A girl walked into the bar. I was hunched over, trying to open a box of Dewar''s without my knife. I''d bent the blade the day before prying loose an old metal ice cube tray that had frozen solid to the side of the freezer. The box was sealed up tight with strapping tape. She waited there quietly, not asking for anything, not leaning on the bar. She held her purse with two hands and stood still. I could see her sort of upside down from where I was. She was on the small side, pale and average-looking, with a big puffy winter jacket on over her dress.

I watched her look around at the stuff up on the walls, black-and-white pictures of Muddy Waters and Howlin'' Wolf in cracked frames, a knocked-off street sign from Elvis Presley Boulevard, the mounted head of a skinny deer. She pretended to be interested in things so she didn''t have to look at anybody. Not that there was much of anybody to look at. It was February, Wednesday, four in the afternoon. The dead time of the deadest season, which is why I wasn''t in any rush. The tape was making me crazy. Before I even got the box open, Cyndi walked out of the kitchen and headed right for her. "What can I get you?" Cyndi said.

Then I straightened up because the girl in the puffy coat wasn''t of a drinking age. She was eighteen, nineteen. Could''ve been younger. When you''d spent as much of your life in a bar as I had, you recognized those things right away. Cyndi, she knew nothing about bars other than getting drunk in them. She was just a girl herself, and girls were no judge of girls. "Get her a Coke," I said, and headed over to them. But the girl put up her hand and I stopped walking just like that.

It was a funny thing. "I''m here about a job," she said. Well, then I could see it. The way she was overdressed. The way she didn''t seem to be meeting anybody but didn''t seem like she was there to pick anybody up either. We got plenty of girls through there. We got the college girls looking to make money to pay the bills who wound up trying to read their books by the little light next to the cash register when things were slow, and then we got the other kind, older ones who liked the music and liked to pour themselves shots behind the bar. Those were the ones who walked out in the middle of their shift with some strange customer on a Friday night when the place was packed and then showed up three days later, asking could they have their job back.

Those were the ones the regulars always took to. "You over at the college?" I said, and Cyndi looked at her hard because she didn''t like the college girls. The girl nodded. A piece of her straight hair slipped out from behind her ear and she tucked it back into place. "How old are you?" I said. "Twenty," she said, so quickly that I figured she''d practiced saying it in front of a mirror. Twenty. Twenty.

Twenty. She didn''t look twenty, but I would bet money that her ID was fake. It didn''t so much matter in Tennessee. Seventeen could serve a drink as long as they kept it clear of their mouths. "Any restaurant experience?" I looked at her hard, trying to tell her age from her face. "Ever work in a bar?" I was out of those employment forms. I made a mental note to order a box. She nodded again.

Quiet girl. "Not around here, though. I''m not from around here." Cyndi and I stood there on the other side of the bar, waiting for her to say where she was from but she didn''t. "Where?" Cyndi said. "East," the girl said, even though that could mean anywhere from Nashville to China. East was the world if you went with it far enough. I didn''t think she was trying to be difficult on purpose.

The way she stood so straight and kept her voice low and respectful, it was plain that she needed the job. I liked her, though I didn''t have a reason. Even when I just saw her standing there, when she put up her hand and for a second it felt like something personal. I liked this girl. "What''s your name?" I asked. "Fay Taft," she said. "Like the president?" "What?" "William Howard Taft." "Oh, no," she said.

"My father tried to trace that back once, but he didn''t come up with anything. I don''t think our Tafts ever met their Tafts." "Only president ever to be chief justice on the Supreme Court." I had no idea why I knew this. Some facts stick with you for no reason. "He was fat," she said in a sorry voice, like there could be nothing sadder than fat. "I always felt kind of bad for him." Not very many people who come into bars can talk to you about dead presidents.

I told her she had a job. Cyndi turned on her heel as soon as I''d said it. Cyndi wanted two shifts a day, seven days a week. She wanted every tip from every table in the place. She saw no need in the world for a waitress other than herself. "Come back tomorrow," I told Fay, not looking over my shoulder at Cyndi, who she was straining to see. "Come in before lunch. We''ll get you started.

" She wasn''t saying a word. She looked too scared to take a deep breath. "That okay?" I asked. "School," she said softly, like the very word would be the end of it. No bar, no job. "So come after class. Just be here before happy hour. That starts at five.

Things get busy then." She smiled, her face wide open with relief. For a second that little white face reminded me of Marion, even though Marion''s black. This was Marion from way back, when I could read every thought that passed through her like it was typed up on her forehead. Young Fay Taft nodded, made like she might say something and then didn''t. She just stood there. "Okay, then?" "Okay," she said, nodded again, and headed out the door. I watched her through the window as she went down the sidewalk.

She took a stocking cap out of her pocket and pulled it down over her ears. The cap was striped blue and yellow and had one of those fluffy pom-pom things on the top. In it she looked so young I thought I must have made a mistake. One thing''s for sure, she never would have gotten a job wearing that hat. It was gray outside and spitting a little bit of snow that wouldn''t amount to anything. The girl, Fay, stopped at the corner and looked out carefully at the traffic, trying to decide when to cross. I watched too, watched until she crossed and headed up the hill and I lost sight of her skinny legs trailing out of that big jacket. "Like we need another waitress," Cyndi called down loudly from the end of the bar.

But Cyndi hadn''t been around long enough. She didn''t understand about the spring, how waitresses take off for the gulf on the first warm day and leave you with nobody trained. Best to stock a few girls up when it''s still cold outside, ones who look reliable enough to last you past seventy degrees. "I''ll tend to my job and you tend to yours," I said, going back to the Dewar''s. Cyndi had a hell of a mouth on her. Maybe that''s the way they teach girls over in Hawaii where she came from. "I''m the one that hires people." Cyndi took up a couple of clean glasses and went back to the kitchen to wash them again, just to let me know it wasn''t right.

If it was or it wasn''t, I had no one to account to. It was my job. I hired people and got the boxes of scotch open. I counted up the money at two o''clock in the morning and took it to the night deposit box, every night waiting to see if somebody was hopped up enough to crack me over the head for it. I plunged the toilets when they backed up. I used to throw people out when they got drunk and started beating one another with the pool cues, but then that got to be a full-time job so I hired a bouncer, a former Memphis State linebacker named Wallace whose knees had gone bad. He worked the door on Friday and Saturday because no matter how drunk people got on a weeknight they just about never took to beating on one another. This is one of the great mysteries of the world.

I was putting Wallace on behind the bar more and more during the week. He made a good mixed drink. The tourists liked him because he was coal black and huge and the sight of him scared them and thrilled them. When he wasn''t busy doing his job he was posing for pictures with strangers. One tourist snaps the camera while the other tourist stands next to Wallace. It tickled them to no end to have their picture taken with someone they thought looked so dangerous. The bar I managed is called Muddy''s and is on the water side of Beale down past the Orpheum Theater. It''s owned by a doctor in town who holds more deeds in Memphis than anyone knows.

He bought it back in the late seventies from Guy Chalfont, a bluesman we all admired. Chalfont swore the bar wasn''t named for Muddy Waters or the Mississippi River, but for his dog, a filthy short-haired cur called Muddy that followed him with the kind of devotion that only a dog could muster. It seemed like all the old bluesboys sold out in the late seventies with some sad notion about going to Florida, They thought it would be better to die down there, sitting on lounge chairs near the ocean, wearing sunglasses and big Panama hats. They sold just before the.