by Will Clarke
It’s scribbled over with Jean’s transcription of one of my mother’s bad poems.
It’s addressed to me.
This letter is the kind of coincidence that would have set La La off into an hour-long diatribe about how the three Bee Maidens are afoot, and that if you just pay close enough attention to the signs and symbols, you can hear angels singing to you in riddles and rhymes. But this crazy letter from one of my mother’s crazy clients is just that: crazy.
“You just wait, Duke. Destinies are not to be farted upon,” Mama liked to say while she held her crystal ball next to her ear like a shot put. “One day, you will understand and you will be ashamed of how you have treated me.”
There are no three Melissae or secret smiles at work here. There are only probability and chance, and as unlikely as it was for Jean to show up today with my mother’s ramblings in hand, the world is full of unlikely occurrences. To try to attach meaning to such an occurrence is very human, but it’s also pointless. The reality is Mama didn’t warn Jean Babineaux about any of this; all Mama did was give that poor woman and her husband some shitty rhymes, the same obtuse riddles and universal truths that you can read anything into once enough time has passed—like a horoscope. It’s La Langue des Oiseaux[1], the Language of the Birds. It’s green language—verdant with possibility. Our brains are built to make connections and correlations when it comes to language, even when those connections aren’t really there: The Book of Revelation, Nostradamus’ quatrains, Mama’s palm readings. Confusing as hell, but these words somehow—if you strain hard enough—seem to reveal the most profound and ominous warnings.
Put it this way: If Mama had truly warned the Babineauxes about their future, then why did they stay when they knew Katrina was coming? Why didn’t this woman who believes my mama can see the future just leave the Gulf? Why didn’t she help her husband find another job before the Sub-Ocean Brightside exploded?
As it always is with Mama’s clients, the Babineauxes are lost souls who have placed way too much faith in my mother’s other-worldly advice. I want to feel bad for Jean and her family. I want to feel horrible. I want to tell them I am sorry that Mama took their money and is now keeping them from the only real payout they will see in the Spill. I want to be angry for Jean Babineaux. But I’m not. I’m just not. This is not my fault. I can’t stop the oil. And I can’t fix Jean and Mark Babineaux’s broken life.
Just as I am explaining all this to that annoying Jiminy Cricket voice inside of my head, my phone rings.
“Mandala External Affairs, Duke Melançon.”
“Duke!”
“La La?”
“You have to go home!”
“What’s wrong?”
“You need to go to Covington.” Her voice quivers with hysteria. “I see it. I see it everywhere.”
“See what everywhere?”
“There is a pox upon your house. A plague!”
“I don’t have time for this.”
“Just go home!” My sister hangs up on me.
* * *
In Hermetic, Eleusinian and other magical traditions, Langue des Oiseaux, the language of the birds, is considered a hidden and divine language that can lead to perfect knowing if you can decipher its metaphors and puzzles. The key to understanding is to read between the lines and to interpret the clues of the obtuse rhymes and mandarin prose. ↵
13
Tonight
There are no stars in the sky
As I am driving over Lake Pontchartrain into Covington, to our rented McMansion inside the Cotton Gin Country Club and Golf Community, far from La La’s visions and rants in New Orleans, Emily calls and tells me that La La was right, that there is indeed a pox upon our house, and that I need to come home “right freaking now!”
Emily has locked herself with our two sons in the panic room.
“They’re everywhere!” she says over the phone.
“Who’s everywhere?”
“Raccoons!”
And by raccoons, Emily doesn’t mean one or two sneaking in our back door. As I pull into our driveway, my headlights illuminate the glowing eyes of hundreds of raccoons crawling all over my house and lawn. They scamper and hiss, lunge and snap. The bastards teeter across my roof, waddle on my front porch. They have found their way inside my house, probably through the attic and air vents. They’ve taken over the den and the playroom. They’ve shredded the couch, leaving the white stuffing strewn into every room. There is piss and shitty handprints everywhere, and these raccoons aren’t the cute Ranger Ricks you learned about in seventh-grade Life Science with thumbs on their paws and goofy smiles. These things are vicious.
