His sweat, as with increasing ease and eagerness he waves at the crowd that clusters at the corners and in the shade of the Norway maples and on the sandstone retaining walls and terraced lawns up into the cool shadow of the porches, loosens his goatee, undermines the adhesive. He feels one side of it softly separate from his chin and without breaking stride – Uncle Sam has a bent-kneed, cranky stride not quite Harry's loping own – he digs out the Scotch tape from the pouchy pocket and tears off an inch, with the tab of red plaid paper. It wants to stick to his fingers; after several increasingly angry flicks it flutters away onto the street. Then he pulls off another piece, which he presses onto his own face and the detaching edge of synthetic white beard; the tape holds, though it must make a rectangular gleam on his face. The spectators who see him improvise this repair cheer. He takes to doffing his tall heavy hat, with a cautious bow to either side, and this stirs more applause and friendly salutation.

The crowd he sees from behind his wave, his smile, his adhesive gleam amazes him. The people of Mt. Judge are dressed for summer, with a bareness that since Harry's childhood has crept up from children into the old. White-haired women sit in their aluminum lawn chairs down by the curb dressed like fat babies in checks and frills, their shapeless veined legs cheerfully protruding. Middle-aged men have squeezed their keglike thighs into bicycle shorts meant for boys. Young mothers have come from their back-yard aboveground swimming pools in bikinis and high-sided slips of spandex that leave half their asses and boobs exposed. On their cocked hips they hold heat-flushed babies in nothing but diapers and rubber pants. There seem so many young – babies, tots, a bubbling up of generation on generation since the town brought him forth. Then it was full of the old: as he walked to school of a morning, severe and scolding women would come out of their houses shaking brooms and wearing thick dark stockings and housedresses with buttons all down the front. Now a cheerful innocent froth of flesh lines Jackson Road. Bare knees are bunched like grapes, and barrels of naked brown shoulders hulk in the dappled curbside shade. There are American flags on gilded sticks, and balloons, balloons in all colors, even metallic balloons shaped like hearts and pillows, held in hands and tied to bushes, to the handles of strollers containing yet more babies. A spirit of indulgence, a conspiring to be amused, surrounds and upholds his parade as he leads it down the stunning emptiness at the center of the familiar slanting streets.

Harry puts some Scotch tape on the other side of his goatee and out of the same pocket fishes his pill vial and pops a Nitrostat. The uphill section of the route tested him, and now turning downhill jars his heels and knees. When he draws too close to the cop car up ahead, carbon monoxide washes into his lungs. Mingled music from behind pushes him on: the gaps of "American Patrol" are filled with strains of "Yesterday." He concentrates on the painted yellow line, besmirched here and there by skid marks, dotted for stretches where passing is permitted but mostly double like the inflexible old trolley tracks, long buried or torn up for scrap. Cameras click at him. Voices call his several names. They know him, but he sees no face he knows, not one, not even Pru's wry red-haired heart-shape or Roy's black-eyed stare or Janice's brown little stubborn nut of a face. They said they would be at the corner of Joseph and Myrtle, but here near the Borough Hall the crowd is thickest, the summer-cooked bodies four and five deep, and his loved ones have been swallowed up.

The whole town he knew has been swallowed up, by the decades, but another has taken its place, younger, more naked, less fearful, better. And it still loves him, as it did when he would score forty-two points for them in a single home game. He is a legend, a walking cloud. Inside him a droplet of explosive has opened his veins like flower petals uncurling in the sun. His eyes are burning with sweat or something allergic, his head aches under the pressure cooker of the tall top hat. The greenhouse effect, he thinks. The hole in the ozone. When the ice in Antarctica goes, we'll all be drowned. Scanning the human melt for the glint of a familiar face, Harry sees instead a beer can being brazenly passed back and forth, the flash of a myopic child's earnest spectacles, a silver hoop earring in the lobe of a Hispanic-looking girl. Along the march he noticed a few black faces in the crowd, as cheerful and upholding as the rest, and some Orientals – an adopted Vietnamese orphan, a chunky Filipino wife. From far back in the still-unwinding parade the bagpipers keen a Highland killing song and the rock impersonator whimpers "… imagine all the people" and, closer to the front, on a scratchy tape through crackling speakers, Kate Smith belts out, dead as she is, dragged into the grave by sheer gangrenous weight, "God Bless America" -… to the oceans, white with foam." Harry's eyes burn and the impression giddily – as if he has been lifted up to survey all human history – grows upon him, making his heart thump worse and worse, that all in all this is the happiest fucking country the world has ever seen.

