COLORBLIND
A MYSTERY
Peter
Robertson
ALSO BY PETER ROBERTSON
Mission
Permafrost
GIBSON HOUSE PRESS
Flossmoor, Illinois 60422
GibsonHousePress.com
© 2016 Peter Robertson
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13: 978-0-9855158-8-1 (ePub)
Cover design: Christian Fuenfhausen
DEDICATION
for my family
One
I stood in the ruin of the front room. I was here in the pale blue house on Lizardi Avenue for the first and last time.
The house had long stood empty, tideswept and abandoned after the storm waters had destroyed and then departed. When I placed my hand on the top of the mantelpiece the wood was remarkably unspoiled, the varnished red-brown mahogany still hardy and resilient beneath a layer of dirt and dust.
Underneath the mantelpiece were exposed bricks that formed a small fireplace. Inside the hearth lay a few pieces of worn green glass attached to paper covered in a printed but illegible message.
The front room gave way to a larger living area, a dining room or possibly a bedroom at one time. A bathroom was off a hallway that led to a small galley kitchen in the back of the house. All the rooms were mostly empty but ruined and filthy, detached from their furnishings, never washed in a decade of sustained neglect.
In the hallway, strips of peeling wallpaper hung low, exposing the mottled plaster underneath. One ceiling section, wooden and tenaciously clinging to all its paint, exposed the rectangular outline of a trapdoor. Its metal handle, centered and rusty and several feet above my head, was beyond my reach.
In the kitchen a stark hole stood where the dishwasher had once belonged, while the old-style stove had been callously rejected and trashed. The plaster wall where the refrigerator had once stood was wet and crumbling to the floor, where pieces of inexpensive tile lay broken in pieces.
I went out to the overgrown back yard, where I inadvertently stumbled over a green wooden stool camouflaged in waist-high grass. It was upside down and miraculously intact.
Back inside the house, I stood on the stool and pulled hard on the trapdoor handle. After a struggle it slid slowly downwards and the steps stuck out like a metal tongue.
They were solid under my weight as I climbed.
The upstairs air was dry and segmented by shafts of sunlight.
The attic room ran the length of the house, with exposed wood beams triangulating to create a canted ceiling, low at the sides, yet high enough to let me stand up straight in the center. The space was still cool this early in the morning. The windows at each end of the attic stood half open to produce a gentle breeze.
In the center of the room, a sleeping bag folded in half had a guitar case spread across it.
Under the front window stood a wooden chair in shade, with cotton trousers folded neatly over a thin sweater. A pair of gym shoes with socks wedged inside was tucked under the chair. Beside the chair was a cheap plastic basin, with a dried-up toothbrush and tube of generic toothpaste tossed inside. A hard sliver of cracked soap lay on the floor.
On the wall by the back window a towel hung high from a nail. A decade of sun damage had leached most the color from the tattered fabric.
I held my breath and knelt down to open the guitar case. Inside was the instrument I had never expected to find. It was surely his guitar–the same instrument from the front cover of his only existing recording. There was almost no dust across the age-darkened honey maple wood, and the fretboard looked to be unbuckled and true. There were six steel strings, brittle and rusted out but still taut.
I lifted the guitar by the neck and held it. A compartment inside the case stored a black metal capo and a thin brown leather bracelet. Under the bracelet was a folded piece of notepaper. The capo was the exact same model as the one I owned.
I unfolded the paper. The lyrics of a song were inscribed neatly in permanent ink. A series of letter and number notations were written above the lines. I recognized minors and sevenths and sharps and flats, unevenly spaced but not random. This was a chord chart.
He’d titled it “Kind Words.” The title was written above a simple dedication:
For my daughter, Catriona, whom I lost.
The paper had aged to a dark yellow.
On the back windowsill, an inch of melted white candle stood in the center of a small plate like a tiny monument. I reached out and touched the candlewick. It smudged black between my fingers.
If I waited long enough, would the room reveal something of its departed? Of its antiquity?
I refolded the paper as it had been. I took the bracelet. I placed them both in my pocket. I ran my hand across the strings, praying that the wood had stayed dry. I lifted the instrument up, tightened the highest string carefully, and plucked the harmonic at the twelfth fret. I played the open string. To my ears the two notes sounded alike.
It was a hopeful sign.
I drew my hand across all six strings. I kidded myself that this was one of his elusive tunings, and not a random sampling of time and damage and desertion. I held his old guitar in my hands and I shut my eyes.
Afterwards I put the instrument inside and closed the case.
I looked around one last time. There was nothing else in the attic–no miraculously preserved notebook containing his other songs, no other parcel of lost writings, no words of either enigma or explanation.
This place on Lizardi Avenue, in the crushed heart of New Orleans, was a southern place, where there was no escape from the heat. This was the extended midpoint of my journey in a town as far south as I would travel, and the longest I would stay in one place.
The aftermath of this journey would be a matter of loose ends. My month had begun in one of Chicago’s southern suburbs on a cold spring morning, and would end on the waterfront in West Seattle on another chilly day.
