Tiger Rag

  Ruby was home with Camille, who was between husbands. Home was a three-room fourth-floor walkup in St. Louis. Camille was waitressing at a pancake house, dating a guy named Buzz, a mechanic. His standard (and apparently only) line was “Let me give you a buzz,” as he poured his personal version of his favorite drink, a whiskey fizz: Five Roses, club soda, a teaspoon of sugar, a dash of bitters, and a squeeze of lime. He was proud of his inventiveness, substituting lime for lemon and adding bitters. He always had so much alcohol in his system that two of these drinks got him drunk, and by number four he was blacking out. That particular day he had given himself one buzz too many by three o’clock and passed out at the kitchen table. Camille left him there, sleeping on his crossed arms. He was still there when she came home from work and announced to Ruby, reading a magazine by the open window, that she had a big surprise for her. She needed her to put on her best dress, the yellow one she’d bought her in Tulsa, comb her hair, and ask no questions. A half hour later, they rode a bus across town to a nightclub called Flamingo Road, a low drab building on a brown street, which tried and failed to live up to its name with an assortment of anemic potted palms, a murky carp pool, and a wall lined with cardboard standups of flamingos.

  The Flamingo Road marquee read TONITE ONLY—BILL GRAY’S DIXIELAND BAND.

  Ruby didn’t know what to expect. She had tagged along to neighborhood bars with her mother, but never a place like this. Camille grabbed a table up close to the small stage, but off to the side. She ordered a bourbon on the rocks, lit a cigarette, and absently popped peanuts from the bowl on the table. The only time Ruby saw her that nervous was when she couldn’t get a drink. Though the club wasn’t full, there was a decent crowd.

  The lights dimmed and the band came out to scattered applause. Conversations trailed off only after the musicians had launched into “Bayou Rag.” It was a brisk, upbeat tune that they managed to make dreary. The pianist was pretty good, and Bill Gray played a serviceable clarinet, but that was about it. And then Ruby took a closer look at the trumpeter.

  “Surprised?” Camille said, throwing back half her bourbon.

  Ruby couldn’t believe her mother was doing this to her.

  After the set, Camille hurried over to the stage and called out to the trumpeter, waving her arms. If he was surprised, he didn’t show it. He kept a poker face. He followed Camille to their table and froze at the sight of Ruby.

  “This is your daughter, Ruby,” Camille said, a little too loudly, with a self-satisfied smile.

  Valentine Owen just stared at her for a moment. “Hello, Ruby,” he said, finding his voice. She nodded. Any shock he may have felt had seemingly evaporated, as if meeting his daughter for the first time in fifteen years was the most natural thing in the world. “Pretty dress. Thanks for coming tonight.”

  Ruby cringed. The fact he hadn’t laid eyes on her since she was a baby didn’t seem to inhibit him. Maybe women like her mother would fall for his glibness. But he was no longer the dashing young man in the white suit in her photo. He was middle-aged, with thinning hair, a soft gut, and a hollow look behind the languorous pose. There were smudges beneath his eyes, his lips were pursed. Maybe it was the cheap stage lights, but to Ruby his skin looked gray, almost bloodless. And he continued to study her closely, not like Husband Number Two, the letch, but not in a way she liked, either.

  “Will you join us for a drink?” Camille said.

  He cleared his throat and forced a smile. “I’ll do better than that. I’d like to take you both out to dinner.”

  The way Ruby remembered it, she knew at that moment that he was lying, but it may be that she had forced herself to remember it that way. For after Valentine Owen left them with a smile, promising to return shortly, she and her mother waited, and waited, watching a roadie disassemble the drum set and pack up the microphones and carry off the amps. It was a good twenty minutes before Camille collared the stagehand dousing the lights and asked if she could go back to the dressing room to talk to a member of the band.

  “They left on their bus five minutes ago.”

  “All of them?”

  “That’s how it usually works.”

  “The trumpeter …”

  “They’re gone, lady. Show’s over.”

