“Hush now. This honeyman needs to loosen up, I hate to see ’em sad, I always have, they aren’t like us, they don’t have the insides to accommodate it. They’s like little babies that way, they passes it off to someone else.” She is offering Rabbit the cigarette, moist end toward him.

He says, “No thanks, I gave up smoking ten years ago.”

Buchanan chuckles, with thumb and forefinger smooths his mustache sharper.

The boy says, “They’re going to live forever, right?”

Babe says, “This ain’t any of that nicotine shit. This weed is kindness itself.”

While Babe is coaxing him, Buchanan and the boy diagonally discuss his immortality. “My daddy used to say, Down home, you never did see a dead white man, any more’n you’d see a dead mule.”

“God’s on their side, right? God’s white, right? He doesn’t want no more Charlies up there to cut into his take, he has it just fine the way it is, him and all those black angels out in the cotton.”

“Your mouth’s gonta hurt you, boy. The man is the lay of the land down here.”

“Whose black ass you hustling, hers or yours?”

“You just keep your smack in the heel of your shoe.”

Babe is saying, “You suck it in as far as it’ll go and hold it down as long as you absolutely can. It needs to mix with you.”

Rabbit tries to comply, but coughing undoes every puff. Also he is afraid of getting “hooked,” of being suddenly jabbed with a needle, of starting to hallucinate because of something dropped into his Stinger. AUTOPSY ORDERED IN FRIENDLY LOUNGE DEATH. Coroner Notes Atypical Color of Skin.

Watching him cough, the boy says, “He is beautiful. I didn’t know they still came with all those corners. Right out of the crackerbox, right?”

This angers Rabbit enough to keep a drag down. It burns his throat and turns his stomach. He exhales with the relief of vomiting and waits for something to happen. Nothing. He sips the Stinger but now it tastes chemical like the bottom of that milkshake. He wonders how he can get out of here. Is Peggy’s offer still open? Just to feel the muggy kiss of summer night on the Brewer streets would be welcome. Nothing feels worse than other people’s good times.

Babe asks Buchanan, “What’d you have in mind, Buck?” She is working on the joint now and the smoke includes her eyes.

The fat man’s shrug jiggles Rabbit’s side. “No big plans,” Buchanan mutters. “See what develops. Woman, way you’re goin’, you won’t be able to tell those black keys from the white.”

She plumes smoke into his face. “Who owns who?”

The boy cuts in. “Ofay doesn’t dig he’s a john, right?”

Buchanan, his smoothness jammed, observes, “That mouth again.”

Rabbit asks loudly, “What else shall we talk about?” and twiddles his fingers at Babe for the joint. Inhaling still burns, but something is starting to mesh. He feels his height above the others as a good, a lordly, thing.