The Neon Palm of Madame Melancon

by Will Clarke

  Stevo and I just look at each other.

  * * *

  I pull up to Jean’s cheerful white house. I have to tell myself to unlock the door, lift the handle, and put my feet onto Jean Babineaux’s driveway. I don’t want to get out of the car. I don’t want to see what I have done to her. I don’t want to see that look in her eyes. I don’t want to smell that house. I don’t want to see those sad surprise party gift baskets.

  But I force myself to get out of the car, and I walk up to Jean Babineaux’s house with the $344 million lottery ticket in hand. I walk up to all the defiantly happy yard art, past the LSU garden gnome to the front door with the “Coon-Ass and Proud” sign on it. I ring the doorbell and stare at the cute raccoon exposing his pink asshole on their sign. I try to breathe and gather up the right words to say.

  “Go away!” Jean shouts out from behind the door.

  “Jean, I need to talk to you.”

  “Go away!”

  “Please.”

  Then nothing.

  I just stand here, holding this lottery ticket, tapping my foot. I begin to wonder if I shouldn’t just leave the ticket in her mailbox and text her that she needs to come outside and get it. That’s what I should do; she doesn’t want to see me any more than I want to see her and I don’t blame her.

  I knock again and still nothing.

  So I turn around and walk off the front steps.

  “He’d still be here if I had listened to your mama.” Jean Babineaux is suddenly standing on the front steps.

  I turn back around. “I’m so sorry.”

  She crosses her arms and starts to weep.

  I walk up the steps and put my hand on her shoulder.

  “Look.” I hand her the ticket.

  She wipes her eyes and inspects it.

  “Mama left a note telling me to give this to you,” I say.

  She shakes her head.

  “Mama wanted you to have this,” I say.

  Jean’s face twists into a red grimace, following by jagged sobs, and then she rips the ticket up and throws the pieces at me.

  “Hey, don’t do that!” I scramble to collect the torn paper before it blows away.

  “I don’t want this! I don’t want any of this!” she says.

  “Look,” I say. “You can’t throw this ticket away. You can’t.”

  “This was your fault. You lied to me,” she sucks up her tears.

  “Give me your palm,” I say.

  “No!” She folds her arms.

  “Just let me see.” I wrench her left hand away from her stomach.

  She relaxes and opens her palm to me.

  “Why are you doing this to me?” she asks. “Why me?”

  An open palm is one of the most psychologically-open positions you can put a person in. This position makes their mind open to whatever you say. Or so Mama always told me.

  “She wanted you to have these numbers.” I force the scraps of paper into Jean’s palm and close her fist around the paper. “Take them and go inside and tape them back together and claim whatever they bring you.”

  She doesn’t say anything, but she also doesn’t throw the ticket at me again. She holds the torn paper in her clenched fist. “Go,” she says. “Just go!”

  “Those are winning numbers!” I shout. “Those are your numbers, Jean!”

  She steps back inside her house. She shuts and locks her door with loud clicks and a rattling slide-chain. I walk back to my Prius. I get back in and push the big round button that silently starts the engine. I back out of Jean Babineaux’s driveway and hush down the street into the brain-splitting glare of the setting sun.

  God.

  39

  June 11, 2010

  Mama has been missing for 38 days

  Upstairs in Mama’s bedroom, Stevo, Cactus, and La La have pulled most of the books off the walls and stacked them neatly into towers on the floor. They’ve been cataloging the names all day long along with dates, names, and addresses that Mama has written on the forty-second page of each one. I open 100 Years of Solitude, check page 42, and sure enough, there’s a lottery number scribbled next to the name and address of a man named Ruganzu Bruno in Kampala, Uganda. I find a number for the Texas Lottery on page 42 of Middlemarch, but it’s to go to a man named Charles Butt in San Antonio by March 26, 2020. Inside Infinite Jest is an Illinois Lottery ticket for a woman named Ann Asprodites, her phone number printed next to it.

  “We can’t just leave all these here. Not with all these numbers and dates,” Stevo says. “Gay André knows about this.”

