They turn left, toward the Weiser Street Bridge. River moisture cools his brow. He decides he will not be sick. Never, even as an infant, could stand it; some guys, Ronnie Harrison for one, liked it, throw up after a few beers or before a big game, joke about the corn between their teeth, but Rabbit needed to keep it down, even at the cost of a bellyache. He still carries from sitting in Jimbo’s the sense of the world being inside him; he will keep it down. The city night air. The ginger of tar and concrete baked all day, truck traffic lifted from it like a lid. Infrequent headlights stroke this girl, catching her white legs and thin dress as she hangs on the curb hesitant.

She asks, “Where’s your car?”

“I don’t have any.”

“That’s impossible.”

“My wife took it when she left me.”

“You didn’t have two?”

“No.” This is really a rich kid.

“I have a car,” she says.

“Where is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“How can you not know?”

“I used to leave it on the street up near Babe’s place off of Plum, I didn’t know it was somebody’s garage entrance, and one morning they had taken it away.”

“And you didn’t go after it?”

“I didn’t have the money for any fine. And I’m scared of the police, they might check me out. The staties must have a bulletin on me.”

“Wouldn’t the simplest thing for you be to go back to Connecticut?”

“Oh, please,” she says.

“What didn’t you like about it?”

“It was all ego. Sick ego.”

“Something pretty egotistical about running away, too. What’d that do to your mother?”

The girl makes no answer, but crosses the street, from Jimbo’s to the beginning of the bridge. Rabbit has to follow. “What kind of car was it?”

“A white Porsche.”

“Wow.”

“My father gave it to me for my sixteenth birthday.”

“My father-in-law runs the Toyota agency in town.”

They keep arriving at this place, where a certain symmetry snips their exchanges short. Having crossed the bridge, they stand on a little pond of sidewalk squares where in this age of cars few feet tread. The bridge was poured in the Thirties—sidewalks, broad balustrades, and lamp plinths—of reddish rough concrete; above them an original light standard, iron fluted and floral toward the top, looms stately but unlit at the entrance to the bridge, illumined since recently with cold bars of violet on tall aluminum stems rooted in the center of the walkway. Her white dress is unearthly in this light. A man’s name is embedded in a bronze plaque, illegible. Jill asks impatiently, “Well, how shall we do?”

He assumes she means transportation. He is too shaky still, too full of smoke and Stinger, to look beyond that. The way to the center of Brewer, where taxis prowl and doze, feels blocked. In the gloom beyond Jimbo’s neon nimbus, brown shadows, local hoods, giggle in doorways, watching. Rabbit says, “Let’s walk across the bridge and hope for a bus. The last one comes around eleven, maybe on Saturdays it’s later. Anyway, if none comes at all, it’s not too far to walk to my place. My kid does it all the time.”