The Axeman’s Jazz

by Ray Celestin

  The convict had spent the night in the icy barracks, and had slept well despite the cold, tired as he was from the journey. The wagon took just over a day to travel from the isolated crook in the Mississippi where Angola was located, far up at the very edge of the state. Convicts were never transported after dark, so the Board of Control used the halfway houses as rest stations – this one being the very last link in the barbed-wire daisy-chain that led all the way to New Orleans.

  A few minutes after dawn the convict was awoken by the jab of a nightstick in his guts, and now he was being shadowed as he walked by the nightstick’s owner, an ominous man in a royal-blue warden’s uniform, who stared at the prisoner with a slant in his eye. After traversing four courtyards and waiting four times for gateways in fences to be unlocked for them by the guards, they eventually arrived at the compound’s front gate.

  ‘Patterson!’ shouted the warden.

  A toothless streak of a man, with a shotgun slung over his shoulder, appeared in the doorway of a sentry hut and grinned at them. He sauntered out of the hut, approached the bars that lay across the front gate, and undid the locks that kept them in place. Then he heaved the bars back and swung open the gate, its lower edge scraping against the uneven clay of the road.

  The warden tapped his nightstick on the prisoner’s shoulder and the prisoner turned to face him. Luca D’Andrea was a slight, dark-haired man in his early fifties, with a face that was both handsome and hollow, brown eyes sparkling under a soft, sorrow-filled brow. The warden removed the cuffs with a jangle of keys, and Luca rubbed his wrists. Then he nodded, as if to say thanks to his captor, and stepped through the gate onto the road outside.

  Boutte wasn’t much to look at. The road was rutted and dusty, and on either side scrubland stretched to the horizon, barren save for a few stubby, crippled trees. If there was any point that marked Luca’s transition from a prisoner to a free man, this was it, but he felt no joy, no sense of freedom, just a heavy, anxious uncertainty – the same feeling of dread that had racked him in the months leading up to his release.

  During the years of his incarceration he had been given two square meals a day, a place to lay his head, and enough work to stop him pondering the sorry turns his life had taken. From dawn till dusk, six days a week, he had farmed the Manhattan-sized penitentiary estate for the profit of the prison board. Angola had been named after the plantation on which it had been built, and the plantation had been named after the mother country of the slaves that had first worked its land. A fact which led the inmates to muse that when it came to back-breaking regimes, shackles and chains, Angola’s name wasn’t the only fragment of its slaving past that echoed into the present.

  Unlike most of the convicts, however, Luca hadn’t begrudged the work. He experienced a serenity in the fields that he had never known before, an acceptance of his place in the world that calmed and reassured him. But now he had no work to keep him from dwelling on memories he’d rather forget, and his days stretched into the future as empty as the scrublands in front of him.

  He peered down the road, and thought he could see New Orleans, just about visible on the horizon, dancing in and out of the shimmering mist that clung to the ground. He thought there was something vaguely feminine in the way the image moved through the haze, like a showgirl in a bar.

  ‘It’s a long way to the Big Easy,’ said a sarcastic, adenoidal voice behind him.

  Luca turned to see a thin, swarthy man leaning against the fence opposite, arms folded, smoking a cheap brand of cigarette. John Riley, a familiar but unwelcome face. During Luca’s trial, Riley’s newspaper had run a series of exposés on him, using editorials Riley had written to stoke up public outrage. The reporter smiled at him, reached into his pocket for a cigarette case of tarnished brass and proffered the contents to Luca. Luca peered at the cigarettes, picked one out, and Riley sparked a match for him.

  Luca studied Riley’s face and noticed how he had aged. Riley had always sported dark patches around his eyes, but now they were more noticeable, more ingrained, and they were accompanied by hollowness around the cheekbones, a stretched, almost mummified pallor. Riley was a man, thought Luca, who oozed decay.

  ‘You don’t look too happy, D’Andrea,’ said Riley in his well-heeled staccato. ‘In lieu of a welcoming committee of family and friends, you should be pleased to see me.’

