The King of Bones and Ashes Read online

  The gas station paper coffee cup she held in her left hand was too hot. The wind tugged hard on her umbrella, straining her to the right. She paused beneath a gallery to trade hands, her eyes drifting up to a pigeon perched on the sharp spike of an old Romeo catcher, a vicious collection of hooks and barbs known to some as “Babau Jean’s dentures”—originally fashioned to discourage suitors from shimmying up posts to reach their girls’ rooms. Go up a Romeo, come down a Juliette—an old joke that may have once had some very real teeth to it. The catchers didn’t pose much of a threat these days, but Lisette still walked around with a mental catalog of the contemporary hazards to her children, her son Remy more so than her daughter Manon.

  Manon was two years older. And smarter. Maybe twice as smart. Not in terms of scholarship—Remy, he was a bright boy, could’ve been top of his class with a little more effort—but sure as hell when it came to the ways of the world. Her boy was fearless in the face of a world where having a little fear could be seen as a virtue.

  Lisette’s mother would’ve loaded Remy down with gris-gris to protect him. She wished she had her mother’s faith. But no amount of brick dust on your front steps could keep a stray bullet from penetrating the wall as you slept. And no eye-opening spell was going to turn the world “woke” overnight. If such a thing were possible, the Widow Paris herself would’ve shifted the world in the right direction going on two centuries ago.

  No, Lisette didn’t share her mother’s faith, not anymore. Still, the world being what it was didn’t stop some folk from believing, and since Lisette and Isadore were still helping with tuition for both of their kids, she knew she should be grateful for that.

  She took a sip of her coffee and was bracing herself to charge back out into the blustery weather when her phone began ringing. She propped her umbrella up against a storefront and fished in her coat pocket for the flip phone she’d been carrying since Manon was in eighth grade. For years, her girl had been mortified by the very existence of that phone—now, she’d matured enough not to care Lisette wasn’t up to date so long as Manon herself had all the latest tech toys the world could not find a way to live without. Her daughter always went to Isadore for those things, knowing that her father would say yes long past the point at which Lisette herself would declare hell no.

  Lisette squinted at the tiny caller ID and saw it was Manon herself ringing. She smiled at the thought that her girl was checking in, but the smile slipped away. The kids only ever texted these days. A voice call meant trouble.

  She flipped the receiver open and pressed it to her ear. “What is it, baby?” she said, striving for a tone that blended the threat of severity with the promise of mercy.

  She waited for a response. Waited too long. She started to pull the phone from her ear to see if the call had gotten disconnected when Manon finally spoke. “Mama,” the tremble in her voice sent shivers down Lisette’s spine, the two syllables of the word carrying the worst news in the world right up to her and laying it at her feet. “Mama, where are you?”

  Lisette’s shoulder brushed the wall. She dropped the paper cup, and it fell, sending a spray of hot brown liquid up on her leg. Lisette barely noticed. “What’s wrong, girl? You okay?” Her breath came to her with difficulty. She felt the pulse in her neck.

  “I’m fine, Mama . . .”

  “Remy . . .”

  “No, Mama. Remy’s okay. Daddy, too. It’s you I’m worried about.”

  Lisette felt the steel return to her spine. “Why’re you worried about me?”

  “I’m outside the shop. Somebody’s . . .” Manon’s words stopped. The sound of her breathing told Lisette that her daughter was choking back tears. “I thought you might be in there,” she cried into the phone.

  “It’s okay, baby girl. It’s okay. As long as you and your brother are okay, everything is right as rain . . .” Her eyes focused on the rain that had gone from a shower to a full-on downpour.

  “Mama, you got to get on over here.” There was a pause. “Some son of a bitch has trashed Vèvè. There’s a goddamned swastika sprayed on the door. The windows . . . ,” she began. Manon didn’t have to finish for Lisette to know the windows were gone. In Lisette’s mind’s eye, she could see herself as a small child looking on as her own mother painted each of the vèvès by hand, precariously balanced on a step stool, and quizzed Lisette as she worked. Which mark belonged to which loa. What offering you should make to summon which spirit.

