Look at that guy’s T-shirt, it has a witty slogan. Desire coruscates. The woman in the red tank top leaves a wake. One woman thinks, if I could be single for just one day, absently sliding a finger across the scar of her C-section. Hey, wait up. Everybody’s saying, hey, wait up. They skid along. At the information booth separated children are emotionally scarred. Cotton candy mollifies the more practical. Her boyfriend is very tall and easily spotted in the crowd when they get separated. Over time people memorize their companion’s T-shirts so they know what to look for when they get separated. Mosey over there. You see that same guy over and over, you keep ending up at the same booths. At the ice cream stand parents commiserate through glances as their offspring demand below. Underage youths try to get beer, trade schemes. The tallest boy is always the one dispatched plus he has stubble. Teenage boys look at teenage girls. Vice versa too. His parents’ friends walk up whenever he gets the nerve to talk to a girl. Happens every time. Grass stains on knees. One guy sells rocks he painted pastel colors. Temporary tattoos. One boy rolls a pack of candy cigarettes into his T-shirt sleeve and tries to look tough.

  The cheap-looking raffle tickets always seem like part of some con job, don’t they. Hot dogs ’n’ hamburgers. The old lady fans herself with the brochure. She wishes he wouldn’t drink so much beer. Older she gets the fatter she gets. People would be surprised how many people have the same unkind thoughts. People cast longer shadows than the angle of the sun can account for. His upper back is already sunburned, like that. Aloe is suggested. Arguments are fertilized for tonight’s harvest. Never knowing whether or not to look at the guy with the facial scarring, which is worse. All agree it’s criminal to pay so much for a bottle of water. He thought he was the only one with this kind of shirt but look around, everybody is wearing it. People encounter bad cover versions of their favorite people. More than one vendor miscalculates the amount of change the day requires and has to go around to competitors saying can you break a twenty. Contemplate the ride home. She’s always buying that crap. She asks him to hold her purse for a minute and his face gets hot, what does he look like standing there with a purse. It’s hot. In the dunking booth he makes remarks. They want to kill him but make do with dunking. They will all sleep a little easier tonight after they have dunked the insolent boy in the tank. He is a scapegoat with swimming goggles. He offers to take a picture of the couple but can’t work the camera. One of those new Japanese jobs. There are too many buttons. The flash won’t go off. He waits for people to clear out of the way but they walk into the frame as if instructed. Fleeting eye contact overanalyzed. Listen to me when I’m talking to you.

  She reads palms, heck it’s a living. People compliment her acumen. There’s no place to wash your hands. Pebbles insinuate themselves into shoes like beings with a purpose. They hold no formal meetings but those who walk around with pebbles in their shoes and those who remove pebbles immediately form discrete groups with philosophies. It’s his fault they collide but the other guy says excuse me. You try to pass each other but you both keep darting in the same direction, it happens three times and you chuckle sorry. In the middle of people the man bites his knuckle and mumbles over bone, if I could just beat this fever. Signs say homegrown and homemade. They keep kissing in public, shaming others into contrived gestures of affection. Where has the fire gone in their marriage. Smell of charcoal. The retired citizens organization has a booth where they all sit around with sun visors. Vendors take shifts, one leaves to see the fair and leaves the other behind. They come back with goods from other booths and to dissipate envy offer obscure directions to this or that distraction. There is a strange oompa-oompa and they stand aside for the high school marching band. Take photographs of this authentic local culture. The boy accidentally sprays a grownup with water when the other kid ducks. The time for the raffle nears, you can win a boat. The smoke from the firecracker drifts over when they are done being startled. They made fun of him for selling underwear and socks that people can get any old place but look at the till. The antacid is in the glove compartment. Someone has to go back to the car to get something. He takes a moment to himself and has a smoke. Everyone stays too long. It’s a fair.

