Gods of New Orleans

by AJ Sikes

Something about New Orleans clawed at Emma, raked talons over her skin. She fought the urge to run and felt her feet winning the argument. No matter how much Eddie had promised her it would all work out, Emma’s doubt grew with every page Hardy flipped until he stopped and looked her in the eye.

  We’re sunk. We should have just stayed in Chicago City.

  Hardy sat back in his chair and stared at them. His veiled eyes glinted with something like delight or glee. For a second Emma felt the world fall away beneath her feet, and then her old spark lit up inside. She’d stared men down before, and gunned them down when she had no choice. With a breath, she drew herself up and did what Emma Farnsworth always did when comfort went out the window and made room for nothing but tension.

  “What kind of payment do you need, Mr. Hardy?”

  “Oh, it ain’t be paying Mistah Hardy you gotta worry about, Miss Lily White and Short Hair. You in Metairie now, and you say your destination be New Orleans proper. You gotta travel around, so you gotta pay up to Papa Lebat. Give him his rum, or his coffee. Maybe a cigar for smoking.”

  Emma gave a slight shake of her head without even trying. They had nothing.

  “Well, you got a key? A cane? Something he can lean on when he walks? The man is old. He bein’ older than New Orleans. But he still gotta walk around everyday, helpin’ people make their way in and out. You come in. If you wanna go out, then be pleasin’ Papa Lebat with what you offerin’ up to him.”

  Hardy waved a hand at the cloth draped box and moved out from behind his desk. He crossed the small space in one stride and pulled the fabric aside. Emma gasped and put a hand to her mouth as Eddie’s grip on her shoulder tightened. The fabric fell away, revealing a casket beneath it. Hardy opened the box and Emma steeled herself for the inevitable.

  She let out a deep sigh and almost laughed when she saw the offerings jumbled together in the box. Cigars poked up from among the items. Here and there a small bottle or jar of amber liquid in amongst steel cylinders. Emma read the brands of coffee on the cans.

  “Did you think we had the man inside, Miss Lily White? Did you think this box is bein’ for you? Is that what goin’ through your brain when Celestin Hardy show you the offerin’ box?”

  He leaned back on his heels and laughed deep and rich, like he had when he’d first greeted them.

  “N-no,” Emma said, letting out a nervous chuckle. Eddie stiffened beside her and she pulled herself up again, standing tall as she could against her lover, still sheltered by his embracing arm.

  “Mr. Hardy, we don’t have any of those things. We’ve just come from Chicago City, and‌—‌”

  Eddie interrupted her with a squeeze of her upper arm, and she happily let him try to smooth things with the station master.

  “Got family in the Easy. Gonna get back with them, but we ain’t got your offering needs. Got nothing but that ship outside, and that ain’t for trading. So what else we can do here to make our passage safe?”

  Hardy stood back and regarded Eddie. Emma’s eyes darted back and forth, watching the two men for signs that either would start swinging. Eddie still had one arm around her and the other held his sides. He’d be easy pickings if the station master wanted to play rough.

  Tension hung between the two men, and Emma shifted her weight so she could jump in front of Eddie if Hardy threw a punch.

  A knock on the door split the silence apart.

  “Come on inside then,” Celestin Hardy said, breaking eye contact with Eddie, but not before letting his grimace fall into a warm smile of greeting once more.

  The door opened and Emma turned to see the Conroy kid standing there. Aiden’s eyes said he’d rather be anywhere but New Orleans, and his hand shook as he held out a can of coffee.

  “Um, I heard you all talking and thought this would maybe help. I hope it’s enough, Mr. Hardy. It’s all we had up in the galley. We’d have more if I hadn’t made some up when we was flying down from Memphis, but we was all tuckered out, and . . .”

  Hardy’s smile had gone, and his face fell into a mask of suspicion. The kid trailed off and squeezed his lips together to keep them from trembling off his face. He turned and handed the coffee to Emma.

  “Thanks, Aiden,” she said. “Thank you.”

  Emma passed the can to Hardy. He accepted it with both hands and deposited it into the open casket. With a tender movement, he closed the lid and replaced the shroud. Then with a flourish of his left hand, Hardy produced three tin badges from a pocket or maybe thin air, Emma couldn’t tell which because his hands seemed to move every way at once.

