by Seth Pevey
Roots Of Misfortune
Seth Pevey
Copyright © 2019 by Seth Pevey
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contents
Author’s Note
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Afterword
Author’s Note
The New Orleans that exists in this book is not a brick for brick replica of the one that exists on the shores of Pontchartrain. Some aspects of this tale are perfectly mirrored in real life, while others have been inflated, altered, or elaborated by the narrative lens. Likewise, while certain traditions, ceremonies, religions, music, rituals and ideas in this novel are drawn largely from life, they have often been twisted and bent to fit the storyteller’s purposes.
One
She’d felt it coming for weeks.
They had gathered round her bed at night and whispered it to her. The lwa, the mystères, the invisibles. No matter how you called out to them they answered, and their message was clear, sober, unanimous. They spoke from a place beyond certainty.
“Run,” their voices cried.
And she’d listened, or tried to. But it was looking as though she had waited too long. That soft heart. Hamstrung by love. Now the lwa were laughing, pouring drinks. They had rolled the dice of her and seen the answer. They were singing songs in preparation for her welcome.
She could hear them. The rhythm of the tires rolling against the pavement was their percussion. Thump, thump, thump. Her heartbeat syncopated.
The car must be going at least sixty, maybe seventy, she thought, trying to measure it. It could hardly be some backroad they were on. Thump, thump, thump. The sound travelled up through the suspension, through the frame, and into her right ear where it was pressed into the velvety seat cushion.
“Please,” she said.
But the man in the driver seat said nothing for the moment. He fiddled with the radio.
Tiny legs kicked in her belly. Did those legs know too? The legs were strong and alive and desperate to remain so. A part of her. She could feel the car changing lanes and accelerating.
“Please, the baby.”
“It was some devil that brought you to this,” the driver said, raising his bony pointer finger. “Perhaps it is the devil you feel in your belly.”
She squinted her eyes, trying to push back the tears. Her wrists had been zip-chorded together in front of her, tightly, roughly. The blood trapped in her palms pulsed with anger. She tried every combination of movement, wriggling her wrists back and forth in the desperate hope that the material might weaken, bend, twist, separate: anything at all beside bind her there helpless.
“Please…I won’t run again. I just got scared. Scared for the baby.”
The man laughed softly. His head rocked from side to side. “We are all scared. Anyone who isn’t is a fool.”
With her hands useless, she began to use her fingers, digging into the fabric of her blouse, hiking it up until she could just get one finger under her bra, digging for the spot where she knew the small, soft, red bag waited. She needed it now, needed to hold it in her hand in this moment.
“How could you do this?” she yelled, her voice cracking. Why had she allowed it to crack?
That made the man laugh even louder. “How? You make me laugh, woman.”
But then he stopped laughing, cleared his throat. “Do you know what the code noir was?” he asked.
She palmed the bag just as her tendons began to ache from the awkwardness of her reach. Now she had it, soft and velvety in her sweat-drenched hands. She held it gentle but sure, like the last ember of a dying fire.
“No,” she coughed, wriggling in pain.
“That doesn’t surprise me,” the man said, glancing over his shoulder at her.
The baby’s kicking grew stronger. Was he dancing? He wanted to be out, to be free, to run just as she did. But they were both trapped. The dice were rolling and it was beyond their control. She kneaded the little bag between her hands, feeling the two rough spheres inside, just beneath the surface of the chamois.
“Code Noir was the black code. A set of rules. For the slaves of the city.” The man looked at her in the rearview mirror. “The first time a slave tried to run, do you know what was done to them?”
“But I’m not…I’m not your slave.”
“The first time they ran, they were to be branded with a fleur de lis. Like cattle.”
She started to cry. As she did, she began twisting at the knotted hemp cinching her red bag closed. Her fingers trembled and fumbled in desperation and fear.
“And the second time? Well, the second time, they hamstrung the slave. A hot knife right through the Achilles.” The man made a sawing gesture with the flat of his hand, and then slapped it back down on the steering wheel.
The car hit a pothole in the road, and it sent a small shockwave through her body. She left the seat and bounced back down harmlessly on the cushion. But the baby didn’t approve of that. He shifted inside her suddenly, sending a wave of nauseous pain up her spine, and she dropped the red bag on the seat. Her shaking hands reached out for it once again.
“And the third time? Of course, the third time was the last. Three strikes, as they say. The third time a slave tried to run, they hung him in the square. For all the other slaves to see. They left him there for weeks until the crows had all but finished him. Him or her.”
“Why you telling me this?” she cried, finally managing to regain her hold on the bag, clutching it, feeling its power. The lwa applauded her efforts.
“To help put things in perspective for you. You know…there is nothing quite so valuable as a little perspective.”
