Roots of Misfortune

by Seth Pevey

“All I want to know… is why?” Melancon said. “Why do you think you can kill women? How do you justify it to yourself? In your fucked up head it all makes sense, doesn’t it? Explain that to me.”

  The man laughed, stood up from his chair. He went to the door and returned with his drink and cigar, waving Min Ji away again and locking the door behind her.

  “Ahh, women,” G.D. said.

  “You see, detective. One day we must all set down the burdens of pain and suffering and go through the door. And when I go through that door, I will have a great house. I will have a grand table set for me, I will sit with them and drink rum forever. I will sit with my many women and children and it will be as if I’m a king. The dead are jealous, you see. All they care for is more company. And I will never want for that. Call it sacrifice if you must. But it is more than that. It is setting of things to rights.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Melancon said.

  The thin man continued his slow chuckle, incredulous. “Your problem detective, is that you feel the need for things to make sense. But it is not just any sense, it is only your sense. And your senses are only what you see, touch, and hear. And your hearing is severely limited. You don’t hear them. You can’t feel them. The legions of them. They surround you. They whisper of the past, of grievances, of ancient wrongs. They are storytellers. You are blind and deaf, wandering the world, looking for meaning. But there is no meaning that you can create anew. All of it has already been made. It has born and died and now only whispers in the dark. No, the world does not make your sense, doesn’t care about your childish sense of decorum or structure. The spirits care about only blood, death, and ruin, because those are the door through which the two worlds are joined.”

  “And you figured you were going to give the spirits what they want?”

  As G.D. turned to tap out the ash of his cigar, Melancon kicked Felix in the shin as hard as he could, causing the boy’s head to rise and his eyes to wince. G.D. didn’t seem to notice. Melancon needed his partner to be paying attention now. He needed to fill his heart with that sly anger that made him the sharpest.

  Finally, Felix spoke up. “Maybe he has a point, partner.”

  Melancon feigned surprise and indignation. “And what the hell point would that be?”

  Felix took a deep breath through his nose and Melancon could see that there were tiny tears forming in the corners of his green eyes—a sincerity that was out of place and frightened the old detective. “The point is that there is no point. Death is the only thing you can be sure of. And that makes it…kind of sacred. The only truth there is. It’s in every move we make. The whole city we live in was built on it. Built on a mound of death. Piles and piles of bones. Just like he said, in his stories. We are living on Corpse Mountain, and we don’t even think about it.”

  G.D. looked back and forth from the two detectives for a long while. Then he laughed again. It was a small trickle of mirth at first, but it grew into a room-shaking, full-bellied laugh that sent shivers down Melancon’s spine. He raised his glass to them and took a big puff of his foul cigar.

  “That is your second problem, detectives. You think you are smarter than you really are. You think you are smarter than everyone, don’t you? That you are smarter than me. But this is not something you can outsmart. This is not something you can fight against. All you can do is make your peace.”

  G.D. stood up and left the room, coming back just a few moments later. He had a leather satchel with him, draped over his arm. He pulled a little coffee table from out of one corner and into the space in front of their chairs. He laid the satchel on the table and unzipped it.

  The dark, rum-smelling man smiled at Felix, an inch away from his face now. “Make your peace…” he said. “That’s quite a thing to say, isn’t it? It must be hard to do when you don’t believe.”

  “Believe in what?” Felix said, his eyes on the satchel.

  “In anything,” G.D. said darkly, his eyes blinking in his own cigar smoke.

  “I believe…”

  G.D. unzipped the satchel. “Tell me then young one. What spirit do you believe can save you now? What is it that you believe in? What do you believe in, Felix Herbert?”

  Felix opened his mouth but nothing came out. Melancon watched the muscles of his partner’s neck tighten and the hate fill up in his eyes.

  There it is, Melancon thought to himself.

  “I believe that anyone who has their minds made up is doing it wrong,” Felix said, and raised his head up to meet the dark man’s grimace.

