The Sunday Scaries
Volume 1, Number 44
Microfiction by Pat Harrigan
Content Warning: Language and Horror
Transcript: Disc 1684, A and B, June 13(?), 1938
This was around the winter of nineteen-eight, nineteen-nine, and the man I was going to tell you about, he was a fellow named Ray Robinson, they sometimes called him Railroad, on account of the two R’s, and because of the way he played, but not always. I always knew him as just Ray. He was a bass player.
Ray was a good player, and he made a good living playing in a nightclub called The Top Hat, on Fourth Street and Union Avenue. And right across a little alley right down from the club was this little pawn shop, and one day Ray decides he needs a new suit. He liked a kind of variety, he couldn’t have the people seeing him in the same old suit night after night, and besides which, his old suit was worn out.
Now at this time there had been a shooting. A fellow named Bill Jackson found his wife in bed with another man, a man named Sean Flynn.
[unintelligible]
That’s right, he was a white man, come down from Boston, started gambling and making a name for himself working for Mike Haggerty at the Monarch saloon, and he was known to have a liking for Negro ladies. Bill Jackson found him in bed with his wife and he shot her and Sean Flynn both in the heart right there in the bed, and he went to jail for it for fifteen years. Some people thought Mike Haggerty would have done him in for what he done to Sean Flynn, but Mike Haggerty must have decided that the law was punishment enough. Bill Jackson stayed in jail fifteen years and when he come out he found a new young wife and went back to living in Memphis.
Well, somehow Sean Flynn’s suit showed up in the window of this pawn shop I was telling you about, and Ray Robinson bought it. It was a brown suit, I don’t know what sort of fabric it was, but it was sharp, and in good shape, on account of Sean Flynn having a lot of money and him being unclothed when he got shot, and the suit had been hanging up in the wardrobe when it happened. So Ray Robinson bought the suit and wore it in the nightclub when they’d play their shows. He was just about the size of Sean Flynn and the suit suited him very well. He wore that suit for just about a week before…
[interruption as recording disc is changed]
As I was saying, that suit fit Ray Robinson very well, and he was pleased with his purchase. But then one night he was walking home in that suit and Bad Sam came up to him in the street and said to him, Sean Flynn, you dirty so-and-so, you son of a bitch, I hear you’ve been with my wife, only he said I hear you been fucking my wife, and he shot Ray Robinson right in the heart, and he died right on the spot. I had seen Ray Robinson that very night, and I was still in the saloon when it happened, a boy ran in and said Bad Sam had shot him, and I couldn’t believe it, I had just been speaking to him.
A song got written about it, which I will play for you soon. It was called Dead Man’s Suit, but I never did know who wrote it. It started like this:
[plays melody on piano]
And I will play the whole tune later.
Now nothing ever came of that for Bad Sam, on account of, as I have told you, he was the meanest Negro in Memphis, and besides he worked for Mike Haggerty. But there were two things no one could understand. One was how Bad Sam could think that Sean Flynn had been fucking his wife when he had been dead for over a week by that time. The other thing that no one could figure was how Bad Sam could mistake Ray Robinson, who was a Negro man, for Sean Flynn, who was a white man. I told you there were two things no one could figure out, but there was a third thing, and that was the next week, when I walked by that pawn shop, there in the window was Sean Flynn’s brown suit, I saw it myself. It looked like it never had got a drop of blood on it, nor did it have a hole in the middle, even though Bad Sam had shot Ray Robinson right through the heart as he was walking home through an alley just off west Pontotoc Avenue, over by the river.
💀
