by Seth Pevey
I press the mouthpiece into my mouth and blow.
I keep blowing it until what is in the future and what is in the past have gone completely away from me. Even Louis is gone. I don’t know what is going to happen, and I don’t care. All of the pictures in my head fade.
When I open my eyes again, everyone on the street is staring at me. Happy faces, red with the beer and whiskey and music, just beam at me from out of the crowd. Some of them clap, and the cardboard box that is sitting in front of the Big Waif Brass Band starts to fill up real quick.
The band members are looking at me too. They don’t smile but I can tell they’re waiting on me. They want me to lead the next one.
So, I do. I start the next song. It’s probably cheesy to them, lame, an old piece of history. But it will always be one of my favorites. I choose it because suddenly I feel powerful, unafraid. I have always wanted to stand out on the street and play it loud just like the men in Jackson Square do. And now I am.
I started it off that way, with the long, happy, bright licks of the trumpet. It’s a song about the end of the world, Mr. Julian told me that. But to hear it, you would think that the end of the world is the most beautiful thing that could ever be. And maybe it is.
To my surprise, Tuba starts to sing. He has a deep, baritone voice that’s just like his instrument, but perfectly full of soul and he can even hit the high notes just right.
Oh when the saints…
I open my eyes between two great big licks.
go marching in…
I feel my feet start to move. I’m dancing.
Oh when the saints go marching in…
I twist around and blow the horn, and suddenly I’m happy. Just for that moment.
But it doesn’t last long. Not even ten seconds. I shouldn’t have opened my eyes, just that bit too soon. I shouldn’t even be here, trapped as I am. The perfect came and went and now I see a face in the crowd. The face is masked, with a sequined type of eye cover that you see usually see at Mardi Gras—the same kind of glitzy things that hang on the walls of the tourist traps on Bourbon.
Yes, I want to be in that number.
The face is wearing a mask, but I know it. Where I know it from, or who it is behind those sequins, I’m sure I couldn’t say. What is sure is that it is getting closer, moving quickly through the crowd. The body it is attached to is not dancing, not making merry, not twisting and shaking with the music, which makes it stand out from the crowd of happy, jostling drinkers. I can’t be sure—the nose, the area around the eyes, the brow. Who can know their shape behind that mask? But I can see the mouth, and the shade of it gives me this sick feeling in my stomach.
The face is coming towards me.
Oh when the sun, refused to shine.
It’s not smiling, but pushing and shoving and coming, pointing directly at me. My insides freeze up for a second and the sound of my horn begins to falter.
Oh when the trumpet, it sounds its call.
Coming quicker now, pushing right through the crowd, parting them like Moses.
I blow a flat note. The fear is too much now. In another second the dark figure will be upon me. The band are looking at me but they keep right on playing and singing.
I look down into the cardboard box at my feet. There are many one-dollar bills, but a handful of twenties as well.
There are only a few bodies now between me and the dark figure.
I reach down into the box of folding money, take the biggest scoop of it I can.
A hand grabs me from out of the crowd. The masked face looms over me now.
I crumple the bills in my fist, into a little ball as tight and small as I am able, and then I shove the bills into my mouth and yank my body back out of the grip of the hand. I fall on my back and I’m too terrified to even look up. From down there, through a forest of legs and hips moving, I see a hole, a way out, and I plunge into it headlong.
I’m hitting knees and dodging sneakers, I’m weaving and ducking, I’m nearly crushed. I keep my horn pointed out in front of me like the cowcatcher on a train, and then I’m out again, out into the street.
The money in my mouth tastes dry and cottony with just a slight tang to it. I use my tongue to tuck it back into my cheek and I run.
