The Ragtime Kid

by Larry Karp

  The men maneuvered Isaac off the wooden sidewalk into the street. People passed by quickly, made sure to look in some other direction. “Okay, nigger,” the spike-haired man shouted. “We gonna start by havin’ you tell Fritz here that you’re sorry for what you did, and you’re gonna make it right.”

  Brun stood on his toes to see over the heads of the circled men. Fritz was a boy about his own age, with a dirty, pimply, scratched-up face. His right eye was discolored, swollen nearly shut. Easy to see he’d been blubbering at least as much as Belinda had.

  Isaac drew himself upright, then took a half-step toward Fritz, who, to Brun’s amusement, took a full pace backward. “Only way I could make it right’d be to break his arms,” the colored man said. “The coward. Pickin’ on an eight-year-old girl.”

  At that point, Brun noticed sunlight gleaming off a blade in the hand of the man on the far side of the circle. But then he heard Stark’s voice, behind him. “All right, all of you. Move away from that man.”

  Stark stepped forward, pointed a nasty looking sawed-off shotgun at the gathered men. He sighted down the barrel. “I won’t warn you again. Get away from that man or I’ll shoot.”

  Freitag moved off, then the other three men shuffled a safe distance away from Isaac. Stark put up the gun, glared at Spike-hair. “Emil Alteneder, you’re the worst kind of redneck bully and coward, and your son’s just like you. If I’d seen Fritz mistreating that little girl, he’d have come off a whole lot worse than he did.” Stark waggled the shotgun toward the fourth man. “Marty, if you had anything better to do than hang around Boutell’s all day cadging drinks, you wouldn’t get into messes like this. Give me that knife.”

  Stark held out his hand. Marty set his feet. Stark raised the gun. “Slowly,” he said. “Handle first, that’s it.” He took the knife from Marty, then retreated to the edge of the sidewalk. “All right. This ugly game is over. Now, beat it, all of you.”

  But Freitag wasn’t finished. A huge smile split his broad face as he looked at Emil Alteneder. “You gonna let him talk to you like that, Mr. Alteneder? Trash like him is why there’s trouble in this country, why the colored don’t know their place. A nigger rubs a white boy’s face in the dirt and blackens his eye, why next you know, a white man’s gonna have to move aside to let a nigger go past.” He jerked a thumb in Isaac’s direction. “I was you, I’d make dang sure that nigger knows if he don’t apologize right to your boy, he’s gonna have to keep his eyes on that li’l gal of his twenty-four hours out of every day, forever.”

  Isaac stiffened. Brun held his breath. The colored man moved toward Freitag, who looked him square in the eyes. “You heard me right. Ain’t no way you’re gonna be able to watch that child every single minute of every day. And both of us can figure out what kind of thing could happen to a li’l pickaninny girl whose daddy don’t keep close enough watch on her. Can’t we, now?”

  Brun thought Emil Alteneder looked like a man resurrected. Fritz made a sound somewhere between a snort and a giggle. Freitag talked on. “Now, I say it’s way past time you apologize to Master Alteneder there. You tell him, ‘I am truly sorry, young Master Alteneder. I am sorry all the way down to my sorry black ass, and I do most sincerely apologize to you.’”

  Isaac took a deep breath. He glanced toward the music shop, where he’d left the little girl and her chalk. Slowly, he repeated the words, sounding like each one was drawn out of him with hooks and wires.

  “Well, now, that is a good start,” said Freitag. “Next thing, you are going to get down on your knees and say, ‘Young Master Alteneder, I beg your forgiveness.’ Then you kiss his feet. Both of them.”

  A terrible look came over Isaac’s face. Stark leveled the shotgun. Isaac took a couple of steps toward the music store, but stopped when Emil Alteneder shouted, “That sure is a cute li’l gal you got. Be a real shame how she’s gonna look when you find her. Just might be she’s still alive, but both you an’ her’ll be wishin’ she wasn’t.”

  Isaac put a hand atop the barrel of Stark’s gun, lowered it, then walked back, knelt slowly, and begged young Alteneder’s forgiveness. He kissed one filthy shoe. But as he shifted to kiss the second, Fritz delivered a kick to the side of his head. Isaac rolled over, clutching his temple.