  Riley grinned a yellow-toothed grin and Luca took a long drag on his cigarette. Riley was wearing a cream-colored blazer and a straw boater with a red silk band wrapped around the crown. The clothes would have hinted of the Ivy League and rowing clubs and strong-jawed, northeastern families if they were on anyone but Riley. Instead they looked coarse, somehow, louche even, on the haggard, round-shouldered figure in front of him.

  ‘I got a car coming,’ continued Riley. ‘Can give you a lift if you like.’

  Luca gave the reporter a sideways glance. People like Riley didn’t do favors without expecting something in return, and Luca was in no position to be striking bargains and making pacts.

  ‘I was thinking I’d walk,’ said Luca, who had been looking forward to strolling in a straight line for as long as he wanted, with no chains around his ankles or barbed-wire fences cutting him off, or gunmen trotting by his side.

  ‘It’s twenty miles plus to New Orleans,’ said Riley with a frown.

  Luca shrugged. ‘What do you want?’ he asked, and the reporter paused.

  ‘You know how it is,’ he said, his tone plaintive. ‘I didn’t particularly wanna come down here and spoil your big moment, but my editor asked me to get some quotes,’ he explained, throwing his hands into the air, bemoaning the whims of fate.

  ‘Still haven’t been promoted, then?’ said Luca flatly, and Riley laughed a short, contrived grunt of a laugh.

  ‘Thanks for the smoke,’ said Luca. He fixed the cigarette between his lips, put his hands in his pockets and started off down the road to New Orleans.

  ‘Jesus, Luca. I came all this way,’ said Riley, scampering along after him. ‘C’mon, you were always good copy,’ he pleaded.

  ‘I was good copy when you were stitching me up,’ said Luca. Riley grimaced and cast a look over Luca’s face.

  ‘I have to say, chum, you’re looking good,’ Riley said. ‘Most folks age at twice the pace in Angola. You look just the same as the day you was sentenced.’

  ‘Go to hell,’ said Luca, taking another drag on his cigarette.

  Luca hadn’t been expecting his return to New Orleans to be an easy experience. He knew the city was no paradise; it was violent and unforgiving, awash with criminals and immigrant communities that treated one another with hostility and suspicion. But it was also a city with a beguiling energy to it, a bright and opulent charm. For all its segregation and spite, its shabby streets and faded glory, it was easy to become bewitched by the city of New Orleans. And so the whole time Luca was in Angola he couldn’t help feeling that when he returned, he would be entering a better world. That the slime of the prison life would wash off him like some kind of amniotic fluid. But now, as he looked at Riley, he wondered if he wasn’t just exchanging one kind of slime for another.

  ‘Well, how’s about that,’ said Riley. ‘I tell you what, on this day of new beginnings, let’s turn over a new leaf? Start afresh?’

  Luca was about to send another curse Riley’s way when he stopped and sighed. Something about the prospect of new beginnings tugged at his conscience. Maybe if he gave Riley what he wanted the man would leave him in peace.

  ‘What do you wanna know?’ Luca said, and Riley’s smile returned.

  ‘Just the usual,’ said the reporter. ‘How was your time in Angola? How’s it feel to be outta that convict garb? What’s your view on the state’s correctional facilities now you’ve seen them from the other side?’

  Luca gave Riley a look. ‘You didn’t come down here to ask me that,’ he said. ‘Not even the Louisiana State Prison Board gives a shit about the state of its correctional facilities. Your read
ership sure as hell ain’t gonna give a damn.’

  Riley screwed up his face. ‘Still sharp as a tack, huh, Luca?’ he said. ‘You know, some men get out and their brains’ve gone to mush. Not you, though.’ Riley tipped his hat at Luca with a smirk. ‘What’s your view on the Axeman murders?’ he said.

  Luca frowned and peered at him. ‘What Axeman murders?’ he asked, and Riley nodded knowingly.

  ‘Word didn’t reach you during your sojourn at the state’s expense? A crazy Zulu’s been running around town killing Italian grocers. Six weeks since the first attack and your old pal Talbot, who’s in charge of the case, is making no headway. Making a mess of it, in actual fact, and people are getting rightly upset.’

