“I ‘spose I could slow down a bit. Too cold to go back East.” He looked around the bar, trying to take in the dinge and smoke through his dark glasses, then turned back to her. “Yeah, I might be able to clear my schedule if”—and here he grinned and Mavis could see a gold tooth there with a musical note cut in it—“if the money is right,” he said.

“You’ll get room and board and a percentage of the bar. You bring ‘em in, you’ll make money.”

He considered, scratched his cheek where white stubble sounded like a toothbrush against sandpaper, and said, “No, sweetness, you bring ‘em in. Once they hear

Catfish play, they come back. Now what percentage did you have in mind?“

Mavis stroked her chin hair, pulled it straight to its full three inches. “I’ll need to hear you play.”

Catfish nodded. “I can play.” He flipped the latches on his guitar case and pulled out a gleaming National steel body guitar. From his pocket he pulled a cutoff bottleneck and with a twist it fell onto the little finger of his left hand. He played a chord to test tune, pulled the bottleneck from the fifth to the ninth and danced it there, high and wailing.

Mavis could smell something like mildew, moss maybe, a change in humidity. She sniffed and looked around. She hadn’t been able to smell anything for fifteen years.

Catfish grinned. “The Delta,” he said.

He launched into a twelve-bar Blues, playing the bass line with his thumb, squealing the high notes with the slide, rocking back and forth on the bar stool, the light of the neon Coors sign behind the bar playing colors in the reflection of sunglasses and his bald head.

The daytime regulars looked up from their drinks, stopped lying for a second, and Slick McCall missed a straight-in eight-ball shot on the quarter table, which he almost never did.