Jackpot Blood: A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery

by Jimmy Fox

  “Here we go again,” complained Brianne. She propped her chin in a palm.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, good morning,” the man said. He had a face like an organizational chart—a grid of symmetrical furrows and compartmentalized muscles that in unison seemed to shout the corporate mantra, “Sell! Sell! Sell!” His beaming cheerfulness made Nick nervous, even at this distance.

  “It’s evening here, Hal,” a woman said irritably from the nearest booth, where she sat with two other business types, a man and a woman, both appearing at least twenty years younger than the unhappy woman and effervescent Hal.

  Nick instantly saw the dynamic of the team: Hal did the smooth-talking and hard selling, probably got all the glory back in Vegas, while the rest of the crew handled the wearisome details. Especially the woman, whose heavy make-up and frequent Botox did not hide the puffy red rage of long subordination. He discerned a certain haggardness at odds with her pantsuited professional image, and he suspected that only lots of money, booze, and serious pharmaceuticals had so far kept her from strangling smiley-faced Hal with the strap of one of her high-dollar purses.

  Will Hawty one day snarl at me for analogous reasons? Nick felt this question roll over him in a sweaty wave of self-loathing as he sipped hot flavorful coffee and broke off pieces of persimmon bread, which was a delicious spicy cake flecked with bits of yellow-orange fruit and the tender, rich meat of pecans. You’re so wise when it comes to the inner landscapes of strangers, how can you be so willfully blind to the feelings of those you care most about? He vowed to mend his ways, but knew he wouldn’t.

  “Oh, boy,” Hal chuckled, rubbing his eyes, and shaking his head playfully, as if someone had just thrown a bucket of cold water on him. “You bet, Connie. I’m jet-lagged, still on Hawaii time, folks; just got back from our newest terrific property out there. And we’ve already synergized with three other groups on this trip. My apologies. Let me tell you, lots of folks are eager to nexus a value-added, win-win, proactive relationship with MaxiGelt Casinos.” With a big toothy grin Hal cagily polished his veiled threat to take his company’s lucrative alliance elsewhere.

  “Slick as a water moccasin, ain’t he?” Tommy said to Nick.

  The MaxiGelt Casinos team had come equipped with laptops and projectors and mini-printers, graphs and maps and aerial photos on foam board, brochures and pamphlets and sample contracts. In a round-robin presentation, the other team members followed Hal. They spoke of cash flow, depreciation, slot-machine take, square footage, payroll, and security. In that spartan back dining area, they constructed a mirage of a casino complex that left the audience with open mouths and blinking eyes.

  The plan called for four restaurants, a nightclub, two hotels, a live-entertainment theater, a golf/ tennis complex, three swimming pools, a skeet range, a go-cart track, a multi-level shopping mall, a Native America theme park and museum, and a two-year accredited junior college with a well-funded sports department and an e-cubator, the last a program to nurture Internet-based business ideas. And there was more: a new super-warehouse store to anchor the fabulous mall. It would be the first of a nationwide chain. Three Sisters Pantry! It all seemed so easy.

  The younger MaxiGelt man dramatically yanked a cloth from a stunning architectural rendering of the proposed development. He began explaining every angle.

  After twenty-five minutes, Connie stood up to cut off her colleague. She deftly handed the ball to Hal for the grand finale.

  “We’re proposing a paradigm shift, here, my friends,” Hal said, as he strutted excitedly before the attentive audience. “With MaxiGelt Casinos at your side, optimizing wallet share, market-focused on reinventing the event horizon, you will headlight into success, helicopter over your competitors—and well we know there are plenty in this part of the South! Oh yes, we need to imaginize the mission statement together.” He flipped to the next board on the easel beside him and used a laser pointer as he read off each word: “Grow self-sustainancy through profitizing your new knowledge workers in collaborative commerce solutions. The Katogoula Indians and MaxiGelt Casinos”—another board—“Change agents for OUR future! Thank you, and many happy returns on our investment!”

  Nick saw puzzled faces among the Katogoula. He himself had been tempted to reach for the pocket dictionary in his briefcase.

  Scattered applause began.

