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didn’t seem right. Or that one of these old boys standing around here was buying it for Lady Montberclair, like it was a drink. “Compliments of the gentleman at the end of the bar.” That wasn’t right, neither.
    Lady Montberclair said, “But that’s silly, Red. Here.” She placed the half-dollar on the counter.
    Red didn’t know what to do. Making change was out of the question.
    He said, “Thank you.”
    She said, “Is that enough?”
    He said, “This is what it costs.”
    She said, “Exactly? Is there any tax?”
    He whispered, “Lady Montberclair,
please.”
    She said, “Oh, all right. Thank you, Red. Much obliged.”
    Blue John Jackson sang,
Hellhound on my trail, hellhound on my trail.
    So that was the first thing that kept Solon Gregg quiet for a few minutes, what Lady Montberclair said. It looked like nothing else was going to happen. Even Solon Gregg was finding it hard to speak to a woman who had just paid hard cash for tampons and on her face wore the look of a woman who meant to use them, as advertised.
    Solon raked the steel comb through his hair one final time and something, who knows what, a sudden effluvium of Wildroot, maybe, or some unwashed, hair-borne contraband from New Orleans, flushed a pigeon out of the rafters.
    Red said, “Solon, keep that durn comb in your pocket, these pigeons got a right to roost here, too.” He took the comb out of Solon’s hand and put it up under the counter with the Kotex and the .44.
    Solon had it in his mind to follow Lady Montberclair out onto the porch and tell her he could use a ride intoBalance Due in that fine white Cadillac car of hers, if she didn’t mind. It’d be okay with Solon if the niggers out on the porch got the idea that him and Miss Sally Anne were together, friends, you know.
    In fact, they might could be friends. Solon was so lonely right now, anything seemed possible, or at least hopeful.
    He pictured himself sitting up in that wide front seat with her, big as Ike and twice as natural, and calling her Sally Anne, right to her face, and liking it, too, and then her dropping him off in front of his own house, where his fool wife and murderous children would be watching out the window.
    But then a second thing happened that stopped him.
    Hole up a minute, spotey-otey, what’s going on here? Somebody else had done come into the bar and gro., whut the hail?—the spotey little colored boy from out on the front porch, po-itch Solon pronounced it, wearing a man’s hat on his head and looking to purchase two cents worth of Bazooka bubble gum, with the comics inside. Just whut in the durn hail?
    It was Bobo, of course, who else is it gone be, that durn Bobo, acting on some dare another, double and dee-double and dog. Somebody out on the porch, ain’t no telling who, done bet Bobo a nickel he wouldn’t axe that white lady for a date, since he liked white girls so much, since he’s all time carrying on about a white girl, toting a white girl’s picturein his wallet, axe her Bobo, go on and axe her, you so smart, you such a spote.
    Red watched the little nigger go to the wire rack and pick two pieces of bubble gum out of an open box—you had to watch a nigger like a hawk, anybody’d tell you that much, they’d steal you blind, rob your chicken house and your back pocket and your gold tooth in one easy motion, what a nigger’d do—when all of a sudden Bobo turned around and looked right square in Lady Montberclair’s face.
    Well, sir.
    He said what he said, Bobo did.
    The blues singers had already stopped playing. They must have heard the children talking, must have suspected that the boy from Chicago didn’t know no better.
    Lady Montberclair didn’t even hear him say it, what he said, or the other neither, didn’t seem like. She just stood there while Red put her already-wrapped-up tampons in a brown paper bag.