  “Gay André knows Mama predicts the lottery.” La La points to the stacks. “He doesn’t know about this.”

  “He and his guys will be here,” Cactus begins to shake. “I have seen it.”

  “You’ve seen it?” La La says.

  “Then what should we do with all this?” I say. “If these really are lottery numbers, then the money we are talking about…”

  “Could change the world,” La La says.

  “Mama was clear. We are to deliver these numbers to the people they were intended for,” Stevo holds up one of Mama’s letters. “They are people who can put this money to good use.”

  So we continue pulling books and checking pages. On every page 42 of every book we open, there is either an actual lottery ticket or a scribbled number with instructions when to buy the ticket. There are thousands of books here—thousands of winning jackpots.

  Stevo finds his name and lottery numbers inside Germinal by Emile Zola. He finds Yanko’s numbers inside Doctor Zhivago and Daddy’s inside Mrs. Dalloway.

  “What do you think Mama’s trying to tell you by putting your ticket in this book?” La La holds up the old green hardback. “What does Germinal even mean? Is it French?”

  “You never read it?” Stevo asks. “It was one of Mama’s favorites.”

  “Maybe you were her favorite,” Cactus says.

  “Stevo, tell your wife we need to talk in private?” La La puts Germinal back onto the towering stack and balls her hand into a fist.

  “Cactus, honey, why don’t you go check on Paint and Brag and let me and La La and Duke talk about this?” Stevo puts his hand on her shoulder.

  Cactus whispers something in her husband’s ear.

  “Just go,” Stevo says through his teeth, and Cactus goes downstairs and leaves us here among the stacks.

  “I will not sleep another night under the same roof as that woman, Stevo. She is a faker and a liar,” La La picks up a copy of A Confederacy of Dunces. “Every lie she tells undermines my life’s work. She makes a mockery of my profession.”

  “Calm down, La La. My wife is not a liar.” Stevo picks up Germinal and places it inside a cardboard box. “And don’t you worry about your precious sleep, we will be leaving tomorrow.”

  “What do you mean you’re leaving tomorrow?” I say.

  “Cactus and I will take the van and deliver the books and lottery tickets to the people they are meant for.” Stevo smiles.

  “Emily!” La La exclaims. “The Bee Maidens keep pointing to this rip in the fabric of time. There was a woman named Emily, they say.”

  “Are you talking about the girl I dated in law school?”

  “You loved her,” La La says.

  “I might have. She broke up with me my second year. In Tulum. Spring break.”

  “I see her. I see her and you and two little boys. There’s a hole where they used to be,” La La says.

  “That was such a long time ago,” I say.

  “Are you sad?” La La asks.

  “No,” I say. “That was a long time ago.”

  La La weeps.

  “Why are you crying?” I say. “What is wrong?”

  “Something beautiful was taken from you—from all of us—and you don’t even know what it is.”

  40

  What We Never Thought Was Possible

  Daddy says that Mama came home late last night while we were all asleep in our beds: Me in the
top bunk, Daddy clutching his rosary, La La behind the three locks she just installed on her door, and Yanko in the attic with some groupie he snuck up the back stairs.

  “Ya Mama shook me awake. ‘I’m home,’ is all she said. Thought I was dreaming,” Daddy stands at the foot of his bed, shaking. “She was so pale. I asked her if she was okay.

  ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Fine.’

  ‘We been worried sick,’ I told her. ‘I ain’t been able to eat or sleep.’

  ‘Then what were you doing when I walked in?’ she said.

  ‘Resting my eyes,’ I told her, and we had us a good laugh. A real good laugh you know like we do.

  ‘Get me some water, Vinny,’ she said. ‘I am thirsty.’

  So I put on my leg and go to the bathroom sink to get her some water.

  ‘We thought someone had snatched you!’ I told her. ‘Where da hell you been?’ I yelled at her.

  But she didn’t answer.

  I came back to the bed with her water, but she had already changed clothes and gone to sleep. Snoring like she likes to do. Sleeping like a baby.