  “Mama’s on her way,” Lisette said, only then realizing that she had already dashed out from beneath the gallery, forgetting her umbrella. “Are you safe?”

  “Yeah. I think so.”

  “Don’t think it. You get over to the café where there are people.” Lisette heard only the sound of her own breathing as she bounded down St. Peter toward Chartres Street. “You hear me?”

  “Yeah, Mama. I hear you, but what if he’s in the café now? It could’ve been . . .”

  “Anyone,” she said, finishing her daughter’s thought. Lisette’s eyes scanned the people she passed, many of them turning to watch her as she dashed past them. Her eyes jumped from face to face. “It could’ve been anyone. But I sure don’t think it was that gay boy who sells you those five-dollar lattes. Now get. And call your daddy.”

  She stepped off the curb and into a puddle. Her already wet shoes flooded.

  She crossed against the light. A taxi blared its horn, and an angry male voice succeeded in demeaning her intelligence and her sex in just three syllables. She didn’t care. She couldn’t care.

  Lisette could make out Manon’s anxious face peering out through the corner café’s window. Then her baby girl rushed out of the café and met her on the corner. Lisette threw her arms around her, pulling her in close. Manon was soaked to the bone. Shivering. Lisette realized that she was, too, but that didn’t matter.

  She gave Manon a tight squeeze, putting on her brave face before letting the girl lay eyes on her again. She glanced at her own blurred reflection in the café window. Her jaw was set, and her eyes looked full of fire. Good. She released Manon. “Show me,” she said, taking her daughter’s hand and leading her down Chartres.

  She gritted her teeth, stifling the urge to cry out as they drew near. The scene was just as Manon had described it. “Wonder why the alarm didn’t sound,” she said, just to have something to say that wasn’t a scream. She took her phone and dialed 911. She glanced around at the neighboring shops. All unharmed. Some were still dark. All seemed unnaturally quiet. Most didn’t open till ten, but certainly someone had come in early. Someone must’ve seen the attack. “I wonder if anyone’s called this in.” She took a step, heard the crunch of glass. “Here,” she held the phone out to Manon. “You talk to them. Tell them to come.” She let the phone drop into her daughter’s trembling hand. “Gonna be fine, girl.” She crossed the street without looking, turning back so that she could take in the extent of the destruction. The windows were indeed all gone, except for one pane on the upper left. A dripping red swastika had been sprayed on the black door, with the words “Go back” above it and “to Africa” beneath it. At first her breath stuck in her throat, but then she started laughing, loud and hard.

  Manon closed the phone and gazed at her. Lisette was pleased her daughter looked both ways before crossing, just like she’d taught her—didn’t matter that it was a one-way street. “Police are on their way,” Manon said. A siren screamed in agreement to her daughter’s words. Manon took her hand. “You okay?”

  Lisette caught her breath, only to start laughing even louder. She pointed at the defiled door, gasping. “They want us to go back to Africa.”

  Manon’s worried eyes narrowed. “That type always does, but I don’t see why it’s so funny.”

  Lisette reached up to wipe away a tear, or maybe just a raindrop. “’Cause, baby girl, we’re Creole. We didn’t just come from Africa. We came from all the hell over.”

  SEVEN

  The rain had ended. The sun was burning high in
the sky. Pothole puddles were boiling up into steam, making breathing a damned misery. Carver’s dirty orange backpack rode his shoulders like a bitch as he struggled up Claiborne past Dumaine Street. His damp, graying tank top clung to his chest, chafing skin still tender from the tattoo he had gotten done last night.

  Still, he was good.

  He was worn out all right. But worn out in the good way. A smile came to his thin lips as he thought of it. As good as sex, it’d been. He’d damn near popped a load, busting up that shop. And son of a bitch if he hadn’t gotten paid to do it. Hell, he would’ve done it for free just to watch that mulatto-looking bitch spinning around, crying for her mama. His mouth was dry. His lips stuck together as they parted to laugh at the thought of her.

