Page 24 of Mississippi Roll


  What also went over well was anything to do with devils, at least for Roger. But when you’d gone to the trouble of getting dik-dik horns implanted into your skull, you took every safe opportunity you had to show them off.

  Roger could understand Shirley’s pride in her tattoos. “You’ll get no release!” He sang the first line of the blues’ final quatrain. “You’ll get no reprieve!” The SS Regret had sailed long ago, and part of being an adult was owning one’s teenage decisions.

  Roger turned to Marie’s drunk parents for the penultimate line. “And if you go down to Jokertown,” he wailed, and looked to Marie for the kicker, “you might never leave!”

  He raised the mike dramatically and dropped it. Halfway through its descent, it vanished in a flash of hellfire.

  Marie applauded slowly, with grudging admiration. Roger had impressed her. It wasn’t forgiveness, but it was still a step toward understanding him and her parents.

  Roger bowed, the actual mike up his sleeve, pulled out of the flash paper sheath with elastic. He glanced to Shirley and gave a wink. Tattoos and horns were both still less of a complication than children.

  After basking in applause, he sauntered over to his bottled water, took a swig, then strapped on his electric guitar. “Anyone ever been attracted to someone who was wrong for them, but oh so right?” Roger asked after idly transforming the clear water bottle into a black microphone to more applause as he sauntered back. “That bad boy or bad girl your parents warned you to stay away from?” He glanced to Marie’s parents but they were too blotto to care.

  “Surely this woman knows what I’m talking about.” Roger turned his gaze back to the next table, and Jim’s spotlight followed. “Shirley.” Roger repeated her name, punning, and she wriggled with delight, his names bouncing for all to see. “I’m talking about the ‘Black Magic Woman’ who helped make me the devil I am today!”

  With that, Roger doffed his hat, revealed his horns, and launched into Santana’s greatest hit and one of the Jokertown Boys’ most requested cover tunes.

  “Black Magic Woman” was a great song, and Roger enjoyed performing it, but Carlos Santana had covered it, too—the original was by Fleetwood Mac. Roger just wished he’d written it, or at least one of his friends had. But Paul’s songs had left with Paul, and nothing the Jokertown Boys had originated since had broken the Top 40, let alone the Top 10.

  Paul had. He’d left his boy band persona behind along with his joker-ace nickname, taking a page from Xavier Desmond, the old mayor of Jokertown, now being plain Paul O’Nealy. And when Drummer Boy, the six-armed joker-ace leader of Joker Plague, the hardcore joker rock band that had replaced them at the top of the charts, had dissed the Jokertown Boys and especially Pretty Paulie in interviews with talk about Joker Plague not being “pretty boy jokers who can pass for nats,” Paul had dipped his pen into his pain and written “Fake Aces,” including the lines “Fake aces with their fake faces / and their hard-edged bitter style / don’t know the hard and bitter places / I hide with my own fake smile.”

  Paul’s dentures had once fallen out onstage. Roger, thinking fast, had made it look like one of his parlor tricks, stealing his own smile next by use of toothblack, then tossing a pair of wind-up chattering teeth into the audience.

  The Jokertown Boys and Joker Plague had had a long and public rivalry despite, or perhaps because of, fans shared in common. Today’s audience was no exception. But where before the double agents had kept their love for Joker Plague on the down-low, today they wore it on their sleeves—quite literally, with cheap black crepe armbands silk-screened with JOKER PLAGUE. You keep your card hidden / but it’s now plain to see / the high horse you rode in on / once was ridden by me.

  The time for rock rivalries and artistic feuds, petty or otherwise, was now dead, along with more than half of Joker Plague, torn apart by a terrorist’s bomb. The Voice, JP’s invisible lead singer, had been made visible and silenced at the same time, permanently. The second had also happened to S’Live, Joker Plague’s monstrous keyboardist, who the wild card had turned into a bald disembodied head the size of a weather balloon who floated over the synthesizer like the Great Pumpkin, depressing the keys with a thousand canary-colored tentacular tongues.

  Roger thought his name had been Rick.

