O.K.” He is uncertain what to do now. They sit looking at the empty plate that had held a pyramid of sesame cakes; they have eaten them all. The waiter, when he comes, is surprised to see this; his eyes go from the plate to Rabbit to Ruth, all in a second. The check amounts to $9.60. Rabbit puts a ten and a one on top of it, and besides these bills he puts a ten and a five. He counts what’s left in his wallet; three tens and four ones. When he looks up, Ruth’s money has vanished from the slick table. He stands up and takes her little soft coat and holds it for her, and like a great green fish, his prize, she heaves across and up out of the booth and coldly lets herself be fitted into it. He calculates, a dime a pound.
And that’s not counting the restaurant bill. He takes the bill to the counter and gives the girl a ten. She makes change with a frown; the frightening vacancy of her eyes is methodically ringed with mascara. The purple simplicity of her kimono does not go with her frizzly permed hair and rouged, concave, deprived face. When she puts his coins on the pink cleats of the change pad, he flicks his band in the air above the silver, adds the dollar to it, and nods at the young Chinese waiter, who is perched attentively beside her. “Thank you very much, sir. Thank you very much,” the boy says to him. But his gratitude does not even last until they are out of sight. As they move toward the glass door he turns to the cashier and in a reedy, perfectly inflected voice completes his story: “—and then this other cat says, ‘But man, mine was helium!’ ”
With this Ruth, Rabbit enters the street. On his right, away from the mountain, the heart of the city shines: a shuffle of lights, a neon outline of a boot, of a peanut, of a top hat, of an enormous sunflower erected, the stem of green neon six stories high, along one building to symbolize Sunflower Beer, the yellow center a second moon, the shuffling headlights glowworms in the grass. One block down, a monotone bell tolls hurriedly, and as long as knives the red-tipped railroad-crossing gates descend, slicing through the soft mass of neon, and the traffic slows, halts.
Ruth turns left, toward the shadow of Mt. Judge, and Rabbit follows; they walk uphill on the rasping pavement. The slope of cement is a buried assertion, an unexpected echo, of the land that had been here before the city. For Rabbit the pavement is a shadow of the Daiquiri’s luminous transparence; he is gay, and skips once, to get in step with his love. Her eyes are turned up, toward where the Pinnacle Hotel adds it coarse constellation to the stars above Mt. Judge. They walk together in silence while behind them a freight train chuffs and screaks through the crossing.
He recognizes his problem; she dislikes him now, like that whore in Texas. “Hey,” he says. “Have you ever been up to the top there?”
“Sure. In a car.”
“When I was a kid,” he says, “we used to walk up from the other side. There’s a sort of gloomy forest, and I remember once I came across an old house, just a hole in the ground with some stones, where I guess a pioneer had had a farm.”
“The only time I ever got up there was in a car with some eager beaver.”
“Well, congratulations,” he says, annoyed by the self-pity hiding in her toughness.
She bites at being uncovered. “What do you think I care about your pioneer?” she asks.
“I don’t know. Why shouldn’t you? You’re an American.”
“How? I could just as easy be a Mexican.”
“You never could be, you’re not little enough.”
“You know, you’re a pig really.”
“Oh now baby,” he says, and puts his arm around the substance of her waist, “I think I’m sort of neat.”
“Don’t tell me.”
She turns left, off Weiser, out of his arm. This street is Summer. Brick rows, not so much run down as well worn. The house numbers are set in fanlights of stained glass above the doors. The apple-and-orange-colored light of a small grocery store shows the silhouettes of some kids hanging around the corner. The supermarkets are driving these little stores out of business, make them stay open all night.