Jackpot Blood: A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery

by Jimmy Fox

  “They don’t buy what’s in here,” Nooj said, beating his chest as though it were a ceremonial drum; Nick felt the percussion from where he stood. “What do we have to become, in here, to get this casino? This ain’t just about gambling and money.” He smiled bitterly. “It’s like the old days, when the whites boozed and bamboozled us, got us in hock with contracts we couldn’t read or understand if we could, and then stole our lands before we could decide to fight back. That’s what I don’t want to happen. It looks too good to be true, because it is. We’re human, just like other people. We’re getting greedy.

  “Leave things like they were,” he continued. “Sure, the mill closed, but these men can find work eventually. The economy’s ups and downs don’t matter so much here. The state’s always got a project on the shelf, a prison or new state recreation area. I been talking to the highway department about maybe using a local crew to do some major road work that’s budgeted. But that ain’t gonna happen. They’ll use Green Card Mexicans for that highway, like always, and the Katogoula casino’ll be built. Too many in Baton Rouge got a stake in gambling. Now we’ll get more of these outsiders coming in, until they own us.”

  He paused a moment. The resentment in the blue eyes eased. “I don’t mean you, so much, ’cause you’re just trying to help. Or her over there; she’s on our side, too. I don’t have nothing against whites, just ’cause they’re white. I work with them all the time.”

  Nick looked across the room and saw a remarkably attractive young woman, a redhead, shouldering a video camera. He’d noticed her before—how could he not?—but he’d thought she was part of the Las Vegas group.

  Nooj said, “Look, I just think all this development and recognition crap is bad for us, dangerous for our souls and tradition. You can take that for what it’s worth.”

  “Hey,” Nick said, “I read you loud and clear. Maybe the Great Spirit is trying to tell you something with Carl’s death.” Nick had tried to make it a joke, but actually he was fishing for some reaction. “Maybe the gods are angry.”

  No sign of guilt struggled to the surface on Nooj’s face. “You won’t get many around here to say they follow the old religion. Sure, we do the Green Corn Ceremony, leave sand and corn at graves.”

  “La Fête du Blé?” Nick asked, throwing out the name the Katogoula used, until modern times, for the sacred festival. “Marriage vows renewed, the year’s arguments resolved, houses swept clean.”

  “Yeah.” Nooj looked at Nick with new interest. “You’re up on your Indian customs. Impressive. But all that’s just superstition now, when you get down to it. Kind of like Halloween, just going through the motions. Catholicism’s too strong. You’re going to find that’s what these folks believe in. Most of our ancestors went to mission schools, if they went at all. The conversion process started a long time ago. We really lost the battle then.”

  “I understand you found Carl’s body out by the lake.” Nick had learned firsthand from New Orleans detectives the value of a sudden shift of direction during an interview.

  Nooj lit another cigarette with a disposable lighter, casting the near side of his face in murky orange relief. Nick got a disconcerting glimpse of cold eyes, watching him. Nooj’s profile, sculpted from the darkness in the momentary flare, was a totemic silhouette, older than written history.

  “Carl, he had lots of enemies,” Nooj said, exhaling a strong stream of smoke. “You don’t have to go looking to gods in the forest for his murderer. My job’s policing the killing of deer and ducks, not people. You best talk to the sheriff, if that’s what you’re interested in tonight.”

  “That’s not my job,” Nick said. “Just curious, that’s all. I’m sure the sheriff doesn’t need me interfering in his affairs. A genealogist usually looks at death from the distance of decades and centuries, not days. I prefer grass on the grave before I start digging around. Besides, I don’t see how Carl’s death has anything to do with the genealogy of the tribe . . . do you?”

  “Not hardly,” Nooj said, without elaboration.

  Nick believed precisely the opposite, but he wasn’t sure if Nooj simply didn’t see it or if he was hiding something. He decided to play unsuspecting genealogist.

  “Speaking of genealogy,” Nick said, “I’m researching the family histories of the six core families, and I’m having a little trouble with your paternal line, the Cheneries. Your parents weren’t included in the original genealogical work for recognition, back in the sixties, right?”

  “My daddy was in the Army. We didn’t move back here for good until the early seventies. We missed out on Mr. Shawe’s tribal- recognition project.”

