He wants to put his hands on the boy, whether to give him a push or comfort he doesn't know; the actual touch might demonstrate which, but Nelson stays just ahead of his father's fingertips, dodging into the summer night. The streetlights have come on, and the Corona's tomato color looks evil by the poisonous sodium glow – a hollow shade of black, its metallic lustre leeched away. Nelson in his haste has parked it illegally, the driver's side along the curb. Harry says, "This side looks fine."
"It's the other side, Dad." Nelson explains: "See Billy and I were coming back from Allenville where his girlfriend lives by this windy back road and because I knew I was getting late for supper I may have been going a little fast, I don't know, you can't go too' fast on those back roads anyway, they wind too much. And this woodchuck or whatever it was comes out in front of me and in trying to avoid it I get off the road a little and the back end slides into this telephone pole. It happened so fast, I couldn't believe it."
Rabbit has moved to the other side and by lurid light views the damage. The scrape had begun in the middle of the rear door and deepened over the little gas-cap door; by the time the pole reached the tail signal and the small rectangular sidelight, it had no trouble ripping them right out, the translucent plastic torn and shed like Christmas wrapping, and inches of pretty color-coded wiring exposed. The urethane bumper, so black and mat and trim, that gave Harry a small sensuous sensation whenever he touched the car home against the concrete parking-space divider at the place on the lot stencilled ANGSTROM, was pulled out from the frame. The dent even carried up into the liftback door, which would never seat exactly right again.
Nelson is chattering, "Billy knows this kid who works in a body shop over near the bridge to West Brewer and he says you should get some real expensive rip-offplace to do the estimate and then when you get the check from the insurance company give it to him and he can do it for less. That way there'll be a profit everybody can split."
"A profit," Harry repeats numbly.
Nails or rivets in the pole have left parallel longitudinal gashes the length of the impact depression. The chrome-and-rubber stripping has been wrenched loose at an angle, and behind the wheel socket on this side – hooded with a slightly protruding flare like an eyebrow, one of the many snug Japanese details he has cherished – a segment of side strip has vanished entirely, leaving a chorus of tiny holes. Even the many-ribbed hubcap is dented and besmirched. He feels his own side has taken a wound. He feels he is witnessing in evil light a crime in which he has collaborated.
"Oh come on, Dad," Nelson is saying. "Don't make such a big deal of it. It'll cost the insurance company, not you, to get it fixed, and anyway you can get a new one for almost nothing, don't they give you a terrific discount?"
"Terrific," Rabbit says. "You just went out and smashed it up. My Corona."
"I didn't mean to, it was an accident, shit. What do you want me to do, piss blood? Get down on my knees and cry?"
"Don't bother."
"Dad, it's just a thing; you're looking like you lost your best friend."
A breeze, too high to touch them, ruffles the treetops and makes the streetlight shudder on the deformed metal. Harry sighs. "Well. How'd the woodchuck do?"
II
ONCE that first weekend of riots and rumors is over, the summer isn't so bad; the gas lines never get so long again. Stavros says the oil companies have the price hike they wanted for now, and the government has told them to cool it or face an excess profits tax. Melanie says the world will turn to the bicycle, as Red China has already done; she has bought herself a twelve-speed Fuji with her waitress's wages, and on fair days pedals around the mountain and down, her chestnut curls flying, through Cityview Park into Brewer. Toward the end of July comes a week of record heat; the papers are full of thermal statistics and fuzzy photographs of the time at the turn of the century when the trolley tracks warped in Weiser Square, it was so hot. Such heat presses out from within, against our clothes; we want to break out, to find another self beside the sea or in the mountains. Not until August will Harry and Janice go to the Poconos, where the Springers have a cottage they rent to other people for July. All over Brewer, air-conditioners drip onto patios and into alleyways.
On an afternoon of such hot weather, with his Corona still having bodywork done, Harry borrows a Caprice trade-in from the lot and drives southwest toward Galilee. On curving roads he passes houses of sandstone, fields of corn, a cement factory, a billboard pointing to a natural cave (didn't natural caves go out of style a while ago?), and another billboard with a great cutout of a bearded Amishman advertising "Authentic Dutch Smorgasbord'' Galilee is what they call a string town, a hilly row of house with a feed store at one end and a tractor agency at the other. In the middle stands an old wooden inn with a deep porch all along the second story and a renovated restaurant on the first with a window full of credit card stickers to catch the busloads of tourists that come up from Baltimore, blacks most of them, God knows what they hope to see out here in the sticks. A knot of young locals is hanging around in front of the Rexall's, you never used to see that in farm country, they'd be too busy with the chores. There is an old stone trough, a black-lacquered row of hitching posts, a glossy new bank, a traffic island with a monument Harry cannot make out the meaning of, and a small brick post office with its bright silver letters GALILEE up a side street that in a block dead-ends at the edge of a field. The woman in the post office tells Harry where the Nunemacher farm is, along R. D. 2. By the landmarks she gives him – a vegetable stand, a pond rimmed with willows, a double silo close to the road – he feels his way through the tummocks and swales of red earth crowded with shimmering green growth, merciless vegetation that allows not even the crusty eroded road embankments to rest barren but makes them bear tufts and mats of vetch and honeysuckle vines and fills the stagnant hot air with the haze of exhaled vapor. The Caprice windows are wide open and the Brewer disco station fades and returns in twists of static as the land and electrical wires obtrude. NUNEMACHER is a faded name on a battered tin mailbox. The house and barn are well back from the road, down a long dirt lane, brown stones buried in pink dust.
Rabbit's heart rises in his chest. He cruises the road, surveying the neighboring mailboxes; but Ruth gave him, when he once met her by accident in downtown Brewer a dozen years ago, no clue to her new name, and the girl a month ago refused to write hers in his showroom ledger. All he has to go by, other than Nunemacher's being his daughter's neighbor, if she is his daughter, is Ruth's mentioning that her husband besides being a farmer ran a fleet of school buses. He was older than she and should be dead now, Harry figures. The school buses would be gone. The mailboxes along this length of road say BLANKENBILLER, MUTH, and BYER. It is not easy to match the names with the places, as glimpsed in their hollows, amid their trees, at the end of their lanes of grass and dirt. He feels conspicuous, gliding along in a magenta Caprice, though no other soul emerges from the wide landscape to observe him. The thickwalled houses hold their inhabitants in, this hazy mid-afternoon too `hot for work. Harry drives down a lane at random and stops and backs around in the beaten, rutted space between the buildings while some pigs he passed in their pen set up a commotion of snorting and a fat woman in an apron comes out of a door of the house. She is shorter than Ruth and younger than Ruth would be now, with black hair pulled tight beneath a Mennonite cap. He waves and keeps going. This was the Blankenbillers, he sees by the mailbox as he pulls onto the road again.