Uptown Blues

by Seth Pevey

  One of the officers has an arm around Mama Jones, but I can tell he doesn’t really mean it. It is more like the kind of arm you’d put on an animal that was misbehaving. An arm for control, not for comfort. But Mama Jones isn’t paying any attention to him anyway. She is staring up at the sky and not paying attention to me either while she shrieks and moans.

  One of the officers steps towards me, and Mrs. Lafreniere gives me a little gentle push forward. Then she slowly backs up to her Pontiac and gets in and shuts the door with a loud thud. I can see her watching for a second out of the corner of her eye, but then she drives away, her sagging tailpipe skipping and bopping over the potholes.

  The officer is still moving towards me, faster now. He has a big gut hanging over his tool belt and his face is not gentle. The opposite of a gentleman. He has not shaved and I can smell some kind of cigar coming off of him. There is a gun on his belt, big and black and heavy. I don’t trust a thing about him and I’m holding on tight to my red horn and feel myself start to step backwards. I don’t want this man to touch me, don’t want to hear his voice, don’t want to hear Mama Jones scream or see the porch people all looking over long-necked like the egrets in the park.

  All I want is to hear Daddy’s boots on the porch, his chair scraping back, his waffles popping. A man takes pride, I want to hear him tell me.

  The officer takes another step towards me, and I see his hand go to his gun just for a second and then fall by his side. I know he didn’t mean it. I know that he is touching his gun in the same way that I’m gripping on to my horn, but I don’t care. I don’t want anything to do with this—with these officers and their bright lights and hard looks. I don’t want them taking me somewhere with more guns and more lights and more strange fat men with stubble on their cheeks. I open my mouth to tell the officer as much, but no sound comes out.

  He gets a hand on me and I start to go dizzy. Everything is blue flashing lights and Mama Jones screaming. There’s a feeling in my head like when you turn to a dead channel in a hotel room and the screen roars black and white and fuzzy at you. All I know is that I’m being pulled away, to a place where I don’t want to go. Then I feel a tug at my horn—someone is trying to take it from me, which is something that no one should ever try to do. I swing out with my free hand, and before I can even think about it I feel the officer’s big gut try to swallow my fist. He calls out in an angry voice, but I’m already running away down the dark street with my horn held out in front of me and my backpack bouncing. The blue fades away and now there are only yellow streetlights and I’m running down as far as I can see, hoping I’ll vanish somehow and this will all be over.

  But of course, that’s not how it turns out at all.

  Two

  Tomás de Valencia had lost a great many things in the course of his life. So many, in fact, that he had become a great master in the art of loss.

  First were his brother and his country. Next went the ability to father children—a kick from a devilish horse had seen to that. He’d been so young, but he’d continued to live past it and accepted two boys of another blood and raised them as his own sons.

  Then he’d lost one of those boys, too. Insult to injury, as they said. Robert Herbert had been such a joy.

  Soon afterwards, he had lost his best friend in the world: the father of those boys. How long had it been now since that day in Audubon Park, when Marcus Herbert had collapsed into the black bayou with his second and final clot in the brain?

  And now the latest loss—his ability to walk.

  Months of pain and attempted rehabilitation had left him chairbound, likely for the rest of his days. And still he lived on. Still he persevered. Past it all, he emerged a great statesman of deprivation, a sage of absence and forfeiture.

  Tomás de Valencia rocked his wheelchair gently and thanked God for all of the joys that were still his. It was a sort of prayer he practiced every night, listing all of the things he had managed to hold on to after so many battles. He counted these blessings with a ritual regularity and discipline.

  First, he still had his cast-iron dignity. There was also the warmth of golden sunshine on his face by day, a cool drink of an evening, the lady of the house to fuss with. She was out of town now on some far-flung pleasure cruise, leaving him to the flavor of his thick cigars. These were a pleasure he only allowed himself in her absence, as the smell of them would arouse her allergies.

