by Seth Pevey
“If you do know where he is, David—look at me, David.” Janine’s face had gone hard again, though her eyes kept that tepid fondness and understanding. “If you know where he is, or you have him somewhere at one of your partner’s…mansions…or some other such foolishness…well, I don’t have to tell you. You know how the world works. It won’t be just Andre that goes into custody. You could be looking at charges. Kidnapping…I don’t know. Just don’t do it, okay?”
Melancon started to turn away, started to nod, started to grit his teeth.
“And especially….no matter what you do….don’t go to the Lighthouse Behavioral Center in Littlewoods and talk to Lashawn Jones about her missing stepson.”
He turned back and stared at her, struck completely silent for once. They nodded at one another, understanding.
“In the meantime, David, I’ve put a BOLO out on all jazz-related places. Concert venues, museums, things like that. All of them are on the lookout for a little boy with a scar on his neck who doesn’t talk and carries a trumpet.”
“Do what you think is right, Janine, you always do.”
She nodded. “If someone finds him before we do, I hope it’s someone with no fashion sense and a bad back.”
“And so do I,” Melancon said, and the two detectives turned to walk away from her.
Twelve
Louis Armstrong is seventeen.
Red beans and rice boil in his pot every night, and he throws away his shorts and wears long pants instead. Now he spends his days with a fussy mule, up and down St. Charles, bringing coal for restaurant ovens. At man’s work, little Louis is just Lew-is: round middle, hard arms, moon face, a smile that stretches from uptown to downtown. Don’t get it wrong, though. He’s tough in a funny, friendly way—the way some people are tough because they have to be and not because they want to be. Really, there’s not a mean bone in his body, but people put money in his hands now instead of throwing it on the street. His voice, when he sings to himself on his rounds, sounds just like the tin buckets of coal being shaken.
The neighborhood has finally turned to look at Louis, turned to listen and to say here is our big son. On the same corner where he used to stuff the quarters into his dipper mouth, a sign appears bearing his name. The name is written small in thin chalk and is under names of bigger headliners, but it’s there all the same.
I’m watching the sun come up over the Mississippi. I’m cold, getting very hungry, and I feel smaller than I’ve ever felt in my life. I want a bowl of beans, a warm bed, and the sound of Daddy’s boots on the porch as he heads to work. Small things. They used to be small anyway, but now that they’re gone, they seem huge.
Runners jog right by. Barges float. I look way down the river to where it bends away from me, past the bridge and out of sight.
Louis had it right, though. His feet are itching and he starts to look past all those small things that are just there right in front of him. The mule, the long street, the coal-sooty long pants his mama hangs on the line out in the courtyard, the pretty women who try to push aside his horn. Finally, he can do that, can see past all the small to the vanishing point. Inside of it he can see the big thing. The feel of it coming, the want of it goes down deeper than rice and beans. Finally, he knows it. Every time he blows his horn, a little more of it goes out of him faster than he can breathe it back in. So he has to do something.
The books don’t say much about what Louis thought or felt. They just say what he did. But I know.
Daddy used to show me the high-water marks on the bank, on the church, on the shed where the streetcars are kept. That green swampy line on everything. He said that line was a limit to all possibilities. He said that I wouldn’t understand until I had gotten to be taller than the watermark Freret Street and north. He used to show me the old spray paint Xs where the bodies were found on houses that still hadn’t been torn down. He would show it to me and say that it would come again. That everything big here would be made quickly small. That we would be forgotten. The water, he would say. But I don’t think he was talking about just water. Not really. When I read about Louis Armstrong being seventeen, I know what Daddy was really trying to tell me. Louis was like the roots of the oak trees on St. Charles and how they bust up and break the banquettes when they get too big. Sometimes the thoughts inside my head feel just like that, too.
An old man comes stumbling down the Riverwalk and right by me. He’s got a scruffy red beard and long stringy hair, and he’s got a dog with him. It’s some kind of a mutt and it has a bad limp. Along the side of it, you can see the rib bones poking out. The man’s face is also thin and dirty, but he’s the first person all morning that has turned his eyes to look at me. When he does, I feel scared, but also ashamed, and also happy that I’m not alone at that very moment because the thoughts I’m thinking about being scared of just this one man are so much easier than the ones about being afraid of everything else in the world.
“Good morning, young man. I don’t suppose you have a dollar so I can get myself something to eat?”
I still have a single from the Big Waif Brass Band, crumpled up in my pocket. It’s all I have, dry now. I pull it out, smooth it across the edge of the bench a few times, and reach it out to him.
He looks down at the bill and then behind me, and then all around me, looking now at everything there except for me. I can see that something about the bill has scared him, so I stick it out again an inch further this time and try to smile.
“You out here alone?” he says.
I nod my head.
“You run off?”
I nod at him again.
The old man takes the bill in his wrinkled hand, holds it up to the sunlight quickly and then folds it and puts it into the front pocket of his shirt, which is the kind that lumberjacks wear in cartoons. He looks at the scar on my neck for a minute.
Then he sits down next to me on the bench and is quiet for a really long time, not saying anything.
