When Joppy moved away from us Mr. Albright turned to look around the room. He did that every few minutes, turning slightly, checking to see if anything had changed. There wasn't much to see though. Joppy's was a small bar on the second floor of a butchers' warehouse. His only usual customers were the Negro butchers and it was early enough in the afternoon that they were still hard at work.
The odor of rotted meat filled every corner of the building; there were few people, other than butchers, who could stomach sitting in Joppy's bar.
Joppy brought Mr. Albright's scotch and a bourbon on the rocks for me. He put them both down and said, 'Mr. Albright lookin' for a man to do a lil job, Easy. I told him you outta work an' got a mortgage t'pay too.'
'That's hard.' Mr. Albright shook his head again. 'Men in big business don't even notice or care when a working man wants to try to make something out of himself.'
'And you know Easy always tryin' t'be better. He just got his high school papers from night school and he been threatenin' on some college.' Joppy wiped the marble bar as he spoke. 'And he's a war hero, Mr. Albright. Easy went in with Patton. Volunteered! You know he seen him some blood.'
'That a fact?' Albright said. He wasn't impressed. 'Why don't we go have a chair, Easy? Over there by the window.'
Joppy's windows were so dingy that you couldn't see out onto 103rd Street. But if you sat at a small cherry table next to them, at least you had the benefit of the dull glow of daylight.
'You got a mortgage to meet, eh, Easy? The only thing that's worse than a big company is the bank. They want their money on the first and if you miss the payment, they will have the marshal knocking down your door on the second.'
'What's my business got to do with you, Mr. Albright? I don't wanna be rude, but I just met you five minutes ago and now you want to know all my business.'
'Well, I thought that Joppy said you needed to get work or you were going to lose your house.'
'What's that got to do with you?'
'I just might need a bright pair of eyes and ears to do a little job for me, Easy.'
'And what kind of work is it that you do?' I asked. I should have gotten up and walked out of there, but he was right about my mortgage. He was right about the banks too.
'I used to be a lawyer when I lived in Georgia. But now I'm just another fella who does favors for friends, and for friends of friends.'
'What kind of favors?'
'I don't know, Easy.' He shrugged his great white shoulders. 'Whatever somebody might need. Let's say that you need to get a message to someone but it's not, urn, convenient for you to do it in person; well, then you call me and I take the job. You see I always do the job I'm asked to do, everybody knows that, so I always have lots of work. And sometimes I need a little helper to get the job done. That's where you come in.'
'And how's that?' I asked. While he talked it dawned on me that Albright was a lot like a friend I had back in Texas—Raymond Alexander was his name but we called him Mouse. Just thinking about Mouse set my teeth on edge.
'I need to find somebody and I might need a little help looking.'
'And who is it you want to—'
'Easy,' he interrupted. 'I can see that you're a smart man with a lot of very good questions. And I'd like to talk more about it, but not here.' From his shirt pocket he produced a white card and a white enameled fountain pen. He scrawled on the card and then handed it to me.
'Talk to Joppy about me and then, if you want to try it out, come to my office any time after seven tonight.'
He downed the shot, smiled at me again, and stood up, straightening his cuffs. He tilted the Panama hat on his head and saluted Joppy, who grinned and waved from behind the bar. Then Mr. DeWitt Albright strolled out of Joppy's place like a regular customer going home after his afternoon snort.
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.
'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 catcher's 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
