Hugo aims at SE coast. USAir jet crashes in N. Y. river. Bomb probably caused crash of French DC-10. Lee slows boaters in manatee territory. Harry feeds himself oat bran and digests the News-Press. Chaos reigned on St. Croix, as police and National Guardsmen joined machetearmed mobs on a post-Hugo looting spree. Tourists pleaded with reporters landing on the island to get them off: What fucking crybabies. It occurs to him that his dream might relate to all this Caribbean news, the pre-weekend party they have at resort hotels, to welcome the new arrivals and jolly everybody into a melting pot. He steps out onto his narrow balcony to seize the day. The paper said today would be sunny despite Hugo and so it is. The distant blue-green skyscrapers hurl back blobs of light from the morning sun at his back. The Gulf cannot be seen but he can smell it out there. He tries to remember who all was at the party but can't; dream people don't stick to the ribs. The plane in New York skidded off the end of the runway and two people were killed. Just two. One hundred seventy-one died in the Sahara. A caller in London gave all the credit to Allah. Harry doesn't mind that one as much as the Lockerbie Pan Am bomb. Like everything else on the news, you get bored, disasters get to seem a gimmick, like all those TV timeouts in football.
While other, younger men shout and kid on the golf course behind the curtained sliding doors, Harry makes the bed and sweeps the kitchen floor, and adds his orange juice glass and cereal bowl to the orderly array in the dishwasher waiting to add up to a load's worth. Not quite there yet. When Janice shows up at last he wants the state of the place to give her an object lesson in housekeeping.
At ten, he goes out for his morning walk. He looks at the northeast sky, toward the hurricane that is snubbing Florida, and is struck by the clouds, how intricate they are, tattered, gray on white on blue, with tilted sheets of fishscales and rows of long clouds shaggy underneath but rounded on top as if by action of swiftly running water, like the rhythmic ribs of sand the tide leaves. A glassy wind blows through the sunlight. There is something in the air that makes it slightly difficult to breathe. Lack of ozone? Or too much ozone? It may be his imagination, but the sky seems clean of airplanes. Usually you can see them layered in their slow circling slants, coming in to land at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport. The planes have been chased from the sky. Under the sun a kind of highway of haze in bars recedes to the northeast horizon like the reflections the moon stacks up in a calm ocean.
On an impulse he decides to take the Celica and drive downtown and park at a meter near the First Federal Bank and walk toward the black section. This afternoon, he thinks, he might feel like trying to get in some holes of golf. The pro shop called up a few days ago and said they found his shoes.
At the recreation field beyond the empty ochre high school, a lone tall boy in denim cutoffs is shooting baskets by himself. His tank top is an electric turquoise stencilled with a snarling tiger head – orange-and-white-striped fur, yellow eyes, the tongue and end of the nose an unreal violet. On this boy, though, the outfit has a certain propriety, the dignity of a chosen uniform. Older than the kids yesterday, eighteen at least, he is a deliberate performer, making good serious economical moves, dribbling in, studying the ground, staring at the hoop, sizing up the shot with two hands on the ball, letting go with the left hand underneath only at the last while shooting. He wears ankle-high black sneakers and no socks; his haircut is one of those muffin-shapes on the top of the skull, with a series of X's along the sides and back where the shaved part begins. Sitting on the bench, the opposite end from a small red knapsack the boy has evidently left there, Rabbit watches him a good while, while the sun shines and the glassy wind blows and passing clouds dip the dirt field and the surrounding frame houses in shadow. The houses have the colors of sun-faded wash and seem remote and silent. You don't see people going in and out.
To vary his attitude Harry sometimes tips his white face back as if to sunbathe, coating his vision in red, letting photons burn through his translucent eyelids. One time when he opens his eyes the boy is standing close, darker than a cloud. There is something matte about his blackness, and his high cheekbones and the thinness of his lips hint at Indian blood.
"You want sumpin'?" His voice is light, level, unsmiling. It seems to come out of the tiger's snarling violet mouth.
"No, nothing," Rabbit says. "My sitting here bother you?"
"You after no Scotty?" With the hand not holding the basketball against his hip he makes the smallest, most delicate little motion of cracking a whip. Rabbit darts his eyes at the knapsack and brings them back to the tiger's mouth.
"No, thanks," he says. "Never touch it. How about a little one-on-one, though? Since you seem to be out here alone."
"I heard some cheesecake come here yesterday was foolin' around."
"Just foolin', that's what I do. I'm retired."