A Twisted Ladder

by Rhodi Hawk

  “Oh no? It’s been all over the news: Angel Frey missing. She could put two and two together. Do you really want to take that chance?”

  “Jesus Christ, man, you said you had my back in all of this. You said nothing could happen to me.”

  Josh leaned forward. “I told you, you had to stick to the goddamn rules. You’re keeping souvenirs. I told you to chill.”

  “You and your bullshit. You know what I think? I don’t think these marks are any threat to me at all. I think they’re a threat to you. You and that old woman.”

  “Dammit Zenon! You keep right on with this shit. Just go ahead. You’re gonna find yourself in a prison cell.”

  The word prison gave Zenon pause, and his anger slipped a notch.

  “I know. All right.” He shook his head. “Look, I’m groping in the dark here. You tell me I’m s’posed to go get this mark but not that one. Makes me some kind of vigilante but I don’t know why. What the hell am I doing this for, anyway?”

  Josh snorted. “I’ve told you a thousand damn times.”

  “Tell me again.”

  Josh ran his fingers through his hair and leaned against the counter. “They’re a different race of souls. We gotta get rid of them.”

  “Why?” Zenon crossed his arms. “What’s so bad about them?”

  “They’re gonna take over, that’s why. They’ll own people like you. That what you want? Be somebody’s pet?”

  Zenon shifted, looking away, and brought a cigarette to his lips.

  “It’s so simple. But you gotta make it complicated. And now,” Josh leaned his face in so that it was inches away from Zenon’s. He pointed at the door again. “Now you’re going to have to get rid of her, too.”

  Zenon blew out a long, slow stream of smoke.

  forty

  NEW ORLEANS, 1920

  JACOB CHAPMAN HAD, ALONG with the rest of New Orleans, been celebrating the eve of Prohibition. It took some time before the street child found him, for Chapman was not at the hotel as expected, but at a saloon nearby. The boy told him that he had encountered Chloe on the street and she had given him a dime to track Jacob down. Jacob and his driver, following the boy’s directions, found the alley just as freezing rain began to fall over New Orleans. The child led Jacob into the darkness. There, he saw Chloe, a prostrate Rémi, and a bleeding, shivering ruffian.

  “Who is this man?” Jacob asked Chloe as he paid the child a second dime and sent him on his way.

  “That is Bruce Dempsey,” Chloe answered. “He belong to me.”

  Jacob frowned but did not press. Icy rain stunted any desire for conversation. When Chloe said that Bruce Dempsey belonged to her, Jacob assumed she meant that Dempsey was her friend. He attributed her strange choice of words to the fact that her English was a bit spotty.

  Still, it seemed a strange turn of events for Chloe and Rémi’s wedding night that they should end up tattered and helpless in an alley with a thuggish-looking stranger. The icy water penetrated Jacob’s clothing and chilled him to the bone, causing the stump of his left arm to ache. No use questioning poor Chloe on a hoary night such as this.

  Jacob asked whether Bruce Dempsey could walk. In reply, the hulking man blubbered and shivered. Jacob and his driver were able to get Rémi into the car fairly easily, but it took all three of them—Jacob, the driver, and Chloe—to move Dempsey.

  Jacob regarded Chloe as they struggled with the man’s bulk. Her clothing was torn and bloodied. But her face showed no sign of alarm or frustration, and she seemed not the least bit affected by the freezing rain.

  It appeared that nothing fazed her; not now, and not even when Jacob had lost his hand on the hunting trip. He wondered what she might have done had the boy been unable to locate him at the saloon, and she was truly stranded with the two bedeviled men in the freezing rain. Somehow, Jacob knew, Chloe would have managed to get them all home. She was not a woman who knew how to be helpless.

  The motorcar was too narrow to accommodate all of them, and so Jacob instructed the driver to take them back to the house while he ran the distance on foot in the cold rain. He had long since sobered under the inhospitable conditions.

