by Larry Karp
More applause.
“Now, then. I’m gonna play you a few more tunes before I let Mr. Welk back on the stage, but first, there’s something I got to tell you. There’s a book, just been found, it’s Scott Joplin’s own journal, and it tells all about how he got ragtime going, single-handed. I want to buy that book and take it out to Sedalia, and show it to the mayor and all the important people in the city. Maybe then they’ll see they oughta set up a ragtime museum in honor of the man who started ragtime right there in their own town. Yes!” Brun removed his hat, bent stiffly from the waist to set it upside-down at the edge of the stage. “Any of you want to help me get Scott Joplin the respect he shoulda got a long time ago, I’ll be in your debt. Now I’m gonna shut up and go back to the piano.”
Applause started slowly and hesitantly, but caught on, and by the time Brun began to play, he thought every pair of hands in the room was clapping.
***
Two in the morning, customers gone, the Aragon Ballroom so quiet as to seem unnatural. A small man with a spine badly twisted to the left pushed a wet mop over the floor past the small table where Brun and Cal sat over partly-filled glasses. Cal glanced at his wrist. “Getting late, Brun.” He knocked down the rest of the whiskey in his glass. “Your wife’s going to have a fit.”
Brun chuckled. “Naw, no trouble there. May’s been sleeping probably four hours already, and when she gets up in the morning to go to church, I’ll be asleep. By the time she gets back home, it’ll be after noon and she’ll be so full of Jesus, I won’t hear a word the rest of the day. Saturday night’s the best time for me to play.”
“Saturdays, you get the best crowds, too.” Cal pointed at Brun’s hat, now back in its usual jaunty position on the old man’s head. “How much did you take in?”
“Almost a hundred-twenty. Not too shabby, but I was hoping some guy with more in his bankbook than he could figure what to do with just might decide to bankroll me.” Brun shook his head. “Lotta dough to have to come up with in just a week or so.”
Cal blinked hard. “I wish I could help you.”
Brun patted the young man’s hand. “I appreciate the thought. At least I got enough from the crowd so I can take the train. Won’t have to ride a goddamn Greyhound bus. Maybe I can find me a sugar daddy in Sedalia, wants to make his town proud.” The old man drained his glass, poured himself a refill. “Damn, Cal, didn’t I have them stomping tonight? Everybody likes my music. Everybody but my wife, that is.”
Cal pushed back from the table. “Come on, Brun. I’ll get you home.”
“No hurry.” Brun jabbed a finger toward the half-filled bottle. “No sense wasting good whiskey. Might as well get hung for a sheep as a lamb.”
Chapter Eight
Sunday, April 8
Late evening
Gray fog filled Jerry Barton’s basement. Clay Clayton, Rafe Anderson, and Barton chain-smoked cigarettes, lighting new ones from the butts of their last. Little Johnny Farnsworth puffed at a fat cigar. Otto Klein eyed him through the haze. “Christ a’mighty, Johnny, you look like you’re eatin’ a turd.”
“Smells like it, too.” Luther Cartwright snickered. The others laughed.
Farnsworth blew a mouthful of smoke in Klein’s direction. “You don’t like my ceegar, too goddamn bad,” the little man snarled. “If it bothers y’all too much, I’ll just pick up what I brung here, take it home, and do my smokin’ there.”
Barton scrambled to his feet. “Otto, Luther, shut the hell up. This’s my house he’s smokin’ in, and what I say is, anybody brings around what Johnny brung can smoke shit, eat shit, or toss shit, whatever he wants.” Barton pointed toward three round sticks on the floor across the room. “How’d you get your hands on that, Johnny?”
Farnsworth laughed, a dismissive sound. “Just figure some people’re more careless than they oughta be. A guy spends as many years as me workin’ as a blaster, you can give him a week, and he won’t have no trouble comin’ back with enough dynamite to bring down any building you’d like. That’s all you gotta know, and that’s all you’re gonna know…what the hell’s the matter with you, Rafe? You look like you got a fart stuck in your ass.”
Anderson shrugged. “I was just thinkin’. That’s all it’s gonna take? Just three sticks?”
