and walks off and he sees her back is open halfway down her spine. So a little bit of black bra shows. Compared with this her skin isn’t black at all, just a nice thick soft color that brings a little honest life into here. Purple shadows swing on the flats of her back where the light hits. She has a pigeon-toed way of sauntering, swinging those orange frills. She doesn’t care about him; he likes that, that she doesn’t care. The thing about Ruth is lately she’s been trying to make him feel guilty about something.
“Don’t fall in,” she tells him.
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You’re right you’re not doing anything.”
If this is a threat, he doesn’t like threats.
Margaret comes and the guy with her, he isn’t very happy to see, is Ronnie Harrison. Margaret says to him, “Hello, you. Are you still hanging on?”
“Hell,” Harrison says, “it’s the great Angstrom,” as if he’s trying to take Tothero’s place in every way. “I’ve been hearing about you,” he adds slimily.
“Hearing what?”
“Oh. The word.”
Harrison was never one of Rabbit’s favorites and has not improved. In the locker room he was always talking about making out and playing with himself under his little hairy pot of a belly and that pot has really grown. Harrison is fat. Fat and half bald. His kinky brass-colored hair has thinned and the skin of his scalp shows, depending on how he tilts his head. This pink showing through seems obscene to Rabbit, like the pink bald idea that is always showing through Harrison’s talk. Still, he remembers one night when Harrison came back into the game after losing two teeth to somebody’s elbow and tries to be glad to see him. There were just five of you out there at one time and the other four for that time were unique in the world.
But it seems long ago, and every second Harrison stands there smirking it seems longer. He is wearing a narrow-shouldered summer suit of some linen imitation and having this nifty self-satisfied cloth hanging beside his ear annoys Rabbit. He feels hemmed in. The problem is, who shall sit where? He and Ruth have gotten on opposite sides of the table, which was the mistake. Harrison decides, and ducks down to sit beside Ruth, with a little catch in the movement that betrays the old limp from his football injury. Rabbit becomes obsessed by Harrison’s imperfections. He’s ruined the effect of his Ivy League suit by wearing a black wool tie like a wop. When he opens his mouth the two false teeth don’t quite match the others.
“Well, how’s life treating the old Master?” he says. “The word is you got it made.” His eyes make his meaning by flicking sideways to Ruth, who sits there like a lump, her hands folded around the Daiquiri. Her knuckles are red from washing dishes. When she lifts the glass to drink, her chin shows through distorted.
Margaret wriggles at Rabbit’s side. She feels somehow like Janice: jumpy. Her presence in the left corner of his vision feels like a dark damp cloth approaching that side of his face.
“Where’s Tothero?” he asks her.
“Totherwho?”
Ruth giggles, damn her. Harrison bends his head toward her, pink showing, and whispers a remark. Her lips tuck up in a smile; it’s just like that night in the Chinese place, anything he says will please her, except that tonight he is Harrison and Rabbit sits across from them married to this girl he hates. He’s sure what Harrison whispers is about him, “the old Master.” From the second there were four of them it was clear he was going to be the goat. Like Tothero that night.
“You know damn well who,” he tells Margaret. “Tothero.”
“Our old coach, Harry!” Harrison cries, and reaches across the table to touch Rabbit’s fingertips. “The man who made us immortal!”
Rabbit curls his fingers an inch beyond Harrison’s reach and Harrison, with a satisfied smirk, draws back, pulling his palms along the slick-top table so they make a slippery screech of friction.
“Me, you mean,” Rabbit says. “You were nothing.”
“Nothing. That seems a little stern. That seems a little stern, Harry old bunny. Let’s cast our minds back. When Tothero wanted a guy roughed up, who did he send in to do it? When he wanted a hot shot like you guarded nice and close, who was his boy?” He slaps his chest. “You were too much of a queen to dirty your hands. No, you never touched anybody, did you?