  “I see. So no one’s formally documented your Chenerie Katogoula roots?”

  “Don’t expect they have.”

  “I’d like to locate your Chenerie grandparents. I’ve checked the censuses for this parish and beyond, actually, but I haven’t found your surname during the likely periods.”

  Nooj hesitated—long enough for Nick to read that he’d hit a sensitive nerve.

  “That don’t surprise me,” Nooj said. “My daddy’s folks moved around a lot, too, between here and Oklahoma. Sort of a family tradition, like avoiding government officials asking questions.”

  Censuses were a mercurial friend to genealogists. In them, Nick had stumbled on lies and omissions as he sought facts and revelations.

  “Like I wrote down on that questionnaire you gave us,” Nooj continued, less hesitantly, as if he’d suddenly recalled the details of his family history, “I don’t know my Chenerie grandma’s maiden name, and my granddaddy was kind of an orphan. Didn’t know for sure who his own parents were; no one talked about it. My daddy always suspected a white man fathered his daddy, and my people run him off. Mighta been love, migtha been rape. Story was my Chenerie great-grandma died in childbirth. See, us Indians used to be ashamed of white blood, like whites were of Indian blood. Used to call ’em ‘breeds.’ Now, most everyone’s a breed.” Nooj gave an arid smile. “Prob’ly something like that, I expect. Wasn’t a Katogoula reservation set aside in Oklahoma, so my granddaddy grew up with a Choctaw family that musta been friends with us.”

  Nick’s pen hovered over a full page of his notebook. “So, you think your grandfather inherited the Chenerie name directly from his mother?”

  “And the heritage,” Nooj said, as if responding to an insult.

  Nick succeeded in prying more information from Nooj about the Cheneries. According to family legend, his Katogoula ancestors of the paternal line left Louisiana with the refugee Choctaw in the 1830s on the long slog to the promised peace of the federal reservations. Over the years, other branches of the Chenerie family married into different tribes, into the general populace, or died out. But a few of Nooj’s line kept the forests of central Louisiana in their hearts, and whenever they could, they returned to live with their struggling brethren hiding in wooded isolation from the overwhelming onslaught of white culture.

  “I never looked myself, never much cared, but I think you can have a better conversation with my Chenerie cousins up there, in Oklahoma, like I said. They’re probably all Choctaw by now. If any are left.”

  He pointed northwest—Nick supposed, for he had no idea otherwise. Nooj would know compass directions intuitively, as part of his job, as part of his heritage. He knew the lay of the land as well as any duck that cupped its wings to land in this major stop on the Central Flyway, a knowledge passed down through generations.

  “Thanks. You’ve been a big help,” Nick said.

  A bit of an overstatement. Nooj had been long on generalities, short on specifics. It would be exceedingly difficult to get beyond his Chenerie grandfather, if the family lore proved true. But at least now Nick had a specific tribe and a general location for his search of the bewildering number of Indian censuses and other Indian records the U.S. government had compiled since the early nineteenth century.

  “Your mother’s family is well represented in parish censuses locally and in
Chitiko-Tiloasha tribal censuses from the 1840s and on,” Nick said. “The Bellarmines consistently state that they’re Katogoula, even when they’re living with another tribe in another part of the state.”

  “Would’ve been easier if they’d just lied and said they were Chitiko-Tiloasha,” Nooj said. “They could’ve gotten on the tribe’s official roll, pocketed a nice handout, maybe taken some allotment land. But the strong ones in my family’ve never been much on selling out. Either side.”

  “Don’t worry,” Nick said, “you’re a bona fide Katogoula. What we already know about your mother’s line proves that.”

  “I’m not worried. I know what I am,” Nooj replied.

  “Yeah. I can see that. But I’ll keep working on your paternal line. Thoroughness—that’s what I’m getting paid for. . . . I wonder, would there be anything useful for me in the tribal cemetery in the forest? Can you take me?”

  Nooj shrugged. “Sure. You won’t find any graves more than about a hundred years old. Katogoula didn’t use the white’s burial practices before then. We were still mound builders. I’ll show you the mounds, if you want; but those don’t come with headstones.”