I’m running down the neutral ground of Esplanade as fast as I can, the iron balconies and bent oaks and headlights all a blur. I’ve got my horn held tight in my left hand, swinging the weight of it to make myself faster. I can feel the gun in my backpack bouncing against my lower back. When I start to run short on breath, I take the money out of my mouth, try to flatten it against my leg, and then stuff it in my pocket, looking behind myself to make sure I don’t see that face following me in the night. I don’t, and I get down past the houses and all until I come to an area with some small hotels. I know it’s a bad idea, but I’m scared and cold and hungry, so I duck into the one with the most light coming from the lobby.
The man behind the counter is dark and has thick eyebrows, and I get the feeling that nothing surprises him. Those eyebrows don’t even begin to jump or react, even me running in with my horn, out of breath and not saying a word. He just looks at me like he has seen such a thing a hundred times.
I put down a few of the crumpled, slightly wet bills of the counter and look at him. He looks down at the money and then back up at me.
“ID?” he says.
I fumble around in my pockets until I come to that sad piece of plastic. Maybe I shouldn’t, but I do, because ethical dilemmas don’t mean much when you’re cold and hungry and maybe being hunted by someone who wants to do you harm. I hand him Daddy’s RTA badge and try to set my face just right.
He looks at it, then looks at me.
“Renato?”
I nod my head.
“How’s the streetcar line doing these days?”
I nod my head.
The guy cracks a smile and slaps the ID back on the counter, but he doesn’t push it towards me.
“So, you want to wait over there while I call the cops?”
I shake my head, point at the plastic badge again. When he doesn’t move, I go to pick it up, but he snatches it away from me and cracks that terrible smirk once again.
“Possession of stolen identification is a crime, young man. Who is this, your daddy? Where is he?”
I get upset.
“What do you got, a girlfriend or something? Why don’t you kids just do it in the park or the back of a car or something? Not at my hotel.”
The man waves his arms in front of him, back and forth. I lunge again for my daddy’s ID badge, which as a poor waif, I know is going to be the only real thing I have of him except what’s locked away inside my own mind.
But the clerk is quicker than me, and he tucks the badge into his shirt pocket and makes a tutting sound at me. I stare death at him, but it’s obvious that it’s going to take more than a look for this man to give an inch.
“What, what are you going to do?” he says.
I stare.
“Go on, kid, I have real problems to deal with. I’ll give the badge to the cops and they’ll contact Renato, nothing to worry about. Got to make sure the people who make this city run are taken care of, after all. What’s a streetcar driver going to do without his ID badge, kid? What are you thinking?”
I stare, so angry that I feel like the gun in my backpack has started to glow hot, burning my back. But I’m not angry at him, I remind myself. I have to remind myself of that three times. The badge is just a piece of plastic, that’s all it is, really. This man doesn’t know anything about who I am or who my daddy was or what happened to him.
But on my way out, I see a lamp sitting on a table just begging to be pushed off. It is pleading with me to shatter it. I stare at it for a second, trying to wrestle with all the anger I feel. The man calls out to me but I’m off and running again, before I let the anger take over, afterwards realizing that I left the money sitting there on the asshole’s counter.
I�
�m not very good at being a waif, I decide.
I head up under the I-10 bridge, because I know that this is where a person goes to sleep if they have no home, like me. The dusty, grassless ground beneath the bridge used to be a big avenue where a lot of Mardi Gras parades happened, but now it’s nothing but a dark cave filled with pigeons and tents and doo-doo and all sorts of bottles and cans. Some sad person painted big oak trees on the concrete pillars, maybe so that they could try to remember the big street that had once been there with leaf shade overhead instead of a bridge. There are Carnival Indians painted on some, long brass instruments painted on another. But all of this color looks washed out in the streetlamps, and without grass and shops and a streetcar this is not a happy place. As I walk further, the number of tents grows until it’s nothing but a sea of them, a whole camp of tents waving and blowing in the breeze. I shudder, looking at the little town within a town. I don’t have any tent, so instead I crawl up into a little hole in the dirt up against a concrete platform.
