ONCE that first weekend of riots and rumors is over, the summer isn't so bad; the gas lines never get so long again. Stavros says the oil companies have the price hike they wanted for now, and the government has told them to cool it or face an excess profits tax. Melanie says the world will turn to the bicycle, as Red China has already done; she has bought herself a twelve?speed Fuji with her waitress's wages, and on fair days pedals around the mountain and down, her chestnut curls flying, through Cityview Park into Brewer. Toward the end of July comes a week of record heat; the papers are full of thermal statistics and fuzzy photographs of the time at the turn of the century when the trolley tracks warped in Weiser Square, it was so hot. Such heat presses out from within, against our clothes; we want to break out, to find another self beside the sea or in the mountains. Not until August will Harry and Janice go to the Poconos, where the Springers have a cottage they rent to other people for July. All over Brewer, air?conditioners drip onto patios and into alleyways.

 

On an afternoon of such hot weather, with his Corona still having bodywork done, Harry borrows a Caprice trade?in from the lot and drives southwest toward Galilee. On curving roads he passes houses of sandstone, fields of corn, a cement factory, a billboard pointing to a natural cave (didn't natural caves go out of style a while ago?), and another billboard with a great cutout of a bearded Amishman advertising "Authentic Dutch Smorgasbord'' Galilee is what they call a string town, a hilly row of house with a feed store at one end and a tractor agency at the other. In the middle stands an old wooden inn with a deep porch all along the second story and a renovated restaurant on the first with a window full of credit card stickers to catch the busloads of tourists that come up from Baltimore, blacks most of them, God knows what they hope to see out here in the sticks. A knot of young locals is hanging around in front of the Rexall's, you never used to see that in farm country, they'd be too busy with the chores. There is an old stone trough, a black?lacquered row of hitching posts, a glossy new bank, a traffic island with a monument Harry cannot make out the meaning of, and a small brick post office with its bright silver letters GALILEE up a side street that in a block dead?ends at the edge of a field. The woman in the post office tells Harry where the Nunemacher farm is, along R. D. 2. By the landmarks she gives him ? a vegetable stand, a pond rimmed with willows, a double silo close to the road ? he feels his way through the tummocks and swales of red earth crowded with shimmering green growth, merciless vegetation that allows not even the crusty eroded road embankments to rest barren but makes them bear tufts and mats of vetch and honeysuckle vines and fills the stagnant hot air with the haze of exhaled vapor. The Caprice windows are wide open and the Brewer disco station fades and returns in twists of static as the land and electrical wires obtrude. NUNEMACHER is a faded name on a battered tin mailbox. The house and barn are well back from the road, down a long dirt lane, brown stones buried in pink dust.

 

Rabbit's heart rises in his chest. He cruises the road, surveying the neighboring mailboxes; but Ruth gave him, when he once met her by accident in downtown Brewer a dozen years ago, no clue to her new name, and the girl a month ago refused to write hers in his showroom ledger. All he has to go by, other than Nunemacher's being his daughter's neighbor, if she is his daughter, is Ruth's mentioning that her husband besides being a farmer ran a fleet of school buses. He was older than she and should be dead now, Harry figures. The school buses would be gone. The mailboxes along this length of road say BLANKENBILLER, MUTH, and BYER. It is not easy to match the names with the places, as glimpsed in their hollows, amid their trees, at the end of their lanes of grass and dirt. He feels conspicuous, gliding along in a magenta Caprice, though no other soul emerges from the wide landscape to observe him. The thickwalled houses hold their inhabitants in, this hazy mid?afternoon too `hot for work. Harry drives down a lane at random and stops and backs around in the beaten, rutted space between the buildings while some pigs he passed in their pen set up a commotion of snorting and a fat woman in an apron comes out of a door of the house. She is shorter than Ruth and younger than Ruth would be now, with black hair pulled tight beneath a Mennonite cap. He waves and keeps going. This was the Blankenbillers, he sees by the mailbox as he pulls onto the road again.

