“Harry, you’ll get us kicked out,” Janice says; but he notices she is still happy, all in circles, a cookie in the oven.

“I’m beginning to dig him,” Stavros tells her. “If I get your meaning,” he says to Rabbit, “we’re the big mama trying to make this unruly kid take some medicine that’ll be good for him.”

“That’s right. You got it. We are. And most of ’em want to take the medicine, they’re dying for it, and a few madmen in black pajamas would rather bury ’em alive. What’s your theory? That we’re in it for the rice? The Uncle Ben theory.” Rabbit laughs and adds, “Bad old Uncle Ben.”

“No,” Stavros says, squaring his hands on the checked tablecloth and staring level-browed at the base of Harry’s throat—gingerly with him, Harry notices: Why?—“my theory is it’s a mistaken power play. It isn’t that we want the rice, we don’t want them to have it. Or the magnesium. Or the coastline. We’ve been playing chess with the Russians so long we didn’t know we were off the board. White faces don’t work in yellow countries anymore. Kennedy’s advisers who thought they could run the world from the dean’s office pushed the buttons and nothing happened. Then Oswald voted Johnson in who was such a bonehead he thought all it took was a bigger thumb on the button. So the machine overheated, you got inflation and a falling market at one end and college riots at the other and in the middle forty thousand sons of American mothers killed by shit-smeared bamboo. People don’t like having Sonny killed in the jungle anymore. Maybe they never liked it, but they used to think it was necessary.”

“And it isn’t?”

Stavros blinks. “I see. You say war has to be.”

“Yeah, and better there than here. Better little wars than big ones.”

Stavros says, his hands on edge, ready to chop, “But you like it.” His hands chop. “Burning up gook babies is right where you’re at, friend.” The “friend” is weak.

Rabbit asks him, “How did you do your Army bit?”

Stavros shrugs, squares his shoulders. “I was 4-F. Tricky ticker. I hear you sat out the Korean thing in Texas.”

“I went where they told me. I’d still go where they told me.”

“Bully for you. You’re what made America great. A real gunslinger.”

“He’s silent majority,” Janice says, “but he keeps making noise,” looking at Stavros hopefully, for a return on her quip. God, she is dumb, even if her ass has shaped up in middle age.

“He’s a normal product,” Stavros says. “He’s a typical good-hearted imperialist racist.” Rabbit knows, from the careful level way this is pronounced, with that little tuck of a sold-car smile, that he is being flirted with, asked—his dim feeling is—for an alliance. But Rabbit is locked into his intuition that to describe any of America’s actions as a “power play” is to miss the point. America is beyond power, it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains and darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible. He fights back, “I don’t follow this racist rap. You can’t turn on television now without some black face spitting at you. Everybody from Nixon down is sitting up nights trying to figure out how to make ’em all rich without putting ’em to the trouble of doing any work.” His tongue is reckless; but he is defending something infinitely tender, the low flame of loyalty lit with his birth. “They talk about genocide when they’re the ones planning it, they’re the ones, the Negroes plus the rich kids, who want to pull it all down; not that they can’t run squealing for a lawyer whenever some poor cop squints funny at ’em. The Vietnam war in my opinion—anybody want my opinion?—”