New Orleans Noir (5 page)
For my brother, Ricky S. Vernon
S
he vomited on Magazine Street.
She stumbled in. The sign read,
Miss Mae’s.
A bar. She and the other white girls, their angular faces melting and disobedient like a blade, a glacier. She and the other white girls, laughing, laughing and stumbling about on the corner of Magazine Street in Uptown New Orleans.
Yes, they laughed and stumbled about with their angular faces pointing eastward; everything about them—the whiteness of them collectively—caught the pupil of the eye and pinned it down. One of them, the girl on the edge of the crowd, stood dark-haired and falling apart; she spoke of her ex, the one who dumped her.
What was his name?
Schevoski, Schevoski was his name and she hated him now.
The tail end of her yellow hair stood away from her shoulders, parted in the middle; there was a strand in the corner of her mouth, her lips purred upward, as if she could not help but notice that she was the dying kind in the crowd; he had, indeed, dumped her, gone back to Russia or some other place where boys go when they’re done with you.
Where had she met him?
At the university, at Tulane, where she’d turned the corner of St. Charles and some other street she could not remember, now that she was drunk, now that she stood amidst the other Tulane girls with their Tulane bodies and wished, she wished she could evaporate.
Yes, now she remembered, she had turned the corner of Tulane and some other street and she wanted something to occur, something that girls her age wanted to happen without having to call out to it;
help me,
it whispered.
And there, Schevoski stood.
He had been pronouncing a singular word, like
beast
, and saw her, standing there before him; this is when he asked her:
Can you?
he asked in the beginning, but then, then when he saw how vulnerable she was, he said:
Say it, beast.
Beast,
she whispered.
Beast.
How did he look to her now? Could she recall the drunken weave of his posture when she met him? It was that, that, that cooing sound he made, as if he were calling out to her,
Come here, there is something I need you to do.
For no one
needed
her, not really.
Or was it that he had no face at all? Even when her friends asked her to describe the boy she’d come across at the corner of St. Charles and some other street, she could not remember—Napoleon, was it?—she could only say that he was from Russia and something had bitten her about the flesh.
He was invisible.
It was no wonder that because she had felt like this, that he was invisible, he wove around her a feeling of powerlessness. He had crept up behind her, just behind the ear, and let her go.
Now, now that she and the white girls stood near the edge of the jukebox at Miss Mae’s, they, too, cooed, as Schevoski had cooed, and lifted their angular faces upward; a water stain the shape of a guitar lay flat on the ceiling.
One of the girls whispered:
Look where he died.
And they all laughed again when she whispered,
Look where he died,
all laughing and shouldering each other, as if they knew, inwardly, that this was Schevoski and that thing he called music; the
beast
was dead.
They looked at her, the broken-hearted girl who had driven them here, and yelled:
Look where he died, Look where he died. Schevoski. Schevoski is dead!
Why had they been so cruel?
the girl thought. Because she could not remember one street? One word? Because this water-stained guitar was his voice and mind? Why ever had she driven them here?
She leaned over the edge of the jukebox and vomited.
And the other white girls, the girls who had come to mock her in their drunkenness, shouted as she vomited:
Schevoski! Schevoski is dead!
And she vomited and vomited, her index finger over the Bee Gees label of the jukebox, until her mouth grew immediate and she turned, held her stomach, and stumbled through the shouting girls and their exclamatory language, stumbled until she reached the wooden door of the bathroom, stumbled until everything she had eaten this morning came up.
Finally, her stomach was bare.
And the world seemed to spin around her and the water-stained guitar seemed to crawl upon the ceiling, follow her through the wooden door of this place and mock upon her the power of its language;
Schevoski is dead. And you are dead. You, beast
.
And the girls who she had driven here, the Tulane girls, as if they had suddenly become aware of their cruelty, took their fists and banged on the outer walls of the lavatory; they banged and their banging seemed to echo throughout Magazine Street and the city of New Orleans that there was a girl in the john and she was weak and her old man had dumped her and she brought us to this place so we could mock her, make her afraid, tear down these walls she had collapsed into and whatever it was she had left, we would take it. Everything would come true.
Her head spun inside the lavatory and the banging of the other girls from Tulane now began to bang inside her head and she could see them, each of them at once, their mouths open and childlike, swimming around in her heart and mind the torturous chaos of one’s not knowing how vulnerable, how thin she is.
