Roots of Misfortune

by Seth Pevey

  If you dig long enough into the depths of the past, you find all sorts of things at the root of you. This goes not only for man, but also for man’s best friend. Dogs feel their own history in a place so deep and complete that their minds are tinged by the eons. They carry with them some indelible flourishes, secret histories of dog-kind imprinted in their souls.

  For instance: dogs were once frequently the prey of large and terrible birds. On some savannah would be a great mutt forebear, crouching in on a mole rat scurrying across the sand. In that next moment, the mere rumor of a shadow might be passing overhead; a shade would barely flit across the sun. Before there was time to flee, or even to consider flight, here would come the wicked decent. In an instant the world would go all talon and beak, down heavy like a bolt out of the clear blue.

  Things like that don’t leave the collective memory easily.

  Scrappy didn’t know all this, of course. He was a dog. And dogs don’t know things, they feel them. And he felt it; it was electric deep in the place where his communal dog sense lived. It lit up something that we, more categorizing animals, might call instinct.

  All of this was why, at the first hint of something untoward happening overhead, Scrappy had scrambled. It was an old part of his brain shooting fire into his legs, backed by millennia of death-defying practice.

  In that terrible moment when the trap door was being opened above, and treacherous incarceration was raining down in the form of a sea-scented web of nylon, Scrappy himself had managed to avoid the worst of it. He found himself outside of the net, watching in animal fear as the two head members of his small pack were writhing for their lives in the strange shroud.

  There were other instincts at play as well. Just as old. They were gut feelings that had grown out of being a friend to man, out of slumbering just outside of his campfires for generations, eons having your belly filled by their pink hands coming down from on high.

  Those tool and fire and food-bringing hands.

  After such a relationship, seeing his masters there in jeopardy caused movements inside Scrappy, feelings, what one might even call emotions. Whatever they were, they were just over the border from humanity. Scrappy had, over the ages, become the scion of another hard won lesson: protect and cherish the pink and naked hands that feed you.

  So, he’d tugged for a moment on the offending net with all his might, the smell of shrimp-slime and kelp overwhelming him, as foreign and potent as all dangers. The lead weights wrapped around his teeth and threatened to rip out his canines, but still he persisted. The odd net was not a part of his instinct, and he was not equipped to do much to oppose it aside from whine and tug, whine and tug. That was what he did, with the savage heart of a panicked beast. At least, until he felt the first kick.

  A rubber fisherman’s boot landed in his ribs, cracking one of them. The man attached to the boot was a shadow over him, a beak and talons, a terrible and strange presence. He was fear and pain itself, tall and menacing with long legs for kicking. Scrappy floundered on the ground, growling wildly. Another kick brought him back up to his feet, and the pain searing through his flank sent him scampering away into the line of cypress trees across the mollusk-scented road. It was a fight he could not have won. The man was simply too long, too equipped, too cruel.

  From the swampy quag across the oyster road, Scrappy crouched low in the grass, watching the dark shadow of a man put rags over the faces of his two beloved masters. The shadow pulled out a knife, and with it cut the net open, throwing Felix’s limp body over its shoulder, up the stairs into its den. The old master was next, lifted and carried like a bag of kibble. In such a way the masters disappeared from Scrappy’s view, and thus his instincts had to shift gear.

  After all, there was one more master—one more giver of treats and belly rubs and love and that deep instinctual feeling of connection and safety.

  Only, he was far from her. But he might change that. The adrenaline shooting through his body bid him make that change, as it eased the pain of his broken ribs and installed a forward feeling in his four legs.

  A breeze blew from the south, over lakes and rivers twenty miles distant. It swept up and carried the salty smell of the gulf. Then it carried itself over the Mississippi River where it picked up that muddy, red smell of the country’s washout. Then it swirled around the brick buildings of the French Quarter, picking up soot and sadness. It swooped like a bird of prey over Chartres Street, where just at that moment, Tina Green, in the process of changing herself into Tipitina, was spraying her signature perfume onto her neck. She was spraying it in preparation for a day of work: that green sandalwood and cedar concoction that was a beacon of her, a homing device, a signal flare.