You couldn’t call it sleeping, what I do there huddled in the dirt. I’m too cold, and too scared to do anything but shut my eyes for about thirty seconds at a time. At about three in the morning, it gets even worse. If you’ve ever put your head to the ground and heard the sound of the big thoroughbreds that the policemen and women ride around town, coming up into your skull, then you know why homeless people look so bad in the morning. When I hear that sound (clop, clop, clop) coming through at about three in the morning, I know that my running isn’t done for the day.
Because even though Louis Armstrong became what he would become in the Waif’s Home, I’m not ready yet to do that. It seems to me that being put away somewhere might be worse than being cold and shivering up under a bridge.
Two of them, a man and a woman, come in their dark blue uniforms. They ride kind of slow but you can see their belts and badges and guns all glowing underneath those streetlamps. They get down when they see a man lying on his back between two tents. The male officer pokes him with a long stick. The sleeper rolls over and lets out a loud moan, and the officers let him be.
I start to slide out of my hiding spot, slow and quiet like, and get my backpack all ready and tight. But I’m stiff from laying on the cold ground, and one of my legs doesn’t act like I want it to. I trip up and fall, and when I do, the lady officer points right at me.
“Hey, kid!” she calls out and puts her hand on either her radio or her gun. I don’t wait around to see which one. Instead I take off running at full speed out into the neighborhood. I hop a fence and jog through a parking lot, then another one, the whole time listening for the horrible clop clop sound behind me.
At the third fence, my backpack gets caught on a barb. Since my horn, at the fat end, is just a little too big for my backpack, and I can’t zip it up all the way, my horn falls out onto the pavement, making a huge metal sound. For a minute I’m sure I’m fixing to be shipped off to the Waif’s Home and almost make up my mind to give up, because I’m getting so tired of running. But no one comes. I wait, at least less cold after my run. Then I scoop up my horn and carry it in my hand until I come over to Tulane Avenue.
I stare for about five minutes at the big new hospital they built there, all glass and lit up. It doesn’t match anything around here, and I wonder if that was the point of the whole thing. A lot of the houses and things that used to be there are now gone, except for one. There’s this big house, painted a hundred different colors and sitting all alone, that seems like it escaped from the bulldozers. The windows and door are all blocked up with plywood, but it stands up off the ground on a couple of cinder blocks, which is just like our shotgun back in the Seventeenth. That’s how I know what to do, even though it’s not a plan I particularly like all that much.
I try not to think about spiders, about rats, about snakes and all of the other creepy crawlers that had the same notion as me as I slide up under the house. I try to think about Louis Armstrong instead. It’s warmer up under the house. There is no cement, no wind, and no horse sounds, so I press myself up against the dirt and pull the army jacket real tight against me.
I pull it tighter and tighter until I feel—
There’s something in the pocket of the old army jacket—something hard and solid that I hadn’t felt there before. I run my hands up and down it on the outside of the coat. There are so many pockets, it takes me a moment before I find the small zipper on the inside and—
Bullet shells.
I know what bullet shells are from so long ago that I’m not sure if the memory is real or not. I remember sitting in a wooden box way up in the middle of the woods. I’m sitting with my daddy and with—
Bullet shells, in the jacket. Something tells me not to touch them too much, so after I make sure what they are, I carefully zip the little pocket back up and lay there in the dark, shivering and wondering why this jacket would have bullet shells in it. But I’m too tired, hungry, cold and afraid to do any real figuring.
So, I let it go. I think about Louis instead. I play through his life in my mind, over and over again, until I forget where I am. I forget about the cold, the spiders, the rats.
Louis Armstrong is fourteen years old. He stands on Rampart Street, which is not far from this old house I’m up under. This was before the overpass, before the hospital, before everything got torn down and flooded and bulldozed and shut down for vice. Behind Louis is a long line of waifs. All of them are in tattered rags, some of their shirts are made from cornmeal bags and others from old faded curtains. They are hungry but not starving. Cold but not freezing. They sleep with a roof over their heads and have three small meals every day guaranteed thanks to Mr. Peter Davis.