  Show’s over. Ruby walked out of the club, into the night. Camille caught up with her at the bus stop, but Ruby rushed to the rear of the waiting bus. She sat eight rows back from her mother. When Camille tried to approach her, she waved her away. Ruby had never felt emptier. She was trembling. It was a hot night, and the bus wasn’t air-conditioned, but she felt cold. She hurried off at their stop and walked the streets alone for nearly an hour, trying to calm herself.

  Back at the apartment, Ruby found that Buzz had revived himself and mixed several more rounds of whiskey fizzes, which Camille had drunk with him before passing out herself on the sofa. Camille never said anything to Ruby about what had happened at Flamingo Road that night.

  The next year, Camille was out of work, and things got so grim around that apartment that even Buzz moved on. Camille sent Ruby to live with her second cousin, Marielle, in New Orleans. She said it was high time Ruby got a taste of that city. “It’s your birthplace, after all. And Marielle’s agreed to put you up. She was always kind to me. There was a time we were friends as well as cousins, but we fell out of touch long ago. She never left New Orleans. Meanwhile, I need to get back on my feet again. Change will do us both good.”

  Ruby knew Camille just wanted her out of her hair.

  “You have always wanted to know about that part of my life,” Ruby said to Devon, sipping her wine. “I hate to admit it, but maybe it’s something I didn’t want to share because it was good, not bad. The one part of my life I kept all for myself.”

  Marielle was a witch. She was Creole. She practiced white magic, not voodoo.

  “Voodoo is a religion,” she told Ruby, “and I am not religious.”

  But she was sober and disciplined and introspective—everything Camille was not.

  Marielle was paid to keep spells off children and exorcise houses and heal the sick. She could also cast spells herself. She carried an alligator bag filled with herbs and tonics: bitterroot shavings, tamarind powder, oleander sap. In their four months together, Ruby learned a lot from her, including things she maybe never should’ve learned, she realized later. For example, that a few grains of arsenic dissolved in kerosene can trigger a heart attack without leaving a trace. And a cup of columbine broth with tamarind can make someone do whatever you ask: swim an icy river, put a gun to his head, pick up a hot coal. And a handful of wolfsbane pollen tossed into a haunted room can make the ghosts glow. Ruby saw some of these things with her own eyes.

  Marielle made a very good living. Her most lucrative jobs were weddings. She wore a black dress, velvet gloves, and a veil. Before the ceremony, she prowled the premises, warding off wicked spirits. She prepared charms for the bride and groom and brewed them a special red tea laced with herbs to ensure fertility and longevity. When someone was dying, she’d be enlisted to help guide his spirit through its final days—and beyond. Then, at the funeral, she’d accompany the family to the cemetery and give them herbs to ease their pain.

  The day Ruby arrived, she found Marielle taking a mud bath in a clawfoot tub in the garden. “From the Cougar River, honey,” she said, her face masked by the stuff. “Turns your skin to butter.” She was thirty-nine and quite striking, tall and slim, with amber eyes and long hair so dark it was blue. Her hands were flawless, smooth as marble. At the end of her bath, she stood up, unselfconscious, beautiful, and her housekeeper, Theodora, an old black woman who was the only person she really trusted, rinsed the mud off with buckets of warm water. Then Marielle slipped into a gold bathrobe and beckoned Ruby over to a cedar bench. She had a sexy walk, a soft voice. She was centered—not New Age centered, but the real thing. She could read people—literally—intuiting your thoughts even before you were fully aware of them.

  Her h
ouse was Gothic on the outside—mansard roof, baroque balustrades—and modern within. Sparsely furnished. Mirrored hallways. A greenhouse off the kitchen in which she grew strange flowers and herbs. Her bedroom was painted sea blue. The bathroom had an onyx sink and tub. She was crazy about onyx. Her jewelry box was filled with it: triangular earrings speckled with diamonds, a panther brooch with diamond eyes, a skull ring.

