Chasing the Devil's Tail

by David Fulmer

  So it was only fitting that as he was arriving there late that afternoon, J. Picot was coming down the broad stone steps. The policeman stopped in his tracks and looked St. Cyr up and down, his lips curling. "Now what?" When the Creole detective didn't answer directly, Picot's grimace turned into a thin smile. "You here about Bolden? I heard they brought him in last night. Everybody heard. He was yellin' and screamin', fightin' with the officers. They had to put him down."

  "Put him down how?" Valentin asked.

  Picot made a lazy mime of swinging a club. "Knocked him cold, I hear. But I wasn't there," he added with a tone of regret. He fastened a hard eye on St. Cyr. "What, you goin' his bail now?"

  Valentin shrugged. The copper shook his head. "I wouldn't waste my money. They need to throw away the key on that one. Nothin' but a rowdy. We get more calls when that band of his is playing somewhere. It makes people crazy. There oughta be a law." Picot's expression turned sardonic. "But while you're inside, go ahead ask him about that Negro girl over to Cassie Maples'," he said.

  Valentin glanced at him sharply, but the copper had turned abruptly and was walking down the steps. "Watch yourself round here," he snickered over his shoulder. "You wouldn't want to find yourself locked up with him." That would mean locked up in the Colored section, as they both knew. Picot strolled off.

  The fellow who had caused all the ruckus presented such a picture staring out from the dim shadows of the cell that Valentin almost smiled. Buddy looked exactly like he had when they were kids and caught in some mischief: baffled by the fuss, but mostly indignant at being nabbed at all. Valentin stepped closer and noticed his right eye, slightly swollen, and purple-blue tinge of bruises here and there on his head. Behind him on a pallet on the stone floor, a lump of putrid-smelling humanity lay snoring up a storm. Up and down the narrow corridor echoed sounds and smells more akin to Audubon Zoo.

  "Buddy?" Valentin said.

  "My horn," Bolden murmured in a tragic voice. "They took my horn."

  "What happened?" Valentin said.

  The prisoner turned away and began pacing behind the bars. "I don't know. One minute we were playing. The next thing I know there's all this noise and the coppers came in and they carried me away."

  "You scuffled with them."

  Bolden stopped his pacing. "Did I?" He looked confused. "Well, they took my horn," he repeated. Valentin noticed the hands fidgeting about, and it occurred to him that it had been years since he had seen Buddy without a silver cornet either dangling from his fingers or stuck to his lips.

  "Where's Nora?" he was saying. "Is she coming to get me out?"

  "She can't get you out. They're going to hold you."

  Buddy's face twisted up with a finicky disgust. Valentin understood. King Bolden had abruptly become a common criminal, stuck in Parish Prison, just another no-account nigger tramp like the rest of them up and down the line of cells. He blinked tensely. "For how long?"

  "Probably two days."

  "Two days!"

  "It's nothing," Valentin said. "They'll take you out with a gang to clean up the Market." Bolden's face fell further. "You want me to go see her?" Buddy shrugged and muttered something. "It's only for the two days," Valentin said. "Then I'll come collect you."

  King Bolden slumped against the steel bars. "What did they do with my horn?" he said.

  Valentin stepped out into a cloudy evening. The streets around him moved in lazy slow-motion with citizens on end-of-the-day errands, sports getting an early line on the night's action, the odd drunkard drifting along on a cloud of cheap whiskey. As he stood on the corner of Canal and Marais, lost in his thoughts, the first thick drops of a Louisiana thundershower splattered on the banquette.

  He bent his head, jammed his hands in his pockets and turned down Canal, walking into the approaching storm. He went at a hard pace, his shoes slapping water, putting distance between himself and that grim hulk of a jailhouse. He made his way south by ducking into doorways and under colonnades, stopping here and there for a few moments as the rain turned streets into shallow lagoons, then moving on. By the time he had reached Basin Street, he was half-soaked. He found a dry spot in the doorway of Cairo Club, closed for the night, and drew a thin cigar from his vest pocket. He struck a lucifer on the brick wall and smoked as he watched the hard rain sweep over Storyville.

