Uptown Blues

by Seth Pevey

  “Cut to the chase, Felix, I’m a man without much time left. And I’m not very good with kids.”

  “He’s got blood on him.”

  Melancon stood up, but the head rush that hit him bade him sit back down again and fumble towards a cold cup of coffee still sitting on one corner of his desk. He spat it back out again. At least a week old, with just a hint of the fungal about it. Noisy cars passed by below on Basin Street, just outside of the French doors, and shook him where he sat.

  “Blood?”

  “Yeah…like a lot of blood.”

  “Did you call the cops?”

  “We’re just about to. I just wanted to run it by you first. The kid is…well, physically, he’s completely okay, but, you know, something seems wrong with him. I was thinking the cops might ask a lot of questions about why he was here. They might even think, don’t know, but…Tomás is having a fit. He’s getting on in years, and I hate to think of him being dragged down to the station in his wheelchair and—”

  “I’ll be right there, Felix. Just make sure the boy is comfortable. You did check him for injuries, right?”

  Twenty minutes later, Melancon’s decaying El Camino was pulling up by the curb in front of one of the city’s most picturesque Victorian homes. Every time he visited, the house had a way of making him feel a pang of regret for things he’d missed in life. Not that he would have known what to do with a property so outlandishly out of proportion anyway. He stood between the two gas lanterns flanking the front door, finding it impossible to keep his hat on his head, and rang the doorbell.

  Felix Herbert answered, looking more beaten and tired than a twentysomething had any right to be. Melancon’s young partner was long of limb, with green eyes and what was usually a self-assured, zesty bearing. But not this evening. His skin was unusually pallid, and those green eyes were urgent and fraught.

  “I still expect Tomás to answer the door every time I come,” Melancon said. “I keep forgetting, about the chair…about the train. Seems an odd thing to forget, I guess, seeing as how I was standing right there. I suppose the mind cuts out some of the bad stuff, the nasty bits, when it really wants to. Where’s the kid?”

  As he stepped inside, the old detective was reminded of the opulence of the place. He tried not to linger, tried not to give away his blue-collar, slack-jawed amazement that such places even existed. Just inside the parlor, he found Tomás sitting in his chair.

  Next to him, on the couch, was a little boy of maybe twelve or thirteen years old. The boy had a roundish face, partially covered by a curtain of thin dreadlocks. His brown eyes bored into Melancon with an intensity very far from childlike.

  The boy had a blanket around his shoulders, was wearing an oversized Metallica tee shirt, and holding a cup of steaming liquid, to which he quickly averted his eyes once Melancon took a step closer. On the coffee table in front of him, a small trumpet had been set on a white handkerchief. Next to that, a silver platter of small finger snacks.

  Melancon smiled at the boy, then walked over to the old man in his wheelchair and took his hand.

  “Tomás.” The two older men nodded at each other respectfully.

  “Should we call the police, Detective?” Tomás asked. His eyes were heavy with bags and he wrung the wisps of hair on his chin.

  “Probably,” Melancon replied. “You don’t have the parents’ phone number?”

  “I do have his home phone, but no one is answering. I left several messages on the machine.”

  “And how do you know the boy?”

  “He was sent over by the junior cotillion. I’ve been tutoring him for a few months now. I’m not sure if Felix told you that I’ve begun teaching etiquette and manners to young people? Of course, the cotillion office is closed for the night.”

  Melancon nodded, shot a look at Felix, who was standing off to the side, his arms crossed and his bright green eyes regarding the boy.

  The aged detective pulled at his belt and strode over to the couch. “Now what seems to be the trouble here, young man?” he asked, pinching up one of the cheese crackers from off the silver tray and using that casual moment to get a better look at both the trumpet and at the boy himself.

