by David Fulmer
“And who do they call?” he inquired of no one in particular—certainly not her. He jabbed a thumb at his chest. “They call me, that’s who.” He all but smacked his lips. “The same sons of bitches that were gonna put me on the street, walking a beat. Now look at what we got here!” He came up with a surly grin of triumph.
May Ida knew better than to comment. He gave not a whit what she thought about this subject or any other. So she let him rail on with his odd mutterings, no more interested in him than he was in her, and returned to her own thoughts with his drunken gripes playing like bad music in the background. It was a typical night at 446 Plum Street.
Skulking back to his rooming house in the evening darkness, Robert Clark had a powerful sense of dread, a swirl of hoodoo that had been hanging at his shoulder like a black cloud ever since he had run off into the darkness, leaving Little Jesse Williams bleeding on that cold corner. Now he couldn’t shake the feeling that someone or something was creeping his bed and following in his path and that eyes were on him everywhere he went.
It was his own damned fault. Instead of buying a bottle, going home, and keeping his mouth shut after he’d left Jesse, he had wandered around to the crap game in the empty Raspberry Alley storefront. Even then, he could have enjoyed a last drink and left out. He didn’t, though; and that was one dumb-assed mistake.
He didn’t know that he had repeated what he’d seen until it was too late. He had finished his own pint, took a couple drinks from the bottle that was going around, and came abruptly out of a fog to realize that he had done just that.
As the blur cleared, he saw that the game had stopped and the boys were all staring back at him in the light of the fire they had built in a can on the concrete floor. When one of them asked for details, Robert mumbled something and made a clumsy exit—another mistake. He should have stayed and explained that what he was saying was actually secondhand, that it was some other fellow who had heard the cop and then the gunshot and had peeked around the corner of the building to see Little Jesse Williams fall. Though he could barely remember who had been in the game, he had no doubt that among their number was at least one rat who would hurry right out on the street to try to trade what he’d heard for something.
After that, Robert went to his room and fell into bed, wishing he could crawl under it. Unable to sleep the rest of that night and into the day, he hurried down to Schoen Alley to ask Jesse what he should do. Somewhere in this addled mind was the notion that he could erase what he had heard and seen, or maybe play it backward like one of the funny bits in the moving pictures, so they could forget the whole thing. But Jesse was in too sorry a state. He couldn’t talk if he wanted to. There were at least a dozen people crowded about his rooms.
Then Robert saw Joe Rose, the white man or Indian or whatever he was, looking at him with those shining black eyes, like he could see inside his head. Right away, he was sure Rose knew, and back out the door he went, and down the stairs and around to Hilliard Street before Rose could catch and corner him.
Now he walked along, glancing over his shoulder every few steps. He figured the best he could do was leave it be. Keep his mouth shut and wait for things to calm down. Maybe those crapshooters would think him nothing but a drunken fool and would forget what he’d said. Or they might figure that he’d just been bragging on something someone else had seen. Maybe he’d be fortunate that way. Though he’d never been lucky before.
Five
Little Jesse had spent tortured hours with his fever spiking and falling and his guts twisting like someone had parked broken glass in there. When the morphine ran out around midnight, he woke to moans and groans, then realized they were coming from his own throat. He thrashed about, his sweat soaking the sheets. Shapes moved in and out of his field of vision, and he felt a woman’s hands on his face, soothing his burning brow. Other kind fingers changed the dressing on his wound. One of the women, trying to joke him out of his pain, slipped her hand under the sheets and between his legs, whispering that everything seemed quite all right down there. Jesse smiled, even though he couldn’t feel a thing.
When he cried for more dope, someone said, There ain’t no more, Jesse, and he yelled a curse, swearing some goddamn fuck of a low-down rounder had found it and stole it away. He kicked off the covers and had to be held down. He wept for mercy. There were more whispers and someone left in a hurry, slamming the door. An hour passed by, then another. A shade flitted through the doorway, and a few seconds later, the point of a needle glistened over his bare thigh.