  Ruby never ate so well in her life. She was amazed at Theodora’s cooking. She could prepare shrimp ten ways, stewed okra, dandelion soup, crawfish gumbo. Three times a day, she brewed Marielle a pot of hibiscus tea. When Marielle served it, she added a teaspoon of sugar and a squeeze of lime to each cup. Occasionally she and Ruby rode the ferry to Algiers for dinner. Marielle liked the outdoor restaurants on the harbor. People came over to pay respects. She seemed to know everyone: artists and socialites, but also tough guys and cops. One night, she introduced Ruby to a famous tap dancer. As he walked away, she said matter-of-factly, “One night he and I figured out that we’d known each other long ago, in India, in another life. Except he was an old woman and I was a young man.”

  When Ruby asked her how that could be, she told her some people live many lives. To find out if you’re one of them, you place an object important to you, like a ring or a watch, under your pillow and see if you have a dream in which that object appears. If so, it’s actually a glimpse into a previous life.

  Of course Ruby tried it. She put an ivory comb, a gift from Marielle, under her pillow. She dreamed she was in a house by a river, combing her hair. There was a baby crying in another room and a man chopping wood outside. She never saw their faces. Later, she tried it with other objects, but it never happened again.

  Ruby learned that Marielle could operate in several worlds at once. Marielle would round a corner beside her and seem to disappear, only to reappear an instant later some distance away. Sometimes Ruby thought she saw sunlight pass right through her, as if she were made of glass. One day when Ruby was to meet Marielle at a restaurant, she smelled her freesia perfume ten minutes before she arrived. Another time, Ruby was in the greenhouse on a rainy afternoon when for an instant her name, letter by letter, appeared briefly on the glass pane before her, Ruby, as if it were being traced on the vapor with a fingertip.

  When Marielle arrived home, Ruby said, “How do you do these things?”

  “Optics. The power of suggestion.” Marielle smiled. “And magic.”

  Ruby began to see that there was a lot more to life than stumbling around with her mother. She met other witches, and people a lot stranger than witches: a Cuban sorcerer who claimed to be two hundred years old, and three Malaysian sisters who said they were mermaids from the Delta, and a self-styled Doctor of Telekinesis from Macao named Qi, who had a watch tattooed on his left wrist that kept the time, he said, as accurately as any three-dimensional watch.

  Ruby also got to know the city. She worked alongside Marielle in the greenhouse and stargazed beside her on the widow’s walk. Ruby was roughly educated, having changed public schools annually, but Marielle gave her books to read, on alchemy, numerology, Egyptian amulets, Caribbean mythology. Ruby wished she could stay in New Orleans with her forever, and she sensed that Marielle wouldn’t object if she did.

  Ruby hadn’t needed to be reminded by Camille that she was in the city of her birth, where her parents had spent what her mother called “their week” together during Mardi Gras. Marielle was one of several cousins Camille Broussard had in the city. The two of them were nearly the same age, but they moved in different worlds. Camille’s father was a construction foreman. Having left home at seventeen, with no prospects and no real interests other than seeking a good time with a succession of good-time Charlies, she quickly found her way to the nightlife. She lived alone, restless, on the verge of becoming the drifter she would remain until old age.

  Marielle’s father had been born into an old Creole family. He was a doctor with a solid practice when he died of cancer at forty-five. He left Marielle a decent inheritance, but his brother, serving as executor, lost most of it on bad investments, forcing her to drop out of college in her first year. She inherited her psychic powers from her mother, who grew up on Martinique. After being widowed, her mother told Marielle that she would have to fend for herself eventually, and she taught her all she knew about witchcraft, divination, and what she called “medicinals.”

  Camille and Marielle crossed paths at large family gatherings—weddings, funerals, Christmas dinners—and they spent one summer month when they were children at another cousin’s house on the Gulf. That was as close as they ever got. There was one occasion in their twenties when Marielle had a chance encounter with Camille outside the family, which she remembered well and related to Ruby.

