“He threw it at me.”

“Will you tell me about it?”

“Why do you want to know these things?”

“I write about the blues.”

He kept planing. A steady thump, thump.

“The world don’t make no sense,” he said. “The blues is dead.”

“I don’t think so.”

Thump, thump.

“JoJo brought some whiskey,” I said.

He stopped planing.

Thirty minutes later, he was drunk, had told the story, and JoJo had bought the dog from him for five dollars. JoJo liked to joke but didn’t joke with Tip-Top. When he was through making the deal, he found some rope to put around the dog’s neck and waited for me by the old truck that my friends called the Gray Ghost.

“We was in this church,” Tip-Top said. “Down where he buried now. And it was still a church then. And he sat in there all night askin’ God to let him die. He walked outside in this thunderstorm. I was too drunk to move and he kept cursin’ God.”

I wrote down some notes. Asked a few more questions. It was the story I needed to finish the piece.

“They pay you for doin’ this?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t seem like an honest living.”

“It’s not,” I said. “Thanks.”

JoJo loaded up the new dog in the truck and she curled into a seat behind us, yawning. “We need to get her some water down the road.”

“What you gonna call her?” I asked.

“Don’t matter to me,” JoJo said. “It’s your dog.”

“No way.”

“You need a dog,” he said. “Every man needs a dog.”

“Where’s she gonna piss in New Orleans?”

“There are a few trees,” JoJo said, watching the yellow lines of the blacktop heading back to Clarksdale. “Can’t you stay till Monday?”

“Got to head on back.”

We passed through a couple of small towns and stopped at a Texaco station for Annie’s water. We decided on Annie because of the old song “Work with Me, Annie.” But I told JoJo it was more like the song “Polk Salad Annie.” This dog was straight Delta mutt, could probably eat a cottonmouth and make the alligators seem tame.