Stavros minutely shrugs. “How about Nelson? Is he acting different?”

“He’s growing up.” The answer sounds evasive. Stavros brushes it aside.

“Drowsy? Nervous? Taking naps at odd times? What do they do all day while you’re playing hunt and peck? They must do something, fella.”

“She teaches him how to be polite to scum. Fella. Let me pay for your water.”

“So what have I learned?”

“I hope nothing.”

But Stavros has sneaked in for that lay-up and the game is in overtime. Rabbit hurries to get home, to see Nelson and Jill, to sniff their breaths, look at their pupils, whatever. He has left his lamb with a viper. But outside the Phoenix, in the hazed sunshine held at its September tilt, traffic is snarled, and the buses are caught along with everything else. A movie is being made. Rabbit remembers it mentioned in the Vat (BREWER MIDDLE AMERICA? Gotham Filmmakers Think So) that Brewer had been chosen for a location by some new independent outfit; none of the stars’ names meant anything to him, he forgot the details. Here they are. An arc of cars and trucks mounted with lights extends halfway into Weiser Street, and a crowd of locals with rolled-up shirtsleeves and bag-lugging grannies and Negro delinquents straggles into the rest of the street to get a closer look, cutting down traffic to one creeping lane. The cops that should be unsnarling the tangle are ringing the show, protecting the moviemakers. So tall, Rabbit gets a glimpse from a curb. One of the boarded-up stores near the old Baghdad that used to show M-G-M but now is given over to skin flicks (Sepia Follies, Honeymoon in Swapland) has been done up as a restaurant front; a tall salmon-faced man with taffy hair and a little bronze-haired trick emerge from this pretend-restaurant arm in arm and there is some incident involving a passerby, another painted actor who emerges from the crowd of dusty real people watching, a bumping-into, followed by laughter on the part of the first man and the woman and a slow resuming look that will probably signal when the film is all cut and projected that they are going to fuck. They do this several times. Between takes everybody waits, wisecracks, adjusts lights and wires. The girl, from Rabbit’s distance, is impossibly precise: her eyes flash, her hair hurls reflections like a helmet. Even her dress scintillates. When someone, a director or electrician, stands near her, he looks dim. And it makes Rabbit feel dim, dim and guilty, to see how the spotlights carve from the sunlight a yet brighter day, a lurid pastel island of heightened reality around which the rest of us—technicians, policemen, the straggling fascinated spectators including himself—are penumbral ghosts, suppliants ignored.

Local Excavations Unearth Antiquities

As Brewer renews itself, it discovers more about itself.

The large-scale demolition and reconstruction now taking place in the central city continues uncovering numerous artifacts of the “olden times” which yield interesting insights into our city’s past.