The Dying Crapshooter's Blues (11 page)

Since that incident, he had nurtured a fantasy of meeting the Captain one day and saying, “Oh, by the way, half the criminals in Atlanta have fucked your wife, and we all agree that she's a peach.” Then he thought about whether he'd like to be buried in Oakland Cemetery or some other resting place.

This made him all the more nervous being in the caustic Captain's eye. And yet there he was, and there he would remain, until the man got what he wanted. He shook his head over ending up so innocently in this corner, and walked off the bridge as the trains huffed in and out beneath his feet.

 

It was a bright day, the temperature already in the high thirties, certainly not cold enough to keep the likes of Willie McTell indoors. Not to mention that feeling the warm sun on his face would dispel some of the gloom that he had carried away from Little Jesse's rooms.

Street by street, Willie heard pockets of noise, caught their echoes, and sensed the way the air moved around in different places. Once he had settled in Atlanta the previous spring, it had taken him no time at all to map the city by way of sound. It was something no sighted person could ever understand. His blindness had so heightened his other faculties that people marveled at the tricks he could perform. Telling a one-dollar bill from a five simply by touching it, or picking out conversations across a street full of rattling automobiles. He could identify people by their smells and the way their clothes rustled on their bodies. It was this other sense, really a combination of his hearing, smell,
and touch, that guided him through the city as if he was on a private rail. He didn't need any help at all, though he sometimes lost his talent when a nice-sounding woman offered to guide him.

He was coming up on Houston Street, on his way to catch the lunch crowd on Auburn Avenue, when he heard Joe Rose call his name. Footsteps brought Joe to his side. He lifted his head and frowned a little. “A Chesterfield?”

Joe grinned and shook his head. “Damn Willie. You ought to be in a carnival with that.”

“I've been in a carnival,” Willie said shortly. “More than one.” They walked on a little ways. “Where you been this morning?”

“I paid a visit to the Captain,” Joe said quietly.

The blind man cocked his head. “About that Inman Park business?”

“That's right,” Joe said. The word was on the street, and it didn't surprise him that the blind man's ears had swept it up.

“He thinks you done it?” Willie said.

“He thinks I might know who did.”

“You talking a—”

“Yeah. Her.” His mouth twisted in a dim smile. “She was working there when it happened.”

“Working there?”

“As a maid for that party.”

Willie mulled this news for a few seconds. “What are you gonna do about it?”

“Don't know what I can do.”

As they made their way down the block, Joe was too distracted to notice the looks the odd couple received from both the white and colored pedestrians. They stopped at the corner of Pryor Place to wait for a creaking hack to roll by.

Joe said, “I asked him about Little Jesse.”

Willie said, “And he don't know a damn thing. Ain't that
right? Don't care, either. Just another nigger shot down on a Saturday night.”

“That's pretty much it,” Joe said.

The hack passed and they started across the street.

Joe said, “All that time you've been over there, has he said anything else about what happened?”

Willie thought about it and said, “A couple times, I did hear him kind of mumbling some things I didn't understand.”

“Like what?”

“It was the same thing a couple times over. The way it sounded, I first thought maybe he was praying.” Joe looked at Willie for a moment, and both men laughed. “I know,” Willie said. “But that's how it sounded.”

“You catch any of it?”

“A little bit. First he said, ‘I done it. Yeah, I done it.' Then he said, ‘Don't got nothin'. Nothin'.' Like that.”

“That's all?”

“S'all I heard.” They reached the other side of the street, and Willie raised his foot and stepped onto the curb without a hitch. He tilted his head in Joe's direction. “What are you going to do now?”

“About what?”

“About Little Jesse.”

“I don't know,” Joe said. “First I need to find that cop. Logue. See what he has to say.” He paused. “And Robert Clark, too. You know he came by Little Jesse's? He ran off before I could talk to him.”

“Ran off? You mean like he was scared?” Willie said.

“Yeah, like that.”

“Well, he was shit scared Saturday night, all right.”

“You know where he stays?”