  “At least he got our name right,” Brianne observed to Tommy and Nick, as she stopped her daughter from collecting the few remaining crumbs on Nick’s plate with a mouth-moistened tiny index finger. “That’s more than some of the others did.”

  Brianne had thick, long, beautiful brown hair, gathered in a loose twist hanging down her back; Nick thought of Mary Pickford, from her films of the 1920s.

  “This is the third presentation this week,” Tommy said. The circles under his eyes were darker than the last time Nick had seen him. Tommy stood up. “Let me go get these people on the road, or else they’ll just move in with us. And I don’t think I’d like that. How ’bout you, boys?”

  His fidgeting twin sons giggled and made disapproving faces.

  Tommy joined the Las Vegans as they packed up. Off to the side, Hal and another man stood chatting. Hal brayed in laughter.

  “Who’s that?” Nick asked Brianne.

  “Talking to that man from Las Vegas? Oh, that’s Irton Dusong. The woman’s Grace, his wife. They run our little tribal museum over on the Golden Trace, not far from our house. He retired from the mill a few years ago after he got hurt. They were the ones that broke the tie.”

  “On the vote to continue the casino process?”

  She nodded. Brianne, as Nick recalled, had voted against it.

  Vegas Hal was playing tribal politics, trying to suck up to those who favored the casino. Nick watched him as he put an arm around Irton like an old buddy, guiding him to the front of the store. Nick heard him loudly promise first-class treatment if Irton ever came out to Las Vegas.

  Nick turned his attention to the twins. He liked children, and he was mesmerized by their mystical power, their omnivorous nature, their connection to a boundless reality adults can no longer access. How many baptisms and bar mitzvahs had he attended? Too many to remember. Sometimes, as now in the presence of these children, he felt the stinging pang of being childless, of having muddled through life chasing superfluous goals that paled beside the amazing grace of a child’s love.

  A line from Yeats’s poem “Among School Children” came to mind. Had he become a ludicrous, slightly scary old man to children—as the twins’ expressions hinted—condemned to be merely an awed observer of the magical creatures other people brought to life, bequeathing their measure of glory to the collective human experience? Was he to be the last of his line, a recusant of four billion years of humanity’s genealogy? . . .

  “You guys excited about being government-approved Indians?” he asked the twins, thinking that he should kick this bad habit of thinking too much.

  The boys waggled their heads in wild meaningless agitation, and then frogged each other in some never-ending, secret war that had just flared up anew. It was as if each boy were striking his image in a mirror.

  “Boys,” Brianne warned, still somehow sounding as calm as a fall morning. “Tonight they’re eleven going on six. Thank heavens for school.”

  Nick had always marveled at the few people he’d known who seemed to sip from a spring of serenity.

  “I used to be a teacher,” Nick told the twins, “now I travel around making sure boys and girls are studying hard and getting ready for college.”

  Their faces grew wary at this revelation. The enemy in their midst! He remembered aunts and uncles who’d played this age-old teasing game with him. Empty, cruel drollery, he’d once thought; but now, having fun doing it himself, he saw it as nourishment for the budding skeptical sense.

  “Boys, go out on the porch and play with the other children,” Brianne said. “Wait!”

  At great speed they’d already bolted toward
the front, as if some huge sno-cone of badness awaited them in the darkness outside.

  “Sam, Matt, you be good, or else somebody I know won’t be riding horses this weekend.”

  And they were gone, in a slightly slower flurry of loose limbs.

  “This should be a happy time for Tommy,” Brianne said, her voice worried and uncertain, the loving sternness directed at her children now missing. “We buried Carl yesterday. Took an awful long time for the autopsy and all.”

  “Where?”

  “The tribal graveyard. It’s on state forest land, but we have rights to use it however we want. Tommy’s father worked that out. It’s a nice place. Quiet. Just the sound of the wind through the pines.”

  She folded a green cloth napkin into a small, neat square and placed it on the table even with the edge.

  “Carl wasn’t all that bad,” she said. “He just didn’t like people telling him what to do. If anybody’d asked him, I bet he would’ve been against the casino. Sometimes I think he was the sanest of any of us. Our tribe might not a had to go through all we did if more of us been like him from the start.”