Just then, she thought of Schevoski, thought of how she’d met him, how cunning he was to have met her there on the corner of St. Charles and that street she could not remember—she wasn’t the only one; now, now amidst the other girls from Tulane and the water-stained guitar, she remembered the photos of the other girls, the other exes, and the labels he had written underneath, all named after the streets on which he had met them—
Elba, Dupre, Willow, General Pershing, Eden
—and there, scribbled beneath her own name,
on the corner of St. Charles and …
Now, now that these things had come to her, she looked up to where the water-stained guitar had been and did her own laughing. And the other girls from Tulane heard it, how powerful it was, and stepped away from the wooden door of the lavatory and stumbled, stumbled back to the abandoned jukebox, back to where the vomit had begun to swell.
Each of them noticed, one at a time and collectively, the image of the water-stained guitar: the
Schevoski is dead!
had now disappeared into the odorous air of Magazine and it was no matter, they were all dead, as the girl who’d brought them here was dead, as Schevoski was dead, like a blade, a glacier.
A beast.
V
alentin St. Cyr crossed to Algiers on the ferry. It was the end of a hot day in May of 1905, and the fading sun reached out to paint the sky in bloody streaks and spread little points of light over the river like early stardust. Every so often, the wake of a barge would traverse the surface. Then the water got quiet again.
The ferry moved unperturbed through the green shifting swirls. Valentin leaned on the stern railing as the profile of New Orleans retreated. It was good to get out of the city, especially out of Storyville, if only for one night. To get paid for it made it even better, even if he dropped a few dollars while he went about running off the card cheat.
What was the character’s name again? McTier?
In any case, it was a Tuesday, and the red light district would be quiet. The Basin Street madams and the sporting women and their gentlemen callers could do without him for one night, and any problems would still be there when he got back.
Valentin spent a few moments patting his clothes in what must have looked like some sort of private genuflection. In fact, he was checking his weapons. The weight of his favored Iver Johnson revolver settled in the pocket of his light cotton suit jacket. His whalebone sap was lodged in the back pocket of his trousers, so that he could reach in with his right hand to swing it around with the force to roll up eyes and buckle knees. Finally, he kept a stiletto in a sheath strapped to his ankle, so it would be easy to grab if some rascal tried to drag him to the floor.
Not that he expected that sort of trouble tonight. He had handled cheapjack hustlers by the dozens. He wouldn’t be walking into a rough back-of-town saloon to encounter a sport down on his luck and desperate for a good score, a rounder who thought he owned the place, or, worst of all, some low-down, no-good son of a bitch on a cocaine jag who saw things that weren’t there, imagined everyone in the room was out to get him, and itched for an excuse to pull out his own weapon of choice and have at it.
There would be none of that tonight, or so said Valentin’s employer, Mr. Tom Anderson. This McTier fellow was just another loud-mouthed, bullying sort, which meant he was most likely a coward, and would quail and run as soon as someone showed up to beat his hand—someone like Valentin St. Cyr. Sometimes all it took was a cold-eyed stare to get a sharp to pick up his loose change and crooked cards or dice and clear out. Other times, a fellow made his exit with his bloody forehead in his hands. And every now and then, nothing but a promise of deadly violence would do. So far, it hadn’t gone any further than that.
Once the ferry docked, he stepped onto the pier and walked up the incline and through the narrow avenues of the little town until he found Evelina Street. When he arrived at the corner address, it was little more than a storefront that had been set up with a plank bar and some tables and chairs, not all of them matching. A ceiling fan creaked overhead and the floor was spread with dunes of sawdust that had gone dark with tobacco juice and spilled whiskey. The windows were open on two sides so the breezes off the river could carry away some of the smell. There was a trough in back that served as a toilet. It would take a hurricane to blow that stench away.
A Negro boy who was standing watch opened the door for Valentin, who tossed him a nickel and stepped over the threshold. Two working men leaned their elbows on the near end of the bar. Valentin stepped up and asked for Mr. Roy. The bartender, a tall and lank mulatto, pointed a finger toward the back of the room.
Settled behind the wooden table in the corner was Mr. Roy, a hugely fat man with broad African features and skin a mottled brown, as if he was suffering from some odd ailment. His hair was woolly and the whites of his eyes were a deep yellow, matching his large teeth. He wheezed on every breath and his body and clothes reeked of sweat.
Valentin had never seen him before and didn’t know if he was a lawman, a criminal, or a nobody. Valentin didn’t know much of anything, other than the fact that Anderson, “The King of Storyville,” owed the owner of this rundown establishment a debt, and that Valentin was there to pay it off.