  The church bells tolled midnight, and with their ringing, Jacob knew a new age of temperance had begun. Alcohol was no longer a legal substance in the city of New Orleans, nor anywhere in the United States. As Jacob dashed through the streets, revelers emptied the saloons and taverns and drifted to their homes, and the saloons and taverns locked their doors for good. Jacob wondered whether, if the weather had been less severe, there might have been a riot at that final moment. Instead the midnight hour came as a whisper. Carousing New Orleanians were systematically doused with freezing rain and their first taste of widespread sobriety. Jacob suspected that they did their best to extend the moment on the sly, smuggling home bottles of bourbon and brandy purchased at cut-rate prices, stuffed in their winter coat pockets.

  He bent his head against the wind and trotted toward Esplanade, trying to guess what might have occurred in the alley. Clearly both Rémi and the strange Bruce Dempsey had drunk themselves to the point of casualty. But why would Rémi do such a thing on his wedding night, saddling Chloe with the burden of escorting him home in such a state? She herself might have been accosted, or worse. Rémi was not the same man who had married Helen only a few years ago.

  With reluctance, Jacob had gotten used to the idea of Rémi’s fraternization with Chloe. They’d had three children together, and now, he had married her. The matter had been elevated to the public eye. No turning back. Jacob could only imagine the scrutiny the couple would endure.

  But stranger still, more and more it appeared that Chloe bore the true burden of the relationship. She had begun to take responsibility for the plantation’s financial state. She, an uneducated black woman, had learned the machinations of plantation economy and prevented Terrefleurs from falling to ruin.

  And to be sure, Rémi himself had become a handful. So prodigious had become his thirst for alcohol that Jacob could not remember the last time he had seen him sober. Even without the odor of whiskey or bourbon on him, Rémi behaved in such a way that Jacob could tell he had been drinking. Hallucinations and frightful outbursts. And Chloe remained by his side to quiet him.

  She was a strong, beautiful colored woman with an iron will. Rémi LeBlanc was not the first to fall under the bewitchment of alcohol, but he might be the luckiest, with a woman like Chloe to prop him up and preserve his lifestyle. Jacob could only imagine what it would be like to have such a woman to soothe him.

  When Jacob arrived at the grand house on Esplanade, the servants were waiting at the door. He could tell by their pinched expressions that they did not approve of these strangers’ presence at the house, and he wondered if Chloe was having difficulty managing them, on top of everything else.

  The servants had already loaded Rémi and the hapless Bruce Dempsey into beds, and so there seemed little else for Jacob to do but return to the hotel.

  “Thank you for coming to me, Monsieur Chapman,” Chloe said.

  Jacob took her hand. “Chloe, when will you learn to call me Jacob?” He gave her hand a squeeze. “It was my pleasure to be of assistance. Please call me if ever you need anything, anything at all. I am at your service.”

  She looked at him with wide liquid eyes set in broad cheekbones, and he thought her beautifully exotic.

  THE LAST OF RÉMI’S surviving relatives had fallen dead. Jacob learned that the day after Rémi married Chloe, dock workers along the riverfront discovered the body of Rémi’s oldest brother, Henri. Witnesses had seen him drunk and staggering in the Vieux Carré the night before, but such had been the state of nearly every other resident of New Orleans, and no one thought much of it until the next day.

  When the workers retrieved Henri’s brined body, they all agreed that the cause of death was drowning, probably hastened by his inebriated state. Jacob heard much gossip as to whether the poor devil’s demise was accidental or deliberate. Som
e said that Rémi’s brother committed suicide because he had lost his youngest sibling and mother in the space of one week, or because he no longer possessed the ability to have children.

  But talk of murder did abound. With the last surviving brother gone, Rémi LeBlanc would become the sole heir to the LeBlanc fortune. Perhaps Rémi LeBlanc, said to have fallen on hard times, killed his brother for control of the family money. Or perhaps his new wife, rumored to be a voodoo priestess, arranged for the brother’s death in order to satisfy a bargain with the devil. Still other rumors speculated that Chloe had him killed because she believed that bad luck came in threes, and when two LeBlancs fell dead in the space of a week, the voodoo priestess sacrificed the brother in order to save her new husband.

