He says to Nelson, “I wonder what they talked about.”

“Dad, there was nothing dishonest about it, these people we stopped felt better afterwards, for having got us off their conscience. Anyway, Dad, in a society where power was all to the people money wouldn’t exist anyway, you’d just be given what you need.”

“Well hell, that’s the way your life is now.”

“Yeah, but I have to beg for everything, don’t I? And I never did get a mini-bike.”

“Nelson, you get some clothes on and stay in your room. I want to talk to Jill a second.”

“If you hurt her, I’ll kill you.”

“If you don’t shut up, I’ll make you live with Mommy and Charlie Stavros.”

In their bedroom, Rabbit carefully closes the door and in a soft shaking voice tells Jill, “You’re turning my kid into a beggar and a whore just like yourself,” and, after waiting a second for her to enter a rebuttal, slaps her thin disdainful face with its prim lips and its green eyes drenched so dark in defiance their shade is as of tree leaves, a shuffling concealing multitude, a microscopic forest he wants to bomb. His slap feels like slapping plastic: stings his fingers, does no good. He slaps her again, gathers the dry flesh of her hair into his hand to hold her face steady, feels cold fury when she buckles and tries to slither away but, after a fist to the side of her neck, lets her drop onto the bed.

Still shielding her face, Jill hisses up at him, strangely hisses out of her little spaced inturned teeth, until her first words come. They are calm and superior. “You know why you did that, you just wanted to hurt me, that’s why. You just wanted to have that kick. You don’t give a shit about me and Nelson hustling. What do you care about who begs and who doesn’t, who steals and who doesn’t?”

A blankness in him answers when she asks; but she goes on. “What have the pig laws ever done for you except screw you into a greasy job and turn you into such a gutless creep you can’t even keep your idiotic wife?”

He takes her wrist. It is fragile. Chalk. He wants to break it, to feel it snap; he wants to hold her absolutely quiet in his arms for the months while it will heal. “Listen. I earn my money one fucking dollar at a time and you’re living on it and if you want to go back bumming off your nigger friends, go. Get out. Leave me and my kid alone.”

“You creep,” she says, “you baby-killing creep.”

“Put another record on,” he says. “You sick bitch. You rich kids playing at life make me sick, throwing rocks at the poor dumb cops protecting your daddy’s loot. You’re just playing, baby. You think you’re playing a great game of happy cunt but let me tell you something. My poor dumb mutt of a wife throws a better piece of ass backwards than you can manage frontwards.”