The card had his name printed on it in flourished letters. Below that was the address he’d scribbled. It was a downtown address; a long drive from Watts.
I noted that Mr. Dewitt Albright didn’t pay for the drinks he ordered. Joppy didn’t seem in a hurry to ask for his money though.
Chapter 2
Where’d you meet this dude?” I asked Joppy. “I met him when I was still in the ring. Like he said, before the war.”
Joppy was still at the bar, leaning over his big stomach and buffing the marble. His uncle, a bar owner himself, had died in Houston ten years earlier, just when Joppy decided to give up the ring. Joppy went all the way back home to get that marble bar. The butchers had already agreed to let him open his business upstairs and all he could think of was getting that marble top. Joppy was a superstitious man. He thought that the only way he could be successful was with a piece of his uncle, already a proven success, on the job with him. Every extra moment Joppy had was spent cleaning and buffing his bar top. He didn’t allow roughhousing near the bar and if you ever dropped a pitcher or something heavy he’d be there in a second, looking for chips.
Joppy was a heavy-framed man, almost fifty years old. His hands were like black catchers’ mitts and I never saw him in shirtsleeves that didn’t strain at the seams from bulging muscle. His face was scarred from all the punishment he had taken in the ring; the flesh around his big lips was jagged and there was a knot over his right eye that always looked red and raw.
In his years as a boxer Joppy had had moderate success. He was ranked number seven in 1932 but his big draw was the violence he brought to the ring. Joppy would come out swinging wildly, taking everything any boxer could dish out. In his prime no one could knock Joppy down and, later on, he always went the distance.
“He got something to do with the fights?” I asked.
“Wherever they’s a little money to be made Mr. Albright got his nose to the ground,” Joppy said. “An’ he don’t care too much if that money got a little smudge or sumpin’ on it neither.”
“So you got me tied up with a gangster?”
“Ain’t no gangster, Ease. Mr. Albright just a man with a finger in a whole lotta pies, thas all. He’s a businessman and you know when you in business sellin’ shirts and a man come up to you with a box he say done falled off’a truck, well… you just give that man a couple’a dollars and look t’other way.” He waved his catcher’s mitt at me. “Thas business.”
Joppy was cleaning one area on his counter until it was spotless, except for the dirt that caked in the cracks. The dark cracks twisting through the light marble looked like a web of blood vessels in a newborn baby’s head.
“So he’s just a businessman?” I asked.
Joppy stopped wiping for a moment and looked me in the eye. “Don’t get me wrong, Ease. DeWitt is a tough man, and he runs in bad company. But you still might could get that mortgage payment an’ you might even learn sumpin’ from ’im.”
I sat there looking around the small room. Joppy had six tables and seven high stools at his bar. A busy night never saw all his chairs full but I was jealous of his success. He had his own business; he owned something. He told me one night that he could sell that bar even though he only rented the room. I thought he was lying but later on I found out that people will buy a business that already has customers; they wouldn’t mind paying the rent if there was money coming in.
The windows were dirty and the floor was rutted but it was Joppy’s place and when the white butcher-boss came up to collect the rent he always said, “Thank you, Mr. Shag.” Because he was happy to get his money.
“So what he want with me?” I asked.
“He just want you t’look for somebody, leastwise that what he said.”
“Who?”
“Some girl, I dunno.” Joppy shrugged. “I ain’t ax him his business if it don’t gotta do wit’ me. But he just payin’ you to look, ain’t nobody says you gotta find nuthin’.”
“And what’s he gonna pay?”
“Enough fo’ that mortgage. That’s why I called you in on this, Easy, I know’d you need some fast money. I don’t give a damn ’bout that man, or whoever it is he lookin’ fo’ neither.”
The thought of paying my mortgage reminded me of my front yard and the shade of my fruit trees in the summer heat. I felt that I was just as good as any white man, but if I didn’t even own my front door then people would look at me like just another poor beggar, with his hand outstretched.
“Take his money, man. You got to hold on to that little bit’a property,” Joppy said as if he knew what I was thinking. “You know all them pretty girls you be runnin’ wit’ ain’t gonna buy you no house.”
“I don’t like it, Joppy.”
“You don’t like that money? Shit! I’ll hold it for ya.”
“Not the money… It’s just… You know that Mr. Albright reminds me of Mouse.”
“Who?”
“You remember, he was a little man lived down in Houston. He married EttaMae Harris.”
Joppy turned his jagged lips into a frown. “Naw, he must’a come after my time.”
“Yeah, well, Mouse is a lot like Mr. Albright. He’s smooth and a natty dresser and he’s smilin’ all the time. But he always got his business in the front’a his mind, and if you get in the way you might come to no good.” I always tried to speak proper English in my life, the kind of English they taught in school, but I found over the years that I could only truly express myself in the natural, “uneducated” dialect of my upbringing.
“ ‘Might come to no good’ is a bitch, Easy, but sleepin’ in the street ain’t got no ‘might’ to it.”
“Yeah, man. I’m just feelin’ kinda careful.”
“Careful don’t hurt, Easy. Careful keep your hands up, careful makes ya strong.”
“So he’s just a businessman, huh?” I asked again.
“That’s right!”
“And just exactly what kind of business is it he does? I mean, is he a shirt salesman or what?”
“They gotta sayin’ for his line’a work, Ease.”
“What’s that?”
“Whatever the market can bear.” He smiled, looking like a hungry bear himself. “Whatever the market can bear.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Don’t worry, Ease, I’ll take care’a ya. You just call ole Joppy now and then and I’ll tell ya if it sounds like it’s gettin’ bad. You just keep in touch with me an’ you be just fine.”
“Thanks for thinkin’a me, Jop,” I said, but I wondered if I’d still be thankful later on.
Chapter 3
I drove back to my house thinking about money and how much I needed to have some.
I loved going home. Maybe it was that I was raised on a sharecropper’s farm or that I never owned anything until I bought that house, but I loved my little home. There was an apple tree and an avocado in the front yard, surrounded by thick St. Augustine grass. At the side of the house I had a pomegranate tree that bore more than thirty fruit every season and a banana tree that never produced a thing. There were dahlias and wild roses in beds around the fence and African violets that I kept in a big jar on the front porch.
The house itself was small. Just a living room, a bedroom, and a kitchen. The bathroom didn’t even have a shower and the backyard was no larger than a child’s rubber pool. But that house meant more to me than any woman I ever knew. I loved her and I was jealous of her and if the bank sent the county marshal to take her from me I might have come at him with a rifle rather than to give her up.