Black to him is just a political word but these people really are, their faces shine of blackness turning as he enters, a large soft white man in a sticky gray suit. Fear travels up and down his skin, but the music of the great green-and-mauve-glowing jukebox called Moonmood slides on, and the liquid of laughter and tickled muttering resumes flowing; his entrance was merely a snag. Rabbit hangs like a balloon waiting for a dart; then his elbow is jostled and Buchanan is beside him.

“Hey, man, you made it.” The Negro has materialized from the smoke. His overtrimmed mustache looks wicked in here.

“You didn’t think I would?”

“Doubted it,” Buchanan says. “Doubted it severely.”

“It was your idea.”

“Right. Harry, you are right. I’m not arguing, I am rejoicing. Let’s fix you up. You need a drink, right?”

“I don’t know, my stomach’s getting kind of sensitive.”

“You need two drinks. Tell me your poison.”

“Maybe a Daiquiri?”

“Never. That is a lady’s drink for salad luncheons. Rufe, you old rascal.”

“Yazzuh, yazzuh,” comes the answer from the bar.

“Do a Stinger for the man.”

“Yaz-zuh.”

Rufe has a bald head like one of the stone hatchets in the Brewer Museum, only better polished. He bows into the marine underglow of the bar and Buchanan leads Rabbit to a booth in the back. The place is deep and more complicated than it appears from the outside. Booths recede and lurk: darkwood cape-shapes. Along one wall, Rufe and the lowlit bar; behind and above it, not only the usual Pabst and Bud and Miller’s gimcracks bobbing and shimmering, but two stuffed small deer-heads, staring with bright brown eyes that will never blink. Gazelles, could they have been gazelles? A space away, toward a wall but with enough room for a row of booths behind, a baby grand piano, painted silver with one of those spray cans, silver in circular swirls. In a room obliquely off the main room, a pool table: colored boys all arms and legs spidering around the idyllic green felt. The presence of any game reassures Rabbit. Where any game is being played a hedge exists against fury. “Come meet some soul,” Buchanan says. Two shadows in the booth are a man and a woman. The man wears silver circular glasses and a little pussy of a goatee and is young. The woman is old and wrinkled and smokes a yellow cigarette that requires much sucking in and holding down and closing of the eyes and sighing. Her brown eyelids are gray, painted blue. Sweat shines below the base of her throat, on the slant bone between her breasts, as if she had breasts, which she does not, though her dress, the blood-color of a rooster’s comb, is cut deep, as if she did. Before they are introduced she says “Hi” to Harry, but her eyes slit to pin him fast in the sliding of a dream.

“This man,” Buchanan is announcing, “is a co-worker of mine, he works right beside his daddy at Ver-i-ty Press, an expert Linotypist,” giving syllables an odd ticking equality, a put-on or signal of some sort? “But not only that. He is an ath-e-lete of renown, a basketball player bar none, the Big O of Brewer in his day.”