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By Root 4390 0

right a nest of old tin cans and bottles sunken into the needles and then he strikes the road. He jacks his long legs over the guard fence and straightens up. Gold spots are switching on and off in the corners of his eyes. The asphalt scrapes under his shoes and he seems entered, with the wonderful resonant hollowness of exhaustion, on a new life. Cold air strokes his shoulder blades; somewhere in there he split old man Springer’s shirt right down the back. He has come out of the woods about a half-mile below the Pinnacle Hotel. As he swings along, jauntily hanging his blue coat over his shoulder on the hook of one finger, Janice and Eccles and his mother and his sins seem a thousand miles behind. He decides to call Eccles, like you’d send somebody a postcard. Eccles had liked him and put a lot of trust in him and deserves at least a phone call. Rabbit rehearses what he’ll say. “It’s O.K.,” he’ll tell him, “I’m on the way. I mean, I think there are several ways; don’t worry. Thanks for everything.” What he wants to get across is that Eccles shouldn’t be discouraged.

On the top of the mountain it is still broad day. Up in the sea of sky a lake of fragmented mackerel clouds drifts in one piece like a school of fish. There are only a couple cars parked around the hotel, jalopies, ‘52 Pontiacs and ‘51 Mercs like Springer Motors sells to these blotchy kids that come in with a stripper in their wallets and a hundred dollars in the bank. Inside the cafeteria a few of them are playing a pinball machine called BOUNCING BETSY. They look at him with their long hair and make wise faces and one of them even calls, “Did she rip your shirt?” But, it’s strange, they don’t really know anything about him except he looks mussed. You do things and do things and nobody really knows. The clock says twenty of six. He goes to the pay phone on the butterscotch wall and looks up Eccles’ number in the book. His wife answers dryly, “Hello?” Rabbit shuts his eyes and her freckles dance in the red of his lids.

“Hi. Could I speak to Reverend Eccles please?”

“Who is this?” Her voice has gotten up on a hard little high horse; she knows who. He smiles and pictures her solid sweet butt, that he tapped.

“Hey, this is Harry Angstrom. Is Jack there?”

The receiver at the other end of the line is replaced; that bitch. Just because I wouldn’t go into her frigging house with her. Poor Eccles probably sitting there his heart bleeding to hear the word from me and she going back and telling him wrong number, that poor bastard being married to that bitch. He hangs up himself, hears the dime rattle down, and feels simplified by this failure. He goes out across the parking lot.

He seems to leave behind him in the cafeteria all the poison she must be dripping into the poor tired guy’s ears. He imagines her telling Eccles about how he slapped her fanny and thinks he hears Eccles laughing and himself smiles. He’ll remember Eccles as laughing; there was that in him that held you off, that you couldn’t reach, the nasal business, but through the laughter you could get to him. Sort of sneaking in behind him, past the depressing damp gripping clinging front. What made it depressing was that he wasn’t sure, but couldn’t tell you, and worried his eyebrows instead, and spoke every word in a different voice. All in all, a relief to be loose from him. Soggy.

From the edge of the parking lot, Brewer is spread out like a carpet, its flowerpot red going dusty. Some lights are already turned on. The great neon sunflower at the center of the city looks small as a daisy. Now the low clouds are pink but up above, high in the dome, tails of cirrus still hang pale and pure. As he starts down the steps he wonders, Would she have? Lucy.

He goes down the mountainside on the flight of log stairs and through the part where some people are still playing tennis and down Weiser Street, putting his coat back on, and up Summer. His heart is murmuring in suspense but it is in the center of his chest. That lopsided kink about Becky is gone, he has put her in Heaven, he felt her go. If Janice had