Rabbit fears the feeling will be fragile and vanish if he looks at it but it does not; it expands, explodes. Timbered gables, driveway pebbles, golf clubs fill the sky with debris. He remembers one doctor. He met him early this summer by accident, coming up on the porch to visit Mom, the doctor hurrying out, under the fanlight that sees everything, in a swank cream raincoat though it had just started to sprinkle, that kind of dude, who produces a raincoat from nowhere when proper, all set up, life licked, tweed trousers knife-sharp over polished strapped shoes, hurrying to his next appointment, anxious to get away from this drizzling tilted street. Pop worrying his teeth like an old woman in the doorway, performing introductions, “our son Harry,” pathetic pride. The doctor’s irritation at being halted even a second setting a prong of distaste on his upper lip behind the clipped mustache the color of iron. His handshake also metal, arrogant, it pinches Harry’s unready hand and says, I am strong, I twist bodies to my will. I am life, I am death. “I hate those Penn Park motherfuckers,” Harry amplifies, performing for Skeeter, wanting to please him. “If I could push the red button to blow them all to Kingdom Come”—he pushes a button in mid-air—“I would.” He pushes the button so hard he can see it there.

“Ka-boom, right?” Skeeter grins, flinging wide his sticklike arms.

“But it is,” Rabbit says. “Everybody knows black pussy is beautiful. It’s on posters even, now.”

Skeeter asks, “How you think all this mammy shit got started? Who you think put all those hog-fat churchified old women at the age of thirty in Harlem?”

“Not me.”

“It was you. Man, you is just who it was. From those breeding cabins on you made the black girl feel sex was shit, so she hid from it as quick as she could in the mammy bit, right?”

“Well, tell ’em it’s not shit.”

“They don’t believe me, Chuck. They see I don’t count. I have no muscle, right? I can’t protect my black women, right? ’Cause you don’t let me be a man.”

“Go ahead. Be one.”

Skeeter gets up from the armchair with the silver threads and circles the imitation cobbler’s bench with a wary hunchbacked quickness and kisses Jill where she sits on the sofa. Her hands, after a startled jerk, knit together and stay in her lap. Her head does not pull back nor strain forward. Rabbit cannot see, around the eclipsing orb of Skeeter’s Afro, Jill’s eyes. He can see Nelson’s eyes. They are warm watery holes so dark, so stricken that Rabbit would like to stick pins into them, to teach the child there is worse. Skeeter straightens from kissing, wipes the Jill-spit from his mouth. “A pleasant spoil. Chuck, how do you like it?”

“I don’t mind. If she doesn’t.”

Jill has closed her eyes, her mouth open on a small bubble.

“She does mind it,” Nelson protests. “Dad, don’t let him!”