Nelson cries, “We’re missing Laugh-In!”

They turn it on. The cold small star expands, a torrent of stripes snaps into a picture, Sammy Davis Jr. is being the little dirty old man, tapping along behind the park bench, humming that aimless sad doodling tune. He perks up, seeing there is someone sitting on the bench. It is not Ruth Buzzi but Arte Johnson, the white, the real little dirty old man. They sit side by side and stare at each other. They are like one man looking into a crazy mirror. Nelson laughs. They all laugh: Nelson, Jill, Rabbit, Skeeter. Kindly the rain fastens them in, a dressmaker patting and stitching all around the house, fitting its great wide gown.

Nights with Skeeter, they blend together. Skeeter asks him, “You want to know how a Ne-gro feels?”

“Not much.”

“Dad, don’t,” Nelson says.

Jill, silent, abstracted, passes Rabbit the joint. He takes a tentative puff. Has hardly held a cigarette in ten years, scared to inhale. Nearly sick after the other time, in Jimbo’s. You suck and hold it down. Hold it down.

“Ee-magine,” Skeeter is saying, “being in a glass box, and every time you move toward something, your head gets bumped. Ee-magine being on a bus, and everybody movin’ away, ’cause your whole body’s covered with pustulatin’ scabs, and they’re scared to get the disease.”

Rabbit exhales, lets it out. “That’s not how it is. These black kids on buses are pushy as hell.”

“You’ve set so much type the world is lead, right? You don’t hate nobody, right?”

“Nobody.” Serenely. Space is transparent.

“How you feel about those Penn Park people?”

“Which ones?”

“All those ones. All those ones live in those great big piecrust mock-Two-door houses with His and Hers Caddies parked out by the hydrangea bushes. How about all those old farts down at the Mifflin Club with all those iron gates that used to own the textile mills and now don’t own anything but a heap of paper keeps ’em in cigars and girlfriends? How about those? Let ’em settle in before you answer.”

Rabbit pictures Penn Park, the timbered gables, the stucco, the weedless lawns plumped up like pillows. It was on a hill. He used to imagine it on the top of a hill, a hill he could never climb, because it wasn’t a real hill like Mt. Judge. And he and Mom and Pop and Mim lived near the foot of this hill, in the dark next to the Bolgers, and Pop came home from work every day too tired to play catch in the back yard, and Mom never had jewelry like other women, and they bought day-old bread because it was a penny cheaper, and Pop’s teeth hurt to keep money out of the dentist’s hands, and now Mom’s dying was a game being played by doctors who drove Caddies and had homes in Penn Park. “I hate them,” he tells Skeeter.

The black man’s face lights up, shines. “Deeper.”