  The young man, though tracing Melancon’s movements with that same sober focus, did not respond. He sat still, and when he broke eye contact with the detective, he again looked down at his cup of cocoa and slightly flared his nostrils with a deep breath. Melancon took a closer study of him, more openly this time. The boy was clean, looked well-nourished. His head hadn’t quite been grown into yet—a little large for the small, spare frame. But those intense wide eyes were so mature that they might have fit better in a grown man’s face. Melancon scanned the boy’s arms for scars, burns, marks of ill use, but he found none of the obvious signs of abuse or neglect, aside from a small scar on the boy’s neck, old and faded enough to be irrelevant concerning the current state of affairs.

  Trying another tack, the detective pointed at the bent, tubular brass sitting on the coffee table.

  “Yours?”

  But the boy was silent still, his eyes moving up to focus on the instrument where it softly gleamed in the lamplight.

  “His trumpet,” Tomás said, breaking the long silence that followed. “He’s never without it. Carries it wherever he goes. It was how I found him this evening. I heard him down in the garden blowing it. When he stepped into the light, I was horrified to see the state of him. I kept his shirt in a freezer bag and gave him that old one to change into. I hope this was the right thing to do.”

  Tomás pulled a bag off the bookshelf behind him. A white shirt splotched with obvious blood, blackening now a bit with time.

  “So, you came here because you were scared, I suppose. This man is someone you trust, I see. I see you are a good judge of character.” Melancon smiled as he directed the line of questions at the boy, who again made no move to respond. Though this time he did sip his cocoa and stare at Tomás for another long, hypnotic spell before looking away again.

  Tomás cleared his throat.

  “Don’t suppose you know his address?” Felix asked.

  A sad shake of the head. “He resides in the Seventeenth Ward. Leonidas area, I believe.”

  “Rough part of town,” Melancon said under his breath.

  “Do you know your address, young man? Do you know your daddy’s phone number?” Felix asked.

  The boy winced. Clearly, unmistakably: a wince. A cringe, even. He looked down again, seemed to be biting at his lower lip. He picked the horn up from the table and cradled it in his lap.

  “There was blood on that instrument as well,” Tomás said. “I tried to take it from him to preserve the…evidence…but he was…unwilling to part with it. I believe he must have washed it off in the bathroom.”

  Melancon grabbed a frilly ottoman, no doubt worth more than his car, and dragged it over to the edge of the couch. “What’s your name?” he asked the boy.

  More silence: complete and unassailable.

  “Andre Adai,” Tomás replied from his wheelchair.

  “Can’t seem to answer me himself, can he?”

  Tomás cleared his throat again. “He does not speak, Detective.”

  Melancon blew out air, huffed a bit and ran his hand against his trouser leg.

  “I can see that. The strong, quiet type. And from the Seventeenth? Yeah, I’m getting quite the picture.”

  The detective winked at the young man.

  “Andre…I had a friend with that name growing up. I grew up in a pretty rough neighborhood myself. Lot of fighting and stuff. Is that what happened to you tonight, Andre? Did you get into a fight or something?”

  The boy bit his bottom lip again. Just then, the old Westminster clock in the parlor chimed the hour. It had a lovely, light melodic tone that rang through the cavernous rooms of the mansion.

  Andre looked towards it, and for the briefest of moments, a small slight smile played on his lips. Melancon watched as the boy bobbed his head
, almost imperceptibly, along with the melody. The detective looked over his shoulder at the clock and then slid a little closer to the boy with his ottoman.

  “You like that sound, Andre?”

  The boy looked at the old detective again. By now the chimes had passed and he returned his pensive eyes to his mug, heavy sadness revisiting his features.

  “He likes music,” Tomás said.

  “I see that. Now, Andre, I need to explain what is going to happen. Because we don’t know how to get in touch with your parents, and because you had blood on you, we are going to have to bring you downtown to the police station. It’s cold down there and uncomfortable, and they don’t give you cheese crackers and cocoa. Now I’m not trying to scare you, but I’m just trying to explain to you like an adult that you can’t just stay here. If you were in a fight or something, then that’s okay, but you need to tell us about it.”

  But Andre was looking past him, over towards something in the corner of the room.

  “Just can’t get through to him,” Melancon grumbled, biting his thumbnail.

