Roots of Misfortune

by Seth Pevey

  She didn’t have a car. She didn’t have a SWAT team at her back. She didn’t even have a Scrappy to help her fight this scrappy battle.

  But he’d left the top down on his Jeep, which was a start. Mick was nothing if not sure of himself to a fault. She crawled in over the door, surrendering to her own sense of courage.

  It was an old enough vehicle that she had no trouble at all. She pulled the tools she had picked up at the hardware store out of their plastic shopping back and went to work, pounding the flat head of the screwdriver into the ignition with the hammer.

  Thanks Dad, she said to herself. At least you left me something.

  As the engine began its combustion, the back door of the club opened and Mick stepped out, the barker Jim behind him, pointing. She could see the gleam of Mick’s bald head in the spring sunshine, and it gave her a shudder.

  “That’s what you can call a mistake in judgement, girly,” he yelled, not so much as taking a step toward her. Mick clearly thought his voice was enough to stop her dead in her tracks. Maybe he was used to it. His eyes widened as she revved the engine. Finally, her resolve must have dawned on him, because he made a dash towards her.

  But it was too late for Mick. Too late for her. Too late for that damn dog.

  She threw it into gear and pressed the gas all the way to the floor with her plastic nurse shoes. The tires squealed and spun her out onto Bourbon and thence to Canal.

  Twenty-seven minutes later, she was pulling onto Oyster Shell Road. Her phone had lost service, but not before it led her to that dead end on the Pearl with its yard full of kitsch and a rusty Pontiac Bonneville.

  She knocked on the door once, twice, three times.

  The terrible thrill of agency surged in her blood, in her heart, in the tears still pushing from behind her eyes.

  She had choices.

  She waited for their consequences.

  Twenty-One

  Two men had spent the night shivering in the darkened lounge. The house on the Pearl was cold and silent, the only light a single candle burning from somewhere behind them, flickering their stooped shadows against the beadboard. On the other side of that wall, the free side with its fresh air and second chances, came the dull sounds of the muted crickets and frogs in their river. The two detectives looked at each other from time to time, each gauging the other’s resolve, but had been mostly quiet now for the past few hours. Neither of them wanted to circle around that most obvious topic of conversation: the final admission that they were likely here just waiting to die.

  More hours passed in that slow dripping of minutes. The room went inky black as the candle burnt down to its end, and Melancon’s arms fell pins-and-needles numb behind his back. They waited. Once in a while, the old detective’s head would drop down onto his chest, and he would awake with a startled thump of the heart and a line of drool running down his chin. But mostly, he squirmed in the chair and fought off sleep. The restless shaking and cold-sweats weren’t solely the result of the dire situation he now found himself in. In fact, his body was also drying itself out, bidding farewell to the weeks of fermented joy he’d been feeding it steady like a hospital drip.

  “A hell of a time to quit drinking,” he said aloud to Felix, who said nothing.

  At maybe three AM—no way to tell for sure—he sat listening to the hooting of a distant owl, dazed by the darkness in the empty lounge. How many hours had it been since the long-armed man sat before them and told the story of a one-armed bandit? Six hours? Just what was he planning to do?

  David Melancon sat on in the darkness, alone with his thoughts.

  Back again with Julie. A day at the beach with his little girl. How she loved all the shells, the green waters, the cockles and conches that it spit up. She’d pick them up and study them with an adult attention. No interest in the sand castles that sun-burned David would scoop together between his hairy, white legs. She wanted instead to know how a jellyfish sting worked, or how a sand dollar had been forged down in that unknowable crucible of the Gulf. He hadn’t known the answers, of course. Not his line of work. His was the study of something deeper than even the sea.

  But he had bought her books with his small detective salary. Always books. She’d read one, then create a smelly compost in the alley behind their house. That was at thirteen. Then at sixteen she’d learned to make fat beans creep up the trestles of their wrought-iron porch. Flowers in the spring— big white blossoms on their front magnolia, a tree that had always been bare until she had somehow fixed with the right balance of phosphorous, nitrogen, mulch. And then at eighteen, at nineteen, at twenty, going strong; David, going through the motions of divorce and drinking heavy, had somehow lost the trail of her.