  “These be your markers of safe passage in New Orleans,” Hardy said, handing the badges to Eddie, then Emma, and finally Aiden.

  “Put them on your shirts or keep them in your pockets. But always have these on your persons when you outside. On the street, day or night. You be found in the wrong part of town without Papa Lebat’s blessin’ token, and is nothin’ can be done to help you.”

  Emma fumbled with the badge, trying to pin it to the thick wool of her coat, but gave up and settled for tucking it into her pocket. Eddie struggled to fit his into a pants pocket until she helped him out. Aiden managed to work the clasp and had his pinned just below his collar. Hardy chuckled and clapped his hands.

  “You do fine here, little dove. Just you count on it. You do fine in New Orleans.” He chuckled once more before he touched a hand to Emma’s wrist and ushered the three of them outside.

  The Conroys stood against the wall of the shack. The mother had been crying, and the father seemed about ready to snap out of his own skin with either fright or rage, Emma couldn’t tell which.

  Hardy came around her and aimed his welcoming smile at the white couple.

  “You got nothing to be worryin’ about. But . . .” Hardy paused to jab a cautionary finger into the air in front of their faces. He had warning eyes for Emma, too, before turning back to the Conroys.

  “You raise your voice, lift a hand, or, blessed mama protect you, a weapon against a one of us, and the Devil hisself be a kinder man than any you will find in New Orleans. You be comin’ down from Chicago City way, and that way is not our way. If you wantin’ to survive, you believe me this is true.”

  As if on cue, a trio of men, two dark-skinned and one white, appeared a ways down the mooring deck. Emma couldn’t tell if they’d been there all along or if they’d just popped into existence. Either could have happened, she knew, and that knowledge gave her no comfort at all. The three men strolled down the deck like they owned the place, and judging from the fur-trimmed coat the middle one wore, and the gold rings on his fingers, they probably did.

  The man in the middle, one the dark-skinned men, stood only as tall as Emma herself, but he made up for it around his waist. His footsteps thunked down onto the mooring deck with a force that Emma felt rattle her ankles. To either side of him marched one of his boys, big and making no mystery of the fact that they packed all the heat their boss would need. Emma had no trouble identifying them. A torpedo was a torpedo, no matter if you were in Chicago City or Timbuktu.

  “Mistah Bacchus,” Hardy sang out as the big man and his toughs approached. “A fine welcome to you on this mornin’.”

  “Celestin Hardy,” the man said, his voice rolling across the air like a thunderstorm. “I do hope I am not intruding upon your business, though I must ask what business you find yourself conducting this morning. On my mooring deck.”

  The man finished with a chuckle that rumbled in his throat and shook his heavy mass. Hardy didn’t speak right away. The two torpedoes stayed straight and narrow, eyes scanning the small crowd around Hardy. Emma watched the torpedoes’ hands, waiting for them to snatch at their lapels to pull out a gat. She’d dive to the left, push Eddie out of the line of fire. The others would have to take their chances.

  “Mistah Bacchus,” Hardy said, finding his voice at last. “I was, in fact, just relievin’ you of a problem from long ago. One problem by the name of Otis Martin, if you recall t
he man and what he do.”

  “I do. I do,” Bacchus said, still smiling like the reaper come calling. “That, Celestin, is the reason for my visit, you no doubt have guessed. But I mean to inquire, again, as to the nature of your business with these pretty little doves.” He stepped closer to the Conroys as he spoke, stopping within arm’s reach of the parents. The kid stayed behind his pa, but kept his head out so he could see what was happening.

  Emma watched the two heavies, who kept their hands in sight at all times. The next thing she knew, Alice Conroy was screaming blue murder and her husband roared like a lion.

  Emma turned in time to see the wife shrinking away from the reaching hand of Mr. Bacchus, who had a lock of her hair entwined in his thick dark fingers. The husband leaped forward, knocking the gangster’s hand aside. In a flash, Hardy had a knife in his hand, pulled from some hidden sheath in his coat. Emma screamed as the knife went through Al Conroy’s hand and drove it back against the wall of the station house behind him.

  The knife came out as quick as it went in. Hardy wiped the blade on Al Conroy’s sleeve and replaced the weapon where he’d kept it hidden inside his coat.