  But the death that truly touched Roger was Ted, aka Shivers, Joker Plague’s guitarist and resident devil. Except Ted’s skin was bloodred and his horns were real and his fingerwork was preternaturally quick, a demon with the strings.

  Fans had had endless fun comparing the two of them, and they’d both enjoyed playing up their devilish rivalry. But when Roger had finally met Ted backstage at the Grammys, all Ted had wanted to do was bond with a fellow devil joker and compare transformation stories.

  Roger forgot what Ted’s was. Catholic catechism? Heavy metal satanic rock rebellion? Too much D&D? It didn’t matter. Roger had been too busy retelling his old lies to listen to Ted’s truth.

  Later, in “Fake Aces,” Paul had written the lines “You cast your spell / but I always knew. / I almost tell / but I never do.” Paul knew Roger’s secret, but had never told, despite the distance that had come between them. “I’ve made mistakes / and in the end / I’m just as fake / as you, my friend.” Roger had never repeated any of Paul’s confidences either.

  Lenore was another matter. “Fuck Joker Plague!” she yelled into the microphone in Paul’s voice at the end of the Santana / Fleetwood Mac number. “DB can blow me!”

  Gasps echoed across the audience, followed by an eerie silence. One guy spewed his beer.

  Roger looked out at the fans, equally aghast, then turned to his pet. “Shhh, Lenore,” Roger chided. “Shhh. The feud’s over.” He placed a finger on her beak for silence and gave the audience his most mortified look, which took no acting given the circumstances. “I think tonight we Jokertown Boys will dedicate the rest of our set to DB and Bottom, the surviving members of Joker Plague, as well as those who were lost, both fans and band members. Especially Ted, who you probably remember as Shivers, my fellow devil.”

  Lenore pulled her beak out from under his finger. “The Devil made me do it!” The raven crowed the vintage punch line, taking her cue from his final word as he’d taught her. “The Devil made me do it!”

  No laughs were elicited, even from the older members of the audience, and the silence was palpable. Roger made a decision, unstrapping the ax and swapping it for his electric fiddle.

  Usually he saved it for later in the set, but a showman did what he had to, and there was one cover song that a fiddle player could never escape requests for, especially in the South. And when he had horns?

  “Speaking of devils like me and Shivers,” Roger began, applying rosin to his bow while at the same time using a lighter fluid–filled thumb tip and some slips of flash paper to make flames shoot from the tips of his fingers, “I notice three gentlemen in the back there who said they saw one chasing Poe’s raven. Isn’t that right, Lenore?”

  “Find the Lady!” cried Lenore, again off cue.

  “Oh, I think they were trying to get away from a lady,” Roger said, looking at the three members of The Dead Report, who’d slipped in near the theater’s rear doors and had just gotten beers. Ryan Forge’s hand looked red and raw, like he’d gone full Lady Macbeth on it in an attempt to wash off Madame LaLaurie’s black-light kiss, “but they were also asking for ghost stories and tales of the supernatural, and while we’re on the Mississippi now, I think I might recall one tale about that time ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia.’”

  Roger doffed his hat and used his horns and the title to launch into the Charlie Daniels Band’s masterpiece and death march for fiddlers. Jim played the rest. His ridiculously tricked-out synthesizer had originally started as one of those ’70s electronic organs that promised it could reproduce the sound of any musical instrument, but by the time Jim and his ace were done with it, it did, plus everything from the voices of angelic choirs to the Devil’s backup demons.
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  The demonic wails, however, had never sounded this authentic. While Roger knew it was just a stop on the organ, it sounded like Athanasius Kircher’s legendary katzenklavier, except when the keys were depressed, instead of pinching the tails of chromatically tuned kittens and alley cats to make them scream on key, it did the same with Satan’s minions, torturing the fiends of the pit till they blasphemed in musical Enochian.

