“We had a name over there for guys like you. Wiseass. Sometimes just by mistake they got fragged.”

“I’ll tell you what else,” Rabbit says. “As a bonus, I’ll try to remember to draw the curtains.”

“You better do fucking more than pull the fucking curtains,” Brumbach tells him, “you better fucking barricade the place.”

Out of nowhere a mail truck, red, white, and blue, with a canted windshield like a display case, squeaks to a stop at the curb; hurriedly, not looking at any of them, a small man in gray unlocks the mailbox front and scoops a torrent, hundreds it seems, of letters into a gray sack, locks it shut, and drives away.

Rabbit goes close to Brumbach. “Tell me what you want. You want me to move out of the neighborhood.”

“Just move the black out.”

“It’s him and the girl together you don’t like; suppose he stays and the girl goes?”

“The black goes.”

“He goes when he stops being my guest. Have a nice supper.”

“You’ve been warned.”

Rabbit asks Showalter, “You hear that threat?”

Showalter smiles, he wipes his brow, he is less depressed. He has done what he could. “I told you,” he says, “not to ride him. We came to you in all politeness. I want to repeat, it’s the circumstances of what’s going on, not the color of anybody’s skin. There’s a house vacant abutting me and I told the realtor, I said as plain as I say to you, ‘Any colored family, with a husband in the house, can get up the equity to buy it at the going market price, let them have it by all means. By all means.’ ”

“It’s nice to meet a liberal,” Rabbit says, and shakes his hand. “My wife keeps telling me I’m a conservative.”

And, because he likes him, because he likes anybody who fought in Vietnam where he himself should have been fighting, had he not been too old, too old and fat and cowardly, he offers to shake Brumbach’s hand too.

The cocky little man keeps his arms stiff at his sides. Instead he turns his head, so the ruined jaw shows. The scar is not just a red L, Rabbit sees it is an ampersand, complicated by faint lines where skin was sewn and overlapped to repair a hole that would always be, that would always repel eyes. Rabbit makes himself look at it. Brumbach’s voice is less explosive, almost regretful, sad in its steadiness. “I earned this face,” he says. “I got it over there so I could have a decent life here. I’m not asking for sympathy, a lot of my buddies made out worse. I’m just letting you know, after what I seen and done, no wiseass is crowding me in my own neighborhood.”

Inside the house, it is too quiet. The television isn’t going. Nelson is doing homework at the kitchen table. No, he is reading one of Skeeter’s books. He has not gotten very far. Rabbit asks, “Where are they?”