  His sweet little girl.

  Here she was with him now, sitting on his lap, a small thing in the dark lounge. The spirit of the little girl, just as he’d kept her locked away in his memory, smiled up at him, all blond curls and gapped teeth and chubby little cheeks. She’d looked up at him with the whole world’s making in her blue, beaming eyes. The weight of her was real on his knee, heavy. But she changed. She grew there on his knee until she was a young woman and her belly swole and her cute cheeks turned into something unknowable. Those marbled blue eyes went paler and paler until he could not bear to look at them anymore. She put a hand on his face and whispered, “Daddy.”

  Looking again, the beautiful face of his daughter went all vermicular and wriggling. The worms struggled just underneath the skin of her and the cobalt eyes burst in their sockets. Soon he was holding a skeleton in his lap. A tiny thing. A little frail bone girl. Dust and seeds and memory.

  He awoke with a scream, a stark sheen of sweat smothering his face and forehead.

  Limp daylight pierced in through the thick curtains, the color of weak tea on the wall. His heart beat inside of him. It thumped far too quickly, but he intended to see that it kept at its labor, beyond this room with its dark phantoms.

  He gave Felix a long and intense study, shaking his old head from side to side to toss out the sleep. From the looks of things, Melancon was alone. Felix was there in the flesh, but he wasn’t really present. Here was his apprentice, his friend, a young man he was starting to harbor some fatherly feelings for: pride, worry, a steering, insistent moral hand. But the boy, normally so full of upright zest, of whimsical challenge, now instead looked despondent. Felix hung his head down low, his green eyes open and gaping at the floor. He seemed to regard the shag carpet without interest or spirit of any kind. If he too had been visited by a specter of his own past in the night, he gave no indication. He looked, in fact, as if he might be a spirit himself—pale, wan as the new sunlight, a bloodless look.

  But perhaps Melancon was being too harsh with this critical, fatherly eye of his. It was easy to look despondent, after all, when you’d spent the night zip-tied to a cheap piece of furniture.

  Without speaking Felix stood, the chair wiggling on his back, and walked over to a corner of the room to let a stream of piss run down his leg near a potted plant. There was no other way to perform this awkward shuffle: his legs locked, the chair hoisted up on his shanks, wetting himself. Melancon stood as well, the chair pulling hard at his old quadriceps. He debated giving the door a kick. But he was sure it led only to the bedroom, to a certain alarm and the dark man with his terrible gold-toothed grin anew, now refreshed by a night of sleep no doubt. There was a weightlessness to Melancon’s coat pocket. He knew that his gun and phone had been taken and stowed away in a shoebox somewhere.

  There were no tools here, nothing to try for a bold, physical escape. He knew it. There was only one way. He would have to use words. A silver tongue had saved him so many times before, and now might be the only hope for salvation.

  “Look Felix,” he said, when the boy had sat back down. “I know how you feel, sitting there with your wet pants, wondering if this is really going to be the end. But I want to tell you. It is going to take more than this. A lot more than this. We’ve got a choice. W
e pull ourselves together and try to figure this thing out, or we sit in our own piss and wait to die. Now I know you, boy. And I know you are brave. And now is the time when you need to call that bravery. Just you watch. Or, on second thought. Do me one better. Don’t watch. Do. We’ve got to figure a way out of this.”

  A sad nod of the head was all he could get by way of reply.

  “Now what do we know about this guy’s motivation? Think. If we could figure that out, maybe we could get him talking more in our direction. Get him to soften up a little bit on the whole ‘slavery and blood’ business. Relax a bit. What do you say?”

  Melancon could see the shadow in his friend’s clenched jaw, the muscle working itself, the grind of anger that was manifesting in the muscles of his face. “You’re not going to find any answers,” Felix said. “Some people just have a darkness inside. That’s all she wrote, I’m afraid.”

