h evening, after supper, he played on the front steps of his cabin, his steel finger picks glinting in the setting of the sun, his voice rising into a sky filled with clouds that looked like colored smoke.
Then, one spring night, while he played on the steps, he saw her car stop on the road. It was a purple 1948 Ford convertible, with an immaculate white, buttoned-down top. She was smoking a cigarette behind the wheel, her skin softly lit by the green illumination of the dashboard. She listened to him play until she had finished her cigarette, then she dropped it outside the window, restarted her engine, and drove away.
In July, on a languid Saturday morning, a guard by the name of Jackson Posey told Junior to put on a fresh change of state blues, to brush his shoes, comb his hair, bring his guitar, and get in the guard's pickup truck. As the two of them drove toward the big house, Junior could feel the guard's irritation like a palpable presence inside the cab.
"What's going on, boss?" Junior asked.
Jackson Posey did not reply. Although he was often called boss, he held the rank of captain, one he had earned by shepherding convicts under the gun for two decades, pulling almost the same kind of time as his charges. But the fact he was a captain was a matter of great pride to him, because it meant he was literate and had administrative duties within the penal system. His forearms were pocked with early indications of skin cancer, the top of his forehead half-mooned like a sliver of melon rind where he normally wore a hat. He put three fingers into a pouch of Red Man and inserted the string tobacco into his jaw, then drove around to the back of the big house and parked under a mulberry tree.
Junior could see Andrea Castille seated on the patio, a pitcher of lemonade on a glass table beside her. A recording machine, the kind that made use of wire spools, rested on the brickwork by her foot, an extension cord running back through the French doors into the house. Inside the living room a little girl, a miniature of her mother, played on the rug with wood blocks.
"I always treated you fair, ain't I?" the guard said.
"Yes, suh," Junior said.
"Then it don't hurt to tell Miss Andrea that, does it?"
"No, suh."
"You stay where I can see you," he said.
"Wouldn't have it no other way, boss."
Jackson Posey narrowed one watery blue eye, as though squinting down a rifle barrel. "You sassing me?" he said.
Junior shut the truck door behind him and approached Andrea Castille with his guitar cradled under his right arm. She wore a pink sundress and dark glasses and a gold cross on a chain around her throat. "Can you play "Goodnight Irene'?" she said.
"Yes, ma'am, I learned it from the man who wrote it," he replied.
"I'd like to record you while you do it. That is, if you don't mind."
"No, ma'am, I'm glad to."
"Would you like to sit down?"
"Standing is just fine, ma'am."
He slipped the cloth strap of the guitar around his neck and sang for her, feeling foolish at the contrived nature of the situation, wondering if the guard's eyes were burrowing into his back or if Andrea Castille's husband was watching him from an upstairs window.
"You have a wonderful voice," she said. "Sit down. Please, it's all right."
"Ma'am, I'm a convict." Involuntarily his eyes swept across the back windows of the house.
She seemed to resign herself to his recalcitrance. "Would you sing another song?" she said.
He sang one of his own compositions. The breeze had dropped and his shirt was damp against his skin. He could not see her eyes behind her
dark glasses, but he believed they were invading his person. His fingers were moist and clumsy on the frets, his voice uncertain. A
muscle spasm sliced across his back from the odd angle in which he was holding the Stella.
He stopped and blotted his face on his sleeve, his heart beating. Why was he behaving like this?
But he already knew the answer. He wanted her approval just like an organ grinder's monkey.
"I hurt my back in the field yesterday. Just ain't myself," he said.
"Maybe you can come another time, when you're feeling better," she said.