Mr. Peter Davis, long and lanky and dressed in a scuffed old suit himself, is standing at the back of the procession. He has a top hat in his hand and is smiling. The residents of both the Quarter and Tremé are standing out in the street, watching the boys who are watching them back.
“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” Mr. Peter Davis cries out to the crowd. His voice is loud and clear and carries with it all the soul of New Orleans. He calls out over the clomping hooves of horses (clop, clop) and the chatter of the mamas and sisters and aunties who are out tossing their pots into the street or flapping long white pieces of laundry, beating rugs and all the other sounds of life.
“My name is Mr. Peter Davis, and I’m the head of musical instruction for the Colored Waif’s Home for Boys. Today, I’m very proud to announce that the boys have marched down this morning in order to play for you. Any and all donations will be much appreciated and will go towards new uniforms for our boys.”
Some of the men watching laugh. Comments are made about the raggedy state of the boys—some words colorful and fun, and some not so.
“Alright now, Louis. Do your thing, boy,” Mr. Pete whispers and nods his head like a proud father might do.
Louis smiles that smile. The one he will use for the rest of his life to put skeptics at ease, to worm his way down into your heart before he has even started to blow. He smiles and beams at the crowd. The cornet goes to his lips, the snare begins to pitter-patter, the bugle to wail, the sound of this place that comes up from the swampy ground in a way that no one can resist no matter how hard they try.
And then Louis lets out the first note. It’s slow at first but rises and twists. It throws all of the other instruments into the background.
The laundry sounds stop. The gossipers lose interest in their gossip and the men don’t dare to crack another joke.
The waifs march all through the neighborhood, smiling, blowing, beating, bowing, dancing, working and making everyone that sees them fall in love. Pocketbooks come out, coin purses, billfolds. This time the money goes into the top hat instead of cast out on the street. Every coin that goes in, every shining piece of silver, allows Louis’s smile to grow a little wider, for his back to straighten just a little bit more, and for his horn to blow in a way that is a little less tired and scared and alone
.
But in the crowd, there is a dark face.
It doesn’t smile but gets bigger, meaner closer.
It gets so close that I can finally make its features out, features that a boy can never forget.
When I see that face, I wake up under the darkness of that old house, and even though I’m freezing cold, my body is wet with sweat.
Eleven
It was indeed only a short walk from the music teacher’s studio to Dr. Sarah Weinberger’s clinic. Melancon had the opportunity to wonder, on his bright stroll through the uptown sunshine, why it was that psych clinics were never to be found in poor neighborhoods—in those places where the people might have real, honest-to-God problems to contend with. Instead, shrinks were mostly found right here, in the wealthy district, designed around self-indulgent, moneyed whiners. What could make your problems seem more trivial than arriving to your appointment in a hundred-thousand-dollar automobile?
Maybe the lack of sleep was just catching up with him. Not all that was trivial was worthy of scorn. He reminded himself of that fact while admiring the new flowers in bloom, and the way their pollen was causing Felix no end of watery eyes, sneezing, and red skin. Melancon lit a clove cigarette and looked up at the wavering blossoms with a smile on his weathered face.
“You reckon Julian is clean?” he asked his young, sneezing partner.
Felix cocked his head a bit and wiped at his nose with a handkerchief. “I don’t know, the charming Brit is always the bad guy in the movies, right?” he said between sniffles.
“If this was a movie I’d walk out and ask for my money back, probably go bowling instead.”
The young man was quiet for a moment.
“He didn’t strike me as capable of…you know. But I could see maestro being frustrated with the father, assuming the father didn’t play ball with all of Julian’s hopes and aspirations for Andre. To hear the way he talked, you could see he had some dreams pinned on the boy. That could make for a tense relationship with the family, especially if the father wanted to keep his son out of the limelight for a while.”