  Don’t find a lot of white men on the South Side of Chicago at night so when he sees the white man leaning on the bar Moses thinks he’s out sneaking on his wife, head downtown to spend a sweet night with a colored girl. The bartender seems to know the man, or at least likes his tips, so Moses figures the guy is a regular in Rudy’s, every weekend he comes down here for a little pussy and music. Then halfway through the set he notices the guy taking notes. Not even trying to talk to any of the ladies but writing down stuff on a piece a paper. Thin brown hair soaked with sweat and snake eyes squinting through wire-frame glasses. No jacket on, sleeves rolled up, the guy’s not dressed up to talk to women. He’s after something else.

  He isn’t that odd a sight, but Moses loses his concentration and forgets to tell the joke about the mule, not a show-killing mistake but he likes the joke and the city audiences love it. He knows half of them, shit most of them are only two soles from bare feet; they remember the country, remember every day why they moved North but they like to be reminded from time to time of where they came from. They can put on their airs, pretend to be city and take the El just like white folks but deep down they’re still country. Rudy’s is the great leveler, could be a Mississippi jook if you didn’t look outside the front door and see the tenement rows across the street. And overlooked the absence of sawdust on the floor—Rudy likes to think this is a class joint. Moses will play the blues and draw these folks back home. That’s what they pay for. He’s sky and unimpeded sky, hilltop brush tickling blue and a sun.

  He starts into “Queen of Spades” and sizes up the couples. It’s his first night in Chicago and he falls to custom and looks for the ugliest woman in the room. There’s rarely any difficulty in finding her: the ugliest woman in a room stands out, like the tallest tree or the biggest rock. She makes a stark jagged outline against the rest of her sex, a landmark of homeliness. In small towns he sings and looks around the establishment (a timber concoction rotting on stilts over a swamp, a tin-walled jook joint shivering on lonely road) for flaw until he finds rickety teeth, all-gum smiles, lazy eyes, or hair like a spiderweb. He’ll make eye contact with the woman (her lazy eye makes him cock his head, which the audience takes for some performance tic) and sings the next song, “Sweet-Hearted Woman,” to her, tossing each word to her like roses. Thorns flicked off one by one. Everyone else in the room recedes until she understands—first in mad glee, then incredulously, finally in rapture— that it is just her and him, he’s singing about her sweet heart. No man has ever loved her as he does now (those goddamned honey eyes of his, he knows how to make his eyes goddamned and honey), and when the song ends she fears that it is the dim light in the saloon that has saved her, created a spell over him that will dissolve once the set is over and he sees her close up. She has developed techniques over the years to mask nature’s imperfections: urged by stares and coarse comments she tends to look at the ground when someone addresses her, mumbles to prevent viewing of the teeth knocked out by her mother some years before, and is wholly and keenly aware when eyes flit over defect and then swiftly shift away. But the singer lifts her chin in his rough palm after the set and coos. His songs did not lie. He is a special human being and can see what the rest of the world cannot, that she is good and decent and has much love to give to the one who discovers her treasure.

  A survival tactic for a far-roaming and rolling man like himself that suggested itself one night in Mississippi when his eyes sailed out into the audience and immediately wrecked on a reef of monstrous titties, titties of such abundant rightness that the botched face of the woman they were attached to did not perturb him. He couldn’t get past the titties. He imagined her aureoles, counted each immaculate bump, they swirled and orbited around the nipple like faithful retainers. He didn’t see her face at all and later that night when his mouth was pressed between her breasts and he could barely breathe he realized from her wetness and greed for him that she hadn’t been laid in a long time. She was grateful. Conceiving in that moment his plan to find the ugliest woman in the audience. A simple matter of practicality. They were grateful and eager to please. They never had a man who was liable to cut him or send him running out the bedroom window with his drawers around his ankles. They always remembered when he came back to town and sat at a front table in a new red dress, with a new hairstyle, with all their scars and defects powdered into invisibility by an emergent confidence and the promise of a night with Moses. He has safe houses from here to Galveston maintained by ugly but worthy women no other man wants. They are good cooks, excellent cooks all of them, and sometimes when he recollects his time with them it is the food he remembers first. Maybe he does it for the food after all. For pig’s feet like jelly.

