Skeeter stretches luxuriously in the chair, yawns, inhales and exhales. “It dawns upon me,” he says, “that you have a white gentleman’s concept of the police and their exemplary works. There is nothing, let me repeat no thing, that gives them more pleasurable sensations than pulling the wings off of witless poor black men. First the fingernails, then the wings. Truly, they are constituted for that very sacred purpose. To keep me off your back and under your smelly feet, right?”

“This isn’t the South,” Rabbit says.

“Hee-yah! Friend Chuck, have you ever considered running for po-litical office, there can’t be a county clerk left who believes the sweet things you do. The news is, the South is everywhere. We are fifty miles from the Mason-Dixon line where we sit, but way up in Detroit they are shooting nigger boys like catfish in a barrel. The news is, the cotton is in. Lynching season is on. In these Benighted States, everybody’s done become a cracker.” A brown hand delicately gestures from the shadows, then droops. “Forgive me, Chuck. This is just too simple for me to explain. Read the papers.”

“I do. You’re crazy.”

Jill horns in. “The System is rotten, Harry. The laws are written to protect a tiny elite.”

“Like people who own boats in Stonington,” he says.

“Score one,” Skeeter calls, “right?”

Jill flares. “What of it, I ran away from it, I reject it, I shit on it, Harry, where you’re still loving it, you’re eating it, you’re eating my shit. My father’s. Everybody’s. Don’t you see how you’re used?”

“So now you want to use me. For him.”

She freezes, white. Her lips thin to nothing. “Yes.”

“You’re crazy. I’d be risking jail too.”

“Harry, just a few nights, until he can hustle up a stake. He has family in Memphis, he’ll go there. Skeeter, right?”

“Right, sugar. Oh so right.”

“It isn’t just the pot bust, the pigs think he’s a dealer, they say he pushes, they’ll crucify him. Harry. They will.”

Skeeter softly croons the start of “That Old Rugged Cross.”

“Well, does he? Push.”

Skeeter grins under his great ball of hair. “What can I get for you, Chuck? Goof balls, jolly beans, red devils, purple hearts. They have so much Panama Red in Philly right now they’re feeding it to cows. Or want to sniff a little scag for a real rush?” From the gloom of the chair he extends his pale palms cupped as if heaped with shining poison.

So he is evil. Rabbit in his childhood used to lift, out of the same curiosity that made him put his finger into his belly-button and then sniff it, the metal waffle-patterned lid on the back yard cesspool, around the corner of the garage from the basketball hoop. Now this black man opens up under him in the same way: a pit of scummed stench impossible to see to the bottom of.

Harry turns and asks Jill, “Why are you doing this to me?”