  A small gibe to put him back in his place as a permanent outsider, Nick supposed.

  “The cemetery’s on state forest land, but the mounds are private property.”

  “Tadbull property?” Nick asked.

  “Um-hmm,” Nooj confirmed through a last puff of his cigarette. He crushed out the glowing end with fingertips as tough as leather. Smoke streamed from his nostrils. “Call me when you’re ready to go out there. Keeping tourists safe is my job, too.”

  He handed Nick a business card, and without another word walked to the edge of the porch and hopped down two feet to the ground. He strode into the dark woods, making no sound on the carpet of fallen pine needles.

  Nick pocketed the card and entered the quiet, empty dining room, wondering about the Tadbulls, who seemed to pop up in most conversations delving into Katogoula history.

  CHAPTER 14

  Hurrying to their next road-show venue, the Las Vegans had departed Three Sisters Pantry. Most of the tribe members had left, as well.

  The Shawe twin boys, possessing apparently inexhaustible energy, chased each other with fallen pine branches on, off, and under the front porch. Their mother, Brianne, visible through the store windows, cradled her sleeping infant and chatted with Luevenia and Royce at the cash register.

  Two men stood beside a car in the middle of the nearly deserted parking lot. Above them, a mercury-vapor light on an aluminum arm arched out from a pine tree and cast a bone-white glare around them.

  Dodging the darting twins, Nick deposited his briefcase in his car and headed for the two men, an easy stone’s throw away. He recognized one man and had no doubt who the other was.

  Tommy Shawe talked with a mahogany giant. Strongly disagreeing or denying, Tommy shook his head repeatedly. The big man reached in a pants pocket and handed Tommy something that caught the light momentarily. Tommy held the item in a tight grasp before carefully depositing it in his own pocket. The big man propped one massive arm on the open door of a white police-model Chevrolet, emergency lights on the inside.

  “Sangfleuve Parish—Sheriff,” Nick read on the car door.

  The big man Nick presumed to be Sheriff Higbee wore a businessman’s semi-casual clothes—large ones, to get around his three-hundred-plus-pound body: button-down, long-sleeve striped shirt, neatly pressed and unencumbered by a tie; dark-gray pleated trousers; and dressy Rockports of double-digit size.

  Nick’s first impression suggested that the sheriff was a self-assured, dynamic man aspiring to higher positions than chief ribbon-cutter of a parish in the sticks.

  Higbee wasn’t packing a gun, Nick could see as he got closer—at least not a visible one. Why should he? Sheer physical intimidation was probably sufficient in most tense situations, and in others that weren’t destined to end violently, words—a politician’s weapon of choice—would do the trick. The sheriff ’s badge gleamed on his belt. That, too, struck Nick as an unnecessary reminder of authority: who wouldn’t know this walking mountain of a man?

  “Well, if it isn’t Mr. Jonathan Nicholas Herald, genealogist extraordinaire,” the sheriff said in a booming voice that shattered the nuanced sighs of the forest night. His tone was full of jovial sarcasm, but the beaming political grin put Nick at ease as the man’s large hand surrounded his. “Your fame precedes you, Mr. Herald. I take the Times-Picayune. Seems like you’re regular front-page material in New Orleans. NOPD won’t make a move without consulting with you first, I hear.”

  Nick’s body shook as the sheriff pumped his arm a few times.

  “A left-handed compliment, but I’ll take it,” Nick said. “Genealogy’s usually a pretty sedate field. But, hey, I do what I have to do. It’s a living, you know.”

  “Not for some of your clients,” the sheriff countered. “Seems like when you point to somebody’s family tree, it gets struck by lightning.” His practiced smile and probing stare waited for a reply Nick didn’t offer.

  “This is Sheriff John Higbee,” Tommy broke in to say. “But I guess you already figured that out.” Tommy’s preoccupied eyes wandered to the darkness as he lost the thread of the introduction.

  Tommy’s good humor was more anxious and forced than it had been earlier in the evening. The two men apparently were friends, but unsettling words must have passed between them before Nick arrived. Maybe Brianne, Luevenia, and Chief Claude were right to be concerned about how Tommy was handling all of this. He looked a bit dazed, but determined to retain control of himself, like a drunk man trying to act sober. Nick considered the possibility that Tommy might have a drinking problem.