  That dog nose: a tool millions of years in the making, was ready to find its purpose.

  But even so, Scrappy could not yet smell Tina. What he had, instead, was a scent map of sorts. A trail of smells that he could trace back from the way he’d come. His mind might have had little visual memory of the trip spent slobbering all over Melancon’s El Camino, but his nose could not forget. It would lead him right back to Tina’s arms if his luck were to hold, one smell at a time.

  And so he began, his snout tracing invisible roads, finding first the smell of the wet oysters leading him down the road to a seafood shack they had passed, and then on back to the exhaust smell of the highway they’d traversed, and thence on towards the increasingly pungent smell of people, people, and more people. It blew from towns and cities, of which Tina was at the core.

  The main highway ran along a swamp pungent of algae and cypress wood and green ruin, and it was this his nose had him running along for the first leg of the journey. He galloped on at a four or five mile an hour pace, his tongue waving, his pads soon growing raw from the rough asphalt. The surface of the highway had quickly gone from wet and cool and petrichor, to now hot and chemical again in the lowering spring sunshine.

  A few more miles into his journey and he came to a green thing. It lay on the shoulder of the road, directly across his path, long and thick in the middle. It looked like a fallen tree. Scrappy sniffed the air around it. The green thing smelled of eggs: sulfurous and rancid and snake-like. As he approached it, a low rumbled emerged from the living log. It was a growl but not a growl, something older than even a canine’s threatening grumble. It hit another place deep in Scrappy’s mind as it hummed. Unsure, the dog tentatively approached to try and perhaps step over the green thing, but the thing grew even more cross at that prospect. It twisted and thrashed and gave him a flash of its long row of yellowing teeth. The two animals stood facing each other for a second—Scrappy barking, and the strange dragon creature snapping its protracted jaws.

  Scrappy abandoned his leaping notion, and instead attempted to go around. Through the roadway he went, and was nearly hit by a giant metal creature that wafted fumes and the smell of rubber in its wake. The tank-beast swerved and honked a long, doleful bleat of warning.

  Too much for the alligator’s sensibilities: it slithered back into its mire and the dog kept going. Soon the sun had dropped, but Scrappy did not slow his gait.

  Further along, as he came to the outskirts of the city, a policeman began to chase him down the side of the road. The black, upright creature swung a beam of light in its soft, clawless hands and ran towards Scrappy on its two blue legs. But Scrappy lost him easily with his four, gently weaving through another one of the oncoming cars. The policeman creature shouted and cursed and spat and went for his cruiser, but the dog had already gone off into the woods and was cutting the corner that lead him to New Orleans East. He could smell the abandoned amusement park they had passed on their way out, all cement and unused plastic, pigeons in their thousands roosting under the dry waterslide.

  In his nostrils, there were no lies.

  Past the park he began to smell the same fried chicken place as he had on the way out, and it pulled him onward.

  Scrappy approached the back door bashfully. Three pink creatures were
huddled on egg crates, smoking. The air around them smelled like grease and tobacco and tiredness. Scrappy whimpered, sat on his haunches and lifted a paw at the air in front of him. It had worked for millions of years and it worked now just the same.

  One of the men raised an arm to him, and Scrappy winced. But the pink hand only rubbed him between the ears. Another man disappeared and came back with a drumstick which Scrappy devoured in about fifteen seconds. He waved his flaccid tongue at the men and plodded on into the night.

  For miles and miles he ran, through the darkness where the cypress trees along the road smelled like the floors of the office on Basin Street, on past the farmer’s market with its fruity and septic odors. The farmers were just unloading in a parking lot, where a young farm boy tried to throw a rock at Scrappy. Of course, the boy missed.

  Scrappy’s ribs ached and his footpads were all but worn away when he finally scampered on into the suburbs of the city where domestic cats began to appear, fat and slit-eyed on their porch hibiscus jungles.

