Roots of Misfortune

by Seth Pevey

  Landry nodded into his drink. “Her ass too big anyway.”

  “You try and try but you don’t succeed.”

  “For the most part,” Landry mumbled.

  “You think the world is against you.”

  Landry felt the hurt of that, but he also sensed something dangerous hidden in the words. He glanced nervously at the bits of daylight streaming in the front door.

  “I don’t know, Big Chief,” Landry said under his breath. “Feels like it today.”

  “Who the hell are you?” the tall man said, after taking a drink of his rum and smacking his lips. The man’s eyes were pure and alabaster. They almost looked like fake eyes to be in a man like that, especially a drinker and a smoker. There was something clear and determined and final about those eyes.

  The question disarmed Landry. He was about to get up and leave, until the fellow tapped his cigar in the ashtray and said, more forcefully now, “Answer the question, Mr. Ducet.”

  “We’ve only known each other since we were kids, tap-dancing in the street for quarters,” he said to the man, who nodded.

  “And yet…I still don’t know the answer to my question. Who are you? Are you my Wildman, or are you a child?”

  It stung. “You know me,” Landry said, feeling the depth of the wound, “I am the Wildman. Your Wildman.”

  Silence, and the man regarding him.

  Landry caved under the weight of those tombstone eyes. “I guess I’m just a little lonely right now…you know…for a woman. I ain’t like you. Never have been.”

  The long-armed man sighed and tapped his cigar stub into the ashtray. “You have more problems than a lack of love, boy.”

  That word, boy. Landry was over fifty. But the man’s imposing presence mixed with the cognac and he found himself nodding his head.

  “You’re right. I do have lots of problems.”

  The man nodded, knowing. His clear eyes blinked in their sockets. “Well, now is the time to shed your burdens. Tell them to me and be done with them. I need a brave today and not a squaw.”

  “Alright…I got a big problem, Chief.” Landry lowered his voice, leaned in for a conspiratorial whisper. “It’s a big problem. It might be your problem too, if you know what I mean. A problem with the law. Well, not even the law so much as a couple of guys getting too curious. Two detectives, asking me all sorts of questions. Questions about…well, questions I don’t want to answer. Because you know where that leads.”

  The man listened and rocked his great head. “That leads into the past.”

  “Yup,” Landry said.

  “And the past….she leads right into the present.”

  Another nod.

  The tall man chewed his cigar and drank his rum thoughtfully. He seemed to reflect on Landry’s words. A coldness had crept into his face. The two twin saucer eyes returned to Landry for an icy study.

  Suddenly, the long arm put a fist down on the bar. The force of it shook Landry’s seat and quieted the entire room.

  “What else?” the man boomed.

  And before he knew it, the words had started to spill. Landry couldn’t stop the curse from speaking its name. “And the worst problem of all is….well you know…what they showed me. The gris-gris. I mean, I think it has always been there…But what they showed me. It made it real, you know?”

  “Go on,” the man said, a cruel edge to his voice.

  “You know the story…Daddy didn’t belong to her… to that other woman who had me. Mama never made peace with that. With me coming out a bastard and all. Looking just like Daddy. Always reminding her of…”

  The big man smiled, his teeth twinkling in the neon lights. Back of Town Blues came on the Juke Box and Louis wailed beneath the clarinet’s dance.

  Landry continued. “I mean, you know the story. Everybody on the block knows the story. Mama was the woman Daddy really belonged to. And she ain’t a woman to forgive and forget bad blood. She always blamed me…for coming out the wrong woman, looking like I look.”

  “Isadore Ducet,” the long man said. He repeated the name again. He let it curl out with his cigar smoke.

  “So…I have to live with this. This curse.”

  The man with the long arms now gave out a great belly laugh. His cigar fell onto the bar and he leaned back, both hands against his stomach. The black and red room echoed with his song. But it was not a warm laugh—the same coldness in his cackle as was in his marble eyes. His canines glowed. He caught his breath, raised his rum glass.