 

The other two places are nearer the road and he thinks he might get closer on foot. He parks on a widened stretch of shoulder, packed earth scored by the herringbone of tractor tire treads. When he gets out of the car, the powerful sweetish stench of the Blankenbillers' pigsty greets him from a distance, and what had seemed to be silence settles into his ear as a steady dry hum of insects, an undercoat to the landscape. The flowering weeds of mid?summer, daisies and Queen Anne's lace and chicory, thrive at the side of the road and tap his pants legs as he hops up onto the bank. In his beige summerweight salesman's suit he prowls behind a hedgerow of sumac and black gum and wild cherry overgrown with poison ivy, shining leaves of it big as valentines and its vines having climbed to the tips of strangled trees. The roughly shaped sandstones of a tumbled old wall lie within this hedgerow, hardly one upon another. At a gap where wheeled vehicles have been driven through he stands surveying the cluster of buildings below him ? barn and house, asbestos?sided chicken house and slat?sided corn crib, both disused, and a newish building of cement?block with a roof of corrugated overlapped Fiberglas. Some kind of garage, it looks like. On the house roof has been mounted a copper lightning rod oxidized green and an H?shaped television aerial, very tall to catch the signals out here. Harry means only to survey, to relate this layout to the Nunemacher spread across the next shaggy rise, but a soft clinking arising from somewhere amid the buildings, and the ripples a little runnel makes pouring itself into a small pond perhaps once for ducks, and an innocent clutter of old tractor seats and axles and a rusted iron trough in a neglected patch between the woodpile and the mowed yard lure him downward like a species of music while he chums in his head the story he will tell if approached and challenged. This soft dishevelled farm feels like a woman's farm, in need of help. An unreasonable expectancy brings his heart up to the pitch of the surrounding insect?hum.

 

Then he sees it, behind the barn, where the woods are encroaching upon what had once been a cleared space, sumac and cedar in the lead: the tilted yellow shell of a school bus. Its wheels and windows are gone and the snub hood of its cab has been torn away to reveal a hollow space where an engine was cannibalized; but like a sunken galleon it testifies to an empire, a fleet of buses whose proprietor has died, his widow left with an illegitimate daughter to raise. The land under Rabbit seems to move, with the addition of yet another citizen to the subterrain of the dead.

 

Harry stands in what once had been an orchard, where even now lopsided apple and pear trees send up sprays of new shoots from their gutted trunks. Though the sun burns, wetness at the root of the orchard grass has soaked his suede shoes. If he ventures a few steps farther he will be in the open and liable to be spotted from the house windows. There are voices within the house he can hear now, though they have the dim steady rumble that belongs to voices on radio or television. A few steps farther, he could distinguish these voices. A few steps farther still, he will be on the lawn, beside a plaster birdbath balanced off?center on a pillar of blue?tinted fluting, and then he will be committed to stride up bravely, put his foot on the low cement porch, and knock. The front door, set deep in its socket of stone, needs its green paint refreshed. From the tattered composition shingles of its roof to the dreary roller shades that hang in its windows the house exhales the tired breath of poverty.

 

What would he say to Ruth if she answered his knock?

 

Hi. You may not remember me . . .

 

Jesus. I wish I didn't.

 

No, wait. Don't close it. Maybe I can help you.

 

How the hell would you ever help me? Get out. Honest to God, Rabbit, just looking at you makes me sick.

 

I have money now.

 

I don't want it. I don't want anything that stinks of you. When I did need you, you ran.

 

O.K., O.K. But let's look at the present situation. There's this girl of ours

 

Girl, she's a woman. Isn't she lovely? I'm so proud.

 

Me too. We should have had lots. Great genes.

 

Don't be so fucking cute. I've been here for twenty years, where have you been?

 

It's true, he could have tried to look her up, he even knew she lived around Galilee. But he hadn't. He hadn't wanted to face her, the complicated and accusing reality of her. He wanted to hold her in his mind as just fucked and satisfied, lifting white and naked above him on an elbow. Before he drifted off to sleep she got him a drink of water. He does not know if he loved her or not, but with her he had known love, had experienced that cloudy inflation of self which makes us infants again and tips each moment with a plain excited purpose, as these wands of grass about his knees are tipped with packets of their own fine seeds.

