“It’s these God, damn, blacks, is what it is.” Earl Angstrom lowers his voice so it turns husky, though Buchanan and Farnsworth always take their coffee break outside in the alley, with Boonie and the other drinkers. “I’ve always called ’em black and they call themselves blacks now and that suits me fine. They can’t do a white man’s job, except for a few, and take even Buck, he’s never made head of makeup though he’s been here the longest; so they have to rob and kill, the ones that can’t be pimps and prizefighters. They can’t cut the mustard and never could. This country should have taken whosever advice it was, George Washington if memory serves, one of the founding fathers, and shipped ’em all back to Africa when we had a chance. Now, Africa wouldn’t take ’em. Booze and Cadillacs and white pussy, if you’ll pardon my saying so, have spoiled ’em rotten. They’re the garbage of the world, Harry. American Negroes are the lowest of the low. They steal and then they have the nerve to say the country owes it to ’em.”

“O.K., O.K.” To see his father passionate about anything disagrees with Rabbit. He shifts to the most sobering subject they have between them: “Does she mention me much? Mom.”

The old man licks spittle from his lips, sighs, slumps confidingly lower, glancing down at the cooled scummed coffee in his hands. “All the time, Harry, every minute of the day. They tell her things about you and she raves against the Springers; oh, how she carries on about that family, especially the women of it. Apparently, the Mrs. is saying you’ve taken up with a hippie teenager, that’s what drove Janice out of the house in the first place.”

“No, Janice went first. I keep inviting her back.”

“Well, whatever the actualities of the case are, I know you’re trying to do the right thing. I’m no moralist, Harry, I know you young people nowadays have more tensions and psychological pressures than a man my age could tolerate. If I’d of had the atomic bomb and these rich-kid revolutionaries to worry about, I’d no doubt just have put a shotgun to my head and let the world roll on without me.”

“I’ll try to get over. I ought to talk to her,” Rabbit says. He looks past his father’s shoulder to where the yellow-faced wall clock jumps to within a minute of 11:10, the end of the coffee break. He knows that in all this rolling-on world his mother is the only person who knows him. He remembers from the night we touched the moon the nudge delivered out of her dying, but doesn’t want to open himself to her until he understands what is happening inside him enough to protect it. She has something happening to her, death and L-dopa, and he has something happening to him, Jill. The girl has been living with them three weeks and is learning to keep house and to give him a wry silent look saying I know you when he offers to argue about Communism or kids today or any of the other sore spots where he feels rot beginning and black madness creeping in. A little wry green look that began the night he hurt her upwards and touched her womb.