He took a seat across the table from Mr. Roy, who gasped lightly though his mouth as he regarded his visitor. The mulatto came creeping from behind the bar with a bottle and a clean glass, then made a quick retreat—making Valentin wonder if his reputation had arrived there ahead of him.
There was no point in exchanging niceties, so Mr. Roy got right to the point.
“The fellow’s name is Eddie McTier,” he said, heaving like a tugboat. “He’s a guitar player and a gambler out of Georgia. He been in near every night. He busts in on every game, then cheats and takes all the money. Then he lies to cover it. When that don’t work, he starts talking that he’s fixing to pull his pistol. He must have took fifty dollars off my customers over here. Now no one wants to come around no more.”
Valentin was noncommittal. He recognized the type, one of an army of tramps who preyed in places like Algiers, within spitting distance of New Orleans, where he wouldn’t last a minute. That he was a guitar player signified nothing.
“Why don’t you just put him out?” he inquired.
“I tried that,” Mr. Roy huffed. “He just laughed in my face and spit on the floor, and then come right back in the next night. He says he ain’t broke no law, and so he has a right. He also say he be carryin’ some voodoo, ’count of playin’ the blues and all, and so nobody want to cross him. Anyway, the gentleman owns the property wants him out for good. He’s ruining business.”
For a moment, Valentin thought Mr. Roy was making a joke.
What business would that be?
But the fat man’s face was grave.
Valentin had seen this gambit before. If a fellow talked tough or bragged on his voodoo enough, people who should know better fall for the act. This McTier had everyone in the place believing he was a bad actor who wasn’t going anywhere until he was good and ready.
Valentin poured an inch of whiskey in his glass and drank it down. “What time does he come around?”
“Soon as the sun goes down. So any time now.”
Valentin picked up the bottle and the glass and nodded in the direction of the table in the other corner. “I’ll sit over there. He and I’ll play some cards. See if he tries to cheat on me.”
“Oh, he will,” Mr. Roy said.
“Then I’ll have reason to put him out.”
The fat man pursed his heavy lips. “Don’t go gettin’ yourself kilt over here.”
“Don’t plan to,” Valentin said. “But if anything starts, you make sure everybody stays the hell out of the way.”
He got up and moved to the table, so that he was for the moment hidden in shadow to everyone except the bartender and Mr. Roy, and only because they knew he was there. He drank one more short glass of whiskey. It was hot, and he wanted his wits about him.
Some minutes passed as the sun went all the way down over the river. Valentin let his thoughts wander until the boy who was standing guard stepped inside, rolled his eyes a certain way, then faded into the woodwork. Valentin smiled; the kid would himself make a decent rounder one day.
He heard Eddie McTier before he saw him. The windows were open all along the street side of the saloon and a raucous voice echoed from the next corner: jagged laughter, a blunt shout, and a couple raw curses. Valentin heard the thump of boots on the banquette and finished the liquor in his glass in one quick swallow. Then he leaned back a few inches from the table. The front door flapped rudely open and a short barrel of a black man pushed inside, dressed in brown trousers, a soiled white shirt, and a vest that had seen some dusty miles. A misshapen gray Stetson was cocked sideways on his head.
Eddie McTier stopped to glance around with a cunning sort of smile, almost a childish thing, as if pleased with himself and all he surveyed. He took the Kalamazoo guitar that was strapped on his back and set it in the corner next to the door. Then he let his oily eyes roam past Valentin, circle the saloon, and come back.
He stared into the corner, looking unsure. “Who the hell’s that?” he asked the bartender.
The bartender swallowed.
McTier smacked a palm on the bar and said, “Twine! You hear me?”
“Fellow come over from New Orleans,” Twine stuttered quickly. “He’s lookin’ for a game.”
McTier peered at the man at the back table. “That right, friend?” he called.
Valentin didn’t move or speak.
“You looking for a game or not?” McTier demanded.
Valentin leaned forward so that his face came out of the darkness and into the light. Without a word, he reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and produced a new deck of cards, which he tossed to the center of the table.
McTier peered at the faces as if looking for someone to let him in on the joke. All he got were averted eyes, so he started a slow stroll along the bar.
From the table in the opposite corner, Mr. Roy cleared his throat. “You ort to leave your pistol with Twine there.”
McTier cocked his head toward Mr. Roy and then swiveled it to look at the bartender. Twine didn’t make the slightest move.
“Let him hold onto it.”