  “I warned you, Mister Big, White, and Dumb. I warned you. Don’t say I didn’t.”

  Emma reached for Eddie and held on to him, visions of their last moments in Chicago City burning through her mind. Aiden went to his father’s side and stood up straight, looking Hardy in the eye, but the kid’s heart wasn’t in it. His feet said I dare you, but his face just begged to be left alone. Al Conroy held his hand against his chest and whimpered as he fell into a squat against the station house. His wife went to him and shot a glare of tear-stained venom at Hardy.

  From her right, Emma caught the beefy voice of Mr. Bacchus, telling his boys to go inside. The two bruisers did as they were told. Hardy moved to follow them into the station house, but his boss put a hand up and the man stopped.

  “I believe we owe the man a book, do we not?” Bacchus said. His voice still scraped against Emma’s eardrums, like a rasp on stone.

  Hardy’s face pinched up like he smelled something he didn’t like, and Emma didn’t miss the look the man almost gave to Bacchus. Then Hardy reached a hand back into his coat and fished around for something. Emma winced, half worried that a book was some kind of street talk in New Orleans for a bullet to the heart. But Hardy stepped fast into the station house and came out just as quick holding a slim book, like a magazine almost, with a green cover. He flung it on the deck at Al Conroy’s feet.

  “Dat book be savin’ you a whole lot of trouble,” Hardy said, looking at Aiden, who still had his gaze fixed on Hardy’s own.

  “What is it?” Aiden asked. The kid’s mother squeaked in terror and flashed a look between her son and Hardy’s hand that hovered over his lapels.

  “It’s the book, Little Dove. White folk who be walkin’ and travelin’ around New Orleans like to be havin’ an idea of where ‘tis safe to go. The book tell you dat. You read up and you tell your Mama and your clipped Pappy here. They know what’s bein’ good for ‘em, they listen to you.”

  Hardy finished with a finger aimed at the kid’s chest and a glare at Aiden’s folks. Then he turned on a heel and stalked into the station house, leaving Emma and the others alone with Bacchus and his toughs.

  “Lest we move any farther down this path,” Bacchus said. “I hope all you doves remember what happened here this morning. And now I bid you good day. And welcome to New Orleans.”

  The heavyset man draped in fur and glittering gold took a short step back. He smiled before he slipped between shadows and early morning mists, leaving nothing in his wake but a fluttering curtain of air above the weathered boards of the mooring deck.

  The Conroy dame gasped and snapped her eyes to look back at her husband, who kept his face bunched up to hold in his tears. The kid shuffled his feet and made like he wanted to help but just didn’t know what to do. He reached for the little green book that Hardy had tossed on the deck.

  “We should . . . we should probably get out of here,” Emma said.

  The kid looked at her like he would reply, but his mother got there first.

  “Yes. You should. You should both go.”

  Emma wanted to tell her it wasn’t like that. That she meant they should all leave together. But the lady’s face said nothing doing. If those eyes of hers were gun barrels, Emma knew she’d be a fool to stare the woman down for another second.

  Putting an arm around Eddie’s waist, she helped him down the deck, leaving the Conroy family behind. She gave a glance back, just to be sure. The parents sat together in a heap, the father holding his hand against his chest and both of them sobbing like it was all they had left to do. The kid kneeled down by them, but he was watching Emma and Eddie leave. He lifted a limp hand to wave, like a bird with a broken wing trying its damnedest to fly from danger.

  Chapter 9

  Brand hears the gunshot. He can even see the man who falls and knows who it is. Otis, the other Negro they’d rescued from Wynes’ little lynching party back in Chicago City.

  But Brand can’t get up there, up those stairs and onto the deck where the Vigilance hangs heavy and dark. He can feel the ship watching him, but he also feels it pushing him back, like it somehow knows he’s trouble.

  “Gave you enough trouble already, hey?” he says, and decides to find someplace to hunker down and hide. At least he’s above ground now, on the street and not in it.

  Brand squats on his bare feet, puts his back against one of the posts of the mooring deck. Lake Pontchartrain kisses the shore a few hundred feet away. The sound of water lapping at mud comes to Brand’s ears along with other sounds of a lakeside coming to life in the early morning. Coughing and wheezing startles him, and he jerks upright on his tired, naked feet. He sees tramps rising from around the airfield.

