Uptown Blues

by Seth Pevey

  I put the pistol in the pocket of my PJs, hating myself, and run back to my bedroom. There I put it in my backpack.

  For a second, I feel a train coming at me from somewhere. I think it to myself just like that.

  Another ten minutes and I start to hear some stirring throughout the big house. Doors shutting and plates clattering. I wander out into the main room. Mr. Melancon is snoring baritone on the couch with all his clothes still on and his old dusty hat leaning over his eyes. Felix is in one of the big fluffy chairs and already rubbing his eyes. He nods at me.

  “Sleep okay, kid?”

  I look at him for a while but don’t say anything. He sticks his finger in his ear and raises his eyebrows at me. “Still too young for coffee, I guess?” he asks, standing up.

  I shrug my shoulders at him, sit down on the couch and start to fiddle with my horn. A few minutes later, Mr. de Valencia wheels himself into the room and right over to me. He smiles at me, but I can tell that the smile may not be genuine at this point in time. Just like the smile that Louis used to give reporters when they asked him about something stupid like the Soviet Union, when all he wanted to do was make beautiful music that made people happy. I try to look at Mr. de Valencia with my own true smile, but I can’t because I’m feeling guilty about the pistol that’s in my backpack but that doesn’t belong to me.

  Mr. de Valencia clears his throat. “I spoke with a Mrs. Jones last night, Andre. I assume she would be your…stepmother? She was very, very upset when she called me last night. I’m sure you can understand. And I’m sure you are just as upset. How could you not be? We spoke at length, my boy. She said that…that the police were also upset. And I also felt upset when I heard about what happened when the officer tried to take your horn. We all talked about it. I know you didn’t mean to punch that police officer, but it has made them quite upset.”

  I can see that Mr. Melancon is awake now, completely, and watching me with a very serious look on his face. Felix has come over too and he does look very upset as well, giving me one of the saddest looks I’ve ever seen.

  “We talked and decided that the best thing would be for you to get a good night’s sleep and in the morning, which is now, for us to take you downtown to the police station. Are you ready to go now, and to talk to the police?” Mr. de Valencia says.

  I stare at him. This is how it’s going to start. All three of them are looking at me with sad eyes, but they would never understand about what I’m thinking and feeling, because this is something even the best books can’t explain, right in this moment. If they did understand, even just a little bit, they wouldn’t be trying to take me downtown.

  I shake my head no.

  “Now, Andre,” Mr. de Valencia says to me, “please try to understand. Put yourself in our shoes.”

  I want him to put himself in mine. Why can’t he? He is a thoughtful man. I shake my head, harder this time.

  Mr. de Valencia stops trying to explain, because I suppose he’s at least thoughtful enough to know when he cannot. He reaches out and puts an arm on my shoulder and pats me three times.

  “I’m so sorry, dear boy,” he says. I see a small tear forming in the corner of his eye. He wheels himself away quickly and disappears from the room.

  There’s nothing else to do. I think about running again, but I am too tired, and I’m still not ready yet to be completely alone. I’m still afraid. So, I let them take me.

  We go downtown in Mr. Melancon’s old car, taking St. Charles and passing four different streetcars on the way. We also pass by the spot where I stood with Daddy on Fat Tuesday just a few weeks earlier, but now it’s empty.

  I’m sitting in the back seat holding my horn in my lap, trying not to see the streetcars.

  “My father died last year,” Felix says from the front, his eyes staying forward. I can’t tell if he’s saying it to me or not, but Mr. Melancon looks at him and shakes his head. There are plastic beads in every oak tree. I want to blow my horn so hard that my lips will split, but I don’t do it. I just sit in the back of the car and go downtown. I put my horn in my backpack and zip it up tight.

  The old scar on my neck starts to itch and burn, which it sometimes does when I get too anxious about something.

