“Backwards is right, she can’t stand facing you.”

He squeezes her chalk wrist tighter, telling her, “You have no juice, baby. You’re all sucked out and you’re just eighteen. You’ve tried everything and you’re not scared of nothing and you wonder why it’s all so dead. You’ve had it handed to you, sweet baby, that’s why it’s so dead. Fucking Christ you think you’re going to make the world over you don’t have a fucking clue what makes people run. Fear. That’s what makes us poor bastards run. You don’t know what fear is, do you, poor baby? That’s why you’re so dead.” He squeezes her wrist until he can picture the linked curved bones in it bending ghostly as in an X ray; and her eyes widen a fraction, a hairspace of alarm he can see only because he is putting it there.

She tugs her wrist free and rubs it, not lowering her eyes from his. “People’ve run on fear long enough,” Jill says. “Let’s try love for a change.”

“Then you better find yourself another universe. The moon is cold, baby. Cold and ugly. If you don’t want it, the Commies do. They’re not so fucking proud.”

“What’s that noise?”

It is Nelson crying, outside the door, afraid to come in. It had been the same way with him and Janice, their fights: just when they were getting something out of them, the kid would beg them to stop. Maybe he imagined that Becky had been killed in just such a quarrel, that this one would kill him. Rabbit lets him in and explains, “We were talking politics.”

Nelson squeezes out in the spaces between his sobs. “Daddy, why do you disagree with everybody?”

“Because I love my country and can’t stand to have it knocked.”

“If you loved it you’d want it better,” Jill says.

“If it was better I’d have to be better,” he says seriously, and they all laugh, he last.