by Larry Karp
Tom smiled when Alan slurred off Kansas City’s final syllable, as he did when he was in a good mood. “Long as you’re not in a hurry, I suppose,” the boy admitted.
“Believe it or not, it’s no slower than the freeway.”
“Sure it isn’t.”
“I’ve timed it. Just a bit over an hour either route. We’ll be there in plenty of time for dinner. Oh, the barbecue in ‘Missoura’—worth the trip just for that alone.”
Another smile, a little wistful, from the boy. The alternative pronunciation of the state tickled his grandfather’s fancy. Tom decided to not ask whether the chemo might throw off Alan’s taste for barbecue.
He pushed the control button to open his own window, took a few deep breaths. It did smell good, cut grass rather than burned gasoline. Real glad Gramma couldn’t make the trip. It’d’ve been dire if I’d hadda stay home. Miss out on maybe being the first person in a century to play a Joplin piece? This is gonna be epic!
Alan began to hum “Maple Leaf Rag.” As the diminished chord resolved into the tonic, the old man felt an odd sensation, a strange warmth filling his head, and he couldn’t remember a moment in his life when he’d felt happier.
***
They pulled into Sedalia about four o’clock, turned off Route 50 onto Ohio Avenue, and drove the few blocks to the Bothwell Hotel. Before Tom could close the door to their room, Alan cranked up the heat.
“Chills?”
“’Fraid so. Chemo fatigue, too.”
Tom set his grandfather’s suitcase on the table and tossed his backpack underneath. “Sorry. That sucks bigtime.”
Alan kicked off his shoes and stood in front of the heat vent for a long minute before he shucked out of his jacket and flopped onto one of the queen beds.
“Give me an hour horizontal, and I’ll be fine. Ready for anything Mickey might throw at us.”
Us. Tom couldn’t hold back a smile at the word. “Sure, Alan.” He kicked his shoes away, pulled the envelope with the music out of the suitcase, sank into the padded chair in the corner of the room, and began to study the work, humming softly. It sure sounds like Joplin to me. But I’ve got a long way to go before my opinion means shit.
***
Alan parked in front of Mickey’s once-pretty house on East Third Street. Tom shook his head. “Jeez, it gets worse every year. One of these times, we’re going to come out and find the place collapsed on the ground around him. He could at least paint it.”
Alan chuckled. “I doubt that’d hold the thing together.” He opened the door. “Music, booze, money—after those, Mickey just doesn’t care. He could live in a tent or a palace, and he wouldn’t notice any difference.”
They walked up the sagging wooden steps to the porch, where an ancient glider, its cloth seat frayed to threads, hung limply from two hooks in the ceiling. Alan pushed the doorbell, heard nothing, and with a disgusted look, gave the front door a couple of sharp kicks. A moment later, it creaked open.
“Hello, Mickey,” Alan said.
The little man took in his visitors and grinned. “I see you brought reinforcements. Didn’t want to take me one-on-one, huh?”
Alan sighed. Genetics and circumstances had given Mickey Potash everything a man could hope for. Extraordinary musical talent, the constitution of a bull, a face that pulled in women like a magnet pulled steel. But he’d pissed away everything except the talent in a half-century of nonstop boozing. Alan felt simultaneous urges to put an arm around him and to smack him hard.
“Reinforcement’s what I need, Mickey.” He gestured with his head. “Okay if we come in?”
Mickey cackled, showing a row of crappy-looking dentures, and opened the door wide. “Please do enter my humble abode, gentlemen.”
The living room was a mess. A pair of ancient couches with springs sticking through the seats. An oval hooked rug in the middle of the floor, so faded its colors were indecipherable. Mismatched, scarred wooden tables from the fifties, one holding a plate containing food remnants topped with a greenish-white fuzz. The only departure in the décor from disorder and deterioration was Mickey’s prize possession: an inscribed, sepia tone photograph in a carefully dusted frame hung near the hallway. As he usually did, Alan smiled at the sight of Scott Joplin shaking hands with the pianist and conductor, Alfred Ernst. Mickey had at least a dozen different stories about how he came to own the picture, none of which corresponded to any of the others, or in all likelihood, to reality.
