Luther couldn’t help himself. “Shit going to kill you, boy.”

Jessie smiled and wagged a finger at him. “Ain’t going to do nothing right now but make me feel right, so shush your mouth and shoot your pool.”

That was the problem with Jessie—much as the boy could talk at you, weren’t no one could talk to him. There was some part of him—the core, most likely—that got plumb irritated by reason. Common sense insulted Jessie.

“Just ’cause folks be doing a thing,” he said to Luther once, “don’t make that thing a good fucking idea all to itself, do it?”

“Don’t make it bad.”

Jessie smiled that smile of his got him women and a free drink more often than not. “Sure it do, Country. Sure it do.”

Oh, the women loved him. Dogs rolled over at the sight of him and peed all over their bellies, and children followed him when he walked Greenwood Avenue, as if gold-plated jumping jacks would spring from his trouser cuffs.

Because there was something unbroken in the man. And people followed him, maybe, just to see it break.

Luther sank the six and then the five, and when he looked up again, Jessie had gone into a nod, a bit of drool hanging from the corner of his mouth, his arms and legs wrapped around that pool stick like he’d decided it would make him a right fine wife.

They’d look after him here. Maybe set him up in the back room if the place got busy. Else, just leave him where he sat. So Luther put his stick back in the rack and took his hat from the wall and walked out into the Greenwood dusk. He thought of finding himself a game, just sit in for a few hands. There was one going on right now upstairs in the back room of Po’s Gas Station, and just picturing it put an itch in his head. But he’d played in a few too many games already during his short time in Greenwood and it was all he could do hustling for tips at the hotel and running for the Deacon to keep Lila from getting any idea how much he’d lost.

Lila. He’d promised her he’d come home tonight before sunset and it was well past that now, the sky a deep dark blue and the Arkansas River gone silver and black, and while it was just about the last thing he wanted to do, what with the night filling up around him with music and loud, happy catcalls and such, Luther took a deep breath and headed home to be a husband.

Lila didn’t care much for Jessie, no surprise, and she didn’t care much for any of Luther’s friends or his nights on the town or his moonlighting for Deacon Broscious, so the small house on Elwood Avenue had been getting smaller every day since.

A week ago when Luther had said, “Where the money going to come from then?” Lila said she’d get a job, too. Luther laughed, knowing that no white folk was going to want a pregnant colored scrubbing their pots and cleaning their floors because white women wouldn’t want their husbands thinking about how that baby got in there and white men wouldn’t like thinking about it either. Might have to explain to the children how come they’d never seen a black stork.