She needed to talk, and I let her. About Ned Loonbucket's last few seconds in this gig; about his last two syllables, hissing out of him like a hydraulic jack facing the Last Letdown. About the matchbook he gave her with his last act of will. And about the hunting knife with the scarred leather handlegrips the cops had found on the sidewalk outside the bar's front door, where it had fallen from Ned's back as he struggled to pass the message. "Pepsi". "Cosmo".

It didn't add up, and somehow as long as I was walking next Lucky, it didn't matter as much.

We got to the fair and wandered past scores of little booths with rented tables and cheap stereos and bored wannabe entrepreneurs running them. They were selling herbal shampoos, dreamcatchers, tie-dyed brassieres, hand-turned brass doorstops shaped like giant capos, cheap pine carvings of Woody, and hand-painted Zimmerman masks fashioned after the album covers from the Village -- the grimy cherub makes music look. There were Polish sausage and soul-kitchens, corn dogs and hot chitlins, pig's foot and Philly steak sandwiches, tofu burgers and diced kumquat candies. If you could imagine it meaning anything to a folky, there was someone turning a buck on it.

We got to the end of the midway where the big sound stage had been set up. Hippies, flower pots, potted flower children, hempsters, hopsters, and finger-popping Daddio-s littered the ground on tarps and blankets. Further back the older and squarer suffered on pain-designed chairs. Up on the stage, they were running with all the clockwork precision of an untuneable twleve-string. Theet Logos was still up there, flanging away on a five-meter banjo -- I think that's what it was called, anyway. I don't pllay much, like I said, except for horses, and I wasn't looking for grass or roots. Theet looked exactly as he had when Lucky had walked him out of the bar two days before.

With one small difference,

He wasn't wearing the ten-inch hunting knife.

He was singing something about "no-one's behind but the cold birds to moan", as near as I could make it out, and all the overgrown seedlings opn the tarps were nodding and singing along and grooving on the old guy. Well, it takes all kinds.