“My only objective was to be polite.” She’ll ooze in the letter slot: haunted by this image and the smoke inside him, he feels he can lift up from the booth, pass across Buchanan’s shoulders like a shawl, and out the door. Nothing can hold him, not Mom, not Janice. He could slip a posse dribbling, Tothero used to flatter him.

“You going to go off half-cocked,” Buchanan warns.

“You ain’t heard Babe play,” the other man says.

He stops rising. “Babe plays?”

She is flustered, stares at her thin ringless hands, fiddles, mumbles. “Let him go. Let the man run. I don’t want him to hear.”

The boy teases her. “Babe now, what sort of bad black act you putting on? He wants to hear you do your thing. Your darkie thing, right? You did the spooky card-reading bit and now you can do the banjo bit and maybe you can do the hot momma bit afterwards but it doesn’t look like it right now, right?”

“Ease off, nigger,” she says, face still bent low. “Sometime you going to lean too hard.”

Rabbit asks her shyly, “You play the piano?”

“He gives me bad vibes,” Babe confesses to the two black men. “Those knuckles of his aren’t too good. Bad shadows in there.”

Buchanan surprises Harry by reaching and covering her thin bare hands with one of his broadened big pressman’s hands, a ring of milk-blue jade on one finger, battered bright copper on another. His other arm reaches around Harry’s shoulders, heavy. “Suppose you was him,” he says to Babe, “how would that make you feel?”

“Bad,” she says. “As bad as I feel anyway.”

“Play for me Babe,” Rabbit says in the lovingness of pot, and she lifts her eyes to his and lets her lips pull back on long yellow teeth and gums the color of rhubarb stems. “Men,” Babe gaily drawls. “They sure can retail the shit.” She pushes herself out of the booth, hobbling in her comb-red dress, and crosses through a henscratch of applause to the piano painted as if by children in silver swirls. She signals to the bar for Rufe to turn on the blue spot and bows stiffly, once, grudging the darkness around her a smile and, after a couple of runs to burn away the fog, plays.