Farnsworth’s face said he was through suffering fools. “Yeah, Rafe, that’s all it’s gonna take. Usin’ too much is as bad as not usin’ enough. Set up them three sticks just right, and you’ll have every person in that auditorium under six feet of plaster and stone.”
“The newspaper boys’ll take proper notice of that,” Klein crowed. “A schoolhouse fulla white and colored, all sittin’ together in the same room, gets blown to kingdom come? Bet it’ll be in the papers coast to coast for a good long while. Make people think mighty hard before they ever try’n do anything else like that again.”
“Be on all the news broadcasts too,” Anderson said. “Every station in Jew York’s gonna be hollerin’ about it.”
“Sure,” Cartwright said. “They sure’n hell will. And before we even got time to turn around, here comes the FBI.”
Johnny Farnsworth’s face said the concern was beneath consideration. “What the hell you sayin’, Luther? That we oughta run scared? Let the FBI stop us? And maybe one day we’ll see our grandchildren workin’ for the colored?”
“Wait a minute now, all of you. Just hold on.”
When Jerry Barton spoke in that tone, people went quiet. Everyone in the room turned his way. Even Klein looked deferential.
“Let’s not get too personal with Luther,” Barton said. “He’s got himself a fair point. Yeah, the feds’ll be here in nothing flat, people in town’re gonna talk, and that means we gotta be more than careful. We can’t figure to just do the job, then run on home afterwards and wait for guys with badges to knock on our doors.”
Klein looked around the room. Anderson and Clayton studied their feet; Cartwright shot glances at the cellar door. “Jerry’s right,” Klein said. “But shit, we got us more’n a week. Let’s do somethin’, then get back here next Sunday night and put the whole thing together, every detail, beginning to end. Make sure what we do gets in the history books, everything except our names.”
Grunts of general approval. Then, Farnsworth pointed at the three reddish sticks on the floor. “Bet I won’t even need an hour to poke around that school, and I’ll know exactly how to bring it down.”
Barton smirked. “Good. And speakin’ of school, that’s another thing. None of us can afford to go flappin’ his lips out of school.”
Anderson snickered.
“I ain’t pilin’ on the applesauce,” said Barton, and again, the room went silent. “All it’d take is for one of us to tie on a few too many, and then go blabbing to the guy across the table.” He glanced at Cartwright. “Or maybe to his wife. Or to have somebody get cold feet at the last minute, and run out and leave the rest of us high and dry. Time to shit or get off the pot. Who’s in?”
Barton put up a hand. Klein followed suit, then Farnsworth, Anderson, and Clayton, and finally Cartwright. Barton nodded. “Okay, then. We’re all in. Now. Do y’all swear that from this minute till after we’re all done, nobody’s gonna take a drop?” He looked at his glass of whiskey, stepped to the sink, poured it down the drain.
“Oh, that hurts,” Farnsworth groaned. But the little man picked up his glass and sent his undrunk liquor after Barton’s.
Barton grabbed an empty shot glass from the shelf next to the sink, blew dust off it, held it up. “Okay, everybody. Get out your knife.”
The men pulled jackknives from their pockets, flipped the blades open. Then, they went to work on their fingers. Three stabbed with the tips of the blades; the others drew knives across finger tips. One by one, they held their fingers over the shot glass in Barton’s hand, and pushed out drops of blood. Barton stirred the little pool with the tip of his knife, then applied the mixed blood to the wound on his
finger. The other men did the same.
“Okay, then,” Barton said to the sound of knives clicking shut. “That’s a blood oath we just took, so now we’re all blood brothers in this thing. We’re gonna swear that this week, we’ll keep on thinkin’ about what-all we’re up to, but we ain’t gonna breathe one word about it to anybody else. Whoever breaks this oath, he’s no brother anymore, and it’s the responsibility of the rest of us to take a proper vengeance. I swear.”
He pointed at Farnsworth. The little man pushed, “I swear” through tight lips.
Barton directed a bloody finger at each of the other men in turn; they all swore allegiance to the oath.
Barton nodded satisfaction. “That’s it, then. Ten o’clock next Sunday night, back here. Anything comes up in the meanwhile, anybody hears anything, you call me, and I’ll get the word out. Right?”