  They sat staring at each other for a long moment. The room was quiet, except for the ticking of the clock and Min Ji off in the guts of the house.

  G.D. reached into the leather satchel and pulled out a long knife. “Here is what I believe in. Let me acquaint you with its teachings.”

  It was a type of kris, the blade slithering out of the hilt like a snake’s body and tapering to a wicked point. It looked old—the flat end was worn and grey and scratched. The edge, however, shone from a recent honing. It glinted in the new light, and in its razor edge Melancon could see a reflection of eternity.

  The old detective felt faint. So this was to be it? Seeing that blade in G.D.’s hand as he held it up to the light caused the reality of the situation to sink in. The blade was sharper than any words; it could slice through his juvenile attempts to trick and coerce. Here was the curtain falling. There were no more things to say or do. No more hope and no more booze. No more late nights listening to sad music and no more sitting in the El Camino while the rain hit the windshield. No more Janine. No more memories of Julie.

  Melancon felt the words burning out of his chest, up his throat and past his tongue. “Before you do this. I have a final question. I want to know how many women have you killed? You might as well tell us, since we will be dead.”

  G.D. looked at him with eyes like the bottom of a well. “The dead speak loudly detective. And anyway, it is surely not as many souls as you’ve sent to the gallows.”

  “I’ve never sent an innocent man!” Melancon cried, the vein on his temple bulging.

  “Ah, but can you be so sure? Tell me detective, what is the last thing they do for one of your guilty men, before they put them in the electric chair at Angola?”

  “A last meal,” Felix said, his voice resigned but steady.

  “That’s right, boy. Surely you know, Detective David Melancon, that it is customary for the condemned to receive a last meal? As many men as you’ve sent to their deaths, no doubt?”

  G.D. blew a plume of smoke over Melancon’s face which stung his eyes and sent him into a fit of mad coughing.

  “You know what Chief? You can go fuck yourself,” Melancon said, catching his breath through dry heaves. Once he’d regained his wind, David Melancon did something he’d never done before in his six plus decades. Slow and somber he pooled what dregs of spittle he could in his adrenalin-dried mouth. Then he pursed his lips and launched an orb of spit right onto G.D.’s face. A dollop of saliva slapped against the dark man’s shining cheek, making a flat sound.

  But the slighted man did not move, did not react, nor did his features furrow into some terrible rage. Instead he pulled a purple handkerchief out of his front pocket and calmly wiped the spittle away, never taking his cold slab eyes off of the detective.

  He brought his icy face up close to Melancon’s, and smiled again, near enough now that the detective could make out the runes etched onto his golden front teeth. Then, in a deep and final voice, he spoke. “For you, Mr. Melancon. For you, David. I have selected something very special for this last meal. It has been prepared particularly for you. The recipe for it was taught to me by the spirits. Do you want to know what it is?”

  In his peripheral, Melancon could just make out his partner Felix, shaking his head from side to side in a long and dolorous refusal.

  “It’s a pie. A very special kind of pie.”

  “I’d prefer a jar of whisky,” Melancon said. “If
it’s all the same.”

  G.D. shook his dark head. “No, no, no. You really must try this pie. It is a special pie that I made myself. From homegrown ingredients. From a fruit that I grow right here, on this very property. I planted the tree myself over ten years ago.”

  Melancon’s gut turned into a bowling ball, a falling boulder thrown down through the darkness of an abyss so large that he could not feel the end of it. Over ten years ago. It just kept dropping: every sinew and fiber of his being gone glacial and ponderous all at once. He squirmed in his chair like a gun-shot victim, wishing to move that feeling away, to unburden himself of that heaviness, to wiggle it around so that maybe instead of his gut, his mind might do the falling into blackness, into numbness, into relief.

  “Don’t say it,” Melancon growled. He bit his lip until he could taste the salty metallic tang of his own blood.

