tries to sort out picking up his car and then his kid. Or should he pick up the kid first? He wants more to see the kid. It would be quicker to walk over to Mrs. Springer’s, she lived closer. But suppose she was watching out the window for him to come so she could pop out and tell him how tired Janice looked? Who wouldn’t be tired after tramping around trying to buy something with you you miserable nickel-hugger? You fat hag. You old gypsy. If he had the kid along this might not happen. Rabbit likes the idea of walking up from his mother’s place with his boy. Two-and-a-half, Nelson walks like a trooper, with choppy stubborn steps. They’d walk along in the day’s last light under the trees and then like magic there would be Daddy’s car at a curb. But it will take longer this way, what with his own mother talking slyly and round-about about how incompetent Janice is. It ruined him when his mother went on like that; maybe she did it just to kid him, but he couldn’t take her lightly, she was somehow too powerful, at least with him. He had better go for the car first and pick the kid up with it. But he doesn’t want to do it this way. He just doesn’t. The problem knits in front of him and he feels sickened by the intricacy.
Janice calls from the kitchen, “And honey pick up a pack of cigarettes could you?” in a normal voice that says everything is forgiven, everything is the same.
Rabbit freezes, standing looking at his faint yellow shadow on the white door that leads to the hall, and senses he is in a trap. It seems certain. In disgust he goes out.
Outdoors it is growing dark and cool. The Norwegian maples exhale the smell of their sticky new buds and the broad living-room windows along Wilbur Street show beyond the silver patch of a television set the warm bulbs burning in kitchens, like fires at the backs of caves. He walks downhill. The day is gathering itself in. He now and then touches with his hand the rough bark of a tree or the dry twigs of a hedge, to give himself the small answer of a texture. At the corner, where Wilbur Street meets Potter Avenue, a mailbox stands leaning in twilight on its concrete post. Tall two-petaled street sign, the cleat-gouged trunk of the telephone pole holding its insulators against the sky, fire hydrant like a golden bush: a grove. He used to love to climb the poles. To shinny up from a friend’s shoulders until the ladder of spikes came to your hands, to get up to where you could hear the wires sing. Terrifying motionless whisper. It always tempted you to fall, to let the hard spikes in your palms go and feel the space on your back, feel it take your feet and ride up your spine as you fell. He remembers how hot your hands felt at the top, rubbed full of splinters from getting up to where the spikes began. Listening to the wires as if you could hear what people were saying, what all that secret adult world was about. The insulators giant blue eggs in a windy nest.
As he walks along Potter Avenue the wires at their silent height strike into and through the crowns of the breathing maples. At the next corner, where the water from the ice plant used to come down, sob into a drain, and reappear on the other side of the street, Rabbit crosses over and walks beside the gutter where the water used to run, coating the shallow side of its course with ribbons of green slime waving and waiting to slip under your feet and dunk you if you dared walk on them. He can remember falling in but not why he was walking along this slippery edge in the first place. Then he remembers. To impress the girls—Lotty Bingaman, Margaret Schoelkopf, sometimes June Cobb and Mary Hoyer—he walked home from grade school with. Margaret’s nose would often start bleeding, for no reason. She had worn high button shoes.
He turns down Kegerise Street, a narrow gravel alley curving past the blank back side of a small box factory where mostly middle-aged women work, the cement-block face of a wholesale beer outlet, and a truly old stone farmhouse, now boarded up, one of the oldest buildings in town, thick crude