* * *
“I ain’t never seen nothing like this. Not even after Katrina,” says Bobby Faucheaux, the owner of Black and Gold Wildlife Control, with his two bottom teeth missing and his Saints Super Bowl Champions hat worn straight and low on his brow. “They got da rabies, ya heard me?”
“Wow. That many raccoons have rabies?”
“Oh yeah, they sick all right,” he says, “Chaouis don’t act like this unless they sick. Sure they gone bite you if you mess with them, but other than dat, they gone run and hide first. Somethin’ ain’t right with Mother Nature, ya heard me? Over on the West Bank, there’s dis pack a wild pit bulls breakin’ down people’s doors, eatin’ dey cats.”
I text Emily, telling her to stay calm, that Bobby Faucheaux is here, that I will be getting her and the kiddos out soon.
“So how are you going to get my family out of the house without getting bitten?”
“Well, it ain’t gone be easy. Da chaouis is fuckin’ murderous when dey pissed, but we can get dem out.”
“When you say we, you mean you are going to get them out of my house.”
“Time to kill us some chaouis.” Bobby takes his pistol out of the holster on his hip and checks the clip.
“You’re not firing that gun inside my house.”
“Fine, I got dis baseball bat in the back of my truck, but dat’s sort of inhumane, and dat’s gone cost ya extra.” He lays on the Cajun accent as most folks down here do when they’re trying to make a point or be funny. Or both.
“Look, we can figure out what to do with the raccoons once we get my wife and kids out of here. Okay?”
Bobby puts his gun back in its holster and grabs a thin, black baton-like canister off his belt. He holds it up. “Peppa spray.”
Bobby Faucheaux straightens his Saints hat and then marches into my house completely unafraid, through the foyer, past the angry raccoons, into the living room, unleashing long, steady streams of pepper spray. I follow close behind, trying to fight the very unmanly urge to hide behind him.
“When you said you got a raccoon problem, you ain’t lyin’, boy,” Faucheaux says. “This shit is Biblical up in here.”
“Over here,” I wave him over to the panic room door.
The vapors from the spray are burning my throat, and I start to choke and cough. My eyes water, which is the least of my problems. While at first the pepper spray repels the raccoons, now it only seems to make them crazier and more erratic. They run around in circles. They claw at the carpet and gnash their teeth.
“Emily!” I shout. “Don’t open the door until I say so.”
“Okay!” She yells back.
And that’s when Bobby screams — “Fuck me!”
One of the “chaouis” is hanging off Bobby’s forearm. Blood is spewing everywhere.
Bobby tries to sling the raccoon loose by waving his arm around, but the raccoon only seems to clamp down tighter, causing Bobby’s vein to squirt an even faster, thicker, darker stream of blood.
Not wanting to make any sudden moves to provoke the rest of the raccoons, I just stand here for what is only seconds but what feels like seasons.
“Is everything okay out there?” Emily calls out.
“No! No, it’s not! Just keep the door shut!”
Bobby’s gun.
“Hold still.” I pull his
t-shirt up and take his firearm out of its holster on his belt. For a split second, I deliberate what to do with this gun.
“Shoot it!” Bobby yells at me.
I hesitate.
“I said shoot it!”
I unlock the safety, press the muzzle against the belly of the growling beast, pointing it away from Bobby and me.
I shut my eyes.
Pull the trigger.
Kapow!
I taste the gunpowder.
Blood, guts, and fur are all over me. My ears ring.
Emily screams from behind the door.
What’s left of the raccoon drops off of Bobby’s arm and into a wet thud onto the floor.
“What’s going on?” Emily calls out.
“We got it under control!” I shout back.
The gunshot causes the swarm of raccoons to scatter, over the chairs, into corners and out of the hallway.
I safety the hot gun and slide it into the back of my jeans.
Bobby pulls an LSU bandana from his back pocket and begins to tie his arm off with a tourniquet.
“Don’t do that.” I take the twisted-up bandana from him. “You’re in shock.”
