by Seth Pevey
“You the man from the police station? The one that brought in Andre?”
A long pause. Everyone waited before the voice continued.
“You got my nephew?”
Melancon pointed to the phone, as if that would somehow clarify the situation. But Felix had already picked up the thread.
“Is this…Melph…is this Andre’s uncle?”
“Yeah.”
“Wait a minute…now, I thought you had taken Andre. I thought you took him from the station, that he was released into your custody.”
“I did…but he’s…well, he isn’t here anymore. I’ve been texting him for an hour, because…well you know…he doesn’t talk. Not even to answer a call. Not even in an emergency. Damn boy can be a lot of trouble sometimes. But I don’t know what else to do.”
Another long and awkward pause. Tomás covered his face with his hands and hung his head low.
“So, you don’t have Andre?” Felix tried.
“Well, wait a minute, you got his damn phone. So, where’s he at?”
The anger in the voice caused Felix to hesitate. His eyes ping-ponged between the two older men before he finally answered. “Yes, we have his phone. We just found it. Under the couch cushions. Andre must have dropped it when—”
“So, you haven’t seen him?” Melph said. “Damn!”
He then began mumbling apologies, in stark contrast to the accusatory tone of a moment before. Tomás made an uncertain gesture at the young detective, who made one back.
Tomás wheeled himself over and grabbed the phone from Felix, putting his mouth up close to the receiver. “This is Tomás de Valencia. Do you mean to tell us that you have lost the poor child, after he was entrusted to you?”
Felix pulled the phone away and covered the receiver, making a silencing motion at his old friend.
“Look, never mind,” Melph said. “This is between us in the family anyway. Just…mail me his phone, would you? 4533 Leonidas.”
Melancon made a quick note on his notepad. “Wait a minute, can you tell me—” the old detective shouted as he leaned into the phone, but the clicking sound emanating from the receiver was unmistakable: the call was over.
“Gentlemen, this just continues to grow worse and worse!” Tomás cried in the dead silence that followed. “Now the poor child is lost…lost in this Gomorrah with no one by his side. Unable or unwilling to speak. Without a phone…without any money.” As he said these words, he seemed to wheel himself backwards, inch by unconscious inch, retreating from the entire dark ordeal.
Felix twiddled with the phone a bit, finally collapsing on the couch with one of his trademark sighs of exasperation. He got himself comfortable and began to pore over the device, inspecting contacts and notifications, scrolling through history, even checking what videos the boy had watched.
Melancon took a step closer to Tomás. “Where would he go?” the old detective asked.
“Where do young boys go when they run away from home?” Tomás replied, a rhetorical shrug to his shoulders and a dreadful despondency in his voice. “He came here the last time he was in need, but after the way I treated him, I doubt he’ll ever make that mistake a second time.”
“There is no sense in beating yourself up any more than you already have,” Felix said from the couch. “He came here because you were his friend, and you acted in the only way that was possible.”
“Back in my day we’d go to the river,” Melancon said, walking over to finger the gramophone. “Maybe to the racetrack. These days I’ve got no idea.”
“Was this before or after you ended up in a Norman Rockwell painting, partner?”
Melancon crossed his arms and raised an eyebrow at Felix. “All we know is that the kid likes music. And that isn’t much to go on. It’s a big city, and if there’s one thing it’s full to the brim with, besides water and potholes, its music.”
“Let me remind you gentlemen that while you are quipping back and forth, there is a child, a child who witnessed a horrendous crime, mind you, out on the streets!” Tomás said. “He is but a boy and has seen something that no child should have to see. And I have certain dark fears and imaginings about what comes next if we tarry too long.”
“You don’t think he can make it?” Felix asked.
“It is not the street smarts of young master Andre that concern me, Felix. What I fear the most is that the person who committed the murder, to which he may be the only witness, may still linger on those same streets. And I should certainly not have to tell you, detectives, what that could mean.”
Melancon picked up the jacket of the old Louis Armstrong record, which showed the iconic trumpeter with cheeks inflated like eight balls, eyes turned upwards, his white handkerchief draped in his playing hand. “To someone out there, someone particularly violent, this boy is a huge liability.”
Tomás nodded. “I need you to find him. Because this situation…it is a black mark on all of our souls. We can’t trust this to the police. It’s time for you to do the most important detective work of your lives. Find him and bring him here where we can protect him, and let us not fail him a second time. We’ll sort the details out later, but I simply cannot abide that thought of something else terrible happening to that young boy on top of what he’s already been through.”
Felix stood up from the couch, slipping the phone into his coat pocket. “We’ll find him,” the young detective said.
Melancon laid the record sleeve back down near the gramophone.
“Yes, we will.”
Eight
Louis the waif is standing on a curb and he’s not the only one—he’s there with a group of the other waifs, and all of them are just hungry. It’s got nothing to do with food. It’s the kind of hungry you get from being a waif. The kind of hungry you either understand from living it, or you just don’t. It doesn’t translate into any word. Like a lot of things, you just can’t tell the feeling to someone unless they’ve felt it themselves, even though the books do try.
I know what it feels like, though, because I’m standing on the same cold streets as he did.