  Brun never could remember running up to Fritz Alteneder; his first recollection was hauling off and giving the boy a punch that sent him straight to the ground, spitting blood. “You kiss my foot,” Brun shouted, and aimed a kick at Fritz’s head. But Emil quickly pulled his son back, and Brun came within a hair of falling on his face. Instantly, Stark was at his side, swinging the gun stock in all directions. “One more word from any of you,” he shouted. “And I swear by all that’s holy, it will be your last. Now! If I don’t see your backs in three seconds, I will shoot. One…two…”

  As the retreating men reached the corner of Ohio, Stark lowered the gun. “All right, Brun, enough for them. Let’s get Isaac inside.”

  Brun and Stark each took one of Isaac’s arms, lifted him, walked him into the store. All the way, Brun kept thinking something was not adding up. Wasn’t Elmo Freitag supposed to be in town to get his hands on colored ragtime to publish? Then it occurred to him. If Freitag couldn’t get music by flattery and playing the con, maybe a little strong-arm might do the job.

  Inside the store, they sat Isaac on the stool behind the counter. The colored man swore he was all right. “Just a glancing blow, that kick. I seen it coming and was rollin’ away from it.” He patted Brun’s shoulder. “Brun sure gave him a whole lot worse than he gave me. Couple of teeth there on the ground, and they wasn’t mine.”

  “Nevertheless,” Stark said. “You are going to let Dr. Overstreet look you over. Brun, go along and make sure he gets there safely, then take off for the day. I’ll close up. Isaac, I’ll take Belinda upstairs with me, Sarah will look after her. But I think we’d better get her out of town for a while.”

  Isaac nodded agreement. “After supper, I’ll take her on out to my sister’s in Smithton.”

  “After dark,” said Stark. “And we’ll take her.”

  Chapter Eight

  Sedalia

  Saturday, July 22, 1899

  Afternoon

  Walter Overstreet watched the new boy lead Stark’s man outside. Once they’d crossed Ohio, the doctor trudged back into his office, plopped into his leather chair, sighed, shook his head, and reached into the little cabinet. He poured from the bottle, knocked down a swallow, refilled his glass.

  He drank his seconds more slowly. Good thing Isaac was all right. Most of Overstreet’s colleagues would tell him that was because the skulls of colored are thicker than those of whites, but one day in anatomy lab, Overstreet had put that precept to test and found it wanting. Isaac likely owed his escape to his own agility and the braveness of that boy, what was his name? The doctor hoped the boy would be all right, working at Stark’s. John Stark could be stubborn and hotheaded, and there was never a time when somebody or other in town wasn’t muttering about the way he behaved toward colored. Why he’d chosen to settle in Missouri, not Kansas, Overstreet couldn’t begin to understand. Something about Stark…he seemed always troubled. Overstreet had known other such men, and made it a point to be on guard around them. They could go through their lives as model citizens, but let something happen that stirred up a memory long tucked away, and all hell would break loose. Fortunately, this time, when push really did come to shove, those Alteneder morons, Marty Browne, and that Freitag dandy had cut and run. Otherwise, Overstreet figured, he’d now be in the middle of East Fifth Street, trying to handle simultaneous medical and civic emergencies. Damn and blast, a man has limits. He picked up the bottle and poured thirds.

  ***

  No sooner did Brun and the Higdons sit down to supper when Higdon announced that a dead woman had been found early Wednesday morning on Washington Street by a policeman making early morning rounds. Brun smiled to himself at the way Belle and Luella made
every appearance of being properly shocked, but not quite so badly that Higdon wouldn’t tell them more. Who was the woman? How had she been killed? Do they know who did it? Do they know why?

  Higdon looked at Brun. “You don’t seem very interested.”

  “Oh, well, sure I am,” Brun said. “But Miss Belle and Miss Luella asked every question before I could even think about it.”

  “Well, then, to answer you all,” said Higdon. “We don’t know who the woman was. She wasn’t local, but she did have on a wedding ring and diamond engagement ring. It’s possible her husband ran off, and she was looking for him. And she was strangled.”

  The two women made terrible faces. Miss Belle moved a hand up to her neck.

  “Did they find a rope, or something like that?” Brun asked.

  Higdon shook his head. “No. Doc Overstreet said from the look of it, it was done by hands. Finger marks on the neck, and her spine was broken…Brun, your face is gone so pale.”