  I’ve never liked downtown because there are too many bad sounds, even though it’s fun to think that it was these same streets and sidewalks that little Louis lived his life on. I like to think it was sleepier back then. But not now. This time there’s a great big garbage truck in front of us that squeals like it’s dying every time it slows down. There are also bars with the doors open and, even though it’s morning time, there are people yelling and acting foolish on the corners. Cars are honking their horns and playing music with only bass and no treble.

  We pull into the parking lot of the police station. I know that’s where we are because every single car in the parking lot is a police car. We go inside, and when I pass through the metal detector it goes crazy. I wait with my eyes closed for someone to discover that I have stolen a pistol and brought it into a place where you aren’t supposed to, but it doesn’t happen.

  Instead, Mr. Melancon moves his coat aside and shows a big gun on his belt to the guard on duty, flashes some kind of a card in his wallet. The guard looks too heavy to get up from his seat, and so he just waves us all through and goes back to scrolling on his smartphone.

  I realize then that both Mr. Melancon and Felix have guns on their belts, and that makes me feel less bad about having the one in my backpack, even though I stole it.

  As I go through the building, I notice that there are beaucoup people looking at me—mostly ladies in business suits with big badges pinned to their chests and with cards dangling down by their sides. Some have pistols and some don’t. When they see me, they stop what they’re doing, look at me with a bunch of hangdog sadness, and whisper to one another in a way that I can certainly tell is about me. The men in the office seem to be the exact opposite. They can’t look away fast enough, and I catch one or two of them that were leaning against a table shooting the breeze tighten up and start pretending to shuffle papers when me and the detectives stroll by.

  At last, we come to a room with a big desk. Mr. Melancon says a few words to the police officer behind the desk, words that I can’t quite make out. I wish that Mr. de Valencia had come with us. Now that they have me here, these police, I’m afraid of what they’re going to do to me. Somehow I know that Mr. de Valencia wouldn’t let any of that bad stuff happen, even though he can’t even stand up from his wheelchair. But he isn’t here.

  They bring me into an even smaller room, where they sit me down across a desk from a pretty lady with big, kind eyes. She smiles at me. Mr. Melancon whispers something into her ear and she nods her head, then he comes back around and puts a hand on my shoulder for just a second before quickly pulling it away.

  “Hello there, Andre. My name is Janine. You doing alright, sugar?”

  She waits for me to answer, but I don’t. I try to smile at her to let her know that I’m not just being rude. But I can’t really do it, so maybe I am.

  “Can you tell me what happened?” Janine says. When I don’t answer, she looks over my shoulder to where Mr. Melancon is sitting.

  “Doesn’t say much,” Mr. Melancon says.

  “He likes music,” Felix says.

  Janine smiles at me again. I pull my horn out of my backpack and hold it tight in my lap. She looks down at it for a long time and then back up at me again.

  “Can you tell me what you saw, on the streetcar? I know this must be a very hard time for you. But it’s very important that you tell me what you saw. What happened?”

  The streetcar. I feel myself start to lean. My lips purse up and tremble. I can feel a pressure behind my eyes. It is pushing and pushing. I’m looking out into the green tunnel of Carrolton Street. The cars are moving away. The people are moving away. Everything is getting smaller and it has already happened before I can stop it. Soon it’s rushing away. I fee
l myself leaning even more.

  “Andre, what happened on the streetcar?”

  Louis Armstrong is just a poor boy. He needs his daddy. I can taste the copper in my mouth. Quarter notes beat in my heart. The gun is glowing hot against my back.

  “Please, kid. You’ve got to answer her,” a voice says behind me.

  I try to open my mouth. I want to speak. But I can’t. Nothing comes out. My eyes start to water. I slip out of the chair and I’m looking up at the fake, bright lights above me, getting all blurry. I hear feet shuffling around the room.

  “Oh, child,” Janine says and comes from behind the desk to put her arms around me. She hugs me to her big chest, where I stay, sobbing, for a long, long time.