The waifs are supposed to be picking up trash. Mr. Peter Davis, one of the head honchos at the Colored Waif’s Home for Boys, brought them there to do just that. But he is only one man and the waifs are many. He can’t be a real daddy to thirty different boys, though he tries his best and does an okay job at being one-thirtieth a daddy to each and every one of them.
So, the waifs run around the neighborhood like a school of fish in a frenzy, like piranha on the nature channel. They punch and claw each other. On one corner, a mealy apple has fallen off a cart. The first boy to discover it is immediately piled on by the others until his lip is bloodied and he drops the fruit. The apple goes poof in a storm of hungry mouths and the kids leave off down the street.
Another corner brings another chance. Here, a man exits one of the Prostitution establishments (that’s what the books call them, and that’s what Storyville is most famous for, aside from Louis Armstrong, of course—but he doesn’t know that yet, being just a waif). The children spot the fine gentleman, with his tailored suit and watch chain and top hat, and immediately begin to swarm. They jostle and push, each one of them already beginning to tap and twist. They bow and gyrate and wrestle, twisting their hungry muscles around on the old cobblestone streets. The hunger has taught them to dance as well. The hunger has taught them music.
But little Louis gets an edge somehow. Somehow, he manages to push the others off into the background. Because he is the star of this place. He doesn’t know it yet, but he is. He finally pushes through the swarm of hungry bodies and then it’s all Louis, center stage. He smiles that big smile and looks up with those wet eyes in a way that will later charm the whole world. He shakes his head and his limbs swing and he lets out a few nonsense scat sounds. “Zap doobie do whop,” he sings, and then he bows really low to the gentleman, who at first was annoyed but now can’t help himself but love Louis in a way that everyone will. So
meday. But Louis doesn’t know it yet. He doesn’t know that he will show this to the world, this hungry music of empty bellies. All he knows is fear. Love has to get in the back of the line for now.
The gentleman smiles down at this charming little boy. He scoops a handful of shiny coins out of his jangling pocket. He grins again at Louis and then tosses them down into the street. Because even though he loves Louis, he thinks himself too high to stop and place a coin in a waif’s hand. So, he dumps them down on the cobble and moves on.
There is a moment, with all of those hungry boys standing around with their eyes sharklike looking down at the shining coins. They all know it’s every waif for himself, but it takes them a minute to get over the shock of seeing such an embarrassment of riches scattered all over the grime and muck of a Storyville street.
When the shock wears off a bit, they attack. They scramble and fumble and punch and even bite each other to get at the precious doubloons. They don’t know that this is still the Louis show, and he is quicker than the lot of them, maybe because he’s the hungriest and most daddy-less of them all, or maybe because he’s powered by all the future world-love that will one day find him.
Louis scoops up the lion’s share of coins. He has them in his fist. Now all the boys stare at him with their hungry eyes. The street has quieted down now. If this was an old western movie, a tumbleweed might have gone by just then. But this is not a western movie, it’s real life for Louis.
The boys form a circle around him. They are edging closer and closer, tighter and tighter, cracking their knuckles and baring their teeth. It is their hunger against Louis and his hunger. Little Louis has the coins pressed in a tight little ball in his fist. He knows he will never hold on to them, or to anything else, if he lets the other waifs have this silver.
So, what does he do?
He puts them right in his mouth. The whole handful of coins, scooped up off of the dirty street—he pops them right in on his tongue, then sloshes them down between his lip and lower teeth and shuts his jaw tight like a trap.
The boys watch him in horror. What would that taste like? they wonder. A few of the hungrier boys even knock Louis down and take a chance trying to pull that mouth open. But they can’t. Louis’s lips are already as rough as burlap. They are strong and muscular. They are tight and do not release the treasure.
He gets up and brushes himself off, all that moola still bulging out of his lower lip.
One of the older boys slaps him across the face. Not too hard, but more as a show.
“Boy got a mouth like a damn satchel,” the bully says and walks away like the fox did from the sour grapes.
The smaller waifs laugh at that, grinning.
“Satchel mouth, satchel mouth, satchel mouth!” they chant.
But for a few of the waifs, that’s just too many syllables. None of them have been to school, or etiquette lessons on how to speak properly and enunciate. So, one of them shortens “satchel mouth” in a way that will echo out from Storyville forever.
“Satchmo, Satchmo, Satchmo,” the boys chant.
I look at the different blocks I walk by, wondering which corner it happened on. But too much time has passed, and all of the old buildings have been cleared away for decades, and the books just don’t say for sure. A long time ago the three bullets that Louis fired fell back to earth and buried themselves into something so deep that no one ever found them. I know this somehow, but I can’t say why.
I think about the gun that is riding in the bottom of my backpack, and it makes me feel ten percent less afraid than I would otherwise. But with it also comes a different kind of fear. There is something attached to the heavy piece of metal that I can’t describe with words, but when I feel the hardness of it bounce against my lower back, I know that everything that happens now is important, more important than the future can ever be. I know that this will be the story they tell about me, if they tell any stories at all.