She finally worked the knot off of the bag and was able to get at what was inside, one in each palm, feeling their strength course through her. The little shriveled, brown balls were warm and potent in her hands. Now the lwa were cheering wildly, and their song gained tempo.
“Do you want to know my perspective?” she said, the courage welling up in her.
“What is that?”
“I think you are the devil.”
That made the man roar with laugher. “Me? No…no…no sister. I’m not lucky enough to be the devil,” he said, slapping the steering wheel.
The root hummed in her hands, each one seated in the folds of her palm, and she knew what had to be done. The baby knew it too, and he raised his little head up, peering into the other world. Peering past all this pain and suffering—he too could see and hear them.
“Fly,” the lwa sang. “Fly.”
The door at her feet had an old-fashioned, manual cylinder locking mechanism. She knew what she had to do. Her bare feet felt their way up the leather until they rested there on the door’s lip, pressed against the cool glass of the window.
The man in the front seat noticed, knew what she was thinking, and he
grinned at her in the rearview. She could see the glint of his gold teeth, even in the low light. Glowing metal was checker-boarded across his mouth, each tooth etched with a different rune.
“I know what you are doing,” he said.
Her big toe had managed to get itself under the locking mechanism. She gripped it and kicked up. Once, twice, three times: click. The lwa nodded appreciatively and inside her the baby chirped.
Click, click, click.
“But I’m not going to stop you. Because you’re right. You ain’t my slave,” the man was saying.
Now the door handle. It was a simple lever for the hand, byzantine for the foot. She wiggled her big toe under it, grasping the two root balls in her hands in determination, careful not to crush them to powder.
“Fly, fly, fly,” the lwa chanted, beating their sacred drums.
The door opened against the wind, just a fraction of an inch, and a deep, sonorous whistle filled the car.
“You have a choice,” the man in the front seat said. “No one can make it for you. For the baby.”
Her palms sweated into the root, so that it grew damp, sodden, soft around the edges. Its bitter aroma filled her nostrils, and still the wind whispered.
“Fly, fly, fly.”
She put the force of her thighs into the door, kicked with all her might. She had her legs out now up to the knees, squirming like a worm towards the whistling freedom outside.
“You will not make it,” the man in the front seat was saying, his grin turned into a frown.
Now she was up to her waist in the rushing night air, the door bouncing against her sensitive belly. The baby, if he felt it, gave no more sign of protest. Perhaps he was as ready as she was to be out, no matter what that meant.
The man in the front seat fidgeted, shuffled his long legs in his seat, but he did not slow down.
Her feet dangled inches above the pavement, above the ground which tore by in flashes of paint and great asphalt-filled cracks. It was as if the whistling ground smiled at her as it rushed by beneath. “We are coming,” she whispered, speaking softly to the spirits, lest they take offence.
“When you see them, tell them to set a place for me,” said the man.
She paused at the precipice, feeling her weight shift finally to the point where it was no longer a choice.
“I will tell them to spit on you,” she yelled.
The last thing she thought of, as she tumbled onto that rushing, inflexible roadway, was the child. The last image in her mind at the first cruel bounce against the hateful, seventy-mile-an-hour cement, was the baby inside her. That, and gripping those two redemptive bits of root as tightly as she could, feeling them burning from her palms down her wrists, and into that place where her soul lived.
The back of her hit first, the force of a great and immediate friction snatching her around violently. Her blouse ripped apart like tissue paper. As she twisted, she could feel the lower part of her belly coming into contact with the sandpaper of the roadway, where it tore a chunk out of her skin. Next, her shoulder found the pavement with a deep crunch. She tightened her grip on the roots, against the agony and fear. She could hear them singing: a glorious chorus.
She rolled and rolled. It felt like hours she spent fearing the next scrape of pavement, the next crunched bone. But she did not lose consciousness. She waited for it, and it happened, and she could not believe it. Blinking eyes, drawing lungs, a pulse in the temple. She found herself hurt, but it was pain. Simple pain. Pain of the living, pain that only a person in the world of the living could know. Instead of death she was merely looking up into the night sky, the stars all muted and deadened by the city’s lights.
She braced herself, hoping to feel the kick of the baby again inside her. But she did not.
Could she move? Her right leg was broken, unresponsive, lying shattered in the moonlight. The other? Perhaps it could be called upon. John would give her strength.
As she sat upright, it ended, and it felt like nothing. Some weights are just too much. Some pressures just exceed what a human can withstand, and there are things that a person was never meant to bear.
She had all but a second to stare down the barrel of the 18-wheeler’s headlights. It honked its horn, it squealed its rubber tires against the roadway, its load twisted behind it. The driver was trying to save a life. But the die could not be uncast.