  The infernal invocation succeeded in lightening the mood of the room, aided by liberal assistance from the Demon Rum and his associate John Barleycorn. Roger concluded the Devil’s rock showstopper with a triumphant Mephistophelean laugh, conjuring and unfurling his best and most cherished prop, an infernal contract written in Latin in gothic Fraktur script by means of Sam’s fountain pen fingernails, illuminated with square-dancing demons, hellcats playing golden fiddles, goetic sigils from the Lemegeton, and hex signs cribbed from an Amish wedding certificate. At the bottom, after much calligraphy coaching from Sam, was the Devil’s wickedest signature in Roger’s own hand, and below that a blank spot above a dotted line. But when exposed to cold air—such as, for example, the hellish fog wafting from the dry-ice machine Jim had kicked on at the beginning of the Devil’s performance—a name developed in blood red in shaky, childish cursive: Johnny.

  Audiences never failed to gasp at this reveal. Some snapped pictures. Another snap, this time of the wrist, made the contract furl up like a window shade, then once it had disappeared up his other sleeve, the flash paper sheath went up in fire. Roger then clapped his top hat back on, covering his horns, and spun around, turning his uncovered blue eye to the audience and doing a posture change so he’d look like honest, if prideful, country boy Johnny, ready to defend his soul and reputation as the world’s greatest fiddler.

  “Acem quzghyn!” Lenore cried in Kazakh, winging across the audience. “Find the Lady!”

  Her jesses trailed behind her, trailing sparks from where they’d been burned through with flash paper. Roger then realized that his frock coat’s right epaulet was on fire.

  Roger could get out of a straightjacket upside down in a water tank with chains wrapped around him and his hands handcuffed behind his back, so juggling a fiddle, bow, and microphone while shrugging off a flaming frock coat and stamping it out was child’s play.

  “Set break!” Roger cried, leaping off the stage and onto Shirley’s table, then onto the next table and the next, sprinting for the raven flying through the vent window above the doors at the end of the theater and out into the Grand Saloon itself. “Jim, follow me!”

  Roger ran, dodging pillars and passersby, getting out the main doors of the Grand Saloon just in time to see his raven winging left around the corner. He chased after, seeing Lenore dive over the railing down to the main deck, winging down until flying up and darting through the curtains of a small high window directly in line with the inner door he’d heard her behind before.

  “Where’d she go? Where’d she go?” asked Jim.

  Roger turned. His bandmate had caught up but was jittering as if he’d just downed the daily output of an espresso machine with his hair standing on end like he’d seen one of the ghosts The Dead Report was looking for.

  Roger had learned long ago not to question anything odd around Jim. Matters either would be explained or they wouldn’t. Asking Jim what was going on was tempting fate.

  “Main deck,” Roger snapped. “Follow but be very quiet.”

  He led the way downstairs, through the inner hallway, past the boiler room, to the locked door. Roger put a finger to his lips for silence, then began to examine the locks. Six padlocks, three combination, three keyed, plus the original lock of the door. Simple enough.

  From behind the door came Lenore’s voice, speaking more words in Kazakh counterpointed with the beautiful singing of the crewman’s caged bird.

  Illicit knowledge gleaned in middle school and a little spinning of dials and tugging on bolts dealt with the combination locks. Lockpicks dealt with the padlocks. And the final lock only needed the head clerk’s master key, which Roger had lifted from Mickey Lee, her assistant, and copied as a matter of habit.

  The door opened inward and the songbird’s trill became louder, then abruptly stopped. Roger stared. There was no poker game. Lenore sat on a reinforced epaulet as per usual, but instead of being attached to the flaming frock coat Roger had left back onstage, it was on the left shoulder of an Asiatic robe, claret velvet embroidered and trimmed with gold. A woman’s coat, rich and lovely, but it looked like it had been through a war, and the same was true of the woman inside.

  She wore a matching cap and she looked at Roger with wide, frightened eyes as the birdsong died in her throat, which was, Roger noted, covered with a patch of soft gray feathers. At her feet sat two children, a girl whose three hands clutched a doll dressed in a folk costume similar to the woman’s, and a boy whose large oval eyes, formless hands, and translucent gelatinous flesh trailed off into tendrils of glistening ectoplasm, like Casper, the Friendly Ghost manifested in corporeal form.