My feet are starting to cramp and ache because I couldn’t take the streetcar. Not anymore. I tried. For almost an hour I stood under the branches at Audubon Park, standing in the shadow that hid my face, and I watched every car that drove by. I even saw the car with the chipped bell, now being driven by a different conductor. That hurt me so bad I nearly doubled over with the pain of it. It hurts still. I could make out the faces of every driver and I was looking for one that didn’t know who I was. But every driver that passed by was one that would certainly recognize me, that would ask me question after question about my father, and if I didn’t answer they would be likely to grab me and the whole situation would only repeat itself again and again. So, I walk, and I feel a sense of relief for not having to get on a streetcar again anyway.
It took me almost two hours to make it to here, and I wonder if my feet will start to bleed. The kicks I’m wearing are mostly worn-out trash, shoes that other kids in the Seventeenth would be embarrassed to wear. I would be embarrassed to wear them too, except I don’t have many friends my age to feel embarrassed about.
The gate is shut because it’s almost ten o’clock at night now. A homeless-looking man shuffles down the opposite side of the street from me. He’s going real slow and keeping one of his eyes on me, but I pretend not to notice. I’m pretty much homeless too now—that’s the thought that passes through my mind while I’m looking at him. Otherwise, the street is dead quiet. It’s getting a bit cold, so I zip up Uncle Melph’s army jacket, but I have to roll up the sleeves because I still need my hands.
I can see him standing there, on the other side of the gate, in Congo Square. His wide midsection, the horn hanging down at his side.
I’ve never been a good climber, but I’ve come too far now and there’s no turning back. I throw my backpack up and over the top and jump as high as I can, grabbing the top of the fence. I scramble my bad shoes against the wrought-iron until the rubber soles get a grip on it, and then I’m up and over and sprawled out next to my backpack on the sacred ground before I realize what has happened.
Congo Square.
I listen really close for a park ranger or police officer to come rushing towards me, or maybe for some alarm to sound, but none of that happens. This is just a patch of dirt, after all.
It is a special one, though, one filled with ghosts and stories. This is where the slaves made jazz music. And when I sit up, I can see him standing in the middle of it all, or his outline anyway. He’s the lord of it. There’s some kind of a light behind him, palm fronds framing him where he stands, leaning slightly forward, his handkerchief at the ready.
The moon is fat up in the sky, pink and dreamy, and I can see just fine. It means that other people will be able to see me also, so I have to be a little careful not to let them. I take off low along one hedgerow, crouching and hiding, wondering if Uncle’s camouflage jacket will help me at all.
I creep around for a few minutes, getting closer to the center of things. But then I start to worry about something else. I start to realize that there is not a soul here, no late-night security guard or sleepy park ranger. No one is here at all except for me and him, and then maybe a few old slave ghosts. I go from being scared of being caught to being scared of the place itself. Maybe I know why there are no people here, why they shut the gate up tight when the sun goes down. It’s because even rangers are afraid to be around this place in the night. This is one of those places in the city that the spirits trouble. A place just like Storyville, which was only a few blocks away before it got torn down. I try to be brave. I have my gun, my horn, and now I have him, too.
I come out from behind a bush, deciding to just stand up and walk up to him like normal. Because there he is, waiting for me. Now I see him in close up, standing straight with that pink moon rising right above his head.
He’s looking down at me, or at least it seems like. I don’t know what he is made of. Maybe bronze or something like that. Maybe it’s the same stuff that Andrew Jackson is made of down in his square.
He has his rag in one ha
nd. A rag carved out of bronze, or whatever. He always carried it with him when he went on stage to wipe away the big drops of sweat that would come on his forehead, would trickle down his inflated cheeks, would condensate on his brass and sop his starched shirt. That sweat was just a part of it because he always put work into that mouthpiece. He’d put everything. He’d split his lips wide open on a high note and come out from under the lights all splattered in blood. He would come away from the stage looking like he’d just built a pyramid, just escaped, just saved the world. And maybe he had.
In his other hand is his trumpet. It’s hung way down at his side, like he isn’t even thinking about blowing it right at this moment because he’s so relaxed to be just standing in his park, standing in Congo Square and looking down at me.
He’s wearing fancy metal clothes and he even has a metal tie. Calm but serious. I stare at him right in his metal eyes, and I think about who he reminds me of most of all.
“Louis,” I say.
I think maybe his eyes widen, the metal brows stretching under the moon. It looks like maybe they do.
“Louis.”
He’s waiting for the question, though.
“I’m scared.”
I realize it still isn’t a question, and his eyes look less warm than they did a moment before. He’s here all day every day, but somehow I can still see that he’s impatient for it. I hear tires squeal somewhere out on Basin Street.
“My daddy.”
But Louis’s metal lips still don’t move. Not really. I stare at them so long that I think they might start to.
But no. He just stares. His face is round and black and hard like a cast-iron skillet. His eyes are narrow metal holes.
I’m talking to a statue. I know it. I’m not crazy, but I just can’t stop.
“I saw him die.”
Still nothing.
“I ain’t like you, Louis. What should I do?”
No answer. The statue only watches forever. I wish I was made of metal. I look over the top of his head at the lights of the tall buildings, at the clouds rolling in between them.