TOMMY SMITH SAT at the back corner table of Ruffin’s Royal Hideaway. On the table before him was a loaded gun, and just beyond it, the two wide eyes of a man he’d very much like to give a third eye.
The music from the trumpet and bass and drums was making everything seem dizzy, every now and again a cymbal crashed and the floor would shake, the gun bouncing a bit on the table, bouncing ever so closer to the long-fingered but folded hands of Alonzo, who, yes, damn well yes he deserved a bullet in the head, Smith thought. Yes.
How had Tommy gotten here?
Things tended to happen this way with him. He tended to make decisions after he’d made decisions, if that made any sense. His uncle had long commented on this trait, the impulsive way Tommy got himself into fixes and only later tried to invent explanations as to how and why. Sometimes those fixes turned out to be good things, like the day he walked up to City Hall and filled out an application to be a police officer despite the fact that he’d scarcely given thought to the occupation until that very moment. Sometimes those fixes were not terribly good at all, like when he’d beaten Chandler Poe half to death in that alley.
And here, now, the gun on the table. Was this really the smartest thing he could be doing?
It had started with him deciding to go hear some music. Innocent enough. He lived an easy stroll from Ruffin’s Royal, a dimly lit second-floor nightclub that sat over a hardware store. It absorbed the spillover crowds who couldn’t get into the Top Hat or Shim Sham a block away. Tommy had needed an escape, from the job and his troubles and even his partner. He liked Boggs well enough, but the man was so damned proper. Almost emotionless. A bit too skilled at retreating beneath his shell. Smith had a shell, too—what Negro in the Jim Crow South did not?—but he came out of it when he needed to. Men like Boggs, though, either became the shell—hollowed out, lacking a heart, reducing themselves to a performance for white folks—or got so bottled up by the pressure that they would one day explode. And that was a risky thing to be around.
Tommy sat at the bar, exchanging some friendly words with Ruffin, the owner and barkeep, a man who seemed pleased with Smith’s efforts to put away all the moonshiners. Legal providers of alcohol, like Ruffin, were no fans of the way moonshiners from the North Georgia mountains drove the hundred miles south with barrels of illegal and often dangerous concoctions that working men could buy at random houses, the buyers never needing to walk into a tax-paying establishment like this. Ruffin had shook Smith’s hand and thanked him for stopping by, as if Smith were some politician and not just a fellow who needed to hear some music. Ruffin told Smith that the first drink was on the house, but Smith graciously refused, opting instead to pay for his Co-Cola.
Over the last few days, Smith had asked Ruffin and nearly every bartender near Auburn Avenue if they’d ever seen a girl matching Lily Ellsworth’s description. But with no photo—Otis still hadn’t provided them with one—he’d gotten no leads.
Smith had sought out Ruffin’s because the joint had air-conditioning. This being Wednesday, Smith hadn’t thought it would be crowded, but he figured wrong. Every table was packed and clusters of people danced before the band, delighted to be someplace where they could move like that and not drop dead from heat exhaustion.
He was wearing his lightest gray jacket over a blue shirt, the sleeves rolled up, a gray tie loosely knotted. He felt a fat drop of sweat roll down his back as he glanced across the room and saw three women sitting in one of the booths. He recognized one from high school, Delia Something. Friendly, he’d remembered, and pleasant enough to look at, but whoever was sitting to her left demanded attention.
She had a thin, narrow face, like some Egyptian princess, eyes small and jewellike against that smooth skin. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she wore a sky-blue blouse that matched his shirt, a thin gold necklace two inches above her heart.
The air-conditioning and music and Coke were nice, but it was company he had ventured out for. He’d caught her eye twice by the time he found himself wandering over to their table.
Delia smiled warily, having seen him from the moment he’d left his stool, his casual jaguar gait not disguised in the slightest.
“Delia,” Smith asked, one hand casually in the pocket of his high-waisted pants, “how is it that you always surround yourself with such beautiful friends?”
“This is Tommy Smith, ladies. One of Atlanta’s new police officers. So hide that contraband in your purses.”
He hadn’t spoken to Delia in more than a year, he figured, yet she knew what he did these days. Everyone seemed to.
“I’m here in an unofficial capacity.” Turning to the girl on the left, he extended a hand and asked, “And you are . . . ?”
“Susanna Jones,” and she let him take her hand, which was cool and clammy from clasping her drink. He lifted her hand to his lips. He ignored Delia’s rolling eyes, and he hoped it wasn’t too rude how he was ignoring the third girl. If she was Susanna’s friend, she was no doubt used to being ignored.
“I would be delighted to share a dance with you.”
“It’s rather warm for dancing,” Susanna replied, her head held at the slightest angle to the right, her left eyebrow raised.
“It sounds to me like they’re getting ready for a slower number.”