  Roger had grown up in Jokertown, so was used to seeing jokers, but there were more: two more women, one older, one younger, both apparent nats, but as Roger knew himself, mild jokers could be disguised; a fourth woman, young, her plain face beautified with Maori-style tribal markings that widened slightly as she gasped, revealing them to be gill slits; a short middle-aged man with one hand ending in a hook, which had speared open a tin of sardines, and the other ending in a stainless-steel spork, still with a sardine impaled upon it as he stared in terror; an older man, also frozen in terror but apparently a nat until a lizard head emerged from his neck, stole the sardine from the other man’s hand-spork, and dove back into its host’s flesh with its prize; a massive man with a turban fashioned not from cloth, but a single overgrown spiraled horn; and two teenagers whose embrace of affection had transmuted to one of fear, the girl with stumpy legs but overlong arms wrapped around her boyfriend and herself, the boy with arms the usual length, but four of them—still two less than Drummer Boy.

  Or at least one less. Roger understood DB had lost one from the bomb. And the donkey-headed Bottom had lost both an arm and a leg and had most of his hair burned off.

  But the four-armed boy had all of Bottom’s hair and then some, simply covered in it. This, mixed with eyes as big as teacups, made him resemble the dog with eyes of the same description from Andersen’s The Tinderbox, assuming, of course, the dog also had four arms and a joker girlfriend.

  One other joker sat to one side, balanced on a broad chitinous tail like an ergonomic rocking chair designed by H. R. Giger. Male, probably, Roger thought, but if he played an instrument, he would totally nail an audition for Joker Plague.

  Roger winced inwardly. The thought was unworthy and unbidden. But also possibly helpful. Were DB and Bottom going to try to reform their band? Or would they continue as a duo like him and Jim, limping along? Literally in Bottom’s case.

  Roger winced inwardly again. He had sent flowers but had received no response except a polite thank-you card from Bottom’s wife.

  But Roger was a showman and a businessman. The plain fact was that, just as the Jokertown Boys were all joker-aces with passing privilege or close enough, Joker Plague’s image was jokers without. And there was no way this joker could pass as a nat short of in an internet chat room, and even that was questionable: his webbed, clawed hands were built for swimming, not typing. He looked like the love child of a beaver mascot and the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

  The air stank with human sweat, fear, and a fishy smell that was not just sardines. A dozen people, a dozen berths built into the walls of the room, six to a side, stacked double, the only ventilation being the tiny window covered with a heavy drape. A cord had been strung across the chamber with a makeshift privacy curtain rigged up from one of the Natchez’s dining service tablecloths, pushed aside now. They were all looking at him.

  Sometimes passing as a nat was not a good thing. Roger quickly removed his
hat, smiling his most devilishly charming smile, and saw everyone relax as he revealed his horns. “I’m Roger,” he said politely, “and I see you’ve already met my friend Lenore.”

  “Devil,” Lenore responded on cue.

  The younger and shorter of the two apparent nat women stepped forward, still cautious, but by her confident stride, Roger pegged her as an ace, and not a new or weak one either. He had been doing his best to emulate that swagger for more than twenty years. And as she stepped into the light, he could see that her skin shone with a slight golden sheen, not luminescence but iridescence, like you got from high-quality bronzer or expensive eye shadow. Ace. “Do you know Jack?” she asked. Her English, barely accented, still missed the idiom the way that usually only Jim could.

  Roger knew Jack, and not just the card. Jack was the new barman. And that made a great cover for a smuggler. But smuggling refugees from Kazakhstan, especially jokers?

  Roger didn’t know if Jack was a Harriet Tubman or a coyote like the ones paid to smuggle folks up from Mexico, but either way, it was dangerous business. “I know Jack,” Roger said, then followed that with, “Jim—get in. Shut the door.”

  Jim, though not precisely simpleminded, took simple orders well. “Okay,” he said cheerfully as he did so. However, while he was an insanely powerful ace, part of that ace kept him from ever realizing it, leading to the body language of a nat, and a ditzy if curiously unflappable one at that. Jim glanced around at the jokers, including the beaver from the Black Lagoon and Casper the gelatinous ghost, as if they were nats having a tea party, then asked the woman with the songbird’s voice and Lenore on her shoulder, “Are you going to finish the fairy tale?”

  “Fairy tale?” Roger echoed in confusion.