All three men turned to toward Valentin. McTier was the only one who spoke. “And what are you carryin’ this evening, mister?” he asked.
“That ain’t none of your business,” Valentin said in an off-hand way.
There was another pause while Eddie McTier decided whether or not to take offense. It was as if an invisible artist had drawn invisible lines in the air, defining the two men and the cold drama that was being staged within those four clapboard walls. Twine stared between them, feeling sweat run from beneath his hair and down his forehead.
It took another few seconds for it to dawn on Eddie McTier that if he did anything except stand there, he’d be finished in Algiers and in New Orleans, for that matter. Meanwhile, Mr. Roy was idly imagining that he could have sold tickets to this event.
Valentin broke the silence. “Did you come to play cards or talk about firearms?”
McTier grinned with his gray, uneven teeth. He turned and called over his shoulder for Twine to bring him a pint and a glass. With a hitch of his shoulders, he pulled out the chair opposite the Creole and sat down.
“I come to play,” he said.
Valentin nodded. “That’s good,” he said. “But, so you understand, you cheat and you’re out.”
McTier had been reaching for the deck. Now his lazy hand stopped in midair. He cocked a quizzical eyebrow. “What’d you say?”
“I said if you cheat, you’re out. And you don’t come around here anymore.”
McTier let out a disbelieving little snicker. “Is that so? And who says if I cheat?”
“We’ll let God be the witness,” Valentin said, his mouth curving into a smile that his eyes didn’t share.
McTier hiked his eyebrows and snatched up the deck with a brusque motion. “God, huh? You gonna need God if you play cards with me. ’Cause I got the devil on my side. I brought some voodoo from Georgia y’all ain’t even
heard
of.”
Valentin gave him a dubious look, as if suffering some boastful child. “Put your money on the table,” he said. He reached into his own pocket, took out an envelope, opened it, and dumped out twenty gold dollars. He raised his eyes to meet McTier’s. “And I mean
all
of it,” he said.
McTier had three choices. He could get up out of the chair, leave, and never come back. He could play it straight and lose his poke. Or he could brazen it out and chop this Creole character into pieces.
While he waited for the guitar player to make up his mind, Valentin gazed past him toward the door, where two men in cheap suits and a young woman in a thin cotton dress had stopped to peer inside. They were whispering among themselves and the girl was staring as if she had never seen anything quite like him before. Once he caught her eye, her face broke into a smile that was shyly wicked.
Eddie McTier shifted his way into Valentin’s line of vision and rapped his knuckles on the table. “That’s it,” he said. There was a small cylinder of gold coins in front of him that looked to be at least the equal of Valentin’s own.
“That all of it?” Valentin asked.
“Every fucking dime,” McTier replied with a snide curl of his lip.
Twine stepped up to the table with a pint bottle of amber liquor in one hand and a short glass in the other. He placed them at McTier’s elbow and skipped away in a hurry.
McTier frowned at the bartender “How come everybody’s so damn skittish today?” he said. “Y’all are actin’ crazy.”
Valentin pushed the deck of cards across the table. “You deal,” he said.
McTier’s face pinched with distrust. He watched Valentin for a second, then fanned a thumb through the deck. Satisfied it was clean, he broke it in half and began to shuffle. “What’s your story, friend?” he inquired.
“No story,” Valentin said. “Just passing through and looking for a game. What about you?”
“What, ain’t nobody told you?”
“Told me what.”
“I come from Georgia. Place called Happy Valley. I heard they like the blues in New Orleans. So I come over and I’m here to stay.”
Valentin studied the sharp’s face, feigning a vague interest, and watched his hands at the same time. McTier was playing it straight so far, but he was talking faster and faster, an old trick that was a variation on the magician’s sleight of hand.
“I got me a woman back home in Thomson. Ain’t but fifteen years old.” He seemed to stumble for a moment. “Got me a child name of Willie. He’s blind.” Now he fell curiously silent for a few seconds, as if he had lost his way. Recovering, he poured his glass full and drank it halfway down. “But truth is, I got more women than I know what to do with,” he crowed as his hands got busy again. “I found me this here young Ethiopian gal and brought her along. I left her over across the river.”
“And what are you doing in Algiers?” Valentin asked.
McTier smiled and said, “Takin’ your money, friend.”
Valentin’s face lightened suddenly and he grinned as if the guitar player had just told a good joke. The whispers at the door stopped and even Mr. Roy halted his wheezing for a few seconds.