  After an awkward moment he himself didn’t seem to notice, Tommy said, “Big John, we call him. You remember, Nick, he played defense for LSU awhile back? Intercepted a pass in the conference semi-finals and ran it for the winning touchdown.”

  “Oh sure,” Nick lied. “Who could forget that?”

  Tommy leaned closer to Nick, in mock secrecy. “Just don’t call him ‘boy,’ and you’ll get along fine. Last guy who did is missing a few teeth. And he was the coach.”

  “Now hold on, Tommy, you’re giving Mr. Herald the wrong idea, and some wrong facts. I hit the assistant coach, and it wasn’t anything racial. He wouldn’t put me in another big game. That’s all it was. You know as well as me this is the new Louisiana, where a black man can get elected sheriff right in the middle of redneck country.”

  Tommy managed a self-conscious laugh. “Yeah, Big John. Sure. Everything is racial in Louisiana, and don’t tell Nick no different? The state where the only thing worse than being Indian is being black. John’s main opponent in the election was a senile old white man who’d been sheriff going on fifty years. Only reason Big John got elected was the old geezer died during the runoff.”

  “And it was still close!” Higbee exclaimed. “Some folks preferred to vote for a dead white man instead of a live black one. Blazing Saddles always was one of my favorite movies.”

  “’Round here, Nick,” Tommy said, “they wouldn’t put white and dark meat chicken in the same bucket until a few years ago. Big John sure got lucky in that election.”

  “No,” Higbee declared, “I got Katogoula power. My family and this tribe go back a long ways, back to the bad old times of slavery and segregation. When I was young and radical, I marched with ’em down at the Capitol, in the late seventies or early eighties, I think it was, huh, Tommy?”

  “It was several times we protested to support civil rights and the unions, thinking it would help with the recognition. Didn’t do shit. They left us high and dry when they got what they wanted. The big one that got all the press attention was 1984. I remember ’cause my parents let me take off grammar school to ride our buses down there, and I heard them speak highly of you later during your LSU glory days, when you were in the paper a lot.”

  “Yep, Katogoula power,
” Big John said, patting Tommy on the shoulder, “that’s what put me over the top. And I’ll never forget it. That’s partly why I’m out here tonight. I don’t take kindly to someone knocking off my loyal supporters. Now that I’ve asked my friend Tommy, here, a few questions, I got one or two things to ask you, Mr. Herald.”

  “Me?” Nick said, choking slightly on the word. When would he learn not to expect a normal conversation with a cop, even a seemingly nice guy like Big John Higbee?

  “Yep. Tommy, I think Brianne and the kids are about ready to go home. You look plum tuckered out, yourself.” It was a gentle dismissal from a skilled manipulator. “You let me know if you see anything funny going on around your place. Y’all drive careful; it’s late. And watch your ass, you hear?”

  “Got my shotgun in the rack, Big John,” Tommy said, with the slight hesitation of a man who would never fire first at an assailant. “Nick, can you use a guide tomorrow?”

  “Could I ever!” Nick answered, relieved. “I’d like to start working with the courthouse records in Armageddon, but I’ll just end up lost again. All these trees start to look the same after an hour or two.”

  He was grateful for the cool, humid openness of the parking lot, recalling the disoriented despair he’d experienced a few hours earlier among the dense pines. Like a Greek chorus witnessing the struggles of a doomed character on stage, the trees had watched him, their enigmatic prophecies soughing in high branches.

  “The Katogoula once knew how to listen to the forest,” Tommy said dreamily, his tentative easy spirit now gone. “Each tree, the sky, the clouds, the ground . . . they all spoke to us.” His hand made a quick pass across his face. “Listen to me. I must be tireder than I thought. . . . Nick, tomorrow at eight okay by you?”

  They agreed eight was fine; Tommy would take him to Armageddon, the parish seat, site of the courthouse, and, Nick hoped, the home of a trove of useful genealogical records.

  “I like his style,” the sheriff said, as Tommy gathered his family and loaded them into the truck. “He’s got backbone, knows when to make a stand, when to back off. He cares about folks. Maybe too much. He’ll be a good chief.”