Tom plopped onto a sofa; dust filled his nostrils and he coughed. Alan carefully avoided the visible sag in the center and lowered himself slowly to the cushion at the other end. Before he could start talking, a lanky, black teenage boy sauntered into the room from the hallway. He wore patched jeans, and a red-and-black checkered work shirt over a faded, dark green T-shirt. The boy looked as surprised as Alan felt, and for a moment everyone in the room sat and stared at each other.
Finally, Mickey broke the silence. “Alan, Tom, this is my young friend, Jackson. Don’t know what I’d do without him. He brings me my newspaper every morning, hot off the press. And if I need help around here, Jackson’s my man. He’s been patching a couple holes in the roof, getting that done before the fall rains hit. And I show him how to play a little ragtime piano.”
Alan thought his friend was running off at the mouth. More going on here than he’s telling us. All the while, Jackson stood in place, squirming as if he’d just realized he’d sat on a nest of fire ants.
“You’ve heard me talk about Alan Chandler, right, Jackson?” Mickey said.
The boy’s eyes widened. “Yeah, sure, Mr. Mickey.” He clomped across the room and pumped Alan’s hand as if he expected to draw water from a well. “Mr. Mickey say you the Big Daddy of all the ragtime players.”
“Well, I’m not sure—”
Mickey interrupted Alan’s demurral. “Maybe he’ll play some for you while he’s in town. But I guess you’d better be heading on home now—don’t want your Granny getting mad at me for making you late for dinner.”
Jackson looked confused, then muttered, “Yeah, sure. See ya in the mornin’, then. You know. With the paper.”
“You bet, Jackson. Thanks.”
As the front door slammed behind Jackson, Mickey said, “He’s a good kid. Lives with his grandma in this little place up in Lincolnville.”
Tom had been staring after Jackson, but pulled his attention back to the room when Mickey spoke. “The old black part of town? I didn’t think anybody lived north of the tracks anymore.”
Alan nodded. “It’s pretty much deserted now that the city’s integrated, but some of the old people still hang in there.”
Mickey smiled. “Get to be my age with no kids or grandkids of your own, you do good to pick one up, even if he’s a different color. Don’t matter a bit that I’m white and he’s black. He does whatever for me, and every now and again I give him a ten or a twenty to put on a horse. If it comes in, he gets a cut. And yeah, he’s only seventeen, but he knows where to find a bottle of good stuff for me, cheap. I don’t ask no questions about where, and he don’t tell me no lies.”
Alan chuckled. “I should’ve known. Is Jackson his first name or his last name?”
“Both.”
“Come on.”
“No, really. His father, mercy on his crooked, twisted soul, is Jack Jackson, so he named his son Jackson—Jackson Jackson.”
“Poor kid.” Alan shook his head, let silence spread for a few seconds. “Well, Mickey, I hardly know what to say. Your package was quite a surprise.”
Mickey ignored the hint. “Rough trip, Alan? You don’t mind me saying so, you’re not looking so good. Getting old?”
Tom and Alan exchanged a quick glance, then Alan sighed. “Still getting older, but not sure for how much longer.”
Tom raised a hand. “Alan—”
Alan’s
lips set into a tight line. “Prostate cancer, Stage 4. In my bones. I’m on chemo, lost twenty pounds since June.” He gestured toward Tom. “My reinforcements.”
Mickey ran fingers through the thin strands of gray behind his forehead. “Oh, jeez, Alan—I didn’t have any idea. I’m sor—”
Alan waved him off. “No way you would’ve known. I’ve kept it quiet for as long as I could.”
“But that stuff—the chemo—it’s gonna fix you up, right…?”
Mickey ground to a stop as Alan shook his head slowly, side to side. “No. Once the cancer gets that far, it’s just a matter of time. The drugs slow it down, but they can’t wipe it out. I might have a year or three, or I might not. No matter. Once I saw that piece of music, nothing would’ve stopped me coming here. Which you knew.”
A smile won out over Mickey’s discomposure. “I kinda figured.”
“Well, then, talk. I don’t have forever.”
