“What the hell was she up to?” Powerhouse shudders. “Tell me, tell me, tell me.” He makes triplets, and begins a new chorus. He holds three fingers up.

“You say you got a telegram.” This is Valentine, patient and sleepy, beginning again.

Powerhouse is elaborate. “Yas, the time I go out, go way downstairs along a long cor-ri-dor to where they puts us: coming back along the cor-ri-dor: steps out and hands me a telegram: Your wife is dead.”

“Gypsy?” The drummer like a spider over his drums.

“Aaaaaaaaa!” shouts Powerhouse, flinging out both powerful arms for three whole beats to flex his muscles, then kneading a dough of bass notes. His eyes glitter. He plays the piano like a drum sometimes—why not?

“Gypsy? Such a dancer?”

“Why you don’t hear it straight from your agent? Why it ain’t come from headquarters? What you been doing, getting telegrams in the corridor, signed nobody?”

They all laugh. End of that chorus.

“What time is it?” Powerhouse calls. “What the hell place is this? Where is my watch and chain?”

“I hang it on you,” whimpers Valentine. “It still there.”

There it rides on Powerhouse’s great stomach, down where he can never see it.

“Sure did hear some clock striking twelve while ago. Must be midnight.”

“It going to be intermission,” Powerhouse declares, lifting up his finger with the signet ring.

He draws the chorus to an end. He pulls a big Northern hotel towel out of the deep pocket in his vast, special-cut tux pants and pushes his forehead into it.

“If she went and killed herself!” he says with a hidden face.“If she up and jumped out that window!” He gets to his feet, turning vaguely, wearing the towel on his head.

“Ha, ha!”

“Sheik, sheik!”

“She wouldn’t do that.” Little Brother sets down his clarinet like a precious vase, and speaks. He still looks like an East Indian queen, implacable, divine, and full of snakes. “You ain’t going to expect people doing what they says over long distance.”

“Come on!” roars Powerhouse. He is already at the back door, he has pulled it wide open, and with a wild, gathered-up face is smelling the terrible night.

Powerhouse, Valentine, Scoot and Little Brother step outside into the drenching rain.

“Well, they emptying buckets,” says Powerhouse in a mollified voice. On the street he holds his hands out and turns up the blanched palms like sieves.

A hundred dark, ragged, silent, delighted Negroes have come around from under the eaves of the hall, and follow wherever they go.

“Watch out Little Brother don’t shrink,” says Powerhouse. “You just the right size now, clarinet don’t suck you in. You got a dry throat, Little Brother, you in the desert?” He reaches into the pocket and pulls out a paper of mints. “Now hold ’em in your mouth—don’t chew ’em. I don’t carry around nothing without limit.”