  G.D. was nodding, his tight grin knotted across his face. The thin, cracked lips went taut and the sunken eyes bored wicked holes into Melancon’s last faith in humanity. “Don’t be silly David. You must try it. Come now, have you ever had a slice of really fine fig pie?”

  “You fucking bastard…”

  The hatred Melancon felt at that moment was overwhelming, it built up inside his chest and threw its daggers into every part of him. His bones ached and his muscles twisted with the terrible insinuation. He could only watch, outside of himself and frozen by this hate, as G.D. pulled a whetstone from his leather satchel and stood sharpening his kris against it, with long slow strops. He smiled and his teeth gleamed in the wan light of a cloudy, final day.

  But just then, a foreign sound. Just then, a knock. A pounding on the door. They all heard it. It reverberated through the wooden, hollow house and left the three men staring at each other in disbelief.

  Each had their own moment to call on faith in its nebulous purpose. They waited in heavy silence, thinking perhaps a nut had merely crashed against the tin roof. But, once again, that knock sounded through the house. It was a sound that could only be made by a human hand.

  Brilliant and full and deliberate, the knock came again.

  Twenty-Two

  She remembered the day something finally unfroze inside her. It was a series of events she had been running over in her head, sitting there in the bedroom next to the lounge where the two detectives were being held. She was sipping a Bloody Mary, painting her nails, listening to the muffled lesson her love was teaching them through the wall.

  The past is precious, G.D. had told her—and she needed to imprint these memories on her mind. After all, she wanted to be able to tell the baby when he or she arrived: this is how I met your father.

  Min Ji Park had always been practical but contrary. Pretending to toe the line, while at the same time skipping across it, was an art she had mastered. She saw it as a retaliation against the overbearing cruelty of her parent’s love. Catholicism and parental zeal had held an almost fanatical stewardship over her formative years, to the point that it had chilled something in her soul. Though her burqa may have been a figurative one, it was guilt-ridden and shame-wrought just the same. Her life of stringent rules and routines and pressure, masked in the guise of love, chained her and grew in her a penchant for furtive rebellion.

  The casting off of these wrappings had taken place over a decade, at a slow and secret pace. She was fueled by resentment and the pleasures of a secret identity. Her parents, Father Kim, her teachers—they all had no idea who she really was. They didn’t want to know.

  She’d undress by the open window in her upstairs bedroom with the lamp on. She stole liquor from the store next to her dad’s beauty supply shop, the owner’s there knowing and trusting her. On at least two occasions growing up she had shocked and cowed boys in her classes by initiating skinny dipping sessions in which they were too shy to join her.

  It wasn’t sexual for her. She just liked breaking rules. Being contrary was the only way to feel alive when your life had been structured brick by brick, around you like a tomb, before you had even begun to live. And what thing would horrify the rule makers the most? What thing about her bestowed her with the greatest power and shame?

  She had no illusions on that. She was a practical young woman.

  Her voyeurism gave way to experimentation. The day of her audition at Mick’s had been magical, for many reasons. There were three men watching and two, more experienced dancers. She had slung her slim frame around that pole and it was like she was a brand new person. A woman. Life was bursting with choice. A fortune of chance. Existence was built for this. It was built for lust, and risk, and thrills, and all that existed just outside of the line that everyone who claimed to love her painted and repainted around her little life.

  Until she met him. His love was not a prison cell but a mansion filled with exotic heirlooms.

  And so, the most magical part of that day hadn’t come until after she had exchanged a handshake with the owner, who promised to call and did, in fact, two days later to say that she had gotten the job.

  But then, on her way out the door, standing on the soot spattered asphalt of Bourbon and deciding what to do with the rest of her afternoon, he had appeared. The tall man with the long arms, the top hat and the purple tie. Gold-grinning, wide-eyed, story-telling, rum-swilling G.D.

  He was a buggy driver. A tour guide who whisked visitors around the Quarter, painting for them his dark and gruesome vignettes of history. He’d pulled up, out front of the club, on that beautiful two seater buggy. He’d gotten out and stroked his mule and looked at her over the mane.