  His feet blistered, tore, burned, went raw against gravel, and finally arrived at numbness—but still he ran. The loyalty of a dog was a powerful thing.

  And that was all Scrappy needed, that simple love, to lead him to an alleyway where he finally got a proper whiff of Tina’s perfume. It blew into both nostrils smelling like hope, and a golden, grassy meadow in fall. It was as unmistakable as a lighthouse to a ship, the moon to a moth, or a campfire to a beast shivering just outside of the warmth.

  Nineteen

  When Felix Herbert regained consciousness, he found himself sitting in a dimly lit room. There was a sweet taste on the back of his throat and a strain in his old bullet wound. His arms had been roughly zip tied behind him, and the tension of it made his injury ache. He sat on an uncomfortable folding chair, unlike in kind from the plush couches and chairs that filled the room. It appeared to be some sort of lounge. A bar at one end and with an old-fashioned Wurlitzer jukebox behind it. Scattered around were a few mirrors and lights advertising various alcohols. It might have been a comfortable place in better circumstances than this one.

  He could turn his head just enough to see his partner sitting to his left in a very similar predicament: zip tied to a chair and just coming to. The old man’s head lolled.

  A voice, just in front of him, coming from one of the couches. He couldn’t make out the words. Slowly, a shape clarified. She was sitting with her legs folded in front of her, filing her fingernails. An Asian woman with large hoop earrings that shone out in the darkness, a low-cut black dress. She wore a disinterested expression on her face and did not look at them.

  “Min Ji?” Felix said.

  She finished her filing and finally regarded him.

  “How do you know my name?” she asked, gentle and calm. In the darkness Felix could see that she was indeed beautiful, and as she stood to study him more closely he came face to face with her slightly swollen belly.

  “We were hired. By Father Kim. Your priest. Your parents are…beside themselves with worry.”

  “Hired?” she said, coming face to face with him.

  A groan came from the left. “We are private detectives, young lady. Hired by worried people who love you,” Melancon said.

  She paced across the shag carpet of the room, a quizzical expression in her eyes. In profile, her features were accentuated: the small nose, tight lips and shining, raven hair.

  “You are here to rescue me then?” she asked.

  “That’s the gist,” Felix replied. “So if you’ll go ahead and untie us we can all be on our way."

  She turned and looked down her nose at both of them, ran the file across her fingers a few time. “A fine job you are doing. Brave knights, zip-corded to the furniture.”

  Felix realized then that something was missing. “Hey, where is my dog?”

  She grinned, showing a row of perfect white teeth. “What dog?”

  Felix looked away from her, around the room. No Scrappy.

  Melancon pushed past it. “We came to help you. I’m not sure if you are aware of the gravity of your situation miss. There has been a man going around murdering young girls. Fact of the matter is that all roads seem to lead us right to this house, and we’ve got a whole lot of reasons to believe that the man who lives here may be planning to murder you.”

  “It’s you who should be worried,” Min Ji said, as the smile left her face. Now her mouth was as thin and sharp as a fish hook.

  “Do I look like I’m here against my will?” she demanded.

  “Well…”

  She threw the nail file at Melancon, where it bounced off his chest and landed on the ground.

  “Then why would you try to control where I go. Who I’m with? Why would my parents? And my fucking priest? Don’t you think I can make my own decisions about my life?”

  That seemed to have left Melancon without much in the way of a retort. Min Ji stamped off, out of the room. The thuds of her footfalls crossing the house seemed too thunderous for such a slight and graceful person.

  And then she called out a name.

  It sounded to Felix like the initials “G.D.”

  She returned seconds later, behind a man taller and thinner and blacker than Felix had ever seen. He might have been seven feet tall, with long and thin arms and legs. He looked top heavy, with broad shoulders on a slender frame. The man looked dressed for some event: a black dinner jacket and a purple tie, a top hat which he removed and flung onto the couch. His clothes were old fashioned and coordinated, but they had been obviously put through some use. Strings danced near the cuffs, and a coffee like stain formed an archipelago across the vest. He carried a snifter of some amber colored fluid in one hand, and a rotten-smelling cigar in the other. When he grinned at them Felix saw a row of viciously golden teeth.