The song I’d discovered would surely arrive at its intended destination. The bracelet I would also hand over, on a whim, and the guitar would be sent away, a play for time, for safekeeping, and for some gentle restoration. When it was all mended, I would decide what to do. I could wrap it up and ship it home, or I could offer to carry it there myself.
By then I would be more than ready to take another trip.
* * *
During the course of my journey I would drive over three and a half thousand miles, be proven wrong several times, and fail to answer most of the questions that I started with. All of which begs the multifaceted question: Why was I wrong so often? Why did I fail to learn anything?
Giving the matter some thought, the answer, I suspect, is that my failures illustrate a singular negative constant—the inability to recognize patterns. I couldn’t see those that actually existed, usually because I manufactured and admired the more seductive and flamboyantly false ones of my own invention. I also erred in observing that randomness can easily mimic order and vice versa, when it chooses to, or when we stubbornly try to impose our own sense of an imperative upon it.
I’m well aware that this story is not starting at the very beginning. I should apologize for that. Unfortunately, I am still somewhere in the middle.
* * *
The doggedly enduring city of New Orleans comprises a handful of long storied streets. These culturally iconic thoroughfares traverse and triumph over dirty water. They lead to areas of abject poverty and beaten down yet evocative locales that have stubborn and enduring sentimental value. Legendary streets like Chartres and Royal and Rampart are prime examples of this beguiling dual functionali
ty. And all three of these legendary roads intersect Lizardi Avenue at some shameful juncture.
The distance between squalor and sentiment is a lot shorter than anything else in this languid place. This locale moves with southern slowness, either unwilling to break into an unseemly show of Yankee-like sweat, or risk cracking open the myth and exposing an underbelly ripe with despair.
The locals ascribe a pleasing symmetry to their town, referring to the city as a crescent. Tourists are baffled by the description. To most of us the town exists as an improbable sponge. Its low-lying land mass is intersected by brackish waters of varying sizes: lakes, rivers, canals, and drainage channels. All exhibit disparate levels of insistent menace.
Did I somehow fail to mention that the cursedly contrary place is also close to irresistible?
I did.
But I digress.
* * *
I carefully carried his guitar case down the stairs. I stood on the kitchen’s tile floor and looked back up. Then I pushed the trapdoor until it was tightly closed once again. I took the stool back outside and placed it as close as possible to the place where I had found it.
Back in the front room, I noticed the brown waterline stood a mottled and indistinct three feet above the warped wood floorboards. The smell inside the house was mostly mature mold by this late stage. A few remnants of abandoned furniture were now nothing more than kindling stacked against the far living room wall. Outside that pale blue house, the grass was thick and wild all the way to the cracked edge of the tree-twisted sidewalk.
Lizardi Avenue has no bohemian sections filled with boldly experimental charter schools and Creole/fusion restaurants. There are no above-ground cemeteries holding the remains of belatedly revered jazz pioneers rubbing marble bones with voodoo enchantresses. Their largely unremarkable lives have been histrionically embellished over the years, to vend tour tickets and plastic gimcrack talismans.
For one thing, Lizardi doesn’t run the length of the city. It doesn’t get the chance to reinvent itself every few blocks as the districts change. Lizardi cuts across the town. Its route is a shorter distance both geographically and socioeconomically. In the South it comes to an ignoble and anonymous end a mere matter of yards short of the levee that can only pretend to restrain the Mississippi River. Residents know the water lurks on the other side of the gently rising grass, behind a rusted steel wall and a no man’s land of cracked mud and broken stone. All are parts of a verifiably abject folly.
Hurricane Katrina takes on different lives depending on which NOLA narrative you subscribe to. It was a blast from a bitter trumpeter god, a spiteful spy boy in a retributive second line blowing hard and righteously on an unrepentantly godless party town. Maybe it was the Army Corps of Engineers caught grafting and trimming, or a French Quarter/Garden District elite sociopolitical cabal armed with stress maps and well placed sticks of dynamite. Or was it simply one ING 4727 barge breaking loose and breaching the Industrial Canal walls before thrashing around in the Lower Ninth like a beached whale in an admittedly good-sized but hardly life-threatening late summer storm whipped up in the turbulent cauldron of the Gulf waters?
But whichever way, as Steve Earle would have it, there’s “nothing holding back Pontchartrain.”
There are a series of Katrina storylines that uneasily coexist by either relying on or beating against a number of hard, uncontestable facts. The storm was between Category 3 and Category 5 when it hit the city on August 29, 2005. There were a handful of major levee breaches over the next three days. Brackish water, measured to a depth of fifteen feet in some places, covered ninety percent of the city. The government response was disorganized at best. Most of the population followed the mayor’s advice and evacuated. The people squatting on their roofs, or left in the Astrodome to fend for themselves, or videotaped floating face down, were mostly poor, were mostly black, were mostly hopelessly unprotected, and were mostly very callously disenfranchised.
It was a cataclysmic clusterfuck in every sense of the word and, a decade later, it is still both a raw wound and an endlessly protracted re-ascendance in progress.