  “Ah, of course!” Tomás said from his chair. “I’d forgotten in all the ruckus.”

  He wheeled himself over to an old gramophone that sat in one corner of the room. It was angular, brassy, deliberately tarnished perhaps to give a patina of distinguished age. It was clearly an artifact meant more to be a conversation piece, an aesthetically pleasing reminder of days gone by, than an object of practical use.

  “We have spent quite some time, Andre and I, listening to old records. Haven’t we, my dear boy? You see, he adores jazz music. Sometimes, after listening to a few songs…well, that’s the only time I’ve heard him speak at all. He might even say a small word or two. Although it was rare at first, it seemed to be getting more common as we became friends.”

  “That so?” Melancon asked, raising an eyebrow.

  Andre stood up from the couch and walked over to a reading chair that was closer to the gramophone. He sat in it and nodded towards the record player.

  “Ah, here,” Tomás said, the delight clear in his voice. “Here is the very song he was playing when I found him in the garden.”

  As the needle went down into the old LP, Melancon recognized it right away: that ancient folk song about love and loss, a gambler’s tune recorded forever in frozen oil by New Orleans’ greatest son. The four of them all sat and listened to the sad dirge for a few minutes, listened to Louis Armstrong wail about finding his lover’s remains stretched out on a long white table. Melancon noticed that the boy had begun to weep. No blubbering or shaking or moaning, just long tears rolling down from his eyes as he listened.

  When the song was finished, the boy stared at the record player for a long moment, listening perhaps to the skipping it made as it spun out and delivered only a faint white noise. Then he went into his pocket and dug out a laminated ID badge. The young man stood up, handed the badge to Melancon, and went back and lay down on the couch with the trumpet held closely in his arms.

  Melancon looked down at the badge: an RTA ID, short for Regional Transit Authority for the city of New Orleans. The man pictured was a middle-aged fellow with close-cropped hair, a chipped tooth, a round face and intense eyes—the spitting image of Andre.

  “Renato Adai. Streetcar Operator,” it read.

  “Oh Lord,” Melancon gasped, almost dropping the card and looking over at Tomás with a panicked expression on his face. The memory of what he had heard earlier that night on the police scanner came rushing back in an instant, the dots all connecting in the cruelest fashion.

  Poor shmuck.

  Poor shmuck’s orphaned son.

  Tomás’s phone rang at that very moment.

  Four

  Louis Armstrong is thirteen and his daddy never did come back home.

  He’s the same age as I am now, has filled out a bit and grown taller, big enough finally for that face of his. But he is still a kid, a kid just like me. Louis lives a life that is filled with friends and enemies. He eats rotten vegetables out of garbage cans when the red beans run thin. He loves the sound of music that comes out of every door and alleyway in the neighborhood where he lives. He knows everyone in back of town.

  Louis is on his knees staring down into a big cedar chest that one of his stepdaddies has left at his mama’s house. There are some clothes, a bottle of whiskey, an old Bible, and a handgun big enough to blow a hole through a concrete wall.

  And he is angry. But more than angry, scared. They’re kind of the same thing. Whenever someone acted nasty, Daddy always said, “Angry comes from scared.”

  Little Louis takes a swig of the whiskey, which burns him so bad he puckers and remembers his own boyhood. But then he scoops up the pistol, and his boyhood runs away again. He looks at himself in the mirror with it. He twirls it like he’s seen them do at the Wild West show, but he’s no good at it, nearly drops it on the floor. He’s not a cowboy, and the pistol is terribly heavy and terribly dull, the shine having gone right off it. He rubs it with his shirtsleeve a few times, like a genie might come out, but it doesn’t do any good.

  It’s New Year’s Eve in New Orleans when Louis takes up that gun, and the night is dark and strange and loud with scary noise. The Great War in Europe is just about to start and will shrink all of those sounds and feelings, but right at that moment, it all feels like big magic when he heads out armed into the streets to see the blooming fireworks and dancing men.