A one-word chorus cut through the smoke. “Right!”
Chapter Nine
Monday, April 9
Morning
A few minutes before ten, Brun turned the corner onto Venice Boulevard, walked up the block to his barber shop, and pulled out his key ring. Before he could unlock the door, though, he saw he had a visitor. The woman smiled. “Good morning, Mr. Campbell. I thought it was time we had a talk.” She motioned with her eyes toward the barber shop.
“Well, yeah, Miss Vinson, sure.” Brun opened the door, then followed the woman inside, leaving the CLOSED sign facing outward. He gestured toward the piano bench, but Bess remained on her feet, still smiling. “What can I do for you?” Brun asked.
“You must have some idea, Mr. Campbell.”
“Well, I guess I do. But hey, Miss Vinson, give me a break, huh? Look around this place. He extended his arms, palms up. “You come by what, four days ago—”
“Five. Last Wednesday.”
“Whatever. Where do you think I’m gonna come up with five thousand dollars? I never had that much money in my life.”
“I don’t know.” Her voice was level, patient. “My brother-in-law’s talked to Mrs. Joplin again, and that’s what she says it would take to get the journal away from Mr. Blesh. Time’s running out. Mr. Knopf will be back this coming weekend, and my brother-in-law says the editor and Mr. Blesh will be all over him the minute he gets a foot into the office. Then it will be too late. If we can’t get the money to Mrs. Joplin this week, we’ll have to forget the whole thing.”
Brun tapped a rhythm on the counter next to the cash register. “Okay, listen a minute. It’s too short of a time for me to send anybody a letter, and I already called everyone I know. Maybe we could make a deal with Mrs. Joplin. She wrote me some real nice letters a few years ago to say thank you for all I’m doing to get people to know about her husband, so how about if I give her a phone call? I could tell her if she lets me take the journal to Sedalia, I’ll use it to pitch the crowd about a ragtime museum, and get ahold of the deep pockets there. Pitch them for her five K. How’s that sound.”
Bess seemed to be thinking the matter through. “What if you don’t get the money from the people at Sedalia?”
“Well…I’ll think of something else.”
Bess favored Brun with a long fish eye. “Mr. Campbell, have you seen Mrs. Joplin lately? Talked to her?”
“I haven’t ever met her face to face. But like I said, she wrote me a bunch of nice letters—”
“She’s almost eighty, her hearing’s not so good, and she’s…how should I say this? Her mind isn’t all that it used to be. My brother-in-law heard Blesh tell the editor she’s gotten pretty flighty. I’m afraid if you try to sell her that idea over the phone, she might get confused or upset, and just hang up on you.”
Brun nodded, then raised a finger. “Hey, wait a minute. I been negotiating with some people in Hollywood to make a movie about Scott Joplin, Ethel Waters might be in it. Maybe they’d give us the money to read what’s in his journal and use it in the movie.”
Bess looked dubious. “You really think they’d give you five thousand dollars while they’re still negotiating with you, and you don’t even have the journal to show them? Besides, they’d probably just as soon make the story up, which they can do for free.”
Brun sighed. “You’re pretty good at shooting down a guy’s ideas.”
She smiled. “You’re pretty good at making up suits out of whole cloth. I’m sorry, Mr. Campbell, believe me, I am. We’ve got a chance here to make something happen, but it’s going to take some cold, hard cash in Mrs. Joplin’s hand.” She moved toward the door. “You’ve got my phone number. I hope you can find a way to get the money.”
“Not to be rude, Miss Vinson, but ain’t there any chance at all you could help a little, yourself?”
She shook her head. “I wish. I’ve got a beauty shop that’s no bigger than your place, a ten-year-old daughter, and no husband. You think you’re strapped every month?”
“Well, it was worth a try.”
She waved crossed fingers at him. “Good luck. I’ll talk to you later.”
Chapter Ten
Wednesday, April 11
Afternoon
Alan ran into the kitchen, dropped his books on the chair at the end of the white formica table, then froze as he noticed the air-mail envelope addressed to him in his own handwriting. He snatched it up, started to tear it open—and saw someone had been there before him. The boy took a couple of heavy steps toward the living room, but curiosity trumped anger. He pulled out the letter, sank into a chair, started to read.
