A Dangerous Road: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  That was the kind of security team I wanted COME to hire for all the marches. People who knew how to work a crowd, how to get in and out of a building. People who knew how to make sure nothing bad happened.

  As the car drove away, I stood near the doorway, getting shoved and pushed as the crowd left the building. I was covered in sweat and exhausted, but relieved. No berets in the audience, no bold threats from young voices, no leaflets proclaiming revolution, no flyers on a race war. It seemed like Thomas Withers and his little group had been scared away from this event, as if Martin’s presence had indeed been the charm that Laura and Henry thought it would be.

  I went back inside to find Laura. She had remained on her chair as I had told her to. Only a couple hundred people were still inside and the hall looked very empty.

  She smiled when she saw me. “He’s wonderful,” she said.

  I nodded. He was an amazing speaker and the best leader the black community had seen in my lifetime. But I had a feeling that he didn’t understand Memphis. I wasn’t sure more confrontation was what we needed. I had hoped, I suddenly realized, for a bit more diplomacy.

  I had hoped that with this speech, all the turmoil would come to an end.

  SIXTEEN

  BUT THE TURMOIL DIDN’T END. If anything, it got worse. White Memphis was scared. Hate literature was passed out throughout the city. Some crazy called WHBQ and said that Martin would be killed if he came back to Memphis.

  Some of the leaders of COME were looking at this as a good sign, as evidence that they had touched a live wire and they might be able to gain control of the strike.

  I wasn’t so sure. Live wires often burned.

  I couldn’t get Laura to leave. She was energized by Martin’s speech, and she wanted to stay for the march. She had never done anything like that, she said, and I was certain her society friends would be appalled. Part of me was glad she was stepping in, and the rest of me was worried.

  I was convinced Laura didn’t know what she was getting into.

  Not even I was sure. We were heading into new territory, and it seemed fraught with danger.

  * * *

  On Tuesday, I finally got to see Jimmy. I arrived just after school, hoping that Jimmy would have made it home by then.

  His foster parents lived near Henry’s church. The neighborhood was like mine; rows of formerly white houses in desperate need of paint lined up too close together. Garbage was piled on the curbs, and I reflected that Loeb’s scabs would have to work real hard to get to all the neighborhoods he had neglected since the strike began.

  I pulled up in front of a house with an overturned bicycle in the front yard. As I got out of the car, I saw a curtain swing closed. I stepped over the mounds of garbage and onto the sidewalk. As I mounted the steps, the front door opened.

  A woman stood there. She was slender and big-busted. She wore a sweater that was too tight, knit pants that weren’t, and a purple apron around her waist. Her face was long, her features classic, her skin darker than mine. She had her arms crossed beneath those magnificent breasts as if she were holding them up.

  “Can I help you?” she asked, her voice so cold that I thought it might turn the air to ice.

  I smiled. Usually women didn’t react that way to me. “My name is Smokey Dalton. Reverend Davis told me this was where Jimmy Bailey’s been staying.”

  “Reverend Davis told you?” She sounded like she couldn’t believe anyone would talk to me, about anything.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, deciding to give her the title of respect even though she was probably younger than I was.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m the one who brought Jimmy to him.”

  She softened at that. “Oh,” she said, pushing the door open wider. “You’re the one.”

  “Is Jimmy here?”

  She nodded. As I passed her, she held out her hand. “I’m Selina Nelson.”

  I took her hand. The fingers were long, slender, and callused. And cold. “Smokey Dalton,” I said again.

  “Sorry to be so rude,” she said. “It’s just you never know these days, especially…”

  She didn’t finish the sentence, but I understood it. Especially with someone asking after Jimmy.

  The interior of her house smelled of fresh cookies. A toddler sat in the middle of the floor, pushing a stuffed dog around as if it were a truck. A little girl, maybe about three, had fallen asleep on the couch, a blanket clutched in one hand like a life preserver. The television was on, but the sound was turned off.