  This night Moses decides to change his repertoire. He’s in Chicago for a week and he feels full of luck. There are so many beautiful women in the crowd tonight he thinks maybe he can do what he wants. Not play it safe. In the front row a young lady in a blue dress with a collar of white lace fans herself and he can see sweat slide out of the depression in her neck. He’ll lick it dry he thinks, and can’t help grinning and gloating over that future taste. She’s smiling too, back up at him, no man at her table, she’s stepping out tonight with two sweet and wonderfully plump friends. All of them in a big bed together. What their asses will feel like with his guitar hands squeezing them. Knead them like dough. His eyes ramble on as he takes notes: Oh, that woman in the red dress leaning on the bar, the way her leg’s cricked up on the rail, he can see the slope of her calf. It’s a small sexy lump, obscured now by a patron dragging himself up for a drink, but it vibrates in his head and trembles with naughty notes. He’ll talk to her, the ugly woman will have to fend for herself tonight. He’s on the South Side of Chicago and he has one or two songs he’s written that describe the devilment he’ll get into tonight.

  Calf or no calf it doesn’t work out that way. He finishes his set, shakes a few hands and struts over to the bar to talk to the woman with the miraculous calf (such a tiny miracle must token other miracles hidden from view by the homemade dress, surely) but before he can get to her the white man intercepts him. Mr. Moses, he says, wiping his eyeglasses with a handkerchief and squinting, that was a powerful set. I wonder if I could talk to you for a minute about a business proposal. Moses, winded from his songs and his mind on his own business proposals thinks, I don’t need any Bibles. He asks, can it wait? and the man says he’s a scout for American Music and he’d like to make a recording of Moses’s songs.

  Down the bar within arm’s reach and yet so far down the bar the woman in the red dress laughs and takes the arm of a sharp-faced man in a crisp pinstripe suit. He smiles back at her out of his blue-black face and notices Moses’s stare, and the itinerant bluesman knows he’s not getting any closer to that calf, in his dreams maybe but certainty not tonight. The white man now presses the handkerchief to his brow. It’s hot in here but not that hot, Moses thinks, this guy’s sweating like he’s in the jungle. Ha Ha. At least he’s not a detective about that other matter. My name is Andrew Goodman, he says, giving Moses his card. Have you ever been recorded before? Moses says no, even though Spier down in Jackson approached him on a street corner a year earlier (a dead afternoon, none of those country Negroes parting with coin for this songman, nuh-uh) with the same proposition. H. C. Spier, the guy that put Tommy Johnson and Ishmon Bracey on Columbia, and who he’s heard just paid Charlie Patton fifty dollars a side. Spier sat him down, gave him some rye and recorded four demo songs. Moses never heard back from him, the songs didn’t make it with the Columbia boys apparently so Moses says, no, never been recorded before. No use letting the guy know his business. He says he’ll come tomorrow to the guy’s shop and he forgets about it for a few hours.

  Good old Rudy comes up and thanks Moses for coming, they clasp shared nights and time together with their hands, which leads to one drink and then a couple of drinks and a poker game in Rudy’s back office. His woman thoughts for the night stepped on by the Chicago boy in the pinstripe suit, Moses finds gambling presents itself naturally as pastime for this night. Not that Rudy would let him beg off. He knows he can win back some if not all of Moses’s pay. The other players joke, but not much: regulars in Rudy’s game, they keep their eyes on the cards. Moses helps himself to rye whiskey and one of the guys asks, that’s how you get your voice like that, huh? That and canned heat and antiseptic when he can’t get his hands on anything else. Rudy wins back his money from the talent for the night. The cards are marked. Moses looks up at the stained ceiling; he hadn’t noticed when the noise downstairs stopped. They play poker above an empty saloon. Come four in the morning Rudy’s won half the next night’s pay as well.

  As Moses gets up to leave, he asks Rudy is that white guy on the level. Rudy says he’s here whenever there’s a blues act booked. Rudy buys his records at the man’s store over on Forty-third. He’s all right, Rudy says, a little quiet.