She knew them then. Like she had never known them before. The lwa, the spirits, the invisibles: they had already set a spot at the table for her.
Two spots, in fact. One for her, and the other a tiny chair with a tiny plate and fork.
Two
“Man, this music must be older than you, Melancon.” Felix Herbert laughed from the passenger seat of the El Camino.
Robert Johnson wailed from the tape deck, singing out to his friend Willy Brown, pleading from his brief epoch. Melancon had turned the music down low, just barely audible over the mockingbird squawking at them overhead, the lawnmowers in the distance.
The detective scoffed. “Aged like fine whisky. Far superior to the shit your generation listens to anyways. I’ve heard enough auto-tune downtown to last me another hundred lifetimes. The person who came up with that and thought it sounded catchy should have been stopped.”
Melancon pointed at the speaker. “You know about this fella? Robert Johnson? They say he sold his soul to Satan to be able to sing and play like this.”
“It ain’t too bad, but is this an honest to God tape deck? What’s the devil charging for a Bluetooth system these days?” Felix drummed his hands on the dashboard. He was a young man in his early twenties, long of limb with disheveled brown hair and small green eyes. He was full of ticks, challenges, zest—the boy couldn’t seem to keep still for all of five minutes, much less the hour and a half they’d been parked, waiting. They were waiting still.
“Try not to draw any more attention than you have to, kid. This is supposed to be a stakeout, after all,” Melancon scolded.
“Yeah, real high level stuff I reckon. Will have to put this on my resume when I go for that Pentagon job next year.”
Melancon looked over at the younger man. “Unlike the blues, your sarcasm doesn’t age well. Now listen. There is a paycheck in this one, Felix. One of our first. It’s not a game.”
“Yeah, yeah. I don’t know about that fella that hired us, though. Not sure I trust him when the bill comes due, you know? Too much anger. We should have got some kind of a down payment on this. A dipshit deposit.”
The old detective smiled. “You might be right, kid. But could you be right more quietly? It might not mean much to you, but I got bills to pay. You do know what a bill is, don’t you kid? Little slips of paper, they come in the mail to fuck your life up?”
Felix waved a dismissive hand at him. “You ain’t going hungry while I’m around, old man. We’ll sell your tape collection to the Smithsonian before that happens. Or some hedge-fund hipster maybe.”
They were parked by the curb on a suburban street out in the small town of LaPlace, about twenty minutes west of New Orleans. It was a town of great refinement: the chemical, rather than the cultural variety. They could see the burning spire of the natural gas plant looming over all the white picket fences as it cast down smoke on the oak trees and swing sets and mockingbirds. From the fossil of a tape deck Robert aired ancient grievances, twanged of loss, bent his strings, went on and on about his malted milk now, mama.
Felix huffed, popped open the glove compartment. “You got anything to read in this thing? I hope you don’t mind.”
“I doubt it, but be my guest kid. Might be an old Reader’s Digest or something.”
“Reader’s Digest? Holy shit, there is a newspaper in here from twenty years ago…and…whatever the hell this thing is.” Felix pulled out an odd device and began to study it, a skeptic angle to his head.
“That, son, is a breathalyzer.”
The young man furrowed his brow. “Why, David Melancon, do you have a breathalyz
er in your glove compartment?”
“Helps to know when you’ve had too much, kid.”
But Felix kept staring at him with those beady green eyes, as if that wasn’t a full enough answer, so the detective continued. “Believe it or not I am often subject to bouts of frivolity that, while joyous and celebratory, sometimes run counter to my best interests. Good to have that thing handy. Makes for a nice, cold, numerical reality check. Catch my drift?”
That caused Felix to chuckle a bit, and he blew into the device for a moment before growing bored with it and slouching in his seat.
“Imagine running off with a guy’s dog just to spite him. A dude you once loved,” Felix said after about two minutes of silence, filled only with Johnson’s own love being in vain. “It is enough to make you never want to get married.”
“You’ll do it anyway though, kid.” The old detective nodded, took off his ratty fedora and wiped the blonde wisps of hair off of where they liked to plaster to his forehead. “It’s up there with death and taxes and prostate checks as something that is just bound to happen to a man if he lives long enough.”
Felix sat looking dubiously in the direction of the detective. David Melancon was aging poorly, had developed a substantial spare tire around the waist, crow’s feet for days. But he was still worth listening to. Felix prodded a bit.
“You’re divorced aren’t you?”
“That’s right kid. Which is generally the next thing that will happen to you after you get the wedding, the taxes, and the doctor’s cold pointer finger. Well, plus a kid or two and about twenty pounds. Your dreams lying smashed in the dirt.”
