"Count on the fuzz to fuck up. Why would I go burn my own pad?"

"To destroy evidence. Maybe Jill – what do you call it? O.D.'d."

"Not on the scag she was getting from me, that stuff was so cut sugar water has more flash. Look, Chuck, that up at your house was honky action. Will you believe the truth, or shall I save my breath for the pigpen?"

"Let's hear it."

Skeeter's voice, unattached to his face, is deeper than Harry remembers, with a hypnotic rasping lilt that reminds him of childhood radio. "Jill sacked out early and I made do with the sofa, right? Since getting back on the stuff she wasn't putting out any of her own, and anyway I was pretty spaced and beat, we went twice around the county unloading that bullshit car. Right? So I wake up. There was this rattling around. I placed it coming from the kitchen, right? I was thinkin' it was Jill coming to bug me to shoot her up again, instead there was this whoosh and soft woomp, reminded me of an APM hitting in the bush up the road, only it wasn't up any road, I say to myself The war is come home. Next thing there's this slam of a door, garage door from the rumble of it, and I flip to the window and see these two honky cats makin' tail across the lawn, across the street, into between those houses there, and disappear, right? They had no car I could see. Next thing, I smell smoke."

"How do you know these were white men?"

"Shit, you know how honkies run, like with sticks up their ass, right?"

"Could you identify them if you saw them again?"

"I ain't identifying Moses around here. My skin is fried in this county, right?"

"Yeah," Rabbit says. "Something else you should know. Jill is dead."

The silence from the back seat is not long. "Poor bitch, doubt if she knows the difference."

"Why didn't you get her out?"

"Hell, man, there was heat, right? I thought lynching time had come, I didn't know there wasn't twelve hundred crackers out there, I was in no shape to take care of some whitey woman, let Whitey take care of his own."

"But nobody stopped you."

"Basic training, right? I eluded as they say my pursuers."

"They didn't want to hurt you. It was me, they were trying to tell me something. People around here don't lynch, don't be crazy."

"Crazy, you've been watching the wrong TV channel. How about those cats in Detroit?"

"How about those dead cops in California? How about all this Off the Pigs crap you brothers have been pushing? I should take you in. The Brewer cops would love to see you, they love to re-educate crazy coons."

Two more cars swish by; from the height of a milk truck the driver looks down curiously. "Let's drive," Skeeter says.

"What's in it for me?"

"Nothing much, right?"

The car starts at a touch. The motor is more silent than their tires swishing in the puddles along Vista Crescent, past the apple-green ruin and the man in the green raincoat dozing on the doorstep. Rabbit heads out the curved streets to where they end, to where they become truck tracks between muddy house foundations. He finds a lost country lane. Tall rows of poplars, a neglected potholed surface. Skeeter sits up. Rabbit waits for the touch of metal on the back of his neck. A gun, a knife, a needle: they always have something. Poison darts. But there is nothing, nothing but the fluctuating warmth of Skeeter's breathing on the back of his neck. "How could you let her die?" he asks.

"Man, you want to talk guilt, we got to go back hundreds of years."

"I wasn't there then. But you were there last night."

"I was severely disadvantaged."

Harry's head is light with lack of sleep; he knows he shouldn't be making decisions. "Tell you what. I'll drive you ten miles south and you take it from there."

"That's cutting it fine, man, but let's say sold. One embarrassment remains. We brothers call it bread."

"You just got six hundred for selling her car."

"My wallet back next to that sofa, every mothering thing, right?"

"How about that black suitcase in the closet?"

"Say. You been snooping, or what?"

"I have maybe thirty dollars," Rabbit says. "You can have that. I'll keep this ride from the cops but then that's quits. Like you said, you've had it in this county."

"I shall return," Skeeter promises, "only in glory."

"When you do, leave me out of it."

Miles pass. A hill, a cluster of sandstone houses, a cement factory, a billboard pointing to a natural cave, another with a huge cutout of a bearded Amishman. Skeeter in yet another of his voices, the one that sounds most like a white man and therefore in Rabbit's ears most human, asks, "How'd Babychuck take it, Jill's being wasted?"

"About like you'd expect."

"Broken up, right?"

"Broken up."

"Tell him, there's a ton of cunt in the world."

"I'll let him figure that out himself."

They come to a corner where two narrow roads meet in sunlight. On the far side of a tan cut cornfield a whitewashed stone house sends up smoke. A wooden arrow at the intersection says Galilee 2. Otherwise it could be nowhere. A jet trail smears in the sky. Pennsylvania spreads south silently, through green and brown. A dry stone conduit underlies the road here; a roadside marker is a metal keystone rusted blank. Rabbit empties his wallet into Skeeter's pink palm and chokes off the impulse to apologize for its not being more. He wonders now what would be proper. A Judas kiss? They have scarcely touched since the night they wrestled and Harry won. He holds out his hand to shake farewell. Skeeter studies it as if like Babe he will tell a fortune, takes it into both his slick narrow hands, tips it so the meaty pink creases are skyward, contemplates, and solemnly spits into the center. His saliva being as warm as skin, Harry at first only knows it has happened by seeing: moisture full of bubbles like tiny suns. He chooses to take the gesture as a blessing, and wipes his palm dry on his pants. Skeeter tells him, "Never did figure your angle."

"Probably wasn't one," is the answer.

"Just waiting for the word, right?" Skeeter cackles. When he laughs there is that complexity about his upper lip white men don't have, a welt in the center, a genial seam reminding Rabbit of the stitch of flesh that holds the head of your cock to the shaft. As Harry backs Peggy's Fury around in the strait intersection, the young black waits by a bank of brown weed stalks. In the rearview mirror, Skeeter looks oddly right, blends right in, even with the glasses and goatee, hanging empty-handed between fields of stubble where crows settle and shift, gleaning.