Some days they return after Rabbit is home an hour from work. “Dad, it was a blast. We drove way up into this mountain that’s a hawk refuge and Jill let me take the wheel on the twisty road coming down, all the way to the highway. Have you ever heard of shifting down?”

“I do it all the time.”

“It’s when you go into a lower gear instead of braking. It feels neat. Jill’s Porsche has about five gears and you can really zoom around curves because the center of gravity is so low.”

Rabbit asks Jill, “You sure you’re handling this right? The kid might kill somebody. I don’t want to be sued.”

“He’s very competent. And responsible. He must get that from you. I used to stay in the driver’s seat and let him just steer but that’s more dangerous than giving him control. The mountain was really quite deserted.”

“Except for hawks, Dad. They sit on all these pine trees waiting for the guys to put out whole carcasses of cows and things. It’s really grungy.”

“Well,” Rabbit says, “hawks got to live too.”

“That’s what I keep telling him,” Jill says. “God is in the tiger as well as in the lamb.”

“Yeah. God really likes to chew himself up.”

“You know what you are?” Jill asks, her eyes the green of a meadow, her hair a finespun cedar-colored tangle dissolving into windowlight; a captured idea is fluttering in her head. “You are cynical.”

“Just middle-aged. Somebody came up to me and said, ‘I’m God,’ I’d say, ‘Show me your badge.’ ”

Jill dances forward, on fire with some fun and wickedness the day has left in her, and gives him a hug that dances off, a butterfly hug. “I think you’re beautiful. Nelson and I both think so. We often talk about it.”

“You do? That’s the only thing you can think of to do, talk about me?” He means to be funny, to keep her mood alive, but her face stops, hovers a second; and Nelson’s tells him he has struck on something. What they do. In that little car. Well, they don’t need much space, much contact: young bodies. The kid’s faint mustache, black hairs; her cedar mane. Bodies not sodden yet like his. At that keen age the merest touch. Their brother-sister shyness, touching hands in the flicker of wet glass at the sink. If she’d offer to lay hairy old heavy him the first night, what wouldn’t she do to bring the kid along; somebody has to. Why not? Chief question facing these troubled times. Why not.

Though he doesn’t pursue this guilt he has startled from her, that night he does make her take him squarely, socks it into her, though she offers her mouth and her cunt is so tight it sears. She is frightened when he doesn’t lose his hardness; he makes her sit up on him and pulls her satin hips down, the pelvis bones starved, and she sucks in breath sharply and out of pained astonishment pitched like delight utters, “You’re wombing me!” He tries to picture it. A rosy-black floor in her somewhere, never knows where he is, in among kidneys, intestines, liver. His child bride with flesh-colored hair and cloudy innards floats upon him, stings him, sucks him up like a cloud, falls, forgives him. His love of her coats him with distaste and confusion, so that he quickly sleeps, only his first dreams jostled when she gets from bed to go wash, check on Nelson, talk to God, take a pill, whatever else she needs to do to heal the wound where his seared cock was. How sad, how strange. We make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.