“Really? You can just feel that?”
“I have finely honed senses of perception.”
“Girl,” Delia said, “just go and dance so we don’t need to hear no more of his lines.”
His sense of perception had proven correct, for he and Susanna had barely found a spot on the floor when the band slowed down with a bluesy number that honestly wasn’t so great for dancing, but they were together, and there was music, and it was Wednesday night and even though he wasn’t drinking he had managed, for a moment, to forget everything he’d wanted to forget.
She was a teacher, she told him.
“I don’t go out to places like this usually, and I certainly can’t do something like this during the school year.”
“We need to keep up a respectable image.”
“This place is perfectly respectable.”
She’d responded only with an “mmm hmm,” so low he didn’t hear it so much as feel it.
The trumpeter, horn at his side, was singing something to the effect of his woman having a backside so firm he could bounce a penny off it.
“How do you like being a policeman?” she asked a few bars later.
“I’m rather fond of the uniform.”
“And that’s a good reason to take a job that puts your life in danger?”
“It’s not that dangerous. And it really is a smashing uniform.”
“You can model it for me next time I’m arrested.”
“You would have to fall a very long way for that to happen, Miss Schoolteacher.”
“Sometimes I do want to murder some of those children.”
The next song was not a slow one, not by any stretch of the imagination, nor was the one after that, or the next one, and right around there Smith lost count. The girl could dance, better than him even, which was impressive, as Tommy Smith was a man who knew his steps.
Later, he was at the bar, ordering another Coke for himself and a gin and tonic for her, when the evening managed to nearly get ruined.
He hadn’t noticed Alonzo come in because he’d been so busy dancing. Yet there the man was, Alonzo Keller, cardsharp and flimflam man, known to his low-life associates as Zo. A man guilty of an offense that Smith could not forgive. Zo was walking toward the bar, having not noticed Smith.
“Thought I smelled something funny,” Smith said.
Zo was tall, had a couple of inches on Smith, but he was thin and certainly didn’t carry himself like someone worth fearing. His kind was all about outsmarting others, and being just smart enough to find the right kind of stupid people to cheat money from.
His retort was disappointing. “Hey there, Officer.”
“That’s all you got for me?”
Zo had a friend beside him, shorter but thicker. Both were light-skinned and wore white shirts with their sleeves rolled up, Zo’s tie striped red and green and the other’s tie nonexistent.
“I’m not looking for no trouble,” Zo said as he slunk off. His friend was a step slower, so when Zo walked away, the friend was suddenly right there in Smith’s line of sight.
The friend stared back and then some. “You got a problem, pretty boy?” he asked.
Then Ruffin appeared, two drinks for Smith in his hand. Tommy dropped bills on the bar without looking at the barkeep. This would have been an ideal opportunity to turn this into a very different evening, Smith realized. Yet he managed to hold himself back. For now.
“No problem at all,” he said with a smile.
He was wrong, though: it was a very different evening now. He had seen Zo and not done what he had wanted to do, what he should have done. So when he returned to the booth with a drink for Susanna and one for himself, talking with her and Delia and the other girl whose name he’d never caught, he was not his charming self. He tried—Lord, he tried, because Susanna’s jewellike eyes were sparkling at him in the way he had hoped they might when he’d first seen her—but he was too angry now, lost in thought about Zo and the other fellow, that he missed a few of the girls’ jokes, and he seemed to register too late that a certain spark at their table was being extinguished.
He asked Susanna to dance with him again, hoping that might help. Halfway through the next song, she batted away one of his hands that had perhaps wandered too far south. They started again, and later when he tried to kiss her neck she arched away from him. He shook his head, annoyed. They stood there, looking at each other, a desert island surrounded by spinning cyclones of happier couples.
“I’m not looking to move so quickly there, Cyrano.”
“I’m just trying to have a good time, girl.”
She shook her head and muttered something he didn’t catch. He watched her return to the booth, saying something to Delia. Whatever she said must have been something very bad indeed, because her two friends glared at him with murderous intentions.
Damn. It could have been such a wonderful evening, Susanna. He walked back to the bar.
Zo and his partner were sitting at a table in the far corner, conspiring about something.
Once again, Smith did not recall making a decision to visit their table, yet suddenly he was there. Sitting opposite Zo.
“No one invited you,” the other man said.
“I didn’t catch your name, friend,” Smith said. “And you know what? That’s a very good thing for you. Because you wouldn’t want me to know who you are or where you live. You can skedaddle while I have a word with Zo here.”
“He for real?” the man asked Zo.
“It’s all right, man,” Zo said. “I’ll be by.”
The man left his drink behind, as if he believed he would soon be back.
The trumpeter was singing into the microphone about how his woman had sold all his dogs.