Not far from Lizardi, the Mississippi River enters the Industrial Canal, which was breached during the storm and its protracted aftermath. The two sections of water meet close to the austere, derelict facade of Holy Cross School, which battles humidity and nature on a weed-choked section of Dauphine. Deeper inside the canal resides an unintended steampunk construct, The St. Claude Bridge, which carries four lanes of pothole-bruised traffic between the Bywater and the Lower Ninth districts.
Around three hundred feet in from the levee, the canal waters had punished the 700-block of Lizardi less than other parts of the Lower Ninth. While much of the parish was swept apocalyptically clean for a restricted rebirth in measured, kaleidoscopic movie-star-sponsored projects, portions of Lizardi were simply left in myriad states of wildly disparate distress. This one particular block was functioning as a virtual cross-section of the city’s woes. It had a reserved resurrection at one extreme, an abject abandonment at the other, and so many illustrated stages easily observable in between.
I walked outside the blue house into the escalating warmth and leaned against my car. My one hand was damp inside the pocket of my trousers as I gently massaged the dried out leather of the bracelet back to life. I put the guitar inside the back of the car and cracked the two back windows open a bit more. There were now two guitars in cases in the Outback. I opened them both and pulled the matching black capos from each case. I held one in each hand for a second and quickly considered. Then I swapped them out, closing each case carefully before relocking the car.
A small act of deception. I wanted to have his for myself.
I unfolded the piece of paper and read it again.
It occurred to me that the names Katrina and Catriona were oddly similar.
I put the paper in my pocket and studied the post-storm tableau.
The first property on the 700-block was a double shotgun frame leaning hard on its neighbor like a loan shark on a delinquent account. The skeleton was both spindly and architecturally implausible. A wooden cart full of mature trash sat composting on broken axles and flat tires out front. The last remaining section of foundation was four sad concrete posts and a doorstep of pre-Katrina vintage, onto which the ramshackle latticing framework of treated timber was attached in a manner no self-respecting builder would wish to claim.
In an unlikely juxtaposition, next door stood a tiny single shotgun fully restored and all urban cute. The grass was neatly trimmed and the front door was new wood stained a lush blood red. An abandoned lot where the grass stood long and wild and gave no evidence of a building ever having stood there, stood next to it. Further down was another double shotgun fully upright. Pale yellow paint flaked off the front and Mardi Gras beads of indeterminate vintage hung gaudy and limp from the rickety wrought iron nailed loosely to the rotting veranda.
On the front steps, a pasty hipster-white trash hybrid male in a yellowing wifebeater sat listlessly, smoking weed and pointedly ignoring the large dog barking loudly somewhere inside.
From the side of the smaller and neater shotgun emerged a purebred hipster pushing an expensive black single-gear bicycle. He too sported a wifebeater and a shoulder bag and an instrument case, which I could only assume housed a tenor saxophone.
The two distinct evolutionary stages of hipsterdom glanced at each other with no visible display of emotion as the mobile one rode slowly away. The stationary guy continued to sit and sullenly smoke as the big dog kept right on barking.
I watched this silent exchange from my vantage point outside the pale blue house, which functioned as the final piece of this New Orleans tableau—the unintended memorial to Katrina’s victims.
It was still standing, more or less. A ratty squat, slowly subsiding, it bore the diagonally crossed scrawls of dark graffiti that the authorities used as they sea
rched through the waterlogged parishes. The markings were crude and overlapped the plywood boarding up the windows and the crumbling wood siding. They indicated the dates of the searches and how many still bodies were found inside the premises.
I studied the numbers. Four sets of diagonals meant four likely inspections. White paint. Orange paint. Brown paint. Black paint. Three sets had zeros in two places. The brown paint had the letters DEA in the left quadrant and nothing in the other three. I took the zeroes to be good signs. The brown was more worrisome. I opted for the optimistic view, choosing to believe that the blue house on Lizardi experienced no instance of hurricane-related death immediately following the flood, or later, even after three subsequent visits.
I was, I will readily admit, less than secure in my rosy conviction.
It was still early in the morning. A brace of thunderstorms had passed overnight, and deep puddles camouflaged the potholes that pockmarked the street.
With the two post-Katrina artifacts in my pocket, I walked the two blocks to the river, where I intended to make a right and track the worn stone footpath along the top of the levee. Then I would make my way to the gate for the pedestrian crossing at the St. Claude Bridge.
But here my simple plan floundered.
The beaten down grass on the embankment held a sea of people who all looked rushed even as they stood still. There were trucks parked and gliding cameras mounted along the section of the levee. Generators hummed and flimsy gantries of lights rose up to illuminate. In the calm vortex of all this studied kinetics sat two young actors on a bicycle made for two. One was tall and thin with a week’s beard and lank hair falling adorably into his eyes. The other was a pretty Vietnamese girl, very much the shorter of the two. They were both dark haired, both astride the old-fashioned bicycle on the side of the path. The tandem-style red clunker had big thick rubber tires, dull silver mudguards, and a basket for groceries, and whatever else, leather strapped onto the front. From somewhere out of sight, a directorial command was issued, and suddenly there was action. The two actors rode the tandem very well, the boy in back doing most of the serious pedaling, and the girl in front doing most of the serious talking and giggling as mounted cameras pursued on each side of the bike.
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