back yard and slept inside a tool shed. Rabbit didn’t, and cut through Mrs. Schrock’s yard in order not to have to go even one half-block out of his way. There were other differences. Of course the dogs were gone, as was Mrs. Schrock, and the house interested Rabbit slightly because of the way it changed—altered mostly by the neighborhood children having secret meetings in it and leaving messages inscribed on the faded sides threatening terrible havoc to anyone trespassing onto club territory. Sometimes, coming home from work, he would see just catches of tops of heads being jerked back down below the window ledge on the second floor . . . this and running through the house and sounds like young owls. Twice a month he personally made a complete and thorough search of the building, looking for broken glass and rotting floorboards—things that a child might be harmed by. In the event that a window was broken, Rabbit would kick out the retaining frame, letting the glass splinter onto the ground, and sweep up the floor. Of course he could have had the house boarded up or razed, as a public nuisance, but it was his contention that without such places and a host of secret rituals and imaginary purposes surrounding them, children might well grow up misfits from their family and their true selves. . . . At the same time, he knew he could buy the property or absorb it into the bank for mortgage, but he didn’t want to be legally responsible in case some accident he hadn’t been able to anticipate happened.
A shiver of satisfaction always passed through him when at the end of his walk home he stepped onto the corner of his own yard and began walking toward his house. This, however, like many of Rabbit’s feelings, was not pristine and he had no idea exactly where it came from, or what type of satisfaction this was—one of pride or contentment, security or freedom, function or form. He told his wife that it was because of her, but at least he knew this wasn’t true because he had had it before he was married, before he had thought of marrying; when he was living alone.
His bank never made him feel anything. Not even after it was moved into a bigger building and he had brass and marble furnishings brought in from Des Moines and two men and two women were waiting after five P.M. on Friday to be paid for their time. Not even after the three floor-stand fans were brought, in July, to move the air around and cost as much as a bricklayer makes in five weeks, and a few of the townspeople, the very old ones with canes and heavy triangular lines under their eyes, were lured away from the Yard in the heat of the afternoon to his hickory benches along the wall, in the exhaust of the huge turning blades. No, it was not until after the six blocks home, after his tiny sparrow eyes had seen everything in between, and after counting the pigeons on the wire in front of his neighbor’s bar-converted garage, and before Ester could hear the soft, heavy touch of his shoes on the front step, there in his own time, that he felt a shiver of satisfaction pass through him like a silent morning train over the dew on the tracks, and be gone before he reached the house.
“Hi, Rabbit,” said Ester Wood, who would not call him anything else, though he was accustomed to so many nicknames—fashioned to him by the people who felt embarrassed to come out and call him Rabbit in public, to his face—that he felt obliged to answer to almost anything. Many of the nicknames were so desperate that they were more attempts to establish a new name than revising and reworking the old, or making something of his shape, names like Jack, Simon, Smokey, Root, Art, The Fat Man, Rub, Beef, and Loren. These names of course were not in use simultaneously, and if one was ardent, he might be able to notice the use of one fade and another one come moving into prominence; still there never seemed to be a time when you couldn’t use any one of them and be understood, or a time when you would hear someone use a name for Rabbit that you had not heard. The only explanation was that they too had been handed down from Merle Wood, and he had acquired them slowly, and people had learned them one at a time . . . “Who? Who did you say? Beef . . . Oh, yes, you mean Root . . . that’s him.”
“Hi, Sneaker,” said Rabbit and let himself down into a kitchen chair with a glass of tap water just as Ester came into the kitchen. Yes, he was the kind of man who could be as comfortable in his kitchen as in any other room in the house.
“The Easters had their baby, you hear?”
“I heard,” he answered.
“C named him Glove.”
“I heard.” He drank. “Why someone would name a child that, I don’t know. Must be the only guy in the whole world that when the nurse came in couldn’t think of anything better than Glove—that that would be the first thing in his mind, before Joe or John or Dave, before deciding to tell her to come back later. It must be from living in that junk yard.” Rabbit finished the water with a long swallow that began as a toss into his mouth, his fat hand nearly hiding the glass.
“What would be the first thing to come into your mind?” she asked, sitting on the edge of a chair across from him, pulling at a button on her blouse as if it were a sandbur, not looking at him.
“And everyone gets tired—or got tired—of hearing over and over again from both of them what a wonderful thing it was. Every time you went into Parson’s, Cell’d tell you again what a wonderful thing it was, having a baby. And C too, as though it were something that only happened to them and no one else.”
“I know,” said Ester.
“And he, like nothing was . . .”
“Have you been over there?”
“That Yard? I stopped over the other afternoon.”
“You know it upsets you to go over there, Rabbit. You ought to have more sense than to do things that upset you. Now you’ll be upset for another week—thinking about C.”
Rabbit went back to the sink and refilled his glass. “Maybe. But you’ve got to admit that Glove is a stupid name for a child.”
“What would you name one? The first name that would come into your head?”
“Fisher,” said Rabbit.
“That’s a good name.”
“What would you name one?” he asked, tossing down half of the second glass.
“Oh,” she said, pulling with both hands at the buttons on her blouse, finally popping one off and holding it as if it had fallen from the ceiling, “I wouldn’t care.”
“That’s what gets you in trouble, not caring. That’s why C’s son is named . . .”
“I mean I wouldn’t mind—anything you would like would be fine with me.”
“Fisher would be a good name.”
“I wouldn’t mind,” said Ester.
Rabbit looked into the refrigerator, finding nothing he wanted.
“She must have stopped using that thing,” he said, half out loud.
“Who?”
“Cell.”
“What thing?” she asked, thinking from his voice that the thing might be worse than the using of it.
“C said that they had something they used to keep from getting pregnant.”
“What?” she asked, thinking, in horror, He must think that I use one. He is blaming me for using something, some piece of rubber or something.
“I don’t know,” said Rabbit.
“Didn’t he tell you?”
“Something