  Landry looked down. There was no more ice left in his drink, where it had been full of tinkling cubes just a moment before. The women were gone from across the bar, though he hadn’t noticed them leave. Everyone was gone, in fact. He was all alone with the man now and the walls pulsed. All that drink and yet now he felt sober.

  Sober and afraid.

  They locked eyes. “You are your own curse, Landry Ducet. But you are also your own salvation,” the tall man said, and slowly placed an object on the bar.

  It was the long shaft that, up until that point, Landry had taken for the long-armed man’s cane.

  But the long-armed man never carried a cane. Landry knew that.

  What is it?

  A spear. The Wildman’s weapon.

  A long wooden shaft. Feathers and leather straps. Some kind of black volcanic glass at the end, twinkling in the neon lights. Landry touched the tip of it and drew a bead of blood from his index finger.

  Then the long-armed man stood up and headed for the door.

  “I’ll see you in two hours, Wildman,” he said over his shoulder as he walked out towards the sunshine.

  Eleven

  The clock was ticking on Janine’s twenty-four-hour favor, and as Felix walked Tina Green down the stairs and out of his office, his mind was already reaching for the next steps. He imagined walking down to Chartres street, pulling his pistol maybe, confronting the bean-headed trombone man with evidence of his crimes. He’d go to yelling something about a citizen’s arrest, shocking him to torpor. Trombone man might try to run, only this time it would be different. This time he would…

  “Felix,” she said, standing just outside the doorway leading to Basin Street. Her warm blue eyes pressed something into him.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “That picture...”

  Felix craned his neck and listened to the stillness upstairs. “What picture?”

  “That girl.

  “You mean Melancon’s daughter. You know something about Julie, don’t you?”

  “I uh…I’m not sure if I should tell you this. Or if you should tell him this. Or what good it might do to say anything at all, but there is a picture of her. In the club. On the dressing room corkboard. We keep a bunch of pictures there. Pictures of the past. Pictures of parties. Of dancers. Well…there is a picture of that girl in the upper right hand corner of the cork board. Dressed as a dancer. I walk by it every day and I like to look at the old girls and daydream about how they rose above it all, you know? This one is now a doctor, that one got her law degree, she hit it big in real estate...I remember because I always imagined the blonde girl in the upper right as some kind of scientist.”

  “Wait, so you are trying to tell me that you think Melancon’s daughter may have been a stripper?”

  She chewed her lip a little. “Either that or she just happened to hang out at a strip club wearing…well…you know. Stripper clothes.”

  “Oh fuck,” Felix said, feeling the weight of it all drop down on him.

  “So, is she a scientist now? Tell me she is a scientist, Felix.”

  He hesitated, unsure what to say. “Thing is, Tina...his daughter has been missing for over a decade. Just vanished during the storm.”

  Pain scrunched the corner of her eyes.

  “How old do you think this picture is?” Felix pressed.

  “Oh, it looks like a polaroid to me. Maybe 10? Maybe 20? Not recent anyway. You can also tell from the beer labels. They look a bit old fa
shioned.”

  Felix nodded. “So, look. Not a word about this to him. Not yet anyway. I need to think. I... You are sure that it was the same girl in both pictures?”

  “Stop by and take a look for yourself sometime,” Tina said. “But it was her. I know my scientist. I just wish my daydreams could come true for once. Anyway, I’ll see you later.”

  “OK,” he said. “But one last thing.”

  She adjusted the small bag on her shoulder and looked up at him.

  “I want you to…you know…to be careful in there. Whatever is happening in that place. At Mick’s. Girls seem to have a way of coming up missing. And I don’t want to be reading about you in the papers.”

  “I’m tougher than I look,” she said, and gave him a tiny smile before turning and clacking down the street, her red hair bouncing in the wind.

  Back up in the office, Felix found himself standing in front of Melancon’s desk. The old man was staring up at the ceiling, his feet up on the desk.

  “You guys didn’t elope? How nice. Welcome back.”

