When we arrived, I dedicated my cheap plastic amulet to the smirking gods of thwarted love and placed it carefully beside a discarded bottle of the voodoo queen’s reputed libation of choice.
Such was the insidious charm of the Crescent City: my wallow in romantic loss soon morphed into utter delight.
* * *
I was sitting on my front step in the early evening when Mel showed up.
“Good Evening, Tom,” she said.
She was back in her Blanche ensemble. Of the two it seemed the more practical—best for bike rides, more suitable for social calls before and after working hours.
She spoke again. “I was able to leave early tonight.”
“Is that right? I’m very glad. Business must have been good.”
“I was able to meet my quota.” Her voice was coy.
“Are you going to say something about the kindness of strangers?”
She was smiling. “Wouldn’t that be a little trite?”
I smiled back. “Perhaps a little.”
There was a long pause.
“I wanted to thank you.”
“Please don’t. I was given the money under false pretenses.”
“Didn’t you give it to me for the same.”
“I don’t need it.”
She didn’t reply.
I had of course said the wrong thing. If there is a way to acknowledge the giving and receiving of charity without embarrassment, I’ve yet to encounter it. If it’s possible for two people to comfortably converse about and confess to a wide discrepancy in their respective incomes, I’ve yet to see it successfully accomplished.
I tried to recover: “I like your act.”
She answered curtly. “No you don’t. When I was younger I was better at this. There was a nightclub on Bourbon where I performed. It was almost a real show then. Now it’s just a means of hollering, of calling attention to myself and begging and . . . ”
I cut her off. “You don’t have to say it.”
“No?”
But she changed the subject.
“So the money . . . ”
“I was playing out again in the very same place as before. An older man gave me the hundred dollars.”
“You say you’re not very good.”
“That’s putting it mildly.”
“Maybe he thought you were cute.”
“I’m not.”
She looked hard at me. “You’re not un-cute.”
“Thank you. It isn’t a matter of cuteness.”
“So why did he give you so much?”
I had given the matter some thought.
“I have a feeling that he rewards effort rather than talent. He has money and he’s on an errand to seek out new musical endeavors, even god-awful ones like mine. I think I got credit just for being there and trying.”
“What does he look like?”
I described him as best I could. Mel looked blank.
“I’m sure I’ve never seen him.” She turned petulant. “I wonder why he’s never been to see my act.”
“Do you sing or play an instrument?”
“Not especially.” She pouted at me then.
I smiled. “Maybe you should try.”
“I can’t really sing.”
“Do you know any songs?”
“We performed ‘You Are My Sunshine’ in my first-grade class. I was dressed as a sunflower. It was my first time in a costume. I remember it was all kinds of fun.”
“Where did you grow up?”
“A small town in Indiana.”
“Does it have a name?”
“I’m sure it does.” She paused. “Do you know how to play that song?”
“It has only three chords and I know all the words to the chorus.”
“It’s a children’s lullaby. It has a lot more words that we had to memorize and it gets weird.”
“How weird?”
“It’s a very sad song. An old governor of Louisiana wrote it.”
“Is that true?”
She hesitated. “Yes. I think so. Maybe.”
I found my laptop and my guitar and my last Hopitoulas and a small glass. Mel only wanted a sip. The rest was to be all mine.
I found the lyrics. Mel was right. It was weird.
Neither of us could claim to sing well. Mel’s voice was deeper than I expected and she sang hesitantly at first. I was louder. Not any better, just louder. I played it in a handful of keys before we settled on A. We sang it once through. Then we sang it again. We took turns on the verses and we shared the choruses. I tried to sing harmony. It was grim. Mel laughed at me and we went back to unison.
We were both giggling by the end of the second run-through. She was leaning against me on the step in order to read the words on the screen. Her bare arm rested on my leg. I adjusted my guitar in my lap and slid very slightly away from her.
If she noticed me move away, she said nothing.
When we had finished singing we went to the Internet, and on YouTube found no shortage of recorded versions.
“You choose one,” I told her.
“I don’t care.” She said. “You choose.”
So I did. We listened to Johnny Cash when he was an old man, and we listened to Johnny when he was a younger man and singing on a television special with June, and afterwards we sat for a while and said nothing until it got dark.
Mel had a light attached to the back of her bike. I watched as it grew smaller and smaller.
Fourteen
This would be my last day as a street performer.
The day began with thick fog washing across the Quarter, coughed up from the river. The air was the coldest it had been since I had arrived in town and kept the tourist count low. I played for about an hour. No one stopped. No one sang along. I wore my jacket the whole time and I performed without once sitting down.
At the end of the hour I put my guitar away and walked towards the market café.