  He also had the exploits of his still-living “son” Felix Herbert to follow, and those intrepid tales came as fast and as engaging as an old man could hope to keep up with. A private detective’s life was full of adventure and bravado, after all, and Tomás had pride to spare for the boy, now turned into a fine man.

  And last, but perhaps not entirely last…

  Well, he simply didn’t like to dwell on it. But it could not simply be overlooked when counting God’s many graces. The simple truth was this: an immense fortune didn’t hurt either. It was worth thanking the universe for, once in a while. Tomás de Valencia was not a man for worldly things, but what better way to lift your crippled spirits than a personal elevator installed at home? Nurses to help you anytime you required? The finest bourbon money could buy and leisure time in which to sip it while overlooking the springtime avenue?

  And that was really the thing, wasn’t it?

  Time.

  Tomás found himself, for the first instance in his long life, with time to spare. That, more than any other thing at this moment, was something he was immensely thankful for.

  He filled that time with gusto and kindness, relishing it in the way only a man free from the salvos of bitterness could. Because there was one loss he would never abide, and that was the loss of his usefulness.

  He’d tried a few different avocations out without finding any particular meaning: painting, violin, teaching Spanish. But a prime opportunity had arisen, just a few months earlier, to give private tutoring to so-called “at-risk youths” in the art of class, etiquette, and manners. And, if he threw in a bit of ethics and philosophy for lagniappe, who would ever make a fuss? Tomás had jumped at the chance to once again do this holy work of boy-rearing, the work that had given him such fulfillment and purpose in the past.

  Well, he had rolled at the chance anyway. His jumping days had gone.

  It was a cool evening now, the air along St. Charles Avenue going crisp and petal-smelling. The parades had passed weeks earlier and the austere season of Lent lay heavy on the city. Tomás watched the streetcars rattle by and appreciated the horse-clopping regularity of the Roman Candy carriage as it retreated for the night. But not all was meek and regular, and there was one blight on the peace of the Avenue—scores of NOPD cruisers blustering their way upriver with sirens and lights blaring, a new cluster of them coming through every ten minutes or so, each pack with its own doubled-down sense of urgency. So many, he thought, that it must portend something awful. That set Tomás to envisioning all of the awful things that went on in the world beyond these stone walls, and so he retreated to the back balcony, lest his bourbon be spoiled by a foul mood.

  Though it certainly lacked the life and activity of the Avenue, from his backwards-facing perch, Tomás could overlook one of the best-kept half acres in the entire city, with Bermuda grass meticulously clipped, fountains of pure white marble, Romanesque columns and a pantheon of statues. All of it was centered around an inviting gazebo, with a grand live oak sprawling over all as it had for centuries.

  He was hoping to hear the whip-poor-will that had taken up residence in that majestic oak. So much better than sirens to accompany an old man’s peaceful thoughts. It was usually at this hour that the creature would practice its lonesome cry. But tonight, Tomás did not hear the bird. In fact, he heard no birds or squirrels or any wildlife coming from the backyard.

  He sipped his drink, cleared his throat, and waited.

  Such eerie silence. A slight breeze passing through the limbs of the oak, the distant wail of the sirens—that was all. Tom
ás peered out into the darkness. The lady of the house being away, Tomás often neglected to turn on the back lighting, preferring the light of the moon, which had by now grown fairly full and bright.

  And so, squinting from his high spot, Tomás was able to catch a flash of something moving through the hedges.

  Something larger than any squirrel.

  The dark shape emerged and stood still on the perfect grass, its outline barely illuminated by the lunar glow. It stopped just between the replica of Michelangelo’s David and the rustic rope swing hanging from the oak tree bough. The specter seemed to consider them both before finally placing itself in that swing and kicking out its lower appendages until the swing itself had been set in motion.