  She turned to check on the sleeping two-year-old girl beside her.

  “This graveyard,” Nick said, “I’d like to see it.” He was mentally salivating, picturing the feast of information such a place usually had in store for the intrepid genealogist willing to brave the elements and assorted biting, blood-sucking creatures—fleas and ticks, mostly, not vampires.

  “See that man over there,” Brianne said, pointing to a man in a uniform. “That’s Nugent Chenerie.”

  “Nooj?”

  “Yes, that’s what everybody calls him. Tommy’s told you about Nooj, then? He’s the one you want to talk to about the graveyard. He’s always taking people on tours out there and on the Golden Trace. Or he’ll point you in the right direction, at least.”

  The baby had awakened and was whimpering. Brianne gathered her up and rocked her. That did the trick; the baby drifted off again.

  Brianne had something else on her mind. She spoke softly as her daughter slumbered on her chest. “I feel I know you, Nick. Like I can talk to you.” Her apologetic hesitation gave way to the boldness of a woman doing what she thought was right. “Tommy’s told me all about you, how hard you’re working for us. How much you care. All this”—she meant the presentation—“doesn’t matter one way or another to me. What’s best for Tommy and our kids, that’s what I worry about. I didn’t want him to have this responsibility, but he wanted it, and they gave it to him.”

  Her next words carried a burden of anxiousness: “People say you—well, I’m not sure how to say this—you untangle things. Not just family trees. I mean, bad things. Murders. Find out who killed Carl. If it was a ‘who.’”

  She looked down at her sleeping baby and then back up at Nick, some deeper force urging her past hesitation. “Some are saying our tribal spirits are unhappy with what we’re doing. There’s evil behind Carl’s death. I can feel it, like a cold wind. Evil that wants to destroy my family and my tribe. Don’t ask me how I know that, because I’m not sure myself. You can stop it.”

  Nick, too, could have sworn he felt a cold wind at his back that raised goose bumps on his skin.

  “You don’t believe in our ways,” Brianne said, “so you’re not afraid. And maybe these spirits won’t hurt you.”

  Unafraid? Right now, dear lady, I’m terrified.

  “Sure, I’ll . . . ,” he stammered, “I’ll do what I can.”

  Brianne patted his hand on the table in thanks. Nick had the feeling she had known he wouldn’t disappoint her. “Will you be staying with us?” she asked. “I can make up the couch real nice for you.”

  “No, but thanks for the offer. I understand there’s a motel not far away. That would be best for me, since I may be here for a few days and my hours are a bit unpredictable.”

  “We’ll be counting on you for supper, then, whenever you want.”

  Nick threaded his way through the gathering. He met Royce Silsby, a low-key, paunchy man who seemed relieved that his wife, Luevenia, had things well in hand. Odeal Caspard was an elfin bachelor in his eighties; he immediately launched into a corny joke about a short man who sued the state for building the sidewalk too close to his ass. Nick also spoke with Irton and Grace Dusong, Felix and Alberta Wattell, and other Katogoula who sounded familiar from his research.

  He began to get a feel for the mood of the tribe. The Katogoula, like an individual, had elements of conflict below the outward unity. An unspoken tension, as thick as the hanging layer of smoke, permeated the dining room; faces showed uncertainty, furtive eyes avoided contact. Nick was sure there must be the usual smoldering feuds here that every close-knit group has; but he gathered that this casino question was a new and serious wedge splitting the grain of this tribe, as nothing had for decades or centuries. There should have been elation over the long-delayed tribal recognition, but Nick saw only ill-disguised angst.

  It was after ten thirty now. Most adults were ambling toward the front of the store. Odeal Caspard still rattled on with his silly jokes, but the others couldn’t muster similar bonhomie. The men, their hands stuffed in pockets, shuffled singly, contemplating their steps. The women walked cross-armed in twos and threes or gave herding spanks to their weary but still obstinate children.

  Only Nooj Chenerie, standing just outside the back door, on the porch that faced the sentinel pines, seemed in no hurry to leave.