  It seemed like a homey place, a comfortable place, just neat enough to show that Selina Nelson made an effort at keeping it clean, and just messy enough to show that children lived here.

  “Is Jimmy here?”

  “In the kitchen,” she said. “We were making cookies.”

  I went inside the small kitchen. It was neat, with nothing on the countertops except cookie sheets covered with dough. Jimmy wore an apron which he hastily took off when he saw me.

  “Hey, Smokey!”

  “Jimmy,” I said, and hugged him. He let me. “Looks like they’re keeping you busy.”

  He eased out of my embrace. “It’s for the kids.”

  “I know.” All of them, I assumed. Jimmy never had the chance to do homey things.

  “He made the dough,” Selina Nelson said.

  “But she says I make the cookies too big.” Jimmy sounded like he didn’t agree with her.

  “If they’re too big,” she said, “you don’t get as many.”

  It didn’t look like that argument persuaded him.

  “Why don’t you let me finish and you can talk with your friend?” she said.

  I looked at Jimmy. He had a dusting of flour on his nose. “We can stay in here if you want,” I said. “I haven’t made cookies in a long time.”

  He grinned. So instead of talking with Jimmy about missing school, I spent the most pleasant afternoon I’d had in weeks, baking chocolate chip cookies, stealing dough, and learning how to make raisin cookies so that they would be soft, not hard.

  We laughed, and made a mess of Selina Nelson’s kitchen, which we eventually had to clean up, and somehow she convinced me to stay for dinner, even though I was so full of cookies I could barely eat.

  And as I left, hours later, the sound of childish laughter still ringing in my ears, I knew that Jimmy had finally found a safe place at last. Maybe there, he would learn what home was. Maybe there, he would learn the value of love.

  * * *

  So, on Wednesday morning, my mind was filled with Jimmy and Martin and the upcoming march when I picked my mail out of its cubby on the first floor of the Gallina Building. The mailman had stuffed a big yellow envelope into the cubby, and I had a hell of a time pulling it out. With it came two circulars and a bill. I grabbed them and climbed the stairs slowly, opening as I went.

  Laura hadn’t arrived yet. I unlocked my office door and went inside, flicking on the light as I kicked the door closed. Then I crossed to my desk, threw out the circulars, tucked the bill in a drawer, and sat down.

  I reached inside the envelope and pulled out a handwritten note, along with another bill.

  “Usually,” the note started in rather florid script, “I send the original to the owner of the file. After all, the doctor’s gone and I don’t have any more use for it. But in this case, I didn’t. You’ll see why. I did go to the expense of having some Photostats made. I’ve billed you for those. They are enclosed.”

  It was signed “Mrs. Beaumont Calhoun.”

  I felt the first bit of excitement I had felt about this case in weeks. It was a break. And I had forgotten about it. I’d been so focused on the financial records I hadn’t paid attention to how long it had taken Mrs. Calhoun to get back to us.

  No wonder it had taken her so long to respond. She had gone to the trouble to copy the entire file. My curiosity was piqued. I reached into the envelope and pulled out a manila folder.

  Inside were tiny, fragi
le Photostats. I placed a piece of clean white paper on my desk and put one of the Photostats on it. I squinted at it. The Photostat was of a piece of lined paper, covered with a nearly unreadable scrawl. The date was April 30, 1939. It took me a minute to parse out the writing. It was the doctor’s history of Dora Jean Hathaway’s pregnancy.

  She had been in Birmingham the entire time.

  My mouth went dry. I wiped my suddenly damp hands on my pants and read. Dr. Calhoun was worried about Dora Jean because she had some toxemia. Her body was swelling all over, and it was still early in the pregnancy. He prescribed a home remedy that sounded just ghastly to me, and bed rest which “I doubt she’ll be able to do, given their situation.”

  The next notation was months later. Dora Jean looked awful, and Calhoun was worried for the health of the baby. He admonished her for not coming into the office, and she had told him that she couldn’t afford to pay him. He told her to keep coming anyway. He was of the old school, a family doctor who had known and cared about his patients.