  He decided to stop and take off his shirt, wring out the sweat. It’d give him a chance to show off his new ink, a circle on his right pec, with the numbers fourteen and eighty-eight separated by twin bolts of lightning in the center. The tattooist had wanted to use red for the bolts, but Carver wanted to keep it real, so they’d stuck to black and gray—black numbers, gray circle and bolts.

  Those who understood would understand. Those who didn’t would soon have no choice but to learn.

  He shrugged off the backpack and dropped it by his feet. He stepped on the strap, just to make sure no one would try to punk him and take off with it. He wasn’t nobody’s damn servant. Not anymore. He was a goddamned entrepreneur. And that backpack contained the beginning of his empire.

  He’d taken the money he’d been paid for the shop job and traded it over on Perdido Street for a pack of pretty white powder—heroin mixed with fentanyl to give it a quick, hard kick. Least that’s what he’d been promised. He knew enough to recognize the real thing, but he wasn’t fool enough to try it himself to find out. That was where a lot of men went wrong—sampling the merchandise. When you went down that road, the sample size just kept getting bigger. Not him, though.

  Be his product a weak-ass buzz or a ticket to the pearly gates, he did not give a good goddamn.

  Carver had already cut that shit in half with cornstarch, and now he was gonna turn around and sell it for four, maybe five times as much as what he’d paid. And then he was gonna start all over again.

  He slipped his shirt over his head, pulling the neck wide so it wouldn’t snag on the freaky Voodoo necklace the old Garden District bitch had given him to wear while he did the job. The necklace was made up of bones, arranged by length. Twenty-seven of them. It didn’t take a whole hell of a lot of imagination to see how they would fit together into a human hand. She’d claimed it’d let him do his work without getting noticed, without getting caught. He didn’t believe in that hoodoo bullshit himself, but he liked the necklace. Liked the way it looked. The way it felt against his skin. The way it made him feel tougher. Stronger.

  Figured he might as well keep it as a little lagniappe, now that he’d decided to move on.

  In her words, it was his “utter lack of scruples,” his willingness—eagerness, even—to break any and all rules, that had landed him the job as her driver. So it could hardly surprise her that he’d decided to leave without giving her notice, or that he’d taken a parting gift of his own selection with him. He figured she was gonna fire him anyway. He could smell it on her. She’d been acting pissy for weeks.

  No skin off his ass. She’d been a bitch to work for. A total ballbuster. Still, Carver figured she wouldn’t sic the cops on him for petty theft. First of all, she’d not want him to talk about the shop. Second, he may not have understood everything she was mixed up in, but he’d driven her around enough to know everywhere she liked to go—and that she wouldn’t want anyone to know she’d been there.

  He worked his shirt through the loophole of his jeans, then pulled on the backpack, the serrated edges of its black nylon straps burning like they were full-on metal mothers. He gritted his teeth and shifted the straps, but only succeeded in giving them fresh flesh to bite. “Son of a . . . ,” he said, but his words fell away when he caught sight of the familiar “Tremé” in black and blue graffiti on a gray picket fence that ran alongside an apartment building on the other side of Claiborne. Some fool had marked over the neighborhood’s name in a careless red scrawl. A new player, maybe? Carver squinted to make out what the tag said.

  Babau Jean.

  For an instant he was six, alone in a dark bathroom, screaming. His big brother laughing on the safe side of the door, holding the knob tight so he couldn’t escape. Calling the bogeyman’s name over and over. Yelling that Babau Jean was coming, and he would step right through the mirror to snatch Carver away.

  Babau Jean. Bitch, please. Carver forced himself to laugh, but the sweat on his back had turned icy.

  He could still taste his six-year-old self’s fear. Carver had been so scared he’d pissed himself. In the goddamn bathroom. He remembered the shame. Remembered washing his pants in the tub so he wouldn’t catch it from his mom. He’d still caught it, though. His brother had made sure to show her the damp trousers.

