"Doing what?"

"Serving Uncle."

"Oh, in the Army; well that doesn't count. Everybody's been to Texas with the Army."

"You order whatever you think is good," Rabbit tells Tothero. He is irritated by all these Army veterans Ruth seems to know, and strains to hear the final bars of the song he spent a dime to play. In this Chinese place he can just make out a hint, coming it seems from the kitchen, of the jangling melody that lifted his spirits last night in the car.

Tothero gives the waiter the order and when he goes away tries to give Ruth the word. The old man's thin lips are wet with whisky. "The coach," he says, "the coach is concerned with developing the three tools we are given in life: the head, the body, and the heart."

"And the crotch," Ruth says. Margaret, of all people, laughs. She really gives Rabbit the creeps.

"Young woman, you've challenged me, and I deserve the respect of your attention." He speaks with grave weight.

"Shit," she says softly, and looks down. "Don't bleed on me." He has hurt her. The wings of her nostrils whiten; her coarse make—up darkens.

"One. The head. Strategy. Most boys come to a basketball coach from alley games and have no conception of the, of the elegance of the game played on a court with two baskets. Won't you bear me out, Harry?"

"Yeah, sure. just yesterday –"

"Second – let me finish, Harry, and then you can talk second, the body. Work the boys into condition. Make their legs hard." He clenches his fist on the slick table. "Hard. Run, run, run. Run every minute their feet are on the floor. You can't run enough. Thirdly" – he puts the index finger and thumb of one hand to the corners of his mouth and flicks away the moisture "the heart. And here the good coach, which I, young lady, certainly tried to be and some say was, has his most solemn opportunity. Give the boys the will to achieve. I've always liked that better than the will to win, for there can be achievement even in defeat. Make them feel the – yes, I think the word is good– the sacredness of achievement, in the form of giving our best." He dares a pause now, and wins through it, glancing at each of them in turn to freeze their tongues. "A boy who has had his heart enlarged by an inspiring coach," he concludes, "can never become, in the deepest sense, a failure in the greater game of life.". He lifts his plump hand. "And now may the peace of God, et cetera. . ." He draws on his glass, which is mostly ice cubes. As he tilts it up they ride forward and rattle against his lips.

Ruth turns to Rabbit and asks quietly, as if to change the subject, "What do you do?"

He laughs. "Well I'm not sure I do anything any more. I should have gone to work this morning. I, uh, it's kind of hard to describe, I demonstrate something called the MagiPeel Kitchen Peeler."

"And I'm sure he does it well," Tothero says. "I'm sure that when the MagiPeel Corporation board sits down at their annual meeting and ask themselves, `Now who has done the most to further our cause with the American public?' the name of Harry Rabbit Angstrom leads the list."

"What do you do?" Rabbit asks her in turn.

"Nothing," Ruth answers. "Nothing." And her eyelids make a greasy blue curtain as she sips her Daiquiri. Her chin takes something of the liquid's green light.

The Chinese food arrives. Eager saliva fills his mouth. He really hasn't had any since Texas. He loves this food that contains no disgusting proofs of slain animals, no bloody slab of cow haunch or hen's sinewy skeleton; these ghosts have been minced and destroyed and painlessly merged with the shapes of mute vegetables, plump green bodies that invite his appetite's innocent gusto. Candy. Heaped on a smoking breast of rice. Each is given such a tidy hot breast, and Margaret is in a special hurry to muddle hers with glazed chunks; all eat well. Their faces take color and strength from the oval plates of dark pork, sugar peas, chicken, stiff sweet sauce, shrimp, water chestnuts, who knows what else. Their talk grows hearty.

"He was terrific," Rabbit says of Tothero. "He was the greatest coach in the county. I would've been nothing without him."

"No, Harry, no. You did more for me than I did for you. Girls, the first game he played he scored twenty points."

"Twenty—three," Harry says.

"Twenty—three points! Think of it." The women eat on. "Remember, Harry, the state tournaments in Harrisburg; Dennistown and their little set—shot artist?"

"He was tiny," Harry tells Ruth. "About five two and ugly as a monkey. Really a dirty player too."

"Ah, but he knew his trade," Tothero says, "he knew his trade. Harry had met his match."

"Then he tripped me, remember?"

"So he did," Tothero says. "I'd forgotten."

"This runt trips me, and over I go, bonk, against the mat. If the walls hadn't been padded I'd'a been killed."

"Then what happened, Harry? Did you cream him? I've forgotten this whole incident." Tothero's mouth is full of food and his hunger for revenge is ugly.

"Why, no," Rabbit says slowly. "I never fouled. The ref saw it and it was his fifth foul and he was out. Then we smothered 'em."

Something fades in Tothero's expression; his face goes slack. "That's right, you never fouled. He never did. Harry was always the idealist."

Rabbit shrugs. "I didn't have to."

"The other strange thing about Harry," Tothero tells the two women. "He was never hurt."

"No, I once sprained my wrist," Rabbit corrects. "The thing you said that really helped me -"

"What happened next in the tournaments? I'm frightened at how I've forgotten this."

"Next? Pennoak, I think. Nothing happened. They beat us."

"They won? Didn't we beat them?"

"Oh hell no. They were good. They had five good players. What'd we have? Just me, really. We had Harrison, who was O.K., but after that football injury he never had the touch, really."

"Ronnie Harrison?" Ruth asks.

Rabbit is startled. "You know him?" Harrison had been a notorious bedbug.

"I'm not sure," she says, complacently enough.

"Shortish guy with kinky hair. A little bitty limp."

"No, I don't know," she says. "I don't think so." She is pleasingly dexterous with the chopsticks, and keeps one hand lying palm up on her lap. He loves when she ducks her head, that thick simple neck moving forward making the broad tendons on her shoulder jump up, to get her lips around a piece of something. Pinched with just the right pressure between the sticks; funny how plump women have that delicate touch. Margaret shovels it in with her dull bent silver.

"We didn't win," Tothero repeats, and calls, "Waiter." When the boy comes Tothero asks for another round of the same drinks.

"No, not for me, thanks," Rabbit says. "I'm high enough on this as it is."

"You're just a big clean—living kid, aren't you, you," Margaret says. She doesn't even know his name yet. God, he hates her.

"The thing, I started to say, the thing you said that really helped me,"Rabbit says to Tothero, "is that business about almost touching your thumbs on the two—handers. That's the whole secret, really, getting the ball in front of your hands, where you get that nice lifty feeling. Just zwoops off." His hands show how.

"Oh, Harry," Tothero says sadly, "you could shoot when you came to me. All I gave you was the will to win. The will to achievement."

"You know my best night," Rabbit says, "my best night wasn't that forty—pointer that time against Allenville, it was in my junior year, we went down to end of the county real early in the season to play, a funny little hick school, about a hundred in all six grades; what was its name? Bird's Nest? Something like that. You'll remember."

"Bird's Nest," Tothero says. "No."

"It was the only time I think we ever scheduled them. Funny little square gymnasium where the crowd sat up on the stage. Some name that meant something."