Free The Dying Crapshooter's Blues by David Fulmer

wanted was Sweet getting a notion that he was avoiding him, though it was exactly what he wanted to do. Sweet was one of those types who could rattle a man’s bones with one look, and Joe didn’t need him for an enemy.
    Before he got around to that business, he decided to take a walk on Peachtree Street. It was his first Monday morning in the city in six months, and he wanted to amble around a bit. He had visited Central Avenue his first day in. Now he would survey the other side of Atlanta.
    Bundling up for the cool morning, he went out the door. Joe’s favored winter wear was a gray wool coat that had been taken off a pile of uniform items stripped from the German dead. After his discharge, he paid a Philadelphia tailor to remove the epaulets and then dye the coat a darker gray. It fit him well and was warm enough for any weather. He liked especially the four secret pockets: one under each arm, meant to hold a pistol but useful for stashing burglary tools and stolen goods like watches and jewelry, and two smaller pokes tucked along the seams in the lining, one on either side. He had been told that the Germans used these cavities to hide tiny weapons, razor blades and such,

and even poison capsules. All four pockets were difficult to detect, their edges cut to appear as seams. Joe had gone through more than one frisking holding gems that were never found.
    He crossed over Ivy Street and reached Peachtree to find that the Atlanta beehive was buzzing ever more frantically every time he came back. Even at this early hour, the sidewalks were getting jammed as workers rushed along to the downtown offices, huffing little clouds, and the main and crossing streets were packed with automobiles, trucks, bicycles, a few motorcycles, and fewer horse-drawn hacks.
    Joe noticed right away that two new electric stoplights had been installed on the main thoroughfare, so there were now a half dozen of the signals in as many blocks. One by one, the crow’s nests were being replaced. Not that the lights eased the congestion.
    The city was dirtier, too. The pall of soot that had hung in the air since he first passed through seven years before seemed to grow thicker every time he returned, advanced by the unending string of coal- and wood-burning locomotives passing through the railroad yards not five blocks away, the belching from the stacks of the factories and the chimneys of the homes clustered around the downtown blocks, and the growing multitude of automobiles and trucks. Indeed, with all that, it was nigh onto impossible for anyone who lived or worked there to stay clean. A white sheet hung out to dry in the morning would be gray by afternoon. Just about every other person passing on the street exhibited at least a mild cough.
    Then there was the smell, a fetid combination of engine exhaust, horse manure, rusting pipes, woodsmoke, and damp rot, along with contributions from the nearby Atlanta Livestock Center, famed for its stench. He never quite understood how the citizens tolerated the stifling heat of summer, and always made a point to be elsewhere during the hot months.
    When he reached Harris Street, he crossed over and came
back down the other side, where the sidewalks were even busier. Atlanta just kept growing, out and up, and it had been going on that way for a long time.
    As he ambled among the heat and close odors of human crowding, he remembered being cornered in a speakeasy one winter evening some years back and treated to a lecture on the history of the city by a drunken professor. The scholar, deep in his cups and provoked by one of those innocuous barroom questions that don’t require an answer, lurched to his feet and into a spiel that began with a claim that Atlanta was founded as a backwoods depot called Terminus, which was still marked by the zero milepost that stood on Alabama Street.
    Later, the name of this way station was changed to Marthasville, after the then-governor’s daughter. When it