  They come out of ruined cars and trucks, and the beat-up hulks of old airships. Brand ignores the tramps for a second, his eyes riveted to the wrecked airships, large and small, their frames like skeletons that have long since spilled their guts and sloughed off their skin.

  A group of tramps shuffles away into the morning, then another. Stragglers come out like cattle to the farmer’s call, lowing in a chorus of hacking coughs, spitting, and groaning as they stretch their legs and reach withered limbs to the sky. Spines, joints, and jaws crack and pop as the tramps stretch, and then they’re on their way, all of them. All but one group.

  The layabouts stay huddled under a piece of old canvas in the remains of an airship closer to the lakeshore. They’ve hung the canvas like an awning from the frame of the ship to the branches of a tree. Brand sees more canvas hanging from the airship frame.

  Brand realizes the tramps aren’t chasing him. The ones who left and these he sees now in their shelter. They aren’t made of mud. These tramps here in the airfield are real men. Flesh and blood, just like he feels himself to be flesh and blood. Still. Even after what he’s done to himself, he still feels alive.

  No. That’s wrong. What he feels most of all is cold.

  His naked feet are freezing, nearly numb but still able to send knives of ice up his lower legs. Brand shivers and wraps his arms around himself tighter, watching the tramps by the lakeshore. They’ve lit a fire and Brand is on his feet now, walking across the mud with careful steps, watching out for every puddle, every slick patch that might hide a deeper pit beneath it.

  He makes it close enough that the men notice him. He sees heads jerking his way, but the tramps’ faces are still indistinct. Three men surround the small fire in the close space of the canvas shelter. One stirs a pot now, hanging it over the fire using a pair of blacksmith’s tongs. The other two huddle together nearby, their dusky faces alight in the glow of the flames.

  Brand is close enough to see that both of them have their eyes closed. The third, at the fireside, has his eyes closed also. When the man turns his face to Brand to greet him, opening his eyes, Brand screams and stumbles backward.

/>   “Oh!” says the tramp with no eyes holding the pot with the tongs. “Do forgive me. It is long since the Three Blind Men have been approached by a fellow traveler beside the waters of Lake Pontchartrain.”

  “Who‌—‌who the hell are you?” Brand says, still on his ass in the mud. He stays there out of instinct. This isn’t the first time he’s found himself in such a position and happy to simply be alive to experience the sensation. At least this time it isn’t the Kaiser’s mortars that put him here.

  The tramp by the fire stirs his pot and grins. His eyes are closed again, and Brand wonders why he doesn’t just keep them that way since he’s got nothing to see with.

  “You got a name, pal?” Brand tries again.

  “A name,” the tramp says, setting the pot aside. He removes a mitten and wipes his thick fingers down both cheeks, like he’s preening for a photograph. He smooths the snarled salt-and-pepper whiskers on his dark face, but they pop back up again, jutting out like some kind of fungus on the bark of a tree. “Surely I do have a name,” he says, putting the mitten back on and taking up the tongs and pot again.

  Brand is about to ask the man for his name a second time when the tramp speaks, his graveled voice carrying a hint of humor across the cold morning air to Brand’s ears, like the man would laugh if only he could remember how.

  “My name is Barnaby Augustine Fellows, and it is a tragedy that I have spoken so much at length but have not yet introduced myself to you. If I may ask your name now, sir, so that acquaintance can be a word we use with honesty.”

  Brand sits up and moves across the ground to accept the shelter of the canvas. He puts his back to the tree and chuckles at the tramp’s talk, his fancy words and the airs he wears like medals on a dead man’s chest.

  “Name’s Brand. Mitchell Brand. No middle name in there because Mother Brand didn’t go in for that sort of thing.”

  “Well met, Mitchell Brand. And is it Mitchell, or do you accept Mitch as a substitute?”

  Brand thinks for a second. His only friend in Chicago City used to call him Mitch, but they’d been in the war together, flying observation missions over No Man’s Land in ‘17 and ‘18. His newsboys called him Mr. Brand, but that was kids talking to a man, nothing like this exchange between equals he’s faced with now.