Jackpot Blood: A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery (18 page)

Luevenia’s gray hair was pulled back and woven into a bun as intricate as the pine-needle baskets that hung for sale from the rafters above them. She would not have appeared Indian to him, he thought as he followed her, if he hadn’t known for sure that she was. Her coloring was more the café-au-lait variety—called locally “high yellow”—of the Cane River Creoles from the area around the old French settlement of Natchitoches, just forty miles to the northwest. Yet, she was supposed to have more Katogoula blood than anyone else in the tribe.

The Katogoula were fortunate that recognition had finally been given, Nick concluded. Race and ethnicity are slippery concepts constantly rewritten in the wet clay of human history. It all boils down to what we want to believe, not what genealogists and the Census Bureau say. In another generation, maybe two, the tribal heirs might look in the mirror and no longer consider themselves Katogoula. The human herd would then be poorer for the extinction of another species of identity.

Luevenia led Nick to the smoky dining area, where a hundred or so people sat at mismatched tables; others chatted in six green-vinyl booths along the back wall. The room was crowded to capacity; almost the entire tribe had come to hear of a possible future.

Tobacco was one Indian tradition that had remained strong: many adults held a cigarette; quite a few men had the telltale cheek bulge of a chaw.

The gangly younger men wore Western clothes; the pot-bellied older ones favored overalls and jumpsuits. On his walk to the back of the store, Nick had noticed similar items hanging in the inventory of Three Sisters Pantry. The women had gone to more trouble for the occasion. Young wives and daughters showed off their figures with flatter-ing blouses and pants and skirts, while plump matrons wore full-fitting dresses. Judging from the plentiful, handsome beadwork and embroidery, Nick figured that most of the women’s clothing was handmade.

The visit of outsiders was an event, and it seemed some formality and hospitality was called for by local customs, even if the attitude of some tribe members was ambivalent toward the visitors.

A rectangular service window framed a view of the well-ordered kitchen, where two young women Nick assumed were also Katogoula served up his coffee and bread to Luevenia, and then leaned forward on the window shelf, ready to listen to the Las Vegas show that was about to begin.

Nick spotted Tommy waving him over to a booth. A woman and three children scooted to make room. Tommy introduced his pregnant wife, Brianne, and as Nick shook her hand a man just to the left of the kitchen began to address the group.

“Here we go again,” complained Brianne. She propped her chin in a palm.

“Ladies and gentlemen, good morning,” the man said. He had a face like an organizational chart—a grid of symmetrical furrows and compartmentalized muscles that in unison seemed to shout the corporate mantra, “Sell! Sell! Sell!” His beaming cheerfulness made Nick nervous, even at this distance.

“It’s evening here, Hal,” a woman said irritably from the nearest booth, where she sat with two other business types, a man and a woman, both appearing at least twenty years younger than the unhappy woman and effervescent Hal.

Nick instantly saw the dynamic of the team: Hal did the smooth-talking and hard selling, probably got all the glory back in Vegas, while the rest of the crew handled the wearisome details. Especially the woman, whose heavy make-up and frequent Botox did not hide the puffy red rage of long subordination. He discerned a certain haggardness at odds with her pantsuited professional image, and he suspected that only lots of money, booze, and serious pharmaceuticals had so far kept her from strangling smiley-faced Hal with the strap of one of her high-dollar purses.

Will Hawty one day snarl at me for analogous reasons?
Nick felt this question roll over him in a sweaty wave of self-loathing as he sipped hot flavorful coffee and broke off pieces of persimmon bread, which was a delicious spicy cake flecked with bits of yellow-orange fruit and the tender, rich meat of pecans.
You’re so wise when it comes to the inner landscapes of strangers, how can you be so willfully blind to the feelings of those you care most about?
He vowed to mend his ways, but knew he wouldn’t.

“Oh, boy,” Hal chuckled, rubbing his eyes, and shaking his head playfully, as if someone had just thrown a bucket of cold water on him. “You bet, Connie. I’m jet-lagged, still on Hawaii time, folks; just got back from our newest terrific property out there. And we’ve already synergized with three other groups on this trip. My apologies. Let me tell you, lots of folks are eager to nexus a value-added, win-win, proactive relationship with MaxiGelt Casinos.” With a big toothy grin Hal cagily polished his veiled threat to take his company’s lucrative alliance elsewhere.