  Tomás de Valencia’s mind quickly ran through the catalog of what mortal enemies he had stacked up in his long and rambunctious life. He found quite a few, though all of them had been long ago bested. So, was this to be some random thief stalking through the Uptown district? If so, how had he found the time for a swinging session amidst his urgent art? Tomás began to think of the pearl-handled pistol, and of exactly what state it would be currently tucked away in his dead best friend’s mahogany desk. He pictured himself trying to wheel there in a frenzy, only to return and find the shadow had disappeared into the night once again, or perhaps—

  Just then, Tomás caught the glint of something metal in the apparition’s hand. Whatever it was, this object reflected the moon’s color quite clearly, flashing against the darkness with a dull shimmer. A long gun, perhaps? A weapon of murder? The old man, from his fairly helpless station, worried his gray beard with nervous fingers as he squinted down at this mystery. Could it be the barrel of a rifle? A stolen crystal pilfered from Madame’s personal collection? Some other—

  His guessing game was swiftly interrupted by a sound. Tomás de Valencia’s mind struggled to understand what it was hearing.

  He’d come to his backyard to listen for the whip-poor-will, but this was no bird.

  And while it was a human sound—unmistakable, blue, old—it was as native and as familiar to that riparian patch of earth as the whip-poor-will itself. It too had a pure voice, a brilliant endurance of wind, and a tone so familiar that Tomás de Valencia could now recognize it just as easily as he could differentiate the distinct peculiarities of birdsong.

  It was the sound of a trumpet blowing.

  It was the boy. The boy who loved to sit on that swing and play echoing tunes under the cocoon of that live oak, Tuesday and Thursdays, just after his etiquette lessons were complete at three o’clock.

  “Andre?” Tomás de Valencia’s called out into the night, resisting an impotent urge to stand.

  Three

  Retired police detective David Melancon’s hair had finally finished going gray. It had been threatening to do so for thirty years and had finally backed up its bluff. There was only a pallid shock of it left now as well, and not a trace remaining of that once-dashing mane of blond. A trio of profound worry lines had struck across his expanding forehead, deepening as his misgivings did the same. He had arthritis in his knees, a back that hurt most every morning. The latter was probably his own fault. He now often slept reclining in a chair at his desk at the Basin Street Detective Agency, an expired Picayune draped over him and a ratty fedora pulled down over his eyes. His doctor had just recommended he start wearing some glasses. He’d had 20/20 his whole life, been a crack shot and a fine driver. Now that acuity, like all the other sharp weapons in his material arsenal, was becoming blunted by the passage of time. It was all like some twisted joke, getting old. Each part of him seemed engaged in an escalating entropy, all except for one.

  His mind, at least in its own estimation, was as keen and as sharp as ever—a surprise, really, for a man who had spent so many years looking up at the world from the bottom of a bottle. Perhaps this was an unfortunate hand of cards to be holding, after all this time had passed. Sometimes he wished it was the other way around: that his mind would atrophy instead. He’d wake up one fine morning and find himself a simple, unworried creature, with the same blade of a body he had taken for granted at twenty-five. Turn the tables, let the intellect go to seed while his body aged like some sort of brilliant Italian libation. Oh, for that big, blond, flowing hair raining down his head in a devil-may-care mop, tanned muscles bulging under his jeans once again. While we’re at it, a mustache that flamed Irish red at the tips. In this fantasy, all of it was his, yet he had not a care in the world because his brain had gone sour mash a long time ago. Fair enough trade. The things a man could do with a strong body and a mind too dumb to care. Such, anyway, were the imaginings of David Melancon’s late nights, his meditations in this lemon of a body.

  But that was not the way of it, and since he’d quit drinking a few years earlier, he’d had to find various ways of keeping that incessant head of his occupied. It was almost a matter of life and death, and silly fantasies only took you so far.

  He reclined, almost lay back, in his office chair at the agency. He could never bring himself to crawl back to his dingy apartment in St. Roch these days. It was too quiet there. No wife, no children, not even so much as a dog to welcome him back.

  And so, he stayed here, where his mind could at least pretend its constant rhythms had some music to them, a masquerade of enterprise, that it wasn’t just a hollow dishwasher on an endless rinse cycle, long ago emptied of the night’s Tupperware, spraying its essence right down the drain for naught.

