Jackpot Blood: A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery (2 page)

A false, anonymous, ultimately circumstantial charge of plagiarism, exacerbated by departmental backstabbing, had ended Nick’s promising career as an upwardly mobile assistant professor of English. His stalwart friends, Professors Una Kern and Dion Rambus, helped him climb from the ensuing emotional morass by suggesting genealogy as a worthy use of his over-educated mind. Una offered some willing cousins as Nick’s genealogical guinea pigs.

The new calling had been good for his soul, if bad for his net worth. Now he wouldn’t give up being a certified genealogist, even if that scheming bastard Frederick Tawpie—presently the head of Freret’s English department, then the leader of the plagiarism investigation—offered him a full professorship on a silver platter.

Well, maybe if he threw in tenure
.

The hatchback coupe’s engine finally coughed to life in a cloud of blue smoke. Doc Cheatham was on a local FM station, fading in and out because the antenna was broken. Fragments of the great virtuoso’s sweet, lyrical trumpet notes filled his musty car—classic New Orleans jazz, a purer version of the Bourbon Street touristy product that drifted nightly on the river breeze to the balcony of his Dauphine Street apartment. He rummaged around in the debris on the passenger-side floor and came up with a Frank Sinatra cassette. He’d recently scored several boxes of them that hadn’t sold and were about to be tossed at an estate sale. The car predated the compact disc, not to mention the iPod.

Ah, “Indian Summer.” Love and loss. Just right
.

Nick pulled out onto Prytania in the direction of a nearby bank to cash the judge’s check before the jerk could stop payment.

Something else would come up.

And something did, that very night, two hundred miles northwest in Tchekalaya Forest.

CHAPTER 2

T
ommy Shawe turned toward the vehicle dipping in and out of sight on the undulating road. Headlights glimmered in the distance, disappeared, then glimmered again. Eyes of an ancient stalking beast crouching and then advancing each time the prey drops its guard, Tommy thought. Then he laughed wearily at himself for being so edgy. It had been a good day. His solitary stroll in the darkness, though not of his choosing, had allowed him time to reflect and to plan. Wasn’t this his forest, the forest of his ancestors? He had nothing to fear.

Let it be a friend
. Otherwise, he wouldn’t much blame the driver for not stopping to pick up a stranger in the dead of night, in the middle of Tchekalaya Forest.

He felt more than he heard something whiff past his ear from the black wall of pines behind him. The bugs were bad this warm fall night; they’d clotted his windshield earlier. But this was no insect, he sensed, no gust of wind, though a storm was building.

Puzzled, he faced the dark woods. A pain slapped him in the chest. Not deep, but sudden and fiery, more like a wasp sting.
At night? Could be a nest of yellow jackets disturbed somewhere near
.

His left hand cautiously, nervously probed a thin, straight object jutting out just below his right collarbone.

Syrupy coldness spread quickly through his body.

In a flash of dim light from the approaching vehicle, he saw a dart stuck fast through his shirt, in his flesh. He recognized it as he would know the tongue-wagging face of a favorite dog from his innocent childhood. The dart was a six-inch strip of sharpened river cane wrapped with thistledown. Just like the ones he and his brother had used as kids, hunting squirrels and birds with their blowguns of hollowed-out cane as tall as they were. Just like the ones his Katogoula Indian ancestors used . . .

Tommy imagined himself sliding through a canebrake of time, and on the other side he opened his eyes to the dazzling daylight of a vanished world, centuries before the white man came to these Louisiana hills and woods.

It was beautiful.
Beautiful!
He wanted to stay forever.

CHAPTER 3

T
hat morning Tadbull sawmill had closed down.

Paychecks had never been much to brag about, but they were all the men who worked here had.

The pine woods hissed in the saturated October heat as the subdued men lined up below the concrete loading bays for their final payment. Word had spread. The last of the year’s cicadas wailed like an echo of the silenced saws.

Chain-smoking Clara, the dried-up white woman who’d been the company secretary since Noah’s time, barked out the names. No apology, no explanation—merely a strip of paper announcing the closure: “Tadbull Lumber Company, LLC, has ceased operations.” No representative from the family that owned the land and the sawmill made an appearance. Not even Wooty Tadbull, who managed the mill and everything else for his father.

It wasn’t the Tadbulls’ fault, the men agreed. Just the way things were. Computerization, automation, consolidation, tree-huggers and owl-lovers, NAFTA, politics—each man had a pet scapegoat. The only certainty was that there would be no more steady jobs, soon or ever, in this hardscrabble enclave of west-central Louisiana.

Most of the men at the mill were descendants of the Katogoula Indians who had settled here before recorded history. The Tadbulls had
always been paternalistically inclined toward the Katogoula and had hired from their ranks almost exclusively. Nobody knew Tchekalaya Forest better than the Katogoula.

The men at the mill and their families loved the forest as the one remaining tangible link to the vanished way their ancestors lived. Without the mill it would be nearly impossible to live here at all. Too many years of encroaching white civilization, too many alien laws, too much discrimination had not yet killed their cherished identity. But closure of Tadbull Mill just might.

For generations the lumber trade had fed them and served as one of the threads holding their fragile social fabric together. They had turned cutting and processing trees into a highly specialized art form. Lumbering was all the Katogoula knew.

After Clara had distributed the checks in the slanting October morning sunlight, Tommy Shawe had lingered at the old mill for a while to cheer up his friends. Many men talked of leaving, going to look for offshore oil jobs; younger ones spoke of the armed forces.