The relief came on him like a warm dawn, a shot of amber light that went down to his last toe. His eyes drooped, his flesh melted from his bones, and he sighed long and low. Through the dirty window, he saw the first red rays of sun coming over the buildings. The rain had gone and he would wake to the new day.
When he got to Atlanta, Joe liked to eat breakfast at Lulu’s, the tiny diner diagonally across Houston Street from the Hampton. The weekday cook, an ex-convict named Sweet Spencer, had a way with a plate of sugared ham and eggs, and his cathead biscuits were the best in downtown. He’d learned his skills in the joint.
Joe considered other choices for his morning meal, then decided to make his visit to Lulu’s and get it over with. The last thing he wanted was Sweet getting a notion that he was avoiding him, though it was exactly what he wanted to do. Sweet was one of those types who could rattle a man’s bones with one look, and Joe didn’t need him for an enemy.
Before he got around to that business, he decided to take a walk on Peachtree Street. It was his first Monday morning in the city in six months, and he wanted to amble around a bit. He had visited Central Avenue his first day in. Now he would survey the other side of Atlanta.
Bundling up for the cool morning, he went out the door. Joe’s favored winter wear was a gray wool coat that had been taken off a pile of uniform items stripped from the German dead. After his discharge, he paid a Philadelphia tailor to remove the epaulets and then dye the coat a darker gray. It fit him well and was warm enough for any weather. He liked especially the four secret pockets: one under each arm, meant to hold a pistol but useful for stashing burglary tools and stolen goods like watches and jewelry, and two smaller pokes tucked along the seams in the lining, one on either side. He had been told that the Germans used these cavities to hide tiny weapons, razor blades and such, and even poison capsules. All four pockets were difficult to detect, their edges cut to appear as seams. Joe had gone through more than one frisking holding gems that were never found.
He crossed over Ivy Street and reached Peachtree to find that the Atlanta beehive was buzzing ever more frantically every time he came back. Even at this early hour, the sidewalks were getting jammed as workers rushed along to the downtown offices, huffing little clouds, and the main and crossing streets were packed with automobiles, trucks, bicycles, a few motorcycles, and fewer horse-drawn hacks.
Joe noticed right away that two new electric stoplights had been installed on the main thoroughfare, so there were now a half dozen of the signals in as many blocks. One by one, the crow’s nests were being replaced. Not that the lights eased the congestion.
The city was dirtier, too. The pall of soot that had hung in the air since he first passed through seven years before seemed to grow thicker every time he returned, advanced by the unending string of coal- and wood-burning locomotives passing through the railroad yards not five blocks away, the belching from the stacks of the factories and the chimneys of the homes clustered around the downtown blocks, and the growing multitude of automobiles and trucks. Indeed, with all that, it was nigh onto impossible for anyone who lived or worked there to stay clean. A white sheet hung out to dry in the morning would be gray by afternoon. Just about every other person passing on the street exhibited at least a mild cough.
Then there was the smell, a fetid combination of engine exhaust, horse manure, rusting pipes, woodsmoke, and damp rot, along with contributions from the nearby Atlanta Livestock Center, famed for it
s stench. He never quite understood how the citizens tolerated the stifling heat of summer, and always made a point to be elsewhere during the hot months.
When he reached Harris Street, he crossed over and came back down the other side, where the sidewalks were even busier. Atlanta just kept growing, out and up, and it had been going on that way for a long time.
As he ambled among the heat and close odors of human crowding, he remembered being cornered in a speakeasy one winter evening some years back and treated to a lecture on the history of the city by a drunken professor. The scholar, deep in his cups and provoked by one of those innocuous barroom questions that don’t require an answer, lurched to his feet and into a spiel that began with a claim that Atlanta was founded as a backwoods depot called Terminus, which was still marked by the zero milepost that stood on Alabama Street.