  Five

  Melancon watched Janine embrace the boy. She held him for a while, letting him weep softly against her chest. One thing was for sure, this was about as much as they were going to get from the kid, and pressing him more and more just wasn’t the right thing to do. It felt wrong, ham-handed, in poor form to even have him in here. The boy wasn’t going to be opening up to anyone anytime soon, not any more than this, anyway. He needed to be with people who loved him.

  After some time, Andre finally was back in his chair with a tissue, his big eyes blinking, while Janine looked down at him tenderly. “Felix, would you mind?” Melancon said, nodding his head towards the hallway. Felix understood, held a hand out for the boy, who took it and followed the young detective out of the room. The door closed softly behind them, and Janine’s face changed instantly.

  “First of all, David, where the hell has the boy been? He attacked a police officer last night, which was the same night he witnessed a homicide, mind you, and from there he was nowhere to be found. A dozen black-and-whites spent the night crawling all over Uptown looking for him. And then he just happens to turn up in your custody? Why is it that you’re always tangled up in these things? Answer me that!”

  He scooted his chair closer to her, though the wide desk kept the distance between them.

  “Damn, Janine, do you know how many years it took me, back when I was a police detective, to get my own private office? I mean, at least two decades. You’ve been at it what? A year or two now? Look at this place. You done really well for yourself, and I know you deserve it.”

  She stared him down, narrowing her eyes and pinching up her lips.

  “You could be charged with kidnapping, you know.”

  “Anybody can be charged with anything, Janine.”

  “So why don’t you just tell me what happened? Exactly what happened. No creative license, David.”

  He sighed. “We’ve already been through it. Kid just showed up. He’s a friend of Tomás. We got in touch with his stepmama, but she said she couldn’t take him, asked us to babysit. Begged us, actually. We brought him straight here the next morning. What were we supposed to do? Take the kid straight downtown in the middle of the night covered in—”

  “Covered in what, David?”

  He hesitated. Stood up and knocked on the exterior door. Felix came in.

  “Give her the shirt.”

  “Ah, right.”

  Felix took out a freezer bag with a little boy’s shirt bundled tightly inside of it, the blackened bloodstains clearly visible through the clear plastic.

  Janine stood up. “So now we can add tampering with evidence to your lists of charges,” she said, snatching the freezer bag.

  “We just delivered you the damn thing, now relax, Detective.”

  She brushed herself off, nodding and running her tongue along her teeth. Her eyes had gone drifting now across the pattern of blood on the shirt.

  “Look,” she said, putting it down and leaning against the desk. “The truth is, we’ve got nothing so far, except what you’ve just brought me. The witnesses scattered, the security camera caught pretty much nothing, and we’ve got a million and one prints, of course, because the crime scene is a damn century-old piece of public transport. And what’s more—”

  Felix spoke up then, raising his chin and interrupting the discussion.

  “What’s going to happen…to Andre?”

  Janine turned and fiddled with some paperwork on the desk. “We’re in touch with the Lashawn Jones, who’s the one who should have custody…but…there’s a problem. CPS may have to have to get involved. At least for the time being.”

  “CPS…Child Protective Services?”

  “That’s right,” Janine said, now looking down at the floor.

  “What’s wrong with his mother?”

  “It’s his stepmother, actually, the one you claim to have talked to on the phone? She appears to have had some kind of psychotic break.”

  “No kidding?”

  Janine nodded solemnly. “She has a brother she’s appointed as temporary guardian, which doesn’t sound like something a psychotic person would be capable of doing, to me. But I’m not a shrink, after all. It isn’t a long-term solution, though. Either the stepmama has to get better and retain custody or…”

  “Or he’s going to be institutionalized… that’s what you’re telling me?” Melancon demanded angrily.

  “It’s a possibility, David.”

  Just then they could hear the sound of sneakers squeaking in the corridor. Janine walked over to the door and stuck her head out.