  He had a bag of Zapp’s laid on his chest and was listening to his police scanner, reliving to himself his dashing days as a NOPD detective, before that organization had gotten the better of him. Though, if you had asked him why he insisted on listening to this late-night staticky drama, he would have lied and said he was looking for job opportunities, hot case leads and the like. Not that anyone did care enough to ask him.

  It was turning out to be a quiet night so far. However, Melancon thought to himself grimly, all you really had to do was wait around long enough and the bodies would begin to drop. It was the way of the city, the bestial nature of the place that would never lie dormant for long. It would have its bodies by sunup, its blood. There was just nothing dry about the place. For now: a few noise complaints, a truck parked off St. Charles had been lit on fire. Nothing to write home about, not yet, and Melancon drifted in and out of sleep. He really needed to pick a new hobby, he decided, about the time he awoke with a long strand of drool near down to his chin. Try out some woodworking or maybe buy a guitar, and there were plenty of good fishing spots within—

  “We’ve got a possible 30-S situation on the streetcar line. I need EMS rollin’… Carrollton and Oak Street. I got one hit in the head. Possible…pfffft.”

  “Come back, Unit 203, you’re breaking up.”

  “I said I got a possible homicide, Uptown at Carrollton and Oak Street. I got one…pfft…male shot in the head…I got…pffft…”

  “10-4…You got any…any scrip on a possible perp?”

  “No. I got nothing. Vic appears to be an RTA worker. Streetcar driver.”

  The dispatcher went quiet for a long moment and the scanner was silent. Melancon almost gave it a slap. “Christ,” he said to himself, leaning forward and raining Zapp’s crumbs all down on the old cypress floor.

  “I need crime scene tape, barricades. I need all St. Charles line streetcar traffic stopped.”

  “Is the…pfft…is the vic still breathing…203?”

  “No, he’s…pfft.”

  “Repeat, 203.”

  “He’s…hit in the head. No way. Goner.”

  “10-4. We’ll get the crime scene unit there ASAP. Anyone else hit?”

  More static on the line. Melancon leaned over to turn the volume up a bit.

  The dispatcher went back and forth with the patrolman on the scene, finally lapsing into a jumble of numerical codes that Melancon had long ago forgotten the meaning of. But it didn’t take a code breaker to get the gist, and the gist of it was a horrid
nightmare.

  “City worker,” he said to himself, fiddling with the papers on his desk and slapping a handkerchief across his face. Melancon envisioned some poor shmuck just trying to make ends meet, gunned down over a road rage incident or maybe over the fact that the streetcar drivers never had any change to return to you, or who knew what else. Melancon turned the volume down as the interference seemed to be worsening.

  He thought about it. Poor shmucks. This town was full of them. Every night the city would dine on a few, wake up in the morning without so much as a bit of indigestion. When your number was up, your blood went down in between the cracks in the cobble, watered the old live oak roots that kept the sidewalks all broken.

  Poor shmucks.

  He dozed again, half-dreaming about bullets that had flown by his own head, their trajectories all handled by an angel that had spared him the fate of poor shmucks like the one on the scanner. He might have dozed an hour, maybe two. Sleeping in that reclining office chair definitely did his old back no favors, but he found it was less lonely somehow. Instead of being an old man curled up alone in an empty house, he saw himself instead as manning some lonely lighthouse above a sea of cruelty. Dozing, yes, but poised to respond should the need ever arise.

  That need arose sometime around ten p.m., when the phone rang. The old grandfather clock they had inherited with the lease was chiming at the same time as his old flip phone began to vibrate.

  Felix Herbert, his partner.

  “What’s up, Felix?” Melancon answered groggily. “Everything okay?”

  “Um…yeah…maybe.” Melancon could hear excited talking in the background, the echo of a big room. He waited.

  “So, Tomás called me. I’m at the house on St. Charles. This kid that Tomás tutors, he’s kind of a…well, I don’t know exactly what’s wrong with him, but he’s…he doesn’t talk, and…”