The RagTime Traveler

by Larry Karp

  Lathan shrugged and downed the whiskey in a single gulp. After a moment, he said “Angie, she not gonna give up chasin’ you, Mr. Joplin. Tha’s why I be here. Gonna keep close, make sure she don’ do nothin’ she shouldn’ oughta do.”

  “I told you already, Mr. Blackstone, I don’t need a bodyguard.” He looked at Alan. “Nor do I expect to remain in Sedalia much longer.” He returned his attention to Lathan. “Even if your wife harbors plans to do more than bombard me with letters, she can hardly follow me about the country any more than you can.”

  A stubborn look spread across Lathan’s face. “You keep close watch, then. Mebbe I cain’t stay near t’ you, but Angie, she determined. She gonna do whatever she think she gotta do.” His head sank lower as he spoke. “An’ when you comes back here t’ Sedalia, I be here, an’ I help you watch.” Lathan’s head slowly lowered to the table, and a moment later, he was snoring.

  “Alan? Should I take this warning seriously?”

  “I can’t say for sure, Mr. Joplin. Nobody in my time knew anything about Angeline until recently. But all that means is she never succeeded in doing anything significantly harmful to you. It doesn’t mean she didn’t—or won’t—try.” He shrugged. “I’d say to be careful, but don’t obsess about it.”

  Joplin sighed. “Very well.” He stared into his soda for a moment, then looked back to Alan. “You’re leaving, aren’t you? Or is that the right way to put it?”

  Alan nodded. “It’s as good a way as any. Yes, I did come to say goodbye. I hope to see you again, here or in, uh, some other places, but I don’t know if it’ll be possible.”

  “Hmmm…yes, I see.” Joplin stood and extended his hand. “It’s been a pleasure meeting you, Mr. Chandler, and I hope we will meet again.”

  They shook, and Alan stood. “I wish I could stay longer, but I had to promise my wife I’d return quickly.” He gently knocked twice on the sleeping Lathan’s head with a knuckle. “Live your own life, Lathan. Angeline isn’t your responsibility any more.” Alan looked back at Joplin. “When he wakes up, tell him I said everything’ll turn out fine if he brings Will up right.”

  “Is that true?”

  Alan smiled. “I have reason to think so. And either way, wouldn’t you rather have him concentrating on his son than on you?”

  Joplin’s mouth twitched, not quite a smile, but almost. “That I would. I’ll tell him.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Joplin. For everything.” Alan took a deep breath. “Until next time.”

  “Until then.”

  A few steps away from the table, Alan stopped and looked back. Damn it, I’ve got to take one. Joplin had returned to his seat and was looking across the table at Lathan with a rueful expression. Yes! It would be worth ten times the risk. Can I get Lathan into the picture too? That’d tickle Saramae.

  He pulled Miriam’s phone out of his pocket, quickly lifted it to get Joplin and Lathan in the center of the screen, and tapped the capture button.

  At that moment, one of the men at the pool table raised his head, and shot a mean stare at Alan. Don’t know if he saw what I was doing, but no way do I want to field any questions about it. He returned the camera to his pocket, and walked to the stairway, where he made certain to grip the wooden handrail as he rushed down the stairs and outside. Last thing I need is to slip and break a leg.

  Alan strolled north on Ohio Avenue toward the J.A. Lamy Manufacturing Company building. Just past the railroad tracks, he stepped from a clear evening to an overcast afternoon. Huh. Easiest return I’ve had. Wish I had thought of this sooner. The outside of the building hadn’t changed much, but the blue ADA sign next to the office door confirmed Alan’s return to the twenty-first century. He retrieved the invitation from his storage unit and drove back to the Bothwell.

  ***

  Miriam snatched her phone from Alan, tapped a couple of times, glared at the screen, then launched an ear-splitting “Jesus Christ! Alan, what is this supposed to be?”

  “Well…it’s a picture of Scott Joplin at the Maple Leaf Club…with another man who’s been important to this story.” There was a nervous edge to his voice.

  “And I’m supposed to believe that?” Miriam held up the camera in front of Alan’s face. “All I see is a fuzzy, near-black photo. Couldn’t you have held still long enough for the auto-focus to work?”