  Felix looked at his partner and friend, let the burden of his new knowledge about Julie wash over him. It wasn’t the right time, though, he told himself. Not now. The last thing he needed was Melancon to go on another of his heartbroken benders.

  “Only about twenty hours left before the police make it a manhunt,” Felix said.

  “Yep,” the old man replied.

  “So, we ought to get started.”

  “I’m doing hard work here kid,” Melancon said. “All of this stuff has to be given some serious thought, and I’m here thinking it. I’m thinking about our Trombone man and how best to handle him.”

  “Well…I think we are about out of options. My opinion is, go try and talk to him again. Tell him the situation. Try to convince him that he is better off with us. That if he runs and the girl dies, we can’t help him. Cooperate now or it is going to be that much worse for him. If he refuses. We do whatever it takes. Meanwhile, any new information we get we pass on to the cops.”

  Melancon sighed. “As much thinking as I’ve been sitting here doing, I don’t see any better course for us than that, Felix. I just don’t see what other move we could make, do you?” he asked, picking up his hat. “We’ve got to try and bring him in, before this can go any further.”

  “Citizen’s arrest,” Felix said. “Hope he cracks under investigation, gives up Min Ji. And any other…girls.”

  “You check your pistol again, kid?”

  This time Felix bit his tongue and nodded.

  It was an hour later. Melancon seemed sober enough to satisfy Felix as they slowly made their way down Chartres Street towards the fateful corner. Both detectives pricked their ears, listening for the trombone to come echoing down the cement canyons.

  The Quarter was fairly empty. Sunday morning, and big thunderheads anchored the March sky to the pastel houses. A rainbow could be seen over the river, and the calliope organ was rollicking through “Old Suzanna.” What gutter punks they saw, all were smiles and songs and polite frivolity. Something was in the air, but the detectives had forgotten just what.

  Damn, damn, damn.

  The trombone man’s corner was empty. Felix had already figured that this would be the case, but he’d held out a small sliver of hope. Now, only a red fire hydrant stood on the corner for them to stare at. They searched around a two-block radius, already knowing that they wouldn’t find him.

  A long-haired man slept against an Italian suit storefront, a stark contrast to the urbane mannequins within. The detectives tried to roll him over for a bit of information, but whatever sauce had marinated him that day was far too potent. The man’s tongue was good for only drooling and a bit of giggling.

  A few more failed attempts at pumping some of the street people, and Felix spotted one of the little boys from their last encounter. He was running down Royal street in their direction—the same dancing urchin who had so successfully covered Trombone Man’s retreat on their prior confrontation. The boy seemed not to recognize the two detectives. He just kept running, his eyes looking right past Felix.

  An idea struck the young detective, and he assumed a wandering, purposeless gait. He walked across the street, hoping to read as a tourist lost in antique window shopping.

  But this tourist had timing. His steps were full of secret purpose, and he arranged his path so that at the last moment, one small shift in direction put him right into the sprinting urchin’s trajectory. The boy collided with Felix’s right shoulder, sending a bolt of pain coursing through the old bullet wound.

  Both of them bounced down at the feet of the old detective, who bent over and placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder.

  “Hold on there just a second young man,” Melancon said.

  The boy wasn’t scared, as a normal child might have been. Instead of fear, there was fight in his eyes. He twisted and turned, a fierce little fish on the line. But, with two grown men holding him tight, he soon gave it up, abandoned the struggle and glared at them with eyes that could have soldered a wire.

  “I’m finta scream,” the boy said.

  Melancon took on a paternal smile. “Look, we aren’t here to hurt you kid, we are the good guys believe it or not.”

  The boy looked away. “Oh, you the good guy huh?”

  “That’s right,” Melancon said.

  “You can suck my dick good guy,” the boy replied.

  “Woah now, who taught you how to talk like that?” Melancon asked. “You’re what, seven years old?”

  “Eight,” the boy said. He was small for that age, but cut like a young welterweight. Whether he was telling the truth or not about his years, there had clearly been enough of them to temper him to a hardness.

