“Quit tearing that cloth!” Albert snapped.
The eye vanished, and two dark fingers took its place. “Hold my hand, Mr. Albert. Just for a minute.”
With a lump in his throat, Albert reached out and hooked his forefinger in Pooky’s. The boy hung on like Albert was the only thing still tying him to the earth.
“Is there somebody else in the store?” Pooky asked.
“Willie Hooks. He’ll be gone soon. Listen, now. When it gets dark, I’m gonna turn on the lights in the display room and start playing piano. That’ll draw any eyes watching the place. Once I get goin’ good, open that trapdoor and drop down to the hole. If the coast looks clear, make your way two blocks over to Widow Nichols’s house. She’ll hide you in her attic till tomorrow. When I think the time is right, I’ll pick you up in my panel truck and carry you to the train station at Brookhaven. From there, it’s the Illinois Central straight up to Chicago. You got that?”
“I guess so. What I’m ’posed to use for money? Man can’t ride the train for free.”
Albert leaned over and slid five twenty-dollar bills under the bottom of the organ.
“Tuck that in your pants. That foldin’ money’s gonna get you started in Chi-town.”
Pooky whistled in amazement inside the organ box. “Can we really make it, Mr. Albert? Them fellas mean to lynch me for sure.”
“We’ll make it. But we wouldn’t even be in this mess if you’d listened to me. I told you that girl was just trying to prove something to her daddy, messing with you.”
Pooky whimpered like a frightened dog. “I can’t he’p it, Mr. Albert. I love Katy. She loves me, too.”
The boy sounded like he was barely holding himself together. Albert shook his head, then got up and returned to the display room, once more belting the blues like a bored man working alone.
He’d met Howlin’ Wolf back in ’55, at Haney’s Big House up the street, back when the Wolf was playing the chitlin circuit. Wolf’s keyboard man had been sick, so Haney called Albert down from his store to fill in. Albert had met most of the great ones that way, over the years. They’d all swung through Ferriday at one time or another, since it lay so close to the Mississippi River and Highway 61. Ray Charles, Little Walter, B.B., even Muddy himself. White boys, too. Albert had taught Jerry Lee Lewis more than a few licks on piano. Some of the black acts had tried to lure Albert onto the road with them, but Albert had learned one true thing by watching musicians pass through his store: the road broke a man down fast—especially a black man.
The white woman screamed in the back. Albert prayed nobody was walking through the alley. Willie was working her hard. Mary Shivers had been married five years and had two kids, but that wasn’t enough to keep her at home. Two months ago, she’d struck up a conversation with Willie while he was working on a house next door. Next thing you know, Willie was asking Albert to set up a meeting somewhere. That was the way it went, most times. The black half of the couple would ask Albert to set something up. Might be the man, might be the woman. A few times over the years, a particularly bold white woman had set up a rendezvous in the store, whispering over the sheet music for some hymn or other she was buying. Albert had reluctantly accommodated most of them. That was what a businessman did, after all. Filled a need. Supplied a demand. And Lord knew there was demand for a place where black and white could meet away from prying eyes.
Albert had set up a couple of places where couples could meet discreetly, far away from his shop. But if the white half of the couple had a legitimate interest in music—and enough ready cash—he occasionally allowed a hasty rendezvous in the back of the store. He’d got the idea for using his radio show to set up the meetings from his stint in the navy. He’d only been a cook—that’s about all they’d let you be in World War II, if you were black—but a white officer had told him how the Brits had used simple codes during music programs to send messages out to French Resistance agents in the field. They’d play a certain song, or quote a piece of poetry, and different groups would know what the signal meant. Blow up this railroad bridge, or shoot that German officer. Using his Sunday gospel show, Albert had found it easy to send coded messages to the couples waiting to hear their meeting times. And since whites could tune in to his gospel show as easily as blacks, the system was just about perfect. Each person in an illicit couple had a particular song, and each knew the song of his or her partner. As disc jockey of his own show, Albert could say something like “Next Sunday at seven o’clock, I’m gonna be playing a one-two punch with ‘Steal Away to Jesus,’ by the Mighty Clouds of Joy, followed by ‘He Cares for Me,’ by the Dixie Hummingbirds. Lord, you can’t beat that.” And they would know.
Simple.
The rhythm of the sofa springs picked up, then stopped suddenly as Willie cried “Jesus!” with a sinner’s fervor. A moment later, the floorboards creaked under Willie’s two hundred and thirty pounds. Albert didn’t know how that skinny schoolteacher could take what Willie gave her, but that was another thing he’d learned over the years: the size of a woman on the outside didn’t mean nothing; it was how much hunger she had on the inside that made her what she was between the sheets. Some of the white women he’d seen come through his store had a desperate hunger that nothing would ever fill.
Albert heard shuffling, then the door opened. Willie Hooks stood there wiping sweat from his forehead with his shirtsleeve. The schoolteacher looked like she’d just run a mile to catch a bus and got run over by it instead. Dazed, she slowly buttoned up her dress with no regard for Albert’s presence or what he might see.