  Alan grimaced and shook his head. “I think one of the men playing pool, one of the guys at the right edge there, saw me taking the picture. It looked like he was about to come after me, so I got out in a hurry.”

  “But why is it so dark…? The auto-flash is turned off. Did you—”

  Alan raised both hands, unconditional surrender. “I don’t think I did anything but tap the take-the-picture button.”

  “And you always hit the screen too hard, make the phone shake like crazy.” Miriam blew out a mouthful of exasperation. “I knew I should’ve gotten a new phone this year…the focus is faster and low-light performance is so much better…Jesus Kuh-ryst!” She waved the camera before Alan one more time. “So…where…is…Scott…Joplin?”

  “He should be sitting there right in your hand,” Alan murmured. “Maybe we should give it to Tom. Let him see if he can fix it up on his computer.”

  Miriam snorted. “And for an encore, he can make a million dollars before lunch. He’s got a better chance of doing that than of salvaging this mess.”

  ***

  That evening, the gang gathered at the Bothwell. From the desk chair, Charles Blackstone regarded his companions with vague pain. None of the men were moving very easily and the jagged cuts on Blackstone’s face from Abigail Nowlin’s lampshade resembled a roadmap. He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket, unfolded it, cleared his throat. “See what you all think of this.” Then he began to read from the paper.

  “An amazing century-long story came to a striking conclusion Tuesday evening in Kansas City. For more than 100 years, members of the Nowlin family fought over possession of musical manuscripts by the great composer, Scott Joplin. The Nowlins, descendants of long-time Sedalia resident Angeline Noland, had been accumulating the manuscripts by various means, not all of them legal, since the 1970s. Some of the music had found its way to Mickey Potash, a local ragtime performer. Mr. Potash was murdered, and the music stolen from his house. Members of the Democrat staff and Sedalia resident Saramae Blackstone assisted ragtime pianists Alan and Thomas Chandler in tracing the culprits to Kansas City. The police were called in and Abigail Nowlin, 71, and her son, Nelson, 40, were arrested. Both made full confessions regarding the murder; however neither admitted to any knowledge of the current location of the music. See the sidebar for full details of the confessions and an analysis by Democrat psychiatric consultant, Dr. Elliot Funderburk.

  “Mr. Chandler remarked, ‘Mickey Potash was a good friend. I’m glad his killers have been caught. But Scott Joplin’s music must be recovered, and I will devote whatever time and effort it takes to do that…though I’m sure Detective Parks of the Sedalia Police will succeed in turning it up.’”

  A quiet chuckle made its way through the group as Blackstone set the page back onto the desk. Side-by-side on one bed, Tom and Saramae exchanged high fives; then the girl turned to give JJ a quick hug. On the other bed, Alan smiled at Miriam; she sent him a tight-lipped nod, then couldn’t hold back a smile of her own.

  “From there it goes into background on Joplin and ragtime. It’ll run in Friday’s paper.” Blackstone waved toward Alan. “Sure that’ll give you enough time to get out of town with the loot?”

  Alan spoke through a grin. “We’re hitting the road first thing in the morning. By the time Parks sees the story, we’ll be safely back in Seattle.” He turned to JJ. “You did a great job of talking around what really happened with the music.”

  JJ made the go-way motion. “Shit, man. How dumb you think I am?”

  “Not dumb at all, not
in any way,” said Alan. “All considered, I’d say you’re a pretty smart cookie.”

  “I suppose I’m not so dumb, myself,” said Blackstone. “If I’d let JJ mention that music, or if I’d done it myself, I’d be up for theft right now. And Alan, you’d never get out of town with the loot. Our friend Parks is really pissed off at having been cut out of the case, and made to look like a fool.”

  Miriam sneered. “Handsome is as handsome does.”

  “Well, thank you for your silence,” Alan said quietly.

  Blackstone smiled and picked up the sheet of paper, scanned the story. “JJ really does have potential. But he needs to work on his punctuation, grammar, and spelling. As of this day, he is no longer on the night shift; he’s a reporter, working under me in the City Room. And I’m a goddamn demanding boss. I spent more time making this story publishable than he spent writing it, and I’m not about to spend the next twenty years doing the same thing to all his stories. He’s going back to finish school, or do a GED. One or the other.”