 

A door down below slams, not on the sides of the house he can see. A voice sounds the high note we use in speaking to pets. Rabbit retreats behind an apple sapling too small to hide him. In his avidity to see, to draw closer to that mysterious branch of his past that has flourished without him, and where lost energy and lost meaning still flow, he has betrayed his big body, made it a target. He crowds so close to the little tree that his lips touch the bark of its crotch, bark smooth as glass save where darker ridges of roughness at intervals ring its gray. The miracle of it: how things grow, always remembering to be themselves. His lips have flinched back from the unintended kiss. Living microscopic red things ? mites, aphids, he can see them ? will get inside him and multiply.

 

"Hey!" a voice calls. A woman's voice, young on the air, frightened and light. Could Ruth's voice be so young after so many years?

 

Rather than face who it is, he runs. Up through the heavy orchard grass, dodging among the old fruit trees, breaking through as if a sure lay?up waits on the other side of the ragged hedgerow, onto the red tractor path and back to the Caprice, checking to see if he tore his suit as he trots along, feeling his age. He is panting; the back of his hand is scratched, by raspberries or wild rose. His heart is pounding so wildly he cannot fit the ignition key into the lock. When it does click in, the motor grinds for a few revolutions before catching, overheated from waiting in the sun. The female voice calling "Hey" so lightly hangs in his inner ear as the motor settles to its purr and he listens for pursuing shouts and even the sound of a rifle. These farmers all have guns and think nothing of using them, the years he worked as a typesetter for the Vat hardly a week went by without some rural murder all mixed in with sex and booze and incest.

 

But the haze of the country around Galilee hangs silent above the sound of his engine. He wonders if his figure had been distinct enough to be recognized, by Ruth who hadn't seen him since he'd put on all this weight or by the daughter who has seen him once, a month ago. They report this to the police and use his name it'll get back to Janice and she'll raise hell to hear he's been snooping after this girl. Won't wash so good at Rotary either. Back. He must get back. Afraid of getting lost the other way, he dares back around and head back the way he came, past the mailboxes. He decides the mailbox that goes with the farm he spied on down in its little tousled valley with the duck pond is the blue one saying BYER. Fresh sky blue, painted this summer, with a decal flower, the sort of decoration a young woman might apply.

 

Byer. Ruth Byer. His daughter's first name Jamie Nunemacher never pronounced, that Rabbit can recall.

 

 

 

He asks Nelson one night, "Where's Melanie? I thought she was working days this week."

 

"She is. She's gone out with somebody."

 

"Really? You mean on a date?"

 

The Phillies have been rained out tonight and while Janice and her mother are upstairs watching a Waltons rerun he and the kid find themselves in the living room, Harry leafing through the August Consumer Reports that has just come ("Are hair dyes safe?" "Road tests: 6 pickup trucks" "An alternative to the $2000 funeral") while the boy is looking into a copy of a book he has stolen from Fred Springer's old office at the lot, which has become Harry's. He doesn't look up. "You could call it a date. She just said she was going out."

 

"But with somebody."

 

"Sure."

 

"That's O.K. with you? Her going out with somebody?"

 

"Sure. Dad, I'm trying to read."

 

The same rain that has postponed the Phils against the Pirates at Three Rivers Stadium has swept east across the Commonwealth and beats on the windows here at 89 Joseph Street, into the lowspreading branches of the copper beech that is the pride of the grounds, and at times thunderously upon the roof and spouting of the front porch roof. "Lemme see the book," Harry begs, and from within the Barcalounger holds out a long arm. Nelson irritably tosses over the volume, a squat green handbook on automobile dealership written by some crony of old man Springer's who had an agency in Paoli. Harry has looked into it once or twice: mostly hot air, hotshot stuff geared to the greater volume you can expect in the Philly area. "This tells you," he tells Nelson, "more than you need to know."

 

"I'm trying to understand," Nelson says, "about the financing."

 

"It's very simple. The bank owns the new cars, the dealer owns the used cars. The bank pays Mid?Atlantic Toyota when the car leaves Maryland; also there's something called holdback that the manufacturer keeps in case the dealer defaults on parts purchases, but that he rebates annually, and that to be frank about it has the effect of reducing the dealer's apparent profit in case he gets one of these wiseass customers who takes a great interest in the numbers and figures he can jew you down. Toyota insists we sell everything at their list so there's not much room for finagling, and that saves you a lot of headaches in my opinion. If they don't like the price they can come back a month later and find it three hundred bucks higher, the way the yen is going. Another wrinkle about financing, though, is when the customer takes out his loan where we send him ? Brewer Trust generally, and though this magazine right here had an article just last month about how you ought to shop around for loans instead of going where the agency recommends it's a hell of a hassle actually to buck the system, just to save maybe a half of a per cent ? the bank keeps back a percentage for our account, supposedly to cover the losses of selling repossessed vehicles, but in fact it amounts to a kickback. Follow me? Why do you care?"