“Slick as a water moccasin, ain’t he?” Tommy said to Nick.

The MaxiGelt Casinos team had come equipped with laptops and projectors and mini-printers, graphs and maps and aerial photos on foam board, brochures and pamphlets and sample contracts. In a round-robin presentation, the other team members followed Hal. They spoke of cash flow, depreciation, slot-machine take, square footage, payroll, and security. In that spartan back dining area, they constructed a mirage of a casino complex that left the audience with open mouths and blinking eyes.

The plan called for four restaurants, a nightclub, two hotels, a live-entertainment theater, a golf/ tennis complex, three swimming pools, a skeet range, a go-cart track, a multi-level shopping mall, a Native America theme park and museum, and a two-year accredited junior college with a well-funded sports department and an e-cubator, the last a program to nurture Internet-based business ideas. And there was more: a new super-warehouse store to anchor the fabulous mall. It would be the first of a nationwide chain. Three Sisters Pantry! It all seemed so easy.

The younger MaxiGelt man dramatically yanked a cloth from a stunning architectural rendering of the proposed development. He began explaining every angle.

After twenty-five minutes, Connie stood up to cut off her colleague. She deftly handed the ball to Hal for the grand finale.

“We’re proposing a paradigm shift, here, my friends,” Hal said, as he strutted excitedly before the attentive audience. “With MaxiGelt Casinos at your side, optimizing wallet share, market-focused on reinventing the event horizon, you will headlight into success, helicopter over your competitors—and well we know there are plenty in this part of the South! Oh yes, we need to imaginize the mission statement
together
.” He flipped to the next board on the easel beside him and used a laser pointer as he read off each word: “Grow self-sustainancy through
profitizing your new knowledge workers in collaborative commerce solutions. The Katogoula Indians and MaxiGelt Casinos”—another board—“Change agents for OUR future! Thank you, and many happy returns on our investment!”

Nick saw puzzled faces among the Katogoula. He himself had been tempted to reach for the pocket dictionary in his briefcase.

Scattered applause began.

“At least he got our name right,” Brianne observed to Tommy and Nick, as she stopped her daughter from collecting the few remaining crumbs on Nick’s plate with a mouth-moistened tiny index finger. “That’s more than some of the others did.”

Brianne had thick, long, beautiful brown hair, gathered in a loose twist hanging down her back; Nick thought of Mary Pickford, from her films of the 1920s.

“This is the third presentation this week,” Tommy said. The circles under his eyes were darker than the last time Nick had seen him. Tommy stood up. “Let me go get these people on the road, or else they’ll just move in with us. And I don’t think I’d like that. How ’bout you, boys?”

His fidgeting twin sons giggled and made disapproving faces.

Tommy joined the Las Vegans as they packed up. Off to the side, Hal and another man stood chatting. Hal brayed in laughter.

“Who’s that?” Nick asked Brianne.

“Talking to that man from Las Vegas? Oh, that’s Irton Dusong. The woman’s Grace, his wife. They run our little tribal museum over on the Golden Trace, not far from our house. He retired from the mill a few years ago after he got hurt. They were the ones that broke the tie.”

“On the vote to continue the casino process?”

She nodded. Brianne, as Nick recalled, had voted against it.

Vegas Hal was playing tribal politics, trying to suck up to those who favored the casino. Nick watched him as he put an arm around Irton
like an old buddy, guiding him to the front of the store. Nick heard him loudly promise first-class treatment if Irton ever came out to Las Vegas.

Nick turned his attention to the twins. He liked children, and he was mesmerized by their mystical power, their omnivorous nature, their connection to a boundless reality adults can no longer access. How many baptisms and bar mitzvahs had he attended? Too many to remember. Sometimes, as now in the presence of these children, he felt the stinging pang of being childless, of having muddled through life chasing superfluous goals that paled beside the amazing grace of a child’s love.

A line from Yeats’s poem “Among School Children” came to mind. Had he become a ludicrous, slightly scary old man to children—as the twins’ expressions hinted—condemned to be merely an awed observer of the magical creatures other people brought to life, bequeathing their measure of glory to the collective human experience? Was he to be the last of his line, a recusant of four billion years of humanity’s genealogy? . . .