It was the sort of foolish revelation he might have once shared with Thelma, in the soft-speaking unembarrassment that follows making love. Thelma was suddenly dead. Dead of kidney failure, thrombocytopenia, and endocarditis, toward the end of July, as the cool dawn of another hot blue-gray day broke on the ornamental roof-level brickwork opposite St. Joseph's Hospital in Brewer. Poor Thelma, her body had just been plain worn out by her long struggle. Ronnie tried to keep her at home to the end, but that last week she was too much to handle. Hallucinations, raving, sarcastic anger. Quite a lot of anger, at Ron of all people, who had been so devoted a husband, after being such a scapegrace in his young unmarried days. She was only fifty-five -a year younger than Harry, two years older than Janice. She died the same week the DC-10 bringing people from Denver to Philadelphia by way of Chicago crashed in Sioux City, Iowa, trying to land at two hundred miles an hour, running on no controls but the thrust of the two remaining engines, cartwheeling on the runway, breaking up in a giant fireball, and yet well over a hundred surviving, some of them dangling upside down from the seat belts in a section of fuselage, some of them walking away and getting lost in the cornfields next to the runway. It seemed to Rabbit the first piece of news that summer that wasn't a twentieth anniversary of something – of Woodstock, the Manson murders, Chappaquidick, the moon landing. The TV news has been full of resurrected footage.

The funeral service is in a sort of no-brand-name church about a mile beyond Arrowdale. Looking for it, Harry and Janice got lost and wound up at the mall in Maiden Springs, where a six-theater cineplex advertised on its crammed display board HONEY I SHRUNK BATMAN GHOSTBUST II KARATE KID III DEAD POETS GREAT BALLS. The lazy girl in the booth didn't know where the church might be, nor did the pimply usher inside, in the big empty scarlet lobby smelling of buttered popcorn and melting M amp;Ms. Harry was angry with himself all those times he sneaked out to Arrowdale to visit Thelma, now he can't find her goddamn church. When finally, hot, embarrassed, and furious at each other's incompetence, the Angstroms arrive, the church is just a plain raw building, a warehouse with windows and a stump of an, anodized aluminum steeple, set in a treeless acre of red soil sown skimpily with grass and crisscrossed by car ruts. Inside, the walls are cinder-block, and the light through the tall clear windows bald and merciless. Folding chairs do instead of pews, and childish felt banners hang from the metal beams overhead, showing crosses, trumpets, crowns of thorns mixed in with Biblical verse numbers – Mark 15:32, Rev. 1:10, John 19:2. The minister wears a brown suit and necktie and shirt with an ordinary collar, and looks rather mussed, and breathless, like the plump young manager of an appliance store who sometimes has to help out in handling the heavy cartons. His voice is amplified by a tiny stalk of a microphone almost invisible at the oak lectern. He talks of Thelma as a model housewife, mother, churchgoer, sufferer. The description describes no one, it is like a dress with no one in it. The minister senses this, for he goes on to mention her "special" sense of humor, her particular way of regarding things which enabled her to bear herself so courageously throughout her long struggle with her physical affliction. During a pastoral visit to Thelma in her last tragic week in the hospital, the minister had ventured to speculate with her on the eternal mystery of why the Lord visits afflictions upon some and not upon others, and cures some and lets many remain uncured. Even in the divine Gospel, let us remind ourselves, this is so, for what of the many lepers and souls possessed who did not happen to be placed in Jesus' path, or were not aggressive enough to press themselves forward in the vast crowds that flocked to Him on the Plain and on the Mount, at Capernaum and at Galilee? And what was Thelma's reply? She said, there in that hospital bed of pain and suffering, that she guessed she deserved it as much as the next. This woman was truly humble, truly uncomplaining. On an earlier, less stressful occasion, the minister recalls with a quickening of his voice that indicates an anecdote is coming, he was visiting her in her immaculate home, and she had explained her physical affliction to him as a minor misunderstanding, as a matter of some tiny wires in her system being crossed. Then she had suggested, with that gentle humorous expression that all of us here who loved her remember – and yet in all grievous seriousness as well – that perhaps God was responsible only for what we ourselves could experience and see, and not responsible for anything at the microscopic level.