“Very beautiful,” the other dark man says. Round specs tilt, glint. The shadow of a face they cling to feels thin in the darkness. The voice arises very definite and dry.

“Many years ago,” Rabbit says, apologizing for his bulk, his bloated pallor, his dead fame. He sits down in the booth to hide.

“He has the hands,” the woman states. She is in a trance. She says, “Give old Babe one of those hands, white boy.” A-prickle with nervousness, wanting to sneeze on the sweetish smoke, Rabbit lifts his right hand up from his lap and lays it on the slippery table. Innocent meat. Distorted paw. Reminds him of, on television, that show with chimpanzees synchronized with talk and music, the eerie look of having just missed the winning design.

The woman touches it. Her touch reptilian cool. Her eyes lift, brooding. Above the glistening bone her throat drips jewels, a napkin of rhinestones or maybe real diamonds; Cadillacs after all, alligator shoes, they can’t put their money into real estate like whites; Springer’s thrifty Toyotas not to the point. His mind is racing with his pulse. She has a silver sequin pasted beside one eye. Accent the ugly until it becomes gorgeous. Her eyelashes are great false crescents. That she has taken such care of herself leads him to suspect she will not harm him. His pulse slows. Her touch slithers nice as a snake. “Do dig that thumb,” she advises the air. She caresses his thumb’s curve. Its thin-skinned veined ball. Its colorless moon nail. “That thumb means sweetness and light. It is an indicator of pleasure in Sagittarius and Leo.” She gives one knuckle an affectionate pinch.

The Negro not Buchanan (Buchanan has hustled to the bar to check on the Stinger) says, “Not like one of them usual little sawed-off nuggers these devils come at you with, right?”

Babe answers, not yielding her trance, “No, sir. This thumb here is extremely plausible. Under the right signs it would absolutely function. Now these knuckles here, they aren’t so good, I don’t get much music out of these knuckles.” And she presses a chord on them, with fingers startlingly hard and certain. “But this here thumb,” she goes back to caressing it, “is a real enough heartbreaker.”

“All these Charlies is heartbreakers, right? Just cause they don’t know how to shake their butterball asses don’t mean they don’t get Number One in, they gets it in real mean, right? The reason they so mean, they has so much religion, right? That big white God go tells ’em, Screw that black chick, and they really wangs away ’cause God’s right there slappin’ away at their butterball asses. Cracker spelled backwards is fucker, right?”

Rabbit wonders if this is how the young Negro really talks, wonders if there is a real way. He does not move, does not even bring back his hand from the woman’s inspection, her touches chill as teeth. He is among panthers.

Buchanan, that old rascal, bustles back and sets before Rabbit a tall pale glass of poison and shoves in so Rabbit has to shove over opposite the other man. Buchanan’s eyes check around the faces and guess it’s gotten heavy. Lightly he says, “This man’s wife, you know what? That woman, I never had the pleasure of meeting her, not counting those Verity picnics where Farnsworth, you all know Farnsworth now—?”