I shake out the purple cloth and hold it against his bleeding arm, trying not to mix the raccoon guts with his blood. “Here, hold this super-tight and keep your hand over your head.”
“Shit! I ain’t got time for no shots this week,” he says.
“After we get my wife and kids out, I can drive you to the emergency room.”
“Nah, dat’s ahright. I can drive myself,” he says.
“Emily! Pick up Stewart, and I’ll grab Jo-Jo!” I yell through the door, “And be ready to run out the front door!”
“Okay! I’m ready!”
I open the door to the panic room. Emily’s face is flush with fear. She is holding a broom in one hand, and she’s got Jo-Jo crying into her shoulder with the other. I pick up Stewart, who’s too young to process how scary this is, and we run through the living room, past the snarling raccoons, into our front yard.
A fat raccoon waddles across our circular driveway, growling, wearing my mother’s gold coin necklace, the necklace that Mama has worn since she was a child in Albania—around its neck.
“Here.” I put Stewart down and give his hand to Emily.
“What are you doing?” she says.
I pull Bobby’s gun from the waist of my pants and walk up to the raccoon.
“Duke, no!” she says.
I unload the clip until there is nothing but blood and fur and a striped tail.
I reach down into the bloody mess and reclaim my mother’s necklace.
14
Midnight
Mama has now been missing for six days
There are thousands of hotels in New Orleans, and it would have made complete, logical sense after what we just went through to get the presidential suite at The Windsor Court for the night. But no, I let Emily talk me into accepting Daddy’s invitation to spend the night at The House of the Neon Palm, in the room where I grew up—a room that still has the same bunk beds intact from when I shared it with my six brothers: Roman, Timur, Yanko, Stevo, Vlad, and Louis.
Emily and I take the top bunks, and our boys are soon fast asleep below us.
“I think you’ll be glad we spent the night,” Emily whispers.
“We should have gotten a room.”
“Your father was begging, Duke. What else are we going to do?”
“After tonight, we’re going back to Covington.”
“No, we are not.” She hits her pillow with her fist and lies back down. “I’m not going back there until you call the police and tell them what happened.”
“I don’t need this in the press right now.”
“You’re paranoid, and quite honestly, a little full of yourself,” she says.
“I’m handling it.”
“I don’t feel safe in that house,” she says.
“I said I was handling it.”
Emily gets down from her bunk bed and opens the door.
“Where are you going?”
“Downstairs.”
“Really?” I say.
“I’m going to read,” she says. “Still too much adrenaline in me to sleep.”
She closes the door behind her.
The boys are making their little sleep-whistle noises, and the room is humid and warm. I am too pissed off and too hot to go to sleep. So I throw off my covers and get up, but I don’t follow Emily downstairs. Instead, I go to the bathroom. I take a leak, and then to the medicine cabinet to pour myself some NyQuil. Too much adrenaline indeed.
* * *
At around 2 a.m., I wake up to drunken shouts and catcalls echoing from The Club Ms. Mae’s, a twenty-four-hour bar across the neutral ground from my parents’ house.
It’s just as well. I kept having the same dream over and over: unrelenting images of my mother lying face down and dead in a ditch, in the trunk of a Mafioso’s car, under an overpass, in a shallow grave dug by a rival fortune-teller who practices a bloody brand of voodoo revenge. I get up, put my clothes on in the dark, and walk downstairs to the kitchen.
Now that I am awake I keep retracing my mother’s steps in my mind. I pick up the broom leaning next to the fridge, and I throw open the kitchen door. I run out into her backyard swinging the broom.
I walk to the gate, open it, and step out onto the street, picking up my speed to see what it would look and feel like to chase that stray cat off her property. I chase this imaginary cat onto the neutral ground, and before I know it, I have chased it to the front of Ms. Mae’s, and here I stand with a broom in my hand. Considering that Mama hated Ms. Mae’s, I feel certain that she didn’t enter this bar the night she disappeared.