  The next six notations were in medical jargon. I didn’t entirely understand them, but from the gist, I gathered Dora Jean was in a bad way. Dr. Calhoun wrote that he worried about the couple’s other children if Dora Jean passed away. “Earl,” he wrote, “doesn’t dare stay home and care for them. He can’t lose this job too. And there isn’t a one of those children over five. I keep warning the Hathaways that you can have too many children too quick, but they haven’t listened to me.”

  Too many children too quick? I glanced at the door. Laura hadn’t arrived yet. Which was good, because I didn’t like the feeling I was getting.

  I kept reading, my face nearly pressed against the top of the desk as I tried to decipher the doctor’s scrawl. Laura was born at home—a one-room cabin outside of Birmingham, one room which was home to four children, their parents, and now the infant Laura. The birth was difficult one, and Dr. Calhoun wanted to take Dora Jean to the hospital. Earl wouldn’t hear of it. Laura was born in the middle of the night; at dawn, Dora Jean died.

  I closed my eyes for a moment. I knew we’d find something, I just wasn’t sure what. And I certainly hadn’t expected it to be something like this.

  I took a deep breath, opened my eyes, and kept going. Dr. Calhoun asked Earl if he wanted to give up the child. Earl said no. Dr. Calhoun argued against it, but did arrange for a wet nurse, whom Earl said he could pay in food. Dr. Calhoun wrote up a small agreement, and Earl signed it—with an X that Calhoun labeled as Earl’s mark.

  Three days later, when Dr. Calhoun came to his office to open it in the morning, he found Earl on his doorstep cradling little Laura. Her face was blue.

  She was dead.

  * * *

  I wanted to lock my office door, shut off the lights, and hide. But I couldn’t. I owed Mrs. Calhoun more than money. After she had read the file, she had known that Laura Hathaway wasn’t the infant her husband had helped bring into the world, but she did send the file anyway. She probably figured that the deception wasn’t Laura’s, or Laura would never have requested the file. The old lady was sharper than I had given her credit for.

  The baby Laura, Dr. Calhoun speculated, died because “her lungs were underdeveloped” and because “she didn’t have a mother’s nurturing.” Whatever the cause, the good doctor had taken his patient’s double grief to heart and had paid, out of his own pocket, to have the little girl buried next to her mother. Dr. Calhoun had even purchased the headstone.

  I sincerely doubted that the Earl Hathaway who was trying to raise four children alone was the Earl Hathaway who had made his fortune in Chicago. But they were tied together somehow. Obviously, it was the headstone that gave Laura’s parents the idea to ask for the dead infant’s birth certificate. But the unusual part of this whole thing was that they didn’t just take the child’s identity. They took the identity of the whole family.

  I stood and shoved my hands in my pockets. It wouldn’t have been that hard to do in 1939, to steal the identity of a poor man who was raising four children. What Earl Hathaway in Chicago did had no impact at all on the Earl Hathaway from Birmingham. And next to little Laura’s grave would be the grave of her mother, so the Chicago Hathaways knew they would have no problem with Dora Jean.

  Documentation really wasn’t an issue at that time, not for an adult. Children’s birth certificates were becoming important—records were becoming important—but a lot of poor folk traveled during the thirties and they did so without benefit of birth certificates or passports or anything else that required proof of identity. If you said you were Earl Hathaway, you were. Only a handful of things required proof of identity and most of those were government related, from driver’s licenses to high level government employment. I was sure Earl Hathaway—Chicago’s Earl Hathaway—could have found a way around that.

  But I had to be sure. I picked up the phone, dialed 0, and asked for a Birmingham operator. Then I asked for a number for Earl Hathaway.

  “I don’t have Earl Hathaway, sugar,” she said. “I have Earl Hathaway, Junior.”

  Junior. Chances were that was as good as I would get. “Fine.”

  She gave me the number and hung up. I checked my watch. Laura was later than she had ever been. I wondered what was holding her up.

