"Four of them," Rabbit says. "Maybe he should go to his mother."
"No! "Nelson says, and breaks loose to face them. "You're not getting me to go until we know where Jill is." His face shines with tears but is sane: he waits out the next hour standing by his father's side.
The flames are slowly smothered, the living-room side of the house is saved. The interior of the kitchen side seems a garden where different tints of smoke sprout; formica, vinyl, nylon, linoleum each burn differently, yield their curdling compounds back to earth and air. Firemen wet down the wreckage and search behind the gutted walls. Now the upstairs windows stare with searchlights, now the lower. A skull full of fireflies. Yet still the -crowd waits, held by a pack sense of smell; death is in heat. Intermittently there have been staticky calls over the police radios and one of them has fetched an ambulance; it arrives with a tentative sigh of its siren. Scarlet lights do an offbeat dance on its roof. A strange container, a green rubber bag or sheet, is taken into the house, and brought back by three grim men in slickers. The ambulance receives the shapeless package, is shut with that punky sound only the most expensive automobile doors make, and again, the tentative sigh of a siren just touched -pulls away. The crowd thins after it. The night overflows with the noise of car motors igniting and revving up.
Nelson says, "Dad."
"Yeah."
"That was her, wasn't it?"
"I don't know. Maybe."
"It was somebody."
"I guess."
Nelson rubs his eyes; the gesture leaves swipes of ash, Indian markings. The child seems harshly ancient.
"I need to go to bed," he says.
"Want to go back to the Fosnachts?"
"No." As if in apology he explains, "I hate Billy." Further qualifying, he adds, "Unless you do." Unless you want to go back and fuck Mrs. Fosnacht again.
Rabbit asks him, "Want to see your mother?"
"I can't, Dad. She's in the Poconos."
"She should be back by now."
"I don't want to see her now. Take me to Jackson Road."
There is in Rabbit an engine murmuring Undo, undo, which wants to take them back to this afternoon, beginning with the moment they left the house, and not do what they did, not leave, and have it all unhappen, and Jill and Skeeter still there, in the house still there. Beneath the noise of this engine the inner admission that it did happen is muffled; he sees Nelson through a gauze of shock and dares ask, "Blame me, huh?"
"Sort of."
"You don't think it was just bad luck?" And though the boy hardly bothers to shrug Harry understands his answer: luck and God are both up there and he has not been raised to believe in anything higher than his father's head. Blame stops for him in the human world, it has nowhere else to go.
The firemen of one truck are coiling their hoses. A policeman', the one who asked after Nelson, comes over. "Angstrom? The chief wants to talk to you where the boy can't hear."
"Dad, ask him if that was Jill."
The cop is tired, stolid, plump, the same physical type as – what was his name? – Showalter. Kindly patient Brewerites. He lets out the information, "It was a cadaver."
"Black or white?" Rabbit asks.
"No telling."
Nelson asks, "Male or female?"
"Female, sonny."
Nelson begins to cry again, to gag as if food is caught in his throat, and Rabbit asks the policeman if his offer is still good, if a cruiser might take the boy to his grandparents' house in Mt. Judge. The boy is led away. He does not resist; Rabbit thought he might, might insist on staying with his father to the end. But the boy, his hair hanging limp and his tears flowing unchecked, seems relieved to be at last in the arms of order, of laws and limits. He doesn't even wave from the window of the silver-blue West Brewer cruiser as it U-turns in Vista Crescent and heads away from the tangle of hoses and puddles and red reflections. The air tastes sulphuric. Rabbit notices that the little maple was scorched on the side toward the house; its twigs smolder like cigarettes.
As the firemen wind up their apparatus, he and the police chief sit in the front of an unmarked car. Harry's knees are crowded by the radio apparatus on the passenger's side. The chief is a short man but doesn't look so short sitting down, with his barrel chest crossed by a black strap and his white hair crew-cut close to his scalp and his nose which was once broken sideways and has accumulated broken veins in the years since. He says, "We have a death now. That makes it a horse of another color."
"Any theories how the fire started?"
"I'll ask the questions. But yes. It was set. In the garage. I notice a power mower in there. Can of gas to go with it?"
"Yeah. We. filled the can just this afternoon."
"Tell me where you were this evening."
He tells him. The chief talks on his car radio to the West Brewer headquarters. In less than five minutes they call back. But in the total, unapologetic silence the chief keeps during these minutes, a great lump grows in Rabbit, love of the law. The radio sizzles its words like bacon frying: "Mrs. Fosnacht confirms suspect's story. Also a minor boy in dwelling as additional witness."
"Check," the chief says, and clicks off.
"Why would I burn my own house down?" Rabbit asks.
"Most common arsonist is owner," the chief says. He studies Rabbit thoughtfully; his eyes are almost round, as if somebody took a stitch at the comer of each lid. "Maybe the girl was pregnant by you."
"She was on the Pill."
"Tell me about her."
He tries, though it is hard to make it seem as natural as it felt. Why did he permit Skeeter to move in on him? Well, the question was more, Why not? He tries, "Well, when my wife walked out on me, I kind of lost my bearings. It didn't seem to matter, and anyway he would have taken Jill with him, if I'd kicked him out. I got so I didn't mind him."
"Did he terrorize you?"
He tries to make these answers right. Out of respect for the law. "No. He educated us." Harry begins to get mad. "Some law I don't know about against having people live with you?"
"Law against harboring," the chief tells him, neglecting to write on his pad. "Brewer police report a Hubert Johnson out on default on a possession charge."
Rabbit's silence is not what he wants. He makes it clearer what he wants. "You in ignorance over the existence of this indictment and defiance of court?" He makes it even clearer. "Shall I accept your silence as a profession of ignorance?"
"Yes." It is the only opening. "Yes, I knew nothing about Skeeter, not even his last name."
"His present whereabouts, any ideas?"
"No idea. His call came through from it sounded like a phone booth but I couldn't swear to it."
The cop puts his broad hand over the notebook as if across the listening mouth of a telephone receiver. "Off the record. We've been watching this place. He was a little fish, a punk. We hoped he would lead us to something bigger."
"What bigger? Dope?"
"Civil disturbance. The blacks in Brewer are in touch with Philly, Camden, Newark. We know they have guns. We don't want another York here, now do we?" Again, Rabbit's silence is not what he wants. He repeats, "Now do we?"
"No, of course not. I was just thinking. He talked as if he was beyond revolution; he was kind of religious-crazy, not gun
"Any idea why he set this fire?"
"I don't think he did. It isn't his style."
The pencil is back on the notebook. "Never mind about style," the chief says. "I want facts."
"I don't have any more facts than I've told you. Some people in the neighborhood were upset because Skeeter was living with us, two men stopped me on the street yesterday and complained about it, I can give you their names if you want."
The pencil hovers. "They complained. Any specific threats of arson?"
&. Wiseasses get fragged. You better fuckingbarricade the whole place. "Nothing that specific."