Rabbit Redux

Worst of all, Harry had to talk to Jill's mother on the telephone. The police had broken the news to her and her tone fluctuated between a polite curiosity about how Jill came to be living in this house and a grieved outrage seeking its ceiling, a bird cramped in a cage of partial comprehension.

"She was staying with me, yes, since before Labor Day," Rabbit told her, over the downstairs phone, in the dark living room, smelling of furniture polish and Mom's medicine. "Before that she had been bumming around in Brewer with a crowd of Negroes who hung out at a restaurant they've closed down since. I thought she'd be better off with me than with them."

"But the police said there was a Negro."

"Yeah. He was a friend of hers. He kind of came and went." Each time he was made to tell this story, he reduced the part Skeeter played, begi

"How are you sure?"

"I just am. Look, Mrs. -"

"Aldridge." And this, of all things, her second husband's name, set her to crying.

He fought through her sobbing. "Look, it's hard to talk now, I'm dead beat, my kid's in the next room, if we could talk face to face, I could maybe explain -"

The outrage tested a wing. "Explain! Can you explain her back to life?"

"No, I guess not."

The politeness returned. "My husband and I are flying to Philadelphia tomorrow morning and renting a car. Perhaps we should meet."

"Yeah. I'd have to take off from work, except for the lunch hour."

"We'll meet at the West Brewer police station," the distant voice said with surprising firmness, a sudden pinch of authority. "At noon."

Rabbit had never been there before. The West Brewer Borough Hall was a brick building with white trim, set diagonally on a plot of grass and flower beds adjacent to the tall madhouse, itself really an addition to the original madhouse, a granite mansion built a century ago by one of Brewer's iron barons. All this land had belonged to that estate. Behind the borough hall stretched a long cement-block shed with a corrugated roof, some doors were open and Rabbit saw trucks, a steamroller, the spidery black machine that tars roads, the giant arm that lifts a man in a basket to trim branches away from electric wires. These appliances of a town's housekeeping seemed to him part of a lost world of blameless activity; he would never be allowed to crawl back into that world. Inside the town hall, there were wickets where people could pay their utilities bills, paneled doors labelled in flaking gold Burgess and Assessor and Clerk. Gold arrows pointed downstairs to the Police Department. Rabbit saw too late that he could have entered this half-basement from the side, saving himself the curious gaze of ten town employees. The cop behind the greentopped counter looked familiar, but it took a minute for the sidebums to register. The collegiate type. Harry was led down a hall past mysterious rooms; one brimmed with radio equipment, another with filing cabinets, a third gave on a cement stairway leading still further down. The dungeon. Jail. Rabbit wanted to run down into this hole and hide but was led into a fourth room, with a dead green table and metal folding chairs. The broke

"Yes-s." Her bright eyes passed over his head. "Over the phone, I was so stupid, you mentioned explaining."

Had he? What had he wanted to explain? That it was not his fault. Yet Nelson thought it was. For taking her in? But she was unsheltered. For fucking her? But it is all life, sex, fire, breathing, all combination with oxygen, we shimmer at all moments on the verge of conflagration, as the madhouse windows tell us. Rabbit tried to remember. "You had asked about Skeeter, why I was sure he hadn't set the fire."

"Yes. Why were you?"

"He loved her. We all did."

"You all used her?"

"In ways."

"In your case" – strange precision, clubwoman keeping a meeting within cha

He guessed at what the word meant. "I never forced it," he said. "I had a house and food. She had herself. We gave what we had."

"You are a beast." Each word was too distinct; the sentence had been lying in her mind and had warped and did not quite fit.

"O.K., sure," he conceded, refusing to let her fly, to let that caged outrage escape her face and scream. Stepdaddy behind her coughed and shifted weight, preparing to be embarrassed. Harry's guts felt suspended and transparent, as before a game. He was matched against this glossy woman in a way he was never matched with Jill. Jill had been too old for him, too wise, having been born so much later. This little pug, her money and rasping clubwoman voice aside, was his generation, he could understand what she wanted. She wanted to stay out ofharm's way. She wanted to have some fun and not be blamed. At the end she wanted not to have any apologizing to do to any heavenly committee. Right now she wanted to tame the ravenous miracle of her daughter's being cast out and destroyed. Mrs. Aldridge touched her cheeks in a young gesture, then let her hands hang heavy beside her hips.

"I'm sorry," she said. "There are always . . . circumstances. I wanted to ask, were there any . . . effects."

"Effects?" He was back with blackened bones, patterns of teeth, melted bracelets. He thought of the bracelets girls in high school used to wear, chains with name-tags, Dorene, Margaret, Mary A

"Her brothers asked me . . . some memento…"

Brothers? She had said. Three. One Nelson's age.

Mrs. Aldridge stepped forward, bewildered, hoping to be helpful. "There was a car."

"They sold the car," Rabbit said, too loudly. "She ran it without oil and the engine seized up and she sold it for junk."

His loudness alarmed her. He was still indignant, about the waste of that car. She took a step backward, protesting, "She loved the car."

She didn't love the car, she didn't love anything we would have loved, he wanted to tell Mrs. Aldridge, but maybe she knew more than he, she was there when Jill first saw the car, new and white, her father's gift. Rabbit at last found in his mind an "effect." "One thing I did find," he told Mrs. Aldridge, "her guitar. It's pretty well burned, but-"