  “I see you,” he said.

  And he’d given her a personal tour for free—shown her secret things that she had never known. Magic things. Dark histories of death and memory all around. First about the Quarter, and then about herself. He carried with him a crown of profundity and after an hour with him she felt he’d placed one on her own head, crowned her his queen like it had always been so.

  At the end of the tour he had pressed the little balls of John the Conqueror into her palm. Told her the spirits had brought them together. Told her life would never be the same again.

  She knew it then like she’d never known anything. It was like a block of ice in her belly, melting.

  She’d had to share at first. With that other woman she’d rather not name. But that had all been taken care of. And now…

  A knock on the door booted her out of her reverie. What time was it? Her mind ran through the list of possibilities. There were certainly no bible salesmen that ventured out so far, and they’d no neighbors at all. She’d been there a while now and hadn’t been in contact with anyone, come to think of it. Whoever it was would need to be gotten rid of, and quickly. She had to let G.D. do whatever it was he needed to do. He had to be left to his work.

  Now that she’d found him, no one was going to take him away. No one was going to make it so her baby grew up without a father. No way she’d let them refreeze her, repaint the line in the sand.

  But what exactly that would take, she wasn’t quite sure. There was an inkling in the back of her head that those two men sitting in the parlor might have to die. Was she prepared for that? She’d never seen someone die, but a part of her found the possibility exhilarating. Powerful and moving to even consider it. That was what she liked about Voodoo. That was what she preferred over the dull Catholic droning. Turn the other cheek when someone strikes you? No, thanks. The meek shall inherit the earth? Fuck the meek. She was done with that philosophy of weakness. Voodoo, on the other hand, saw power in blood and death and memory. No more empty platitudes.

  Min Ji kept the chain in place as she allowed the door to crack a few inches, feeling the brisk air blow against her belly.

  The woman at the door stood in a combative pose, but she relaxed when she saw who it was that had opened. “Holy shit. Min Ji! What the hell are you doing out here?”

  Tina Green. She wasn’t a friend, and barely an acquaintance. What did she think she was doing? Min Ji looked
her up and down, barely recognizing her in her nurse outfit, minus the glitter and the fake eyelashes. Her makeup had run down her face and it looked as though she’d been crying. Red eyed, Tina stared at her in disbelief through the small gap in the door.

  “I live here Tina. I might ask you the same question…Why are you here?”

  Tina tried to peer in behind her, into the darkness of the house, but Min Ji shifted to block her vision.

  “Min Ji…I…we thought you had been kidnapped, girl. Do you…you know who lives here right? I mean, do you know who he is? Or what he might be?”

  “You mean my boyfriend?” Min Ji said, openly hostile now. She unchained the door and pulled it back a bit so that Tina might witness the fullness of her belly. She hoped that would make her feel foolish: that maybe she would look at it and understand that Min Ji wasn’t toying with the notion of breaking the rules, but was full on committed to it.

  “Min Ji, what the fuck? They think this guy might be a killer. And you’re having his baby?”

  “Oh, is that what they said? Look we are kind of…tied up right now. I think you should leave, Tina. Before you get hurt.”

  “They are in there, aren’t they? You guys have kidnapped them haven’t you? Do you have any idea the kind of shit you are getting yourself into? That baby into? The government will take your fucking baby away from you Min Ji.” Tina was screaming now, kicking at the door and raising holy hell. “And they will stick you and your prince into a fucking six by eight for decades! Not together of course, but all alone. That baby will have no idea who the fuck you are by the time you get out of there. Accessory to kidnapping and God knows what else? You want your baby raised by the state, Min Ji….because….”

  “Enough!” Min Ji tried to cut her off. But Tina just kept talking. There were always people talking at her, and the subject was always what was best for her. If it could be called a conversation, which it wasn’t, then it was one that she was long tired of having.

  Tina reached out and placed a hand on her wrist, and that caused the seams of civility in the encounter to pop out all at once.