  Tom groaned. “Yeah. And I’m on my way back to school, too. Blech.”

  A quick look at Miriam’s face set Alan to thinking, then speaking. “Yes, you need to at least graduate from high school,” he said. “But I’m going to need a lot of help getting that music authenticated, copyrighted, and published, and you’re it. Someday that music is going to be yours. You’re going to be playing it at a lot of festivals and concerts. ‘Tom Chandler, Joplin’s…Apostle?’”

  Tom smiled weakly. “Maybe something a little less religious?”

  Alan patted the boy’s shoulder. “We’ll work on it. And Saramae, anything to do with Angeline’s music, I’d say you have the most valid claim. It could bring you a little money, especially when the story gets out about the old woman. Also, it’s an important part of musical history now. It needs to be preserved for scholars and musicians.” He grimaced. “Too bad you lost ‘Will’s Way.’ Musically, it was much more interesting than that ‘Queen of Calico’ piece.”

  Saramae smacked her palm to her forehead. “Completely slipped my mind in all the fuss. I did get it back, along with a bunch of other music. I wasn’t gonna leave Triple-great’s music with that smelly ol’ bitch, so I snatched it all out of the shrine before I took off.” She plopped the pile down on the bed between herself and Tom. “I don’t think they got too badly mussed in my bag. Couldn’t have been any worse for ’em than that duffel, anyway.”

  Alan’s eyes widened. “Oh, my. The career output of a previously unknown composer—and a well-preserved family history of her career? You’re going to have academics offering to have your baby to get their hands on that music.”

  “I’m not ready to have kids yet, thanks.” Saramae stopped and reparsed Alan’s statement, then grinned. “And when I am ready, I’ll do it the old-fashioned way. No test tubes with some dusty lady music professor for me.”

  While Saramae and Alan were talking, Tom had been leafing through the stack. “Hey, Saramae, some of this ain’t Angeline’s. Looks like Abigail pulled some music out of the duffel bag, same as Jarvis did.”

  Saramae drew herself up and gave a queenly wave of her hand. “Since your granddaddy gave me Triple-great’s music for myself, why don’t you pull out anythin’ that ain’t hers and give it to him?”

  “Sure thing, Your Royal High-and-Mightiness.”

  Alan grinned indulgently while Tom finished his survey, and pulled a baker’s dozen sheets out of the pile. He sorted them quickly and handed all but two to Alan. “I think this is it—looks like random pages from some of the incomplete pieces in the duffel.” He thought for a moment. “I wonder how many other Nowlins have pages squirreled away.”

  “Probably a bunch of them,” Blackstone said. “From what my father said, almost everything in the bag was complete when he and his father got it. Those damn Nowlins have been fighting over it for decades. Probably every time someone new got their hands on the bag, they snagged a few sheets, just in case they lost it again.”

  “I doubt we’ll ever know for sure what’s been lost,” Alan added. He leaned forward, squinted at the pages Tom was holding with the reverse, unmarked sides toward the room. “What are those?”

  Tom shrugged elaborately. “Well…you were right about the invitation strain being for a cakewalk. With the pages we got from Mickey and the one Gramma swiped from Jarvis—”

  “Watch your mouth, Thomas. I’ve never swiped anything in my life.” She smiled faintly. “Certainly not from that Jarvis fool. I was just reclaiming something he never should have had.”

  “Yes, Gramma. As…I…was…saying,” Tom continued in theatrically martyred tones, “with those sheets and these, we’ve got the whole composition. He grinned and handed the pages to Alan.

  Alan quickly scanned the first page. When the words registered, he redirected his eyes back to the top of the sheet.

  The Chandlers Cakewalk

  Scott Joplin

  New York, 1915

  Is that an apostrophe before the “s” or an inkblot? Alan wiped his eyes, looked closer, wiped his eyes a second time.

  Can’t tell. Well, good enough. So be it.

  “Are you okay, Alan?”

  “Fine, Tom.”

  Alan held up the page to show the title to the rest of the group. “Ragtime composers did enjoy using cryptic titles.”

  Saramae grinned and, after a few seconds of thought, JJ did as well. Blackstone and Miriam looked puzzled.