  So I drank the water myself, took off my leg, and snuggled up to ya mama.

  I thought about waking you up, but it was four in the morning. I decided it would be a nice surprise for you. We could all have coffee and beignets with her in the morning. We could all have us a good laugh. So I just cuddled up and went to sleep just so glad she was home.”

  However, there would be no laughing this morning. Only hysteria. La La is carrying on, shrieking and wringing her fists to heaven.

  “No, Mama! No!”

  * * *

  Yanko, La La, and I file into Mama and Daddy’s bedroom. We stand over her body. Each of us staring at what is left of this once great and terrifying woman: her eyes are wide-open, her mouth is gaping, but her chest is still.

  Daddy stands beside us. He keeps repeating himself, keeps telling us over and over how he got her the water and took off his leg and thought he would fry us up beignets and bananas, and how he never thought she would ever die, not after she found her way home like this, not after all we had been through, after all she had put us through, she wouldn’t just die like this.

  Yanko stares at Mama. We all stare at Mama.

  “She’s dead?” The question falls out of me, even though I am looking at the answer.

  La La closes our mother’s mouth and shuts our mother’s eyes. She wipes away her own blackened tears and then pulls Mama’s favorite strand of pearls from the jewelry box on the bedside table.

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “Go get Mama’s scissors out the sewing box,” she says.

  “And where is that?”

  “In her closet. Bring me the ones with the orange handle.”

  I open Mama’s closet. The smell of her perfume makes me sneeze. White Shoulders and Katrina-era black mold. There are shoeboxes stacked to the ceiling. The closet is crammed full of black dresses, purple cloaks, and velvet everything. Mama loved a costume. I take her sewing box down and pull out the scissors and bring them to my sister.

  La La cuts up Mama’s pearl necklace with the scissors. She takes two pearls and sticks one up each of Mama’s nostrils.

  “Keeps the evil out.” She looks me in the eye as she puts the broken strand of pearls in my hand.

  “What do you want me to do with these?”

  “Throw them away,” she says.

  “Aren’t these real?” I ask.

  “Everything is real, Duke. Everything.”

  41

  June 12, 2010

  9:28 AM

  If this wasn’t New Orleans, Detective Mary Glapion’s ambivalence about Mama’s return and subsequent death would be shocking. But alas, this is New Orleans and the detective assigned to Mama’s case has proven herself on more than one occasion to be unstable at best.

  “The coroner has pronounced her dead,” Detective Glapion says. “The death certificate should be ready in a couple of weeks. You can pick it up at the county courthouse or go online, and they can mail it to you.”

  “And that’s it?” I say.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I thought you were are on our side,” I say.

  “What makes you think I’m not?”

  “The fact you just closed the case.”

  “She came home.”

  “What about an autopsy?”

  “She died in her sleep. No signs of foul play. ” Detective Glapion folds her arms. “What else do you want from me?”

  “She was missing for weeks and comes home and then dies. And you don’t think you should investigate that?”

  “Not to be callous, Mr. Melançon, but what do you want me to investigate?”

  “How can the case be closed?” I am trying not to shout. “Where was she?”

  “I don’t know. We may never know. You’re going to have to be okay with that.”

  “That’s not okay.”

  “I’ve done this long enough to know that some things will never be known,” she says.

  “Tell me now. No more b.s.” I point to the gold coins just barely tucked behind her blouse. “What’s with the necklace?”

  “You tell me.” She smirks.

  “Why are you wearing it? And why was The Loup Garou wearing one? And why was he so obsessed with me bringing Mama’s to him?”

  “You know how hard this job has been for me, Duke?” She looks up to keep from crying.

  “I don’t care how hard this has been for you, Detective. I want you to tell me why you and The Loup Garou have the same necklace as my mother.”

  “One day, you will understand. We will meet for coffee, and you will hold my hand, and you will regret all of this.”

  “Okay, here we go again with the past-life crap and the crying. Do you have any idea how unprofessional you’re acting? How crazy you sound? I didn’t know you in a past life, Detective Glapion. You and I don’t have a thing. I needed you to find my mother. I needed you to do your job. Not come here and act like every other whackjob in this town.”