  “I met your father,” she told Ruby one night, lighting up a clove cigarette. “It was in February 1960, and I was walking in Jefferson Park with a girlfriend. And there was Camille, all dolled up and grinning, on the arm of a man. She waved to me, and I could see right away that she was crazy about him and that he didn’t give a damn about her. He looked my friend and me up and down, real quick, but he couldn’t once look me in the eye. He smiled, but I didn’t feel it was connected to anything inside him. Then, just a couple of years ago, I was at a private party in a nightclub when I saw Valentine Owen again. There was a crowd. Cops, gangsters, politicians. He was in a corner, deep in conversation with two large men who happened to be detectives. He didn’t see me. He was too busy trying to talk himself out of a jam. He had been stupid enough to try to extort a drug dealer who happened to be the son of a city judge. Owen had done some business with this guy, helping to arrange for cocaine to be smuggled in from Saint Croix. He got his cut, then turned around and demanded more money. He had no idea who he was messing with. They could have knocked him off on the spot, and no one the wiser, but they decided to use him instead. That’s how the police operate here. The police chief, Mathias Beaumont, really runs the city. He took over the largest crime syndicate and directs it from the police department. He answers to no one. He’s untouchable. He’s corrupted half the force and killed anyone who crossed him, hoodlums and politicians alike. His MO is tossing them into the Mississippi chained to anchors. For a while, I went out with his half brother, Wick, who was nothing like Beaumont. He had a weakness for cards, but he was a decent man. Still, he’d seen and heard plenty, just because of who he was. He explained to me later what was going down when I spotted Owen at that party. He told me those detectives were giving Owen a choice: he could go to jail and wake up with a knife in his gut, or he could do them a service and then get out of town. It was a dirty piece of work, helping to set up an honest cop they wanted out of the way, as in shot dead. It wasn’t a complicated plan. They showed Owen a photograph of the cop. They said he ate lunch every day at one o’clock at Morel’s Café on Antille Street. Owen was to go there the next day at twelve forty-five, order a meal, pay his check at one-fifteen, and walk out, making sure the cop noticed him. A minute later, he was to run back in and shout that there was a robbery in progress at the jewelry store across the street. When Owen asked, ‘Why all the theater, why aren’t you just icing him outright?’ the detectives said, ‘Because we need him to die a hero. The chief needs it. This will square you with him, so don’t fuck up.’ Owen did as he was told, and it went as planned: the cop ran into the street and was shot in the chest and Owen walked away. The one thing they hadn’t told him was that the shooter was supposed to shoot him, too. But he missed twice, shattering a store window and wounding another man. When Owen got on a bus for Houston an hour later, he felt he had used up more than one of his nine lives. Wick said that as far as he knew, Owen never returned to New Orleans. That was the last time I heard anything about Valentine Owen.”

  In addition to this portrait of her father that was so at odds with everything her mother ever told her, what Ruby took away was that Marielle was the first (and last) person she ever met who encountered her parents together around the ti
me she was conceived.

  Ruby had her mother’s old address, an apartment house on Cassandra Street. She rode the Gentilly streetcar there. It was a backstreet in a poor parish. The bar, the grocery, the Chinese laundry looked as if they had been there for centuries. The panhandlers, too, all of them on crutches.

  Her mother had relived that week of hers many times over the years. She had accompanied a friend to a jazz club called the King Cobra. The crowd was raucous. The band was hot. Her friend was dating the drummer. During a break, he and a tall man in a white suit joined them. The man introduced himself as Val. They drank bourbon, and after the last set Camille took Val home. She scrambled them eggs and they drank some more. Every night after that they went club hopping until dawn. She was impressed that he had played with some of the musicians they met. He wore lizard boots and a Stetson and rolled his own cigarettes. She became pregnant.

  Then he left.

  Ruby’s own time in New Orleans, seventeen years later, also ended abruptly. It was a hot day, and she and Marielle had been working together all afternoon in the greenhouse. As they sat down to dinner in the garden, Ruby finally got up the courage to ask Marielle if she could stay in New Orleans with her for good. “Of course, honey,” Marielle replied, taking her hand.

  Ruby should have known that nothing good ever comes that easily.

  The following week a man broke into the house and came into Ruby’s bedroom. She was asleep, and suddenly he was on top of her. A big guy with rough hands. One of them was clamped over her mouth. He was tearing at her clothes and trying to push her legs apart. He stank of booze. She bit him. She screamed. Then the lights came on and he froze. Marielle had come up behind him and stuck a pistol in his ear. Ruby never knew she had a gun.