“Must use a microscope,” Rabbit says.

“And you,” Mim says, turning, “he thinks you’re about the biggest spook he’s ever met. He can’t understand why if you want Janice back you don’t come and get her back.”

Rabbit shrugs. “Too proud or lazy. I don’t believe in force. I don’t like contact sports.”

“I did tell him, what a gentle brother you were.”

“Never hurt a fly if he could help it, used to worry me,” Pop says. “As if we’d had a girl and didn’t know it. Isn’t that the truth, Mother?”

Mom gets out, “Never. All boy.”

“In that case, Charlie says,” Mim goes on.

Rabbit interrupts: “ ‘Charlie’ yet.”

“ ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘why is he for the war?’ ”

“Fuck,” Rabbit says. He is more tired and impatient than he knew. “Anybody with any sense at all is for the damn war. They want to fight, we got to fight. What’s the alternative? What?”

Mim tries to ride down her brother’s rising anger. “His theory is,” she says, “you like any disaster that might spring you free. You liked it when Janice left, you liked it when your house burned down.”

“And I’ll like it even more,” Rabbit says, “when you stop seeing this greasy creep.”

Mim gives him the stare that has put a thousand men in their place. “Like you said. He’s my type.”

“A gangster, right. No wonder you’re out there screwing yourself into the morgue. You know where party chicks like you wind up? In coroners’ reports, when you take too many sleeping pills when the phone stops ringing, when the gangsters find playmates in not such baggy condition. You’re in big trouble, Sis, and the Stavroses of the world are going to be no help. They’ve put you where you are.”

“Maa-om,” Mim cries, out of old instinct appealing to the frail cripple nodding at the kitchen table. “Tell Harry to lay off.” And Rabbit remembers, it’s a myth they never fought; they often did.

When Pop and Harry return from work the next day, Harry’s last day on the job, the Toronado with New York plates is not in front of the house. Mim comes in an hour later, after Rabbit has put the supper chops in the oven; when he asks her where she’s been, she drops her big stripey bag on the old davenport and answers, “Oh, around. Revisiting the scenes of my childhood. The downtown is really sad now, isn’t it? All black-topped parking lots and Afro-topped blacks. And linoleum stores. I did one nice thing, though. I stopped at that store on lower Weiser with the lefty newspapers for sale and bought a pound of peanuts. Believe it or not Brewer is the only place left you can get good peanuts in the shell. Still warm.” She tosses him the bag, a wild pass; he grabs it left-handed and as they talk in the living room he cracks peanuts. He uses a flowerpot for the shells.