The car is a Toyota; it reminds Harry of his father-in-law and gets a whole set of uneasy feelings sliding. “I’d just as soon stand,” he says, “if it won’t take long,” and leans on the mailbox to make himself less tall above these men.

“It won’t take long,” Eddie Brumbach promises, hitching his shoulders and coming a crisp step closer.

Showalter dips his shoulder again as if to intervene, looks sadder around the eyes, wipes his soft mouth: “Well no, it needn’t. We don’t mean to be unfriendly, we just have a few questions.”

“Friendly questions,” Rabbit clarifies, anxious to help this man, whose careful slow voice is pure Brewer; who seems, like the city, bland and broad and kind, and for the time being depressed.

“Now some of us,” Showalter goes on, “were discussing, you know, the neighborhood. Some of the kids have been telling us stories, you know, about what they see in your windows.”

“They’ve been looking in my windows?” The mailbox blue is hot; he stops leaning and stands. Though it is October the sidewalk has a flinty glare and a translucent irritability rests upon the pastel asphalt rooftops, the spindly young trees, the low houses like puzzles assembled of wood and cement and brick and fake-fieldstone siding. He is trying to look through these houses to his own, to protect it.

Brumbach bristles, thrusts himself into Rabbit’s attention. “They haven’t had to look in any windows, they’ve had what’s going on pushed under their noses. And it don’t smell good.”

Showalter intervenes, his voice wheedling like a woman’s, buttering over. “No now, that’s putting it too strong. But it’s true, I guess, there hasn’t been any particular secret. They’ve been coming and going in that little Porsche right along, and I notice now he plays basketball with the boy right out front.”

“He?”

“The black fella you have living with you,” Showalter says, smiling as if the snag in their conversation has been discovered, and all will be clear sailing now.

“And the white girl,” Brumbach adds. “My younger boy came home the other day and said he saw them screwing right on the downstairs rug.”

“Well,” Rabbit says, stalling. He feels absurdly taller than these men, he feels he might float away while trying to make out the details of what the boy had seen, a little framed rectangle hung in his head like a picture too high on the wall. “That’s the kind of thing you see, when you look in other people’s windows.”

Brumbach steps neatly in front of Showalter, and Rabbit remembers who his handshake had been reminiscent of: the doctor giving Mom the new pills. I twist bodies to my will. I am life, I am death. “Listen, brother. We’re trying to raise children in this neighborhood.”

“Me too.”

“And that’s something else. What kind of pervert are you bringing up there? I feel sorry for the boy, it’s the fact, I do. But what about the rest of us, who are trying to do the best we can? This is a decent white neighborhood,” he says, hitting “decent” weakly but gathering strength for, “that’s why we live here instead of across the river over in Brewer where they’re letting ’em run wild.”