Unwritten Laws 01(4)

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.

After writing in the particulars about Willie and the schoolteacher, Albert replaced the ledger in the firebox and covered it with the floorboard. Then he took a quart of corn whiskey from a suitcase, went out to the sales floor, and sat at his favorite piano. He drank in silence until the street went dark outside the display window. Then he got up, switched on the lights, and returned to the piano.

Laying his fingers on the keys, he started with “Blues in the Night,” rolling his right hand with a feather-light touch. Then he gently twisted the melody inside out until it became “Blue Skies,” despite not having felt smiled upon in quite a while. It was times like this that Albert wished his wife had lived. Lilly would always sit at his side while he played, or on the floor behind him, leaning against his lower back, and sing over the notes he coaxed from whichever piano they had at the time. Sometimes she’d sing the way Billie Holiday sang on the radio, other times she crooned in a language all her own, improvising over whatever Albert did with the keys. Tonight he’d give all the money he had in the bank to have recorded the songs his wife had made up on those nights. But he never did.

And then she died.

Lilly had passed when he was thirty, she twenty-eight. Albert had never remarried. He’d passed the last twenty years with various girls, none more special than the last, and he’d stayed away from white women as much as he could, despite considerable pressure from some of the housewives whose homes he visited to tune their pianos. He always tried to make his calls when the husband was home, and he worked hard to make a good impression. That was how you survived in cotton country. From one corner of the parish to the other, every white man of property knew Albert Norris as a “good nigger.”