  Jacob took staunch offense to these tales, and at least twice his outrage came to blows.

  Of course, some folks believed that Henri’s death was a simple drunken accident.

  Whatever the cause, the bizarre events that had befallen the LeBlanc family made for riveting conversation in the salons and halls of New Orleans society, and also in the brothels and back rooms of its subculture. Though the fading war in Europe and the new Prohibition law provided New Orleanians with much fodder for discussion, it was Rémi and Chloe LeBlanc who’d become the talk of the town.

  forty-one

  NEW ORLEANS, 2009

  MADELEINE WALKED PAST THE nurse’s station to the visiting area. She wore her white lab coat, badge, and a still-battered face. Daddy had been admitted the previous afternoon, her day off, and was already stabilized on his meds from his time spent in jail. Madeleine looked forward to having a real conversation with him again—chemically altered or not.

  She scanned the couches and tables in the visiting area. Several patients were reading, chatting, or watching TV. Daddy rose when they spotted each other.

  “Hey, baby girl.” Daddy kissed her cheek, but his gaze was fixed on the foil-covered paper plate she’d brought along. “Welcome to my humble temporary abode. You bake a chisel into a cake or something to bust me out?”

  “Bust you out? You all but busted in this time. Here, I see you’ve zeroed in on your supper.”

  “Well, now, don’t mind if I do.” He laughed as he accepted the plate, but he looked hazy and tired.

  They settled onto plastic chairs in front of a round laminate table. The medications that kept him clear were probably making him sick. That was the trade-off: He was either out of his mind, or he was lucid but suffering the side effects of the meds that had brought him back.

  He peeled back the foil and peered inside. “Mmm-mm. Jambalaya and cornbread. Thank God. The food’s so bad here I can’t eat it. I do better scrounging in the Quarter.”

  He eyed a woman at the other end of the room. Her plastic ward bracelet dangled from the hand she used to hold a novel, and her hair was backlit by the sun as though she’d stepped out of heaven.

  Daddy hoarded the plate close to his chest. “See that one over there? She’s a klepto.”

  Madeleine looked again. “That angelic-looking thing? Did she take something of yours?”

  “My pocket watch is missing.”

  “Oh no!” Madeleine looked over at the woman, doubtful. “Maybe you just lost it.”

  “Maybe. But just because she didn’t take it, dudn’t mean she’s not a klepto. I’ve been in here enough times I can spot’m a mile away.”

  He regarded the patient—she was absorbed in her book and seemed to have no idea Daddy was talking about her—with a sideways nod. “Yeah, I got my eye on her. She’s kinda pretty anyway.”

  Madeleine lifted a brow. Daddy smiled as he appraised the heavenly kleptomaniac.

  He said, “But that shrink of mine. He’s the craziest one of all of us. Narcoleptic.”

  “Narcoleptic?”

  “Yeah! My own shrink! You don’t believe me? He’s in his office sleepin all the time. He even sleeps while we’re havin our session. I got up and moved the furniture round while he was dozin off the other day, just to mess with him a little.”

  That got her giggling, and it felt good to laugh. But then Daddy was looking at her full in the face. His brow creased. The intensity of his concerned expression suddenly drained her laughter away.

  He said, “How’d that bruise get there?”

  Her hand went to her cheek.

  “Ah, baby girl.” He shook his head, aghast, tears springing to his eyes. “My baby girl. I’m so sorry.” He swallowed hard. “You’re my sunshine, honey, I don’t know how I could ever hurt you. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.”

  Madeleine’s eyes brimmed over. She took his hand and they sat in silence, gripping each other. Sunlight poured through the window and stretched their adjoined shadows across the laminate.

  “Daddy, I know it’s hard for you. I know the medications make you sick.”

  His voice was hoarse. “Yeah, they do make me sick. But it isn’t just that. I—”

  He worked his lips as though straining to formulate his thoughts into words.

  He said, “Madeleine, I know you want to believe I can just take some medicine and get better. But there’s more to it than that. And then the coming back, it’s like, it’s . . .” He sagged in his chair.