  In the space of a week, he had stood over the corpses of Littlejohn and two sporting girls, both of whom had been left with a black rose. He had taken a strange trip to Jackson with an old priest. And now he had seen King Bolden locked up in Parish Prison.

  He guessed that the first three killings would add up to nothing. The Angel of Death stayed busy on these streets of New Orleans, and homicide was only part of his gruesome harvest; there were ravaging diseases and bizarre accidents and slow suicides to add to the tally, as evidenced by two cemeteries—St. Louis No. 1 and No. 2—so full of victims that they were buried atop each other, stacked like cordwood. Around those parts, slipping gently into the Bosom of God took some doing.

  So he could forget about the pimp, and Annie Robie and Gran Tillman wouldn't be far behind. Even with Bolden and the priest to muddy the waters, there was nothing to make a fuss over. Old men's wits failed; and Bolden in jail was not exactly a surprise, either. Even Buddy knowing Annie Robie was no great mystery. Back-of-town was nothing if not a small village, so why wouldn't he know such a young, pretty girl?

  The black roses were curious, but more than likely a coincidence, like Anderson claimed. Valentin had thought about visiting the local floral shops and ask about anything suspicious, then dismissed the idea. There were only two flowers, after all. It would be a waste of time. Odd things happened daily in Storyville. Once the sun went down, it was all a cheap carnival, layer on layer of illusion pasted on scarlet streets. That was the District, a thousand strange players shoved together on one crowded stage.

  He let out a plume of smoke and turned his thoughts back to Bolden, now sitting in that dank cell. He could not remember Buddy even getting into schoolboy fights. No, young Charles Bolden didn't roughhouse much at all; and when he began with his music, he stayed off the streets and out of trouble altogether.

  But the person he'd left at Parish Prison was not the Buddy Bolden he'd known back those long years ago. That fellow had been replaced by this raw, desperate character who too often had the eyes of a stranger.

  Standing under the dripping eave, he shook his head at his own dramatics. He admitted what his thoughts had been teasing: that he would love the random pieces to assemble into a mystery, something beside the callow fringes of the flesh trade to engage him. And a chance to tangle with an evil and put something right.

  He pitched the butt of the cigarillo into the gutter, watched the rushing water carry it away, then took out his pocket watch, glanced at it, and put it back. He stood under the overhang for another long minute, pondering what to do next, where to go. The rain was getting lighter. It would move on soon.

  He had said something to Buddy about paying a visit to Nora. But he knew he could just as easily step onto the banquette, walk south, make a few turns and be back at his rooms before darkness fell. Bolden would never know the difference and he could put an end to his day.

  More minutes passed and then he stepped to the corner and climbed aboard the streetcar heading west.

  The car came to a stop and he stepped down. The rain had passed, leaving white tatters that snaked off the cobblestones like thin ghosts. The last rays of evening sun were peeking through the high distant clouds, casting the city streets in a soft mist the color of a seashell.

  He stood on the corner, remembering. Across the way was the shave and barbering parlor at First and Liberty. Now run by Mr. Louis Jones, it was Nate Joseph's when Valentin was a kid, and was known as much as an informal social club and musicians' employment office as a barbering parlor.

  But a barbering parlor it was, of course. He saw himself, a small boy, his tiny hand in his father's thick one, walking up
to the double doors early on a Saturday afternoon. Inside, the solemn wink of greeting from Nate to his father. Being lifted onto the child's seat that crossed from arm to arm. The barber throwing the cape like a matador, the billow a white sail that seemed to fill the tiny room before settling over him, right down to his shoes. Then stopping to pour his father a glass of brandy before he got to the business at hand. His father's face was reflected in the glass, watching with a lazy but critical eye the career of the scissors. And if young Valentin sat still and did not fuss, a piece of caramel candy to enjoy on the way home.

