see, I know I can do anything. The second half I take maybe just ten shots, and every one goes right in, not just bounces in, but doesn't touch the rim, like I'm dropping stones down a well. And these farmers running up and down getting up a sweat, they didn't have more than two substitutes, but we're not in their league either, so it doesn't matter much to them, and the one ref just leans over against the edge of the stage talking to their coach. Oriole High. Yeah, and then afterwards their coach comes down into the locker room where both teams are changing and gets a jug of cider out of a locker and we all passed it around. Don't you remember?" It puzzles him, yet makes him want to laugh, that he can't make the others feel what was so special. He resumes eating. The others are done and on their second drinks.
"Yes, sir, Whosie, you're a real sweet kid," Margaret tells him.
"Pay no attention, Harry," Tothero says, "that's the way tramps talk."
Margaret hits him: her hand flies up from the table and across her body into his mouth, flat, but without a slapping noise.
"Touché," Ruth says. Her voice is indifferent. The whole thing is so quiet that the Chinaman, clearing their dishes away, doesn't look up, and seems to hear nothing.
"We're going, by jingo," Tothero announces, and tries to stand up, but the edge of the table hits his thighs, and he can stand no higher than a hunchback. The slap has left a little twist in his mouth that Rabbit can't bear to look at, it's so ambiguous and blurred, such a sickly mixture of bravado and shame and, worst, pride or less than pride, conceit. This deathly smirk emits the words, "Are you coming, my dear?"
"Son of a bitch," Margaret says, yet her little hard nut of a body slides over, and she glances behind her to see if she is leaving anything, cigarettes or a purse. "Son of a bitch," she repeats, and there is something friendly in the level way she says it. Both she and Tothero seem calmer now, on the move.
Rabbit starts to push up from the table, but Tothero sets a rigid urgent hand on his shoulder, the coach's touch, that Rabbit had so often felt on the bench, just before the pat on the bottom that sent him into the game. "No, no, Harry. You stay. One apiece. Don't let our vulgarity distract you. I couldn't borrow your car, could I?"
"Huh? How would I get anywhere?"
"Quite right, you're quite right. Forgive my asking."
"No, I mean, you can if you want =" In fact he feels deeply reluctant to part with a car that is only half his.
Tothero sees this. "No no. It was an insane thought. Good night."
"You bloated old bastard," Margaret says to him. He glances toward her, then down fuzzily. She is right, Harry realizes, he is bloated; his face is lopsided like a tired balloon. Yet this balloon peers down at him as if there was some message bulging it, heavy and vague like water.
"Where will you go?" Tothero asks.
"I'll be fine. I have money. I'll get a hotel," Rabbit tells him. He wishes, now that he has refused him a favor, that Tothero would go.
"The door of my mansion is open," Tothero says. "There's the one cot only, but we can make a mattress –"
"No, look," Rabbit says severely. "You've saved my life, but I don't want to saddle you. I'll be fine. I can't thank you enough anyway."
"We'll talk sometime," Tothero promises. His hand twitches, and accidentally taps Margaret's thigh.
"I could kill you," Margaret says at his side, and they go off, looking from the back like father and daughter, past the counter where the waiter whispers with the American girl, and out the glass door, Margaret first. The whole thing seems so settled: like little wooden figures going in and out of a barometer.
"God, he's in sad shape."
"Who isn't?" Ruth asks.
"You don't seem to be."
"I eat, is what you mean."
"No, listen, you have some kind of complex about being big. You're not fat. You're right in proportion."
She laughs, catches herself, looks at him, laughs again and squeezes his arm and says, "Rabbit, you're a Christian gentleman." Her using his own name enters his ears with unsettling warmth.
"What she hit him for?" he asks, giggling in fear that her hands, resting on his forearm, will playfully poke his side. He feels in her grip the tension of this possibility.
"She likes to hit people. She once hit me."
"Yeah, but you probably asked for it."
She replaces her hands on the table. "So did he. He likes being hit."
He asks, "You know him?"