In the Square the crowds were thin. Mel was sitting on a park bench. She had a wool shawl draped across her shoulders. She was in her Marilyn outfit. She looked cold. I offered to get her some coffee but she declined. I told her she should go home. She agreed but her response was a half-hearted one. She kept glancing up and down the path looking for her customers, for her young men, for her stock-in-trade.
I said goodbye and headed over to the café.
Green plastic walls enclosed the café, and inside, the place was mostly full. I got coffee and an order of beignets and sat down at one of the unoccupied tables outside. A daily paper had been abandoned at the next table and I quickly grabbed it. The forecast was for the fog to last well into the afternoon, when the sun would reappear, and the temperatures would rise to become more seasonable.
Most of the Square was visible from where I sat, but thick bushes obscured the bench where Mel had been sitting. It wasn’t warm in the exposed seating, and I made sure to eat my powdered pastries quickly while they were still fresh and hot. I threw one chunk at a bold pigeon darting between tables as I read The Times-Picayune from cover to cover.
Then I thought some more about going home.
This had been lots of fun, but I was fooling no one. I now knew a lot about Logan Kind. I’d got to hang out in New Orleans and play guitar. But most of the questions I had wanted answers to remained unanswered. The things I knew about Logan could have been found by anyone anywhere with a little patience and a working Wi-Fi connection, although I suspected that I wouldn’t have found them if I hadn’t come here.
Because context is everything.
But I was playing guitar again, with Logan as my newfound muse and inspiration.
A moment of delusion had me heading back north, pulling rank, bullying Nye into letting me playing at Belvedere, or even at Cygnet,
where surly barista and stoutmaster Jesse would surely cherish the opportunity to mock me mercilessly. There were open-mic nights everywhere, which were not restricted to the young or the prolifically talented. This was good, as I was clearly neither.
Then the moment ended. The street corner in the Quarter where Logan had played was going to be my only gig for a while. The near future would see me sitting on my porch in Boulder, noodling up a storm, staring up at the mountains. If I got good enough, I might play someplace else, but not until I was ready, until I was better.
There would be no playing on the streets anywhere, not on Pearl Street, and definitely not down by the creek.
My street performances in the Quarter were a form of devotional, not the beginning of any kind of busking career, because the streets were for the hardened and the needy, and not for the dilettante.
So much for stardom.
Stephen Park, the young man who died in the coffee shop, was still all kinds of an unresolved mystery. So were Logan’s last days and a huge chunk of his earlier life. So were so many other things. I didn’t have a clue what “Circumstance” was, beyond being a reference to a song that didn’t seem to exist anywhere. I didn’t know how Logan Kind sounded like no one else when he played the guitar.
About the only thing I did know was why the Deltatones song sounded like Logan’s.
I thought about Boulder and Michigan and about Art and Keith. Back then all the answers to their deaths had depended on clues that had been visible to me. When I thought about this search there were several unfortunate possibilities.
There were no clues.
There were no clues I could see.
There were no clues I could see or understand.
I wanted to know why two people had died. There was no good reason that I could see.
There was no good reason why there should be a good reason.
I desired a certain resolution.
It wasn’t about to happen.
I did suddenly have a thought.
The newspaper article about Stephen Park was a lot harder to read on the tiny phone screen. His interests were listed, the subjects he studied in college, the paper he wrote. Everything was as I remembered it.
“The Town Where She Loved Me.”
The title had reminded me of something. I thought perhaps it was poetry. Whether I was clearly wrong or if I was right, I had no idea what poetry it was.
Stephen Park was also reminded of something. I had assumed it was a song, but I found I was wrong again. Stephen had written about Scottish poetry when he was a student.
Logan’s song had reminded Park of a poem.
And he was correct.
“Circumstance” was a short poem written by a Scottish poet named Norman Allan Haig in 1996. It was readily available on the Internet.
The first verse read as follows:
Is it so surprising to you?
That a wonderful place would kill my love dead?
Both you and I came from there once,
From the town where I loved you,
From the place where you told me goodbye.
The first few lines of Logan’s song were as follows:
It’s a wonder to me that the place that we came from,
Is a wonderful place where you love me.
You and I came from there once long ago,
From the town where I once loved you.
From the town where she loved me,
From the place where I told her goodbye.
In Logan’s version the last two lines were repeated, and formed the verse of the song.
I stared at the two pieces of text for a while.
* * *
My brief Eureka! moment was broken by the sound of someone screaming from the direction of the Square and I started to run.
I got to the young man just as he brought his foot down hard on Mel’s skull. She lay still on the ground. There was a sharp crack. Her whole body quivered. He raised his foot again. I grabbed him and threw him onto the bench. He hit it hard face first and turned around, surprised. I jumped on top of him and punched his face several times. Then I grabbed him by his hair and smashed his head into the top of the metal bench as many times as I could until the cop pulled me away.
