“This is the last time,” Albert said. “For a long time, anyway. And you be damn careful when you go. Big John’s cruising around out there, and half the Klan is hunting for Pooky Wilson.”
“Big John Law,” Hooks said with venom. “What’s Pooky done?”
“Don’t you worry ’bout that.”
“Is that why you sent that little boy to warn me off?” Willie asked, his voice a full octave lower than Albert’s. “Why you had that warning light on? ’Cause of Big John?”
“I’ll tell you why I sent that boy. Two white men busted up in here today, and one was screaming bloody murder. Screaming ’bout his daughter goin’ with a nigger boy.”
“What white men?” Willie asked, interested.
“Brody Royal, for one.”
Willie blinked in disbelief. “That fine girl he got is doin’ Pooky Wilson?”
The schoolteacher elbowed Willie in the ribs.
Hooks didn’t flinch. “That skinny little bass player with the crooked back?”
Pooky Wilson had severe scoliosis, but Katy Royal didn’t seem to mind. “You forget you ever heard that,” Albert said. “You, too,” he added, glaring at the white woman, who under any other circumstances could have had him jailed for backtalk.
“I ain’t scared of Brody Royal,” Willie said. “That rich bastard.”
Albert gave Willie a measuring glance. “No? Well, the man with Brody was Frank Knox.”
Willie froze.
“You ain’t talking so big now, are you?” Albert asked.
“Shit. You let Mr. Frank’s little girl come up in here to meet somebody?”
Albert stamped his foot in disgust. “I look retarded to you, boy? Frank Knox ain’t got no little girl. He was just here to make the point. Now, you get the hell out of my place. You got to find some other place to get your corn ground.”
The schoolteacher moaned, sounding more like a feral cat than a human being.
Willie looked at her with frank desire. “Well, if this is the last time for a while …”
She opened her mouth and started unbuttoning her dress, but Albert shoved Willie toward the side door. “Get out! And don’t come back. Anybody stops you, tell ’em you moved some pianos for me. I’ll take care of getting missy out of here.”
Hooks laughed and plodded to the side door. “How about a hit of lightnin’ for the road, Mr. Albert?”
“I got no whiskey for the likes of you!” He turned back to the woman as Willie cursed and vanished through the door.
The schoolteacher’s dress was buttoned now. She looked primly up at him. “You know a lot about a lot of people, don’t you?”
“Reckon I would,” Albert said, “’cep’ I got a bad memory. Real bad. Forget a face soon as I see it.”
“That’s good,” said Mary Shivers. “We’ll all live longer that way.”
She started to follow Willie through the side door, but Albert blocked her path and motioned for her to leave by the front. “Pick up some music from the rack on your way out. God help you if you can’t lie, but I imagine you’re pretty good at it.”
After a moment’s hesitation, Mary Shivers obeyed.
Albert switched on a box fan to drive her smell from the lesson room. He figured darkness would fall in about fifteen minutes. To pass the time, he walked into his office, knelt beside the desk, and pulled up a pine floorboard. The door of a firebox greeted him. Taking out one of several ledgers he kept inside the box, he sat at his rolltop desk and opened the leather-bound volume, revealing perfect columns of blue-inked names and numbers in his own precise hand.
Albert kept a ledger for everything. He had one for sales of musical instruments, another for rentals. He kept a book for instruments he sold on time, marking in the payments and late charges. He kept a black ledger for whiskey sales, and a red ledger for loans he’d made to people he trusted. He’d loaned out a lot of money over the years, much of it to boys he’d trained in his store, boys sent off to cities like Chicago and Los Angeles with a single marketable skill besides digging ditches or picking cotton—tuning pianos. To a man, they had paid him back their stakes, even if it had taken them years to do it. Those boys were Albert’s faith in humanity. It comforted him to know that when Pooky Wilson reached Chicago—if he did—he’d probably be able to find work as a piano tuner before the hundred-dollar stake Albert had given him ran out.
In the back of his loan ledger, in red, Albert wrote in the sums he’d loaned to folks in trouble, the kind of trouble where he knew he’d never get the money back. Sometimes you had to do that, even if you were a businessman. That was his mama coming out in him. But the ledger Albert worked in now was special. In this volume he kept a record of every rendezvous he’d ever arranged—the names of the people involved, the times and dates they’d met, the money they’d paid him, their song codes for his radio show. Over eighteen years, quite a few pages had accumulated. There were nearly eighty names in the ledger now. Albert wasn’t sure why he kept it. He had no intention of blackmailing anybody, though the ledger would certainly be worth a lot to an unscrupulous man. But a good businessman kept records. It was that simple. You never knew when you might need to refer back to the past.