Nevertheless, I drop the broom in the street, and I go inside the bar. At best, I’ll chat up one of the regulars who might have seen something that night, and at worst, I can down a couple of cheap nightcaps and get drunk enough to fall asleep again. But before I can even get my foot in the door of the bar, I hear my brother, Yanko, cussing and kicking the video poker machines inside.
Ah, Yanko, the rock star. Yanko, the unbathed pussy magnet. Yanko with his mustache and his gold tooth, with his Palestinian hipster scarf and fedora that he snagged from Urban Outfitters. Yanko Melançon, the second-most-famous member of my family.
“Ha! Duke!” He stomps his foot like a flamenco dancer and puffs out his chest. He grabs me and kisses me on both cheeks.
“My brother!” he exclaims in his horrible fake Russian accent.
“Would you stop talking like that!”
“Don’t embarrass me, brah,” he whispers with the normal, less exotic accent that he grew up speaking with, and then he exclaims with his Russian affectation, “Everybody! This is my long-lost brother, Duke!”
Everybody in the bar, and I mean everybody, turns around on their stools, away from their pool games and video poker machines, and they drunkenly shout, “Hello, Duke!”
Like I said, Yanko, the wild accordion boy, is famous, or at least he is in bars like Ms. Mae’s. So I wave and smile to the crowd so that they will all get back to getting drunk and leave me the hell alone.
“So you have a drink with me.” Yanko reeks of cheap bourbon, Ice Breakers chewing gum, and oceans of Giorgio Armani cologne.
“Sure,” I say. “Why not?”
“Ketel One martini! Dirt-tay! Dirt-tay!” Yanko shakes three dollars at the bartender all the way across the room, and because he is Yanko Melançon, the lead singer of the New Orleans Baltic funk band, Yankotronic, the bartender ignores everyone else who is standing in line at the bar, and he begins to pour Yanko’s martini into a silver shaker of ice.
“Look, I need to talk to you about Mama.”
“She is a businesswoman. She will return to us when she is ready.”
“Not if someone killed her, Yanko.” I pull Mama’s necklace from my pocket.
“Where did you get that?”
�
�Someone put it around a raccoon’s neck and then set the raccoon, or rather raccoons, loose in my house.”
“In Covington?”
“Yes, in Covington.”
“This is some sort of sign. What do you think it means?”
“It means someone is threatening us. It means someone has her.”
“Get rid of it!” Yanko pushes the necklace away from his face.
“Seriously, Yanko?”
“I’m opening for Dr. John tomorrow. I don’t need that kind of bad luck around me right now.”
“Someone did this.”
“So you think it’s the mob?” Yanko asks. “You think they would be that stupid?”
“I’m just waiting for a horse head to show up in my bed next,” I say.
“I know a guy.” Yanko pulls out his phone and starts texting. “See what he says.”
“Who are you texting?” I ask.
“Mama’s bookie. Dude knows everyone.”
Yanko’s face glows in the light of his phone as he types on the tiny screen.
“Says we can meet him at the Dungeon later.” He slides his phone into his back jeans pocket.
“The Drungeon? You got to be kidding me.”
“Do you want to find her or not?”
“Do you want me to punch you in the neck?”
And just as I am about to throw my drink down and walk home, Yanko snaps his fingers over his head and raises his leg like he’s the goddamn fiddler on the roof.
“Let’s go make love to the dance floor!” He lays on the Russian accent extra-thick. “Let’s go to the Dungeon and chase some poo-say!”
“Hells yeah!” One of Yanko’s fans high fives him.
Despite my better judgment, I follow Yanko and his sudden entourage out the door into a cab.
* * *
Ye Olde Dungeon is an after-hours bar in the Quarter where many of Mama’s customers like to get their drunk on while they hip-thrust and fist-pump to death metal and shitty nineties rap rock like Limp Bizkit and Sugar Ray. Once we go inside, Yanko, the famous son of Madame Melançon, is mobbed by Wiccan wannabes and Voodoo bikers. He goes from just being another area rock star to the Dark Prince of New Orleans. The first round of drinks is on the house, according to the manager, so Yanko, being Yanko, demands bottle service: Cristal. And he gets it.