“I don't,” Willie said. “He's just one of them that's around a lot.”

“Not now, he ain't, and I need to find him,” Joe said. “You let me know if Jesse says anything else.”

“I will.” Willie frowned and shook his head mournfully. “But I don't know if he's gonna last much longer. That doctor didn't do him no good at all. He's gettin' worse all the time.”

“Then he needs to speak the hell up,” Joe griped. “You can tell him that.”

“All right, Joe.”

An automobile pulled to a stop at the curb and sat, idling. Joe glanced over and said, “Quarter says you can't name it.”

“Four-cylinder Sears,” Willie said absently. Joe went digging for the coin. “I don't need the twenty-five cents, thank you.”

They lingered there for a moment. Jesse would be heading east on Auburn Avenue, Joe south to the Hampton.

“I'll be back over there a little later on,” Willie said. “I want to be around while he's still alive.”

“You really don't think he can last?” Joe said. “He's always been a tough one.”

“He ain't that tough,” Willie said. He hitched his guitar, offered Joe his hand, and continued along the sidewalk, swerving nimbly around the pedestrian traffic as if guided by perfect eyesight.

The Buick sedan passed through the little community called Buckhead, heading due south. The car moved slowly, bouncing through the ruts in the hard red clay as the rear end, laden with the several hundred pounds of recording gear that was crammed in the trunk, scraped over exposed rocks.

The driver of the sedan, Jacob Stein—Jake to his friends—was relieved to see the signs announcing it was only another three miles to Atlanta. It had been a long drive, a good part of it on rural southern roads. The newly minted graduate of Fordham had heard the stories, knew the territory below the Pennsylvania state line could be hostile for some types, and he wondered if the city they were approaching, by far the largest in the South, would prove any less so. It was, after all, the locale of the infamous Leo Frank case, which had transpired only eight years before. He had read in the New York papers how that tragedy had drawn Jewish communities together at the same time it enhanced the power of the Ku Klux Klan. As if to punctuate this recollection, a half mile farther on, he peered to his right to see a building marked with a proud banner identifying the headquarters of that same organization.

Jake glanced over at the man who was snoozing in the passenger seat. “Mr. Purcell?”

George Purcell, twenty-five years Jake's senior, opened his eyes from his drowse, blinking in the late morning sun.

Jake said, “We're almost to Atlanta.”

Purcell sat up, stretched his thin arms forward, and yawned. He looked around at the landscape passing the windows. They were now on an unevenly paved, two-lane road that ran by little clusters of homes, the occasional store, patches of farm fields, and small stands of trees that had recently been woods. Purcell noted the street sign at the next intersection.

“So this is the famous Peachtree Road.” He treated the younger man to a quiet smile. “Have you seen any peach trees?”

“No, sir,” Jake said, then realized he wouldn't recognize one if he had.

“That's because the name of the street doesn't have anything to do with peaches,” the older man said.

“No?”

“No. Before there was any Atlanta, there was just a little crossroads next to a huge pitch tree.”

“
Pitch
tree?”

“A pine tree. Somehow it got turned into a
peach
tree.”

Jake raised his eyebrows with appropriate interest.

“That's one story. Another one says the Cherokee did name it for a peach tree.”

George Purcell was a font of such arcane knowledge. He had kept Jake entertained with all sorts of trivia over the week it had taken them to drive down from New York. Where and when he had collected all the curious lore was a mystery, since the man worked day and night either making sound recordings or arranging to do so. When he wasn't out on the road, he was ensconced in a studio or office somewhere. Jake sometimes wondered if Mr. Purcell fabricated his stories just to pass the time. What would Jake, a New Yorker all his life, know from peach or pitch trees?

It was no less a puzzle how this learned man came to be traveling the lost back roads of the South seeking out only what common folk sang and played, which in this part of the world meant either hillbilly music or blues. Jake admired him for giving up a comfortable home and academic career to travel these dusty and sometimes dangerous byways in search of what his peers viewed as marginal music. And he was glad for the opportunity to share the adventure, though the driving was brutal and some of the locales they visited gave him nightmares.