  Luca noticed a light wind whipping dust along the road towards New Orleans. Times had changed, he thought: now it was Michael’s turn to have his name dragged through the mud. Luca had tried to keep abreast of changes in the city. As inmates arrived in Angola they brought with them news of the outside world, and Luca had listened in earnest to these prison-yard dispatches. He’d heard of the Great War, of the Great Hurricane, of the Influenza Pandemic, of Storyville being closed down; he’d even heard of the new type of music that was, according to the Negro inmates, engulfing the city. He knew the Eighteenth Amendment had been passed and prohibition was just around the corner, and he wondered what it would do to the tinderbox of clashing interests that was New Orleans. But amidst all this news of upheaval and strife, Luca had heard nothing of the goings-on in the police force, or of his old protégé.

  ‘What’s it got to do with me?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, seeing as you got history with Talbot, the boss and I were hoping, in his hour of need, you’d supply the Schadenfreude. I mean, it’s only because he squealed on you that he got promoted. If he’s not fit for the job it’s kinda funny you getting released just at the point people are beginning to notice.’

  Riley breathed deeply, having trouble talking, smoking and keeping up with Luca’s brisk pace all at the same time.

  ‘Kinda like the chickens coming home to roost,’ he wheezed. ‘At least, that’s the angle the ed wants. Ironic.’

  He peered at Luca, waiting for an answer, but Luca stayed silent, his eyes fixed on the horizon, on the distant image of New Orleans in the mist. He was trying to make out once again the dancer in the mirage, but all he could see now was a swirl of dust, sunrays and dew.

  ‘No one cares what I think,’ he said. ‘People’ll believe what they wanna believe. I learned that much during the trial.’

  Riley nodded, and they strode on a little further without talking. Over the fields on either side of them a murder of crows angled and swooped, letting out piercing, nervy squawks.

  ‘Don’t you have anything you want to say?’ said Riley after a while, his tone softer, pleading. ‘It’s because of Talbot you spent the last six years in a cell. I mean, he was supposed to be your protégé.’

  Luca made a valiant effort not to let his spirits sink, and tried not to think of betrayal. He stopped and turned to face Riley, and Riley instinctively took a step back.

  ‘Five years,’ said Luca calmly. ‘I got one off for good behavior.’ He took a last drag on the cigarette, flicked it onto the road and swiped it out with his boot. ‘Michael did the right thing,’ he continued, ‘I don’t hold him no grudges. I just wanna start my life off again. No vendettas, no living in the past. All I wanna do now is get to New Orleans, eat some food that ain’t half-rotten and covered in roaches, buy me a drink, and maybe buy me a woman. Put that in your paper.’

  Luca turned and strode off down the road and Riley watched him go, a perplexed expression on his face.

  ‘Luca, haven’t you heard?’ he shouted. ‘You can’t buy a woman no more! The Navy outlawed the brothels!’

  Luca ignored him and carried on down the long, dusty road to New Orleans.

  4

  As Ida had expected, the wake was a raucous affair, the house bursting with an uproar of drunken, dancing people. Most of the neighborhood was there, the club members, the five bands, the street kids, the happy stragglers, and the deceased’s family too. Music and noise blared through the thin walls of the house and out across the ward like a siren, promising good times that called yet more hopefuls to the party.

  By noon the majority of the mourners were stumbling through the house, inebriated on cheap spirits and marijuana, heroin or cocaine, or else they had paired up to sweet-talk in quiet corners and nooks. A cutting contest between two of the bands was taking place in the yard, each band trying to outplay the other. The noisy and unforgiving crowd not only played judge, but joined in with the music too, clapping and shouting and crashing their feet onto the floor in a shuddering percussion that shook the ground.

  To avoid the crush inside the house, people had spilled out onto the street, some passed out in pools of vomit, others lying on the grass drinking and smoking, still others leaning against fence posts, shooting the breeze.

  On the porch steps of a house opposite, Ida and Lewis sat side by side, taking in the scene. Ida always felt uneasy in the midst of a party, never quite sure of what she was supposed to do, invariably looking for a corner to melt into. Lewis, catching on to her discomfort, had suggested they go outside and survey things from afar, and Ida had taken him up on the offer. She glanced at him as he watched the goings-on opposite. She noticed the puffy eyes, the weary look, the slump to his shoulders. Funerals were tough work – the bands had to play all the way through the parade, the ceremony, and then the wake, which could continue well into the early hours.

