“Daddy likes taking the bus.”

“I hate it!” Rabbit yells, “it stinks of Negroes,” but no voice below in the kitchen acknowledges hearing him.

Throughout the evening he has this sensation of nobody hearing him, of his spirit muffled in pulpy insulation, so he talks all the louder and more insistently. Driving the car (even with his flag decal the Falcon feels more like Janice’s car than his, she drives it so much more) back down Emberly to Weiser, past the movie house and across the bridge, he says, “Goddammit I don’t see why we have to go back into Brewer to eat, I spend all frigging day in Brewer.”

“Nelson agrees with me,” Janice says. “It will be an interesting experiment. I’ve promised him there are lots of things that aren’t gooey, it’s not like Chinese food.”

“We’re going to be late for the movie, I’m sure of it.”

“Peggy Fosnacht says—” Janice begins.

“That dope,” Rabbit says.

“Peggy Fosnacht says the beginning is the most boring part. A lot of stars, and some symphony. Anyway there must be short subjects or at least those things that want you to go out into the lobby and buy more candy.”

Nelson says, “I heard the beginning is real neat. There’s a lot of cave men eating meat that’s really raw, he nearly threw up a guy at school said, and then you see one of them get really zapped with a bone. And they throw the bone up and it turns into a spaceship.”

“Thank you, Mr. Spoil-It-All,” Janice says. “I feel I’ve seen it now. Maybe you two should go to the movie and I’ll go home to bed.”

“The hell,” Rabbit says. “You stick right with us and suffer for once.”

Janice says, conceding, “Women don’t dig science.”

Harry likes the sensation, of frightening her, of offering to confront outright this faceless unknown he feels now in their lives, among them like a fourth member of the family. The baby that died? But though Janice’s grief was worse at first, though she bent under it like a reed he was afraid might break, in the long years since, he has become sole heir to the grief. Since he refused to get her pregnant again the murder and guilt have become all his. At first he tried to explain how it was, that sex with her had become too dark, too serious, too kindred to death, to trust anything that might come out of it. Then he stopped explaining and she seemed to forget: like a cat who sniffs around in corners mewing for the drowned kittens a day or two and then back to lapping milk and napping in the wash basket. Women and Nature forget. Just thinking of the baby, remembering how he had been told of her death over a pay phone in a drugstore, puts a kink in his chest, a kink he still associates, dimly, with God.

At Janice’s directions he turns right off the bridge, at JIMBO’S Friendly LOUNGE, and after a few blocks parks on Quince Street. He locks the car behind them. “This is pretty slummy territory,” he complains to Janice. “A lot of rapes lately down here.”