“Don’t, boss, don’t, Powerhouse!”

“Oh!” the waitress screams.

“Go on git out of here!” bellows Powerhouse, taking his hand out of his pocket and clapping after her red dress.

The ring of watchers breaks and falls away.

“Look at that! Intermission is up,” says Powerhouse.

He folds money under a glass, and after they go out, Valentine leans back in and drops a nickel in the nickelodeon behind them, and it lights up and begins to play “The Goona Goo.” The feather dangles still.

“Take a telegram!” Powerhouse shouts suddenly up into the rain over the street. “Take a answer. Now what was that name?”

They get a little tired.

“Uranus Knockwood.”

“You ought to know.”

“Yas? Spell it to me.”

They spell it all the ways it could be spelled. It puts them in a wonderful humor.

“Here’s the answer. I got it right here. ‘What in the hell you talking about? Don’t make any difference: I gotcha.’ Name signed: Powerhouse.”

“That going to reach him, Powerhouse?” Valentine speaks in a maternal voice.

“Yas, yas.”

All hushing, following him up the dark street at a distance, like old rained-on black ghosts, the Negroes are afraid they will die laughing.

Powerhouse throws back his vast head into the steaming rain, and a look of hopeful desire seems to blow somehow like a vapor from his own dilated nostrils over his face and bring a mist to his eyes.

“Reach him and come out the other side.”

“That’s it, Powerhouse, that’s it. You got him now.”

Powerhouse lets out a long sigh.

“But ain’t you going back there to call up Gypsy long distance, the way you did last night in that other place? I seen a telephone. . . . Just to see if she there at home?”

There is a measure of silence. That is one crazy drummer that’s going to get his neck broken some day.

“No,” growls Powerhouse. “No! How many thousand times tonight I got to say No?”

He holds up his arm in the rain.

“You sure-enough unroll your voice some night, it about reach up yonder to her,” says Little Brother, dismayed.

They go on up the street, shaking the rain off and on them like birds.

Back in the dance hall, they play “San” (99). The jitterbugs start up like windmills stationed over the floor, and in their orbits—one circle, another, a long stretch and a zigzag—dance the elderly couples with old smoothness, undisturbed and stately.