  She watched him closely. “What’s it like?”

  “It’s hard to explain, baby.” He shook his head, quiet for a moment, and then said, “I have conversations with someone who supposedly isn’t really there. It’s funny, you always see in the movies how you can just ignore these things, but that just isn’t so.”

  She nodded.

  He said, “But this other person—or thing, I don’t know—he tries to talk me into . . . Things I would never consciously do. But the way he phrases it, it makes sense. Especially if I follow him into that other place. That damned bramble.”

  Madeleine sat up straighter. “What? What do you mean?”

  Daddy frowned. “I don’t know, I guess it isn’t even the way he phrases it. I’m doing a piss-poor job of explaining this.”

  He growled in frustration and looked toward the window. “I guess it’s how he wills me. And later I’ll remember what I heard, or what I saw on the other side, but I don’t remember the sense of it. That’s what’s important. The sense. Words are words, but there’s a whole feeling, like a . . . an understanding.”

  He looked at her, and his gaze landed on her bruises. “Of course, when I realize what I’ve done to you, I get to wondering if maybe I am just another crazy person.”

  She swallowed, but it did little to lighten the ache in her throat.

  Daddy said, “You want to know what it’s like taking those pills? You just wake up and find yourself in the real world again. You’re still seeing things but you’re here. You’re sick, and everything moves slower, and harder, and dumber.”

  He shook his head, eyes red and damp. “It’s misery. But you know that’s what normal is. That’s how it’s s’posed to be. You look around, and you’re . . .” He shrugged. “Embarrassed. You find out you’re actually a monster.”

  The anguish in his voice turned a vise on her heart. She was weeping. Barely breathing.

  His hand trembled when he spoke again. “And there you are, useless, a burden to your family. To your own children.”

  “Daddy, it isn’t like that at all, you know that. We love you.” She stopped. “I love you. Yes, I worry, and we have to figure out a way to get a handle on the violence. But it won’t do either of us any good if you see yourself as a burden or a monster.”

  But as she spoke, she heard herself from the standpoint of the observing scientist, and the scientist noted the overwrought stoicism in her voice. While her words were a true reflection of how she felt, she knew there was more to it. More to say.

  And so she said, “Truth is I need you, Daddy. I love you but I need you, too.”

  He squeezed her hand. Her mind buzzed like a radio picking up multiple broadcasts: fears, scenarios, hopes, frustrations, the bramble; and
it suddenly exhausted her. She couldn’t observe through the tangled inner noise. So she shut off her thoughts. Radio silence. Just like she’d done with Zenon, only this time she did it not as a means of self-defense, but to strengthen the twisting, complex connection with her father. She heard the murmurs of other patients and their visitors, the television bleating out some enticement to a car lot in Metairie, and all of it passed through her as though she were the now-familiar field of steam. The life force jumped in that field. She felt it radiate from her and all around her, even in their oblong shadows on the laminate.

  Thoughts pressed back in. She knew she couldn’t keep them at bay for long. At the forefront of the returning flood of thoughts was a digital image of Marc, his arm slung around Emily Hammond’s middle. But this time Madeleine recognized the life force dancing in that picture too. Fresh and sparkling.

  “Daddy,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Marc was dating a girl named Emily Hammond. I think they might have had a child.”

  “Yeah.”

  She swallowed. “So it’s true?”

  He looked at her, eyes full of sadness and love.

  She said, “If you knew this, why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Marc’s gone now honey, and that girl, she left. Moved up to Canada. She and the baby.”

  Madeleine shook her head. “But why? It’s not that simple. This means you’re a grandfather. And I’m an aunt.”

  “Honey, don’t you know it’s better this way? Let that girl have her life. That baby’s gonna grow up safe and normal.”

  Madeleine stared at him. “Does this have anything to do with Chloe LeBlanc?”

  Daddy shook his head very slowly to the side and back again. “Don’t say anything to old Chloe, honey. Don’t ever let her know.”

  “You’d better tell me why.”

  “She watches. Got her eye on everything we do.”

  “All right. I got that. But why?”