I ran to Mel and held her broken head in my hands. Her wig was gone and blood poured from her hair through my hands. There was more blood covering the bodice of her dress where the knife was shoved deep into her side. The skirt of her dress was far enough up so that her underwear was exposed and you could see the bulge of her cock and her balls. I pulled the skirt all the way down as quickly as I could and I smiled at her face and I held onto her.
“I’m all broken, Tom.” She whispered these words before she died in my arms. The ambulance and many more cops showed up, and they made me let her go. By then I was crying, and my tears had fallen on her dead face and washed some of her blood away.
The cops talked to me for a while but I wasn’t listening. Someone from the café brought my guitar and my cell phone, which I had left lying on the table. My coffee had been thoughtfully transferred into a plastic cup and I gratefully sipped from it as they asked their questions. The knuckles on my right hand were red and very sore. I was provided with an ice pack.
The cops asked me if I knew Melvin Taylor. I hesitated, then I told them that I did. They asked me how I knew him, and I told them everything, which wasn’t very much. They asked me several harder questions but they were for the most part friendly. The New Orleans police enjoy an unenviable reputation, but these fine men were both professional and courteous. The cop who had pulled me off Mel’s killer had heard the same scream and been two blocks away at the time. He was young and fit and he had arrived at the scene very quickly.
But we had both been too late.
They hastened to tell me more than once that I wasn’t in any kind of trouble. There were eyewitnesses with cell phones, and no one had said or recorded anything that made me look anything other than overzealous. Mel’s killer had regained consciousness and was on his way to the hospital. One of the cops was an older man. He knew all about Melvin Taylor.
“He’s worked down here for a good long while. The Bourbon revue clubs at first. Doing his act on the city streets more lately. As he’s gotten older there’s been more sex for cash stuff, head and hand jobs for the most part. He used to be a real cutie when he first showed up in town. Passed easy for a chick. Must be close to twenty years ago. Y’all knew he was a guy.”
I told him I did. He looked at me strangely for a moment.
“As he’s gotten older the trade he’s taken up with has gotten rougher. Mostly he hooks up with handsome young drunks who would fuck a goat if it wore heels. But he’s gotten himself injured before, spent time in the hospital emergency ward, hit by macho types who sober up and get seriously pissed when they find out they got it on with a guy in a dress. That’s how they try to tell it. Lying fucks mostly. Truth of the matter is they knew what he was and liked it just fine. When we get a statement from the hospital bed that’s what he’s eventually gonna tell us. A real stone-cold ladies man who went and got his masculinity all fucked up and felt all threatened.”
I asked how he was.
The cop smiled. “You were in the process of fucking him up nicely. The guy who pulled you off says you would have cracked his fucking head wide open. He says he’s feelin’ kinda sorry he had to stop you. Were you thinking of leaving town soon?”
I told him that I was.
“Then don’t. Stay here for a few days. We’ll have some more questions for you probably. You shouldn’t need to be worrying any. It all looks pretty righteous. We can give you a ride back to your place in a while if you like.”
I was tired and covered in blood. I told him I would appreciate a ride.
The cops were still tidying up as I left.
Mel’s bike was still chained to the fence. They were having some trouble getting the lock off. They had already taken away all the stuff in her basket, her Blanche dress and her beads and her Blanche wig and all the rest of the worthless shit that she had littered the road with when we first met.
I looked at the empty basket, her crappy bike, her drying blood on the path. I could hear a siren far away. The air was already warmer. The sun was beginning to burn away the morning fog, just like the forecast said it would. A trumpet blew an extended note outside the market café. It was the same gentleman from the other day, the same jogging suit, the same finger extended skyward at the end of every song, to give it all back to the big guy upstairs, the same big guy upstairs who had just let Mel get killed.
He began to play “Abide with Me.”
I was soon crying.
I really had to leave.
They sat me in the back of the police car.
The ride was short.
I remembered last night.
Mel had moved close to me as we sang together.
Now I wished I had held her, but it was too late for that now.
Fifteen
For the next two days I mostly stayed on Elysian Fields and shamelessly sulked. I had more laundry to do now. I bought my groceries at Whole Foods, some beer and some laundry detergent and tissue paper. I played my guitar in the courtyard during the day. I tried to play “You Are My Sunshine,” but I wasn’t able to finish. I sat on my front step in the evening. I listened to my compilations a little but mostly I listened to Crofter over and over again.
The cops showed up on the second day.
The hospital had released Mel’s killer and the cops had him in custody. It would be a simple case, with copious cell-phone video and a lot of supporting testimony. The video clips included my act of retribution, which was apparently a popular item at the station, but I was assured it was not going to be seeing the light of day any time soon.
I was officially free to leave town and unofficially encouraged to hang around for a few more days.
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