  Lewis looked her way and caught her inspecting him, and she smiled at him sheepishly.

  ‘Whose funeral is it anyway?’ she asked.

  ‘I dunno,’ said Lewis, ‘some old-timer.’

  Ida nodded and they lapsed into silence once again. She hadn’t seen Lewis since the dog days of the previous summer, the longest they had gone in their six-year friendship without meeting up, and she hoped they weren’t slipping away from each other for good.

  ‘You sure you don’t wanna beer or something?’ said Lewis, noticing Ida’s stiffness.

  ‘No, I’m good, thanks,’ she said, shaking her head.

  A drunken mourner staggered past them, the collar of his shirt broken, his eyes watery. He recognized Lewis and nodded hello, then he stopped and stared at Ida, frowning, confused. She was used to these kinds of reactions from passers-by. People stared partly on account of her looks, but mainly because they were never quite sure what race she was. She stared at the ground, praying the man would leave without making a comment, and eventually he stumbled on. Lewis watched the man go then he peered at her.

  ‘Ain’t nothing you can’t handle,’ he said, trying to sound warm and reassuring. She smiled at him coyly, and looked across the road to the house opposite, at the man swaying up the stairs. ‘Lewis, I’m sorry I ain’t been coming around so much these days.’ She wanted to follow up with an excuse, to say she had been just so busy lately, or that Gretna was so difficult to get to. The hiatus had coincided with her getting the job at the Pinkertons, the bottom-of-the-rung office job she hoped would lead to a detective’s role one day. She could have used that as an excuse, but she couldn’t lie to Lewis – they both knew the reason she had stopped coming around.

  ‘How’s Daisy?’ she asked.

  ‘She’s good,’ Lewis said, responding as if the question was perfectly innocent, and Ida could tell by the way he answered that he was lying. Ida and Mayann, Lewis’s mother, both agreed that Daisy was no proper match for him. The girl was a couple of years older than he was, querulous and prone to bouts of violence. She worked as a prostitute in the honky-tonks across the river, rough places full of levee workers and longshoremen, and it was in one such place, the Brickhouse, that Lewis had met her the previous spring. Although Mayann was in no position to criticize a working girl on account of her job, both she and Ida couldn’t help but feel that Daisy was below Lewis, and worse yet, she made him m
iserable. Mayann had given her blessing begrudgingly, and a few months shy of Lewis’s eighteenth birthday, he and Daisy had married at City Hall, less than five weeks after first meeting each other. Lewis had moved across the river to Gretna to be with her, and at first Ida paid them regular visits. But over the course of the year, as it became plain that Daisy thought Ida a snob, and Ida dropped every hint she thought Daisy ratty and coarse, Ida had visited Lewis less and less, until eventually the visits had petered out altogether.

  ‘And how’s Clarence?’ Ida asked, smiling, trying to move the conversation to less sensitive subjects. Clarence was Lewis’s 5-year-old cousin, who Lewis had taken in when the boy’s mother had died after childbirth. Lewis had legally adopted the boy just after his marriage, and had moved him into the apartment he shared with Daisy, where the three of them made a peculiarly teenaged and hobbled-together family.

  Lewis frowned when he heard Ida mention Clarence and a pained look crossed his face.

  ‘You didn’t hear?’ he asked, and Ida shook her head, alarmed at the upset she could hear in his voice. Lewis peered at her, taking a moment before speaking again.

  ‘He had a fall,’ he said. ‘Landed on his head. Doctors said he’s gonna be slow.’

  ‘Oh Lord!’ Ida exclaimed. Her eyes widened and she clasped her hand on Lewis’s arm. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, her voice quavering, tears welling up in her eyes.

  Lewis shrugged, forlorn, and spoke in a halting voice, explaining how on a rainy afternoon a few months back, Daisy and he were listening to records while Clarence played with his toys on the back gallery of the house. Then they heard screams and ran out to see Clarence lying in the courtyard below, a drop of twenty feet, blood all over his head, crying and anguished.