Throughout the early morning, those little hours that are so black, the music keeps coming and the signs keep pointing. His brain feels like a frail but alert invalid with messengers bringing down long corridors all this music and geographical news. At the same time he feels abnormally sensitive on the surface, as if his skin is thinking. The steering wheel is thin as a whip in his hands. As he turns it lightly he can feel the shaft stiffly pivot, and the differential gears part, and the bearings rotate in their sealed tunnels of grease. The phosphorescent winkers at the side of the road beguile him into thinking of young du Pont women: strings of them winding through huge glassy parties, potentially naked in their sequinned sheath gowns. Are rich girls frigid? He'll never know.
He wonders why there are so many signs coming back and so few going down. Of course he didn't know what he was going toward going down. He takes the Brewer turnoff off the Pike and the road takes him through the town where he first bought gas. As he takes the road marked BREWER 16 he can see cattycornered across the main street the dirtdigger's pumps and his dark window full of glinting shovels and fishing rods. The window looks pleased. There is just a lavender touch of light in the air. The radio's long floe of music is breaking up in warm—weather reports and farm prices.
He comes into Brewer from the south, seeing it in the smoky shadow before dawn as a gradual multiplication of houses among the trees beside the road and then as a treeless waste of industry, shoe factories and bottling plants and company parking lots and knitting mills converted to electronics parts and elephantine gas tanks lifting above trash—filled swampland yet lower than the blue edge of the mountain from whose crest Brewer was a warm carpet woven around a single shade of brick. Above the mountain, stars fade.
He crosses the Running Horse Bridge and is among streets he knows. He takes Warren Avenue through the south side of town and comes out on 422 near City Park. He drives around the mountain in company with a few hissing trailer trucks. Sunrise, an orange strip crushed against a far hill, flares between their wheels. As he turns left from Central into Jackson he nearly sideswipes a milk truck idling yards out from the curb. He continues up Jackson, past his parents' house, and turns into Kegerise Alley. Suddenly cool pink pallor tinges the buildings. He glides past the old chicken house, past the silent body shop, and parks the car in front of the Sunshine Athletic Association, a few steps from the boxed—in entrance, where anyone coming out would have to notice. Rabbit glances up hopefully at the third—story windows but no light shows. Tothero, if he is in there, is still asleep.
Rabbit settles himself to sleep. He takes off his suit coat and lays it over his chest like a blanket. But the daylight is growing, and the front seat is far too short, and the steering wheel crowds his shoulders. He doesn't move to the back seat because that would make him vulnerable; he wants to be able to drive away in a second if he must. Further, he doesn't want to sleep so heavily he will miss Tothero when he comes out.
So there he lies, his long legs doubled and no place for his feet, gazing up with crusty vision across the steering wheel and through the windshield into the sky's renewed flat fresh blue. Today is Saturday, and the sky has that broad bright blunt Saturday quality Rabbit remembers from boyhood, when the sky of a Saturday morning was the blank scoreboard of a long game about to begin. Roofball, box hockey, tether ball, darts . . .
His eyes have closed. A car purrs by, up the alley. The darkness behind his lids vibrates with the incessant automobile noises of the night past. He sees again the woods, the narrow road, the dark grove full of cars each containing a silent couple. He thinks again of his goal, lying down at dawn in sand by the Gulf of Mexico, and it seems in a way that the gritty seat of his car is that sand, and the rustling of the waking town the rustling of the sea.
He must not miss Tothero. He opens his eyes and tries to rise from his stiff shroud. He wonders if he has missed any time. The sky is the same.
He becomes anxious about the car windows. He hoists his chest up on one elbow and checks them all. The window above his head is open a crack and he cranks it tight and pushes down all the lock buttons. This security relaxes him hopelessly. He turns his face into the crack between seat and back. This twisting pushes his knees into the tense upright cushion, an annoyance that for the moment makes him more wakeful. He wonders where his son slept, what Janice has done, where his parents and her parents hunted. Whether the police know. The thought of police for a second paints his mind blue. He feels the faded night he left behind in this place as a net of telephone calls and hasty trips, trails of tears and strings of words, white worried threads shuttled through the night and now faded but still existent, an invisible net overlaying the steep streets and in whose center he lies secure in his locked hollow hutch.
Cotton and gulls in half—light and the way she'd come on the other girl's bed, never as good on their own. But there were good things: Janice so shy about showing her body even in the first weeks of wedding yet one night coming into the bathroom expecting nothing he found the mirror clouded with steam and Janice just out of the shower standing there doped and pleased with a little blue towel lazily and unashamed her bottom bright pink with hot water the way a woman was of two halves bending over and turning and laughing at his expression whatever it was and putting her arms up to kiss him, a blush of steam on her body and the back of her soft neck slippery. Rabbit adjusts his position and returns his mind to its dark socket: the back of her neck slippery, the small of her back pliant, both on their knees together, contortions that never were. His shin knocks the door handle, the pain becoming oddly mixed with the knocks of metal on metal down in the body shop. Work had begun. Eight o'clock? He recognizes elapsed time in the parched puffiness on his lips. He writhes and sits up, the covering coat falling to the car floor, and indeed through the splotched windshield there is Tothero, walking away down the alley, up beyond the very old farmhouse. Rabbit jumps from the car, puts on his coat, and runs after him. "Mr. Tothero! Hey Mr. Tothero!" His voice sounds flaked and rusty after hours of disuse.
The man turns, looking stranger than Rabbit had expected. He looks like a big tired dwarf. He seems foreshortened: a balding big head and a massively checkered sports coat and then stubby legs in blue trousers that are too long, so the crease buckles and zigzags above the shoes. As he brakes his run, and walks the last strides, Rabbit fears he's made a mistake.
But Tothero says the perfect thing. "Harry," he says, "wonderful Harry Angstrom." He puts out his hand for Harry to seize and with the other squeezes the boy's arm in a clasp of rigor. It comes back to Rabbit how he always had his hands on you. Tothero just stands there holding on and looking at him, smiling crookedly, the nose bent, one eye wide open and the other heavylidded. His face has grown more lopsided with the years. He is not going bald evenly; brushed strands of gray and pale brown streak the top of his skull.
"I need your advice," Rabbit says, and corrects himself. "What I really need right now is a place to sleep."
Tothero is silent before replying. His great strength is in these silences; he has the disciplinarian's trick of waiting a long moment while his words gather weight. At last he asks, "What's happened to your home?"
"Well, it kind of went."
"How do you mean?"
"It was no good. I've run out. I really have."
Another pause. Rabbit narrows his eyes against the sunlight that rebounds off the asphalt. His left ear aches. His teeth on that side feel as if they might start hurting.