  The man had strong eyes. A hardness and an intensity to his leering aspect that could wilt flowers. His skin was like the wet bottom of an oak tree. Graying hair ran back slick against his head. He wore wire rim glasses that formed two perfect bronze circles around his eyes and magnified the dark pits of them.

  He smiled at them again, closer this time, revealing his row of gold teeth to be etched with strange runes.

  “Welcome to the party, gentlemen,” he said.

  “Big Chief?” Felix asked, with a sneer.

  “I forget, because I’ve watched you for so long, that we actually have not been properly introduced. Where are my manners? My name is G.D. Bellarose.”

  He reached a long skinny arm out to shake, chuckling to himself. “I see you’re in no mood for handshakes.”

  Min Ji had gone to the other side of the room, now behind the detectives. She could not be seen but Felix could smell what he reckoned to be her perfume, something close to grapefruit, beneath the cigar.

  “We’re just here for the girl,” Melancon said. “Her folks have gotten worried about her. She hasn’t called home in a while. One phone call to her parents is all it would take, and this whole thing can be resolved.”

  Felix could hear the sound of the old man’s chair creaking as he struggled to free his hands.

  “No, that is definitely not why you are here,” the man said. “You are here, no doubt, as payment?”

  “Payment for what?”

  “For old sins,” the man said with some relish.

  “We don’t know anything about that,” Felix cried, the blood pulsing into his face.

  “Oh I don’t doubt your ignorance, Felix Herbert. Not for one moment. How could a boy like you understand all the debts he owes?”

  “I don’t owe you shit,” Felix replied.

  “I find that humorous. I wonder, do you gentlemen know the story of Bras Coupé?” he asked, squatting down on his haunches and looking from one of them to the other.

  “I bet you’re about to tell us,” Melancon said.

  “I find it appropriate for this particular moment. After all, here you are claiming I kidnapped someone. Claiming that it is I who
owe you an explanation instead of vice versa. Acting as if some slight has been done to you. But this is only because you lack perspective.”

  The man with the long arms took a long drink of what smelled like rum, a puff of his cigar, and sat down on the couch across from them, crossing his legs.”

  “He was a slave. They called him Squire. A beast of a man. He could sing like a church bell and dance like a leaf in a storm. They say he was tall and wide and sharp as a knife, and that he never accepted the chains he was born into. And so,” he pointed his cigar at them, opening his frightening eyes wide and blowing a trail of smoke into the air, “he ran off every chance he got. Ran off into this very swamp in which you are now sitting.”

  G.D. leaned back and uncrossed his long legs in front of him, peering out between the curtains behind him before continuing.

  “Eventually he was caught, and as punishment the planter’s patrol cut off his right arm. But that didn’t stop him. He ran off again and formed a gang of escaped slaves, living out here, out by the Pearl. His gang lived on their wits, robbing plantations and merchants. For years, the legend of Squire continued to grow. They said he was immune to bullets. That he couldn’t be killed. They called him Bras Coupé…the man with the cut arm. He kidnapped and stole from the city to make his way. And, I like to think, as a form of setting the scales to rights. Eventually he misplaced his trust in some drunkard who clubbed him, sleeping, for the reward money. But it didn’t matter. The legend had already grown beyond the man.”

  “What is the point of all this?” Felix asked, his limbs getting tingly and his head swimming.

  “I already told you. The point is perspective.”

  “On what?”

  The man smiled, his head bent low and his eyes beaming up at them. “On your situation. Because I am the man missing parts and pieces, and you are something I’ve stolen to pay that debt.”

  “And what parts are you missing?” Melancon asked.

  “Not all amputations can be seen old man. You, of all people, know that.”