  Then I shook my head. I was becoming used to this, these daily meetings where we were alone, sifting through records. It wasn’t that we talked much—we really didn’t—but we were becoming comfortable with each other, a first, I think, for both of us. She had never promised that she would be in at ten. I had just assumed she would, just as she probably assumed I would.

  That would change now. The entire investigation would change.

  I dialed the number the operator had given me. I doubted I would have any luck. Earl Hathaway, Junior, if he was the child of the Earl Hathaway who fathered the real Laura, was—at the oldest—34 years old. He was probably working on a Friday morning.

  To my surprise, someone picked up on the third ring. “Hathaway’s Auto Repair. Mavis speaking.”

  “I was wondering if I could speak to Earl.”

  “He’s in the shop. Can I help you?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m calling long distance.”

  “Lordy,” she said, and put down the phone. I heard her screech, “Earl!” and moments later her voice was echoed by a much younger one shouting, “Daddeee!”

  I wanted her to pick up the phone so that I could tell her it was all right, I would dial him directly, when I heard a male voice in the distance.

  “Mavis, how many times I gotta tell you—”

  “It’s long distance, Earl.” She was speaking in a whisper, but I still heard her.

  “Long—?” Apparently that caught his attention. I heard footsteps, a child’s laughter, and a mumbled “Squirt” before someone fumbled with the phone.

  “This’s Earl.”

  “Mr. Hathaway?” I asked in my best educated white man voice. I kept the northern accents I had learned out, though, and let my Memphis through.

  “Yessir.”

  “My name is Billy Dalton, and I’m from Memphis. I am investigating a case involving a man I believe to be your father. Do you have a moment?”

  “Yessir.” I heard the squeal of chair legs against linoleum. “Whoizzit?” Mavis whispered. Earl shushed her.

  “Mr. Hathaway, are you the son of Earl and Dora Jean Hathaway of Birmingham?”

  “Yessir.” You’d think I was a school principle for all the inflection Earl Junior was putting into his words.

  “Is there any way I can speak to your father?”

  “He died ten years ago.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” And I was. It would have made things easier.

  “My momma’s been dead now thirty years.”

  “She died giving birth to your sister, right?”

  “Baby died too.” It was so long ago that Earl Junior was able to speak of it almost flippantly. He had been five at the outside; the baby probably h
adn’t been a real thing to him then.

  I didn’t quite know how to ask the next question. “After your mother died, did your father move to Chicago?”

  There was a long, long pause, and then Earl Junior snorted with laughter. Shocked laughter. “My daddy? My daddy never left Alabama in his whole life. Why would you ask a fool question like that?”

  “Because I’m trying to find out about an Earl Hathaway from Chicago, and some of the work I did led me to believe that he was your father. I guess I’m wrong.”

  “Guess so.” Then with slow deliberation, Earl Junior said, “How’d you know about my sister?”

  I had to lie on the spot, something, fortunately, I was good at. “The Earl Hathaway I’m checking has a daughter born in 1939. I’ve been checking birth records all over the country.”

  “Well, my sister died,” Earl Junior said again.

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Do you mind my asking what your father did after your mother died?”

  “Hell, just about anything,” Earl Junior said. “He wanted to keep our family together. Almost didn’t do it. But his maw helped out, and we made it. He wasn’t nobody special. Jus’ did what he could, when he could.”

  “Did he teach you how to fix cars?”

  “Sure. Saw it as a necessity, not a skill.”

  I smiled. “Thanks for your time, Mr. Hathaway.”

  “Sure thing,” he said, and hung up.

  I cradled the receiver for a moment before hanging up myself. Within fifteen minutes, I saw bits and pieces of someone else’s life. Earl Hathaway of Birmingham, Alabama, wasn’t anyone special, but he had raised four children on his own, managed to hang onto them without skills, education, or a wife, and had at least one child who had grown up to own his own business—and who seemed to have a good relationship with his own child.