Tom Piazza - A Free State

“Where’s the Black Horse?”

The bartender removed the glass from in front of Tull and drew more cider from a small barrel at the end of the bar. He came back, set the glass down, and said, “That’s two cents. Two blocks up. You’ll see it. There’s a monkey painted on the side.”

Tull placed a coin on the bar and walked out the front door.

Two blocks away he saw the sign advertising Bigelow’s Bitters, customers entering and leaving the Black Horse. It was getting on toward lunchtime. Tull walked in. The interior was dark after the street, but light trickled in from the front windows, which were bayed out under a sidewalk canopy. Five or six men at the bar, another half dozen at tables. Tull moved through the room and found an opening halfway down. When the bartender approached, he ordered a phosphate and asked when the jig banjo player showed up.

“Hasn’t been around for a couple weeks,” the bartender said. “I wish he’d come back. He was good for business.”

“Doesn’t look like you’re suffering,” Tull said, all fellowship.

“This is nothing,” the bartender said. “You’d have people outside like it was the circus. Made them thirsty. That’s a penny.”

Tull set a coin down on the bar. “I heard about him. Kind of light-complected, like a Mexican?”

“That’s him.”

“Is his name Joseph?” Tull said.

“I don’t know what his name is.” The bartender looked at Tull for a moment. “Where are you from?”

“St. Louis,” Tull said, smiling.

The bartender took the coin and walked away.

Tull sipped from his glass. Across the bar, behind the risers of bottles, he gazed back at himself from the mirror. He liked knowing things that other people did not know. He smiled raffishly at his reflection. He summoned a menacing look, squinted. He raised one eyebrow, turned his head slightly to one side, held his own gaze. He let his features slump into a vacant, idiotic expression. He laughed out loud. The bartender looked down the bar at him. He sipped from the glass. It was not good, however, that the boy hadn’t been seen for weeks. Maybe he had gone on to Canada, the way they liked them to. If the boy was gone, he was gone; not much he could do about that. He stared at himself in the glass, finished the last of his beverage, and called the barkeep over. He took one of his cards — a simple white slip on which he had penciled the address of the rooming house — and slid it to the bartender, with a ten-cent piece.

“I’m staying here,” Tull said. “If that banjo player shows up send a messenger to me as quick as you can, and it will be five dollars for you.”

The barkeep looked down at the card without touching it, then he slid the coin off and put it in his pocket and placed the card next to the coin box behind him and moved down the bar to another customer.

Tull stood at the top of Market Street, looking out toward the river. He turned from the river and looked down Market into Philadelphia, with its jabbering sidewalks and stalls, its parks and columned buildings, and the great, blind, presiding eye of the City Hall tower. The wagons, the blistering sun, the awning shade, the signs. He exhaled slowly, making a hissing sound with his tongue against his front teeth. “Come here, Joseph,” he thought. “Come to me.”

He visited a dozen furniture makers, and at least as many saloons, a handful of music stores and six theaters, and by Thursday afternoon he knew nothing more than that a Mexican-looking banjo player had worked outside the Black Horse and had not been seen for several weeks. No messages had come to the rooming house. None of the furniture makers had employed the boy, or they wouldn’t admit to it if they had. None of the music stores knew about him, none of the theaters knew about him. The boy, he admitted, might very well have left town. If he had ever been there in the first place.

He had saved Lombard Street for last. Word of a white man looking for someone would spread around Darktown faster than you could sneeze. And Tull did not like being outnumbered by free blacks, hostile to his mission and accountable to no one. Lombard was a last resort.

Against his inclination, he had returned to police headquarters after a Thursday morning round of theaters, to ask for a competent deputy, or two, who could accompany him. He arrived to find the same trio of officers occupying the same positions in which he had found them four days previous.

“Would you like an apple?” the captain said.

Trogdon, wearing his shiny-brimmed hat, was speaking to the black-haired officer, who had leaned back against the wall in his chair, with his eyes closed.

“I wouldn’t eat the stuff,” Trogdon was saying. “Beets give you gas, and they say it gives a dog the distemper. I wouldn’t want to find out. They say you need to drink water, but if you drink it out of a public tap you get maggots.”

“Especially if you’re a dog,” the black-haired man said.

“I need two deputies,” Tull said.

“I wouldn’t know about a dog,” Trogdon said. “I’ve never seen a dog with the maggots. Hullo — have you found the nigger?”

“You’ll need a warrant,” the captain said.

“A warrant?” Tull said. He stared at the captain. “This is a niggertown search. What do I need a warrant for?”

The captain shrugged. “That’s the law. The magistrate is on the second floor. Shouldn’t take more than an hour, maybe two.”

To Trogdon, Tull said, “You want to make five dollars?”

“I have a friend could help us,” Trogdon said, outside on the sidewalk. “You said deputies —I heard that. He would not mind making a dollar. He lives nearby.”

“Where?”

“Just the other side of Cherry Street,” Trogdon said, already out of breath trying to keep up with Tull. “In the Excelsior.”

Cherry was four blocks in the wrong direction.

“You’re sure he’s there?”

“Oh, he’s always there,” Trogdon said, breathing hard as they walked. “He’s a good man, if you need one. He’s done every kind of work except for beekeeping. He has never kept bees, never would. Hates them. I do, as well. Most insects are an annoyance. They make maggots. .”

At the corner of Cherry Street, Trogdon looked around, apparently puzzled, and after a moment said, “Oh, two more blocks.”

The Excelsior was a flophouse on the other side of Vine Street. The hallway smelled of mold and urine.

“This one here,” Trogdon said, boldly leading the way.

The door was open into a room where a man lay on a bed, reclining, smoking a pipe.

“Hallo, Vic!” Trogdon said. The man looked up at him. “Where’s the parrot?” To Tull, he said, “Vic has a parrot with the most extraordinary. .”

“Shut up,” Tull said. To the reclining man, he said, “Can you stand up?”

“I can,” the man said.

“I’ll give you three dollars if you’ll come with us for a couple hours.”

“Well. . what. .” the man began.

“Police business!” Trogdon said.

“Can you keep your mouth shut and walk around?”

“Well,” the man said, frowning, “I. . yes.” He slid himself forward on the bed and stood up, leaned over and began emptying his pipe to refill it. Concentrating on the pipe, the man said, “That is quite an interesting hat.”

Tull grabbed him by the shoulder. A thin trickle of drool made its way through the man’s stubble.

“Leave your pipe.”

The trio walked the ten blocks to Lombard Street through the hot afternoon, across the tracks. The neighborhood changed like a change of weather, turned shabbier, except for a huge stone church at the corner, a block away. Isolated brick houses sat amid rough wooden shacks and sheds. The people on the street, almost all of them black, walked along, seemingly without any destination. Blacks in proper jackets, blacks in rags, young blacks, old blacks. Tull felt disgust at the disorder of it all. At Fourth Street, a Negro with a patch of discolored skin on his forehead sat on a wooden crate, holding a violin.