Mickey looked at his wristwatch. “Jeez, Alan…listen, I’d like to give you dinner, but—”
Alan laughed. That’s Mickey. “I didn’t expect you would—and I’m not going to drop dead in the next hour. Let’s go to Kehde’s and have some barbeque. Then we can come back here, and you can trot out that duffel bag.”
***
Mickey burped into his hand as he pushed his front door open and motioned his guests inside.
Alan shook his head in wonder. “Don’t you lock your door?”
“My deal with the burglars.” Mickey laughed. “I don’t make trouble for them, they give me a ten percent discount to buy back what they take.”
Alan groaned and Tom stifled a laugh.
“Okay, have a seat, I’ll be right back.” Mickey gestured toward the dingy sofa. Then he disappeared through a doorway into the back.
When he returned, he was carrying a medium-sized black duffel bag in both hands as if he thought any jolt would set off an explosion. Alan and Tom leaned forward, stared. The old man suddenly realized he’d stopped breathing, and inhaled slowly, deeply. The bag had seen hard use, color faded irregularly, a few small rips in the fabric. Mickey set it down on a banged-up coffee table in front of the sofa, then pulled up a chair opposite Alan and Tom. He yanked the knot out of the drawstring, opened the duffel wide, then gestured toward the opening.
“Go ahead, Alan. Have a look.”
Alan aborted his instinctive grab for the bag to pull a pair of white cotton archival gloves from his jacket pocket, and slipped them on. Only then did he reach into the duffel. He came out with several sheets, which he carefully spread onto the table. Then he blew out a deep breath, and began to scan the music, eyes following fingers across and down the pages. When he’d looked through the sheets he’d extracted, he went back to the duffel, pulled out another handful, repeated the scanning.
There were a number of published works, ranging from a first printing of “Maple Leaf Rag” to a few that Alan instantly dismissed as “modern crap.” But most of the music was handwritten, primarily on yellowed music paper, 11 by 14 inches, crinkled and showing old fold marks. A few pieces were scrawled across 8-1/2 by 11 sheets, and there was a substantial sprinkling of smaller scraps that held short musical passages, almost all of which showed signs of multiple revisions. Alan examined everything until, halfway down the bag, he pulled out a hand-bound composition, thicker than any of the others.
Finally, he spoke. “My God, I can’t believe this. It’s a concerto—a piano concerto.”
“Better believe it,” said Mickey. “You’re the authority, but I’d put more than a little of the money I don’t have on it being by Scott Joplin.”
“You’d win,” Alan murmured. “Mickey…where did you get this?”
Tom and Alan glanced at each other, sharing a thought, as Mickey opened his mouth: He’s going to spin a whopper.
“Well, it came outa Kansas City. See, I got this call from an antique dealer, he cleaned out a house down in the District when the old lady went into some kind of a nursing home. He saw the duffel bag full a music, and said he figured well, it probably ain’t worth much, but somebody might appreciate havin’ it…and of course there might be a little something in it for him. So he talked to a couple other dealers, one a them was Rudolph Korotkin, I’ve sold him a few things over the years and Rudy told him to show ’em to me. He came up a few days ago, I scraped together five hundred bucks for him, and here we are. I guess it’s a good thing Joplin didn’t put his name on any of the manuscripts—but there’s something else, bet you didn’t notice.”
“About the music? Like what?”
Mickey shook his head. “No, not the music.” He picked up the empty duffel bag, turned one edge of the opening inside out. “Lookit here.”
Alan and Tom came forward as a unit, and squinted into the bag. “Writing?” Tom muttered.
Alan craned his neck. “Pretty faint…well, look at that—a W and an S. Wilbur Sweatman.”
“The guy who played three clarinets at the same time?” Tom asked, his eyes wide.
Mickey and Alan both laughed. “That’s the guy,” Mickey said. “He died, what, about 1960?”
Alan agreed. “He was Joplin’s friend, and Lottie’s, and when Lottie died, he got his hands on a load of Joplin’s music. Then, when he died, the music went to his illegitimate daughter, and after her, it vanished. There’s a story that one of the lawyers threw it all away, but that was more than fifty years ago, and nobody knows what really happened. Do you know whose house it was the antique dealer cleaned out?”
Shrug. “I didn’t ask. He didn’t say.”
