wedge and widens out from the entrance. The bar is in the center, and on either side there is an aisle of booths. The young couple heads for the opposite aisle. Mim wears bright white shoes with very high heels. The boy with her has woolly blond hair cut just long enough to comb, and a self-consciously brown face, a somehow bought tan. I went south this winter, it says.
“Is that your sister?” Margaret says. “She’s attractive. You and her must take after different parents.”
“How do you know her?” Rabbit asks Harrison.
“Oh—” His hand flicks diffidently, as if his fingertips slide across a streak of grease in the air. “You see her around.”
Rabbit’s instinct was to freeze at first but this suggestion of Harrison’s that she’s a tramp makes him get up and walk across the orange tile floor and around the bar.
“Mim.”
“Well, hi.”
“What are you doing here?”
She tells the boy with her, “This is my brother. He’s back from the dead.”
“Hi, big brother.” Rabbit doesn’t like the boy’s saying this and he doesn’t like the way the kid is sitting on the inside of the booth with Mim on the outside in the man’s place. He doesn’t like the whole feel of the thing, that Mim is showing him around. The kid is wearing a seersucker coat and a narrow tie and looks very innocent, in a smirched prep-school way. His lips are too thick. Mim doesn’t give his name.
“Harry, Pop and Mom fight all the time about you.”
“Well if they knew you were in a joint like this they’d have something else to talk about.”
“It’s not so bad, for this section of town.”
“It stinks. Why don’t you and Junior get out?”
“Say. Who’s in charge here?” the kid asks, drawing his shoulders up and making his lips thicker.
Harry reaches over, hooks his finger around the kid’s striped necktie, and snaps it up. It flies up and hits his thick mouth and makes his manicured face go slightly fuzzy. He starts to rise and Rabbit puts his hand on top of his tidy narrow head and pushes him down again and walks away, with the hardness of the kid’s head still in his fingertips. At his back he hears the sweetest sound he’s heard that night, his sister calling, “Harry.”
His ears are so good he hears, as he rounds the bar, Junior explain to her, in a voice made husky with cowardice, “He’s in love with you.”
To his own table he says, “Come on, Ruth. Get on your motorcycle.”
She protests, “I’m happy.”
“Come on.”
She moves to collect her things and Harrison, after looking around in doubt, gets out of the booth to let her up. He stands there beside Rabbit and Rabbit on an impulse puts his hand on Ronnie’s unpadded pseudo-Princeton shoulder. In comparison with Mim’s kid he likes him. “You’re right, Ronnie,” he tells him, “you were a real play-maker.” It comes out nasty but he meant it well, for the sake of the old team.
Harrison, too slow to feel that be means it, knocks his hand away and says, “When are you gonna grow up?” It’s telling that lousy story that has rattled him.
Outside on the summer-warm steps of the place Rabbit starts laughing. “Looking for my motorcycle,” he says, and lets go, “Hwah hwah hyaaa,” under the neon light.
Ruth is in no humor to see it. “Well you are a nut,” she says.
It annoys him that she is too dumb to see that he is really furious. The way she shook her head “No” at him when he was gagging it up annoys him; his mind goes back over the minute again and again and every time snags on it. He is angry about so many things he doesn’t know where to begin; the only thing clear is he’s going to give her hell.
“So you and that bastard went to Atlantic City together.”
“Why is he a bastard?”
“Oh. He’s not and I am.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“You did too. Right back in there you did.”
“It was just an expression. A fond expression, though I don’t know why.”
“You don’t.”
“No I don’t. You see your sister come in with some boy friend and practically pee in your pants.”
“Did you see the punk she was with?”
“What was the matter with him?” Ruth asks. “He looked all right.”
“Just about everybody looks all right to you, don’t they?”
“Well I don’t see what you’re doing going around like some almighty judge.”
“Yes sir, just about anything with hair in its armpits looks all right to