To protect the electrical wires, a lot of the maples along Jackson Road have been mutilated, the center of their crowns cut out. Rabbit hadn’t noticed this before, or the new sidewalk squares where they have taken away the little surface gutters that used to trip you roller skating. He had been roller skating when Kenny Leggett, an older boy from across the street, who later became a five-minute miler, a county conference marvel, but that was later, this day he was just a bigger boy who had hit Rabbit with an icy snowball that winter—could have taken out an eye if it had hit higher—this day he just tossed across Jackson Road the shout, “Harry, did you hear on the radio? The President is dead.” He said “The President,” not “Roosevelt”; there had been no other President for them. The next time this would happen, the President would have a name: as he sat at the deafening tall machine one Friday after lunch his father sneaked up behind him and confided, “Harry, it just came over the radio, engraving had it on. Kennedy’s been shot. They think in the head.” Both charmers dead of violent headaches. Their smiles fade in the field of stars. We grope on, under bullies and accountants. On the bus, Rabbit prays as his mother told him to do: Make the L-dopa work, give her pleasanter dreams, keep Nelson more or less pure, don’t let Stavros turn too hard on Janice, help Jill find her way home. Keep Pop healthy. Me too. Amen.

A man in a pink shirt drops down beside him with a stagey sigh, after a stop on the side of the mountain, by the gas station with the Day-Glo spinner. The man’s face, turned full, clings to the side of Rabbit’s vision; after a while he defiantly returns the stare. The other man’s cheeks are like his shirt pink, smooth as a boy’s though his hair is gray, and his long worried eyebrows are lifted with an effort of recognition. “I do beg your pardon,” he says, with an emphasis that curls back into his voice purringly, “but aren’t you Harry—?”

“Hey, and you’re Eccles. Reverend Eccles.”

“Angstrom, yes? Harry Angstrom. How very wonderful. Really.” And Eccles takes his hand, in that plump humid grip that feels as if it will never let go. In the clergyman’s eyes there is something new, a hardened yet startled something, naked like the pale base of his throat, which lacks a clerical collar. And the shirt, Rabbit sees, is a fancy shirt, with a fine white stitch-stripe and an airy semi-transparent summer weave: he remembers how the man wore not black but a subtly elegant midnight blue. Eccles still has hold of his hand. Harry pulls it free. “Do tell me,” Eccles says, with that preening emphasis again, which Rabbit doesn’t remember from ten years ago, “how things have gone for you. Are you still with—?”

“Janice.”

“She didn’t seem quite up to you, I can say now, frankly.”