“People keep telling me that,” Rabbit says, “but I don’t see much evidence. She can find me if she wants to.”

Mim crosses her pants legs, aligns the stripes, and lights another cigarette. “She’s trapped. Her love for this guy is the biggest thing she has, it’s the first step out she’s taken since she drowned that baby. Let’s face it, Harry. You kids back here in the sticks still believe in ghosts. Before you screw you got to square it with old Jack Frost, or whatever you call him. To square skipping out with herself she has to make it a big deal. So. Remember as kids those candy jars down at Spottsie’s you reached inside of to grab the candy and then you couldn’t get your fist out? If Janice lets go to pull her hand out she’ll have no candy. She wants it out, but she wants the candy too; no, that’s not exactly it, she wants the idea of what she’s made out of the candy in her own mind. So. Somebody has to break the jar for her.”

“I don’t want her back still in love with this greaseball.”

“That’s how you have to take her.”

“The son of a bitch, he even has the nerve, sitting there in these snappy suits, he must make three times what I do just cheating people, he has the fucking nerve to be a dove. One night we all sat in this restaurant with him and me arguing across the table about Vietnam and them playing touch-ass side by side. You’d like him, actually, he’s your type. A gangster.”

Patiently Mim is sizing him up: one more potential customer at the bar. “Since when,” she asks, “did you become such a war lover? As I remember you, you were damn glad to wriggle out of that Korean thing.”

“It’s not all war I love,” he protests, “it’s this war. Because nobody else does. Nobody else understands it.”

“Explain it to me, Harry.”

“It’s a, it’s a kind of head fake. To keep the other guy off balance. The world the way it is, you got to do something like that once in a while, to keep your options, to keep a little space around you.” He is using his arms to show her his crucial concept of space. “Otherwise, he gets so he can read your every move and you’re dead.”

Mim asks, “You’re sure there is this other guy?”

“Sure I’m sure.” The other guy is the doctor who shakes your hand so hard it hurts. I know best. Madness begins in that pinch.

“You don’t think there might just be a lot of little guys trying to get a little more space than the system they’re under lets them have?”

“Sure there are these little guys, billions of ’em”—billions, millions, too much of everything—“but then also there’s this big guy trying to put them all into a big black bag. He’s crazy, so so must we be. A little.”