  Six

  He didn’t shoot anyone. Not Louis. That’s why he had such a hard time to begin with, I think—because he was a gentle soul. Like me. Angry, scared, but gentle. Some books even go so far as to say that the pistol he stole from his stepdaddy’s trunk was loaded with blanks. I don’t know about that, but I do know that if he had accidentally shot someone, you would have never known his name.

  No International Airport, no King of Zulu, no Carnegie Hall.

  But he didn’t. He just shot the air.

  Blam, blam, blam.

  Right into the night sky, sending the other children scattering. Did he laugh? Or did he frighten himself? I don’t know. But maybe he felt less scared, if only for a second or two.

  What happened next is that police officers rushed towards him on horseback, guns already drawn. Guns pointed at him, not at the sky. Little Louis Armstrong dropped the pistol on the banquette as the cops on Clydesdales charged towards him (clop clop clop). What have I done? he thought to himself. Louis screamed when the thick arms seized him. He wailed. He cried. He’d be in the paper the next day for his crime. That was the first time his name would ever show up in the paper, but far from the last.

  If things were hard before, they were about to get much, much harder. Now, Louis is a criminal. And if the world hates a poor daddy-less boy from back of town, it hates one that breaks the law even more so. He has no idea that being arrested on New Year’s for firing his stepdaddy’s pistol is going to be one of the luckiest things that ever happens to him.

  That it is destiny.

  So, Louis screams and cries with his Big Dipper mouth, wailing and rolling on the nasty street. If he had done this just a few years later, it would have been incredibly unlucky, because the judge would have sent a grown man straight to penitentiary. As it stood, though, Louis was just the right age.

  My age.

  So, the judge sent little Louis to a place called the Colored Waif’s Home for Boys.

  I wonder if Louis, hearing the judge’s notion, had to pause and think about what the word waif meant, because I had to look it up in the dictionary. I’m glad I did, though, because it turns out that I am now a waif as well. So, a good word to know about, I guess.

  I’m sitting in the hallway of the police station, thinking about my waif life to come. A janitor is trying to mop, but when he sees me, he drags the wet thing to the other end of the hall. Squeak squeak go his shoes.

  When the mop man moves out of the way, that’s when I see Uncle. I dry my eyes as quick as I can with the little tissue in my hand and then I toss the whole snotty mess in the trash. Uncle is coming down the hallway fast towards me. I know the way he walks, ev
en before I’m able to make out his face. He’s got an officer behind him, that blue shape strutting and jangling like it owns the whole joint. But Uncle’s walk is so different from that he stands out like a broken guitar string. He is wide-legged, smooth-moving, muscly at the top and thin around the waist. His long braids sway in the bright light and his shoes squeak too.

  “Hey, little man,” he says to me when he gets to where I’m sitting. He doesn’t smile but he puts a hand on my shoulder and squeezes, bends down low and looks me right in the eyes. “You making it?”

  The door to the room has come open now and the detectives are spilling out.

  “Felix Herbert,” Felix says, and he shakes Uncle’s hand.

  “Melph. I’m this young’un’s uncle. I’m here to pick him up.”

  “So we were told,” Mr. Melancon says and grins real big at Uncle, but I can see that his blue eyes are not grinning but rather watching real close.

  I stand up and take Uncle Melph’s hand. As we start to walk away, I turn to look back at the detectives. Mr. Melancon and Felix stand there in the hallway watching me go, looking sad.

  I wave at them. A few seconds pass where I think maybe they won’t wave back, but they do—just as I’m turning the corner, they wave back.

  I guess I forgive them for taking me downtown. Daddy always said it was good to forgive.

  A few minutes later and Uncle is gently buckling me into the passenger seat of his Explorer. He watches my face real close while he’s doing it. I’ve taken my horn out of my bag again and am holding it tight in my lap and we’re going up Claiborne Avenue. He’s fiddling with the radio, asking me what I’m listening to these days. We pass by groups of men out on the neutral ground playing dominoes and checkers on the top of cardboard boxes. I look out of the window and watch the top of the Superdome, all glinting in the sunlight, as it gets smaller and smaller.