  Belle drew a glass of water, and passed it to Brun, who took a long swallow. So that was why her head had flopped all around when he tried to lift it. “Sorry, Mr. Higdon. I was just thinking what it must be like to get your neck cracked like that. It had to have been a pretty strong man.”

  Higdon made a sour face. “That’s a very good point. The man they’re holding in the County Jail isn’t big, and he doesn’t look at all strong. But the police went around to the hotels with pictures and a description of the dead woman, and they hit pay dirt today at Kaiser’s. John Kaiser told them a man brought her in there Tuesday evening, got her a room, took her upstairs, and John never saw either one of them again. According to John, the woman was badly upset or drunk, and he gave the police a to-the-T description of the man. They picked him right up and arraigned him, and he’ll probably go to trial week after next. He’s not a local, so Bud Hastain contrived to throw a little work to his former clerk.” Higdon chuckled. “Ladies, your brother and uncle are the man’s attorney. He’s an odd duck, to say the least. Says he lives in Buffalo, New York, and works for the Procter and Gamble Company. But he talks like an unreconstructed Virginia plantation owner.”

  Brun coughed and choked on a mouthful of chicken, grabbed for his water glass, swallowed hard. Tears ran down his face. By the time he recovered himself, everyone at the table was staring at him. “Oh, he couldn’t have done that,” Brun said. “I’d warrant he couldn’t have strangled a woman and broken her neck.”

  Higdon put down his fork and knife, stared at his young boarder. “But Brun…I haven’t even mentioned the man’s name.”

  “It’s Fitzgerald. Mr. Edward Fitzgerald.”

  Higdon leaned across the table. “That’s right. But how did you know that? And just how can you be so sure Mr. Fitzgerald couldn’t have done it?”

  Sure as a person can be, Brun thought. But he was careful to limit himself to recounting Mr. Fitzgerald’s kindnesses to him, and how Fitzgerald had told him he was in town to set up a large subsidiary plant for Procter and Gamble. “It’s not just that he’s way too gentle to ever do a thing like that. It’s that he’s too…”

  “Ineffectual? Is that the word you’re looking for, Brun?”

  The boy nodded. “I just plain know Mr. Fitzgerald couldn’t have done it. You’ve got to get him off.”

  Higdon gave the boy a curious look, then said, “Well, Brun, tell you what. If you have any information that might help me help Mr. Fitzgerald, I hope you’ll give it to me.”

  Brun thought of the time, years before, when he watched an older boy catch a darning-needle bug, then stick a pin through its body, making the poor thing squirm and flap its wings something awful. “I haven’t, sir. Or I would for certain, kind as Mr. Fitzgerald was to me.”

  Before Brun finished talking, the understanding hit home that it was up to him to find information that would get Mr. Fitzgerald off the hook without getting Scott Joplin on. Because if either Fitzgerald or Joplin went to the gallows, Brun doubted he’d ever again sleep through a night.

  ***

  The Central Presbyterian Church stood on Sixth and Lamine, just a couple of blocks from Higdon’s. As soon as Luella and Brun were out of view of the house, the girl linked her hand into Brun’s arm. Crossing Ohio, Brun cast a glance toward Main Street, where he wished he could be on this Saturday evening, his first in Sedalia. But when Luella said, “It really is very nice of you to escort me, Brun. I hope you don’t mind,” the boy gave her the best smile he could manage, and said, “Why ever should I mind? You’ve all made me feel right at home, and I’m glad to be asked.” Two out of three weren’t lies, he thought, not so bad.

  The Social was in the church basement, gray and dreary in the paltry light of coal-oil lamps. The minute Brun and Luella walked in, the mustiness sent the boy into a sneezing fit. Up front, a long table held plates of cookies and a cut-glass bowl full of some kind of pink, over-sweet fruit punch. The young people sat around little tables and talked, all the while under the eyes of six vinegar-faced chaperones, three men and three women. There was no music, and certainly no dancing—Satan get thee far from Central Presbyterian. Brun thought the boys were mostly milksops and sissies with exaggerated manners; many of them wore spectacles. The girls were much like Luella, prim and very proper. There was a good deal of prattle about Colonel Robert Ingersoll, who’d died suddenly the day before. “Serves him right,” one of the girls said. “Old Mister Pagan Bob, always trying to get people to believe the Bible is wrong, and Jesus wasn’t the son of God. I wonder if he thinks there isn’t any hell now.” Everyone at the table, Brun excepted, laughed.