  “Where are your parents?” Melancon asked.

  “They long gone. Where yours pops?”

  Felix had pulled out some hundred dollar bills from his wallet, and held them for the boy to see. When the boy caught the sound of the bills rubbing together, he turned to regard them. The hateful tension went out of him then, and he smiled. A smack of the lips, eyes filled with a kind of mocking pity.

  “You must be the good guys. Only good guys stupid enough to be flashing they money on this corner.”

  Felix pressed. “We want to know where the trombone man is at. We just need to talk to him, OK? We aren’t cops.”

  The boy spit. “I ain’t telling you shit.”

  Melancon rolled up his sleeves. “Listen kid, you’re either going to take this money and tell us where he is, or you are going in for truancy.”

  The boy looked down each angle of street. “It’s Sunday pops,” he said.

  “Alright, call it loitering then. How does that sound? Or maybe we don’t even charge you with anything. We just bring you in and turn you over to the state for being an orphan. You ever read Oliver Twist?”

  The boy looked down at the ground. “No…Listen, I mean today is Sunday pops.”

  The two detectives looked at each other, confused.

  “Is you even from here?” the boy asked.

  Felix finally caught the thread. “You talking about St. Joseph’s day? You don’t strike me as a Catholic school boy.”

  “Super Sunday, fool. And here you is looking for the Wildman,” the boy said. His voice was full of derision as he snatched the money out of Felix’s hand. When he had the bills in his palm, he spent a moment looking down at them. A soft, childish wonder returned to his face. He looked up at Felix, right in the eyes.

  “I never seen no hundred-dollar bill before.”

  “Here, take another one,” Felix said. “You look like you need to eat. And get the hell off the street. You really don’t have anywhere to go?”

  “I got places.”

  “Well get on there then,” Melancon said. “And go to school tomorrow. School is still free isn’t it?”

  The boy scoffed, ran off a block. He stopped there, turned and look over his shoulder at them. “His name Landry by the way.
Call him Trombone Landry. And he ain’t do nothing,” the boy called at them. “He one of the good guys, too. Just cursed is all.”

  With that he was gone.

  Minutes later, the detectives were in the back of a yellow cab, deciding it was quicker than a trip back to the El Camino.

  “Corner of LaSalle and Washington Ave,” Melancon said.

  “Super Sunday!” the cabby replied, and they were off.

  Super Sunday was a holiday quite peculiar to New Orleans, though Felix only had a limited knowledge of it. For Felix, it was St. Joseph’s day—a minor Catholic holiday featuring parades, Italian food, and the little altars that families would make for the saint.

  What he didn’t know, was what Melacnon explained in the back of the cab. Which was that there was a bit of division when it came to the holiday, a class tension even. The world Felix was born into celebrated St. Joseph, but for another side of the city, Super Sunday was something else entirely.

  “It’s the second biggest day of the year for Mardi Gras Indians, kid, right after Fat Tuesday itself. Any tribe worth its salt will be out masking on LaSalle. That means if our little boy was telling the truth and this Trombone Landry guy is the Wildman of a prominent tribe, he will most certainly be at that corner.

  “Wildman?”

  “You really don’t know about all this stuff, kid? How long have you lived here?”

  Felix reddened. “Only my whole life. But you know I went to private school. Try not to hold it against me.”

  The detective nodded. “The tribes have this whole hierarchy. Big Chief at the top, and then a bunch of lower positions. Spyboy, flagboy, squaw, and so on. Well, the Wildman is the second in command. Basically, the body guard. He traditionally carried a real weapon, back in the days when the tribes used to actually fight, and settle grudges. Once upon a time it was quite a bloody thing, really. The whole tradition is just bathed in blood. Anyway, it is different, now. Soft. Now, it is mostly just to show off the suits, have a parade. These days the Wildman usually carries some plastic toy weapon or something. A kind of symbol of the past. He dances around and drinks, taunts the other tribes. Makes a show of protecting the Big Chief. Shit like that.”