The old-time writing style with its classic Ws and Ms took Alan back to second grade, a room full of kids moving their pencils up, then down, to the rhythm of Miss Baxter’s chant of “Push-pull-Palmer, push-pull-Palmer.” The letter filled three pages, and by the time Alan mouthed, “Sincerely yours, Brun Campbell,” his heart was pounding so hard, he could barely breathe. There it all was, what he should play, how he should play it, all straight from the man who’d learned from the master. If Brun Campbell lived in Hobart, or even New York, Alan would have run directly to the old man’s home, and apprenticed himself without another thought. But California?
With desire ruled out by geography, anger reasserted itself. The boy stormed into the living room, where he found his mother on the green tufted armchair, feet up on the matching footrest, nose buried in a novel. All the King’s Men. She didn’t notice him.
“Mother!” he shouted.
She looked up, reluctantly, he thought. “Well, hello, dear. I thought I might have heard you come in. Did you have a nice day at school?”
He brandished the envelope. “You opened my mail.”
She seemed to find the reproach in his voice incomprehensible. “Why, yes. I couldn’t imagine who might have sent you an airmail letter from California. Who is this Brun Campbell person, and where on earth did you ever turn him up? That letter reads as if a grade-school child might have written it, and not a very bright grade-school child, at that. ‘Practice, p-r-a-c-t-i-z-e?’” She shook her head. And ‘r-e-c-i-e-v-e.’ I before e, except after c—”
“Mother, shut up.”
That got her attention. “Don’t you dare speak to me—”
“Why did you open my mail?”
She set her book on the end table, a clear declaration of war. “Because you are not yet of age, and Lord help me, you are still my responsibility.” Her voice was as severe as her face. “I’d be negligent if I didn’t know with whom you associate, and I can’t say I’m pleased, or that I approve. This phase you’re going through with that ragtime music worries me.”
“It’s not a ‘phase’ and I’m not ‘going through’ it. Ragtime is good music. Not anybody can play it, at least not right.”
“I’m sure they’ll be impressed with you at Juillard, playing ragtime!” She clucked disapproval. “Oh, Alan! One day I want to walk into Carnegie Hall, and as the usher seats me in the first row, I want to hear the people all around whispering, ‘That’s his mother.’ Pl
ease don’t spoil it for me.” She pointed toward the piano. “Practice your lesson. I’ll sit here and pretend I’m in Carnegie Hall, and—”
“Mother, you opened my mail. That’s a federal offense.”
Patronizing smile. “After you practice and do your homework, you can call the police and turn me in.” She picked up her book.
Alan tore the novel from her hands, flung it across the room.
She drew herself poker-straight. “Mister, you will pick up that book and apologize for your behavior. Now.”
“You apologize for opening my mail,” Alan howled. “And then you can get your fat ass out of that chair and pick up the book yourself.” He wheeled around, stormed out of the room, out of the house and down the sidewalk.
***
Fifteen minutes later, he rang the doorbell at the stone and marble mansion on Park Avenue. Slim opened the door, looked the sweating boy up and down. “Horse gets in a lather like this, you put a blanket on him.”
Alan gulped air. “I…ran…all the way…from my house.”
“Must be important then.” Slim pointed to a little wooden seat just inside the door, next to an umbrella rack. “Have yourself a sit-down, else you ain’t gonna be able to tell Miriam nothing about it.”
Alan nodded. “Thanks.”
By the time Miriam hurried up the hall, the boy had pretty well recovered. Miriam tried to smile. “What’s cooking?”
He waved the envelope. “Not exactly…” He peered down the hall. “Tell you what. Let’s go sit in the park.”
She got it. “I’ll tell Sally we’re going out.”
***
Within three minutes, Miriam was back, a light pink sweater over her blouse, small leather purse swinging from one shoulder. Alan ushered her across Park Avenue, into the park, to a bench under a gigantic oak tree. The instant they sat, the boy started to talk. “Remember the barber I told you about in California? The one who took lessons from Scott Joplin?”