  “Come on, Felix. You snap out of it now. I need you, partner.”

  The young man’s lips bunched up. His hair was disheveled and fell across his face as he shook his head from side to side. “I loved that Goddamn dog,” he said. “He was some dog. They probably sacrificed him to their snake God or some shit. And we are next.”

  “Calm down, son. Think. Use your head. Where is that pride? Get angry, that’s fine. Get angry and then, get smart. We’ve got to do something. It has to be smooth and it has to be perfect. Now we got no guns, no phones, and we are basically hog tied. Ok. That’s the situation. We have to accept it. So, the way I see it, the only way we are getting out of this is with our words.”

  Felix lifted his head and turned those green eyes towards him. “Words? You want to know about my words?”

  Melancon was disturbed. He’d never seen Felix this deflated.

  “You can’t trust my words,” Felix said.

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “I remember why I started all this. I needed to find the truth. The truth was a kind of…beautiful purpose I thought. But lately, I can see that the truth doesn’t always…it doesn’t always work. Not like it is supposed to…you think it’ll be like an old warm glove on the first cold day. But it’s not. It’s raw and it’s got too many faces to recognize. Maybe there is no such thing as the truth to begin with.”

  Melancon nodded, trying to let his partner get it out, hoping that would purify him and make his head clear for the life or death struggle that was sure to ensue, likely as soon as the sun was done rising.

  Felix cleared his throat. “The truth, partner. Here it is. There is a truth I want to share with you before….you know, before...”

  The old man leaned his head back and waited.

  “It is about Julie,” Felix said.

  Melancon’s eyes widened and he stopped squirming while the air slowly drained from the room.

  “During the time she went missing, she was working as a stripper at Mick’s. There it is. I didn’t tell you sooner because…well…I didn’t know if it would make things worse for you. Or if you’d even want to know something like that. There is an old picture of her in…stripper clothes…hanging up in the dressing room back there. Tina saw it. She showed it to me and it was Julie.”

  David Melancon let out a long, slow breath, nodded his head.

  “I think maybe I knew it all along,” he said. “I think I realized that she went on some path, some place that I didn’t see…was too busy to see, maybe…but I just…I guess hearing you say it…I’m glad you told me, Felix.”

  They were silent for a long time. He couldn’t sync up the image of his little girl with a pregnant stripper, dancing for dollar bills. But maybe he didn’t need to. Maybe, once she had grown up, it wasn’t his job to try and teach her right from wrong. Maybe he wasn’t the man for right and wrong that he once thought he was. He turned back to his friend.

  “I’m not sure what to feel. No father wants to hear that. She was a grown woman I guess. I just like to hope that she could have…gotten away from all that. Found her farm. Her dream was to be an organic farmer. I know I told you that but I just wish…I wish I would have done more to help her reach it.”

  Melancon blew out more air. “Anyway, it seems to be a popular vocation. Stripping I mean,” he said with sad laugh.

  “Apparently it beats the call center,” Felix replied, before dropping the levity and looking worriedly at his partner. “But it means that…you know…well, you are the detective with all the experience. So, you see what it means just as clear as anyone. You see what it means, don’t you?”

  Melancon nodded. “She could have been involved….in all this. With these people. With this man. They could have….” The detective stopped short, choked on his own words.

  Felix looked down at the puddle of piss in his lap. “I think our friend G.D. here killed your daughter, partner, and I think he is about to try and do us the same.”

  Melancon couldn’t accept it, wouldn’t accept it. He put it out of his mind for the moment, tucked it away for later. If there was a later.

  “When he comes in here with his stories and his threats, Felix…Felix listen. Now we are going to talk to him, you and me. We are going to try and use those old tricks, OK? That psychology and interrogation you learned in your training. Now I’ll try shame, and if that doesn’t work you come in hesitant, kind of on his side, understanding him.”

  “Seems like this is an old plan, Melancon. Pretty sure I’ve heard it a few times before.”

