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members suffered wounds in the exchange.

    The office of outgoing Mayor Frank Rizzo declined to comment upon the incident. "We don't come up against as many of these crazies as we used to," Lieutenant Surpitski volunteered.

    The clipping had been accompanied by no note. Yet the sender must have known him, known something of his past, and be watching him, as the dead supposedly do. Creepy. Skeeter dead, a certain light was withdrawn from the world, a daring, a promise that all would be overturned. Skeeter had foretold this, his death young. Harry last had seen him heading across a field of corn stubble, among crows gleaning. But that had been so long ago the paper in his hand this last April felt little different from any other news item or from those sports clippings hanging framed in his showroom, about himself. Your selves die too. That part of him subject to Skeeter's spell had shrivelled and been overlaid. In his life he had known up close no other black people and in truth had been beyond all fear and discomfort flattered by the attentions of this hostile stranger descended like an angel; Harry felt he was seen by this furious man anew, as with X-rays. Yet he was surely a madman and his demands inordinate and endless and with him dead Rabbit feels safer.

    As he sits snug in his sealed and well-assembled car the venerable city of Brewer unrolls like a silent sideways movie past his closed windows. He follows 111 along the river to West Brewer, where once he lived with Skeeter, and then cuts over the Weiser Street Bridge renamed after some dead mayor whose name nobody ever uses and then, to avoid the pedestrian mall with fountains and birch trees the city planners put in the broadest two blocks of Weiser to renew the downtown supposedly (the joke was, they planted twice as many trees as they needed, figuring half would die, but in fact almost all of them thrived, so they have a kind of forest in the center of town, where a number of muggings have taken place and the winos and junkies sleep it off), Harry cuts left on Third Street and through some semi-residential blocks of mostly ophthalmologists' offices to the diagonal main drag called Eisenhower, through the sector of old factories and railroad yards. Railroads and coal made Brewer. Everywhere in this city, once the fifth largest in Pennsylvania but now slipped to seventh, structures speak of expended energy. Great shapely stacks that have not issued smoke for half a century. Scrolling cast-iron light stanchions not lit since World War II. The lower blocks of Weiser given over to the sale of the cut-rate and the X-rated and the only new emporium a big windowless enlargement in white brick of Schoenbaum Funeral Directors. The old textile plants given over to discount clothing outlets teeming with a gimcrack cheer of banners FACTORY FAIR and slogans Where the Dollar Is Still a Dollar. These acres of dead railroad track and car shops and stockpiled wheels and empty boxcars stick in the heart of the city like a great rusting dagger. All this had been cast up in the last century by what now seem giants, in an explosion of iron and brick still preserved intact in this city where the sole new buildings are funeral parlors and government offices, Unemployment and join the Army.

    Beyond the car yards and the underpass at Seventh that had been flooded last night, Eisenhower Avenue climbs steeply through tight-built neighborhoods of row houses built solid by German workingmen's savings and loans associations, only the fanlights of stained glass immune to the later layers of aluminum awning and Permastone siding, the Polacks and Italians being squeezed out by the blacks and Hispanics that in Harry's youth were held to the low blocks down by the river. Dark youths thinking in languages of their own stare from the triangular stone porches of the old corner grocery stores.

    The vanished white giants as they filled Brewer into its grid named these higher streets that Eisenhower