Free Southern Cross the Dog by Bill Cheng Page A

running now, out the kitchen and into the hall. Then up the stairs, two, three, four steps at a time, his whole body vaulting forward. And as he came to the third floor, his eyes refocused, he marched down the long hall, every bedroom door shut, and did not stop till he came to Hermalie’s room.
    He knocked. Hermalie, he said.
    There was no answer.
    He started to say it again but stopped.
    There was a noise coming from inside. He was barely able to make it out. Quietly, he knelt down to the keyhole, lowering his eyes toward the brass plate. He put his hand on the floor for balance and touched on something gritty. He brought his hand up. Small white grains pressed into the flesh of his palm. He stood up slowly and looked around him, at the ring of salt circling the door.

A ugustus Duke drove through the night and into the morning where dawn fire spilled out above the Luxapalila Valley. Through the saplings, he could make out the canal—a shimmering serpent of silver-black water. For days he’d been on the road, hunting throughout the state for the right instrument for his new investment—Eli—and in that time he had not slept, nor had a decent meal. The road had taken a toll physically. His back ached from the hours of driving, and his bowels were packed hard in his gut. A skin of grease lay in a sheen across his face.
    And yet still his mind itched with excitement.
    He had found him. He had finally found him.
    There was a fortune to be made. First, here, in these hick backwaters—then up north, to the Roxy Theater, the Paramount, Carnegie Hall. He imagined the crowds they would draw—the hundred-count bodies going down the block and around the corner. From miles around they’d flock to hear him. Eli Cutter. The Singing Con. The Murdering Musico.
    He’d first heard his name in a music hall in Bronzeville in Chicago. Duke was a younger man then, fresh from college. His father, Hiram, a medical doctor, had died the month before. Duke had been feeling depressed and on a whim he wandered in to hear the darkies play. The room was hot and smoke filled, the sticky residue of stale liquor underneath his soles. It was a shock when the band started up—the thrumming noise, the savage howls. He watched the Negroes as they danced, palms smacking, their eyes rolled back into their skulls. Duke sat in his chair, his hands wet with sweat.
    Later that night he overheard the performers reminisce about a piano player named Elijah Cutter. They said he was a black jinx, that when you shook his hand, you could feel a bad wind move through you. Chill you to the core.
    Cutter was unclean, one of the men said. Kept goofer dust in his shoes and a bag full of devils. It wasn’t natural, how good he could play, frenzying from chord to chord, from note to note.
    Duke spoke up.
    And where is this man now?
    The performers looked at him then fell quiet.
    Duke stepped out of the hall and wrote the name on the back of a matchbook. After he sold off what was left of his inheritance, he traveled for years up and down the country, the slip of cardboard in his left breast pocket. He went into the dance halls and juke joints, to the corner musicians and the traveling medicine shows, and he’d ask about the mysterious piano player, Eli Cutter.
    Some said he’d been killed in a bar fight in Laredo, or that he was working on a shrimp trawler out on the Gulf, or that he had gone mad from syphilis and was locked away in some New Orleans crazy house. He chased these leads across the country, ending where he started—with a head full of tall tales and nowhere closer to finding Eli Cutter.
    In the idle hours of the night, exhausted from the road, Duke would lie in bed with a bottle of rye and read through his notes. He had an age. An approximate height. Nothing firm. He would shut his eyes and feel the pressures shifting in his skull. In his mind’s eye Elijah Cutter was long and tall with fingers that stretched