  When he wakes, sun through slats striping his body, he doesn’t know where he is. There’s nobody next to him and he can see that the room is so small that he must be alone. Unless she’s hiding under the bed. Spending his first night in Chicago by himself. He remembers losing his pay in a poker game and waking up the crotchety old hotel manager at dawn. Did he hit the man or just yell to get him to open the door (his keys glinting on the bureau where he left them before departing for his gig). There’s his guitar along the wall, tilting and sure. He didn’t lose that. He never loses that. It’s like a curse. He drops his feet to the floor and looks at his hideous toes. Does he have anything, even a drop? There’s a brown bottle from two towns ago in his scarred suitcase. It calms him down.

  He’s a mug. He has no money. But he feels better now and maybe he’ll see that record man. Fifty dollars a side sounds more real after Rudy’s okay of the man, after a night losing money in Rudy’s back room. Nothing but a train stub in his pocket. He thinks back to how he never heard back from Spier; the lost opportunity made him feel like he does when he’s playing music on a corner and just watching everybody walk on by, no one stops to put a dime in his guitar case. Like he’s not even there. Cracker had a face like a handful of gravel. When he hears about Ish and Skip James selling records and people say, Moses, why don’t you have one of those, he says, shit those crackers know better than to mess with a nigger like me. Tough, like he doesn’t care. At a house party or a dance in a Delta mud town some fool with ashy elbows will ask him to play something he heard on somebody’s record. You don’t do someone else’s stuff. Steal it, yeah, but you don’t just do it like that because some burrheaded fool asks you to. Those guys have got something and it ain’t nothing Moses ain’t got. Sometimes. On a good night. With a good audience, fine women up front to look at and he hasn’t been drinking too much. Spier didn’t call him back so forget about him. Let’s see what this Goodman has to say.

  Goodman’s Records is the store on the corner, and its windows are so clean compared to the rest of the establishments down the row that it seems to prop up the whole block, like a piece of wood steadying a wobbly chair. Moses burps, feels a finger of bile in his throat. He looks down at the black handle of the guitar case cut across his palm like a blood brother slash. Time to meet the man, he says and pushes in the door, waking bells.

  He figures a lot of these people are in from the country, come into town on a Saturday afternoon to pick up what they need to make the neighbors jealous. Yards of fine new cloth, new pots like what they see only in the Sears catalog and maybe a new Bible. Dust in their cuffs and untamed hems, boots for the fields. No place to buy race records where they live, Goodman’s is a telegraph wire to the rest of the Negro world. He’s a smart little white boy: set up shop on the South Side where other white people are too scared to give the folks what they need. Where there’s a clientele and a need. He sees four listening booths along the right wall and a skinny boy disappears into one, clutching some nasty tune under his arms. Generally he’ll stay out of record stores; the names of his fellow songsmiths up there on the wall, or angled up in crates like a plot of wind-fret weeds, depress him. He sees the names of men he has played with, traded tunes with, shared women with. They have been recorded. A young woman, her face hidden by the drooping flaps of her hat, snatches a James record out of a bin; he recognizes the label: Paramount. Paramount and Decca and Lonely Moon. Lemon Jefferson has been dead for years but they don’t want the public to know. They put out the backlog of recordings one after another so people will think he’s still alive. He reads, Paramount Records are recorded by the latest electrical process. Great volume, amazing clear tone. Always the best music—-first on Paramount! There’s a little pip of a boy at the register but Moses doesn’t see Goodman. Sweat pouring out of him. He tightens the fat knot of his tie and sees the instruments at the back of the store. Violins and banjos on little hooks on the wall like family pictures, sheet music in rows, folk ditties and Scott Joplin. He sees the guitars. Brand-new Stellas and Nationals for nine dollars and ninety-five cents. Rues his scratched-up old Stella that’s almost as scratched up as him, and works the best as it can, like him. Have you seen the new Tri-Cone Nationals? Goodman asks, coming out of the back room. He nods up to something beautiful that Moses doesn’t see; Moses sees a hundred-and-twenty-five-dollar price tag and strings popped on his old Stella. I’m glad you came down, Moses, Goodman says. The man nods to the stringy boy at the register and sends a stare that orders, don’t let these people put anything in their coats.