“My old man was a real bastard,” he finally says and looks at me sideways.
I don’t say anything.
“You will be alright,” he says to me.
I nod my head at him as if to say thank you. After a long while, he stands up and walks on down the river.
I’m still cold and I’m hungry but now I’m sure something big is about to come. Not only is it coming but it is big and it is coming today. The sun is fully up and I watch the old man getting smaller and smaller as he follows the river upstream and away from me, taking my last bill with him. I can feel it, deep inside my bones. Something is going to happen. It may be a bad thing that happens, but at least there will be no more waiting for it.
I make it down to the café. It has a wide outdoor area with at least a hundred tables, all filled with people from other places. Even the waiters, their uniforms, the way they move—all of it seems like it is from somewhere else. But it’s a place I’ve been many times before. Daddy used to take me here once in a while. I try to pick out which tables we sat at, I try to remember what we had, but then I remember there is only one thing on the menu and that is beignets.
I pick out a particular table where I think Daddy and I must have sat a few years ago. I don’t know why I remember the exact table, but I’m sure, as soon as I sit down at it, that this is the very one. I look across from where I’m sitting, over the piles of crumpled napkins and coffee cup lids and powdered sugar. I look down at the empty chair where Daddy sat back then.
“You probably don’t understand why I’m being like this.”
I remember him saying that.
“You have to remember what happens when that train starts to roll. You just a boy, Andre. But you won’t be one forever. Whatever happens now is going to stick on you the rest of your life, like mud on your boots that there is no scraping off.”
He looked sad, tired. Or maybe it’s my memory that is tired. I think he was still wearing his uniform. I try to pretend he is still sitting there, talking to me. But there is
nothing but a patch of pale sunlight in the chair now, coming just under the awning.
“One day you will remember. You will just choose to remember,” he told me. “When that happens I want you right here with me, not off someplace in New York City.”
I try to keep Daddy there in my mind’s eye, to finish remembering what he said to me, but I can’t because I’m too hungry. He fades away because all I can smell is the frying dough and the coffee now and I start to realize how food is such a tiny little thing until you don’t have it, and then it is a huge thing, the only thing. I wonder if I’m going to end up looking like that old man’s dog, a waif with my bones poking out. There are pigeons at my feet, and they are all pecking like mad, and I guess I must know how they feel, too. Everything in the world is hungry.
I’m sitting and watching all of the people come and go, watching them bite into the soft little wads of dough, and suddenly I have an idea. I can’t say the idea is original or special really. In fact, it’s more of like a memory from the times I’ve been here before.
I brush myself off a little bit. But no matter how hard or fast I brush, some of the dirt and grime that comes from sleeping under an old house just won’t come off. I pull my horn out of my bag. I find a box in the trash can.
Now I’m standing on the cobblestones with my horn out in front of me, shaking because of what I’m about to do. A whole mess of people are sitting in the café, talking and eating. I want to say something charming and gravelly to get their attention, I want to be loud and big. Of course, they aren’t paying me any mind. Then I remember that I’m not charming or gravelly, I’m a house-sleeping-under waif.
“There is no shame in being small,” Daddy said, sitting at that table right there. I finally remember that part.
I put the horn to my lips and I blow. I hit that high C. I blow so hard and high that I can feel the seam of my lip burst. It fills my mouth with a taste that isn’t much different than the taste of coins—iron and copper and other important things. I blow that one long note and I put everything bad in the world in one end and out the other comes everything good. I look around and the people have got real quiet and are staring at me, so I let loose again with a twisting high note. By the time I go into the chorus of “Saints,” people are clapping along and whistling and smiling at me. I feel myself start to rock from side to side. I’m slurping the blood down in between blows as best I can so that the people won’t go from fun to concerned. A woman with a sweater tied around her waist prods a blond-headed little boy over to my box and I watch him drop a five. Three other people come up with bills and a few other come up with change.
I just finish a song and am about to start another when an old man grabs me by the arm. He is dark, with a flat cap and gray whiskers and a strange look on his face.
“What…the…hell you think…you’re doing?” he stammers. He’s so angry that he can’t seem to get his words out straight. He’s missing a tooth on the right side of his mouth, and there’s a yellow tint to the whites of his eyes.
I raise my horn up to him, trying to show him what it is I think I’m doing, but that doesn’t help.
“You can’t just be…moving spot. This sidewalk’s…got three grown men in line waiting for it, and you just come up and start to…start to blow? Now how does that work?”
A few of the tourists are watching now, and I notice that the old man is pretending to smile and getting most of his words out under his breath, like. He takes a step towards me and—
She comes in between us suddenly. Where did she come from? Out from the crowd walking by on the streets, no warning. But somehow, she knows just what’s happening and is ready for it. Right away she raises her arms over her head. She’s in the face of the old man, yelling at him, screaming. The tourists in the café stare hard and then not at all, looking down seriously at newspapers and cell phones.
