The Dying Crapshooter's Blues by David Fulmer

true that Grayton Jackson had always appeared to the denizens of Atlanta like a chunk of granite, in truth his bulwark had a gaping chink that came in his five-foot-three-inch pleasingly plump cupcake of a wife, May Ida.
    Had Joe not learned firsthand that her tale was genuine, he would have taken it for one of the kind of crazy fiction created and then embellished for the delight of men who drank in speakeasies and had nothing better to do with their time.
    Growing up in a little town just east of Atlanta, May Ida had been somewhat chubby—
Junoesque
in the parlance of the day—and much sassy. Upon meeting her, a stranger’s gaze would be drawn immediately to her eyes, bosom, and bottom, all of which were prominently rotund. She was pretty in an old-fashioned way, the nubile farm girl of the jokes when she left herself plain, a Kewpie doll when she put a little powder and paint on her face.
    Emerging from the innocent haze of her childhood, she developed an alarming fascination with her body and the pleasure it could generate. By the age of sixteen, she seemed to be constantly in heat. May Ida loved the boys, and then the men, and they loved her right back, on what was a daily basis, or so said the hometown wags.
    No one could say precisely when, where, and to whom she had surrendered her innocence. Once she had, though, she was a filly bolting from the gate, and a marvel when it came to finding locations for interludes: closets, attics, root cellars, toolsheds, barn lofts. She was democratic with her favors, too. Around the village of Scottsdale, they’d tell you she had initiated more boys than the Scouts. She even batted her eyes and twitched her plump tail at some of the young Negroes, all of whom immediately ran the other way. Once she was introduced to French pleasure, she acted as if she had invented it, and went about showing off her new skills with abandon.
    She didn’t slow down once she left school. None of the local fellows would court such a coquette, and whatever job she found was nothing more than a portal into more amorous adventures. Her family didn’t know what to do with her. They couldn’t afford the kind of sanitarium that might offer a cure for her affliction.
    It was then that an unlikely salvation appeared, in the person of Grayton Jackson.
    The Captain, who was then a sergeant, hailed from the village of Marietta, and so had no knowledge of May Ida’s lurid past. He was a man without social skills whose only intimacies had been the occasional cold caresses of Atlanta whores. A fellow police officer who knew both his situation and the plight of May Ida’s family stepped forward, and Sergeant Jackson was encouraged to ask for her plump hand.
    The marriage was seen as a way to kill two birds with one stone, providing him with domestic comforts and at the same time corralling a young woman’s bawdy behavior. The idea was that if anyone could put a harness on May Ida, it would be a severe, no-nonsense sort like Grayton Jackson. For him, it was a way to get a spouse without the discomfort of courting, a ritual at which he would have been hopelessly inept.
    It was unclear how May Ida had been talked into this farce. From one side of the city to the other, there was much laughter when the two exchanged their vows. A justice of the peace conducted the ceremony, and the couple moved into a small house on Plum Street, around the corner from the Luckie Street School.
    Despite the hopes of the concerned parties, the plan failed. May Ida soon realized that monogamy was not to her liking, even less so when it involved a frigid and dour mate like Grayton Jackson. For some weeks after her wedding, she fidgeted about in an overheated flush, all but bursting from her clothes. It was her good fortune that the Captain couldn’t tolerate children and had no thoughts of hitching her to that harness. In truth, he was

married to his job. Most days, he was up and gone before dawn