None of it seemed to worry his employer. Indeed, Mr. Purcell never failed to proclaim himself a New Yorker, and had no fear of charging into the places he clearly wasn't welcome in order to collect more music. He wanted to be first, and so he took the risks. No matter where they went, the musicians warmed to his passion.

Despite the doubters, Purcell was proving that there was a market for unschooled music. When common folk came home from work, they didn't want to hear the
good
music that the Carnegies and Rockefellers and Fricks with their grand opera houses and symphony halls wanted to shove down their throats. They wanted to hear the ballads and dance to tunes their families had been nursing for generations, songs that rang with a fervor that echoed the joys and agonies of their hard lives. Purcell had discovered that even a poor man or woman would spend a precious quarter for a record to play over and over and hear an echo of the ages. And there were millions of people like that with millions of quarters in their pockets.

Jake, who had stumbled into the job right out of college, first thought it a lark, then became a believer, taking pride in the knowledge that they were doing important work. He hoped the word had gotten out in advance and that Atlanta would be a boon for recording and a safe place to land for a little while.

Looking ahead, he saw houses spotting the sides of the road, mostly frame structures, along with some sturdy brick homes on little plots of land.

“Where are we going first?” he asked.

“This will carry us right downtown,” Mr. Purcell said. He went into his pocket for a piece of paper and read over it. “We're looking for the Dixie Hotel. Keep on until we get to Walton Street, then take a right turn.”

Jake was wondering what kind of city Atlanta could be. He could see the shapes of tall buildings, now within walking distance, even as they drove past plots of thickly wooded land and rolling fields where cows grazed. At the next intersection, he saw chickens pecking on the ground while a pig dozed in a patch of dirt.

Another half mile and they came upon the train station at Brookwood, beyond which was a vast web of rails, roundhouses, and thousands of freight and passenger cars, sitting still or moving in slow motion. Mr. Purcell had described Atlanta as a colossal railroad hub and here was the proof. It stretched as far as Jake could see, acre upon acre, all the way to downtown. The smoke from the trains, along with what belched from the factory stacks that poked up like ghostly fingers in the distance, had shrouded the panorama in a tepid brown cloud for which the weak winter sun was no match, so that the most distant corners of the yards looked like they were submerged in dank water.

The city arrived abruptly. At the next corner was a Gothic mansion, then a cluster of two- and three-story office buildings, followed by a stretch of large mansions. The cityscape increased steadily from this point, and within ten minutes they were driving into the heart of the downtown area, with towers that reached as high as ten and twelve floors and the usual palette of stores and eateries. The streets were jammed with automobiles, trucks, horse-drawn hacks, and the occasional carriage, so that they crept rather than motored along. Jake rolled down the window and took a whiff of the air. It certainly smelled like a city.

As they made their way down Peachtree Street, he let out a deep sigh of relief. The hotel couldn't be far. It had been a long grind, and he ached right down to his bones.

That relief would have to wait; Mr. Purcell wasn't quite ready to stop. “Let's drive around a bit,” he suggested, pointing to their left. With a grunt of frustration, Jake Stein turned the car east on Auburn Avenue. When they came to a stop three blocks down, a blind Negro crossed before them, dressed in a natty gray suit with a twelve-string guitar strapped across his back.

“I'd say we've come to the right place,” Mr. Purcell said.

 

Grayton Jackson stood gazing out his office window at the downtown streets and mulling the jagged and treacherous path that had brought him there.

Over the past decade, corruption had flooded the city like a dirty tide, and few fingers had been lifted to halt it. Atlanta had been a wide-open town, the kind of place where crooks, yeggs, and confidence men could practice their illicit trades with only token interference from the law. The well-oiled machine created by a boss named Floyd Woodward had run most of the criminal enterprise, with bootlegging, narcotics, counterfeiting, scams, gambling, and prostitution fueling the engine. Even after Woodward fled the city to escape a trumped-up murder charge, the business was too robust and lined too many pockets to fold.