  Nick had been hoping for a chance to talk to the wildlife enforcement agent, and this looked like it.

  CHAPTER 13

  Nooj Chenerie smoked a cigarette and gazed out into the night. He leaned on a leg propped on a massive old cypress stump.

  The stump apparently served as a chopping block, Nick judged from the clinging feathers and dried stains. He had trouble picturing Luevenia—she of the lovely hands—remorselessly chopping the head off a chicken, duck, dove, or quail.

  At Nick’s approach, Nooj put both feet on the porch and straightened up. He wore the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries uniform: gray short-sleeve field shirt, black epaulettes over departmental shoulder patches, and forest green pants. If he stepped a few feet off the porch, Nick thought, he would blend easily into the shadows of the pine woods—except for his glittering state-shaped badge and the departmental pins on his collar. His black-billed gray cap repeated the embroidered LWF shield patches on the sleeves, each featuring a mallard flying over the word “ENFORCEMENT,” a wary buck standing below it.

  The man was two inches shorter than Nick, but barrel chested and ridged with muscle from neck to shoulders. His hips were slight and his arms were thick. The body of a wrestler and weightlifter, Nick decided—not that he spoke from any first-hand knowledge. Nooj’s hair was jet black, straight, shiny, and short; his face was round with a deep cinnamon tint below the surface glaze of constant exposure to the elements. He appeared to be somewhere in his early thirties.

  It had turned cool unexpectedly. Nick wondered what was keeping the enforcement agent warm.

  Nooj’s genes had come together in a noticeably Indian way. His personality was not so open to examination. Nick thought he had the look of a man who could go weeks or years without seeing or speaking with anyone, and not care—certainly a plus in his line of work, though he probably had a partner and a team he had to work with.

  Nick introduced himself, offering his hand. Nooj tamped and squashed the glow on his cigarette between the tips of his thumb and index finger, and then jettisoned the unfiltered butt into the darkness, in no particular hurry. “Fire hazard,” he said, as he turned to shake hands, keeping the shadow cast by the bill of his cap in a line just below his eyes.

  “What did you think of the presentation?” Nick said, still a little distracted by the cigarette trick. Was it macho ostentation, or did this guy simply like pain?

  Nooj shrugged and draped his powerful right hand on the big stainless semi-automatic on his right hip, as if i
t were his sweetheart. “Don’t know that I have to think anything. Or tell you about it, if I do.”

  Tommy had his work cut out for him; this was one cranky tribe. Nick recalled Luevenia’s less than ecstatic reception, and briefly considered suggesting to Tommy that he hire a psychologist rather than a genealogist for the Katogoula.

  “Are you opposed to gambling?” Nick said, undeterred by the man’s aloofness.

  “Not for it or against it,” Nooj said, again looking into the night-shrouded forest. “I buy my Lotto every week. Somebody wants to waste his money, guess that’s his business.”

  “But you don’t think the casino’s a good idea? Could be the chance this tribe’s been waiting for. I’ve heard that a casino is a big factor in determining whether a tribe lives or dies these days. It could make you self-sufficient. Like the Chitiko-Tiloasha.”

  “A tribe can die in more ways than one.”

  Nick was about to ask him what he meant by that cryptic reply when Nooj turned to him, now seemingly ready to engage fully in a conversation that might give Nick something he could use—either to fill in the story of the tribe’s history, or to get closer to the murderer of Carl Shawe.

  Nooj cocked his head at an inquisitive angle. Light from the dining room slanted across his eyes. Striking eyes—dark blue, mostly, but chameleonic, like a spellbinding paperweight that reveals a new view of glittering mineral jaggedness locked inside each time you turn the icy globe of glass.

  “Look,” Nooj said, “we got along without the government and without these Las Vegas hucksters for a long time. Now we’re federally recognized. We’re gonna regret it, mark my word. When you get the government involved and you belly up to the trough, things get messed up real fast. I know. I’ve seen what fuck-ups and crooks run our state government. All governments. Always have, always will. Nothing changes.”

  “You take a paycheck from the state. Aren’t you biting a little too hard the hand that feeds you?”