 

"Just interested."

 

"You should have been interested when your granddad Springer was around to be talked to. He ate this crap up. By the time he had sold a car to a customer the poor bozo thought he was robbing old Fred blind when the fact is the deal had angles to it like a spider web. When he wanted Toyota to give him the franchise, he claimed sixty thousand feet of extra service space that was just a patch of weeds, and then got a contractor who owed him a favor to throw down a slab and put up an uninsulated shell. That shop is still impossible to heat in the winter, you should hear 'Manny bitch."

 

Nelson asks, "Did they used to ever chop the clock?"

 

"Where'd you learn that phrase?"

 

"From the book."

 

"Well. ..." This isn't so bad, Harry thinks, talking to the kid sensibly while the rain drums down. He doesn't know why it makes him nervous to see the kid read. Like he's plotting something. They say you should encourage it, reading, but they never say why. "You know chopping the clock is a felony. But maybe in the old days sometimes a mechanic, up in the dashboard anyway, kind of had his screwdriver slip on the odometer. People who buy a used car know it's a gamble anyway. A car might go twenty thousand miles without trouble or pop a cylinder tomorrow. Who's to say? I've seen some amazing wear on cars that were running like new. Those VW bugs, you couldn't kill 'em. The body so rotten with rust the driver can see the road under his feet but the engine still ticking away." He tosses the chunky green book back. Nelson fumbles the catch. Harry asks him, "How do you feel, about your girlfriend's going out with somebody else?"

 

"I've told you before, Dad, she's not my girlfriend, she's my friend. Can't you have a friend of the opposite sex?"

 

"You can try it. How come she settled on moving back here with you then?"

 

Nelson's patience is being tried but Harry figures he might as wéll keep pushing, he's not learning anything playing the silent game. Nelson says, "She needed to blow the scene in Colorado and I was coming east and told her my grandmother's house had a lot of empty rooms. She's not been any trouble, has she?"

 

"No, she's charmed old Bessie right out of her sneakers. What was the matter with the scene in Colorado, that she needed to blow it?"

 

"Oh, you know. The wrong guy was putting a move on her, and she wanted to get her head together."

 

The rain restates its theme, hard, against the thin windows. Rabbit has always loved that feeling, of being inside when it rains. Shingles in the attic, pieces of glass no thicker than cardboard keeping him dry. Things that touch and yet not.

 

Delicately Harry asks, "You know the guy she's out with?"

 

"Yes, Dad, and so do you."

 

"Billy Fosnacht?"

 

"Guess again. Think older. Think Greek."

 

"Oh my God. You're kidding. That old crock?"

 

Nelson watches him with an alertness, a stillness of malice. He is not laughing, though the opportunity has been given. He explains, "He called up the Crépe House and asked her, and she thought Why not? It gets pretty boring around here, you have to admit. Just for a meal. She didn't promise to go to bed with him. The trouble with your generation, Dad, you can only think along certain lines."

 

"Charlie Stavros," Harry says, trying to get a handle on it. The kid seems in a pretty open mood. Rabbit dares go on, "You remember he saw your mother for a while."

 

"I remember. But everybody else around here seems to have forgotten. You all seem so cozy now."

 

"Times change. You don't think we should be? Cozy."

 

Nelson sneers, sinking lower into the depths of the old sofa. "I don't give that much of a damn. It's not my life."

 

"It was," Harry says. "You were right there. I felt sorry for you, Nelson, but I couldn't think what else to do. That poor girl Jill -"

 

"Dad -"

 

"Skeeter's dead, you know. Killed in a Philadelphia shootout. Somebody sent me a clipping."

 

"Mom wrote me that. I'm not surprised. He was crazy."

 

"Yeah, and then not. You know he said he'd be dead in ten years. He really did have a certain -"

 

"Dad. Let's cool this conversation."

 

"O.K. Suits me. Sure.