Delia appeared behind Smith, berating him with, “You got some nerve, Tommy Smith. After I vouch for you to one of my friends, you treat her like that? You should be ashamed of yourself.”
Zo laughed, only too delighted to see the hated officer taken down a notch.
Tommy turned to face her, annoyed that she’d ruined his entrance. “I am ashamed, Delia. And I’m sorry. Now, to make it up to you, I’m gonna tell you a little story about my friend Zo here.”
“I don’t want to hear no story.” She was about to back up but he grabbed her wrist with his right hand. With his other hand he removed his revolver from where it had been rather precariously nestled at the small of his back. The left hand and gun were now resting on the table, and Zo leaned back at the sight of it. Delia’s eyes were saucers.
“That’s all right, that’s all right,” Smith said to her, keeping his eyes only on her, as if completely unconcerned with what the lowlife opposite him might do next. “This is to make sure my man Alonzo doesn’t try to walk away before I finish. Put your hands on the table, Zo.”
Palms as flat as his expression, Zo complied.
Delia’s face was rigid as he released her hand. Tommy reached forward with his other hand and picked up the glass that Zo’s friend had left behind. Booze. He hadn’t touched a drop since March. The glass felt cold and magical in his hand. He felt his heart pound, but his decision had been made.
“You watching this, Zo? Be sure and get a good look.” He tipped back the glass and swallowed the contents in a single gulp. Rum and something. Fruity and easy to drink but still that illicit warmth he hadn’t felt in months.
“Oooh-wee,” he said. “Been a while.” Then he reached for Zo’s drink, the man himself a statue as Smith took it, shook the ice a bit—it looked like straight liquor—and downed it. Bourbon. It burned so he had to stop himself from coughing and ruining the effect. “Whoa, you go for the strong stuff! Goodness, all that liquor in me, there’s no telling what I’m liable to do!”
Smith leaned back in his chair now, the gun and his left hand still resting on the table, casually so, as if he were cradling a glass and not a gun with six shots.
“Now, Delia, couple of weeks ago, one of my fellow officers got suspended for no good reason. Lost a lot of pay and a lot of respect. You know how that came about?”
He locked eyes with Zo, whose forehead looked even sweatier than Smith’s. “See, there are special rules governing how officers of the law must behave, even when we aren’t on the clock. Funny thing is, my fellow Officer Bayle has never had a drink in his life. He’s a very religious man. It happens that one night he’s reported to have been out drinking and carousing and causing a scene. So he gets suspended. Thing is, he’d been home in bed that night, not that he had an alibi for it, other’n his wife. But that made it awfully difficult to fight the charges.”
Delia said, “Tommy, please put that gun away.”
“I will directly. But I’m almost to the good part. The man who reported him was a cop, a white one, who claimed he’d been at the club that night. The thing is, the white cop actually hadn’t been at that club at all. That little fact came out later, when he had to testify under oath to an internal committee investigating the charges. You got that? An internal committee. We take these things seriously in the police department. But it makes you wonder, if the white cop hadn’t been there, what made him think Officer Bayle had been out drinking?”
Delia’s voice quavered, “Tommy, I want to go home.”
“You will, Delia, I promise you that. Just hold on. You see, Zo, when you decide to be a rat to the police, there’s usually a record of it. Maybe you didn’t know that. But it comes out eventually, even to us nigger cops who have to work in the basement of the YMCA. We have ways to see these reports, too, you know, and lo and behold, this white cop, Dunlow’s his name, he says that he had it on good information from his boy Alonzo that Sherman Bayle was drinking that night.”
“I don’t know nothing about that,” Alonzo said.
Smith smiled. He opened the fingers that had been holding the gun and slowly slid the firearm until it was in the center of the table. Then he pulled his hand back, resting it at the edge of the table. The gun perfectly between that hand and Alonzo’s two. Smith’s other hand rested on the edge of an empty chair, just a few inches from where Delia stood stock-still.
“I ain’t here to be lied to. I’m here because I want you to confess the truth, in front of my old friend Delia here. That you’re a goddamn rat, that you’re a traitor who’d give up another Negro for a few dollars from a white man.” Wailing trumpet in the background. “Tell it, Zo. Admit what you are.”
Delia said, “Tommy, come on, I don’t need to be no part of this.”
“You’re right,” he agreed, his eyes still on Zo. “I’m sorry, Delia. Good night.” He lifted his right hand from the chair to wave her away.
She backed up slowly, and even though she was out of his peripheral vision now he had a sense she had backed up only a couple of steps, as if she didn’t believe he’d released her or as if she realized now that she had to see this moment through.
Smith continued: “You lied to Dunlow about seeing Officer Bayle drinking. Because maybe you were sore at Bayle for how he busted your buddy the week before. Or maybe the whole story was Dunlow’s, and he just needed a spineless nigger to sign off as witness, and you raised your little hand.”
