"Last drag," he says, and passes her the tiny wet butt.
She crushes it into the Sunflower Beer ashtray. "This roach is hereby dead." And holds her thin hand palm up for a hit.
Buchanan is clucking. "Mother-love, go easy on yourself," he tells Babe.
The other Negro is lighting another cigarette; the paper is twisted at the end and flares, subsides. He passes it to her saying, "Waste is a sin, right?"
"Hush now. This honeyman needs to loosen up, I hate to see 'em sad, I always have, they aren't like us, they don't have the insides to accommodate it. They's like little babies that way, they passes it off to someone else." She is offering Rabbit the cigarette, moist end toward him.
He says, "No thanks, I gave up smoking ten years ago."
Buchanan chuckles, with thumb and forefinger smooths his mustache sharper.
The boy says, "They're going to live forever, right?"
Babe says, "This ain't any of that nicotine shit. This weed is kindness itself."
While Babe is coaxing him, Buchanan and the boy diagonally discuss his immortality. "My daddy used to say, Down home, you never did see a dead white man, any more'n you'd see a dead mule."
"God's on their side, right? God's white, right? He doesn't want no more Charlies up there to cut into his take, he has it just fine the way it is, him and all those black angels out in the cotton."
"Your mouth's gonta hurt you, boy. The man is the lay of the land down here."
"Whose black ass you hustling, hers or yours?"
"You just keep your smack in the heel of your shoe."
Babe is saying, "You suck it in as far as it'll go and hold it down as long as you absolutely can. It needs to mix with you."
Rabbit tries to comply, but coughing undoes every puff. Also he is afraid of getting "hooked," of being suddenly jabbed with a needle, of starting to hallucinate because of something dropped into his Stinger. AUTOPSY ORDERED IN FRIENDLY LOUNGE DEATH. Coroner Notes Atypical Color of Skin.
Watching him cough, the boy says, "He is beautiful. I didn't know they still came with all those corners. Right out of the crackerbox, right?"
This angers Rabbit enough to keep a drag down. It burns his throat and turns his stomach. He exhales with the relief of vomiting and waits for something to happen. Nothing. He sips the Stinger but now it tastes chemical like the bottom of that milkshake. He wonders how he can get out of here. Is Peggy's offer still open? Just to feel the muggy kiss of summer night on the Brewer streets would be welcome. Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.
Babe asks Buchanan, "What'd you have in mind, Buck?" She is working on the joint now and the smoke includes her eyes.
The fat man's shrug jiggles Rabbit's side. "No big plans," Buchanan mutters. "See what develops. Woman, way you're goin', you won't be able to tell those black keys from the white."
She plumes smoke into his face. "Who owns who?"
The boy cuts in. "Ofay doesn't dig he's a john, right?"
Buchanan, his smoothness jammed, observes, "That mouth again."
Rabbit asks loudly, "What else shall we talk about?" and twiddles his fingers at Babe for the joint. Inhaling still burns, but something is starting to mesh. He feels his height above the others as a good, a lordly, thing.
Buchanan is probing the other two. "Jill in tonight?"
Babe says, "Left her back at the place."
The boy asks, "On a nod, right?"
"You stay away, hear, she got herself clean. She's on no nod, just tired from mental confusion, from fighting her signs."
"Clean," the boy says, "what's clean? White is clean, right? Cunt is clean, right? Shit is clean, right? There's nothin' not clean the law don't go pointing its finger at it, right?"
"Wrong," Babe says. "Hate is not clean. A boy like you with hate in his heart, he needs to wash."
"Wash is what they said to Jesus, right?"
"Who's Jill?" Rabbit asks.
"Wash is what Pilate said he thought he might go do, right? Don't go saying clean to me, Babe, that's one darkie bag they had us in too long."
Buchanan is still delicately prying at Babe. "She coming in?"
The other cuts in, "She'll be in, can't keep that cunt away; put locks on the doors, she'll ooze in the letter slot."
Babe turns to him in mild surprise. "Now you loves little Jill."
"You can love what you don't like, right?"
Babe hangs her head. "That poor baby," she tells the tabletop, "just going to hurt herself and anybody standing near."
Buchanan speaks slowly, threading his way. "Just thought, man might like to meet Jill."
The boy sits up. Electricity, reflected from the bar and the streets, spins around his spectacle rims. "Gonna match 'em up," he says, "you're gonna cut yourself in on an all-honky fuck. You can out-devil these devils any day, right? You could of outniggered Moses on the hill."
He seems to be a static the other two put up with. Buchanan is still prying at Babe across the table. "Just thought," he shrugs, "two birds with one stone."
A tear falls from her creased face to the tabletop. Her hair is done tight back like a schoolgirl's, a red ribbon in back. It must hurt, with kinky hair. "Going to take herself down all the way, it's in her signs, can't slip your signs."
"Who's that voodoo supposed to boogaboo?" the boy asks. "Whitey here got so much science he don't even need to play the numbers, right?"
Rabbit asks, "Is Jill white?"
The boy tells the two others angrily, "Cut the crooning, she'll be here, Christ, where else would she go, right? We're the blood to wash her sins away, right? Clean. Shit, that burns me. There's no dirt made that cunt won't swallow. With a smile on her face, right? Because she's clean." There seems to be not only a history but a religion behind his anger. Rabbit sees this much, that the other two are working to fix him up with this approaching cloud, this Jill, who will be pale like the Stinger, and poisonous.
He announces, "I think I'll go soon."
Buchanan swiftly squeezes his forearm. "What you want to do that for, Br'er Rabbit? You haven't achieved your objective, friend."
"My only objective was to be polite." She'll ooze in the letter slot: haunted by this image and the smoke inside him, he feels he can lift up from the booth, pass across Buchanan's shoulders like a shawl, and out the door. Nothing can hold him, not Mom, not Janice. He could slip a posse dribbling, Tothero used to flatter him.
"You going to go off half-cocked," Buchanan warns.