 

Rain. So sweet, so solid. In the garden the smallest scabs of earth, beneath the lettuce and lopsided bean leaves perforated by Japanese beetles, are darkening, soaking, the leaves above them glistening, dripping, in the widespread vegetable sharing of this secret of the rain. Rabbit returns his eyes to his magazine from studying Nelson's stubborn clouded face. The best type of fourslice toaster, he reads, is the one that has separate controls for each pair of toast slots. Stavros and Melanie, can you believe? Charlie had kept saying he had liked her style.

 

As if in apology for having cut his father off when the rain was making him reminiscent, Nelson breaks the silence. "What's Charlie's title over there, anyway?"

 

"Senior Sales Rep. He's in charge of the used cars and I take care of the new. That's more or less. In practice, we overlap. Along with Jake and Rudy, of course." He wants to keep reminding the kid of Jake and Rudy. No rich men's sons, they give a good day's work for their dollar.

 

"Are you satisfied with the job Charlie does for you?"

 

"Absolutely. He knows the ropes better than I do. He knows half the county."

 

"Yeah, but his health. How much energy you think he has?"

 

The question has a certain collegiate tilt to it. He hasn't asked Nelson enough about college, maybe that's the way through to him. All these women around, it's too easy for Nelson to hide. "Energy? He has to watch himself and take it easy, but he gets the job done. People don't like to be hustled these days, there was too much of that, the way the car business used to be. I think a salesman who's a little ? what's the word? ? laid back, people trust more. I don't mind Charlie's style." He wonders if Melanie does. Where are they, in some restaurant? He pictures her face, brighteyed almost like a thyroid bulge and her cheeks that look always rouged, rosy with exertion even before she bought the Fuji, her young face dense and smooth as she smiles and keeps smiling opposite old Charlie's classic con?man's profile, as he puts his move on her. And then later that business down below, his thick cock that blue?brown of Mediterranean types and, he wonders if her hair there is as curly as the hair on her head, in and out, he can't believe it will happen, while the rest of them sit here listening to the rain.

 

Nelson is saying, "I was wondering if something couldn't be done with convertibles." A heavy shamed diffidence thickens his words so they seem to drop one by one from his face, downturned where he sits in the tired gray sofa with his muskrat cut.

 

"Convertibles? How?"

 

"You know, Dad, don't make me say it. Buy 'em and sell 'em. Detroit doesn't make 'em anymore, so the old ones are more and more valuable. You could get more than you paid for Mom's Mustang."

 

"If you don't wreck it first."

 

This reminder has the effect Rabbit wants. "Shit," the boy exclaims, defenseless, darting looks at every comer of the ceiling looking for the escape hatch, "I didn't wreck your damn precious Corona, I just gave it a little dent."

 

"It's still in the shop. Some dent."

 

"I didn't do it on purpose, Christ, Dad, you act like it was some divine chariot or something. You've gotten so uptight in your old age."

 

"Have I?" He asks sincerely, thinking this might be information.

 

"Yes. All you think about is money and things."

 

"That's not good, is it?"

 

"No."

 

"You're right. Let's forget about the car. Tell me about college." "It's yukky," is the prompt response. "It's Dullsville. People think because of that shooting ten years ago it's some great radical place but the fact is most of the kids are Ohio locals whose idea of a terrific time is drinking beer till they throw up and having shaving cream fights in the dorms. Most of 'em are going to go into their father's business anyway, they don't care."

 

Harry ignores this, asking, "You ever have reason to go over to the big Firestone plant? I keep reading in the paper where they kept making those steel?belted radial five hundreds even after they kept blowing up on everybody."

 

"Typical," the boy tells him. "All the products you buy are like that. All the American products."

 

"We used to be the best," Harry says, staring into the distance as if toward a land where he and Nelson can perfectly agree.

 

"So I'm told." The boy looks downward into his book.

 

"Nelson, about work. I told your mother we'd make a summer job for you over there on wash?up and maintenance. You'd learn a lot, just watching Manny and the boys."

 

"Dad, I'm too old for wash?up. And maybe I need more than a summer job."

 

"Are you trying to tell me you'd drop out of college with one lousy year to go?"

