Rabbit reassures him, “Skeeter would’ve gotten her out.”

“He wouldn’t of, Dad! He wouldn’t care. All he cared about was himself. And all you cared about was him. Nobody cared about Jill.” He writhes in his father’s fumbling grasp.

A policeman is beside them. “You Angstrom?” He is one of the new style of cops, collegiate-looking: pointed nose, smooth chin, sideburns cut to a depth Rabbit still thinks of as antisocial.

“Yes.”

The cop takes out a notebook. “How many persons were in residence here?”

“Four. Me and the kid—”

“Name?”

“Nelson.”

“Any middle initial?”

“F for Frederick.” The policeman writes slowly and speaks so softly he is hard to hear against the background of crowd murmur and fire crackle and water being hurled. Harry has to ask, “What?”

The cop repeats, “Name of mother?”

“Janice. She’s not living here. She lives over in Brewer.”

“Address?”

Harry remembers Stavros’s address, but gives instead, “Care of Frederick Springer, 89 Joseph Street, Mt. Judge.”

“And who is the girl the boy mentioned?”

“Jill Pendleton, of Stonington, Connecticut. Don’t know the street address.”

“Age?”

“Eighteen or nineteen.”

“Family relationship?”

“None.”

It takes the cop a very long time to write this one word. Something is happening to a corner of the roof; the crowd noise is rising, and a ladder is being lowered through an intersection of searchlights.

Rabbit prompts: “The fourth person was a Negro we called Skeeter. S-k-double-e-t-e-r.”

“Black male?”

“Yes.”

“Last name?”

“I don’t know. Could be Farnsworth.”

“Spell please.”

Rabbit spells it and offers to explain. “He was just here temporarily.”

The cop glances up at the burning ranch house and then over at the owner. “What were you doing here, running a commune?”

“No, Jesus; listen. I’m not for any of that. I voted for Hubert Humphrey.”

The cop studies the house. “Any chance this black is in there now?”

“Don’t think so. He was the one that called me, it sounded as if from a phone booth.”

“Did he say he’d set the fire?”

“No, he didn’t even say there was a fire, he just said things were bad. He said the word ‘bad’ twice.”

“Things were bad,” the cop writes, and closes his notepad. “We’ll want some further interrogation later.” Reflected firelight gleams peach-color off of the badge in his cap. The corner of the house above the bedroom is collapsing; the television aerial, that they twice adjusted and extended to cut down ghosts from their neighbors’ sets, tilts in the leap of flame and slowly swings downward like a skeletal tree, still clinging by some wires or brackets to its roots. Water vaults into what had been the bedroom. A lavish cumulus of yellow smoke pours out, golden-gray, rich as icing squeezed from the sugary hands of a pastry cook.

The cop casually allows, “Anybody in there was cooked a half-hour ago.”

Two steps away, Nelson is bent over to let vomit spill from his mouth. Rabbit steps to him and the boy allows himself to be touched. He holds him by the shoulders; it feels like trying to hold out of water a heaving fish that wants to go back under, that needs to dive back under or die. His father brings back his hair from his cheeks so it will not be soiled by vomit; with his fist he makes a feminine knot of hair at the back of the boy’s hot soft skull. “Nellie, I’m sure she got out. She’s far away. She’s safe and far away.”