Rabbit’s time has come. He is packed so solid with anger and fear he is seeing with his pores. He wades toward the boy deliciously and feels his fists vanish, one in the region of the belly, the other below the throat. He is scared of the head, whose glasses might shatter and slash. Skeeter curls up and drops to the floor dry as a scorpion and when Rabbit pries at him he has no opening, just abrasive angles shaking like a sandpaper machine. Rabbit’s hands start to hurt. He wants to pry this creature open because there is a soft spot where he can be split and killed; the curved back is too tough, though knuckles slammed at the hole of the ear do produce a garbled whimper.

Jill is screaming and with her whole weight pulling the tail of his shirt and in the ebb of his sweetness Rabbit discovers his hands and forearms somehow clawed. His enemy is cringing on the floor, the carpet that cost them eleven dollars a yard and was supposed to wear longer than the softer loop for fifteen that Janice wanted (she always said it reminded her of the stuff they use in miniature golf courses), cringing expertly, knees tucked under chin and hands over head and head tucked under the sofa as far as it will go. His Levis are rumpled up and it shocks Rabbit to see how skinny his calves and ankles are, iridescent dark spindles. Humans made of a new material. Last longer, wear more evenly. And Jill is sobbing, “Harry, no more, no more,” and the door chime is saying its three syllables over and over, a scale that can’t get anywhere, that can’t get over the top.

The door pops open. Nelson is there, in his spiffy new school clothes, fishbone-striped sport shirt and canary-yellow slacks. Billy Fosnacht is behind him, a hairy head taller. “Hey,” Skeeter says from the floor, “it’s Babychuck, right?”

“Is he a burglar, Dad?”

“We could hear the furniture being smashed and everything,” Billy says. “We didn’t know what to do.”

Nelson says, “We thought if we kept ringing the bell it would stop.”

Jill tells him, “Your father lost all control of himself.”

Rabbit asks, “Why should I always be the one to have control of myself?”

Getting up as if from a bin of dust, one careful limb at a time, Skeeter says, “That was to get us acquainted, Chuck. Next time I’ll have a gun.”

Rabbit taunts, “I thought at least I’d see some nice karate chops from basic training.”

“Afraid to use ’em. Break you in two, right?”

“Daddy, who is he?”

“He’s a friend of Jill’s called Skeeter. He’s going to stay here a couple days.”

“He is?”

Jill’s voice has asked.

Rabbit sifts himself for the reason. Small scraped places smart on his knuckles; overstimulation has left a residue of nausea; he notices through the haze that still softly rotates around him that the end table was upset and that the lamp whose base is driftwood lies on the carpet awry but not smashed. The patient fidelity of these things bewilders him. “Sure,” he says. “Why not?”