 

His voice has grown loud and the boy looks alarmed. He stares at his father open?mouthed, the dark ajar spot making with his two eyesockets three holes, in a hollow face. The rain drums on the porch roof spout. Janice and her mother come down from The Waltons weeping. Janice wipes at her eyes with her fingers and laughs. "It's so stupid, to get carried away. It was in People how all the actors couldn't stand each other, that's what broke up the show."

 

"Well, they have lots of reruns," Ma Springer says, dropping onto the gray sofa beside Nelson, as if this little trip downstairs has been all her legs can bear. "I'd seen that one before, but still they get to you."

 

Harry announces, "The kid here says he may not go back to Kent."

 

Janice had been about to walk into the kitchen for a touch of Campari but freezes, standing. She is wearing just her short seethrough nightie over underpants in the heat. "You knew that, Harry," she says.

 

       Red bikini underpants, he notices, that show through as dusty pink. At the height of the heat wave last week she got her hair cut in Brewer by a man Doris Kaufinann goes to. He exposed the back of her neck and gave her bangs; Harry isn't used to them yet, it's as if a strange woman was slouching around here nearly naked. He almost shouts, "The hell I did. After all the money we've put into his education?"

 

"Well," Janice says, swinging so her body taps the nightie from within, "maybe he's got what he can out of it."

 

"I don't get all this. There's something fishy going on. The kid comes home with no explanation and his girlfriend goes out with Charlie Stavros while he sits here hinting to me I should can Charlie so I can hire him instead."

 

"Well," Ma Springer pronounces peacefully, "Nelson's of an age. Fred made space for you, Harry, and I know if he was here he'd make space for Nelson."

 

In on the dining?room sideboard, dead Fred Springer listens to the rain, misty?eyed.

 

"Not at the top he wouldn't," Harry says. "Not to somebody who quits college a few lousy credits short of graduating."

 

"Well Harry," Ma Springer says, as calm and mellow as if the TV show had been a pipe of pot, "some would have said you weren't so promising when Fred took you on. More than one person advised him against it."

 

Out in the country, under the ground, old Farmer Byer mourns his fleet of school buses, rotting in the rain.

 

"I was a forty?year?old man who'd lost his job through no fault of his own. I sat and did Linotype as long as there was Linotype."

 

"You worked at your father's trade," Janice tells him, "and that's what Nelson's asking to do."

 

"Sure, sure," Harry shouts, "when he gets out of college if that's what he wants. Though frankly I'd hoped he'd want more. But what is the rush? What'd he come home for anyway? If I'd ever been so lucky at his age to get to a state like Colorado I'd sure as hell have stayed at least the summer."

 

Sexier than she can know, Janice drags on a cigarette. "Why don't you want your own son home?"

 

"He's too big to be home! What's he running from?" From the look on their faces he may have hit on something, he doesn't know what. He's not sure he wants to know what. In the silence that answers him he listens again to the downpour, an incessant presence at the edge of their lamplight domain, gentle, insistent, unstoppable, a million small missiles striking home and running in rivulets from the face of things. Skeeter, Jill, and the Kent State Four are out there somewhere, bone dry.

 

"Forget it," Nelson says, standing up. "I don't want any job with this creep."

 

"What's he so hostile for?" Harry beseeches the women. "All I've said was I don't see why we should fire Charlie so the kid can peddle convertibles. In time, sure. In 1980, even. Take over, young America. Eat me up. But one thing at a time, Jesus. There's tons of time."

 

"Is there?" Janice asks strangely. She does know something. Cunts always know something.

 

He turns to her directly. "You. I'd think you'd be loyal to Charlie at least."

 

"More than to my own son?"

 

"I'll tell you this. I'll tell you all this. If Charlie goes, I go." He ?struggles to stand, but the Barcalounger has a sticky grip.

 

"Hip, hip hooray," Nelson says, yanking his denim jacket from the clothes tree inside the front door and shrugging it on. He looks humpbacked and mean, a rat going out to be drowned.

 

"Now he's going out to wreck the Mustang." Harry struggles to his feet and stands, taller than them all.

 

Ma Springer slaps her knees with open palms. "Well this discussion has ruined my mood. I'm going to heat up water for a cup of tea, the damp has put the devil in my joints."

 

Janice says, "Harry, say goodnight to Nelson nicely."

 

He protests, "He hasn't said goodnight nicely to me. I was down here trying to talk ni............