“What? You don’t like beer? You got some medical problem?”

“Oh no. I like beer fine. I’d love a beer.”

“Well, hell,” I said. ‘‘Then drink one.”

She got sort of close to me then. She leaned over to my ear, so I could look right down that Big Valley.

‘‘They don’t ’low it,” she said.

“Don’t ’low what?”

She jerked her head. “You know.”

I looked in that direction. Then I saw the mean-ass momma watching us. Black chick, about thirty, medium fro, teeth probably filed to tiny points. Definitely not a vegetarian.

“Listen,” I said. “If I want to buy you a beer, can’t I buy you a beer?”

“Well, I don’t know,” she said. ‘‘They don’t like for us to drink.”

She smelled sort of bad. I was crazy and I knew it. Maybe her husband—if she had one—she probably did—was a shrimper and she shrimped with him in the daytime. Maybe she’d been down in the hot hold all day long shoveling up shrimp with a shovel. I didn’t care about any of that. She was a human being. She had the right to drink a beer. Even a drunk knows that.

“Just wait a minute,” I said. I got up from the table and staggered over to the momma. A hard chick. You could tell it from her eyes. No telling what she’d seen or done in her life. I wouldn’t have wanted to fistfight her. She could have been pretty and might have been at one time. No more, though. All she was after was money. Money to get the hell away from that dive she’d found herself in.

“Listen,” I said. “I want to buy this girl over here a beer. Do you care?”

She turned a cold pair of eyes on me. Eyes that cut me to my soul. They went up and down me, and stopped on my face. How many had she seen like me? I’d never seen such contempt.

“We don’t ’low it,” she said, nearly whispering. But then she leaned over. “But you can buy me a drink if you want to, sugar.”

She didn’t look bad. She had some huge ones. All I had was shrimp money. I could see the sunshine coming down on my head the next morning while I was trying to find the Elvira Mulla or the Vulla Elmirea or the Meara Vulmira or the WhatEverltWas. There had just been whispered, hurried conversations over the phone, and I didn’t even like the people involved. What if the nets had holes in them or the shrimp weren’t sleeping?