  La La walks up and steps between the detective and me.

  “Thank you for coming by, Detective Glapion,” La La interrupts.

  “You’re welcome. So sorry for your loss,” Detective Glapion raises her eyebrow at me and then scratches her nose. She then looks at her lavender fingernails as if she’s deciding what color to paint them next.

  La La’s uncharacteristic calm jars me. The detective is no longer on the verge of tears. It’s odd. So very odd.

  “Here.” The detective hands La La a business card that says “Sinclair’s Funeral Parlor” in gold foil.

  “They’re in the Marigny. They’ll fix her up real good. You know, do a good job with her makeup and her hair.” Glapion smiles at La La. “My family’s used them for years. They’re good people.”

  “Thank you.” La La shakes the detective’s hand.

  “Duke.” Detective Glapion nods at me. “Next lifetime perhaps.”

  And that is that.

  “What are you doing?” I nudge La La. “I need to know why she’s got those goddamn coins around her neck.”

  “The Bee Maidens will not let her answer you. You must let her go.” My sister lights a cigarette. “They have spoken.”

  “That’s not for you or them to decide.”

  “Your answers are coming, Duke. Just not from her.”

  My sister and I watch the coroner and Detective Glapion walk out Mama’s front door, past the wooden signs that once proclaimed Madame Melançon’s holy place in the world, her mastery over time and space, the here and now, yesteryear and tomorrow. Detective Glapion and the coroner get in a white Ford Fusion and drive off together.

  The case is closed.

  Madame Melançon is no longer missing. She died from natural causes, just like any other old lady in New Orleans in need of a casket and second line.

  42

  The Answer

  As expected, Daddy wants a second
line for his bride. So the rest of my brothers and their families have driven in from around the country to send Mama off in this traditional New Orleans fashion. Timur, Roman, Vlad, and Louis have brought with them their wives and their sons and daughters—many of whom I have never met. They have all parked along the street outside The House of the Neon Palm with their Winnebagos, their Hummers, and their Escalades. And now we are all shaving and showering in the three small bathrooms, getting ready for Mama’s funeral today. The younger ones among us have taken to getting dressed outside—putting on fancy black suits and designer ties that Louis sells out of the back of his Escalade. Timur and Vlad are on the front porch tying their new paisley ties with Daddy. My nieces are helping Daddy fasten his fake leg and polish his clarinet. The older grandsons help dress him in one of Louis’ fancy suits. A nephew I’ve never met until today, Timur’s youngest, crawls around on the floor helping Daddy find his glass eye.

  Likewise, Yanko and some of his musician friends from Yankotronic are here with their brass instruments, accordions, violins, and drums. They begin revving up the band and getting ready for the long march in the unforgiving sun. Once we all make it to the funeral home near St. Roch, I find La La in the parlor, next to Mama’s casket and sprays of white roses. La La has put on a blond wig and pulled it back into a bun. She has dressed somewhat appropriately in a tweed suit and a red pillbox hat and veil.

  “Lady Gaga?” I ask.

  “No, Madonna when she was playing Evita. That’s when she had her best luck.” La La’s teeth are bright against her dark lipstick. She smiles at me, then dissolves into tears.

  “It’ll be okay.” I put my arm around my sister.

  She cries into my neck. I give her a Kleenex, and she wipes her face and blows her nose with it. Then in a classic little sister move, La La shoves her used Kleenex into my inside coat pocket.

  She teeters off in her ridiculous high heels, shaking hands with all of my mother’s old customers and people who may or may not be my cousins on Daddy’s side of the family. And before I can really get my bearings, Yanko’s drummer rattles off a chest-shaking beat and we all begin to follow Mama’s casket down the road. The umbrellas bounce and the handkerchieves wave. The jazz carries us to the cemetery. It is indeed a second line, but I can’t make my feet dance no matter how healing and wonderful this tradition is supposed to be.