  The six-year-old’s embarrassment flared in a blink to a grown man’s rage. He felt the ice turn to fire, thinking of the beatings his older brother had given him. The beatings he’d taken for the liar from their mom, who didn’t really care who she punished so long as she could pass along her own bad day to one of her boys. He clenched his fists and gritted his teeth. Then he looked up at the wide blue sky hanging over his head and chuckled, thinking of his sorry punk of a brother now, up in Angola, the state pen, in his fourth year of twenty, getting turned out and traded for a new pair of sneakers, or maybe even just a pack of smokes, now that he wasn’t as fresh.

  Carver passed the stub end of Ursulines Avenue without noticing.

  His eyes continued to scan the other side of Claiborne. Pilings, some faced with brick, others covered with bright street art—the kind the city liked, not the kind they painted over—supported the overpass that ran the length of this stretch of the street. A parking lot about the width of the overpass separated the lower street’s eastbound and westbound lanes. There were five, maybe six guys wandering around the pilings and taking advantage of the shade the overpass provided. They looked rough and maybe homeless—the kind of guys who might not like his tats, if they got a better look at them.

  On the corner of Esplanade, an old Negro woman sat on a green folding chair beside a large red cooler. A sign taped to the cooler’s lid advertised “Water $1.” She shielded her eyes as she took him in. “Nice cold water, here,” she said, lifting the lid to show a dozen or so plastic bottles jammed down into the melting ice.

  He reached down, but she slammed the lid closed. “One dollar,” she said, her lips pursing as she looked up at him with cautious eyes. He raised his hand up and ran it down his chest, letting it hover over the new tattoo.

  The way she looked at him said that she did not give a single damn. “One dollar,” she said.

  He forced his hand deep into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled twenty. He dropped it in front of her. She bent over in her chair without ever taking her eyes off him. “I ain’t got change for no twenty.”

  He grabbed the cooler’s handles and raised it overhead, dumping its contents. “No need.” He dropped the cooler back to the sidewalk before snatching up a bottle as it rolled away.

  “What the hell is wrong with you, boy?” the old woman said, struggling up from her chair.

  The guys he’d noticed a block back were watching him from beneath the shade of the overpass on the opposite side of the street. He took one of the necklace’s bones between his thumb and forefinger. He wasn’t scared of those sonsabitches. And there was a good chance some of these dusky shadows would be his first, maybe even best, customers. He zigzagged through oncoming traffic and walked right up to the nearest of them.

  Rather than challenge him, the men cast nervous glances at him as he approached, then began slipping away, a couple east, a couple west. One whistling a warning that wasn’t worth his spit—Carver w
asn’t spooked by this bunch of pussies—as he headed lakeside back into the Tremé.

  Only one of the group didn’t take off, some punk wearing a hoodie, hood up, despite the heat. He was hunched over in the overpass’s deepest shadow, his back to Carver, using one of the pilings as support. Damn junkie, Carver thought, then wondered if he was a damn junkie with cash. “You need something, buddy?” he called out. “I got something good here for you. Something that’ll fix whatever you got wrong with you.”

  The guy began shaking. At first Carver suspected a seizure, but soon the man’s wild laughter echoed around him, drowning out the traffic noise, bouncing down off the concrete overhead, reaching around him and pulling him closer. Carver’s next breath found him standing several feet closer than he had been, toe-to-toe with the man. He felt his pulse pounding in his neck. The man’s face wasn’t right. Too white. Too shiny. The freak was wearing a Mardi Gras mask. This had to be the bastard behind that Babau Jean tag.

  Carver tried to pull away, but something held him in place. No. There is no damned way.

  The man raised his hand, pointing at the necklace with one sharp nail. The necklace lifted, rising up and scraping the back of Carver’s neck, tugging against him like it wanted to fly into the outstretched hand. The man slipped off the hood and leaned in, sniffing him like a dog, running his nose along the tender skin of Carver’s neck, breathing him in. A moist tongue darted out and pressed itself against the point where Carver’s blood pulsed. Carver felt a warm dampness running down his leg. The man—no, this was no man, it was a monster—leaned back, its hollow black eyes, eyes that had once stared back at Carver through a mirror in a darkened bathroom, focused on him, recognized him. The face—he knew it was a face now—moved like flesh, moved like no mask could, the mouth opening wide in laughter, exposing sharp, silver teeth like razor blades.