  Tom said “From the last couple of pages, Alan figured it’s got an ABACA structure. Repeating the first theme that many times is pretty odd for a cakewalk, but there it is. Interesting, the way the piece keeps going back to its beginning like that.”

  After a moment, Miriam got it and she squeezed Alan’s hand. “It’s a nice thought, certainly.”

  “There’s obviously something I’m missing here,” Blackstone said. He waited a few seconds, and when nobody chose to enlighten him, he went on. “Be that as it may, I’m still not clear on what ’Mae’s going to get out of having Angeline’s music.”

  Tom nudged Saramae. “Penny for your thoughts.”

  She smiled weakly. “I don’t give away thoughts for less than a buck.”

  The boy pulled a bill out of his pocket, and pressed it into her palm.

  She snapped it open, folded it, opened it again, then kept folding the bill while she talked. “Okay, what I’m thinkin’. I don’t know much about copyrighting and publishing, and nothin’ about what I could do on my own with this music. So, y’know? I wanna go to Seattle with you guys. You’ve got schools; I can finish up high school there as easy as here—and I could work with you and Alan on the music. Somethin’ else, too. I wanna learn how to play ragtime. I’ve been takin’ piano lessons for—how many years, Daddy?—and I can play whatever you want by Chopin and Liszt and all those dead white German guys too.” She gestured toward Alan. “But if you can teach me how to play ragtime, I’d love that. I could play at festivals too.”

  Saramae dropped the dollar bill, now an origami heart, into her purse and flashed Tom a look whose meaning held no ambiguity. “Be fun to play four hands with Tom.”

  The boy’s cheeks flamed.

  Blackstone stiffened and pulled forward in his chair, but ducked away from the palm Miriam held up before his face.

  “Let’s think about that a little,” she said. “You’re going to take on JJ and his career in a big way. Why not let Alan teach Saramae ragtime, and get her a start in performing? But in no manner, shape, or form would I release your daughter to my husband’s social custody; I would personally take full responsibility for her well-being. Would that make you feel better?”

  Blackstone guffawed. “Infinitely.”

  Saramae leaped across the room to throw herself into her father’s arms. “Oh, Daddy, that’s so cool…and y’know what? I’ll even miss you. But I’ll come b
ack for visits—and to pick your brain for everythin’ you can remember about Great-great Will and Triple-great Lathan.”

  “Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival, every June,” said Alan. “I think you just might see a six-hand piano performance there next summer.”

  JJ took Alan’s hand, and gave it a firm shake. “I done promise Gramma I wouldn’t forget t’ thank you.” The young man picked up the Democrat article, pointed to a passage, and read, “‘The investigation also revealed that the longstanding injuries suffered by “Big Jack” Jackson, which confined him to a state care facility for several years, were inflicted by a member of the Nowlin family in the course of their extra-legal ventures related to the Joplin music. Mr. Jackson recently returned to the home of his mother, Elvira Jackson, who expressed great happiness to have her son back.’”

  Miriam’s eyes filled. Alan put his arm around her. “Are you and your grandmother going to move into Mickey’s house, JJ?”

  “Not any time soon, we ain’t. Lawyer say Mickey’s estate be held in trust fo’ me till I twenty-five. Say Mickey want me to become a respect’ble citizen like he weren’t. Don’t sound like much fun, but if it what Mickey want, I give it a shot.” The young man glared at Alan. “An’ speakin’ of shootin’, I can’t believe you made me get rid a Jarvis’ fire iron, but you keep his gun.”

  “Tell you what, JJ. When you get to be eighty years old and have Stage Four cancer, you have my permission to play with guns all you want.”

  “Like you be able to stop me then!”

  Alan winked at the young man and gave his wife’s shoulders a squeeze. “You know, Miriam, you seemed to be having a good time yourself—with JJ getting out of the business, there’s an opening for a slick housebreaker.”

  “Oh, Alan. You damn wooden nickel. I think I’d better stick to what I’ve been doing. Somebody’s got to support you penniless musicians. I’ll tell you this, though: I sure as hell would’ve enjoyed giving that nasty, evil old bat a few good smacks across the chops with her own cane.”