“Could be,” Buchanan says. “It would explain that wife.”

“Come on, let me out of the booth. I’d like to take her—”

“Then help yourself, friend. On me.”

Babe is playing “Time After Time.” I tell myself that I’m.

Harry sags. The table edge is killing his thighs. “O.K., kid. Come along.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“You’ll be bored,” he feels in honesty obliged to add.

“You’ve been had,” she tells him.

“Jilly now, be gracious for the gentleman.” Buchanan hastily pushes out of the booth, lest the combination tumble, and lets Harry slide out and leans against him confidentially. Geezers. His breath rises bad, from under the waxed needles. “Problem is,” he explains, the last explaining he will do tonight, “it don’t look that good, her being in here, under age and all. The fuzz now, they aren’t absolutely unfriendly, but they hold us pretty tight to the line, what with public opinion the way it is. So it’s not that healthy for anybody. She’s a poor child needs a daddy, is the simple truth of it.”

Rabbit asks her, “How’d he die?”

Jill says, “Heart. Dropped dead in a New York theater lobby. He and my mother were seeing Hair.”

“O.K. Let’s shove.” To Buchanan Rabbit says, “How much for the drinks? Wow. They’re just hitting me.”

“On us,” is the answer, accompanied by a wave of a palm the color of silver polish. “On the black community.” He has to wheeze and chuckle. Struggling for solemnity: “This is real big of you, man. You’re a big man.”

“See you at work Monday.”

“Jilly-love, you be a good girl. We’ll keep in touch.”

“I bet.”

Disturbing, to think that Buchanan works. We all work. Day selves and night selves. The belly hungers, the spirit hungers. Mouths munch, cunts swallow. Monstrous. Soul. He used to try to picture it when a child. A parasite like a tapeworm inside. A sprig of mistletoe hung from our bones, living on air. A jellyfish swaying between our lungs and our liver. Black men have more, bigger. Cocks like eels. Night feeders. Their touching underbelly smell on buses, their dread of those clean dry places where Harry must be. He wonders if he will be sick. Poison in those Stingers, on top of moonburgers.

Babe shifts gears, lays out six chords like six black lead slugs slapping into the tray, and plays, “There’s a Small Hotel.” With a wishing well.

With this Jill, then, Rabbit enters the street. On his right, toward the mountain, Weiser stretches sallow under blue street lights. The Pinnacle Hotel makes a tattered blur, the back of the Sunflower Beer clock shows yellow neon petals; otherwise the great street is dim. He can remember when Weiser with its five movie marquees and its medley of neon outlines appeared as gaudy as a carnival midway. People would stroll, children between them. Now the downtown looks deserted, sucked dry by suburban shopping centers and haunted by rapists. LOCAL HOODS ASSAULT ELDERLY, last week’s Vat had headlined. In the original version of the head LOCAL had been BLACK.