Mavis eyed him suspiciously and lit a Tarryton 100. She’d been taught as a girl not to trust Black people.

“Name your poison,” she said.

He took off his fedora, revealing a gleaming brown baldness that shone like polished walnut. “You gots some wine?”

“Cheap-shit red or cheap-shit white?” Mavis cocked a hip, gears and machinery clicked.

“Them cheap-shit boys done expanded. Used to be jus’ one flavor.”

“Red or white?”

“Whatever sweetest, sweetness.”

Mavis slammed a tumbler onto the bar and filled it with yellow liquid from an icy jug in the well. “That’ll be three bucks.”

The Black man reached out—thick sharp nails skating the bar surface, long fingers waving like tentacles, searching, the hand like a sea creature caught in a tidal wash—and missed the glass by four inches.

Mavis pushed the glass into his hand. “You blind?”

“No, it be dark in here.”

“Take off your sunglasses, idjit.”

“I can’t do that, ma’am. Shades go with the trade.”

“What trade? Don’t you try to sell pencils in here. I don’t tolerate beggars.”

“I’m a Bluesman, ma’am. I hear ya’ll lookin for one.”

Mavis looked at the guitar case on the bar, at the Black man in shades, at the long fingernails of his right hand, the short nails and knobby gray calluses on the fingertips of his left, and she said, “I should have guessed. Do you have any experience?”

He laughed, a laugh that started deep down and shook his shoulders on the way up and chugged out of his throat like a steam engine leaving a tunnel. “Sweetness, I got me more experience than a busload o‘ hos. Ain’t no dust settled a day on Catfish Jefferson since God done first dropped him on this big ol’ ball o‘ dust. That’s me, call me Catfish.”

He shook hands like a sissy, Mavis thought, just let her have the tips of his fingers. She used to do that before she had her arthritic finger joints replaced. She didn’t want any arthritic old Blues singer. “I’m going to need someone through Christmas. Can you stay that long or would your dust settle?”