She wins the fight before it even happens—the type of tough you can tell is because she enjoys it, because that is how she is. The old man can see it right away too, and maybe her small size makes it so that she can act that tough and get away with it. He doesn’t look scared so much as confused, out of ideas. She is screaming at him and I can see the spit landing on his face, but he only stands there bug-eyed and quiet. She finishes with him and turns to me and yanks my arm hard, pulling me across the street. Then she marches me into a quiet area of Jackson Square Park, pushes me down on a bench.
“Andre,” she says.
I look right down into her dark eyes and get pulled backwards. Her eyes are a forest around me. Her eyes are quiet. Her eyes are like the eyes of some animal slowly dying on the forest floor. Those eyes look up at me, shocked and afraid but also accepting the vanishing point that’s coming one way or another.
And her lips? What is that color? The shade is like the wine you see people sipping in restaurant windows. It is smeared across a large, gum-chewing mouth.
Her face is the one from my dreams. The one from the crowd on Frenchman Street.
“You know me, don’t you, boy?”
I shake my head. She smacks her gum and lets out a little chuckle. She has one arm on my leg and is pinning me to the bench. She must feel the muscle in my leg flinch. It wants to run. She looks down at me and tightens her grip a bit, shuffling forward on her haunches. People in the park are playing frisbee, guitar. Children are running circles around Andrew Jackson on his horse. We are a woman and a child in a park and I realize no one knows that this isn’t normal.
“Say it.”
I lower my eyes, my head. I think about the gun in my backpack.
“You know that old man that was about to take your head off? I hope you got a good, long look at him. You saw how dirty he was. You saw the missing teeth, the crooked back. I hope you got a good look at him, Andre.”
There are a few police officers walking through the park now. I look at them. She uses her fingers to turn my chin back towards her.
“Because that is going to be you. That old man is just how you are going to turn out, if you don’t listen to me.”
I stare at her.
She puts a second hand on me now, up on my forearm. I can feel her long nails pressing into my skin. She holds me tighter as she talks, and it hurts.
“Andre.”
She’s squeezing so hard I start to flinch, and it feels like the skin on my arm will burst.
“You remembering? Maybe you don’t remember. But try. The pine trees, the horses, the creek.”
The pain of her tight, pointed grip hurts me too bad. I can’t focus. That color on her lips. What is that called? Where do I know it from? Why am I so filled with terror?
I try to pull away, softly at first and then as hard as I can. She frowns at me, slaps me across the face so hard that the blood in my mouth, which is from blowing the horn too hard and not from the slap, comes flying out. Only she doesn’t know what it’s from and must think she has hurt me worse than she has, because she immediately bites her lip, loosens her grip a bit, and looks over her shoulder at the police.
When I feel her hand go soft, I pull with all my force and suddenly break free. But the first thing I do with freedom is fall off the bench from the momentum. She stands up, but I manage to get to my feet before she can grab me a second time.
I don’t look back at her, but I can picture exactly what her face might look like. That wine color. The eyes like an animal dying on the forest floor. One of my shoes falls off, but I don’t bend down to pick it up.
I just run. I’m out of the park gates and into the groups of people in seconds, deciding that I’m not going to stop, not now and not ever. I decide that running is my life now. I pass Decatur Street and look down it both ways, wondering where it is that I might go.
Something in my feet makes the choice for me, and in the next moment I’m bouncing up the steps to the Riverwalk. I can feel the horn in my backpack, the rim of it pressing into the skin on my neck just as cold and hard as her nails bit into my arm. Because of the leve
e, I come up to one of the highest places in the whole Quarter. I can stop and look back, look down. I see the top of her head.
I see her talking to the police, I see her pointing at me.
I keep running, down to the little area of tents and boxes set up along the big rocky bank of the Mississippi.
“What you running from, boy?”
It’s the old man from earlier, the one with the hungry dog that I gave my last dollar to. He’s standing in front of the open flap of a tent.
I point behind me. A big, strong, arm-waving point.
He nods at me, waves me towards the inside of his tent. I don’t have time to think about it. I dive in headfirst and crawl into the corner.
Thirteen
It was midday, the sun perched high up in the cloudless sky. A hungry line of people stood in the open doorway of the little restaurant on Annunciation Street, letting the cool wind mix in and dilute the burnt-grease smell of the deep fryer.
Melancon loved this place, had loved it since he was a boy. But today he only poked at his food, sipping his root beer and trying to keep his eyes off the frosty mugs of the real deal being poured up at the bar. He might have had little appetite, but the place was packed to capacity, and through the open kitchen he could watch three generations deep in the weeds, laboring over egg wash and cold fixings and bread knives. He gave his young partner the chance to get a few bites of po’boy in, trying his best to manage the queasiness rising up in his gut. Melancon might have been troubled, worn thin and even a little sick to his stomach, but the youth had to eat.
“Weird day,” Felix said in between mouthfuls of fluffy French bread.
Melancon watched him as he put the sandwich down and fiddled with Andre’s cell phone, just as he’d been doing the whole morning. The young man’s shoulders had sunk a few degrees, and there were dark circles under his eyes. He’d been picking at his fingernails, a sure sign that his zesty energy was taking a darker turn. Even his eating seemed distracted—he’d left bits of batter and bread crumbs spread across the table.