  After a while, Brun became the center of attention, not surprising, considering that he was new in town and a runaway. He went on at considerable length, knowing that if he stopped talking, there would be further palaver over divine retribution and other matters holy and spiritual. The sissy boys and proper girls goggled as he told his story of riding the rails to Sedalia, and taking lessons in colored piano music from an actual colored man. The chaperones got more ugly-mugged by the minute. Every now and again, Brun caught the eye of a boy he knew envied him, or of a girl he thought might prove an interesting companion once outside sacred walls. He tried to catch the names of a couple of those.

  At the stroke of ten o’clock, the chaperones announced with obvious relief that the pleasant evening was at an end. Brun and Luella walked a block back across Sixth with Fred Vollrath and Mabel Horton, seventeen-year-olds who had an understanding, which meant they’d agreed when Fred finished his schooling at Missouri University, he would come back to Sedalia, join his father’s insurance firm, and he and Mabel would be married. Brun could not for the life of him understand how they could talk that way and sound so happy about it. He pictured the couple in twenty years, thirty, forty, fifty, but finally forced himself to stop, as the images made him sadder than he cared to feel.

  At Ohio, Fred and Mabel went off, hand in arm, toward the big houses on Broadway. Luella smiled up at her escort. “Thank you, Brun, it’s been such a lovely evening. But it’s gone by so fast, hasn’t it?”

  Something about her face put a lump into Brun’s throat. “Well, then, let’s not have it end so fast.” Words spoken before considered. “Suppose we go back up Ohio to the Boston Café, and have us an ice-cream soda.”

  Like he’d offered her the moon and stars.

  By that hour, Ohio Avenue’s Saturday evening festivities were winding on down, but there were still a fair number of people on the sidewalks and the pavement, talking, arguing politics, courting. An hour or two earlier, Ohio would have been a sea of men, women and children, and Brun regretted not having been there to share in the fun. He and Luella walked past a street corner where four young blades were harmonizing on “In the Evening by the Moonlight,” one of them strumming a guitar, another rattling a pair of rib bones, setting a livelier rhythm than one usually heard for that drippy old tune. The shrill whistle of the popcorn and peanut wagon on the corner of Fourth
cut the air. And from a few blocks beyond, the sounds of revelry on Main Street came louder and clearer with each step. Brassy music, shouting. Luella obviously heard it, too, and clear she didn’t approve.

  Brun steered her past a fiddler and a banjo man doing a fair job on “Old Zip Coon,” then past four boys, a clarinet, two trumpets and a banjo, so bad Brun couldn’t even tell what tune they thought they were playing. Just outside the Boston Café, a loud bang set Luella to shrieking and throwing both arms around Brun’s neck. “It’s okay.” The boy pointed at two men a few steps past the doorway, one with his hands on his knees and laughing to beat the band, the other holding a cigar stump and sporting a scowl that said his friend might be lucky to go back home that night without a blackened eye. Luella giggled, “Sorry.” Brun noticed she was not quick to pull back her arms.

  They walked inside and up to the counter, and Brun asked what flavor Luella would like. Strawberry, no uncertainty. Brun ordered a strawberry ice-cream soda with two straws and two spoons. As he sat head-to-head with Luella over the glass, he caught a raised eyebrow and a sly wink from goatish Mr. Balch, behind the counter. If Luella looked any happier, Brun thought, she might bust wide open, and he felt a sadness deep in his stomach. Girls like Luella should go for sissy boys like the ones at the Social, but she hadn’t paid a one of those boys a moment’s notice, and here she was, flirting with Brun Campbell for all the world to see. Not fair. At least one of them was going to end up getting hurt.

  Walking hand-in-arm back to Higdon’s, Luella let her head rest against Brun’s shoulder. Watch out, Brun thought, this could get dangerous in a hurry. He tried to walk faster, but it’s not easy to put on speed with a girl’s head resting right next to your own. Luella sighed. “Oh, Brun, I just love the way the air smells at night this time of year. Like a million flowers.” Brun told her, yes, the smell was most agreeable, but he wished he were smelling the perfume from the women and the smoke from the cigars and cigarettes in Miss Nellie Hall’s place on West Main.