Rabbit Redux

IV. Mim

RABBIT is at his machine. His fmgers feather, the matrices rattle on high, the molten lead comfortably steams at his side.

ARSON SUSPECTED IN

PENN VILLAS BLAZE

Out-of-Stater Perishes

West Brewer police are still collecting testimony from neighbors in co

A guest in the home, Mill Jiss

A guest in the home, Miss Jill Pendleton, 18, of Stonington, Co

Miss Pendleton was pronounced dead on arrival at the Sister of Mercy Homeopathic Sisters of Mercy Homeopathic Hospital in Brewer.

A man reported seen in the vicinity of the dwelling, Hubert Johnson last of Plum Street, is being sought for questioning. Mr. Johnson is also known as "Skeeter" and sometimes gives his last name as ]Farnsworth.

Furnace Township fire chief Raymond "Buddy" Fessler told VAT reporters, "The fire was set I'm pretty sure, but we have no evidence of a Molotov cocktail or anything of that nature. This was not a bombing in the ordinary sense."

Neighbors are baffled by the event, reporting nothing unusual about the home but the skulking presence of a black man thought

Pajasek taps him on the shoulder.

"If that's my wife," Rabbit says. "Tell her to bug off. Tell her I'm dead."

"It's nobody on the phone, Harry. I need to have a word with you privately. If I may."

That "if I may" is what puts the chill into Harry's heart. Pajasek is imitating somebody higher up. He shuts his frosted-glass door on the clatter and with a soft thump sits at his desk; he slowly spreads his fingers on the mass of ink-smirched papers there. "More bad news, Harry," he says. "Can you take it?"

"Try me."

"I hate like Jesus to put this into you right on top of your misfortune with your home, but there's no use stalling. Nothing stands still. They've decided up top to make Verity an offset plant. We'll keep an old flatbed for the job work, but the Vat said either go offset or have them print in Philly. It's been in the cards for years. This way, we'll be geared up to take other periodicals, there's some new sheets starting up in Brewer, a lot of it filth in my book but people buy it and the law allows it, so there you are." From the way he sighs, he thinks he's made his point. His forehead, seen from above, is global; the worried furrows retreat to the horizon of the skull, where the brass-pale hair begins, wisps brushed straight back.

Rabbit tries to help him. "So no Linotypers, huh?"

Pajasek looks up startled; his eyebrows arch and drop and there is a moment of spherical smoothness, with a long clean highlight from the fluorescent tubes overhead. "I thought I made that point. That's part of the technical picture, that's where the economy comes. Offset, you operate all from film, bypass hot metal entirely. Go to a cathode ray tube, Christ, it delivers two thousand lines a minute, that's the whole Vat in seven minutes. We can keep a few men on, retrain them to the computer tape, we've worked the deal out with the union, but this is a sacrifice, Harry, from the management point of view. I'm afraid you're far down the list. Nothing to do with your personal life, understand me – strictly seniority. Your Dad's secure, and Buchanan, Christ, let him go we'd have every do-good outfit in the city on our necks, it's not the way I'd do things. If they'd come to me I would have told them, that man is half-soused from eleven o'clock on every morning, they're all like that, I'd just as soon have a moron with mittens on as long he was white -"

"O.K.," Rabbit says. "When do I knock off?"

"Harry, this hurts me like hell. You learned the skill and now the bottom's dropping out. Maybe one of the Brewer dailies can take you on, maybe something in Philly or up in Allentown, though what with papers dropping out or doubling up all over the state there's something of a glut in the trade right now."

"I'll survive. What did Kurt Schrack do?"

"Who he?"

"You know. The Schockelschtuhl guy."

"Christ, him. That was back in B.C. As I remember he bought a farm north of here and raises chickens. If he's not dead by now."

"Right. Die I guess would be the convenient thing. From the management point of view."

"Don't talk like that, Harry, it hurts me too much. Give me credit for some feelings. You're a young buck, for Chrissake, you got the best years still ahead of you. You want some fatherly advice? Get the hell out of the county. Leave the mess behind you. Forget that slob you married, no offense."

"No offense. About Janice, you can't blame her, I wasn't that great myself. But I can't go anywhere, I got this kid."

"Kid, schmid. You can't live your life that way. You got to reason outwards from Number One. To you, you're Number One, not the kid."

"That's not how it feels, exactly," Rabbit begins, then sees from the sudden gleaming globe of Pajasek's head bent to study the smirched slips on his desk that the man doesn't really want to talk, he wants Harry to go. So Rabbit asks, "So when do I go?"

Pajasek says, "You'll get two months' pay plus the benefits you've accumulated, but the new press is coming in this weekend, faster than we thought. Everything moves faster nowadays."

"Except me," Rabbit says, and goes. His father, in the bright racket of the shop, swivels away from his machine and gives him the thumbs down sign questioningly. Rabbit nods, thumbs down. As they walk down Pine Street together after work, feeling ghostly in the raw outdoor air after their day's immersion in fluorescence, Pop says, "I've seen the handwriting on the wall all along, whole new philosophy operating at the top now at Verity, one of the partner's sons came back from business school somewhere full of beans and crap. I said to Pajasek, `Why keep me on, I have less than a year before retirement?' and he says, `That's the reason.' I said to him, `Why not let me go and give my place to Harry?' and he says, `Same reason.' He's ru

Pop talks more than ever now, as if to keep Harry's mind cluttered; he clings to him like sanity. It has been a dreadful three days. All Sunday, on no sleep, he drove back and forth in Peggy's borrowed Fury through Brewer between Mt. Judge and Pe