Applause as one song ended and the next began. If anyone else in the joint had noticed there was a loaded revolver sitting in the middle of a table like some lethal napkin dispenser, they hadn’t run screaming or dived beneath any chairs.
“Because, the thing is, you ain’t that different from a lot of people who just cannot abide seeing a black man in uniform. I know a lot about that, matter of fact. I served in the war, Zo, not that you did. You were in jail at the time, if I remember right. But some of us did our duty.”
“It wasn’t me.”
“People just can’t abide a black man in uniform. I’ve known that a long time. My father, he served in the First World War. Did yours?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“I never knew my father, either. Reason I didn’t know mine is because he served, and he survived the trenches and the mustard gas and all that, yes he did. Glory be and all that doughboy shit. Then he came back to Georgia and his little infant son Tommy and his pretty wife, and you know what happened? Just a few months later, when he was marching in a parade with some other proud veterans? Got himself lynched. Beat to a pulp and hung from a tree. Because the white man, no, he cannot stand the sight of an uppity Negro in a nice uniform like that. It is the last thing he wants to see. Or the second-to-last.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Hey, I wasn’t but seven or eight months when it happened. Sad thing is how many people seemed to forget about all that, you know? Those were some bad years, lotta black veterans strung up when they came back home, but everybody wants to forget. Thing is, I can’t forget, because it’s who I am. I’m a goddamn antiamnesia medication. And it’s happened again, hasn’t it? Just a few years ago, black men coming back in uniform and strung from trees. Shot dead or strung up or both. That’s bad enough without us realizing that other colored folks don’t like to see us in uniform, either. Low-down good-for-nothing folk like you.”
They stared at each other a while then, and now was the part of the song where the cymbals started crashing, and with each impact the revolver bounced a bit on the table. Sliding ever so closer to Zo.
“Come on now, Zo. You tried to get Bayle fired, and now you can do even better than getting a colored cop fired. You can shoot one down. Because here’s a cop being drunk and disorderly and irresponsible with a loaded weapon.”
Zo stared him down.
“Pick that gun up,” Smith said. “Show everybody how you feel about niggers in uniform.”
The music seemed to have stopped. People were standing still, as this was no longer a private concern.
“I don’t want no trouble,” Zo finally said. “I’m going home now.”
“Not. Until. You. Say. It.”
Zo’s nostrils flared. “Fine. Dunlow leaned on me, so I signed it. Happy? Big cracker’s been throwing his weight so long, he knows how and when to lean on someone. And now you’re here to take his place, ain’t you? Doing a fine job so far.”
“I ain’t no Dunlow.”
Zo stood. Very, very slowly. “I don’t know what the hell you are.”
Smith watched as Zo moved past the table, just in case he decided to reach for the gun, but he did not.
When Zo was gone, Smith pocketed the piece. Not sure if he was relieved or disappointed, knowing only that the rush was fading, the moment gone already.
“Tommy Smith,” Delia said, “you are plain crazy.”
“Only sometimes.”
“I think you ought to head home.”
He stood and noticed that her friends were gone. He offered to escort Delia to her place, as a woman shouldn’t be out alone at night. She looked like she wasn’t sure if this was a good or horrible idea. The music started again and people were averting their eyes.
He was nearly out the door, trailing Delia—realizing, now that he thought of it, that she wasn’t all that bad-looking, had a fun body on her, and this evening might be salvaged after all—when he saw that Ruffin was standing at the doorway, far from his station at the bar, a hand extended. Smith reached out and clasped it.
Tommy Smith was a strong man. Yet the hand that clasped his nearly broke his wrist.
Before Smith could pull his hand away, Ruffin had clamped his other hand on Smith’s elbow, and that grip was even tighter. Ruffin leaned in close, looked Smith in the eyes, and, in a voice just quiet enough that no one save Smith would be able to hear, commanded, “Don’t you disgrace us, now.”
His voice angry, stern, paternal.
“No, sir.”
“There is a lot riding on you, son. And I expect you to bear that in mind day and night.”
“I do.”
“Don’t you go bring no shame on us.”
“I won’t, sir.”
Delia was a few paces away. She’d turned to look back at them, wondering what was taking so long. Men doing their talking. From that far away she couldn’t see the look in Smith’s eyes, but if she had, what would she have seen? Shame? Embarrassment? That anger again—or was it gone, had Ruffin quashed it?
Ruffin released Smith’s hand and elbow. He leaned back, a big smile on the barkeep’s lips, so any patron who might be watching merely saw the owner thanking the officer for stopping by, another great night in Atlanta, come back soon and bring y’all’s friends.
Smith walked out quickly, passing Delia, ignoring her “What’s the matter?” and walking straight home.