Later, the name of this way station was changed to Marthasville, after the then-governor’s daughter. When it was selected for a north–south rail line because of the gentle slope of the surrounding land, Miss Martha lost her place in history in favor of Atlanta, a name some engineer threw out on a whim. More rail lines followed, so that by the onset of the Civil War, the town had gained strategic value. Indeed, the drunken professor avowed, Jefferson Davis had sealed the fate of the Confederacy when, facing an advancing Union army, he stupidly refused to order the destruction of the rail lines over some petty squabble with local politicians.
At this point, another sot rose to dispute the notion that Jeff Davis ever did anything stupid, and demanded the lecturer step outside to answer for so dishonoring the Confederacy. Joe settled this by treating the rebel diehard to a few hard slaps that put him in his place. The professor was entertaining, and he wanted to hear the rest of the story.
The rest of the story was that the Confederate officers and brave troops who tried to save the city were no match for Sherman’s overwhelming force, and Atlanta was pounded almost into oblivion by shelling and burned into ashes by set fires. The general recognized that his victory would have been more arduous save for those rail lines, and left them intact to use for his march to the sea.
After swigging from his glass, the professor launched into act two, relating how the hearty citizens rebuilt their city, literally from the ground up. The rail lines multiplied once more, and soon a thousand freight and passenger cars were rolling in and out of Atlanta’s yards every day. The population grew at an astounding pace. By the turn of the century, the city held almost one hundred thousand citizens. Ten years later, it was half again that number. When the 1920 census appeared, the scholar opined, it would show that the population would pass two hundred thousand with no slowing in sight. This, less than sixty years after being a city of ashes. Shortly after delivering this last proclamation, he wound down to a string of disjointed mumbles and then dropped his head onto his folded arms and into a peaceful doze.
Joe wasn’t surprised at the business about how the city had flourished, more so in the last five years. The boll weevil had devastated cotton crops across Georgia, and farm families by the thousands had packed up and left the land. Atlanta offered work, in the rail yards and the mills and in private homes. From what Joe could tell, at least half of the new arrivals were black. They laid track and ran looms and dug ditches and raised the children of white families. Musicians like Willie McTell followed this wave of migration, their guitars strapped to their backs.
It was no easy ride for the migrants who huddled in sections like Cabbagetown for the whites and Mechanicsville for the colored. Poor and dirty and dangerous, they were also the sort of neighborhoods Joe sought out. He was comfortable among working people and the floating population of working folks, gamblers, petty thieves, confidence men, and whores. Meanwhile, he stayed in cheap downtown hotels like the Hampton and the Atlanta just up the street, places where everyone minded their business and a fellow could stay out of sight and out of trouble.
Not this time, though; his second night in town, he had stumbled upon a shooting followed by something even more ominous, an invitation—that was a joke, it was an order—to visit the Captain.
First, though, came breakfast. Joe arrived back on Houston Street and stepped inside Lulu’s door. Once he had called out his order to the fellow behind the counter, he took a corner table. While he waited, he perked an ear for any snippets of gossip about crimes around the city, always a subject of interest. Two office clerks in white shirts and ties were talking at the next table over, and Joe caught the words jewels and mansion. Under the guise of picking up the newspaper that someone had left on the next table, he shifted around to a chair that was closer to the pair.
Over the next few minutes, he gleaned pieces that assembled into a story, and was stunned to learn what he had missed the day before, that someone had gotten into the Payne mansion on Elizabeth Street during a Christmas charity event and made off with a catch of jewelry. The clerks snickered giddily over the crime and batted it around some more without adding any details.
Joe shared in the frivolity right up until the moment it dawned on him that this was the reason for the summons to police headquarters. The Captain wanted to grill him about the burglary, and might even suspect that Joe had a hand in it. His gut sank at the thought of what he was facing, though not enough to ruin his appetite, and when his breakfast arrived, he plowed in.