Then Tommy drove the swaybacked truck that had been his father’s to the Three Sisters Pantry. He cashed his check and promptly blew some of it on beer and five-dollars’ worth of scratch-off lottery tickets.

“Your brother was just in here,” Luevenia Silsby said. “That boy is looking scarier every day, I tell you. He don’t even speak when you say hello anymore.” She tore off the tickets and handed them to Tommy. “I hope you win one of them, I surely do. I don’t know how we’re going to make it when the mill checks are gone.”

She swallowed a lump of sorrow and adjusted her thick steel-rimmed glasses. One of the purer blooded of those who called themselves Katogoula, Luevenia was a small woman with a round face the color of a paper grocery bag. She kept her ash-gray hair pulled back and secured in a neat bun. When she was young, most of the whites
had regarded her and her family as mullatoes and had treated them to the racism built into Louisiana’s elaborate caste system of the time. She spoke succinctly and like many folks of different heritages around this part of Louisiana she gave her sentences a French inflection. Her grammar was a bit off; she’d been denied the benefits of a complete education, as had most Katogoula her age.

Even though she shunned a leading formal role in the affairs of the tribe, Luevenia’s opinions carried great weight.

At the front of the store, six stools were arrayed before the plate glass windows facing the gravel parking lot. On one stool sat an elderly man in suspenders. With great enthusiasm he was telling a story to Felix Wattell, a slightly younger man in denim coveralls. Both men wore baseball caps with the Tadbull Lumber Co. insignia.

“So, when that fight was over, the poh-lice came in the barroom and ask what all them muscadine grapes doin’ on the floor. I say, ‘Them ain’t muscadines, them’s eyeballs!’”

The teller of the tale, old Odeal Caspard, laughed in his high-pitched, uninhibited, childlike way and slapped Felix on the back.

Luevenia said to Tommy, too low for Odeal to hear, “How many times you heard that story?” She smiled affectionately at the old man who spent most of his days just where he was.

“I grew up on his stories, Miss Luevie. We all did.” It hurt him to think that their tribe would be gone soon, forever, leaves in the wind, just as would Odeal himself, whose family had been one of the six core kinship groups which had stayed during the forced marches to Oklahoma, beginning in the 1820s. Tommy wished he’d paid more attention to Odeal’s corny tales.

“I saved you a sweet potato-and-acorn pie,” Luevenia said. “Tell Brianne it’s my great-great-grandmother’s recipe from before the Trail of Tears. You just remember where you bought them lottery tickets,
now, and spend a little of that jackpot when you win, you hear? I’m going to need the business.”

“Yes’m, Miss Luevie.” Tommy knew that the seller of a winning ticket reaped a small payment; but any meager one-shot payoff he might win wouldn’t be enough to buy a future for Three Sisters Pantry or for the tribe. “Thanks for the pie.”

Tommy sat on the porch of his family’s house. From inside, he heard Brianne cleaning up after lunch. He had not joined them; Brianne hadn’t pressed him. His baby daughter didn’t understand why he was home at this hour. But she’d sensed something bad was on the horizon. She was unusually subdued, like her mother.

They’d never had trouble like this, even when she’d gotten pregnant in high school (she and Tommy having ignored a thousand parental and priestly warnings). She’d lost that child, and the next, but she’d refused to give up. And now she’d matured into a strong woman, a good mother to their twin boys and daughter. Another kid on the way. Tommy loved her so much it sometimes literally took his breath away.

What am I going to do?
he asked himself desperately. Welfare? Food stamps? Would his family have to leave the forest, too, as the others were talking of doing? His parents had helped through past rough patches; but they were gone now. He was the head of his family, and, in fact, the head of the tribe, such as it was. He didn’t feel much like a leader now. His family tradition was about to stop with him; he must be unworthy of it.

The remaining beer cans swam in an ice chest next to his rocker. Finishing the can in his hand, he crushed it easily and laid it quietly in the paper sack with the other empties. Then he popped another one,
shielding the wet explosion with his hand. He didn’t want Brianne to know how many he’d drunk.

Tommy was not a morose person by nature, but this hunting season he was thinking he might take his shotgun on a short walk into the woods and bag some very familiar prey. Himself.

He fought off the horrible image of his family at his funeral and began to tote up his possibilities for income. There was the guiding he did during duck season. Not bad, but it all depended on connections, an elaborate servant-master relationship with certain powerful men in the area. He hated that part of it. One of these days he would tell off some fat, pampered, son-of-a-bitch. He knew he had a temper when pushed.

At least he stayed on the right side of the law, unlike his brother, Carl. Funny how Carl seemed to get along with the rich hunters: he couldn’t get along with most other people—especially his own brother.

Tommy had bought out Carl’s share of the family property for eighty thousand dollars. When Tommy defaulted on some loans and his mortgage, as seemed inevitable now, the bank would take his and Brianne’s home away. Carl, as usual, had squandered the money in no time. Now he blamed Tommy, accused him of something shady. The brothers avoided each other.

Tommy forced his fuzzy attention back to thoughts of future employment. What else could he do on a regular basis that wouldn’t require him to grovel? Drive a school bus, deliver newspapers, mow yards for the few affluent residents of Cutpine? Not very appealing or rewarding, and he’d be fighting for the same jobs with every other ex-mill worker and logger. Fellow Katogoula men.