“You guys excited about being government-approved Indians?” he asked the twins, thinking that he should kick this bad habit of thinking too much.

The boys waggled their heads in wild meaningless agitation, and then frogged each other in some never-ending, secret war that had just flared up anew. It was as if each boy were striking his image in a mirror.

“
Boys
,” Brianne warned, still somehow sounding as calm as a fall morning. “Tonight they’re eleven going on six. Thank heavens for school.”

Nick had always marveled at the few people he’d known who seemed to sip from a spring of serenity.

“I used to be a teacher,” Nick told the twins, “now I travel around making sure boys and girls are studying hard and getting ready for college.”

Their faces grew wary at this revelation. The enemy in their midst! He remembered aunts and uncles who’d played this age-old teasing game with him. Empty, cruel drollery, he’d once thought; but now, having fun doing it himself, he saw it as nourishment for the budding skeptical sense.

“Boys, go out on the porch and play with the other children,” Brianne said. “Wait!”

At great speed they’d already bolted toward the front, as if some huge sno-cone of badness awaited them in the darkness outside.

“Sam, Matt, you be good, or else
somebody
I know won’t be riding horses this weekend.”

And they were gone, in a slightly slower flurry of loose limbs.

“This should be a happy time for Tommy,” Brianne said, her voice worried and uncertain, the loving sternness directed at her children now missing. “We buried Carl yesterday. Took an awful long time for the autopsy and all.”

“Where?”

“The tribal graveyard. It’s on state forest land, but we have rights to use it however we want. Tommy’s father worked that out. It’s a nice place. Quiet. Just the sound of the wind through the pines.”

She folded a green cloth napkin into a small, neat square and placed it on the table even with the edge.

“Carl wasn’t all that bad,” she said. “He just didn’t like people telling him what to do. If anybody’d asked him, I bet he would’ve been against the casino. Sometimes I think he was the sanest of any of us. Our tribe might not a had to go through all we did if more of us been like him from the start.”

She turned to check on the sleeping two-year-old girl beside her.

“This graveyard,” Nick said, “I’d like to see it.” He was mentally salivating, picturing the feast of information such a place usually had
in store for the intrepid genealogist willing to brave the elements and assorted biting, blood-sucking creatures—fleas and ticks, mostly, not vampires.

“See that man over there,” Brianne said, pointing to a man in a uniform. “That’s Nugent Chenerie.”

“Nooj?”

“Yes, that’s what everybody calls him. Tommy’s told you about Nooj, then? He’s the one you want to talk to about the graveyard. He’s always taking people on tours out there and on the Golden Trace. Or he’ll point you in the right direction, at least.”

The baby had awakened and was whimpering. Brianne gathered her up and rocked her. That did the trick; the baby drifted off again.

Brianne had something else on her mind. She spoke softly as her daughter slumbered on her chest. “I feel I know you, Nick. Like I can talk to you.” Her apologetic hesitation gave way to the boldness of a woman doing what she thought was right. “Tommy’s told me all about you, how hard you’re working for us. How much you care. All this”—she meant the presentation—“doesn’t matter one way or another to me. What’s best for Tommy and our kids, that’s what I worry about. I didn’t want him to have this responsibility, but he wanted it, and they gave it to him.”

Her next words carried a burden of anxiousness: “People say you—well, I’m not sure how to say this—you untangle things. Not just family trees. I mean, bad things. Murders. Find out who killed Carl. If it
was
a ‘who.’”

She looked down at her sleeping baby and then back up at Nick, some deeper force urging her past hesitation. “Some are saying our tribal spirits are unhappy with what we’re doing. There’s evil behind Carl’s death. I can feel it, like a cold wind. Evil that wants to destroy my family and my tribe. Don’t ask me how I know that, because I’m not sure myself. You can stop it.”

Nick, too, could have sworn he felt a cold wind at his back that raised goose bumps on his skin.

“You don’t believe in our ways,” Brianne said, “so you’re not afraid. And maybe these spirits won’t hurt you.”

Unafraid? Right now, dear lady, I’m terrified
.

“Sure, I’ll . . . ,” he stammered, “I’ll do what I can.”