"That doesn't sound like very mature behavior," Tothero says.

"It was a mess as it was."

"What sort of mess?"

"I don't know. My wife's an alcoholic."

"And have you tried to help her?"

"Sure. How?"

"Did you drink with her?"

"No sir, never. I can't stand the stuff, I just don't like the taste." He says this readily, proud to be able to report to his old coach that he has not abused his body.

"Perhaps you should have," Tothero offers after a moment. "Perhaps if you had shared this pleasure with her, she could have controlled it."

Rabbit, dazed by the sun, numb through weariness, can't follow this thought.

"It's Janice Springer, isn't it?" Tothero asks.

"Yeah. God she's dumb. She really is."

"Harry, that's a harsh thing to say. Of any human soul."

Rabbit nods because Tothero himself seems certain of this. He is beginning to feel weak under the weight of the man's pauses. These pauses seem longer than he remembered them, as if Tothero too feels their weight. Fear touches Rabbit again; he suspects his old coach is addled, and begins all over. "I thought maybe I could sleep a couple hours somewhere in the Sunshine. Otherwise I might as well go home. I've had it."

To his relief Tothero becomes all bustling action, taking his elbow, steering him back along the alley, saying, "Yes of course, Harry, you look terrible, Harry. Terrible." His hand holds Rabbit's arm with metallic inflexibility and as he pushes him along Rabbit's bones jolt, pinned at this point. Something frantic in so tight a grip diminishes the comfort of its firmness. Tothero's voice, too, having turned rapid and precise, cuts into Rabbit's woolly state too sharply. "You asked me for two things," he says. "Two things. A place to sleep, and advice. Now, Harry, I'll give you the place to sleep provided, provided, Harry, that when you wake up the two of us have a serious, a long and serious talk about this crisis in your marriage. I'll tell you this now, it's not so much you I'm worried about, I know you well enough to know you always land on your feet, Harry; it's not so much you as Janice. She doesn't have your coordination. Do you promise?"

"Sure. Promise what?"

"Promise, Harry, we'll thrash out a way between us to help her."

"Yeah, but I don't think I can. I mean I'm not that interested in her. I was, but I'm not."

They reach the cement steps and the wooden storm shed at the entrance. Tothero opens the door with a key he has. The place is empty, the silent bar shadowy and the small round tables looking rickety and weak without men sitting at them. The electrical advertisements behind the bar, tubing and tinsel, are unplugged and dead. Tothero says, in a voice too loud, "I don't believe it. I don't believe that my greatest boy would grow so hardhearted."

Hard—hearted: the word seems to clatter after them as they climb the stairs to the second floor. Rabbit apologizes: "I'll try to think when I get some sleep."

"Good boy. That's all we want. Try is all we can ask." What does he mean, we? All these tables are empty. Sunlight strikes blond squares into the drawn tan shades above a low radiator dyed black with dust. Men's steps have worn paths in the narrow bare floorboards.

Tothero leads him to a door painted to blend with the wall; they go up a steep flight of attic stairs, a kind of nailed—down ladder between whose steps he sees sections of insulated wire and ragged gaps of carpentry. They climb into light. "Here's my mansion," Tothero says, and fidgets with his coat pocket flaps.

The tiny room faces east. A slash in a window shade throws a long knife of sun on a side wall, above an unmade Army cot. The other shade is up. Between the windows stands a bureau cleverly made of six beer cases wired together, three high and two wide. In the six boxes are arranged shirts in their laundry cellophane, folded undershirts and shorts, socks balled in pairs, handkerchiefs, shined shoes, and a leatherbacked brush with a comb stuck in the bristles. From two thick nails some sport coats, jarringly gay in pattern, are hung on hangers. Tothero's housekeeping stops at caring for his clothes. The floor is dotted with rolls of fluff. Newspapers and all kinds of magazines, from the National Geographic to teenage crime confessions and comic books, are stacked around. The space where Tothero lives merges easily with the rest of the attic, which is storage space, containing old pinochle tournament charts and pool tables and some lumber and metal barrels and broken chairs with cane bottoms and a roll of chicken wire and a rack of softball uniforms, hung on a pipe fixed between two slanting beams and blocking out the light from the window at the far end.

"Is there a men's?" Rabbit asks.

"Downstairs, Harry." Tothero's enthusiasm has died; he seems embarrassed. While Rabbit uses the toilet he can hear the old man fussing around upstairs, but when he returns he can see nothing changed. The bed is still unmade.

Tothero waits and Rabbit waits and then realizes Tothero wants to see him undress and undresses, sliding into the rumpled lukewarm bed in his T—shirt and jockey shorts. Though the idea is distasteful, getting into the old man's hollow, the sensations are good, being able to stretch out at last and feeling the solid cool wall close to him and hearing cars moving maybe hunting him far below. He twists his neck to say something to Tothero and is surprised by solitude. The door at the foot of the attic steps closes and footsteps diminish down a second flight of stairs, and an outside door closes and a bird cries by the window and the clangor of the body shop comes up softly. The old man's standing there was disturbing but Rabbit is sure that's not his problem. Tothero was always known as a lech but never a queer. Why watch? Suddenly Rabbit knows. It takes Tothero back in time. Because of all the times he had stood in locker rooms watching his boys change clothes. Solving this problem relaxes Rabbit's muscles. He remembers the couple with linked hands running on the parking lot outside the diner in West Virginia and it seems a great loss that it hadn't been him about to nail her, her seaweed hair sprawling. Red hair? There? He imagines West Virginia girls as coarse hardbodied laughers, like the young whores in Texas. Their sugar drawls always seemed to be poking fun but then he was only nineteen. Coming down the street with Hanley and Jarzylo and Shamberger the tight khaki making him feel nervous and the plains breaking away on all sides the horizon no higher than his knees it seemed and the houses showing families sitting on sofas inside like chickens at roost facing TV's. Jarzylo a maniac, cackling. Rabbit couldn't believe this house was right. It had flowers in the window, actual living flowers innocent in the window and he was tempted to turn and run. Sure enough, the woman who came to the door could have been on television selling cake mix. But she said, "Come on in boys, don't be shaaeh, come on in and heyiv a good taam," said it so motherly, and there they were, the hooers, not as many as he had pictured, in the parlor, on oldfashioned—looking furniture with scrolls and knobs. That they were pretty homely made him less timid: just ordinary factorylooking women, you wouldn't even call them girls, with a glaze on their faces like under fluorescent lights. They pelted the soldiers with remarks like pellets of dust and the men sneezed into laughter and huddled together surprised and numb. The one he took, but she took him, came up and touched him, hadn't buttoned her blouse more than one button from the last one and upstairs asked him in her gritty sugar voice if he wanted the light on or off and, when out of a choked throat he answered "Off," laughed, and then now and then smiled under him, working around to get him right, and even speaking kindly: "You're all right, honey. You're gone along all right. Oh yeaas. You've had lessons." So that when it was over he was hurt to learn, from the creases of completion at the sides of her lips and the hard way she wouldn't keep lying beside him but got up and sat on the edge of the metal—frame bed looking out the dark window at the green night sky of Texas, that she had faked her half. Her mute back showing in yellow—white the bar of a swimming—suit bra angered him; he took the ball of her shoulder in his hand and turned her roughly. The weighted shadows of her front hung so careless and undefended he looked away. She said down into his ear, "Honey, you didn't pay to be no two—timer." Sweet woman, she was money. The clangor of the body shop comes up softly. Its noise comforts him, tells him he is hidden and safe. While he hides, men are busy nailing the world down, and toward the disembodied sounds his heart makes in darkness a motion of love.