“Mickey, do you have this guy’s card?”
A shake of the head, no. “I gave him the five Cs, he gave me the bag, why would I ask for a card? But if you want to know, Rudy could tell you.”
Alan noticed Tom absently running gloved fingers across the music sheets. The kid was as taken up as he was. He looked back to Mickey. “So, what now?”
“Well, that’s what I figured you were gonna help me decide. I mean, first thing is, is this really all Joplin stuff? And if it ain’t, who wrote it?”
Alan nodded. “I did see a few things that Scott Joplin couldn’t possibly have written, but on a first look—I admit, a quick one—I’m sure most of the handwritten pages have to be Joplin. The published stuff—pretty much all of it looks more recent. I’ll check all of it more closely, but I’m going to be surprised if Joplin didn’t write at least three quarters of it.” He groaned and massaged his lower back. “There’s going to be a lot to think about, and authenticating it is only the first step.”
He looked at the ceiling. Give me strength. “Proving provenance will be a mess. But after that…this looks like unpublished, uncopyrighted material. Who has the right to secure copyright on it? How about publishing it? How should you—we?—go about keeping it safe? Mickey, who else knows about this besides those antique dealers?”
For answer, a slow sidewise shake of the head and a shrug. “No one, far as I know. You guys, me, that’s it…Alan, you okay? You’re all of a sudden white as a ghost.”
Alan waved off his friend’s concern. “I get really tired, sometimes a little dizzy. It’s the chemo…along with a long plane ride and some pretty exciting stuff happening. But mostly the chemo. I need to lie down for an hour every so often.” He glanced at his watch and eyed the duffel bag. “Tom and I can go back to the hotel, I’ll flop, and then I’ll be good for a little more work. Okay if I take some of these sheets? I can check them out carefully, and we can get back together in the morning, look at the others, and go from there. We’ve got some big decisions ahead of us.”
“Sure, Alan, sounds fine. You okay to drive?”
“Yeah. We’re at the Bothwell. No sweat.”
Alan dug into the bag for pieces he hadn’t yet seen. A dozen sheets of manuscript paper, a few of plain paper, and a half-height piece of light
card stock with a short musical passage, just a single theme.
“These’ll do for tonight. About ten tomorrow, okay, Mickey?”
“I’ll be waiting. Hey, take care, pal, okay?”
***
Alan and Tom perched side by side on the edge of the bed, each holding a piece of music, running fingers across the lines of notes, every now and again humming a passage.
“Best I can tell, this is Joplin,” Tom muttered. “I mean, this piece…‘A Bouquet of Daisies’? Look here.” The boy hummed a passage. “Isn’t there something awfully like that in ‘Heliotrope Bouquet’? Maybe he was writing them at the same time.”
“Could be, but probably not. Remember, the first two themes in ‘Heliotrope’ came from Louis Chauvin, and they’re not in ‘Daisies’ at all. I’d say it’s more likely Joplin was experimenting with the themes he wrote. Look at this chord progression. That’s something he never did as early as ‘Heliotrope Bouquet’.” Alan stretched, felt his shoulders pop. “If everything we’ve seen so far is typical, most of what’s in that duffel is middle or late Joplin, things he wrote in St. Louis or New York. But look at this.” He held up the piece of card stock. “Definitely early Joplin. He must have written it sitting at a table at the Maple Leaf Club, just a few blocks down the way from where we’re sitting right now.”
Tom looked puzzled. “How can you be so sure?”
Alan chuckled and flipped the card over and held it out. The card was printed with a few lines of text:
The Maple Leaf Club
W.J. Williams, Prop.
121 East Main Street
Sedalia, Missouri
The management of this club would be pleased to extend their hospitality to you and anyone you may wish to bring to an evening of music.
Friday, September 1st, 1899.
Scott Joplin, entertainer.
Present at door. Admission 20c.
Alan tapped the date. “I cheated.” His eyes drifted to the wall and slid out of focus. “Can you imagine,” he said slowly, “Joplin picking up a discarded invitation and writing out a theme that had been bouncing around in his head all evening?” He blinked a couple of times, dragging his attention out of 1899 and back to 2015.