He drives his rented car across town to Jurgen’s house, a white wooden Tudor, brick trim, picket fence in front. Pamela lets him in. She’s thin.
“How are you,” he asks.
“Tired.” She doesn’t seem friendly.
“Your father?”
“Some better. How are the kids?”
“Fine. Cyndi was going to take them to the zoo.”
Pamela nods.
Jurgen is also unfriendly. “Why are you helping that old goat?” he croaks, sitting up in bed. Kleenex and bottles of capsules crowd the night table to his right.
“He has nowhere to go. Somebody’s got to look after him.”
“You think I’d just abandon him?” Adams shrugs.
“He’s my brother, even if we don’t get along.”
“I’m just lending him a hand, Jurgen.”
“Well, it’s not Christian charity, Sam, I don’t believe that for a minute. You’re doing it to spite me.”
“I’m doing it because you stuck him in that sanitarium against his will,” Adams says, glancing at Pamela. She is standing by a window, letting the sun warm her shoulders.
“Well, aren’t we on a high horse?” Jurgen says. “Since when are you so concerned about other people? If you’d worried this much over Pammy, she might still be your wife.”
Pamela turns toward the window.
“I think I’d better go,” Adams says. “I didn’t want to get into this. I just came by to see how you were.”
Jurgen coughs loudly and can’t stop. Three white hairs wiggle in the middle of his forehead. Pamela pounds his back. Adams brings him a glass of water. When Jurgen is calm again, Adams squeezes Pamela’s wrist, tells her he’ll let himself out.
That night, time on his hands, Adams goes to an ice show he’d seen advertised in the paper. Otto is resting comfortably at the sanitarium; Adams’ room at the Holiday Inn is too depressing for anything but sleep. The ice show is being staged in a giant arena downtown. His seat is good, a little high perhaps. The arena looks like an airplane hangar, with a green metal roof and heavy rafters. The crowd moves about restlessly on the scarred wooden bleachers. Everyone’s wearing a coat.
The show begins at eight. Cold vapors rise from the square of ice, big as a basketball court, on the arena floor. A man dressed as Chaplin’s Little Tramp circles the rink, tossing white roses to women in the front row. Adams remembers nights he spent with Jill, the sheen of her legs in the chilly air of her apartment, the warm touch of her hip on his thigh. He thinks of Carol on a bed of snow. He makes a mental note to take Toby and Deidre skating when he gets home, and to buy for them at a hardware store a heavy chain, a fragrant piece of pine wood, a sheet of water-repellent plastic, because these textures are nice to feel.
Otto disappears on the day of the signing. For two hours Adams combs the city. Finally, after lunch, Otto appears in the lawyer’s office, drunk, wearing a checkered flannel shirt. He is covered with hay; he won’t say where he’s been.
The lawyer tells Adams, “Clean him up. Buy him a suit.”
Adams drives Otto to a department store where just this morning, searching the streets, he’d seen a blue serge suit in the window.
“Where the hell do you get off, buying me a suit I don’t want?” Otto snaps.
Ties run two for eight dollars. Adams gets a couple for himself.
Back at the office the lawyer signals her assistant to start the videotape machine.
“Are you married?” she begins.
“No, are you?” Otto says.
The lawyer begins again.
Adams tells Otto, “You’ll need a place to stay while your case is waiting to go to trial. It could take months. Why don’t you come back to Nebraska with me? I’ve got a place in the country now. It’s isolated. You can have it to yourself most of the time.”
“Does Pammy know about this place?”
“She never comes out.”
“She’s awfully upset with me.”
“You’ll never see her. I promise.”
“Sam, my man. What’s shakin’?” Pete has let his hair grow back. He’s wearing a sleeveless jersey.
“I’m trying to map the universe.”
“Heavy,” Pete says.
“Do you ever think about it? I mean, do you have a mental picture of what’s out there?”
“The universe, man, is a single sax note blown in the face of God.”
To Bob, it’s a series of cogs.
To Denny, a case of jewels.
Mary, the teenage girl who flirts with Pete between sets, doesn’t know but hopes it’s soft and cool, like sand at night. “Maybe they’ll teach me in college,” she says.
“No, books published one week are obsolete the next,” Adams tells her.
“Like music, you mean? Heavy metal was in for a while, then disco, then punk?”
“Sort of, yes.”
“Well, shit. What’s the point of going if everything I learn’s a golden oldie before I even get out of school?”
Otto has settled into the dome, an uneasy alliance with the computer. Adams introduces him to Rosa, hoping they’ll hit it off, but Rosa has recently purchased an ammunition belt (dummies) and insists on eating a box of chicken wings she has brought. Otto is leery.
“What makes you love black people so much?” he says.
“It’s not a question of love.” She licks her fingers. “It’s the wave of the future. Even if the spirits hadn’t told me, I’d have seen signs in this world.” “What signs?” Otto says.
“Poetry, music, theater, dance … the most vital art is being produced by minorities.”
“What’s art got to do with it?”
“Art reflects changes in the world. The imagination of the white Anglo-Saxon male has run out of gas. Read their books. They’re all depressed.”
“Let’s eat,” Adams says.
“That woman’s crazy as hell,” Otto tells Adams once Rosa is gone.
“I know.”
“Why do you hang around a woman that’s crazy as hell?”
“She’s kind to the children. Keeps me company.”
“Married?”
“Widow.”
“Probably talked her husband into the ground. Although …” Otto props his feet on Adams’ stone table. “She’s got a point about the signs. I used to figure out what was happening in the country by looking at the ads we painted. Whatever ails you, that’s what we put on our billboards. When I first started painting, it was just stomach disorders and colds, then it was female troubles and I knew if that’s what people were reading signs about they were talking a whole lot more about screwing than they used to. I coulda told you there was going to be a sexual revolution years before it happened. You just got to watch what’s ailing folks.”
The tips of weeds in the field behind his yard sparkle like spurs. Bright quarter-moon. Wooden roofs on nearby houses resemble rough thatch.
The man in Adams’ yard crouches by the fence, elbow on leg, free palm to the ground. The same man who appeared in the yard months ago. Quickly, Adams slips past the front door, circles the house, and approaches the man, stealthily, from the rear. A light mist is falling. He lifts the latch on the gate. The stranger has not moved. Adams steps forward, not too close. “Can I help you?” he says.
The man turns, keeping his face in shadow. He pushes away but trips over Adams’ right foot. Together the men fall in a bed of wet leaves. The stranger tries to rise, slips again. Adams holds his shoulders.