The gravel in the driveway crackles again. From the bathroom window he sees the boxy dun top of Springer’s spandy new Toyota wagon. To Nelson he calls, “Grandpa’s here. Let’s go-o.” To Janice he murmurs, “Sit tight, kid. Don’t commit yourself to anything.” To his father-in-law, sliding in beside him, across a spaghetti of nylon safety straps, Rabbit sings, “Buy me some peanuts and crack-er-jack …”

The stadium is on the northern side of Brewer, through a big cloverleaf, past the brick hulks of two old hosiery mills, along a three-lane highway where in these last years several roadside restaurants have begun proclaiming themselves as Pennsylvania Dutch, with giant plaster Amishmen and neon hex signs. GENUINE “Dutch” COOKING. Pa. Dutch Smörgåsbord. Trying to sell what in the old days couldn’t be helped. Making a tourist attraction out of fat-fried food and a diet of dough that would give a pig pimples. They pass the country fairgrounds, where every September the same battered gyp stands return, and the farmers bring their stinking livestock, and Serafina the Egyptian Temptress will take off all her clothes for those yokels who put up a dollar extra. The first naked woman he saw was Serafina or her mother. She kept on her high heels and a black mask and bent way backwards; she spread her legs and kept a kind of token shimmy rhythm as she moved in a semi-circle so every straining head (luckily he was tall even then) could see a trace of her cleft, an exciting queasy-making wrinkle shabbily masked by a patch of hair that looked to him pasted-on. Rubbed threadbare? He didn’t know. He couldn’t imagine.

Springer is shaking his head over the York riots. “Sniper fire four nights in a row, Harry. What is the world coming to? We’re so defenseless, is what strikes me, we’re so defenseless against the violent few. All our institutions have been based on trust.”

Nelson pipes up. “It’s the only way they can get justice, Grandpa. Our laws defend property instead of people.”

“They’re defeating their own purposes, Nellie. Many a white man of good will like myself is being turned against the blacks. Slowly but surely he’s being turned against them. It wasn’t Vietnam beat Humphrey, it was law and order in the streets. That’s the issue that the common man votes upon. Am I right or wrong, Harry? I’m such an old fogey I don’t trust my own opinions any more.”

One old geezer, Harry is remembering, at the side of the little stage, reached from behind and put his hand up on her pussy, shouting, “Aha!” She stopped her dance and stared out of the black mask. The tent went quiet; the geezer, surprisingly, found enough blood in himself to blush. Aha. That cry of triumph, as if he had snared a precious small animal, Harry never forgot. Aha. He slouches down and in answer to Springer says, “Things go bad. Food goes bad, people go bad, maybe a whole country goes bad. The blacks now have more than ever, but it feels like less, maybe. We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn’t big enough for all that wanting. I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”