  “Well, that’s because it’s one that works. Kinda like that blues music. It’s old, but it has stuck around for a while because it works. Just like me, Felix. Just like why I’m still here using the same old tricks. Now let’s make this a good one and I can keep on doing the same for at least another decade. You and me partner.”

  Footsteps.

  “Remember Felix. Shame, and commiseration. Soften him up and then talk him into making a mistake.”

  Before they could say more, the door slid open and G.D. came back in the room with Min Ji behind him. The couple were looking well-dressed, celebratory. They were giddy with each other and cast long, silent glances at the two detectives.

  “You two have been in here whispering like schoolboys,” G.D. said.

  Melancon measured him with his eyes. “Well, we’ve just been trying to work out how you manage it.”

  The long, dark man pulled up a chair and straddled it in front of the detectives. “So, you are a detective. Your cogs turn for a living.” He looked over at Min Ji, who sat on the arm of the couch. “You see? This is what they do. They study evil.”

  Melancon narrowed his eyes at him, trying to catch every flicker of emotion on the tight face, to trace them back to the mind within. But the face was hard and determined: a cold stone mask of unreasonable will.

  “Yeah, I guess you could say we study evil. But not in the…Robert Johnson sense. More like trying to guess what makes sick fuckers like you get their rocks off.”

  “Ah, you are a fan of the delta blues,” G.D. said, waving a bony finger at Melancon. “I know this about you detective. You like to listen to old, hard, sad music of the poor. You think it touches something in you. You think it is somehow a part of you. But…I wonder…to myself. Can he really hear the blues, with his full belly and his pink, soft hands? With his red nose? Can you hear it at all, detective? Or are you just another old man, out of touch and holding on to something as…as old as you are.”

  He is trying to anger me. Don’t take the bait, Melancon thought.

  “I’ve had a hard enough life. And speaking of holding on to the past…have you heard yourself lately?” the detective said.

  “You lack perspective,” said the dark man with a fierce, sharkish grin. “Don’t be ashamed. Perspective is a virtue lost in our times.”

  Melancon returned the harsh glare of G.D’s bottomless eyes. “Let’s talk about you. Shall we? I mean how do you manage the cognitive dissonance? You seem to think that some juvenile understanding of history justifies murdering innoce
nt young women, right? I mean, the power of the delusion there is fairly incredible. It is staggering really. Fucking staggering. Tell me, what the hell did Jessica Diaz have to do with a one armed slave bandit? Go ahead…this will be rich. If you’re going to kill us, we might as well have a bit of entertainment on the last leg. Go out with a laugh.”

  G.D. grinned his golden smile and went wide-eyed. “Ah yes,” he said. His eyes floated up and his head began to rock. He was remembering. “Min Ji, dear, why don’t go and fix me a drink. Rum with some pineapple juice. And one of my cigars, as well. Also, you might burn some incense. It smells like this young one pissed himself in the night. And I can smell the fear coming off this old one. Old fears smell the most rotten.”

  She looked at him strangely for a second, hesitating, teetering there on the edge of the couch. Her beauty was really overwhelming. Melancon wondered just how much had escaped her—how much she knew and intuited and how much was buried behind whatever odd sense of attraction she felt for this giant, skeletal man. A tinge of doubt blossomed on her face, but she left the room without protest.

  Melancon knew about that well. He knew that from a certain angle, with a certain amount of love and heat and desire, you could ignore even the worst aspects of a lover. That was the curse of the young, the beautiful, and the contrary.

  “She was your first wasn’t she? Jessica Diaz? And you did it with that trombone man. That Landry Ducet. But you. You were the Big Chief, weren’t you? But your Wildman, he’s already been locked up you know. Felix here shot him in the shoulder. A once in a lifetime shot. He is probably down in OPP right now singing like a canary.”

  The dark man rubbed his hands on his bony knee caps. “Landry is at peace now. His burdens have been lifted.”

  Melancon looked at Felix, but the young man did not return his gaze.