  The books get confused around this point. Some of them say that Louis was being bullied terribly by older, harder boys, and that that was why he scooped the gun. Others say it was just a happy thing, like bringing a string of firecrackers to a party. Some books say it was a way of defending himself from someone across the street with their own heavy pistol, and that he had no choice—kind of like why we have nuclear missiles, which is something Mr. de Valencia explained to me in one of his ethical dilemmas.

  But I know why, know it much better than the books could ever say, because it’s the way I feel right now. Exactly the way I feel.

  Louis can’t see the future, can’t yet know how much love will come around later. He doesn’t know he will climb the pyramids and play for kings and queens and show off, smiling, in Hollywood films that the whole world will smile back at. For now, all he knows is that he is young and alone, and so needs metal in his hands. He hasn’t learned yet to tell one kind of metal from another. He hasn’t learned the difference between brass and steel and iron and lead, because there has been no one to teach him.

  I must have fallen asleep thinking about it—little Louis with that gun in his hand on New Year’s.

  I wake up and there is sunlight coming into a big room. I’m sweating and my heartbeat is uptempo, but there are soft sheets that smell flowery wrapped all around me. Nice sheets, silky-feeling against my skin. Something is not quite right. I don’t smell red beans or hear music and I don’t hear Mama Jones moving in the kitchen. For a second, I don’t know where I really am. I grab for my horn, which is lying next to me on this big, ridiculous bed. For a second, I don’t remember. But then I hear it. It is the clang, clang, clang of a streetcar passing by because I’m on St. Charles right in the nose of the smile and—

  I’m hurting.

  Suddenly I know I’ll feel this way every time I hear the streetcar for the rest of my life, and that what used to be a happy sound has now changed forever. Hell, maybe I’m going to feel it every time I wake up no matter what I hear. I get out of the big bed and go stand out in the hallway in the PJs they gave me and listen real close for anyone moving around. No one seems to be awake yet. So, I’m walking around this big old house on St. Charles in borrowed PJs and I’m thinking about how it’s going to feel to be hurting like this for the rest of my life.

  It’s not really even a house. It’s a mansion. A museum. A collection of things that makes up a cold place where you almost can’t believe some people live and shit and cook. It’s almost not even real. I look at the things on the shelf.
There’s an elephant carved out of black wood. There are pictures in silver frames. There’s what Mr. de Valencia calls the “Westminster clock,” which I can hear chiming downstairs with its singsong jolly-old-England vibe. As soon as I think I’m to the end of the house, it just opens in some other direction and keeps on going. I look at all the books, all the records, all the bottles of wine. I push open one door and step inside a large office.

  Here are more books than a person could ever read, and they’re all a deep shade of brown. I look for a book on Louis Armstrong, but there don’t seem to be any, which I find very strange. In the middle of the room is a large desk without much on it. Sunlight is streaming in from a big window and hitting right on the desk in only one spot, right where one of the drawers is. Is it a sign? I don’t know, but I can’t help myself from walking over and hovering my hand over the drawer handle.

  I pull the drawer open and right there, sitting and looking up at me, is a pistol with a pearl handle. I know a little about a pistol because Daddy took me to shoot one a few times out on the West Bank. I also know that this is a revolver, and that all you have to do is pull that thing on the back, which is called a hammer, and then pull that thing on the bottom, which is called a trigger, and whoever it is who took something from you that can never be replaced will have something taken from them that cannot be replaced either.

  I’ve never stolen a thing in my life because a man takes pride. Daddy always taught me not to do such things. But Daddy is—

  Mr. de Valencia likes to talk about ethical dilemmas with me. Sometimes they involve different groups of people on different train tracks, which is awkward since I know Mr. de Valencia was hit by a train and that’s why he is in his chair. But he doesn’t seem to mind talking about train tracks. On one track is a school bus and on another stands you. You have the switch in your hands. Now, do you sacrifice yourself? Or do you save yourself and sacrifice the school bus full of kids? What if it’s only two kids? What if it’s only one? What if one of the kids will grow up and become Jack the Ripper? What if it’s only one person, but that person is the one person in the world you need more than anything?