  Later, he and Buddy stood outside, looking through the glass at the fancy men preening for a Saturday night's action, getting their shaves, haircuts, manicures, and shoeshines. It was a ritual as stylized as Mass, and for the two boys, a glance beyond their childhood world into something strange and wild.

  The men: Creoles of every shade, redheads with dark freckles on russet skin, tans and high yellows and black, black, African-looking sports. Now and then, one olive-skinned like Valentin. Their hair was pomaded or oiled shiny. There were diamonds on their fingers and garters and stuck on pins in their ties. Tiny envelopes with cocaine and cards of hop peeked from vest pockets. The shapes of spring knives or straight razors showed in their trousers, but pistols were checked at the door.

  "Here, sir," old Nate would implore, his voice soft, soothing. "Let me take that for you," as if relieving the customer of a tiresome burden. And the oily blue-black weapon nestled with the others in a drawer beneath the mirror.

  They took their turns dropping into a chair with its brass fittings and leather the color of old blood. They watched the world through cool, sleepy eyes like snakes, and like snakes they were always ready to strike. But they relaxed now, as the darkness fell and Nate pampered their heads and faces, one assistant tended to their manicures, and yet another shined their shoes.

  Buddy and Valentin knew the cast of characters like some boys knew the players on a baseball club or the gamblers knew the horses at the Fairgrounds. So they noticed when suddenly one disappeared. Before long, they'd know why: in jail or dead, for the most part. But always there was another candidate to slip into the vacated place.

  They were gawky kids, both growing too fast for their clothes. Buddy, brown-skinned, getting tall, Valentin shorter, his skin so light so people often thought he was plain Dago. The two of them stood shoulder to shoulder, staring wide-eyed into that waiting room to the world of night. And the scenes beyond the glass were caught and held in time, like one of Papa Bellocq's photographs.

  Still later, Valentin was sent off to Chicago just as Buddy's widowed mother was taking up with Manuel Hall, a plasterer by day and musician by night. It was Hall who taught Buddy the rudiments of the horn, but student quickly outstripped teacher, and Master Bolden left school to play music and work day jobs. Along the way, he fathered a son by a local girl, both of whom he promptly forgot.

  By the time Valentin came back from his wanderings, Buddy was a bit player in the cast at the Louis Jones Shaving Parlor, because it was there and at the other barber shops around uptown New Orleans that band leaders left word that they were hiring for this job or that.

  He was not yet spending his nights there, lazing with the sports. He had a pretty wife and new baby girl and half of a double shotgun down on First Street, just up the street from the house he grew up in. That all came later, when his horn and his good looks and his reputation turned him into one of the fancy men that a new crowd of young boys ogled through the tall windows.

  That was right about the time that Valentin joined the New Orleans Police Department. They saw each other now and then, but Kid Bolden was now a regular rounder and St. Cyr was a copper; they were set apart by their choice of uniforms and, truth be told, embarrassed by each other. It was after Valentin quit the force over the rough business with his sergeant and began working the back-of-town streets that their paths crossed again. The friendship resumed, awkwardly at first, then with more comfort. But a distance remained, and they both knew it would never go away.

  Valentin strolled by the shop, saw only a solitary barber sitting in a chair, reading a newspaper. It was early; people were still at their suppers.

  He walked down two blocks to the corner of First Street and picked out one of the white clapboard shotgun houses that lined the streets in every direction, set apart from the others only by the number 2719. The street was quiet. He put a foot on the perron and knocked.

  Nora Bolden opened the door. Her eyes flashed with surprise, then settled on him with an inscrutable calm. "Is he dead?" she said.

  Nora asked if they could walk. She left Bernedette with the next-door neighbor and they strolled to the corner of Philip and Howard, then east in the general direction of downtown, away from the neighborhood.