As he ate, he looked over the front page of the newspaper. There were articles about trouble in Germany, rioting in the streets as part of a rebellion against the leaders who had lost the last war. Meanwhile, civil war was brewing in Cuba. Another item described a shipment of thirty thousand bottles of Scotch that had been intercepted in Maine, with an estimated value of four million dollars. Joe grinned over that, then laughed when he read in a local story about a still that had been found in the basement of a house just a few blocks north of where he sat. He recognized the character who had been arrested as a loudmouth who was known to sample too much of his own product. This time the fight was with a police officer, and as a result the fool’s source of income had been smashed to pieces.
He flipped through some more pages, dawdling. He wasn’t looking forward to his visit with Captain Jackson. Though if he didn’t show up, Collins or some other cop would come looking for him, and the slight would put the Captain in an even worse humor. With a reluctant glance at the clock on the wall, he put the paper aside and left his twenty-five cents, with a nickel tip for the girl.
Stepping onto the sidewalk, he strolled around the side of the building and in through the kitchen door. The Negro cook, dark and burly, with a round shaved head and shoulders like a steer, peered from his station at the stove. His broad face sported a half-dozen scars, souvenirs of battles in the hellhole where he had spent three of his years.
“Mr. Joe,” Sweet Spencer said. “I heard you was in town.”
“Came in Friday,” Joe said.
“What’s the word on Williams?” Sweet’s voice was cool.
“You heard about that?”
The Negro shoveled scrambled eggs and a thick slice of ham onto a plate and put it in the window. “Yeah, I heard ’bout that sonofabitch,” he grunted. “He got shot. Now, there’s a damn surprise.” Sweet had no time for slicks like Jesse.
“Any talk going around?”
“No,” Sweet said. “And if they is, I don’t want to hear it.” He made up another plate and set it in the window for the waitress. His eyes slid to Joe. “What do you care?”
“He’s a friend. I’ve known him a while.”
“I guess that’s your problem, then,” the cook said. Though he radiated danger from every pore, he wouldn’t dare use such a caustic tone with another white man. Joe was different that way.
Sweet’s eyes flicked. “I also heard some jewels got stole out in Inman Park Saturday night.” He kept his eyes on the stove. “That what the Captain be wantin’ to talk to you about?” he inquired casually.
Joe was not surprised that Sweet knew about it; that kind of word would
travel. “That’s right,” he said glumly. “I’m going down to see him now.” He nodded a good-bye and the Negro turned back to his work.
Joe had just reached the door when Sweet said, “She was out there.”
Joe stopped, puzzled. “Who was out where?”
“Pearl was at that house. The Payne place. Where them things got snatched. She was there.”
Joe took a startled step back. “Jesus Christ, Sweet!” He lowered his voice. “It was her?”
Sweet shook his head. “No, it wasn’t her. She got hired on as a maid for that Christmas party they was havin’. She does that kind of work sometimes. You know that.”
Joe let the jibe go by. “She was . . .” He stopped, baffled by this news. “Well, that ain’t good.”
“No,” Sweet said shortly. “It ain’t.”
Joe looked at him. “Is there something else?”
“That ain’t enough?”
Joe could see from Sweet’s deadpan expression that he wasn’t going to get any more out of him. “I better get on,” he said.
“Mr. Joe?” The Negro’s eyes were like pieces of flint. “That, there, is all the more reason you want to stay away from her,” he said in a rumble of a voice. “Even if she comes knockin’. That would be my advice. You hear what I’m saying?”
“I hear you, Sweet.”
Sweet came up with a dim smile. “Stop by any time,” he said.
Joe took the prison glint that had rested in the dark gaze out the door with him. It gave him something else to think about on his way to Decatur Street.
As usual on a Monday, the weekend’s gossip made the rounds as the first order of business. The whispered word about the theft at the Payne mansion spent Sunday traveling from one maid to the next, and from that maid to the lady of the house, and then along church pews from Druid Hills to Buttermilk Bottom. By the time evening rolled around, it had spread to every corner of the city.
