“And you’re the black Jesus going to bring it in,” Rabbit mocks. “From A.D. to A.S. After Skeeter. I should live so long. All Praise Be Skeeter’s Name.”

He offers to sing but Skeeter is concentrating on the other two, disciples. “People talk revolution all the time but revolution’s not interesting, right? Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another and that’s bullshit, that’s just power, and power is just guns and gangsters, and that’s boring bullshit, right? People say to me Free Huey, I say Screw Huey, he’s just Agnew in blackface. World forgets gangsters like that before they’re dead. No. The problem is really, when the gangsters have knocked each other off, and taken half of everybody else with them, to make use of the space. After the Civil War ended, there was space, only they let it fill up with that same old greedy muck, only worse, right? They turned that old dog-eat-dog thing into a divine law.”

“That’s what we need, Skeeter,” Rabbit says. “Some new divine laws. Why doncha go up to the top of Mt. Judge and have ’em handed to you on a tablet?”

Skeeter turns that nicely carved knife-handle of a face to him slowly, says slowly, “I’m no threat to you, Chuck. You’re set. Only thing I could do to you is kill you and that matters less than you think, right?”

Jill delicately offers to make peace. “Didn’t we pick out something for Harry to read?”

“Fuck it,” Skeeter says. “That won’t swing now. He’s giving off ugly vibes, right? He’s not ready. He is immature.”

Rabbit is hurt, he had only been kidding. “Come on, I’m ready, give me my thing to read.”

Skeeter asks Nelson, “What say, Babychuck? Think he’s ready?”

Nelson says, “You must read it right, Dad. No poking fun.”

“Me? Who’d I ever poke fun of?”

“Mom. All the time you poke fun of Mom. No wonder she left you.”

Skeeter gives Harry the book open to a page. “Just a little bit. Just read where I’ve marked.”

Soft red crayon. Those Crayola boxes that used to remind him of bleachers with every head a different color. This strange return. “I believe, my friends and fellow citizens,” Rabbit reads solemnly, “we are not prepared for this suffrage. But we can learn. Give a man tools and let him commence to use them, and in time he will learn a trade. So it is with voting. We may not understand it at the start, but in time we shall learn to do our duty.”

The rain makes soft applause.

Skeeter tips his narrow head and smiles at the two children on the sofa. “Makes a pretty good nigger, don’t he?”

Nelson says, “Don’t, Skeeter. He didn’t poke fun so you shouldn’t.”

“Nothing wrong with what I said, that’s what the world needs, pretty good niggers, right?”

To show Nelson how tough he is, Rabbit tells Skeeter, “This is all bleeding-heart stuff. It’d be like me bellyaching that the Swedes were pushed around by the Finns in the year Zilch.”