  Valentin figured that she did not want to happen upon Buddy's mother and sister, who lived around the corner on Howard Street. He recalled Buddy telling him that Nora never liked his family, she called them "funny." Though she was religious, he guessed she had a superstition about whatever had gotten hold of him. One person picked up a curse or some other gris-gris, the whole family suffered. It could be in the blood and it could go back generations.

  She was a small, very pretty woman of medium-brown skin, a good mother and life-long member of St. John Fourth Baptist Church who now found herself in a common-law marriage with a madman.

  As they walked, she began to recount her own version of the tale. Everything had been good at first, though she fretted over Buddy leaving steady jobs playing in parades and at concerts and white folks' dances to work in filthy Rampart Street saloons. She recalled him all happy at getting to lead his own little band, how he heard himself called "Kid Bolden" for the first time and rushed home to tell her about it.

  She allowed herself a small smile. It was not so long after that people on the street started to talk about The Bolden Band, kids peeked in the windows to see her husband, young women at church looked him up and down and wet their lips.

  His star rose. The word spread that his band could play anything, from sweet and solemn spirituals to double-time rags to gutbucket blues that would milk blood from a rock. And the show he put on! People loved it that Kid Bolden didn't sit stuck to a chair like the others. He got up and moved, up and down the stage, using his horn like a magic wand and sometimes like something dirty. Nora watched as he began to change, as he got lost in all the fawning attention, as he fell prey to the free whiskey and the loose women.

  But it was really always the music. Thomas Edison had invented the machine to make sound recordings on cylinders of wax and then play them back. It was a true wonder, and as soon as the first contraption arrived in New Orleans, Buddy herded his band to the back room of the music store on Canal Street and made a recording, a rushed mess that convinced him to tear that band apart, build another. And then a third and a fourth and each one moved him more out in front, like the engine on a fast train.

  How it all got crazier then! People rushed to listen to his wild music, to stomp their feet and yell, to flail about like they were in the jungle somewhere. At Longshoreman's Hall on South Rampart or Odd Fellows Hall in Storyville or Masonic Hall across the river in Algiers, at the outdoor dances in Jackson and Johnson Parks, in dirty saloons and in pavilions built on pilings on the waters of Lake Pontchartrain. Anywhere Buddy's band played, a crowd gathered. And it wasn't just colored folk either; downtown Creoles and even some reckless young whites from proper Garden District families were coming round to see what all the fuss was about.

  So his one or two late nights a week turned into five or six. And then "Kid" became "King." And the music changed, not just popular styles "jassed-up" or "ragged," like they called it; Buddy turned everything around, then inside out.

  Nora didn't understand what he was playing at all. She didn't hear the music; it sounded like a mush of noise. She didn't understand why it made people so frantic. She didn't understand why it started young girls fighting
over who would hold his coat and scarf (but never his horn; he never let anyone touch his horn). She didn't get all the rambunctious motion up on the bandstand. And, as the months passed, she realized that she no longer knew the man who was her husband and father to her daughter.

  But he was part-time in that role anyway, staying with her, disappearing and turning up at his mother's house on Howard Street, then disappearing again and coming home days later as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

  They started having spats. Buddy would be calm and sweet one moment, in a rage the next, stomping from one end of the shotgun house to the other, ranting nonsense and scaring the daylights out of Bernedette. Then he was quiet again, lying on the couch with a wet cloth across his face. He got headaches.

  Nora knew about the drinking, suspected opium. She didn't mention the women, either, though she surely knew about all them, too. It had been going on for a year or more, Buddy tottering around his home life with his wife and child, then crashing off into uptown New Orleans like some animal released from a cage.

  "And this time they took him to jail," she said, ending on a weary note.

  Valentin looked at her. "This time?"

  "Oh, I had to call the po-lice myself," she said. "Once when he came in all crazy and started breaking things. The other when he stood outside the house in the middle of the night. Yelling like a crazy man. Woke up half the neighbors. The coppers came out, got him settled down."

  "Yelling about what?"